I’m astounded that Hat World was made in RPGmaker. Valkyrie Profile style exploration, with Romancing SaGa style combat, character progression, route structure, and more. There's tons of side content, customizable (and potentially very difficult) boss fight difficulty, and a surprisingly interesting story. There’s a fair amount of Madoka and Phillip K Dick going on in the story, and I love it.

A lot of the rough edges from the Romancing SaGa series are filed down – quests are more clear, encounter level increases when beating a boss instead of with all battles, etc. There’s a bit more room for grinding throughout the game than most of the Romancing SaGa series, but most means of character progression are gated by the current enemy difficulty, so you can only grind so far. There are a ton of optional end game bosses to fight, which tend to require specific strategies. There were several I found harder than any of the final SaGa bosses.

The game looks and sounds quite good for a solo RPGmaker project as well. The pixel art conveys a lot of character, and the music and sound effects were well chosen.

It leans too hard into anime tropes for my taste in general, but I'm not too horribly bothered by it. In particular, I’d really rather the game not have the one section with 'lolicon' jokes, but luckily it's a very small portion of the game and I’m fully capable of rolling my eyes and moving on. While the customization options are great, I do wish characters had more innate traits setting them apart, though that’s a fairly minor quibble.

I had an absolute blast with the game. It says a lot that I'm tempted to jump straight back into another route without taking a break first. I almost never replay games without at least a year or two in between.

Very charming and cute. It's more or less what you'd expect from the concept - an open world spin on Boku no Natsuyasumi. There's lots to do in it and it feels great to just roam around. Plenty of interesting and cute character interactions and lovely music and presentation.

My biggest problem is that the switch doesn't run the game very well and it's often noticable. The draw distance isn't great and the framerate drops in certain areas. Worth a try though, and the language is quite simple if you want to use it for practice.

It's interesting to bring the summer vacation game formula to full 3D, but I'm not sure if borrowing so heavily from open world-isms was the way to do it. Something more in the vein of Yakuza games or A Short Hike might have been more effective, especially because this game doesn't have the sandbox mechanics that are needed to make open worlds 'work'. Still, it's cool to have a full 3D map to explore for summer vacation things, it's just too big. The idea of there being multiple towns in the world you can take a bus or cross a mountain to is neat. I also appreciate that the character design is nontraditional. The story I didn't play enough to get in to, but what I read seemed charming in its best moments and involves a travelling circus staging performances (and you get to help in deciding the performances)

sitting at the top of a hill littered with 2010s western independent charmers with hamfisted attempts at satire, post-modernism, genre critique, societal reflection and subversive storytelling is this crown jewel; the crème de la crème example of the self-serving haughty pretentiousness of an entire generation of would-be internet geniuses scrolling through tv tropes page by page in hopes to form contrarian opinions on popular media based on the talking points and consensuses of other people. if you're of a certain age demographic, you know this person - the one who parrots the opinions of your nostalgic critics and mr. enters as if the information they siphoned by lazing about youtube in search of a personality might be enough to make someone go, 'geez, this guy KNOWS his stuff' without having to go through the effort of formulating their own thoughts, or even worse, having to experience the media they're responding to the response of firsthand.

doki doki literature club stands as an indulgence of saturated moe-era anime tropes under the guise of a critique of the wikipedia plot summaries of KEY, ryukishi07 and type-moon games without having the slightest bit of humility or self-awareness in its execution. it, its creator, and its audience herald itself as some massive deconstruction of the visual novel form, when in actuality it's about in line with the actuality of what it's criticizing as yiik is with jrpgs. there is no metatextual subversion to be had. doki doki is a children's birthday magician - a couple of flashy tricks capable of fooling someone who doesn't know how ren'py works, but beyond its cheap parlor tricks which might give the astute horror mastery of, say, happy tree friends a run for its money, the title lacks substance, it lacks any form of personality, and it lacks the competence to warrant these mistakes in the face of a greater picture or experience.

i won't even dip into the implications the creator has made about how this game is apparently a very real and serious approach to topics such as self-harm and abuse - as a survivor of both i find these claims bordering on insanity - but i will offer the benefit of a doubt and suggest that maybe this is a product of genuine, ineffable incompetence and misjudgment... rather than one of deep-rooted pretention and narcissism. you could get the exact same experience intersplicing five nights at freddy's jumpscare reaction videos, one of the upteenth saw sequels, and nyan neko sugar girls as one would have playing doki doki literature club, but at the least, the former is shocking, entertaining and funny when it intends to be. do your wallet a favor and pass on this one - and yes, i know it's free.

Can't say i've played this game enough to give it a star rating but there is a few reasons why I decided to drop it. Usually with murder mysteries you would expect a small cast with a linear sort of way of deciphering clues. Obra Dinn makes you work backwards, starting the game off with the ending and then eventually working your way towards the beginning it seems. That part isn't a big problem, but what is a problem is the way the game makes you decipher clues.

First of all, the cast is HUGE. There are 60 characters, and you have to determine the name of each one, how they died, and who killed them. It's not easy. In fact I would even go so far as to say it's quite tedious work.

The concept here is really cool though, going back in time to see the memories of what happened during that exact moment. The graphical style used in this game is fitting, yet at the same time makes things a little more difficult for the player. It's pretty hard to make out faces when everyone is pixelated and in black and white.

Anyway most of these criticisms might be baseless considering I've only spent an hour in this game. Think of this as just my first thoughts (probably also my final thoughts.) It just didn't seem appealing enough for me to continue any further than this.