Really fun and charming, Pikmin strikes what must have been a tricky balance of calmness and tension. It does feel like something is missing, as Yellow Pikmin don't get much of a chance to shine compared to the other types, and bomb rocks are a bit clunky to use.

That being said, when the game makes you use all three types together, like when getting the Libra, it really feels like something special. Olimar's end of day logs and ship part descriptions are charming and give you some insight on his life on Hocotate and also highlight the depth of the planet's ecosystem. It also feels like the perfect length to revisit and see if you can get all the parts in less days, which I'm excited to do at some point.

It's difficult to recall the best parts of Super Mario Bros. Wonder because each level is so full of fun ideas, refreshingly unique and vibrant scenery, and cute moments that singling out an individual highlight is almost impossible. The Wonder Flower effects are such a treat, and contribute even further to how packed with ideas the game is. Even when some are reused on occasion, the environment is usually different enough that still feels fresh. Additionally, the Bubble Flower alone is enough to create an entire game around it, in fact I wish that they had chosen it as the "main" power-up of the game over the Elephant Fruit, which I feel does not do enough to justify its existence.

The Badge system is an interesting way to tweak the gameplay to suit your preferences, but I admit that controlling Mario is so fun and full of nuance that I barely touched it, opting instead to play each level as close to their intended experience as possible, but I'm looking forward to delving into it on a deeper level in future playthroughs. I did really enjoy the Badge challenge levels, especially the more demanding ones.

I have never felt a greater desire for more from a game than I felt after 100%ing Super Mario Bros. Wonder, mostly because most ideas are only given a single level to be explored and I feel as though there is so much depth to uncover that the main game does not fully deliver on. Compared to Super Mario 3D World (which I feel is Wonder's closest sibling title), there is very little postgame content, which exacerbates this feeling of wanting more to challenge me to fully master each mechanic and power-up. A bonus world of remixed, more challenging versions of the levels with the most compelling mechanics would do a lot to remedy this. Another idea would be to add a set of challenge levels for each power-up, as I feel that they have a lot of potential left unused, especially the Bubble Flower as previously stated and the Drill Mushroom which I feel did not get much time to shine.

One last thing I wanted to mention, despite my mixed initial impressions on the Talking Flowers from the game's reveal trailer, I am shocked to say that I ended up finding their lines quite charming and added a lot to the experience.

I love this game, and the worst thing I can say about it is that it was so fun that I wish it went on just a bit longer and challenged me a bit more, which I think are pretty good problems to have.

I started playing Pikmin 2 right after beating Pikmin 1, and there are immediate quality of life improvements that I greatly appreciated. Being able to switch between Pikmin types while holding a Pikmin is great for quickly picking the one you need without having to dismiss as often, and Pikmin feel more clever overall, for example they now automatically pick up a pellet after taking out a Pellet Posy. Being able to switch to a second leader is also useful, but admittedly I was not able to do as much multi-tasking as I expected to do, which may be due to my own inability, but being able to send a leader somewhere automatically while doing another task would be helpful (and is something the Pikmin games would later implement in future titles).

The game's new structure with a focus on procedurally-generated caves where you bring a set number of Pikmin in and are unable (for the most part) to get more shows a big change in the game's focus compared to its predecessor. Since Pikmin 1 focused more on the overall challenge of finding all 30 ship parts in 30 days, each individual challenge was less demanding, as major disasters could throw players off pace and the tension came from hoping you had enough days left to recover all the parts. In Pikmin 2, there is no time limit, instead each cave demands more from the player with challenging layouts full of enemies and hazards. The designers were free to create more difficult encounters, as if the player lost all their Pikmin, they could simply take time to get more and come back later with no time limit looming overhead. I find this change to be a great one. The tension of getting through a cave is palpable, knowing that every Pikmin lost is a permanent weakening of your abilities to not just to defeat the boss at the end, but also to take back all of the treasure.

