I understand this started as a mobile game, but contextualized into a console game, this is not worth sitting down to play. While it's accurate to say this is a puzzle game based on single-player mancala with 100 levels and a visual novel element, conceptually the puzzle at the core of this game is weak and the presentation does not do it favors. Most puzzles are quite easy, and when you solve a difficult one, it feels less like you discovered the pattern to intentionally solve it, and more like you brute forced it based on trial and error. For the harder puzzles counting things out is less appealing than just trying different combinations.

This game feels designed to be played in short bursts rather than 50 puzzles in a row, however the long-winded story segments and gentle music doesn’t give that impression. It invites you to take the game slowly in a longer session, which reveals how repetitive it is. The story does not add to the game, and despite the presence of a “lore” button, it fails to create entertaining context around what you’re doing. The UI elements could use some improvement, just based on colors and small arrows it's hard to tell what direction arrows are going and having gems light up on the pillars becomes less helpful for sight-reading the puzzle as it gets more complex.

I played Attack of the Friday Monsters…. and I hate it. I hate when adults are condescending to kids or don’t respect their intelligence, and it’s a very strong ludonarrative theme in this game.

I went in wanting to love it, but I recognize I was only interested due to the aesthetic and the idea of it. A slice of life game with an ambiguous story and setting sounds amazing on paper. In reality, the game didn’t really do anything to earn my attention. It has good art and ok music and strong prose at times, but the end product goes nowhere. I couldn’t get wrapped into the story. More power to you if you enjoyed it, I just couldn’t relate.

I didn’t care for the story or the characters orbiting the main character’s life. Everything felt very surface level. Even when the game tries to be a little quirky with the character of Frank, it just feels very unnatural. The game tries very hard to capture an innocence or nostalgia, but it didn’t earn it from me. I know I’m not the target demographic but I am very open to empathizing with any character, they just didn’t give me anything to latch on to.

The pacing is a major problem due to the gameplay. Every 2 seconds walking and picking up a card sucks. it just doesn’t feel right, especially since you can’t see the shines half the time so you can’t avoid bumping into it. The card game is bad. Rock paper scissors didn’t work for Alex Kidd (possibly my least favorite game ever), it doesn’t work for Ayabe Kaz either. There’s no actual discovery or problem solving to be had, just go to points marked on the map in the order its presented. Something like scaring the bullies could have allowed for player choice or at the very least, challenged the player to figure out that they need to yell into the other end of the pipe, but instead it just instructs you to go from point A to point B then back to point A. Riveting.

Also the fact every conversation “unlocking” or “advancing” a new chapter feels very unnatural and like when a gatcha game is playing a dishonest psychological trick on you. Why does this exist? To make the game feel like it’s moving along faster? Because it feels more like it’s slowing the game down unnecessarily.

EARLY ACCESS REVIEW:

I’ve been highly anticipating it ever since I saw the fantastic art style and thought I’d take a chance on early access, even knowing that it’s pretty unpolished. The presentation is better than screenshots capture. There’s a great twist that the 2d environments “shift” into 3D when 3D-modeled bosses appear. Fantastic vision and well executed.

It definitely pulls a lot of inspiration from the Kiseki games, with its sense of humor/puns and fourth wall breaking by clicking on different objects. You can also have your character do silly things that subvert the forward progression of the game. The battle system has a very solid, if simple, foundation. It’s not challenging, but the beginning of JRPGs hardly ever are. The enemy encounters and animations definitely take inspiration from Chrono Trigger, and there’s a scene at the end of the first chapter that really drives that home.

But unfortunately despite its short length, it does not really value the player’s time. For example, the main protagonist’s journey starts with her teacher lampshading that he’s assigning you menial tasks. And menial they are. At one point, one of the quest givers/protagonists of another story was sleeping, and I asked for a list of supplies they wanted me to buy. But I missed part of it and clicked again to read it and the character went back to sleep and wouldn’t wake up as a joke. So I literally had to just find a walkthrough video and scrub through to rewatch it. Leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. It’s made all the weirder that the game as it is right now is made up of 3 5-hour character stories and this is how the time is spent. Hopefully the stories get better, but for now they are by far the most amateurish part of the game. This type of nonsense does not seem like it would be changed, unless they kind of rewrite the whole thing. There’s so much great potential here but I have a feeling it might always come across as a pretty amateur effort as a result of the tone set by the weak story.

