While a slight game eclipsed by Nintendo’s best on the platform, it’s a fun, uncomplicated platformer with some clear inspiration for the games that follow it.

Manifold Gardens is a conundrum. I enjoy the puzzles and the visuals, but I don’t love the process of finding the puzzles. Exploration is a good opportunity to see the stunning worlds, but their mind-warping architecture isn’t easy to navigate and it makes simply locating what you’re “supposed” to do frustrating. It’s an unavoidable byproduct of the Escherian worlds and perhaps the problem is in my drive to solve the next puzzle instead of merely sightseeing.

A relic of its original release, it can’t escape the limits of the initial platform and it suffers for it. Aspects of the combat are too random to be fun, the side content is mindless, and the story is convoluted. The voice acting is laughable, yet there is an earnestness to the game that is somehow endearing, and I found myself enjoying it as one would junk food—under no illusion that it’s good, and in fact, maybe precisely because it isn’t!

Lost my save; don’t know if I’m coming back. Very fun what I did play.

My first foray and love for first-person puzzle games can be attributed to the original release of Portal, and this visual update gives it a nice facelift. Still a banger, and I don’t think I can add anything new to the praise of Portal that hasn’t already been said. I was surprised all over again by the escape sequence at the end. It truly transforms this game from brilliant to transcendant.

I’m an easy mark for a first person puzzler, but I think my biases aside this is a good one. Some clever ideas and puzzles that are just the right difficulty—tricky but manageable. I also like the final set of puzzles as they solve the problem many puzzle games face of how to conclude a puzzle game in a satisfying, climactic way without resorting to a boss fight. However, the story is pretty flat and some puzzles feel redundant. These are small marks on an overall great game.

More courses for the best Mario Kart game, what do you expect? They’re fun and some are all-time greats.

This platformer suffers from unfortunate timing, I started it before Super Mario Wonder and finished it shortly after beating that game. I can’t help but compare the two, and I also suffer from a Mario bias. With that being said, this game still is a lot of fun, and you can see some of the influence it had on Wonder with the musical levels. There’s an absurd amount of value here with the frankly excessive amount of levels and collectibles.

Cute and fun to start, but progression felt to slow to really hook me.

A joyous, imaginative celebration of 2D Mario.

The platonic ideal of phone games, now even better! Some grinding feels unnecessary, but otherwise it’s nearly perfect.

I'm not much for visual novels, and this one is more heavily weighted towards novel than I realized. As far as analyzing the merits of the story, the ending seems sudden and character motivations are unexplained and underdeveloped. With some more development, I could see it being an effective story.

A poignant story of the complicated relationship between parent and child that was all the more impactful as a parent myself. It asks some profound questions without pretending to have all of the answers. As an interactive story, there’s more story than interactivity, but I didn’t mind as it’s told effectively with beautiful music and a strong performance. It isn’t the greatest game in Annapurna’s catalog, but it is solid and worthwhile.

Clever premise that could use some polish in execution. The rules that govern the stories—determining and manipulating them—is the thrust of the gameplay, and the game’s fun and frustration are derived from them. I can’t help but feel that a hint system that guided the player, or locked in panels that were correct, would benefit this game greatly. There were stories that seemingly should’ve worked , but the rules were too narrowly defined for the game to recognize.

A fun but barebones TRPG that plays easier than its board game counterpart.