#5 of 2023

Absolutely delightful. A holistic vision of a familiar and psychedelic world. I felt immense amounts of intent and love poured into Knuckle Sandwich, and cackled at the way it revealed itself. Even the flaws are interesting!

Also, Dolus is my boyfriend.

#4 of 2023

An exercise in refamiliarisation.

Tears of the Kingdom says yes, you do know this world well. However, the important parts - the way you learn your role in the space, the way you negotiate with your surroundings, the way you PLAY (and by God do you play this game) - have been transformed.

There's a feeling I try and describe to people when I want to talk about this game

Think of a time in your life when you first visited a location you would come to know intimately (a workplace, a school, a friends house) and think about the way you perceived it when you arrived. Which door did you enter through? What route did you take as you explored? Where did you ultimately settle when it was time to rest? What does that place look like?

Now, think about how it looks to you today. Think about how alien that place was compared to how you now know it. You realised there was a more convenient entrance for you, the friends you made tucked themselves in some corner or another that you didn't notice at first.

Tears of the Kingdom does that to Breath of the Wild. By subtly changing your perception of the space by the way you enter it, and by the locations of the towers, somehow - suddenly - the space changes. You arrive at landmarks from unique angles, rivers and hills you've seen a thousand times before are mistaken for others.

A game has never before given me that ultra specific feeling. For all the flaws here (many) I have to give the game credit for that.

#7 of 2023

God I was so sceptical when I saw the trailer for this, but the mad men over at Nintendo actually did it. They made a truly excellent 2D Mario game that learned genuine lessons from the best parts of Mario Maker.

Next time, take out all the talking 🙏

For much of this year I found playing most video games nearly impossible without getting a truly unpleasant anxious rush, and Cloud Gardens was the best medicine for that feeling that I could have been prescribed.

Lots of games are meditative, but not nearly as many are 'meditations' - by which I mean in the transitive sense, allowing one to reflect or focus thoughts onto a repetitive action.

Cloud Gardens gave me pause on several occasions when I considered the implications it was laying out: that human trash and inorganic detritus could, under certain solitary conditions, give rise to it's own life. It almost felt radical in it's simplicity, placing these objects and allowing their aura to emanate and their essence to grow plants through their inherent existence. It made me think about my place in the world, the energy I emit unconsciously, the energy I take in from inanimate objects around me or on my person, the way that reverberates around a room or a house or a yard or a street or a suburb or a city.

It's a simple game, but a beautiful one. For many puzzle games of this variety I find myself reaching for podcasts or documentaries to listen to in the background as I play. With this game, I never felt the need.

Butterflies Episode 1 pays perfect tribute to its influences and feels great to move around in. There's really nice sense of momentum with only a few camera issues keeping it from feeling super polished.

I really liked the mission structure in the open world, nice twist on the formula keeping it from being pure Jet Set Radio tribute hour. Unfortunately there's no map (or none that I could find) and the world does not have enough distinguishing landmarks to not continually get lost, and I wasn't able to find all graffiti spots and missions.

Episode 2 is in the bundle too, I'm excited to see what the developers learned and changed between instalments. Might revisit this and 100% it one day!

It took me until early December to start playing this, but by putting off picking it up the only thing that got played was myself. I knew I would adore this game, but I didn't really realise just how thoroughly and completely it would consume me. For a week-long stretch it was literally all I wanted to play.

This game learns the best lessons from tabletop games and then presents them in a phenomenal, economical way. Every time I started a new campaign, I was worried that I wouldn't love my new characters as much as I loved the last one. However within the first dozen encounters, events and opportunities, each group and individual had such a unique combination of flavours that I was never once bored with them. It's a really special thing that this game has achieved!

My only gripes are small, but they keep this game from getting a perfect score from me: firstly, I really don't love the way the game looks, and in fact the handdrawn handcrafted style was one of the reasons I put off playing the game in the first place. The initial pitch was ALWAYS exciting to me, but when I saw footage I faltered. Now, after having played it for many hours I can say that the aesthetic grew on me, but every now and then I felt a little slighted that my party members all felt like they were ripped straight from a budget fantasy webcomic circa 2004, perma-smirking their way through a world otherwise gloriously written.

