i get that this game is probably not for everyone - its gameplay systems don't go deep the way harvest moon or stardew valley do. but that's exactly why i loved it. before the green moon is not a game about you, it's a game in which you decide to spend some time before leaving on your own terms. you are not a hero; you are not a leader. you are just another person, living your life, trying to do the best you can. it's human, it's melancholic, it's one of the most beautiful game experiences i've ever had.

tbh i think this is like 3.25 stars, but i rounded up. i played lil gator game right before this and i didn't like it because it lacked what i might call productive friction - that game is so oriented around the player that i felt like i was being talked down to - everyone in lgg is there to support you and participate in your schemes. there's no challenge. smushi is much more willing to decenter and alienate you; it's definitely not hard, its goal is still to be cozy and (ugh) wholesome, but it has enough pushback that it feels fun to play.

yeah i didn't like this. i played the version with all the dlc included, and i wonder if the base game is more focused/less overwhelming. as it is, there was just too much stuff - too many mechanics, too many skill trees, too many questlines. it's like having a bunch of push notifications shoved in your face. it feels good to make the numbers go up but that's all it really is.

for a game that is nominally "about the spirit of capitalism" it kind of has nothing to say about capitalism; it just recreates capitalist incentive structures.

had the same experience here as i did with okami: this is a game that designed around its style first. the team has said that it was built to be how we remember the old jrpgs, not as they actually were; in practice this means the thing that is prioritized is the setpiece, the spectacle, the feeling, over the things that might lend the game internal coherence, like story and character.

that's not to say it's bad! style-first is a totally valid way to build a game, and it can work; games are audiovisual experiences. but the games that it's recalling are primarily remembered for their stories and characters - chrono trigger's narrative is rich and beloved, super mario rpg's characters are vividly drawn, golden sun's worldbuilding is beautiful and detailed. sea of stars' writing is just.... so bad, so empty. characters make dramatic pronouncements and never follow through; there's no payoff for the main conflict. (in the standard ending, anyway. i'm not going back to get the true ending. i shouldn't have to.) zale and valere get it the worst: they have the same bland personality, the same odd subservience to the needs of the plot (such as it is). they have no interiority at all. what do they really think about all this? about their lost childhoods? about their relationship to each other, and to their party members? we will never know; they are only surface-level. much like the rest of the game.

look it's fine. it's less a game than it is a theme park ride but it's fine and cute idk, it just makes me feel so smooth-brained.

i like the badge challenges because they're focused platforming levels with interesting abilities instead of spectacle autoscrolls. i like the special world stages because they're spectacle autoscrolls but with actual friction.

it feels like they couldn't quite decide whether to make this game hard or easy and just went eh it'll be both and the difficulty curve will be nonexistent who cares? well guess what nintendo, i care!!!! i feel like the point of the level progression platformer is to create a narrative of improvement and mastery but this feels more like a toybox with flashy effects, kind of the breath of the wild/new horizons ethos applied to 2d mario in that it looks great but betrays little developer intent. or more accurately the intent is to be everything to everyone.

i mean, this is definitely a Vibes-Based Game. the production values on this thing are absolutely unbelievable - it's not just about how detailed the graphics are, but how the textures work in tandem with the color palette work in tandem with the instrumental choices in the score. it's really rich, sumptuous stuff, and it goes a long way towards selling this game world as a place.

i feel like this game carves out the gradation between "side-scrolling zelda" and "metroidvania," because while those terms tend to be used interchangeably, they actually connote different things - a metroidvania will have a singular coherent space, where a zelda (in the ocarina/lttp mold) has distinct areas connected together. owlboy is more of the latter than the former, so while it looks like metroid it feels like link to the past. i think this is actually a very cool idea, and i like that the game explores a lot of different tones in its dungeon crawling. the side-on view makes dungeon layouts feel a lot more obscure, so you really get the sense of these spaces as mysterious and dangerous, and the game's focus on player disempowerment via the partner system and its setpieces combines with that very convincingly. it ties back into the story, too, and i think the overall writing and design coherence here is really strong...

...except when it comes to the actual, played experience. it just doesn't feel that great to control. it's not horrible - and lord knows that metroidvanias (which i know i just said this game isn't, but it is related, and these terms are imprecise and genre isn't real anyway) tend to suffer from overburdened control schemes. but it definitely feels compromised. shooting with geddy, for instance, feels like a twin-stick shooter; that's fine. move with the left stick or d-pad, aim with the right stick, fire with the right trigger. the issue is that holding the right trigger fires more slowly than pressing it repeatedly, while both otus and the bullets geddy fires also move very slowly. so it encourages you to press the trigger repeatedly in order to keep up with fast moving enemies, while nudging the stick with your thumb, and it started to physically hurt my hands during intense fights.

there's a lot of stuff like this in the game, just little areas where it's clear that there wasn't quite enough polish or time spent on how it feels to play. the focus here was clearly on thematic consistency, written and environmental storytelling, and production values. that's fine. i wouldn't say this is a classic, but i think it's pretty solid.

i wasn't really sure how much i liked this and then, when i got to the bonus levels, i realized that i was disappointed that there weren't more. so yes i did like it!

i do feel like there's a little bit less to the game than there appears to be on first glance - the world map is pretty but kind of empty, the side content in waddle dee town is either not spaced out well or is pretty skimpy (or both), and there are so few actual levels. but those levels are so joyful and fun, so it evens out.

and there's a sense of excitement here - last level is the most obvious example, but it really feels like the devs are having fun with the contrasting tones of cute-kirby and apocalyptic-environment. it's got some real kingdom heartsy klonoaness going on, being very approachable but still a video game-ass video game at heart. good stuff.

ok crazy thought here but: i think metroidvanias with a combat focus as granular as this one should be about one-half to one-third the size of this one - or they need to be balanced much more carefully. i keep running into regular degular enemies who can teleport across the room, thus allowing me to get in maybe two hits before they disappear, and who have health bars that are way too big, and who chase me across the screen so i have to stop exploring in order to get them out of the way.

perhaps this is a 'get gud' kind of problem! but it's extremely annoying and disincentivizes backtracking or exploration or thoughtful puzzle solving, which the game also wants me to do. so like, what's the end goal here?

the core issue is that, while the game is fun, it doesn't feel like it has a point of view. i can really feel the market calculation here - like, storytelling tropes from the mcu and anime? check! counter-heavy combat - and getting-stalked-by-enemies areas - along the lines of metroid dread? check! exploration/combat/save rhythm from souls? check! time manipulation because that's the prince of persia Thing? check! it just feels vaguely soulless and committee-designed. even when i enjoy the way it plays - which is often! - i just don't feel particularly engaged with it.

this is reading very pessimistic. there are things i like about this game! i think it does a good job of selling mount qaf as a coherent space - comparatively, metroid dread did not do this with planet zdr even a little bit. i like the concept of the combat-focused vania and there are lots of good ideas there. some of the cutscene direction is cool and fun. but it all feels very... focus-tested.