Putting my thoughts down just after finishing so I won't forget.

Heartfelt, intricate, and full of life. Pentiment is built on meaningful discussions of purpose and truth and lets you find your way through it with as much control as I've ever seen in a game with as sturdy a plot as this. There is absolutely no way I saw even 50% of the content in this game, yet what I saw had as much effort you could expect from any other version of a well-polished game.

A game that values your time and rewards it, too. A story worth telling, a treasure.

It's insane that I didn't write a review for this game (though probably because I got it on PS5, so where to put it?) after I finished playing it in 2021. It's even MORE insane that I still didn't write one in 2023 after watching the monumentally insightful PSYCHODYSSEY.

Which you can also do, anytime you want. For free (maybe with ads? it's on youtube)), but you can also 100% legally download it or watch it from archive.org too.

It's a play-by-play account of the entire development process of Psychonauts 2, and I mean the ENTIRE development process. From Tim getting a niggling feeling it's time for a sequel, all the way to launch in 2021, moments of all these people's lives captured in 4k amber.

I've never designed a game, sometimes I think I might try to get involved in a game jam. That literally happens to the camera guy in this doc. He pitches an idea that takes off so much that it becomes part of THE GAME HE IS MAKING A DOCUMENTARY ON.

This is honestly just me telling you to watch Psychodyssey. Maybe if/when I play this game again I'll write a proper review.

A really pleasant experience, short but sweet. The environmental storytelling is awesome, there are so many little details about the world you can only discover by really exploring and putting everything under a magnifying glass. And the world really is stunning, there are a few spots where you can let the cat rest and watch the camera slowly zoom out to encompass a large area, and I was glued to the screen the entire time.

I was surprised - but not actually in a bad way - that this game isn't some mega-polished ultra high quality visual showpiece. There are object physics, but they easily get screwy when you start to mess with them. The cat animations are great, but up close, the cat isn't actually very graphically detailed. But none of that really matters, the team obviously knew where to spend there time, where the visuals really mattered.

Biggest issue for me was the latter half of the game feeling a bit quick and lackluster compared to the wonder and explorability of the slums. The final area was quite cool, I wish they did more with it.

If you love Ace Attorney/Danganronpa, you might not enjoy this.

Despite a lot of comparisons being drawn between PK and those series, I see that as a bit of a stretch. While PK is a murder investigation game with plenty of dialogue and evidence, the similarities fall apart there. The trial does not involve punching holes through witness testimony, you don't get to know if you made errors in judgement, and there is only one grand trial for everything (albeit with multiple parts). If those are the similarities you were looking for in PK, I recommend doing a little bit of research into this game before deciding whether you want to play it.

Personally, I never felt the "click" while playing this game that I did with many other mystery/detective games that I love (Ace Attorney, Danganronpa, Return of the Obra Dinn, Nancy Drew, Her Story, Shenmue, Zero Escape). However, PK was a confidently executed, fresh take on the genre and I'm excited to see what may follow after it.

Netflix games: a puddle of idle games and locked up older titles... that's what it was, until Poinpy walked into town.

GOD Poinpy is good fun. I played Downwell and knew the developer had the goods but literally making Upwell as a cute fruit collection mobile game with music from Calum Bowen was unexpectedly wonderful. The difficulty is just right, it allows plenty of room for assistance if needed, it has a proper endgoal and ending, and then there's even a puzzle mode and high score mode. It has everything, day 1.

My only issue with it was the sometimes frustrating hit detection. If you get a jump whose zenith overlaps with a platform, you're basically doomed to land on it before you can jump again. And so many times, I slammed into the ground 1 centimeter from an enemy instead of bouncing off of it, and I just felt like: come on, poinpy. Give me a break kid.

Lovely happy game. Play it to the end.

Had an absolutely wonderful time with this game. Although at it's core it's "just" a 3D adventure game, it has so many features unique (as far as I know) only to Tunic. Providing a digital game guide highly reminiscent of those found inside Game Boy games is cool. Having it written in a constructed language system so it's (at first) impossible to read, but possible to interpret is clever. Having the pages of this guide scattered throughout the world is genius. And it doesn't stop there, but in a game built of secrets it's more fun to let them stay secret.

I generally liked the combat, although I found that I had to rely on the most powerful weapons and lots and lots of dodging to get past the bosses, as parrying is not worth it most of the time (and can be a bit fidgety with the button combo requires). I also abandoned most of the unique weapons early on as they didn't quite hold up to the sword, and magic was extremely hard to come by, or requires saving up precious blue berries to try to consume mid-fight.

The ending (B ending) was refreshingly painless (unless you consider puzzles a pain but come on). I later watched someone complete the A ending and yeah wow, no thanks (for multiple reasons). I think the lore of the world is actually pretty remarkably compatible with the gameplay itself and was awesome to unravel. For example, the lore behind the Lost Echoes is quite interesting, and makes them an especially cool enemy concept.

And yeah, Tunic is absolutely beautiful. It plays on the isometric view so extremely well, the game simply wouldn't work any other way. I love the locations and the constant uneasy atmosphere that something taking place here is wrong.

