I saw Hero and Daughter+ recommended as a JRPG with a ton of recruitable characters. I was in the mood for that type of thing and it was cheap, so I said "cool" and grabbed it without thinking much. Turns out, it's a harem game. Not really my thing, but I decided to press ahead anyway. I was met with an enjoyable, if grindy, 4th wall breaking, dungeon delving experience. It does hit most of the harem anime checklist of stupid bullshit along the way, but I'm happy to just ignore that. If you're not, then I'd recommend avoiding this one.

I completed the main storyline, and the end game content required a wall of grinding to get going with, so I decided to call it quits there. It actually presents a very fun grind with a lot of systems to interact with, but I was only looking for 10-15 hours before moving on. I got that, so I'm happy enough.

Red Bow is a bite-sized adventure horror game by Stranga. I really enjoyed Stranga's My Big Sister (Remastered), but Red Bow didn't really manage to land on an emotional level or offer much that was particular creepy. There were some glaring typos in the script that didn't impede the ability to understand, but pulled me out of the moment a bit. Still, I liked the general concept, the pixel art, the music, and the overall atmosphere. I enjoyed my time with it, and I find it easy to forgive an experience that only took me 80 minutes for not being as impactful as I would have liked.

Another great pixel art horror-adventure by Stranga. Much like Red Bow, it's very light on anything that is actually frightening, opting for an eerie, aesthetic that calls to mind a slightly bloodier Spirited Away.

As with Stranga's other games, there's endearing characters and excellent environments at every turn. The plot stands on its own somewhat well, but becomes much better in the full context of Stranga's previous games Red Bow and My Big Sister (the remastered edition, in particular). Everything up to the ending is great without full context, but I imagine the ending would feel a bit dissonant without the context of the other games. As such, I'd highly recommend playing them first.

I found most of the adventure game style puzzles to be straightforward and not frustrating, serving their job to keep me engaged with the environments well. Only the final puzzle threw me for a bit of a frustrating loop. Unfortunately, for my tastes, the overall narrative puzzle required to unlock the full ending was even more frustrating. Unlike Stranga's previous games, the conditions required to unlock the full ending were sprinkled throughout the game's 4 hour run time and easy to miss. The ending was a bit of letdown without earning all of the scenes, so I didn't want to just leave things there. I opted to just watch the portions of the ending I missed on youtube rather than replay the game in its entirety, which allowed me to a experience a much more satisfying ending, but also left things off on a bit of a sour note.

Still, despite the frustrations at the end, Ashina was a great time. I can't wait to see what Stranga puts out next!

My brother gave me Stone Story RPG as a Christmas gift. Once again, he found a game on my wishlist that I'd entirely forgotten about. Once again, it's a genre that I wasn't currently really thinking about playing -- this time an idler. And, once again, I've been having a lot of fun with it.

The presentation in Stone Story RPG is very unique and awesome. I've never seen such fluid, entirely ASCII animation before. I especially love the whip wielding enemies in the mines. So cool. The soundtrack is great and has a good balance of being ambient and mysterious with being catchy at times. The story is fairly minimal, but works very well with the visual and audio presentation to evoke an air of mystery I wasn't expecting from the genre.

The game is very well paced such that each new feature you get feels like it's opening up the possibilities you need at that time. You get weapon crafting off the bat, but slowly add on potions, enchanting, etc. This culminates in an entire scripting language, allowing for an insane degree of automation. I had a great time sitting down and figuring out how to use the limited logic available to automate some of the stages with more complex interactions.

Overall, between the presentation and straight up having scripting available, I've had a great time with Stone Story RPG. I finished the main story and got the credits, but there's a ton of post game content that I can see myself continuing to chip away at.

Games like Elohim Eternal make me glad that RPGmaker exists, allowing more creators to put their stories into the world in video game form.

