Generational puzzle game. You never quite forget the first time you play something like Portal. The ideas are insanely cool and you feel like a genius whenever you finally solve a level. I replay this game every year looking for another hit of that puzzle goodness, but nothing will ever replicate the first play. Valve did so much right with this game, and the only thing I wish it was longer. Thankfully there's an equally brilliant sequel that compounds on everything this game attempts to do. Short play and entirely worth your time.

An all around solid metroidvania with beautiful art and a heavy but serene atmosphere.

I really like how open and cryptic the game is. You're dropped in this world with no explanation and it's up to you to figure out what to do, though it's not too hard to piece together. There are several areas you can head to from the start and it's your choice what order to tackle them in. Even when an area seems gated by a specific item, some clever thinking can get you through.

The gameplay and items feel very tightly knit. Often in metroidvanias the powerups you get will have singular uses, but that's not the case here. Every item you get has some unique interactions. I'd like to talk more about this point but I feel that'd spoil the experience.

The puzzles are cute. A lot of them are hard but not obtuse, I never found myself getting stuck for very long. I do wish there was more to the puzzles than just "press three yellow buttons to open a door" though. The solutions don't feel samey but it still would've been nice to have more variety. The game is very short so there wasn't enough time for this to start bothering me, but if it were any longer it would've.

Which brings me to my main complaint. The main game took me 4 hours to get through. I didn't feel like I was rushing at all either, I explored as much as I could. I think it's nice how tight the game experience feels, but I really enjoyed exploring the Well and was sad to see it didn't last long.

There seems to be a good chunk of post game content but I'm not too interested in going through it. A lot of it seems to entail going over the map again, but the main draw of the game for me was the sense of discovery when visiting new locations so I don't think I'd enjoy doing that.

Short and sweet. An all around fun game with little to complain about asides from a couple annoying missions (especially the final one).

The different parts are interesting to play around with and can really change up how your mech plays. The money system is interesting and encourages you to keep tweaking your mech to waste as little money on ammo and repairs as possible.

The missions have some decent variation. Maps themselves are mostly narrow, maze-like hallways but there's a bunch of different locations so the level design never got tiring for me.

The story is basically non existent but I found it to be a nice backdrop for missions. It's funny how forthright companies are about having you do heinous shit, they'll casually ask you to terrorize a city and directly explain it's so that the citizens will pay them protection money.

Uh oh, this is awkward.

I think DDLC is awful, it was my first VN and I really enjoyed it as an edgy teen but time has not been kind to the base game or my opinion of it. I came back to it because it's been about 7 years since my first experience with DDLC, and honestly this time around, it probably made my opinion of the main game drop even further. Act 1 has some good parts, but is a fairly boring time, and acts 2 and 3 are awful, very edgy slop. So, when I booted up the new Side Stories I wasn't expecting much.

Except the side stories are some of the most genuine and heartwarming writing I've seen in a long time. It's seriously a disservice that they're tied to the base game. Anyone who thinks act 1 was even passable owes it to themselves to at least try the side stories in my opinion. I didn't expect DDLC of all things to make me bawl my eyes out.

DDLC - 2/10
Side Stories - 8/10