For perspective, I'd consider Rain World to be the best game I've played and close to perfection. Downpour is great but the problem is that it makes a lot of changes and I am so enamoured with the base game that most of these changes feel wrong.

Where Rain World is grounded, subtle and naturally unfair, Downpour is wacky, blatant and unnecessarily frustrating. The new slugcats have ridiculous abilities that change the player from a natural part of the world to a one-of-a-kind superhero. This is countered by the environments and creatures being tougher to deal with along with. Creatures that were seen only in the 'hard-mode' hunter class are now commonplace in every new campaign along with the previously neutral scavengers being more aggressive and powerful. New creatures are mostly stronger 'remixes' of existing creatures. The game is harder now but I don't think it's more fun or interesting. The weaknesses of the new slugcats perfectly encapsulate this feeling, with each one having restrictions on their abilities in a way that was presumably intended to aid balance or immersion but for me it just made it more frustrating. See Artificer's explosion cooldown or Saint dying of cold or Gourmand exhaustion for examples.

I was surprised and somewhat disappointed to see most of the new content being focused on adjusting existing content rather than being entirely new, a lot of the regions are places that already exist but at a different point in the timeline. The totally new regions are primarily areas that the base game already teased as being part of the world but weren't explorable. As for any new depth in the ecosystem, well I wouldn't say there was any. The changes all seem focused more on gameplay and lore rather than creating a believable world.

Downpour goes out of its way to answer any questions the player might have had while playing Rain World, but I think there's a lot of value in having these questions remain unanswered. Most of the new campaigns don't give you this option, instead giving the player some kind of primary goal; performing a task that has major implications on the story. In the base game you could entirely miss the story and still have a rich experience.

This DLC is a relatively fun experience with a huge amount of quality content. It’s extremely impressive, especially considering it started as a purely fan-made expansion. Ultimately though, I feel there is an evident lack of cohesion between the intentions of this DLC and the base game, while this is high quality ‘fan content’, it has somewhat tarnished the perfect score card of Rain World and I can’t help but have a bitter taste in my mouth when talking about it.

A great 3D action platformer, this game is extremely competent even by modern standards with fun movement, combat and exploration. It's extremely impressive to me that such a well-rounded game came out in 2002.

I have some nostalgia for this since I played the sequel and demo for this game a lot as a kid but I only got round to playing the full game for the first time a few years ago, replaying it now was surprisingly fresh but still familiar.

The visuals have certainly aged a bit but everything else is solid, the characters are fun, there is good variety in the gameplay and level design. Overall I don't really have anything to complain about besides the final boss being a big difficulty spike. If you want to experience some peak early 2000s action platforming then this series is a great choice.

Weird 3D Lemmings kinda game. Some positive reviews on Steam claim that it starts slow but picks up, sadly for me it started slow and continued that way until I gave up.

I never felt like I was actually solving puzzles, instead I was just completing tasks. There were no interesting decisions to make in each level, only a linear set of tedious chores with some unskippable cutscenes sprinkled in randomly. I don't think I really understood the point of the game. The relaxing atmosphere made it an alright experience but eventually I got too bored and realised it wasn't going to suddenly click for me.

This is my first Serious Sam game (or expansion), I would describe it like if you took a game developer from the 90s who just played DOOM for the first time and let them create a game without technical restrictions. Instead of small levels with 20 enemies at a time you have massive open levels with 200 enemies coming at you. The shooting gameplay is very old-school and the story and characters similarly so, it's a total cheese-fest but I like it.

It's pretty fun for the most part, I only found certain sections near the end to be a bit annoying but overall if you like boomer shooters and have a strong PC then this is a great choice. Admittedly the performance wasn't perfect even on my 7800X3D which was a shame but it held up much better than my 5600X with which Serious Sam 4 was essentially unplayable.

Fantasy action-souls in a Chinese mythological setting. A bit of a mixed bag overall but I liked it a lot despite the problems.

The combat is the main focus here, it's very fast paced and momentum based with an emphasis on parrying rather than dodging. Instead of attacks costing stamina, you gain stamina on successful hits and parries which can then be used for special attacks like weapon arts in Elden Ring. Enemies also have a 'stamina' bar that can be broken down leading to them being staggered and you get a free attack with a crazy anime animation. I had a fun time with the combat once I knew what was going on but found it a bit button-mashy and repetitive later on, 1vX feels pretty bad also.

The difficulty is a bit all over the place but it’s not generally unfair, just obscure since there are a lot of mechanics and the tutorialisation is not effective despite being heavy-handed. This is probably less of an issue if you are more familiar with Team Ninja or action games in general. I’m not, so there was a steep difficulty curve at times but after Lu Bu clapped me for 4 hours, I learnt how to play the game properly and it was smooth sailing from there.

The level design is much simpler than Souls, you have a little bit of exploration and some shortcuts but it's set in discrete levels that mostly take less than an hour to see and fight everything, then you finish with a boss and a cutscene to setup the next level. It’s much more old-school and arcadey than Dark Souls so don’t expect as much immersion but there are some neat environments and a lot of cool design ideas for bosses. The music is also a strong point.

