never heard of this but I kept seeing someone I follow on twitch stream it and every time i went "is this dude really streaming roblox?" watched 30 minutes of it and purchased immediately.

so refreshing to get the enjoyment of a AAA shooter without having to free up 200 GB and upgrading 3 different PC components just to still be plagued with poor optimization issues. the game is 2.1 GB and runs at over 140 frames, even with a massive 255 player match and destructible environments.

especially love the voip comms. no one has been toxic, everyone is just roleplaying, it owns. i love that when you die it auto triggers your mic and you can let out a death gurgle. good fun.

Super fun set of movement tools in this game. Really had a blast seeing a location I just BARELY couldn't get to and then spending like 20 minutes trying the same set of jumps over and over until it's pixel perfect and manage to make it.

The game goes for a very specific look/vibe of n64 platformer and it executes on it exceptionally well. Good music, textures are muddy in just the right way and the models animate just right.

Not a huge fan of the combat. Sometimes struggled to tell when I was colliding with an enemy and something about the lock-on camera just felt... not right, even with the follow option on. The menus are kinda ugly and I wish there had been a map of some sort, or like an item screen with collected/totals in the zone or something. Can't fault it that hard though, menus and maps are hard and I have to assume it's from a solo dev.

Absolutely worth checking out if you like movement heavy platformers. Recommend paying full price too, it's such a good value at only 6 bucks.

This is a hard 2 to give, but Tunic was an experience that was much more than I expected only to be brought down by being exactly what I expected.

I don't tend to watch trailers or follow pre-release footage outside of an initial reveal, so I had no clue about the instruction manual aspect of this game or the fact that it was all in a fantasy language. I loved this part of Tunic. The manual artwork was superb and really nailed the feeling of the old Zelda chibi art. The way information is dealt out was very nostalgic, and just as a concept, I love it so much. 5 star stuff. I grew up with a bunch of floppy drives with a ton of NES and SNES roms and combing through the JP releases was one of my favorite things to do. I don't speak this language, and I don't know what is going on, but I play a lot of games so I should be fine, right? And after some trial and error, yeah, I could pick up on that stuff with context clues and intuition. Tunic does such an amazing job of recreating this feeling.

Visually, the game is amazing. Soft shadows and lighting combined with a super strong art design goes a long way. I was in awe of some of the locations in this game (Blue Key area especially.) Likewise, the music also shines. Lifeforced is such a strong composer with Dustforce being one of my favorite game OSTs ever. The track that plays in the East Forest is so reminiscent of an alternate reality "Secret of the Forest" it gave me goosebumps. Every track did such a good job of setting a mood without being too ambient.

The puzzles are so clever. I was filling out a notebook in a way I haven't done since I played Fez and this completely caught me off guard. I had no idea the game was going to go this way and I was so for it. I don't want to spoil too much, but there is one mechanic that gave me the same feeling cracking the Rosetta Stone did all those years ago. I solved the obvious ones then found one of the secret ones, and then I was hooked. I had to 100% this, I had to solve every riddle, I had to complete this.

But I didn't. And that's because I have not talked about, well, playing the game. This game takes heavily from Souls games, more-so than Zelda, honestly. Block, parry, rolling i-frames, stamina, Estus, corpse runs, punishing combat encounters, the works. And okay, cool, I like those games a lot too. The issue is that Tunic..... just doesn't fit that style of gameplay. The controls are very loose... It's hard to describe, moving around feels tank-ish? Like you have a pretty substantial turning radius, so moving about in precise combat just never felt good. I'd constantly find myself dying due to get stuck on geometry or just trying to run past an encounter just to overshoot the path and then be stuck in a corner. Enemy AI at points is relentless and sometimes outright broken, and I mean in the sense that it wasn't functioning correctly, not that it was too hard or something. There's one encounter in West Garden where a bunch of flying enemies come swarming in from halfway across the map, even though I had never even been near them. Like I knew where they became active, it wasn't even remotely close to where I was, and yet the AI would become active and just flyover at hyperspeed like they're trying to catch up. Also, for those particular flying enemies, you aren't really equipped to handle them at that point. The game does a pretty good job about giving you items and consumables, but you don't get a projectile weapon until the end of that area. They weren't hard or anything, so why even have them? They were just annoying, having to wait for 20 seconds for this thing to get it's pathing right and not get stuck somewhere for you to just kill it in 2 hits.

The camera was another big issue for me. The game is pretty cheeky and hides paths that you can't see due to a static isometric angle. And then it does it 50 more times, like it's being clever. It got tiring very quickly and the annoyance was only exacerbated by how often I found myself clipping into the geometry. I constantly found myself asking, "Is this a hidden path or am I just stuck in a cliff again?" I don't even need like a free camera, but just a simple 90 degree rotation would have made things so much less frustrating.