While Pikmin 2 is definitely challenging, I never felt that it was poorly balanced until taking on the final boss, which was a nonstop 30 minute gauntlet of dodging attacks and running in to throw Pikmin before recalling when they started their next attack. The boss does not give you enough of a window to deal much damage, so the fight turns into a bit of a slog that had my hands cramping up from throwing so many Pikmin. Having to refight the boss if you don't have enough Pikmin to take back its treasures is another brutally punishing element that, while interesting, I found to be a bit much.

For the most part, I also believe that most Pikmin types fill an important niche. Yellow Pikmin are much more useful now, as they resist electricity which is the most fatal hazard type in the game, as it instantly kills the other Pikmin types with no chance of whistling them back to safety. Red Pikmin are still useful for fiery enemies and traps, but their role in combat has been somewhat overshadowed by the powerful but somewhat rare Purple Pikmin. The quick White Pikmin are able to keep up with the leaders' speed easily unlike all other types (which have been slowed down since Pikmin 1), allowing you to make some risky but exhilarating moves to quickly grab treasure and get out before enemies have time to attack, but I would say that they are the new least-utilized Pikmin type. As most poisonous hazards can be neutralized with a single White Pikmin, there is little need to amass many of them.

The game's writing is clever and thought-provoking, reading the Piklopedia and Treasure notes was a fun way to wind down after a tense day exploring caves. Learning more about Olimar's family dynamics, his thoughts on Louie and the President, as well as his theories about the ecology of the planet was something I looked forward to at the end of each day. Unlocking Louie's notes towards the end of the game was great, seeing his recipes for each creature gave him some much-appreciated characterization after being absent for much of the playthrough, though I still wish you could pick either Louie or the President as the second leader after Louie is rescued.

Pikmin 2 is a game that surprised me in how much room Pikmin had to grow, and gracefully takes on a new direction for the series considering how much has changed structurally. Even after beating the game, I could not stop thinking about how rich the world of Pikmin 2 is, and it makes me wish that Nintendo would do more to emphasize their writing in their games, as Pikmin 2 clearly shows how much it can add without getting in the way of players who are not interested.

Hollow Knight is one of my favorite games, and sets a high bar for the genre that, in my opinion, has yet to be bested. The movement and combat feel snappy and expressive, the world is an ever-expanding delight to explore with countless secrets with meaningful rewards, and the breathtaking art brings the game's characters and environments to life.

The game's healing system is brilliant, allowing you to gain Soul by attacking enemies and having to take a moment to heal. This system is so flexible that it works in both of the game's main contexts; exploration and boss fights. When exploring the world, taking a stray hit here and there is never a major issue as you are able to heal and keep going, but if you find yourself one hit from death with no Soul, then you have to brave taking the offensive in order to gain enough to heal. When fighting bosses, you're constantly looking for small moments to sneak in a heal between the bosses' attacks, forcing you to pay attention and intimately learn the fight and pick your moment wisely, or else be interrupted and take further damage. More confident players can also opt to spend their Soul on powerful offensive spells to take down bosses faster, which adds an extra layer of depth to your decision-making when managing Soul.

As a Paper Mario fan, I greatly appreciate Hollow Knight's Charm system, which is similar to the Badges of the first two Paper Mario games. These Charms allow you to pick and choose from various effects, such as regenerating health and increased attack speed. Building your loadout of Charms is a fun decision-making process that you constantly reevaluate as you unlock new Charms and Charm Slots, and they make for some of the most exciting rewards for exploring the world. All that being said, I wish the Wayward Compass was a key item instead of a Charm. I can definitely understand that this makes for an interesting trade-off, but seeing your position on the map feels so integral to the game that removing it is too much of a quality-of-life downgrade for that one freed-up Charm Slot.

My only real gripe with the game is that its major mobility upgrades are fairly standard Metroidvania fare; you get a dash, a wall jump, a super dash, and a double jump. Some more inventive upgrades that stray from these well-trodden abilities would have been welcome.

I've dabbled with Counter-Strike in the past with CS: Source and CS:GO, but I never really got invested until CS2 released. It's been a lot of fun to play Competitive with friends and start to slowly learn the maps and their callouts (along with making up our own silly ones).