Elohim Eternal takes a large amount of inspiration from Xenogears and Abrahamic tradition, with a sprinkling of other Egyptian-Mesopotamian mythology. The Xenogears influence is strong enough that I think of the game in many ways as Xenogears-lite, but not disparagingly so. Outside of the obvious facts that Elohim is largely a solo project and clocks in under 15 hours, it also feels much more modern and streamlined than Xenogears, allowing for a smoother play experience. For example, there are no random battles and enemies only respawn if you choose for them to do so. Furthermore, the heavy use of Abrahamic symbolism and historical elements give the game's world a very different feel from any JRPG I've played before.

The writing and characters are solid and kept me engaged and curious throughout the game. That said, I felt at some points that the themes were explored a bit too bluntly -- it could feel like the character was directly telling the player what they should take from events, rather than showing. Luckily, the game never felt preachy, just a bit clumsy in a few instances.

As mentioned, the game is full of modern conveniences, from non-respawing enemies, to auto-optimizing equipment (if desired), to easy access to fully healing between battles. Combat consists of determining an enemies elemental weakness, hitting them with the correct spell which then allows for timed button press for bonus damage, and using "divine mageia" as they charge up. The "divine mageia" allow for most of the interesting strategy having a wide array of buffs, debuffs, damage, and utility, all of which have some sort of cost (e.g. health points) outside of the divine cost to cast them. It's not my favorite JRPG battle system, but it's well done and holds up for the games somewhat short runtime.

Elohim Eternal is only the first game of a planned series. As with any solid first entry, the storya was self-contained enough to be satisfying, but left many questions about the broader mysteries of the world. I'm certainly interested in seeing where those mysteries go.

One of the best soundtracks in gaming

Excellent story and characters

Very cool directorial ideas

Strong symbolism and themes

Mediocre combat

Some good bosses

Some annoying but easy bosses

Terrible fetch quests

Horrible repetition

If I were Willow Smith and could make time go slow or fast however I please, then this would be a 5/5. Unfortunately, I am temporally fettered.

I'd had my eye on Monster Crown for a while, but thought it looked... rough, so I kept holding off. I grabbed it in the current Humble Bundle and woof. It's as bad as I feared.

It's buggy. The presentation is bad. The combat somehow manages to be a notably worse version of Pokemon. The writing isn't good. The monster designs are more miss than hit for my taste.

I'm big on small indie games and can put up with a lot of jank if I can find a half decent reason to do so, but the only appealing thing here is the breeding system. Unfortunately, breeding monsters becomes much less exciting when you don't like the designs or combat. It's too bad, I really wanted to enjoy this one.

I absolutely loved my time with Paranormasight. It deserves the effort of a well structured review, but I'm not feeling motivated at the moment, so I'm just going to write.

Paranormasight is more of a supernatural mystery visual novel than horror as it bills itself. There are certainly horror elements, but the mystery is the focus and it's done extremely well. There was never a moment that I felt like something just came out of left field -- there were surprises, but they always made sense in the end. It was an excellently thought-out and written storyline.

I think the characters may have been the highlight here, even with the overall narrative and mystery being so well done. The diversity was nice -- from your standard anime high schoolers, to mid-20s, a mid 30s mother, a detective in his 50s, and so on. I found that they all behaved believably... well, unless there was a supernatural reason for them not to. The backstories and motivations were solid for each, and humor was used fairly liberally and effectively in character building moments.

The art and music were great. The creepy atmospheric tracks were spot on, the more dramatic choir themes were excellent, and I very much enjoyed the somewhat goofy jazz theme that would accompany a pair of detectives in the less dire moments. The character designs and expressions were top notch, and I enjoyed the scenery as I searched each of the games locations for the (optional) collectible Mocking Bird stickers -- which included such greats as a penguin with a pompadour and an eagle with a mohawk and biker jacket.

In the 13 hours it took me to reach the true ending, there was only one point that I found a puzzle to be annoying. It required advancing a completely unrelated and fairly easy to miss conversation in a different scene altogether. I generally made sure to exhaust all conversation options, so it was mainly bad luck that I missed this one and couldn't figure out how to proceed for a bit. Still, there was no indication of what I needed to do other than a brute force search. That said, all of the other puzzles were well done and required a bit of clever thinking. There are some meta elements to some of the puzzles that I found well done and enjoyable to figure out.