I have a bunch of other minor grievances like the stamina system sucks, the rules the game sets seem inconsistent and it breaks them at seemingly random times, the lack of (good) fast travel in a game about exploration is frustrating, and they all just came culminating to a point where I didn't want to play anymore. I'm missing 2 pieces to the Mountain Door puzzle and maybe half a dozen secret puzzles left and I am super curious about what I left unfinished. But I'll probably just look up a longplay and see if I can solve them without having to actually play the game. This is a game I should be gushing about non-stop to people and honestly I probably still will, just with a big fat asterisk at the end.

Look if I'm going to be honest I would say that I have a negative interest in vtubers. I don't watch them and actively avoid them. I don't know a single person in here outside of the funny dog lady and the White Woman.

But I can't deny the amount of love and passion put into a free game that honestly rivals Vampire Survivors in my eyes. So many characters, so many items and unlocks, a heap of bonus minigame stuff, great art, solid music. I especially love that each character's main weapon is unique to them and they have special unique skills as well. That solves the biggest issue I have with Vampire Survivors where the characters didn't really matter and I all built them the same way, with whatever was OP. Here I have to think more and play to their individual strengths.

I downloaded this on a whim and played it for 8 hours straight and will probably put at least another 30 in, if not more.

surprised at how much more i like this than 2.

they finally made functional lobbies that you can use to just join a friend. story is more octo expansion style missions, which owns. last boss was so sick.

everything else is par for the course for splatoon. great art and character designs, incredible music, and super addictive gameplay.

not much i can complain about, other than nintendo shipping a console without an ethernet port (if you are playing switch games online, BUY THE ETHERNET ADAPTER)

One of the better retro royale styled games. Not as good as Tetris 99, better than Pac-man or Mario 35. F-Zero X had a battle royale mode in it anyway, the high octane, violent, boost/energy balance nature of F-Zero fits the genre great! I wish that the races kept going until 1 person was standing, though, instead of ending like a normal race. They add a bunch of obstacles anyway, why not keep amping it up! trailing 1 person on Death Wind for like, 2 and a half minutes for the win would've been super hype. Still, enjoy how they set it up and I like the customization and all of the old comic art in the UI and menus! More F-Zero please!

I definitely understand why Tokimeki is the titan of dating sims that it is today. Art and presentation is fantastic and all of the girls are super fun and full of personality. They each have such charm that I really want to see them all to completion.

That being said, in the modern time, the game kind of sucks. Gameplay loop is super repetitive and dull. Mechanics are obfuscated seemingly just to be frustrating. Basic actions take forever to complete (calling Yoshio sticks out as being so unnecessarily time consuming) and it feels very unfulfilling to play. Definitely a series that I will go back to appreciating from a distance.

Also, Yoshio, why the hell do you know your little sisters BWH?

my gut reaction to this game was just average. seemed solidly put together but didn't capture what i liked about guilty gear. after letting it breathe some and giving it more time, it's definitely grown on me. it's definitely different from old gear, but the dna is still there. it's still a blast to play. i think this is a sentiment more fgc players need to adapt. if you enjoy the old game, play the old game, and try to see the new as something new. if you still don't like it, well, the old games aren't going away and plenty of people will stick with the game that really hits for them, so you can keep playing what you do like.

the music truly is abysmal though. most of the character in the songs comes purely through the lyrics, with the instrumentation taking a backseat and largely sounding very samey, and naoki's performance is almost satirical, sounding like a theater kid playing the role of a metal musician in a high school play. a lot of the song structures just don't fit a high intensity fighting game either, with too many tracks having odd low energy interludes. i really like the themes of faust, baiken, and hc, but all of them just have terrible sections that completely kill the momentum during a round. i wish they had been chopped and edited so the in-game versions would've flowed better in a match, and left the full versions for the ost album. i love the lyrics as a lore fiend and think they do well at displaying the character they represent, i just wish they were performed better, or there were optional instrumental versions just due to my disdain of naoki's performance. i will admit that (most of) aisha's performances were really nice and shine through the sludge that is the majority of the soundtrack.

i respect this game a lot. incredible art and atmosphere. they were going for a vibe and they nail it. the world is sorrowful and filled with sin and guilt. it's like hollow knight but all the bugs are replaced with european catholics.

but the gameplay just wasn't for me. the movement wasn't interesting and the combat was very bland. mechanics seem obtuse just because "lol dark souls did it" and i was constantly feeling like i was missing something major. felt like i was just mashing attack and then hitting dodge to mash it on the other side.

i might go back to it. but i don't know. i spent a lot of time with it and never got grabbed. might just check out a longplay to see the visuals towards the end.