The website for this game didn't make it at all clear that the core tactical board-game portion of it wasn't available in single-player mode, so all I played was the dungeon rush. This is unfortunately just a mediocre platformer with inexplicably annoying-to-collect coins.

While I can't speak directly to the rest of the game, if it had the same lack of attention to detail as the portion I played (things like lacking d-pad support despite being Switch-only and having most controls emulate directional buttons), I'm not excited to give it a try.

There were some solid stories in this, but it doesn't live up to the standard set by other Bravemule games. The structure has too much space to comfortably be filled by two writers, leaving stories (particularly Snow's) feeling repetitive and cheesy. The framing device, while kind of amusing the first time, became seriously annoying when going back to play through all the stories--particularly in the third playthrough where the player is forced to replay a story they've already seen. That said, Khaw's "The Necromancer's Blues" was an inventive use of the form, and Henderson's art was evocative throughout.

Somewhere in the possibility space bracketed by 80 Days and Sunless Sea/Skies there lies the perfect synthesis of mechanic and narrative, a game that assembles stories so fluidly as you play that you can't tell where the bespoke attention of the writers ends and the emergent storytelling of your particular playthrough begins.

Griftlands is not that game, but it reaches towards it as an ideal. It makes each run feel like its own little story with a grace Invisible Inc never managed, and the individual relationship with each NPC in each run makes the world feel alive in a way that outsizes the relatively simple social mechanics involved.

The deckbuilder mechanics are solid, too. It's not up to Slay the Spire's standard yet, but then again I haven't unlocked everything and Slay the Spire isn't even up to its own standard without everything unlocked. I'm sure I'll come back to this many times in the coming years.

After playing through all the Soulsies this year, this felt like a reminder of why I usually DON'T like action RPGs. Maybe I've grown too used to their deliberate combat speed and minimalist mechanics, but the combat in Ys melted together into an undifferentiated sea of numbers flying off enemies as they soaked up damage. I kept learning special move after special move but I could never figure out which to use when and why so I would just jam buttons almost at random (and usually win anyway). Flash guard and evade were almost enough to pull it back out to something I felt like I could engage with, if they didn't feel like an ancillary feature of the primary goal of jamming the right buttons to maximize DPS.