Beacon Pines is just a lovely and charming game. The art is gorgeous, with lots of expressive characters and detailed & colorful backgrounds. The narrator offers a decent framing device, along with the branching path gimmick lending some interesting interactivity to the storytelling. The story itself has engaging characters, a digestible mystery with some fun plot twists, and a satisfying conclusion. This is just the kind of thing that's up my alley and it certainly made me nostalgic for my childhood of reading Hardy Boys books.

It's always a pleasure to see a game that sets out to achieve essentially one thing and then proceed to execute on that one thing flawlessly. Pseudoregalia demonstrates this with its movement, resulting in perhaps the most satisfying movement platformer that I've played. The world is cleverly crafted to enable players to use their tools in such a way that reaching a ledge or a platform often feels unintentional. Finally pulling off just the right string of moves to make it to a platform that seemed unreachable was exhilerating each time it happened. Outside of the movement, I felt like the game was perhaps just a bit too obtuse with its direction and that the combat felt half-baked, but getting around the castle and its surrounding areas just felt too good for these things to get in the way of my enjoyment.

I'm generally a fan of bite-sized Metroidvania games, but this one didn't really do it for me. Playing on Steam Deck was a little awkward because the control stick just mapped to the d-pad buttons making it challenging to properly handle up and down inputs. This minor frustration, plus the lack of any real indicators on the map (e.g. save rooms, pickups) made traversal less fun. The bosses are fine enough, requiring some basic strategy to beat them, but the game just ends abruptly once each boss has been cleared, with no real fanfare. It would have been nice to have perhaps one final area that the four bosses culminated in. Not a terrible game, but not something that I'd recommend unless someone was deep into Metroidvanias.