There's a couple of other quick things to mention. While the game features multiple endings, it is essentially a linear affair -- there's no real branching to be had here. Perfectly fine with me, but I know that's not everyone's cup of tea. Also, as mentioned above the horror elements are fairly light. If you want to be frightened, this isn't the game. Again, that's actually to my preference -- I love games that have a horror flavor without actually messing up my sleep haha.

There are already plenty of reviews on here talking about the artistic merit of Immortality, how good the FMV acting is, the novelty of finding new clips, etc. I mostly agree with those 5 star reviews -- there's some really cool stuff to experience here. Uncovering the plots of the three movies is very cool. The bigger picture is very cool. It's certainly a game worth experiencing.

That said, I found several key aspects of the game to hinder my experience.

The controls for watching the FMV clips somehow managed to be absolutely awful. I think the intent was to feel like your winding an unwinding actual film? I really don't know. I work in computer vision, so I spend a good amount of time scrubbing back and forth over videos. I can say with honesty that I have more fun doing it at work than I did here. The clunky controls actually almost led to me missing a key mechanic of the game and did lead to me having to rewatch a lot of video.

The mechanic for finding new videos -- clicking on something on screen to see something similar from a different clip -- is really cool at first, but it gets a bit frustrating by the end. There's some amount of randomness to the clip you end up at and no clear way to find new clips. So, as the amount of clips you've seen increases, it becomes proportionally that much more difficult to find a new clip. This was mainly an issue in the last couple of hours, but it contributed to a bit to souring the impact of the finale.

Finally, the game soft locked during the finale. What should have been an impactful, shocking, and dramatic moment instead led to 10 minutes of me confusedly wondering if I was just having issues with the controls again or if it really wouldn't continue past the point I was at. A google search and reddit post revealed that this has happened to others -- and that there was no way to retrigger the final sequence without clearing your data and starting over. I tried myself to make sure, but sure enough, no luck. So, I had to watch the last bit on youtube after that interruption.

On top of the gameplay issues, I just didn't quite connect with the thematic components of the game. As I said in the first paragraph, it was extraordinarily well done, but I think I'm just not the person to be strongly impacted by what Immortality offers. There were also a a couple of fairly basic mysteries that I wanted answers to and couldn't find one, even googling afterward.

All of the complaining aside, I'm glad I played the game and will almost certainly circle back to Sam Barlow's other games in the future.

Fun little puzzle heavy Zelda-like. Most of the puzzles were sokoban style box pushing, but with some extra twists. The combat felt very clumsy, but the game never asked too much of the player and was very forgiving with healing and restarts after death, so it wasn't too frustrating. There's a lot of smirk-worthy humor throughout the game, but nothing really laugh out loud funny.

I wasn't too interested in continuing on to do the optional content, but I enjoyed the three and a half hours I spent on the main quest.

Well, that was a unique experience. The melee combat is fairly entertaining and the gun combat is serviceable. The narrative is interesting enough to keep attention, but not spectacular.

The atmosphere is amazing, though. Insane character designs and motivations, bizarre dialogue and music, strange landscapes. I absolutely love the acid trip this game provides.

Zeno Clash took about 3.5 hours playing on normal difficulty -- a bit short, but appropriate for what the game offers. I could easily see it growing stale as a 10-15 hour game, but, luckily, it was paced out well.

What a charming little trilogy.

All three games together have a runtime of about 3 hours, and the gameplay is very simple -- you collect items from the environment and trade them with other characters to get what you need to solve the mysteries. I'd say it lands a bit closer to walking simulator than what you'd expect from point and click games.

The fun comes from the goofy, sometimes absurd, and frequently awkward writing. I was grinning throughout the series, and even laughed out loud on multiple occasions. Top that off with enjoyable music and cute artistic direction, and you've got a great package. There's nothing mind blowing here, but the ending managed to be surprisingly impactful for such a short, silly series. Definitely worth the time!