With how heavily this gets memed I figured it was going to be awful, but it's actually just... fine? The core gameplay is a bit awkward but serviceable. I've played much worse single-screen platformers. Feels like they were trying to come up with something new to do with the old Mario Bros arcade game, and it's not great, but it's fine. It's fine!

The cutscenes are awful but in a way that's kind of funny to watch, while the rest of the game is just kind of bland. I'd struggle to tell you what the levels look like; they're not offensive, definitely competent, but not distinctive, and each level blurs into the next. The music's actually pretty fun, but it needs more variation. Guy has a way with a bassline though.

I've seen a lot of "story told in a phone UI" games at this point, but doing it in a hook up app is a nice touch. Appreciated the physicality of forcing the player to actually type in all of the player character's messages.

A lot of the characterization is pretty basic, for the main characters as much as extras, and it largely doesn't feel like it landed for me.

I see what it was going for, but I don't think the story really gelled. I can't tell if I got the real ending or if it just glitched out, because the final fade out for a story scene seemed to just end without a real conclusion or thematic throughline.

TPM CO Soft Works still out there making the best games around.

If Tarotica Voo Doo was about "what's your physical relationship to space in an adventure game", this one's that concept applied to shooting games. "What if you only had one bullet and you had to catch it to keep shooting" is hilarious on its face, but what's special is making it work. And it works! It works so well. Doging bullets and enemies feels so different when you're dodging in all directions trying to get your bullet back, not the specific kind of movement that happens when you're always going forward.

Fun but unexceptional little RPG Maker adventure game. I've played a lot of "deduce your own murder" types of games, and there aren't really any surprises here, but I had a good time anyway.

I think the best, most distinctive feature for me here is its very smart use of RPG Maker-style space. The thing that sets apart RPG Maker adventure games is the player's relationship to the space they're in. Direct control and RPG-style area layouts means the player gets a more physical connection to the space they're in compared to, say, a point and click style game. Constraining the player to a single endlessly-looping screen is a pretty clever take on this style of space, and helps the game make an impact it might otherwise not have. The use of outlined NPC characters, without any details, might be cribbed directly from Palette but it still does a good job of communicating the player character's alienation from other characters around him even as he needs a connection with them to solve his personal mystery.

Cute, sweet little game. Not much to it, but I enjoyed my time with it. The romance between the two main characters was understated in an honestly pretty sweet way - it's nice having a game about characters who are already in love instead of focusing on the "will they / won't they" sometimes.

I'm a sucker for incremental games, and while this is a very simple one, it still got its hooks in me for awhile. I see what they were going for with "growing flowers" and "story about a struggling flowershop owner" as the two halves of the game, but they don't really thematically connect. When I reached the scene where the main character begs her parents for money, I felt immediately taken out of the game because I had more money than I was able to spend at that point. Likewise, when she experiences the financial crush of the parents demanding the money back, I would have been able to pay it back without even thinking about it. It doesn't seem like the pacing of the incremental game portion was really considered; the way it communicates elements of the main character's life doesn't fit in with the story at all.

I feel like this suffers from the "fanfic syndrome" where "Japan" is functionally America with a couple cliched cultral details sprinkled on top. It's not clear to me why this was set in Japan to be honest; aside from zoning that let you put a flower shop, apartment, and rooftop garden in a single building, nothing felt especially Japanese about it.

This one didn't really click for me.

The idea of a golf 2D platformer isn't a bad one, but the two genres have very different gameplay flows and they don't mesh. In golf, you don't really end up going "backwards" - maybe you take a bad shot and have to proceed from a bad position, but at least you're somewhere new. Here, though, the stage design means it's very easy to either get stuck behind an obstacle and taking almost the same shot over and over, or fall down a hole to the floor you were just on.

I gave it a few shots hoping it'd click at some point and I'd settle into the flow, but it never happened.

Really feels like Uchikoshi let himself loose on this one, and I love it. Little bit of everything he loves all in one place.

After 999 I wondered how the format would work, and switching to a transparent flowchart with "surprises" is a reasonable evolution. I found myself missing 999's total lack of clarity of how it was structured, but I also know you can't really do that trick twice in a row.

I did find that the structure meant that there was a lot of repetition and that key plot moments were spaced awkwardly. Towards the end of the game, when I'd mentally pieced a lot of the plot together, I found myself ready for the game to be over but with several main branches to get through before the "true" final route became available. I wish it felt like the ending came when I was ready for it to come, because I'd love for the last parts of the game to feel like they came at the height of my excitement.

The escape room segments felt a lot weaker this time around. There were several rooms that were weakly designed or even boring, which is a big problem for a game like this where they're meant to be key pacing moments, and it's especially bad when the worst escape room in the game is the very final, climactic one. With 999, I couldn't imagine how the escape room-less iPad version would possibly work, but here I could actually see a version with no escape rooms being paced well.

Really cute little game. This is basically exactly what I hoped Playdate would be - short and sweet, unique, the kind of thing people might not take a chance on but given a platform where it can shine. The writing's maybe a little too twee for my tastes sometimes, but it's fun and I chuckled at a lot of it. Cranking to focus photos is perfect. Loved it.

My copy came unpatched so I played without a few clarity improvements, so I got stuck in a few places. I didn't realize the park existed for a long time, so I wasted a lot of time trying to photo birds in the forest that you can't possibly do with the starter camera. Looks like it's a bit clearer if you play the latest version.