Secondly (and this might be greedy of me, but) the repetition of certain events over multiple questlines took me out of the experience somewhat. I know there's only so much the devs can prepare, and that inevitably you're going to see the same things happen multiple times. I just feel that there should have been some more care put into making sure you don't see the same event 3 times in 3 consecutive stories, because that specifically was a little jarring to me. This is ESPECIALLY considering how few times the repetitions have happened for me in my first 20 or so hours, it seems really unlucky that the same one or two events and quest opportunities have happened so frequently in completely separate stories so early on in my experience.

Those things aside, I adore this game. Considering there are only three unit types and the combat is relatively simple, there's enough nuance and differentiation between abilities that fights can be handled in a really respectable number of ways. Obviously the main thrust of the game isn't the combat, so the fact that they put this much effort into it at all is honestly nice.

I'll continue playing this game as long as they keep putting out new content for it. I can't wait to see what story I write next.

I started Circa Infinity pretty unimpressed with what seemed like too simple an idea to be interesting to me in 2022. However by level 2 I was thoroughly hooked into the vision of this game, which is in equal parts both compelling and utterly disorienting.

This is a twitch-platformer in the vein of VVVVVV or Love, but segmented out in digestible chunks in the same way a puzzle game might do it. I think that's where my initial impression may have faltered, because I assumed the challenge was cerebral rather than dextrous. Turns out, it's both! The response-time needed for some of these levels was preposterous, but progression was (for the most part) pretty forgiving. I really liked the way checkpoints were implemented organically as circle-layers, rather than through some obvious flag the way most games do them.

I also REALLY loved the bosses, and the first was where my feelings really started to shift. Rather than simply acting as a conclusive event, they function as a test of the skills developed in each level, which is - I think - the ideal of what a video game "boss" should be. The only thing I didn't love was that, upon taking damage, each boss fight starts again from the beginning. I totally understand why this was done, but it resulted in a frustration that eventually overtook me and prevented me from getting past the fourth level.

This is absolutely a game I intend to return to and complete one day, really good stuff.

I cannot be expected to write anything about a remake of a game that means so much to me, so I'll try and keep it short, simple, and relevant to the remake rather than the source material:

The team did a really great job modernising NieR, but by bringing it closer to the memory of Automata and further from the memory of Gestalt maybe a little bit of the magic was lost to me. However everything sounds and looks wonderful, and I relished the opportunity to luxuriate in one of my favourite fantastical worlds once again.

Played this live on stream on the 23rd of March (twitch.tv/sleepy_nice, come thru).

Total banger of a game, but might just be a little too hard for me to get much further through than what I've already seen. The dynamic of GoNNER rewards speed but punishes imprecision, and is a teensy bit too stressful for me - it's in my nature to try and rack up combos to collect the glyphs but I'm not able to balance that impulse with precise movement.

Loved the feel of everything, the jumps and the guns and the wall-jumping are all really finely tuned. Love the painterly style and the way the levels build around you as you traverse through them. I liked how little was communicated to you, letting you learn as a player what you're meant to be doing as you experiment. I would have appreciated a LITTLE bit more information when it came to certain masks or accessories, because the thrill of discovery was marred a little bit by the chance you had to take on a new item when you're already in the middle of a run.

There are still a couple mechanical mysteries to me. For instance, on my last run (where I managed to get the furthest I've been able to reach, just past the 2nd boss room and into level 3) I got such a good combo going that the colour scheme of the rooms changed to green. I'm not sure what that meant! It might have meant nothing.

But yeah, highly recommend giving this game a whirl but I'm still learning to be any good at it. Let's see if I ever get there.

I've had Sokobond vaguely on my radar for nearly 10 years (!!!!) when I remember it getting featured in some PAX roundups around the time of release. I feel like I may have benefitted from playing it earlier, because unfortunately now the cool things that this game does aren't particularly novel - echoes of what it's doing can be found to greater effect in English Country Tune, Hexcells, heck even A Good Snowman Is Hard to Build (which I also played as part of my Ukraine Itch Bundle deep-dive).

All that said, this is for sure a Good Puzzle Time, and the theme of putting together compound molecules tickled me just right at a time when I'm relearning a lot of high school chemistry. The music is GORGEOUS, composed by Ryan Roth who also did the music for Starseed Pilgrim, Beginners Guide and A Good Snowman (what a fun coincidence). The whole presentation of it is still delicious, even if it's not super unique.

I wasn't able to finish it in a single sitting, but can tell that I got pretty darn close - I don't want to spoil it, but as the map expands out there's a pretty cute reveal that indicated to me how far through I was. Might pick it up later, but the queue is long so who knows !