It's always neat to get a game that comes up with a neat movement mechanic and just devotes a whole game to it. In Pepper Grinder you play as a cyan haired girl named Pepper and you traverse various themed levels with a drill. It's similar to when you would go through the ground or hidden spaces in a level in Yoshi's Island but with a whole game built around it. Also the digging is the primary mechanic and it's very fluid, fast, and requires some precision. It actually take a bit to get good at moving around and can be an adjustment knowing how you'll arc through the air or when to boost your speed. It's a lot of fun.

The premise is pretty simple. Pepper washes ashore some island and some magenta hair lady and her monster minions like loot her and run away. You pursue them across four worlds that kinda felt generic-ish with an island, a volcanic region, and a snow area. The final area is a bit more unique though.

Also, despite some kinda bland theming, it's not really much to think about when actually playing the game. Nearly every level is designed to make use of the incredible digging mechanic and some of them can really flow well. Levels can be beat fairly quickly and even can be replayed in a time attack mode.

There's a slight misstep here though I feel like. With the core digging mechanic being the highlight of the game and some levels having really nice flow, I can't help but feel like they then spit in their own face by having each level have collectables. Each non-boss level has five big coins to collect and they're almost always hidden in plain sight and if you stop on each screen to look they're pretty easily identifiable hiding spots. That's the trick though. Stopping. When a game has such good flow to then make you STOP and check every inch of the screen before moving on totally broke up the vibe for me. It's like my whole issue with Sonic games as a premise. Gotta go fast doesn't mesh with stop and look around lol.

It's bad for me in particular having a compulsion to want to 100% a level before moving on. I got all the coins in the first couple worlds but found myself getting more frustrated because it just felt bad to keep stopping and double checking. After missing one coin at the end of a level toward the end of world 2 I just said "fuck it" and just played each level after to get tot the end. Lemme tell ya, for me, this is when it got real good. No more worrying about what I'm missing, just tearing through a level and enjoying the thrill of the core mechanic and how it flows with the level design.

That's not to say there's no reason to do collectables though. Contrary to some platformers, the big coins you collect through a level actually have a purpose. Each world has a hidden level you unlock by going to a shop and purchasing a key for it for 10 big coins. Pretty neat, I think.

In the shop, as well as the key, there are sticker pages to buy for coins and I'm just now realizing how to access them in the map screen. Neat thing for people who like that stuff. You can also use the big coins to buy different hairs or hats for Pepper but I never bothered because I like her default look. The shop also contains two gacha machines you use the miscellaneous treasure you pick up through levels to buy. One of them dispenses the stickers and the other gives you an additional temporary hit. You can add up to four to double your health which can help big time on troublesome levels or a tough boss.

Boss fights in this are pretty cool too. Most of them are a big spectacle monster you fight in a large space that makes use of the whole screen and has diggable environments so you can use the drill to attack and defeat the enemy. I found them all to be pretty unique and fun to go through. I think the difficulty spikes for the third boss but it's also my favorite one and the most interesting conceptually.

SO yeah. Pepper Grinder is a video game ass video game. It's short but knows what it's about and does it well. There were some choices with collectables that turned me off but I learned to ignore them and if anything it'll just add to replay value down the line. That and some minor bugs aside, this is a very solid action platformer. Short, cheap, and fun. Perfect thing to kill an afternoon with if you just casually play through it. Definitely recommend to platformer fans or anyone looking to play with a neat way to move around a game. Just keep that collectable stuff in mind if you're the same way I am.

Chained Echoes is exactly what you expect it to be. A retro indie game, trying its own take on classic JRPGs from back in the day. In my opinion, it actually succeeds in it, but it just doesn't reach greatness, like the games that inspired it.

The thing that you'll immediately notice when starting Chained Echoes is its charm. It oozes style and nostalgia with its beautiful graphics and solid environmental design. It's definitely a treat, if you like games like this. Characters and their animations are cool to watch, the monsters are quite creative, bosses look threatening, the world looks beautiful, dungeons are cool and the overworld map is just perfect.

In this beautiful world, I loved how fast and freely you and your armor can move, how quick you can explore the fairly linear areas and just how well each event is paced. You pick up things pretty easy and they never overwhelm or stay long enough to bore you. I also liked the focus on the main quest and how they handled the few sidequests you can find. More open world games and RPGs should take notes from this design.

On top of that, you have a very fun and engaging combat. It's quick, clean of grinding, the overdrive system keeps you on your toes and the freedom to swap characters and improvise during battles, creating your own strategy, was very neat. You can see how well the combat works during boss fights. They're not only epic, but require some thinking in order to win, while maintaining everything fast and fun.