So so so clever and wonderful. Probably my favorite game of 2022 as of yet.

Dreams is an incredible, unique game that you should check out for numerous reasons, but I'm going to specifically review Tren here.

Tren, a game built within another game (by the devs of the game themselves), is one of the best games of 2023. I easily sunk something like 10 hours into it and completed the full game, 100%ing too. It's the most impressive creation I've ever encountered in Dreams, and could easily be a standalone release.

It took minutes for the question of "how could a game that forces you to stay on tracks be that fun?" to be answered, and answered again, and again and again. The gameplay is straight up joyous. It brought back memories of playing with the wooden train tracks I had as a kid. I had a constant smile on my face and was stoked to see the little train do any sort of trick, and broke out laughing whenever the physics worked in some unexpected way, flinging pieces across the scenery.

The scenery, by the way, is SO meticulously detailed that you could spend the whole game in free cam mode and still have a great time. It's akin to an "I Spy" book, where little scenes built from models and household objects played out across the landscape. I had to slow down and start playing through the time trial levels without watching the timer because I just wanted to check out everything across the ~100 levels.

Because there are like 100 levels! And new, interesting mechanics showed up again and again. Even by the time you are at the last few levels, Tren has still more wonderful surprises built with so much care, just to be featured in one or two levels. The same goes for the music, there are dozens of tracks and you will be hearing new ones right till the end. The music perfectly suits the fun-loving mood of the game. I've started listening to it outside of playing the game, because it's honestly just that good.

If you have Dreams, I can't recommend you play Tren enough. If you don't have Dreams, Tren is a great reason why you should pick it up. What a blast!

A remarkably balanced, well paced, and replayable card game. God it feels so good to build a strategy out of all of the weird relics and cards you end up with through the run. I don't think I've replayed what is essentially the same game this many times and never once felt bored. I think StS hit the sweet spot in run length and difficulty curve. It's so easy to pick it up, give the spire another shot, and put it down whether it's a victory or a loss. And somehow out of dozens of failed attempts with what seemed like miraculously perfect decks, I never felt demotivated starting back at square 1.

Yeah it's alright!

I managed to beat it on my first run, which I'm okay with. It definitely wasn't easy, and probably having had played the demo made that a little more possible. Took about 6 hours total to complete.

I don't know if I just somehow missed it, but I didn't find out about spin until pretty late in the game, when I saw it on the controls menu. It's pretty crucial in the late game so I'm glad I came across it when I did.

This game is purportedly a rogue-like, but it doesn't do much to encourage multiple runs after you've beaten it, and in fact it might be discouraging to get sent straight back to the start without having much to show for it. I played Slay the Spire earlier this year, so the bar was set pretty high for rogue-likes, but even then, there are some basic elements I would've liked to see, such as having to choose between awards from trophies, more randomization/paths, outfits being special rewards and not just attained incrementally after beating bosses.

It would've been cool if the outfits had benefits/drawbacks. You only get the chance to change them at each shop, so it seems like the perfect opportunity for that. Imagine if the Spicy outfit made every ball inflamed, but also made it so you could never use frost, and vice-versa with the Frozen outfit. I can easily think up a bunch more, but already that sounds like it would add more strategy and planning.

Golf-rogue-like is a really clever idea for a game, and it was kinda well executed, but kinda unambitious too. I still had a lot of fun, anyways.

First and foremost:

If you want to play this game without any external help (like I did), you can totally do it. Don't let other people tell you this game is ridiculously obtuse, it's really not. However, the English translation omitted a single line that does make one part basically impossible without lots of random guessing. I promise it won't spoil the experience, but in case you don't want to see it, I advise you stop reading here.

The one thing the English translation omits that makes an unguided playthrough extremely annoying is "Dempou Soccer". That's it. More specifically, a computer should say "Dempou Soccer" on its screen. That's enough for you to complete the game now. Have fun.

By the way, if you play on emulator, I recommend allowing yourself to use savestates BUT ONLY after first experiencing the game for a few hours. Abusing them will diminish the experience, but some bits of this game are easy to fail and agonizingly slow to return to to try again.

I think the devs must have known how brutal each mis-step could be, and if one chose to avoid the consequences of a mis-step by save-scumming, how meticulously boring and tedious it would be to head to a save location, save, quit, and reload the game. On the GAME OVER screen, your twitching, heartbroken body routinely gets kicked by one of the teachers, followed by them walking away and leaving you there in the dust. It's a pretty accurate summary of how this game treats the player at times.

However, Chulip is a genuinely wonderful game. Like Backseat Gamer said in his analysis video of the game, Chulip is (probably accidentally) a great detective game. And unlike most of the most popular detective games, there is so much information to learn that won't help you progress, but will enrich your experience. The characters become more than NPCs, they become more like people, with their own lives and own problems and own passions. And you will want to understand them and you will want to help them and it's easier to forgive them for the way they act towards you at first.

One-year-later addendum:

Chulip embodies the Shabby Life. The rough life. Living with what money you got, if you got any. Getting by how you can. And looking at love as a way to escape it all. A fascinatingly unique game, that many imitators have attempted to emulate but haven't quite hit the mark yet (as far as I'm aware!).