I'm really glad that a game like Counter-Strike can succeed and thrive in the modern multiplayer game climate, where the developers do not feel compelled to add unnecessary fluff to keep people coming back. There's an elegance to the game's design, it does so much with so little, and each seemingly trivial aspect of the game has so much nuance that players can slowly tease apart without things feeling too overwhelming. I don't need to learn lineups if I don't want to; I will be rewarded for doing so, but I can also just intuitively throw a smoke or flash grenade more directly to achieve a similar effect.

There's so much history to this franchise that squeezing out the last drops of efficiency in your play is part of the appeal, and while I doubt I will get to that kind of level any time soon, it's been really enjoyable to play such a mindful shooter.

Moonleap is a charming platformer puzzle game where jumping changes from day to night, with enemies and hazards changing behavior or moving accordingly. The pixel art is charming and full of character, the music is moody and immersive, and overall it's a fun experience you can complete in an evening.

The puzzles ramp up nicely, starting out simple enough to get a feel for the day/night change while jumping. This can be tricky at first as you'll try to jump to dodge an obstacle, only for the obstacles to rearrange themselves and potentially having you hurl yourself into danger, but figuring out how maneuver in both forms of each level is a big part of the fun.

The game shines in its hub world, which fully commits to the idea rather than feeling like a glorified level select. The music is beautiful and haunting, adding so much atmosphere to the game. Each screen of the hub world has secrets to discover, some small and simple, but the best-hidden secrets are obscure enough to leave you thinking about their purpose as you play through the rest of the game. Some of these secrets were more fun than others, the jumping one was a bit too much of a logical leap for me to understand it, and even after looking up the solution later, it was not obvious how to execute the jumps in the correct timing. Ultimately, some of these secrets were more fun to discover and wonder about than to actually solve, but it was still a great time and added a lot to the game.

(For transparency's sake, Shooting Saucer was developed by my younger sibling. I stand behind my praise for the game, but I understand that I am in a uniquely biased position and I think it's only fair to mention this in the review.)

Shooting Saucer is a platformer shooter that is as charming as it is challenging, with a cute and simple pixel art style and creative environments. The game features linear levels with a twist; you're constantly being chased down by a flying saucer with its tractor beam ready to suck you up if you don't go fast enough. This makes each level a frantic scramble to defeat enemies and clear a path before you get caught by the UFO.

Defeated enemies drop experience orbs which can evolve your character when you get enough to increase your firepower, and getting hit will devolve you by one level, so this evolution mechanic also acts as a health system. This system encourages you to play aggressive and defeat enemies when you're weak, which can be risky but rewarding, and when you level up when fully evolved, you earn an extra life, which will be very helpful considering how difficult some of the later levels and bosses are.

The game's story is simple and cute, and adds more charm and silliness to the game without it getting in the way. The game even features multiple endings, with a bonus stage for players who are able to reach the end of the game without dying. The other playable characters (including some secret unlockable ones) are all very interesting to play and change the game in meaningful ways. Paraffin, one of the alternative characters unlocked by default, attacks with a passive fiery aura instead of shooting, allowing you to deal a lot of damage if you stick close to enemies and bosses. Turr, the other alternative character that you start with, is small and weak, but every experience orb you earn creates a copy, so you'll start mowing enemies down with a big enough group, but managing that group becomes a new challenge as you navigate the level and dodge attacks.

This game is a blast, and beating it is only the first step with all of the bonus content like unlockable characters and getting the true ending. If you're a fan of other platformer shooters like Kero Blaster or bullet hell games, I recommend checking it out.

A chill 3D platformer that shows how an open world structure can work in a small and dense game. Climbing and flying around is fun, and collecting the golden feathers to make it easier to traverse is a great reward for exploring and completing quests.

The summit area that freezes used feathers so that they don't recharge over time is an interesting twist on the mechanic, but it's so short with little to do that it does not feel like a true test of your knowledge of climbing and flying efficiently.

This game makes me hope to see more small games experiment with open world design, I feel like the structure lends itself better to a smaller, more dense world rather than a vast, sparse one.

