Mario Golf: Super Rush is an empty husk of a game and the epitome of Nintendo's long and relentless journey towards making all of their games as soulless as possible.

The adventure mode is horrendously bland and pointless, it's linear to the point where you question why they even put all the time and effort into making it if all you do is travel from A to B to C and play the same courses over and over. The only things to do besides playing courses to reach the extremely anticlimactic ending is: talk to nameless Mario brand characters who say words, all of which are instantly forgotten, play practice missions which actually teach you some techniques but at the cost of doing them over and over until you memorize how to hit the shots as wanted, or buy gear at the stores which are completely useless unless they are the gear for the specific course you are about to play next in the plot. Speaking of plot, the story is eye-wateringly contrived and miserable. You drift apart from the only friends you have in the world to follow the whims of some nameless god in order to beat some sort of evil snow thing, but it really doesn't matter, by the end you will have forgotten why you did any of this and you are rewarded with nothing beyond some text on the screen trying to convince you that you did something meaningful, but you have not.

The golf is almost fine but still manages to be bad. The accuracy for each shot is not only randomly determined but also predetermined, so you get the worst of all worlds. You can't know how your shot's accuracy will line up when you hit it, but if you restart the match, now you do. Scoring a birdie/eagle/albatross/hole in one is rewarded with your character doing a spin and smiling or something, there are only two animations and neither are that congratulatory. This actually lines up pretty well with the fact that if you are running on the course, you will not be able to see any impressive shots you make, and there are no replays. If a ball falls into a hole and no one is there to see it, does it even matter? The accuracy shift, the redline of the shots, also doesn't matter. The wind hardly matters. Club choice depending on terrain doesn't matter. Just hit the ball to the next spot so that you can hit the ball to the next spot.

This is a bad video game and no one should play it. Actually, it's worse than that. It's a competently made video game that has no point in existing, other than to cause distress and regret. I write this review to try to cope with the fact that I spent sixty dollars to play an awful golf game by the developers who made Advanced Tour.

This game is such a weird mix of polish and tarnish. I went like 10 levels into this game ready to drop it because the levels were so linear and boring, then suddenly the difficulty was amped up and the puzzles got pretty interesting! And there's some great game design, like the transition between orientations which is super clean to the point it just feels natural, but there's some horrible game design, like how the dark platforms have no sort of outline when they are turned off.

Overall, I enjoyed Disoriented and am glad I stuck through to the end, but also, huh?? Polish this sucker up and it's an awesome first person puzzler!

Very short puzzle game, 48 levels that took me about 2 hours in total to finish. The idea is cute, though I think there was still a lot left to explore with it. The controls/UI are really not great, there are 3 buttons on screen with a < symbol, a U, and a "restart"/"redo" looking character. At some point I confused all 3 of these for another button, and because there's no warning prompts, often reset a puzzle when I meant to undo a single move. Pieces should be more clearly highlighted when you are selecting their next move. A lot of the puzzles had straightforward solutions that could've been "disguised" better. I think I cheesed some levels because there were unused pieces/areas. Kinda fun for what it's worth.

Ah, Pompom. I love it for what it does right, I hate it for what it does wrong.

Pompom is a fantastic game - as long as you play it as the creator intended! That's not necessarily a bad thing, most puzzle games have you find the logic to arrive at a satisfying solution, and I think Pompom counts as a puzzle game. And it's great to find the intended solution, watching the hamster bounce off of enemies just in time and land neatly onto each platform. However, the game's best moments are when you totally wing it and manage to catch every pitfall and stumble into a perfect combination of mistakes that somehow lead you to victory. The problem is these styles of play - solving a puzzle and creating your own solution - are totally at odds with each other.

I often found myself struggling to get past a section, getting SO close to collecting all the coins while maneuvering past the obstacles, just to get hit, slam escape and hit "Reset to Checkpoint" once again. Then, finally, when I'm almost ready to give up, I try a different method - and everything starts lining up instantly. All my struggles were not really necessary, the solution was right there, I was just doing it the "wrong way". And sometimes, I never find the "right way". I end up carefully conserving the bubble to grab the coins and escape past the area that I could not get past properly, either because I didn't have enough items, enough time to stop and think up a solution, or I couldn't figure out the intended route.

