After my first blind playthrough I'm absolutely astounded by the front-to-back quality. It's witty, it's sad, and it sticks out like a (glorious) sore thumb amongst all the vanilla, run of the mill, color in the numbers RPGS in name only that release every year. I'm gonna play it a second (and maybe even a third) time without looking up anything just because I want to experience every corner of the game on my own.

The VO work for the Final cut is overall tremendous. There are a few characters who don't fit in quite as well, but that's really a minor quibble.

The score is perfect. British Sea power managed to create these compositions that encapsulate the emotions and feelings of Revacholian life. It's gripping work

I've heard that people find the overarching narrative weak, but I think separating the "main story" from "side quests" here is doing a disservice to both. The game functionally requires you to complete a myriad of side quests to complete the game, and they all are a part of Kim and yours journey through the case.

It goes without saying at this point, but Disco's writing is beyond good for the videogame medium. It builds it's world bit by bit and with an excess of million words it somehow doesn't waste any. It feels so purposeful and directed in every situation

Anyway, 1010 good game

When I accidentally glitched through a wall and found the narrator I knew this was special.

Incredible vibes, confident presentation. A dead-end town playing idly with its lighter as a sickness slowly engulfs it. The calm before the storm, before the death throes kick in. Systems of power play a big role in every story in Boreal Tenebrae, tangibly through threats of violence and death but also intangibly through poverty, desperation and exhaustion. The boss at the local factory spends his time crushing unions even as he plans to close down and move elsewhere. The mayor talks a big game about unity while packing his bags to leave in the middle of the night. All the while the broken cast characters fighting against the oncoming tide of malicious magical realism with whatever hasn't been stripped away from them.

Act 1 is astoundingly cheap on Steam and Itch right now, and it's also a part of the BLM Bundle if you've got that.

When I tried the demo on Steam last year, I quickly brushed it aside as a gimmicky color-book adventure and ignored it after that. After release a solid number of remarkably high review scores convinced me to give this another shot and oh boy, did I fall in love. Chicory is essentially a 2D Zelda game without combat and a strong focus on metroidvania-style progression, puzzles and exploration. I don't like to play with mouse and keyboard for comfort reasons these days and I was afraid that a game centered around precision painting would fall flat with an analog stick and to be fair, it really isn't the most ideal input device for this mode of gameplay but it works totally fine after getting used to it - and certain optional upgrades will definitely make your life easier as you progress. This is due to the easy going nature of all aspects of the design, while there are some sections that require fast, precise inputs, you aren't punished much for failing, and pretty much every action of yours in the world is reversible.

I am not the biggest fan of the 2D Zelda games, so I can confidently say that this is probably my favorite in the genre. The characters and narrative are so full of heart, the puzzles are clever but never overwhelming and the stellar music by Lena Raine adds an incredibly rewarding layer to exploring all the different nooks in the world. The game drove me to spent extra time in it to explore every part of the map and finish even the most (seemingly) mundane side errants just to get the chance for some new character interactions, which is high praise to the charming writing and world design, that allows its characters plenty of room to breathe and surprise you in unexpected places. I really can't emphasize enough how much this game surprised me. It brought me so much joy over the last weeks and actually hit home quite hard with its themes and narrative. I can't recommend Chicory enough, it is so so good.

Chicory is a wonderful game about finding your place in the world, but more than that, is about being comfortable and happy with who you are.

The ensemble cast of characters are charming, the OST often floored me with its excellent assortment of tracks, the puzzles are well made with (personally) having the perfect difficulty of making you feel like a genius about getting some of them, but never really inhibiting your progress as you made your way through the game.

One facet of the game that shocked me how much I enjoyed it was the "boss" sequences. Very tense sequences with visuals and music to make an excellent scene.

Though it is not a requirement to enjoy the game by any means, I felt I lost a little bit of the game as someone who isn't very artistically inclined. The game never shames you for it of course, but looking at my crude drawings took me out of it a bit.

Ultimately, this game was an absolute joy to go through and with this and the developer's previous release "Wandersong" released and amazing, they are definitely worth watching moving forward.

Well worth the wait for this sequel to the original N64 title!!!
It improves upon nearly every aspect of the original while keeping most of the charm intact.

I'll quickly get my two main disappointments out of the way:
1) The music is the most bland and forgettable stuff they could've picked. Maybe they did that not to distract from the Pokemon in their habitats but the original managed to have catchy tunes so..... yeah
2) A lack of the evolutions mechanic. The original had some nice puzzles with knocking a Charmeleon into lava for Charizard to pop out or Magikarp up a waterfall for Gyarados to pop out. It's a shame they didn't do that here but it's not a deal breaker.

