a super enjoyable, charming experience! wears its influences on its sleeve, but that's not a bad thing. monkey island meets papers, please, lil guardsman has the charm of sussing out who to let in and who to keep out of the sprawl, while also having fun self-aware humor. the solutions to getting 4 stars on certain characters can be slightly obtuse, but it just makes replaying the game to see all the outcomes all the more fun.

some might say the humor is a bit hit or miss, and while i found the first half to be the more miss part for me (mainly the fact that nobody seemed to be more upset that lil's father was making his child cover his shift to illegally gamble) the mid-game shift was a welcome breath of fresh air and makes the second half of the game all the more exciting. i enjoyed the first half well enough, but the second half really stands out. that being said, the first half is still needed, as i think the change that happens in that second half wouldn't be quite as endearing and fun if the buildup wasn't there.

so many choices too! and they genuinely affect certain things! unique dialogue galore, fun characters, i could go on but i'd be spoiling for sure! highly recommend at least one playthrough, if not multiple to get all the fun outcomes you can!

all in all a satisfying game with beautiful visuals and wonderful songs. far more choice than i expected what with the layout of the game, but being able to change the vibe of the song was so much fun. more choices than i thought would be possible as well, as i only really knew it was a roleplaying game via playing as grace and that you could romance certain characters.

honestly only have three complaints really, and they aren't enough to not recommend this game to people.

first off, the pc controls, as playing with mouse and keyboard, while not excrutiating, would often see my mouse jumping to the next confirmation button during certain screens, which was jarring. i feel a little more fine tuning with regards to the pc controls would be for the best.

next, you get to choose from one of three different "moods" for grace, both as her character and in songs. while i predominantly chose red or green, the blue options often felt the least fleshed out, or at least like there wasn't as much agency in there. it feels like blue was added to create less of a this or that type game, and while i'd rather its inclusion than cutting it , i feel a little more fine tuning could make the blue options really stand out.

my final complaint, honestly, would be with how little of the world we get to see. i think the story behind the story and the worldbuilding are just as interesting as the story we got, and while it's understandable that there wouldn't be as many idols as there once was, i wish we'd gotten to see a lot more greek gods and legends personified in this interesting world than we already did.

i recommend at least one playthrough, and don't be scared to redo a song if you don't like the outcome.

also, if you get to aphrodite's party, go red. even if you don't make that your canon choice, at least listen to the red song.

with choose your own adventure games sometimes you just get lucky with certain choices. this was my experience with parliament of knives, where i just so happened to get what many call the "golden route" on my first go (i swear!! no guide!!!)

that being said, despite getting the most narratively satisfying ending on my first go, i enjoyed the story being told thoroughly. there were, of course, missing threads i missed out on due to not going through the game again and picking other options, but all in all i was satisfied with my playthrough.

one of my favorite things about these cyoa games is the ability to craft a character that truly becomes your own. i created olivia lovejoy, a ventrue who had little to no charisma and who so loathed her new unlife as a vampire that she grew resentful of her sire, even as she lived relatively comfortably in the ivory tower of the camarilla. even without character customization, images, or voice acting, i found myself incredibly attached to olivia as i played, and wanted to ensure my choices were as in character as possible for her.

this is a good jumping off point if you want to get into the vampire the masquerade series of games/rules, as it explains most things a basic kindred would know. highly recommend for the excellent writing, interesting mystery, and wellspring of options.

i always figured my top 10 was solid. there's a bunch of games on there that maybe aren't masterpieces, maybe aren't the greatest stories ever told, but they're important to me in one way or another. i didn't think anything could breach it.

until now.

pentiment is now in my top 10 games of all time. when i think about portal 2 i think of it as a mathematically perfect game. pentiment is the artistic equivalent. this game is LITERALLY art.

i didn't think i could get so invested in the world of 16th century bavaria, where half the cast are devout members of a religion that i've never felt particularly close to, and yet the humanizing of each and every character from a lowly peasant to even the archdeacon is absolutely fascinating.

acts 1 and 2 both involve investigating a murder, and the time limit never felt too short, there's never too much pressure, but you're always faced with the choice of what lead to take, which person to investigate. and even afterwards, you're often given the question of "SHOULD this person be punished" because of new information you discover through your investigations.