Annalynn is a love letter to classic arcade games like Pac-Man, where you navigate through mazelike caves and outmaneuver four snakes that chase you with varying tactics. The game feels challenging without being unfairly difficult as classic arcade games often were, taking on more modern design sensibilities like practice mode to try harder levels you've already reached to get a better understanding of how they work without having to work your way back there from the beginning.

While it only took a handful of runs to get through all of the caves and defeat the boss at the end, the game offers a lot to keep you playing past your first successful run. Getting a perfect clear of each level - which requires defeating each snake with each Shining Ruby powerup in the level and collecting the bonus food, all without dying - is a fun challenge that the game rewards with unlockable color palettes for Annalynn. There are also various gameplay modifying settings that you can toggle to further change things up.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with Annalynn, I'm a big fan of platformers so it's cool to see a modern take on Pac-Man's design as a platformer. I'd like to return to perfect clear more levels and unlock all of the palettes.

Street Fighter 6, unlike the previous entry in the series, launched feeling like a complete experience. If you're looking to play with friends, there are plenty of options for a more social experience, ranked mode gives the most competitive players plenty of goals to work towards, and newcomers or fans of single-player games have a large, fleshed out story mode to explore. I spent almost all of my time in Street Fighter 6 playing against friends in private lobbies or playing ranked matchmaking online. I gave the story mode a shot, and while I've seen lots of praise for the mode, I quickly bounced off of it. It felt a bit too much like a middling MMORPG where I'm just walking from point to point doing things without really having much interest in why I'm doing them, and the performance issues I encountered also kept me from wanting to continue with the story.

The base roster is a microcosm of the game's goals; there are plenty of classic characters for longtime fans of the series, but there's also lots of new blood, which feels appropriate for a game that hopes to usher in the next generation of fighting game fans while respecting the legacy of what made Street Fighter what it is today. I'm not sure exactly where I stand on this spectrum, as someone whose first entry into the series was Street Fighter 4 but also did not play it often, and also played Street Fighter V on and off for a few months. I also appreciate the game's return to the hip-hop influence that it also embraced in Street Fighter 3, which inspires the game's overall presentation and soundtrack.

In terms of mechanics, I really enjoy the Drive Gauge system for adding so much of a push-and-pull to each round. Starting with a full gauge makes it tempting to go on an all-out offensive with powerful Overdrive (OD) moves, guard-breaking Drive Impacts, and the Drive Rush dash, but this can quickly drain your resources and put you in Burnout. Burnout is a dangerous state where you can no longer perform any actions that spend any stocks of your Drive Gauge, you take increased blockstun from attacks, and being knocked into a wall by a Drive Impact will stun you, leaving you open to a huge punish from your opponent. I really enjoy the risk/reward of this system, and how it tests your patience; do you want to use some of your Drive Gauge to get in quickly or deal some extra damage on a combo, do you want to use it to get yourself out of a tricky situation, or do you want to abstain from using it for now so that you don't risk putting yourself in Burnout? It adds a lot to the game's mental stack, weighting your options against each other and also taking your opponent's Drive Gauge into account; if they're close to Burnout, you could go for a Drive Impact or a Super Art to try and force the issue.

I believe that Street Fighter 6 does a great job of setting itself up for the next generation of fighting games, and sets a high bar for other games in the genre. I know that the current implementation was pretty popular, but I think a more tightly focused single player mode would have been a bit more interesting to me personally.

Friends vs Friends is a unique take on the arena shooter, where you build a deck of cards with various effects such as equipping more powerful weapons, increasing the size of your enemy's heads, or even completely changing the map. Each card's effect lasts for the round, and you draw more cards each round, so you need to be smart about which cards you use and make sure you keep some around so that you have more options next round. Before the match starts, you can also select a character that will have a unique passive effect, I liked playing Moose because of her passive double jump ability!