It's about time I mentioned that Pompom is EXTREMELY ambitious: nearly every single level throws a new gameplay mechanic at you that totally resets your mastery of the game back to zero. So all these frustrating moments were temporary, once I got through them it was almost certain I'd never see a level like it again. And the ways the levels explain to you what the new tool is going to do before you try it yourself, or how the new enemy will function before you have any items to avoid it with, are astoundingly clever. It functions so well in a game that doesn't let you control the character, but it's a feature that could have easily been missed. Like, for example, in the Temple Zone level where you get the rope, and it doesn't explain how to use it! Wasn't that confusing and annoying? Well, at least there's something to compare against.

At the same time, if a game has 100 different mechanics, it's unlikely they will all be perfect. It's not always clear what parts can be interacted with, or what those interactions will do. I think some sort of highlighting around any clickable parts (like the buoys, the chandeliers, etc) would go a long way. The controls can also be a bit frustrating. Because the game only has two buttons - left and right click - they sometimes overlap each other. More times than I can count, I have accidentally placed an item while trying to click an interactable object or pop the 2nd chance bubble, and because I placed that item, now I'm short a item, and now something is blocked off by that item, now I need to try to die on purpose to try and salvage this run - it can easily be the thing that kills an attempt.

Despite a large portion of the credits going out to testers, I don't think the levels were playtested enough. There are some levels that I can see from the developer's perspective made so much sense, but just don't come across that way to a first-time player. For example, there is a level in Spooky Zone with levers that rotate the entire stage. One section has a lever in an awkward spot - kinda hard to grab, but doable with some clever block placement. This leads to a cache of coins + the carrot, awesome! The only thing is it is extremely difficult to get back to the level after this. I struggled for so long with it before realizing I wasn't meant to grab that awkward lever, it was supposed to be used later, after rotating the level. But because it COULD be grabbed and DID lead to the treasure, I was sure I was doing it right!

For a genre of game that doesn't have much to build off of (maybe Lemmings or Oddworld? I have played neither), this game got so much right. It's easy to point out it's failures and shortcomings, but it's genuinely amazing at times how the central idea was so fully fleshed out. And the artstyle is absolutely spot-on. This game feels like a long lost SNES title. Every detail down to the repeated "Pompom, You can do it!" at the end of every zone, the little skits that play out during opening cutscenes, the simple goofiness of some of the spritework, the wonderful, 16 bit soundtrack, are so endearing.

Pompom can be wonderful. It's concept is refreshingly new, it's clever with how it uses it, the game always feels fun and alive. Pompom can also be awful. It's frustratingly rigid, unfair at the worst possible moments, and the spicy pepper level is too gosh dang hard. But I played through the whole thing, always eager to see what new challenge I was to overcome next.

Ah, revisiting Layton in HD is amazing! Sharp, full resolution graphics and sound make a huge difference. It's amazing that we can see the game in this way, it's the video game equivalent to a movie recorded on film getting a modern release at full resolution. No new art, the same but finally at the highest quality. Also, having all puzzles (weekly downloadable puzzles + hidden door + game's own set) in one place is awesome. I'm glad they didn't leave anything out.

Other than the HD upgrade, there are very few new additions. The memo pad has wider array of tools, there's an options menu with a playguide and volume adjustments, some very minor puzzle adjustments to accommodate for mobile... and that's about it.

While there wasn't much room for improvement over the original, I'm disappointed by a few choices. First, the most grievous error is in the one functionality that was updated: the memo pad.

The original DS release's memo pad was extremely bare bones: you could write in black, and you could clear the screen. But it did the job most of the time. The HD version added: colors! stamps! pen sizes! an eraser! undo/redo buttons! And yet somehow they really screwed it up. It's already hard enough to write memos with a fingertip (next time I will definitely use a pen with a touchscreen nub), but the memo pad's functionality will make you want to use it as little as possible. To write anything other than in the thinnest pen size in black, like let's say, in a second color, you have to: press the colorpad, choose a color, press the pencil icon, tap the screen, and then you can begin writing. It's hard to understand how frustrating this is unless you experience it yourself. Note-taking can be so crucial in many of the puzzles and it was turned into such a chore for no good reason.