It comes at a cost though. Chained Echoes is a very easy game, with very few good challenges. It manages to wipe the need of grinding, maintaining the flow with easy encounters. I actually don't mind it too much, but I know some people will not enjoy it. Also, while dungeons are cool to explore, some of the gimmicks are a hit or miss. They're good, for the most part, but some of them, like the final one, can get really annoying.

My biggest gripe with the game is something that I actually enjoyed. The story. It is good, but it's not great. It's engaging, but also sort of forgettable. The writing is mostly at fault here, along with how I just couldn't develop a good bond with almost any character or villain. It's all thrown at you. Motivations are shallow, with its issues being resolved with ease, sometimes. And that's a shame, because it actually reaches epic proportions at times, but it never really breaks the bubble of just being a decent story. Good, yes, but I wish it were much much better.

Soundtrack disappointed me as well. There are some really good songs in the game, but not a lot them. It's mostly repetitive, failing to immerse you in parts of the story. One other thing that kept distracting me, this time in regards to gameplay, was character progression. This type of leveling up system just did not work for me, as I felt I wasn't getting stronger or improving at all, just learning new things, often not as useful as who I was in the beginning. Leveling weapons and armor suffer from the same problem, since using crystal, upgrading them and then having to do it again and again once you get a different item just didn't cut it for me.

But, at heart, Chained Echoes is a good game! One that mostly succeeds in doing what it sets out to do. It did manage to scratch the itch for a good "classic" JRPG, even if just a little.

So if you really want to play FF6, but not replay FF6, now we have a solution for you now!

I like a lot of things about Mundaun. Unease permeates most of the journey, only fading away at times when the pastoral beauty simply becomes overwhelming through picturesque views of the mountainside parish. The Swiss folk horror storytelling mixed with good ol' creepy Catholicism and light touches of antique tech gives the game such distinct character, blurring the familiar with the unfamiliar to heighten the feeling of things being a bit off-kilter.

There's a quiet confidence to the slow pacing that I admire. The game lets you explore open environments at your own leisure without worrying about you triggering progress to hit the next plot beat. Curiosity is rewarded with scraps of worldbuilding, items to help you on your quest, or arresting vistas of the mystic alps. It never feels like a waste of time to get off the beaten path.

When you are on the critical path, you find yourself somnambulating through hazy daydreams of hay demons and paper vessels slicing sea and sky, ponderously navigating chiaroscuro nightmares of talking severed goat heads and dark figures casting ominous shadows, and spiraling into vignetted memories of foregone duty and pacts undone in claustrophobic tunnels and caverns as you stare into pictures that stir the past. Oh, and you do simple horror adventure game puzzles like play musical notes on hooked carcasses so that a key oozes out of a hanged man's mouth.

You drive a hay baling truck sometimes. You can tune its radio to any of the stations that play different flavors of traditional church music, operatic ballads, and local talk radio in Romansh, then leave it playing as you wander off. You can also turn on the headlights to serve as a beacon at night. But you can't leave the engine running. You have to turn the key every time you get in to start moving your beloved Muvel. It can go surprisingly fast, but its handling cannot handle any surface outside clearly marked roads at a speed any faster than a crawl. You have to drive it deliberately, somewhat like a normal person in a normal world would, or you risk careening off winding tracks and barreling down steep slopes. It can feel a wee bit silly.

That deliberateness and silliness extend to the rest of the mechanics, in a way that's charming and effective at times and immersion-breaking at others.

When I had to make coffee by filling a pan with water by the fountain a stone's throw away from grandpa's house, returning home to put it on top of a stove, pouring coffee beans into the water-filled pan, placing a log in a compartment and lighting it on fire, waiting to let the coffee boil, then using a cup to collect the coffee, I found the process to be a soothing little ritual.

When I had to weakly poke at lumbering enemies with a pitchfork that broke off one prong with every hit, rendering it useless after three strikes, resulting in two consecutive game over screens for me, I found myself cursing at the intrusion of combat and hard failure states once more. Never have I so quickly turned down the difficulty setting of a video game to easy.

The explicitly game-y stat upgrades and on-screen text like saying you did "bonus damage" for a successful sneak attack feel so out of place and took me out of the reverie whenever I had to contend with them. They're jarring compromises to facilitate survival horror elements that don't add anything to the experience. I don't need the game to be a straight-up, conflict-free, linear walking sim, but the puzzle-solving and exploration were totally enough to keep me engaged on a mechanical level. The tension in the narrative and presentation was all the tension i needed.

While I can't say I was emotionally engrossed in the story and that it was fairly easy to grok the broad strokes, the odd imagery in its set sequences and the small tricks it pulls made for a captivating time. I wanted to see what weird thing it would show me next, and I was satisfied with the ending that fit the genre.

Aside from a couple of minor complaints about the mechanics, I enjoyed Mundaun, with the pencil-drawn visual style, the unsettling mood, and the strange sights as the obvious highlights.