The game has a charming visual style with low-poly 3D models and crisp pixel art textures. The hub world you explore while matchmaking is charming and full of details, making it fun to look around while waiting for a match. Speaking of which, while playing I never had a hard time finding a match, even though that seems like a challenge for many indie multiplayer games. This is probably helped by the game's format of 1v1 or 2v2 duels, though there were often times where matchmaking felt unbalanced, where my opponent either had lots of powerful rare cards that were hard to work around, or had clearly just started and barely had a chance against my deck.

That leads me to my main gripe with the game, the card system is fun and is what gives the game its unique twist on the genre, but many of the cards are very strong and are very difficult to work around without having a direct counter in your own deck. This comes with the territory of card games, so I'm mostly fine with this, but newer players will not be prepared for dealing with the more powerful cards like Vampire Bullets, Katana, Heartless, Titan, and Mind Blowing, and could cause them to bounce off the game if it feels like their own arena shooter fundamentals are not able to keep pace with the cards.

There's plenty of moments where the cards shine as a strategic layer on top of the gunplay, and coming up with different card combos or ways to counter a strong combo you saw gives you a lot to consider when building your deck. Swapping weapons with your opponent after they equip a powerful weapon, or preventing your opponent from jumping while they're on the subway tracks and leaving them helpless to get run over, there's lots of clever ways to use the cards that kept me coming back and rethinking my deck.

I loved Breath of the Wild's fresh take on Zelda after the series started to get a bit stale, so I came into Tears of the Kingdom with high expectations. Breath of the Wild was not without its flaws, but they only really made themselves clear to me after sinking in a lot of time with the game and in my opinion were excusable given how much was thrown out from previous games and how much experimentation was done in reworking core systems such as healing and combat.

Pretty much immediately something did not feel right about this game, the opening area of the Great Sky Island is laboriously long, tedious, and surprisingly linear-feeling compared to Breath of the Wild's incredible Great Plateau. Instead of getting set loose to explore and fend for myself, I felt railroaded towards the next point of interest by Rauru or the construct robots, and it was clear to me that the themes of loneliness and being one with nature were replaced with rebuilding civilization. This would not be a bad thing on its own, but the writing feels just as lifeless and uninteresting as it was in Breath of the Wild, but now this is a much bigger part of Tears of the Kingdom so it sticks out more.

My main issue with Breath of the Wild that I hoped to see smoothed over in a sequel (before Tears of the Kingdom was announced) was that the game does very little to disincentivize you from ruining your own fun. This is an issue that is pervasive through almost every aspect of the game; healing instantly in menus with no limit takes the tension out of combat completely, upgrading armor will accidentally make you unkillable because of how BotW calculates damage vs defense, and cooking is completely imbalanced by the existence of Hearty ingredients which completely restore all your hearts and add temporary bonus hearts on top of that. While to some extent can be seen as a consequence of prioritizing player freedom over all things, I think a sense of freedom can be preserved even when making changes to address these issues. Not even an attempt was made to address these major issues, really the only major issue with Breath of the Wild that you could say that Tears of the Kingdom resolves is that it makes materials more useful, which to the game's credit is an important issue that I am happy to see resolved in such an creative way with the Fuse system. The only issue is that it doesn't take long to realize that the Fuse system is not as interesting or fun as it seems at first, and even feels like a step backwards in some ways, as you end up just slapping the strongest and most abundant monster parts on every weapon and now all your weapons feel even less unique from each other than they did in Breath of the Wild.

The game is also a complete UI and UX nightmare, fiddling with the arrow Fuse menu is easily the most egregious issue, but dropping items from your inventory to Fuse them, and having to go to the menu to un-Fuse weapons are similarly tedious and you perform these actions so often that I can't believe this workflow was not made smoother before release.

The game is clearly all about the Ultrahand ability and Zonai devices, but not being able to use your Zonai devices in Shrines feels like a bizarre slapped-on solution to prevent players from breaking puzzles by smuggling in their own solutions. I can understand the logic, but it flies in the face of the game's design philosophy of letting the player do whatever they want; if the player can trivialize combat for themselves by eating 10 apples every time they get close to death, why not let them bring in a few rockets and just fly to the goal. This is especially funny considering that you could still bring in a shield with a rocket attached and use that to brute force your way through several puzzles. Just a baffling decision overall. Reusing the Shrines concept alone is a bit unfortunate and keeps the game from feeling like much of an improvement from Breath of the Wild, so seeing them implemented in such a half-measured approach only further makes me wish they had gone for something completely different that better compliments Ultrahand.

