jakobvongunten
the best public transit system in videogames
everybody's nitpicks are annoying and bad except for my nitpicks which are correct and good
2018
the numbers get pretty hard to read on a switch lite at larger puzzle sizes - in particular, once a color chunk is detected as 'complete' (and it becomes a number written in that color on a white background) it can be very difficult to discern what color it was, and i suspect this'd be a problem even on a larger screen. also like two or three of the 35x25 puzzles at the end were bugged and not correctly detecting completed sections in certain rows (can still be finished, just annoying)
there's a charmingly amateurish or perhaps 'programmer art' quality to a lot of the finished pieces that i really enjoy though – they're not badly done, there's just a certain goofy looseness to the style that i find charming
there's a charmingly amateurish or perhaps 'programmer art' quality to a lot of the finished pieces that i really enjoy though – they're not badly done, there's just a certain goofy looseness to the style that i find charming
1995
trying to suss out which breakout/arkanoid clone i remember playing a little bit of when i was a kid, it was some windows or dos shareware demo i think. this one has an excruciatingly long animation of some robot arms grabbing a new paddle and ball you have to watch every time you die. i would not recommend it.
2016
both are neat but worth going for the updated standalone version on itch rather than the original from the triennale collection
2016
Powers of Ten but for the celestial spheres. which isn't nothing, for a free trifle, but I guess based on what little I knew of Tale of Tales I did expect something plottier.
2017
the weirder/more whimsical parts are good. the stats are never adequately explained, there's no way to immediately quit or restart a challenge even if you're already guaranteed to lose, and it's often bewildering how confidently they choose to pursue a real clunker of a joke. it's still generally fun, and when the game manages to pull out a new trick you weren't expecting it often delights. at the end of the day, though, it's mostly just golf.
2019
"You meet a new person, you go with him," Kid mused, "and suddenly you get a whole new city." He'd offered it as a small and oblique compliment.
Pepper only glanced at him, curiously.
"You go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass places you didn't know were there. Everything changes."
"This way." Pepper ducked between buildings not two feet apart.
They sidled between the flaking boards. The ground was a-glitter from the broken windows.
Pepper said, "Sometimes it changes even if you go the same way."
- Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren
Pepper only glanced at him, curiously.
"You go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass places you didn't know were there. Everything changes."
"This way." Pepper ducked between buildings not two feet apart.
They sidled between the flaking boards. The ground was a-glitter from the broken windows.
Pepper said, "Sometimes it changes even if you go the same way."
- Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren
2019
great look but unfortunately i found it unplayable due to the camera controls (might be a mac problem, certainly in the gameplay vid on the itch page the camera isn't careening around wildly and getting stuck in the ceiling)
pretty neat until the gross shocker ending
i came away with mixed feelings and it's admittedly a bit janky (including being able to be penalized for the 'mistake' of mistapping to fill in a box within a nonexistent row/column just outside the grid) but the aesthetics are rather nice (even if they are put above legibility) and the puzzles are generally good (the normal ones, at least; the multi-puzzle mosaics are mostly just extremely repetitive
2018
genuinely don't want to imagine what this year would have been like without this game
2020
came in with guarded expectations but it still flew below them
really highlighted the value in ace attorney being about a defense lawyer. phoenix wright desperately trying to defend a client, scrambling through a case just trying to disrupt the evidence/testimony linking your client to the murder and hopping from theory to theory in the process before ultimately revealing the truth is an infinitely more enjoyable journey than having the amateur detective player characters bumble in and make clearly unsound assumptions and accusations in the course of moving the plot forward, to say nothing of the cop stuff. did find the ex-husband stuff surprisingly good amidst the otherwise serviceable-at-best writing though
puzzles are samey, with little sense of speculation during or joy upon completion (beyond most clues just being mundane rectangular objects, the pixel art style used for displaying finished puzzles means that the b&w pixels often barely suggest the finished product). but hey, it's picross so i still had trouble putting it down in spite of everything
really highlighted the value in ace attorney being about a defense lawyer. phoenix wright desperately trying to defend a client, scrambling through a case just trying to disrupt the evidence/testimony linking your client to the murder and hopping from theory to theory in the process before ultimately revealing the truth is an infinitely more enjoyable journey than having the amateur detective player characters bumble in and make clearly unsound assumptions and accusations in the course of moving the plot forward, to say nothing of the cop stuff. did find the ex-husband stuff surprisingly good amidst the otherwise serviceable-at-best writing though
puzzles are samey, with little sense of speculation during or joy upon completion (beyond most clues just being mundane rectangular objects, the pixel art style used for displaying finished puzzles means that the b&w pixels often barely suggest the finished product). but hey, it's picross so i still had trouble putting it down in spite of everything
not sure the overarching seriousness reconciles itself with the Goreyesque cavalcade of child death the vignettes take you through
This review contains spoilers
the flashlight effect (which i knew was coming, i think i'd heard michael discuss it on a podcast before) wasn't working for me so i had to highlight text the old-fashioned way, which still worked in a certain sense but probably wasn't as evocative