A mid-00s light novel come to life, with all the trappings therein. I like some of the gameplay elements here; anyone miffed about the loss of press turn is whinging over some fun experimentation. The Sabbath system offers some interesting choices in combat, forcing you to question how offensive you need to be to maintain your forward advance.

I really like these characters in their downtime, the hangouts and meal segments are sweet and they manage to feel both like coworkers and emotionally stunted 20 somethings meandering through life. Milady was the standout to me and Ringo is a lovely protagonist, I enjoyed Saizo, Arrow was not my fav.

This isn’t a bad game by any means, just a bit simple; the dungeons, particularly the Soul Matrix segments, can be brutally tedious and pale in comparison to the original’s Vision Quests. But it’s a cute and fairly short (compared to its peers) game that never quite coalesces into something truly essential. I will say this game is extremely stable on Series S and ran beautifully. Some fun tunes too.

I think when it leans into its more relaxing, “lo-fi” vibes the game does shine. The hate campaign against this game is saddening because it’s inoffensive at best—you don’t really see this kind of energy for all the Vita RPGs it isn’t too far from

This game was probably running bitcoin mining programs on my console.

Palworld despite the myriad of “influences” (to put it kindly) most of the time feels completely uninspired. Each Pal looks like an AI-generated Temtem reject and the gameplay is derivative of every other survival/factory title (such as Ark). Environments don’t look appealing in terms of texture quality or art design and the game’s performance is mixed (On Xbox). Not exceptionally buggy or glitchy to be hilariously bad but never performing well to be a convenient or well optimised experience. Play it if you think legally distinct Pokemon slavery sounds appealing and have a gamepass membership because it’s not worth the $30 or time that’s probably used to fund a mass orangutang extermination project in Borneo.

It’s just slop. Slop that hilariously has a higher all time player peak than Starfield on Steam but its still completely dull, flavourless slop.

After discovering Hotel Dusk, I like many others became enamored by the mystique surrounding its developer, Cing: A tiny team that brought the absolute most out of both the DS and Wii, made 4 Nintendo-published games, and despite that died less than 10 years after being founded.

Out of those 4 games, Hotel Dusk is definitely the most well known, and I absolutely fell in love with it. Beyond the fascinating hardware uses and overall presentation, it was the mood and overall pacing of its story that captivated me. A game relishing in the mundane. Games like Shenmue and No More Heroes captivate me with how they use those chunks of silent, "uninteresting" gameplay to both further enhance the more exciting moments and immerse you more in their everyday worlds. Even Ace Attorney does it in a sense with its investigations.

Long story short: I wanted more Hotel Dusk and decided to try out Cing's first ever Nintendo-published game. And to make another long story short, whilst it definitely shows more rough edges and lack of focus compared to Hotel Dusk, the game's heart is still in the right place.

Its a quirky little game: The textboxes look right out of a flash game, the mouth movements can look flat-out creepy if you pay enough attention to them, and unlike Hotel Dusk most puzzles are moreso there to just...be puzzles, rather than have much of anything to do with the world. Its set up sort of similarly to old-school Resident Evil in that way, I guess. You get a mansion with an assortment of rooms and need to decode how to progress further into the house: Solving a puzzle in the living room gives you a key to a drawer in the office, et cetera.

What really made me draw the Resident Evil connection is the abundance of lore-nuggets sprinkled about: It uses its premise of having two characters with memory issues to let the player ponder over two mysteries at once. Its a neat way to handle the story over its short runtime. Outside of solving that mystery the story isn't all that special on paper, and honestly I mostly played this game as preparation to eventually be able to play Another Code R on Wii.

Yet even in those 5 little hours and all that crust you can definitely feel the Cing spirit here. The atmosphere of Blood Edward Island in general is fantastic, arguably better than Hotel Dusk, due both to the surprisingly large soundtrack as well as the absolutely brilliant use of the two-screen setups. Its straight-up one of the best Adventure game UI's I've ever used, having a 3D-modelled world on one screen as well as 2D stills of the island's most captivating viewpoints on the other. When paired with the music, it creates a kind of immersion I haven't really felt in any other game, and am sad to realize will probably never be seen in any future games given the 3DS' discontinuation. It really does help sell this abandoned mansion's eerieness to both be able to see it at large and see its more detailed spots at the same time.

What also helps with this is that, for as simple as the story is on the whole and as cutesy as the premise seems (A 14 year old goes investigating with her ghost best friend!!), it touches on some surprisingly dark yet very real subjects, with Ashley reacting accordingly. The writer of all four Cing games, Rika Suzuki, has always emphasized that Another Code is specifically about Ashley's mental state first and foremost, and I feel like these moments of discussing betrayal, suicide, abandonment and grief really tie the game together nicely. But really, what'll drive you through the game is its story and atmosphere, alongside the curiousity of how it'll use the DS hardware next.