speaking of discovering information, the ease with which certain things in this game can be revealed to you is sometimes dependent on which backgrounds you pick. sometimes these backgrounds don't do much other than add flavor text or a bit of extra depth to your character, but other times you can use your fluency in other languages to read different texts, whereas other people might need to find somebody to translate for them. furthermore, the sheer number of backgrounds you can choose from means any and all replays can be unique and interesting.

every playthrough is likely at least a bit different. my andreas was a hedonist who also studied medicine, but was also an excellent orator and logician. he could make reasonable inferences based on context and so despite his flirty, fun-loving demeanor, he was a force to be reckoned with intellectually. other people's andreases will be different, and even my own, second andreas will be different from my first. this was utterly fascinating, and led to tons of replayability.

normally i like to comb a game once i finish it for the first time, try to get every achievement possible. i started up pentiment to do just that and found myself... hesitant. i was skipping dialogue and, sure, it was slow, too, but... i didn't want to. i didn't want to just go through the motions, making random dialogue choices. i wanted to build a new andreas, one that made different choices from myself.

joshua sawyer once more proves himself a competent writer, who utilizes the historical lens to craft a unique, touching, beautiful story that floored me many times. highly recommend even if you're wary. give it a shot.

controversial opinion alert: i might like this about as much as i like dark souls 2. elden ring is gorgeous at every turn, and the breath of the wild influence is easily felt, but even at launch something felt... wrong. different.

fromsoft is known for their ability to streamline you into the path they've designed for you, where your skills scale up as the game progresses, starting you off small until even bosses from the beginning of the game are regular enemies in the endgame. elden ring feels like it struggles under the weight of trying to balance this inherent linearity with the open world. numerous people--myself included--only went to the weeping peninsula far later than intended because the game never gives any motive or direction to head there, except for the idea of "walling" you via margit, wherein we encounter another problem: the boss mechanics.

even before watching joseph anderson's video on elden ring, i felt a lot of his gripes while i played myself. the balance is just not present in this game. i played (and platinumed!) every other souls game with just my broadsword and a dream, never bothering with any flashy moves or cheesy techniques because that's just how i played the game. elden ring feels like it has turned my playstyle into the hard mode of the game. this would be fine if the spirit ashes weren't completely and utterly broken, if they didn't bug out the vast majority of the bosses' ai and make them incredibly easy to beat. in my first playthrough i died to margit but he died simultaneously with me because my jellyfish's poison got to him. i beat that fight and felt no satisfaction, so i put the game down.

on my most recent playthrough, i got through leyndell, got to the mountaintop of the giants and therefore the shitty damage scaling, and shelved the game once more. the best fights in this game are godrick and morgott, with mohg and radahn close in 3rd and 4th respectively.

i might just prefer linearity in my souls games, but this game feels like a goodbye to the souls veterans. a way of encouraging new players to not be afraid of the difficulty because of the spirit ashes, while barely taking older fans into account. i feel like i got broken up with, but gently, so as not to hurt me.

i could talk more about obtuse npc quests and the god awful implementation of torrent as well as the dungeon rewards that stop being good the second you choose not to play as a mage, but my thoughts are scattered. at least the nokron reveal was gorgeous.

i know bugsnax had a lot of memes attached to it, especially around its launch, but going in even without the meme context, i had a genuinely good time here. the concept is novel, and explores tough themes through innocent-looking, colorful, fun characters. oftentimes i'd feel like the only human character around a cast of puppets, a la mr hooper in sesame street.

every character is memorable, the bugsnax are hilarious design-wise, and i loved every second with the game, even when the physics got a little janky. sometimes it could be frustrating to catch specific bugsnax, but it didn't deter my enjoyment.

for what it is, the sexy brutale is a short, sweet puzzle game with an interesting environment that's fun to navigate and pleasing to look at. that being said, while i enjoyed figuring out how to solve each guest's murder and how to save them, i found it far too easy to miss the actual murder itself as well as brute force your way into saving somebody.

no spoilers, but the story was decent and served its purpose. nothing too special, but the way it wraps up is interesting.

i'm not sure if it's possible, but i think it would be fun to be able to save every guest within one loop. it might be tight, even impossible, but i thought that's what we were building up to, honestly.