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!).

A strange one. I love these early games that try to figure out how to play with a new medium (PS1/3D graphics) and sometimes stumble into brilliance and sometimes completely miss the mark. You get a good amount of both with Tomba, but the things they got right are more memorable than what they got wrong.

The event system is odd by today's standards but honestly I wonder why it never caught on. I was always happy to see another event message pop up and completing another event for the list was just as satisfying. Sometimes the event names/descriptions really hung you up to dry, and without using a guide it can be frustrating to run into the right NPC or small room to progress the game.

I really liked this game despite it's flaws and am looking forwards to playing the sequel;

The Dungeon Rules is a genre-mash of sokoban, roguelike, and dungeon crawler, which as a fan of some of those things, is pretty wild! I was surprised that this could work. The combat gameplay is vaguely reminiscent of Slay the Spire, while not holding up to that masterpiece, it is still serviceable and encourages you to put some thought into your card playing. The sokoban aspects are also serviceable, however, and this is a big however, there is a lot of potential for softlocks. Because there is no undo button, every move is final, which is typical for a roguelike, but frustrating for a sokoban. On the very first level, I got a box trapped in a corner after already clearing out most of the dungeon, and was forced to simply restart the entire level, which is discouraging at the least. Besides that, there are cards you can use outside of the combat that are one-time use and at first seem like optional goodies to help you get through some tougher puzzles/dungeons. But instead, they are mandatory for solving certain puzzles which you won't know until it's too late.

This game is currently a bit too rough around the edges for me to recommend. But I hope the developer keeps trying as there are some good ideas here.

(I received a review code for free from the dev)

Grapple Dog is polished to a sparkle. It's really a blast to play, it just instantly feels fun, and the level design is effortlessly intuitive. The pixel art is SO CLEAN too, it's kind of mesmerizing.

My biggest issues with the game lay with the gameplay itself. I've seen some other comments mentioning the motion feeling off somehow, but honestly I got used to it as the game went, although specifically when Pablo is in his rolled-up ball animation, he really does tend to fly around at the touch of a button and becomes way too hard to control precisely, which is sometimes required. My bigger issue was with the grappling hook, which unfortunately is kind of the core of the game.

The grappling hook has three angles: up, up-left, and up-right. I don't think this ever felt right. It forces you to make shots at weird angles when you'd rather just tilt it a bit more this way or that way. This is one of those things that's not really meaningful to someone who hasn't played the game, so I'll leave it at that.

One other major game design issue that I'm still confused about: checkpoints don't work like they do in... every other game. And by that I mean, if you touch a checkpoint, it doesn't save your progress, and it doesn't heal you. It only works once. This sounds like a little nitpick, but it seriously messed with my playthrough several times in ways that made me restart a level when I was 80% done with it. This is because if you hit a checkpoint, then go back and collect some gems or fruits, if you die before hitting another checkpoint, you have to redo it all. Even worse, the level might block you from going back after you die because certain gates will reset. It's also just frustrating to lose health right next to a checkpoint and instead of being able to quickly touch it and get going once again, I would often just die on purpose or open the menu to restart at the checkpoint, which just felt so unnecessary. Very odd choice that I saw no benefit from.

Other than some gameplay flaws, it's a really, really solid platformer that is so easy to get into and hardly needs any carrots-on-sticks to get you playing more.

Bewilderingly incomplete, broken, and boring.

If you asked me at any point in the last 3 years what game I was looking forwards to most, it was Sports Story. Golf Story was the first game I had played upon getting my Switch, and I will always have fond memories of how unexpectedly fantastic it was. Couldn't have asked for a better game to kick off the next gen of Nintendo games.

Sports Story, by all means, was looking to be the Silksong to Golf Story's Hollow Knight. Sure, it was originally scheduled for release in summer 2020, but it was delayed so that it would only be released when it was ready. Welp. Here we are.

You'd be one of the lucky ones if you managed to beat the game prior to the 1.3 patch, as there were several game-breaking glitches that prevented players from progressing the game. Besides that, the game has countless softlocks that can occur through completely normal gameplay, as well as sudden inexplicable crashes. While the game has an auto-save feature, it didn't do a good enough job that many people (me included) were forced to redo hours of gameplay.

The gameplay, by the way, generally sucks. Absolutely no instructions on what you are doing are given for anything. The best you will get are a few button prompts at the bottom of the screen that you must discover the purpose of as you are trying to play the sport, often when your focus is needed elsewhere. Though, if you fail a match, it hardly ever seems to matter. As far as I can tell, you can't lose any of the golf tournaments in the game, no matter how bad of a score you receive. By the way, golf is roughly 80% of the Sports in Sports Story.

