I am typially very bad at technical action games but having watched a quick YT tutorial I became pretty decent in a few hours and subsequently had a great time with this. It has a simple but compelling story told in a very Dark Soulsy way. Sifu has such distinctive art direction and varied encounter design that it was no chore playing through the game multiple times, to find all its secrets.
For those of you put off by the reviews saying how hard it is, I suggest watching any video explaining a couple of simple combos and how to beat the hardest bosses without cheesing them and the game will suddenly become much faster and much more engaging.

Cosy settlement game with great art and animation plagued by balancing problems. There wasn't any point in the game where I didn't have more resources than I could hold which more or less removes any sense that you are managing anything. I didn't pay attention to any of the perks associated with food or weather that affect production as I was operating at a permanent surplus. Later on new habitats are introduced that either have no real function or have a new set of confusing mechanics you can totally ignore and still maintain a giant surplus.
The story gates the mechanics such that you are having new mechanics introduced right up until that last few minutes of the game which is fine but the theme of climate refugees surviving adversity is undermined by the near impossibility of anything approaching failure. The story feels bolted on after the fact since none of the individual story acts have more than a superficial relation to any of the others, which is most evident in the conclusion when the game suddenly stops without even a bit of dialogue acknowledging completion of the final mission. I played an exhibition build of this game two years before release and it seems like some of the criticism related to the game being too challenging. The solution seems to have been to keep adding extra mechanics that give the player yet more efficient ways to generate resources without correspondingly scaling the challenge. Its a shame this game is so shallow as the shear amount of stuff in it points to a huge amount of work, its unfortunate that few of the games elements are able to succesfully synthesise with one another.

Potentially the most simplistic city builder I've ever played. There are no problems that need solving, you just slap down whatever the next thing you have been asked to develop is, go down to the mines and continue digging until you are missing tech, then back up top to build more houses. Loop until it ends.
The split between mines and topside is an idea with a lot of potential but its not explored in any interesting way.
The storyline doesn't feel congruous with the low stakes gameplay, especially the genocidal ending.
The game looks nice but the individual building mostly melt into the background such that there is no real sense of what it is you have build.

The game is made up of skating, cooking and turn based RPG combat and while each of these is exectuted competently the game is far more than the sum of its parts. The passive aggressive confrontations between the characters during the cooking sections are often hilarious and then when resolution is found during the combat sections, it is narratively well earned.
Combining grounded kitchen sink narrative with expressive colourful animation and character design elevates this to something very special.
The story that moves the narrative forward is a little weak and does little to contribute to the relationships at the heart of the game.
Something narratively sophisticated that can only work as a videogame and leans into its gameyness. I love it. Sick game.

Shocked at how much I loved this. Definitely a vibes driven game, so don't expect serious detective work or deep thinking. Extremely detailed city that was a joy to traverse over its pretty tight runtime. You travel to your dilapidated childhood manor to visit your mothers grave on a Mediterranean island. Sherlock realises the events about his mothers death isn't consistent with the story he's been told. Why are you hallucinating Watson, why is there a statue of Baphomet in the house, why is there a German gallery owner following you around and inviting you to sex parties. I decided to play it as a massive cop and condemn every possible criminal to death on very shaky grounds and drive a wedge between him and Watson and the narrative pay off for me playing the game as a piece of shit was extremely well realised.

Pretty simple roguelite dungeon crawler. The difficulty varied in difficulty a little unevenly for me. I was stuck on the second dungeon for ages but then finished the final one on my second attempt.
There are way too many mechanics in the shop section with no real benefit, or frankly possibility, to seriously engage with any of them. Narratively, it doesn't really hold together very well. The ending doesn't feel like it was set up by the preceding parts.
The ability to leave a dungeon and then resume it at the part you left will make this much more approachable for people who find roguelites too difficult but it did mean that the central loot risk/reward mechanic is basically irrelevent and arguably this is where the game should have assigned most of its focus.
Stripping out some of the mechanics and rebalancing would have made this good rather than merely fine.

I've played two full playthroughs now and I only really worked out how the core mechanic worked at the end of the first run. I also only worked out the solution to the games central problem on the final turn of the game, which potentially makes this very well balanced.
The novel conceit is being able to construct stories using conversation topics you've encountered, but by leaving part of story unfinished you can now use this as the basis of a question to ask NPCs. By the time you get the hang of it, it becomes very expressive.
Whilst a core part of the game is the dating sim mechanics, in trying to complete as many of the quests as possible I didn't really have time to engage with it so can't speak to that.
If you have any interest in narrative design then you will definitely find this game interesting at the very least.

Mechanically very shallow. I was fortunate to never work out how to make any of the buildings that make the camp self sufficient operate, which meant that I had a finite time to finish the game before running out of money which added some much needed intensity but otherwise its a case of training a soldier for a mission by assigning them to a building, waiting for them to get to the desired level, then send them on a mission. Repeat. No depth beyond that. It's surprising that this game hasn't already been made as military and management are two themes that both make sense together and are popular, yet this game fails to make the them synergise.