Played this (partially) live on stream on the 15th of April (twitch.tv/sleepy_nice).

Metal as all hell! There's a lot to love here, it's fast and hilarious and cruel and heavy. The soundtrack rips, the levels look phenomenal, the colours are perfect. Love the limited scope and the accessibility of everything - there's a set of levels and you can play through them for the score and the cred, but if you wanna just see them all, you can simply select each level from the menu. The character and enemy design is perfect, wouldn't change a single thing.

I have two main gripes that keep me from singing Penance's praises unconditionally - firstly, there doesn't seem to be a map view (which is probably intentional) and losing your bearings is frequent. If the corpses of enemies remained in place like they do in Doom this wouldn't matter, but a few of the levels require a lot of exploration to be able to parse fully and if you're not paying attention sometimes that can be troublesome.

Secondly, there isn't much grit when it comes to the feeling of everything, no feedback. Guns don't recoil, enemies have no weight, when you get hit you don't FEEL it. There's just a lot of fast-moving parts all flying around at once and none of it feels like I think it deserves to.

All of that said I really really like this, it's so much fun. It's a speedrunners DREAM, would love to see this at GDQ or something.

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.

Woah! Snake's Tale really surprised me with its depth. Did the thing I really like in level-based puzzle games where just as I've gotten my head around one obtuse mechanic, another is added. That accumulation stopped this from being your standard sliding-tile game, I can see the vision here.

There was no hand-holding either, some of the earliest levels you can access had some of the wildest solutions that I needed to come back to after understanding the way the pieces fit together. I LOVED this.

A few things stop this from a perfect score. Firstly the absurd music - it had such a short loop that drove me crazy instantly. If this had some light ambience with occasional variation I could have chilled out in this game forever, but instead I had to find my own soundtrack. Secondly the presentation of the overworld felt a little thin. It's a minor thing, but I actually love how the snakes look in the level, but anytime I had to navigate to the next puzzle it felt like I was looking at an early 00s flash game (which doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing I guess, but in this case it was).

Definitely high on my recommendations for the Ukraine Bundle

I’ve had a few cool little experiences up to now, but this is the first truly exciting game I’ve experienced thanks to the Ukraine Bundle.

Really solid concept and execution, great music, sequentially engaging. I particularly like the mastery system which reminds me of FFTA, where abilities are learned through equipment but once that ability has been mastered you don’t need to keep that piece of equipment on your team member to have them use it.

Also, the AI ripped me to pieces a few times when I tried to complete the bonus objectives, which was a nice way of balancing the incentive to try and do them every time. As a result I missed a few pieces of gear, so might go back and try and get them now that I’ve got end-game stats.

Loved a lot here that I haven’t mentioned yet - the character and team customisation is sick, the story is sparse but has a perfect minimalist shonen vibe to it. Also love that it was made by a solo Australian developer!

It’s a little rough around the edges in some aspects which keeps it from a perfect score for me. Some menuing is a bit unintuitive and occasionally the interface gets a bit cluttered with noise which made it hard to assess my best moves. Small quibbles, nothing that kept me from enjoying this for the few hours it took me to clock it.

Can’t wait to see what this dev does next!

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 !

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.

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.

Inbento is gorgeous and challenging and I desperately wanted to love it as much as Golf Peaks by the same developer, but it didn't reach the same heights for me.

Aesthetically there isn't really a flaw I can point to - beautifully drawn with charming animations, great music, thematically pretty strong. If you wanna chill out with something for a while there are plenty of way worse options, and the way it looks and feels to be in the game might be enough to keep you engaged all the way.

Unfortunately, while the mechanics were very unique and interesting the variety was low (at least as far as I saw), and some puzzle solutions were far too obtuse. I ended up giving up about halfway through after I spent 15 minutes on a puzzle with no solution in sight, and was not tempted to push through at all.

This game is still really great! I may have persisted if there wasn't such a huge number of puzzle games in this bundle - I've got plenty to move onto if I want to scratch some brain itches, so unfortunately I'm putting this one down (for now).

WOAH. This was great! This was about to be a 5-star review until I played the sequel and realised the series had more to give.

But yeah, game design wise this is a near-perfect exercise in Living Your Truth. It wears every influence on its sleeve and explores so many opportunities in the kinds of 3D platforming you can do given the constraints. For a game with no combat it does a really great job of making you forget that you're really just running and jumping. Level themes are varied and the structure of each level fits its respective theme, it joyfully expresses itself at every moment you're playing it. The music slaps too, it all feels ripped right from the era, it's all perfectly placed and incredibly varied.

There's also a really appealing and playfully sinister edge that immediately undermines itself with additional whimst upon the conclusion of the game. I don't want to spoil anything, the game takes around 30 minutes to beat so just check it out for yourself and see what I mean.

Also, yeah it only takes 30 minutes to beat, but that doesn't include getting A (or the elusive S) rank in every level and collecting every star, which is well worth doing. There's a couple of great bonus unlockables that I'm really glad I got.

Toree rocks! I would gladly play one or two of these games every month for the rest of my life and never get sick of it.

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.