Another weird decision was: they actually added an an accommodation for writing on a touchscreen with your finger! Awesome! It is used on one single puzzle. What. On puzzle 68, and only on puzzle 68, a magnifying circle appears besides where you tap and shows where you are drawing your line. I almost wish they never added to that puzzle, because every puzzle after that I kept thinking how a magnifying glass would be so useful. I just don't understand why that wasn't a game-wide option.

Overall, while I think this is the best way to play the game, I wish they did just that little bit more to make the definitive version.

Cool first person puzzle game. Did a surprisingly great job of translating the senses into puzzle types, even for smell/taste. Some of the secret/bonus puzzles were unfair to the player, which can be frustrating if you refuse to use outside help. The music loops were a little short in some areas, which is unfortunate because the music was actually quite well suited to the atmosphere of the game. Also, I found the movement to be a little too fast. It was fun to speed around from area to area, but when you actually were trying to navigate carefully it was a nuisance. Overall, I would say the unpolished parts do not really take away from the main game, which has a fantastic collection of puzzles with nice variety.

I really like platformers. I really like puzzle games. As soon as I hear enough good news about a game from either genre, I dive in instantly. I heard a lot of great praise for Lair of the Clockwork God, and seeing that it was a puzzle platformer, I picked it up without doing any further inspecting so to prevent spoiling the experience.

I didn't like LotCG. Not even enough to get past an hour or so of gameplay.

Here is why it didn't work for me:

- Glitchiness: 20 seconds in I got a glitch where Ben got stuck underground and popped up after a couple seconds. After a few more minutes, this had happened several times, sporadically. Then I got to a section where a NPC is supposed to interact with an object. Instead, the character glitched out and became invisible. I could only solve the puzzle by finding his invisible body.

- Controls: I started with mouse and keyboard, but it felt really awkward by default and the "look" function felt naturally suited for a joystick, so I switched to controller. Some of the buttons were assigned wrong, and by default showed up in game incorrectly (the game would indicate press the left button on the pad, but that would be incorrect). I'm not sure if that is just on my end with my controller, but I thought I'd mention it. The real issue was actually understanding what the function of all the controls was. Ben (or whichever the puzzle one is) has a typical set of point and click controls, but set to a quick menu where you can choose basic functions (Look, Talk to, Use, etc). The weird thing is, you can also always look at things with the joystick and hear a description. Not sure why the "Look" feature is doubled up like that. Otherwise the quick menu is a bit strange at first but then feels pretty natural.

- Platforming: It's hard to make a platformer with good feel, but this just doesn't have it. There is a strange snapping action that happens when Dan (I think he's the platforming one) jumps into the corner of a platform. It doesn't feel natural at all as can even hinder movement. This also became an issue with a bit of the platforming in the first couple areas where you had to make a surprisingly tight jump to a object that wasn't very visible (I think? I had a hard time navigating some areas, the background is very samey and I got lost within even smaller areas).

- Puzzles: Think "Secret of Monkey Island" but with nothing to actually piece together. This game doesn't explain anything to you - which I'm fine with! This game is clearly an homage/parody of those older point and clicks. Yet, the beginning puzzles are ridiculously simple while also being convoluted. For example: There is a cloud of poison smoke. "Ok, I guess I need some sort of tool to get past this, or maybe I just need to platform cleverly?" No, "look"ing at the smoke tells you you could use a make a sort of periscope/snorkel with a pipe you obtained earlier. And it just tells you that, so nothing to solve anymore, just do what game says. Maybe this was supposed to come across as a sort of aping on the ridiculousness of early adventure puzzle games, but the joke shouldn't have to replace fun gameplay.

- Humor: This is the last thing I wanted to address, because humor is very subjective and I don't think it's worth arguing about what's funny and what's not. But for me, it just didn't click. From very early on, it's apparent this is a meta-commentary on video games, specifically indie puzzle and platforming games from recent years. But it just keeps digging into these topics without any relief, and I personally dread that sort of 4th wall breaking introspectiveness, at least when it comes as constantly as it does in this game.

I gleaned from only a bit of gameplay that this game just wasn't my cup of tea, despite this being my favorite flavor. Oh well.

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.