With its puzzles feeling so deliberately designed to be "DS gimmicks" compared to the more grounded Hotel Dusk puzzles, it end up feeling somewhat self-aware in a really fun way, like "ooh yeah this puzzle is really clever of us", and you yourself cant do anything but go "yeahh youre right", even when they as puzzles are often not anything special. A lot of the time I'd even argue they're too cryptic for their own good.

The story at large is also like a puzzle in of itself, but with its aforementioned short runtime and constant new little pieces uncovered, alongside just generally pretty sweet little character moments, its very fun to just follow along with. Weird, grounded, silly, ominous, crusty, atmospheric: Another Code is most definitely able to be a lot of things in its runtime. At the end of the day I am still very glad I took the time to play it, if only for the memories it gave me.

Playtime: 5 hours
Key Word: Novelty

So Sam lake comes in as himself in Alan wake 2 as the actor for Alex Casey in the films based on books of Alex Casey that Alan wake wrote while Alex Casey is essentially max Payne and Alex Casey is also a real detective who is also acted and voiced by the people who act and voice the fictional Alex Casey based on Alan wakes books and this is all written by Sam lake So there's multiple max Paynes and multiple Alex Casey's and multiple Sam lakes and multiple James McCaffrey's and Alex Casey is a fictional detective who is Sam and James but Alex has a book series written about a detective of the same name who isn't actually Alex Casey just a detective written by Alan wake but the fictional Alex Casey movie features Sam lake and James mcaffery as that fictional Alex Casey who's based off Alan wakes book who's character shares the name to a real but fictional guy who's acted and voiced by the same people who act and voice the fictional fictional movie adaption of a guy who shares his name but the actor and voice actor of him there is a fictional version of those respective actors

" What if I made a fantasy world where all fantasy races lived in peace "
Me: 🙂🙂🙂

" And then you had a comfy coffee shop with a diverse cast of costumers "
Me: 😄😄😄

" But the world was filled with prejudice and xenophobia "
Me: 😓😓😓

" And they used memes to describe structural racism "
Me: 😞😞😞

" And orcs are like... black people! "
Me: 😔😔😔

this is very much a me problem, but i've found myself falling out of love with or retroactively disliking the direction taken by many nintendo franchises for years, with big disappointments like paper mario sticker star, luigi's mansion dark moon, animal crossing new horizons, and now pikmin 4. as someone who's love of games stems from being raised on the unconventional and often times unapproachable late n64 and early to mid gamecube eras, i'm ultimately not surprised that in a post-wii world that nintendo is trying to make their games appeal to as many people who own a switch as possible, but it's still pretty disappointing.

in terms of pikmin 4 itself, it's ultimately fine but i have plenty of issues with it. i feel as though pikmin 1's tone and atmosphere of a surviving on an oppressive, lonely, and seemingly abandoned alien world juxtaposed with cute silly creatures while fighting for your life is one of that game's biggest strengths, and absolutely none of that is in pikmin 4 other than the cute silly creatures. everything is so pristine and clean and preserved to give the illusion that these cute little critters could be having silly fun adventures in your backyard to the point where the game being "pretty" means absolutely nothing to me, and the already desecrated tone definitely isn't helped by having a decent amount of characters involved who have nothing that interesting to say. it's like the captains from 3 but more and worse, and all of this combined leaves pikmin 4 to feel shallow in a lot of the aspects that matter most to me. we're no longer fighting for survival completely isolated in a world we aren't familiar with as a race against the clock and anything that was originally tied to that feeling is now completely disconnected from it.

gameplay wise, however, pikmin 4 is not that bad. pikmin's gameplay has kind of become secondary to me in that i find it too accommodating to the player as the series goes on and i can only really get too engaged while playing 1 or 2 because of this, but 4 is still fun at times. i think the forced lock on, throwing stopping when you use the right number of pikmin, and lack of respawning enemies are all insanely stupid and poorly thought out choices that do nothing to improve the experience and i'm still not 100% sold on the 3-type limit, but they're all ultimately minor issues. caves are back and at this point i don't really care about them either way in 2 or 4, they aren't remotely what i've ever liked about the series gameplay but i don't find them as awful and offensive as i used to and i'm sure there's plenty of people who are happy that they returned. oatchi kinda ruins the actual moment to moment gameplay for me though, i feel like he's too centralizing and overpowered and it's weird that character's will say "Where's Oatchi?" when he isn't currently on screen and i really do not care for his design or "look at the new dog character!" additions in general, but if you don't upgrade him too much you can still have a decent amount of fun.

ultimately pikmin 4 is a fine game that does its job, but one made for a completely different audience than me. being alienated by a series aiming for mass appeal isn't a new feeling for me, but in our world a company is going to do what it can to make the most amount of money possible and i'm glad people are making the most out of that and enjoying what comes of that even if i can't.