Unfortunately, the game doesn’t stick the landing when it comes to the visuals, there are some nice colours and effects but the finished product looks half-baked, the shadows and lighting look scuffed and many assets are reused or low-detail. I think with a bit more work, this game could look really great but as is, it's mostly scuffed like Dark Souls 2 but less ugly.

This becomes more of a problem when you factor in the performance issues of this game, this is one of the worst games I've played on a technical level. It was almost unplayable for me on my previous PC but I recently upgraded to a 7800x3D which is more or less the best CPU for gaming and it's still poor. You can play this game at 120 fps which is nice but the frametimes feel terrible unless you are maxed out and using an external FPS cap. I had to play at a lower resolution with image scaling and DLSS to try and maintain performance but even that wasn’t consistent. The native game scaling makes turns any low resolution into a blurry mess so I did that in my desktop. Also, custom resolutions don't work and you can't change half of the graphical settings from in-game which is particularly annoying because the loading times for this game are incredibly long, far longer than any game I can remember playing on PC. I must have spent hours trying to configure this game optimally. My end result was playable enough but I'm going to put off the DLCs and other side-content for a future playthrough when my PC can handle this game more comfortably. This is a decent game let down by a garbage port.

I've tried a bunch of these emotional narrative-focused games but I think this is the first one in a while to actually click with me. The main reason for this I'd say is the characters being a lot more realistic and relatable compared to what I normally see in this genre. That's not to say I've faced this trauma personally but it's believable and similar to real stuff I've seen which makes it all the more traumatic.

This one is a bit different to most in that it's more like a 3D platformer than a walking sim or visual novel (but still fairly close to walking sim). The gameplay is fine which is above average for this kind of game. The graphics are simple but nice throughout with great lighting and colours.

I almost didn't play this because I remember reading some reviews saying the voice acting was really bad. I didn't find that to be the case at all, sure there were some uncommon accents but it was pretty convincing for the most part.

These games are always going to be a hit or miss depending on how well you connect with the characters, this one worked for me so I'd recommend it if you like the look of the game and you get something out of this genre.

This is a kinda cool idea on paper where the game evolves as you play but it doesn't really work in execution. You can tell they came up with the idea and started making the game without really thinking about where it was going to go. Essentially it ends up being a bunch of somewhat scuffed gameplay sections that clone classic popular games like Zelda, Diablo and Final Fantasy.

I managed to get to the end so it wasn't entirely terrible. It was fine enough as something to play when I'm tired and don't care about the game being good but overall it's just not a great experience. DLC Quest is much funnier and more coherent than this game.

Difficult physics-based grapple platformer. The concept is really great and gives a unique movement system with a high skill ceiling. I definitely got better as I played but it still felt very inconsistent all the way through since it's so wobbly and weird. It's somewhere between satisfying and extremely rage-inducing, I would say Getting Over It is a lot more fair and reasonable than this game.

The graphics and music are nice and cheery which almost gaslights you into thinking this isn't a masochistic game. Sadly the PC port is half assed so the resolution is low and the controls are terrible. You can fix the internal resolution with a third-party tool but this shouldn't be the user's responsibility. I suspect you'd have a better experience emulating this game since these problems would be nullified and you'd also have save-states available which I would definitely have appreciated.

Additionally, I felt the level design was quite terrible. There is a huge learning curve so at the beginning you aren't going to pay much attention to this but later on I realised a lot of the levels are just tedious or incredibly painful rather than being fun.

I still like the game despite all its problems since the core gameplay is good and entirely unique from what I can tell, it also has great vibes. I'll definitely try other games in the series since there isn't really anything else like this out there. I just wish this game was better since it clearly has huge potential.

Emotional visual novel with stupid teenager characters. It's like Persona except I don't like any of the characters and they aren't funny. There is some gameplay but it's more of an illusion than anything mechanically interesting. The worldbuilding was excellent but the story and characters I don't think were good. There's about one million flashbacks which I thought was just lazy.

Aside from a particular event at ~25% of the way through, I didn't click with the story emotionally which I think is the main point of the game. It was an okay experience overall but I was expecting a lot more considering how people rave about this game. I want to like this genre but I don't seem to get much out of these 'emotional' type games.

Jusant is a pretty 3D platformer and by platformer I mean climbing game since there isn't really any platforming. In-between climbing sections, you are either taking in the sights, reading lore or travelling to the next climbing section.

The climbing mechanic involves aiming the joystick and holding each trigger to grab with each hand. This sounds interesting but it mostly plays itself, not entirely unlike Assassin's Creed parkour. It's not all bad since the game is going for a relaxing vibe anyway so the laid-back gameplay helps here somewhat. There are some other ideas like swinging around on your climbing rope but there isn't a lot going on mechanically. I think the focus here is more on the experience rather than the moment to moment gameplay.

Unfortunately the game didn't really resonate with me at all. Sure, the world was well made but I found it to be overwhelmingly generic and unsurprising if you are familiar with the wholesome indie-game shtick that has been prevalent for a while. On the bright side, the game is competent enough to still make for a few enjoyable chilled out sessions before bed. It looks great with impressive lighting and some nice environments.

This game isn't bad, it just feels extremely safe and I guess I was expecting more, it's just fine. The main problem here is that Grow Home has existed for nearly a decade, it has the same core gameplay but done much better and with a much more interesting world.