And somehow golf is worse than it was in Golf Story. You can't put spin on the ball, the courses are uninspired in their layout, and besides that, constant stuttering in the game will often prevent you from tapping A at the right moment, ruining your shot. Oh yeah, the game is slightly laggy everywhere, and will randomly stutter.

Despite the trailers, the game's own description on the eShop page, and the cover art for the game, you don't really play any sport other than golf and tennis. There is one mission where you kick pinecones into a goal (which by the way makes no sense at all). That's about it you'll see for soccer. There is one minigame where you hit toasters with a baseball bat. That's about it for baseball. Cricket amounts to blocking incoming balls being launched towards a wheelie bin. You play volleyball once at the beginning of the game and never again.

What you will have a chance to play is BMX, which is generally despised, and fishing, which is actually alright though not very fleshed out.

The plot of the game is absolutely batshit insane. I seriously cannot explain what is going on. You will see emotional arcs with characters you know nothing about talking about supposedly important things that you know nothing about. The game ends with the Queen of the island declaring sports shall never change again and your character showing full support for god-knows-what reason, then some mystical looking dudes staring at you through a magical telescope implying there is something bigger going on. And then credits roll.

Everything about this stinks. I have no idea what happened. Whether it was due to internal complications with the devs, or Nintendo pushing out a game that clearly wasn't ready, I doubt we'll ever hear a full explanation, as the devs have been mysteriously silent through nearly the entire development of the game.

It is with confusion and sadness that I recommend you don't play this game.

Playing JellyCar Worlds, it feels like no time has passed at all since the original game I used to play practically daily on my iPod Touch. Worlds is built on the same solid grounding of pure fun, low consequences that the original had. It's not hard to tell each level was built with love and care while still allowing so much room for the player to push the boundaries (sometimes literally).

I wish I could try out the custom car sounds, but I don't think that feature is available on Switch. Designing my own car was a lot of fun though, especially when I found out the burger design I drew coincidentally had matching tires and an antenna to go with it. The car variety was nice too, and the different cars actually had their own little pros and cons that actually made me swap back and forth (though I think if I had to stick with one, it'd be the tank which seems like the most direct upgrade over the original).

I've seen it been mentioned by someone else, but the skull levels are ridiculously difficult compared to anything else in the game. It's fun to have a big challenge as a reward for getting through everything else, but the movement required to beat some of them is insanely precise and often fidgety. They quickly go from fun to frustrating when you fall back to the start in Getting Over It style fashion.

As of writing this there are 6 worlds with 2 more yet to come, plus a level editor. The price already fits the bill for the amount in 6 worlds, and this game is easy to step back into so I feel fine with the slight incompleteness of the game on release, if anything just because that means the fun isn't yet going to end.

Q-Beh is pure understated serenity. It doesn't presume any lofty notions or attempt to lore-ify it's world, it just is what it is. It's also almost always keenly aware of exactly what the player might want to explore, and sometimes invites exploration to places without rewards other than getting somewhere you weren't supposed to get to.

I love how each world has distinct personalities, based purely off of the music, the lighting, the color tone of the blocks...

A very cozy game that I love dearly.

Unfortunately Soccer Story is a total misfire. I'm not sure whether it was capitalizing on the World Cup hype or attempting to beat Sports Story to the punch that made Panic Barn want to push this game out before it in this underdeveloped state, but here we are.

I really wanted to have a good time with Soccer Story. I love Golf Story to pieces and don't really care about the obvious influences if it means another fun sports RPG, but the devs just wrote down all the ingredients without knowing the recipe.

In concept it's great: open-world soccer RPG that you interact with using a magic ball, playing in matches to take down the hilariously villainous Soccer Inc. who banned soccer across the land. Kicking the ball around in the overworld is actually not so bad, and wanting to see where they would take that was part of what kept me going to the third area. The stylized graphics are nice, and they make the otherwise unexciting pixel art really pop.

But man does this game give you nothing exciting, no motivation to care about anything. I think the dialogue was the epitome of this.

The characters all speak using monotonous, abrupt speech that just feels like placeholder text. I cannot read the emotion on any character. When your player loses a match, the owner guy says "You lost the match.". And your player replies "Okay!". I feel nothing. If you've ever listened to a casting audition, the speech reads like the crew feeding the lines to the actor. No emotion, just words for function.

Besides that, the endless amount of bugginess in small (text cues not appearing properly) to big (softlocks) ways, the 2 pieces of music which are by no means bad but get a bit old after the 100th time hearing them, the far, far too easy matches that feel like a chore, the boring collectibles that reward you with boring rewards, the endless fetch quests to move the plot forwards, ALL OF THIS just sours the experience to a point where I can't help but get sucked out of the game and start wondering if this is really my time being well spent. It's not.

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.