In every other aspect though, this is a superior sequel. The courses offer multiple routes to show off Pokemon in different areas. They also have research levels to build from your scores unlocking more interactions and Pokemon as you replay levels keeping things from getting stale.
The Illumina Pokemon act like bosses in a similar way to Mew in the original where you have to figure how to get them to glow to take a photo of them. Speaking of the Pokemon, the roster choice is a fantastic show of Pokemon across all generations. No Gen 1 bias here as Pokemon like Milotic, Meganium, Vivillon, Joltik and many more are given the chance to shine while a lot of the more prominent Gen 1 Pokemon of recent games (cough Charizard cough) take a while to show up and aren't given any special focus. In fact the final Illumina Pokemon is an inspired choice and fits the theme of nature very well.

What this game does incredibly well (and something that has been missing from the series for a while now) is show off Pokemon in their natural habitat just being themselves. Whether it's Squirtle riding on a Lapras, Grookey and Pichu playing in fields, Wailord emerging from the ocean, Kecleon camouflaging itself, or Froslass creating blizzards, the Pokemon are given a chance to shine and make you smile as you see the many interactions they have. It gives them a way to imprint on people's minds that has been sorely missing since the earlier days of the franchise.

Finally, the game offers a ton more content than I expected. There's over 200 Pokemon to see, each with 4 different star levels of pic to snap, multiple varieties of courses, and even bonus objectives to complete if you so desire. It took me around 15-20 hours to get a picture of every Pokemon and I'll gladly revisit it someday to try and fill out more of the 3 and 4 star entries.

A brilliant sequel and well worth the wait! We can only hope there's more to come because there's so many Pokemon deserving of a chance to shine!

This is genuinely the most immersive, and graphically impressive pokemon experience out there. The levels actually feel like you're naturally stumbling upon pokemon just living in the world, and interacting with one another. I'm also excited that it's an incredibly much longer game than the original, with plenty more stages, and lots of photo opportunities to discover. The game does have an issue where you'll have to repeatedly play stages to unlock more pokemon in the stage. So while it's a different experience almost every time you jump in, it can sometimes feel like tedious busy work. Overall, it does a great job of moving along smoothly, and making sure you're snapping lots of new and exciting pokemon constantly. If you're a fan of the old one at all, this will defenitely not disappoint.

I have spectacularly conflicting feelings about this game.

My first few hours with The Longing were something very strange and special. Those first couple days of exploring this underground cave system, looking for purpose, and trying to see all the grim, lifeless wonder you can find down there, were meditative, mystifying and at times even magical. In these opening hours The Longing has a thick atmosphere of loneliness, solitude and yearning, and I was left wanting to spend more time in this world exploring these emotions.

After those early couple days though, a little over a three months ago, the game lost and never really regained that sense of wonder. There are two big reasons, the first being the time-gating the game utilises to stretch its content out over its advertised 400 days. You'll find areas you can't access until a week, two weeks or even a month after you initially discover them. The justifications for these are often very entertaining (well, I have to wait for moss to grow over that rock down there so that I can land on it safely, should take about two weeks), and this delightful mix of dry and absurdist humour is laced throughout the whole game, but the effect these enforced waits had on my playthrough were disastrous.

Whenever I'd finish all the content I could find I would leave the game for a couple weeks to come back post-time-gate, invariably forget that I was meant to return so leave the game waiting twice as long as I'd intended, would have forgotten a lot about the world and its layout by the time I did return, and would then be impatient to get to the new content having waited a few weeks to be able to access it. The ways the game asks you to be patient when playing it largely worked for my early days with it, encouraging the meditative tone I relished there, but the ways it encourages patience on a wider more meta level asking you to wait a substantial amount of time to access content were greatly to its detriment.

The other problem is that the game's attitude towards patience and waiting whilst playing was just pushed too far for me beyond a certain point in the game, around about the point when I found the mattock. Breaking crystals with the mattock can often take ten minutes, digging through walls can be similarly problematic, and that's not to get into the Hall of Eternity. I'm one of the people who found the meditative nature of the early game really rewarding and even I was ultimately forced to read whilst my shade did things, or to turn off the game whenever a particularly long task was initiated with the intent of returning later once my Shade had completed it.

I get what the creators were going for with all this, and I'm glad it seemed to resonate with some people very strongly, but ultimately I just wanted to be able to immerse myself in this world, my Shade's explorations, and the strange, ominous mood found here, and found the game pushing back against that frustrating. My first five hours of playtime were spent over my first couple days of playing and were very enjoyable; my latter five spread over three and a bit months ultimately resulting in me going for the worst ending as I felt like I had been done with the game for a long time already.