Smushi Comes Home manages to stand out in a suddenly very crowded cosy game marketplace (even within the A Short Hike-like subgenre) thanks to some well crafted overworld hubs that invite exploration, along with a steady stream of upgrades to your traversal abilities.

It's generally just a chill game that doesn't outstay its welcome. As pleasant as they are to whoever they meet, Smushi does just want to get home after all, although I don't blame anyone who wants to stay in a particular area for a bit longer just to vibe for a bit.

There are of course some pretty obvious inspirations here in the form of Twin Peaks and Silent Hill, but Alan Wake manages to standalone well enough to be its own thing. Some of the foresty areas, while nice, can get a little samey but Bright Falls feels like a lived in location, helped by the menagerie of characters you find along the way and the story really did manage to hook me.

I wouldn't call them bad, but the enemy encounters can get a bit clunky and repetitive, especially with a pretty narrow selection of tools at your disposal, but these elements are actually surprisingly easy to look over thanks to the overall presentation and story. The conceit of finding manuscript pages for a book that's been written for events that are yet to occur as collectibles is very well done, allowing them to not feel like pointless trinkets.

Pretty good overall but at times it does feel like Jusant is having a bit of an identity crisis. I appreciate the wordless storytelling, finding pictograms along your way to punctuate the journey and give hints as to what's coming next, but then you're also given a ton of overlong text logs that really halt your flow. I think there was a great opportunity for environmental storytelling as you climb higher, focusing on your own journey but seeing how things used to be, but that feeling was undone my some of the essays you find along the way.

A similar issue exists with climbing itself. In general, it's actually quite good but the mechanics you're introduced to as you climb come and go just as quickly, leaving little to no time for them to be explored and certainly no chance to see how they could interact. There's also a couple of issues where you can get stuck on scenery, and it can be fiddly to be able to climb down specific ledges.

One of those games that showed a lot of promise but its just left wanting by some decisions to play things a bit too safe.

Dropsy is a misunderstood being, seemingly blamed for a fiery disaster at the circus and almost ostracised from society; an easy target due to their seeming illiteracy and unconventional look. In reality and despite appearances, Dropsy just wants to make people happy and will help anyone out in order to do so, all to achieve that elusive hug.

It's a wonderfully bizarre world and refreshingly open for an adventure game - sure, some sections are progress locked but the initial area you get to explore is substantial. Definitely one to play in a sitting or two so you don't forget where things you can't access just yet are waiting for you. The inhabitants are equally weird, each with their own requests to fulfill to get that hug (and maybe some progress) and your only clues for solving them being pictograms. The puzzles thankfully aren't too taxing but not having to rely on dialogue cues or item descriptions is a nice change of pace and adds a different kind of gameplay element to the genre.

I just really gelled with the overall experience - the art style matches the places you explore and the strange people you meet, the music is truly a delight and I was taken in with the basic but charming story.

The single player feedback loop is somehow even worse than GT7. I appreciate that you're actually punished for collisions and corner cutting here, but I could do without each event being a minimum of 5 races with a mandatory 10-15 minute segment at the beginning of each race to get a specific lap time, feels like a massive waste of time especially for anyone who's already familiar with the track/car.

Also not a fan of constant level up notifications and gamification of individual track segments and the need to keep using the same car over and over to unlock upgrades - I know FM is more simcade than sim but did the parts they've taken from more arcade like games really don't mesh with the more serious tone here, and can suck the fun out of some multiplayer events for cars you haven't driven too much before.

The atmosphere of the game is (very fairly) praised for being rich and unsettling, but it's really the audio that really sold me on Hob's Barrow. The voice acting is really strong throughout, and the soundtrack feels dense and at times ominous and truly fits the tone the game is going for.

The third act of the game doesn't quite match the first two, but that's likely a result of the well-written script and dialogue taking a backseat to puzzles which are fine - it feels like a different experience than the rest of the game which isn't necessarily bad, just a big jarring. Still, that change can't detract from the overall package and marks another great entry into Wadjet Eye's publishing library.

I get the sense that it's not meant to be taken seriously as a golfing game (the par scores for each level are a massive hint towards this), and is more of a analogy on the tedium of being at the office, how you can get stuck doing the same thing over and over and constantly being knocked back on any attempt you make at climbing the corporate ladder.

But then the game also has seemingly random game-y power ups, and also tracks your score and time taken. It wants to be both a fun little golf game and a parable about the pointlessness of office life but doesn't really succeed at either thanks to its limited ambition with each course (it's just more bits of furniture in the way) and imprecise swing controls. It's also quite disappointing that the crank doesn't really get much of an outing here, relegated to an alternate method of aiming or shifting the camera (both of which are already mapped to the d-pad)

The metaphor for being knocked back down might get lost but I wonder it this could have been more successful at achieving both elements of what it sets out to be if it were a top down mini-golf style game. But I can't review it for what it isn't, only what it is, and Executive Golf DX is a time-waster in every sense of the word.

I think this game looks great on the system, with the 1 bit art-style really lending itself the Samurai aesthetic the game is going for, but I ended up a little bored by the game. The concept is sound - Zipper is a semi-rogue lite in that enemy placement stays the same when restarting a run you've died on, but changes it if you quit out and restart.

In practice, it wasn't so interesting. That was mainly the lack of any real push to get what I needed to go where I needed to get to. There are no upgrades, the map is always the same layout and though positions in a 'room' will change, the makeup of enemies doesn't. It could have been a decent high score/time attack game but the random placement of a mandatory key each round makes that aspect far more luck based and thus tedious for repeat playthroughs.

Crank-watch: On the surface the crank seems to have no functionality in this game but it actually serves as a preview for on screen enemy movement when you have highlighted a target square for yourself - it's a bit of a shame that the game doesn't mention this, leaving an almost vital mechanic completely missable.

Generally okay - it's a 2D single screen shooter where you're using the crank to rotate and another button to boost, as you attempt to destroy enemies and objects around you. The only way you can do this is by hitting the thin black outlines of anything on the screen, or by using a very rare bomb to get rid of everything on screen.

I think Hyper Meteor's problem on the system is the screen size - there's not much space to play with here, and it's very easy to slide away from where you intend to go, or get caught out by meteors rotating just a little bit too fast. Or maybe I'm the problem and it's just not a style of game I gel with that well. Probably a great game if you're the kind of person the 'get into the zone', but just an average one for me.

That said, there are some bops in the soundtrack and it's sometimes worth playing through just to hear them