It also feels as though the game's marketing materials were a bit dishonest about the role that the sky would serve in the game. Besides the Great Sky Island, there are barely any sizeable islands in the game that do more than act as simple puzzles or a place to play a minigame or get some Zonai devices. This was one of the greatest disappointments to realize as I filled in the map. More baffling still is that the Depths, an area that was never revealed before the game released, is huge and almost completely devoid of interesting experiences. The Gloom enemies that deal permanent damage until you return to the surface or stave off the Gloom damage in other ways such as food or an armor set do make things interesting at first, but it becomes old very quickly. I would have much preferred if the Depths were removed in favor of fleshing out the sky and making it the exciting hook that the game pretends it is.

I kept playing this game hoping for things to get better and for the "real game" to start. That moment never came, and just exploring reshuffled areas from Breath of the Wild with some caves here and there was not enough to keep me playing, I gave up on my way to the Fire Temple after clearing the Wind Temple, but not before exploring significant portions of Hyrule and the Depths. I think that the gameplay style that Breath of the Wild started to unearth has a lot of potential, it's a shame that the game's direct sequel squanders the opportunity to build on that potential in any meaningful way.

Boxbrawl Delivery is a spiritual successor to the Mario Bros. arcade game, and improves on its inspiration in almost every way. The original Mario Bros. is an interesting game conceptually, I like the single screen arenas and the strategy of trying to take out all the enemies efficiently, however your grounded movement is a bit too slippery and you have no midair control at all, which makes moving around a bit laborious. You also spend most of your time waiting for enemies to pass above you so you can stun them and knock them out, which can be a bit tedious.

Boxbrawl Delivery has much less slippery controls and a good level of midair control, so moving around is much more fun. You also attack enemies directly by throwing boxes, which carries inherent risk as you are more directly vulnerable to being hit if you mess up, and because missing your throw will damage the box and decrease your potential score gain. The game also varies between several different arena layouts and has several different enemy types, which is appreciated and unexpected considering that this is a jam game. Through the lens of a game that was made in 48 hours I think it's an incredible achievement and very polished.

Looking at Cruise Elroy's Annalynn, it's clear that he has a great appreciation for arcade games of this era and knows how to breathe new life into them and I am excited to see what he makes next.

A charming free prologue to Kero Blaster where you play as the pink office lady, a side character in Kero Blaster's story. The gameplay is pretty much identical to Kero Blaster, just pared down to its most simple form - no shops upgrades and only one weapon - and features a single short level. More Kero Blaster is always a treat, so I really enjoyed getting to play what feels like a bonus level, but what makes Pink Hour stand out to me is that towards the end of the level, you receive a document that is destroyed if you take damage. So you have to clear the boss and the rest of the level without being hit to get the good ending, taking this short game and making it more replayable with this added challenge. I think a short and replayable game is great combo, its difficult for me to want to slog through a 20-30 hour game again just to see what I missed or go for another ending unless I really adored the game the first time around, but something that takes just a few minutes makes it easy to want to jump right back in. I'd like to experiment with this type of short, replayable game some time in the future!

A sequel to Pink Hour, Pink Heaven doubles down on the idea of being a short and sweet replayable game by adding a choice of powerup, letting you choose to power through enemies with increased damage, or glide to shortcuts and simplify platforming challenges with an umbrella. There are also two levels instead of just one, along with another unique boss fight. Playing through the game twice to try out each powerup is fun, and considering the scope of the game, they do change more about the experience than you might expect. I would have liked to see the document appear from Pink Hour, which requires you to not get hit in order to get the good ending, just to add an additional challenge. The unlockable hard mode returns, and was tough enough that I wasn't able to finish it right away, but I'd like to come back and finish it soon!