Eternights is a huge achievement for the individuals who made the game. While the game's writing comes across pretty juvenile, the creators still delivered on their vision and made an interesting work. What clearly started as a fan work of Persona, SMT, and action RPGs does create its own identity. There is a great amount of gameplay variety, and you can feel the joy the creators must have felt adding in different puzzles, minigames, bonds, and creating the dungeon layouts. These additions are not there to distract from the core gameplay loop, but instead does a good job of breaking it up and feeling like you have a diverse experience for the entire 12 hours or so of the game.

I had fun with the battle system, but without the extra bells and whistles outside of combat, it would have overstayed its welcome. There is a decent amount of unlocks in the combat, but most of it can be reduced to dodging attacks and then building up your meter to breaking an enemy's shield wit ha special attack and then just spam "x" to combo and deathblow them. The special attacks have quicktime events and sometimes missing prompts would have you lose your momentum or it wouldn't target the right character, which was really just a minor annoyance more than anything. The skills you unlock from your party members also mostly went to waste and I didn't even really realize how much it changed things until the final chapter. All of it is a little bit janky, but it's fun jankiness. It's a challenge on normal difficulty but you will eventually meet the game on its own terms.

The writing is something I am still conflicted about. It's mostly pretty funny and has a sort of interesting world building that seems very inspired by COVID and the impact it has on already socially isolated teens. The characters are all quite sympathetic, though there is an abundance of horny otaku stuff, which is offputting. I think this could have been well neutralized by going darker, but I think the edginess that the game hints at early on doesn't deliver. I think the game is at its most compelling at the very beginning but the momentum doesn't really have much of a place to go. The mystery and unsettling early chapters don't pay off. To the game's credit, they chose not to go for an easy fanservice ending, however it still didn't have much of an impact on me.

In the end, I think this game will split people a lot, but it is exciting to see something like this as a debut game from a new developer and I look forward to seeing what they produce next.

Picross S is one of the best Switch-exclusive series, and the Genesis & Master system version is fantastic. Great music that matches the tone of the game well. Plenty of modes and 500 puzzles to get lost in. The only thing that holds it back is the sense they could have done more, offered a wider variety of pictures or even broken out of the standard picross formula a bit and tried something new. Still, you can't fault it for being a fantastic way to play picross and a great game to travel with.

I guess I've officially shelved the game after Act 1, but not by choice. At the end of Act 1 I got Error Code 222, saying that I can't load my save file and to contact Larian support. They have not responded in almost a month. The game is far from perfect, particularly when it comes to optimization and bugs, so now that it seems I'm forced to start a new game, I am going to take a break.

Still, I was loving the game before it broke on me. I hope I have as much enthusiasm when I return to it eventually, and I hope that having to play through Act 1 all over again doesn't derail my future experience.

The Red Lantern is an interesting indie roguelike about Dog Sledding. The game makes a great first impression with its graphics and voice acting, and even though the game is relatively short at about 2 hours long, it ends within minutes of overstaying its welcome. Credit to the team who made this for being realistic about the scope and showing some restraint. I beat it in 5 runs, but if I had to do a 6th, I would have started to sour on it. There is a post game and a way to be a completionist for those who want it, but I felt like I had seen everything after 4 runs.

I love the idea of having non-combat roguelites, but the game would have worked better if it was structured like Oregon Trail instead of having permanent upgrades. I found the basic gameplay loop enjoyable, but the meta progression very lacking. The basics are, you pick a direction, an event is set up, you can engage or not, and if you engage you have a second choice. There’s not much beyond that, there’s only 1 minigame (hunting), and it was so easy I never missed my shot. Most of your time is spent doing resource management, but that’s where the larger loop breaks down. Some of the permanent upgrades are incredibly impactful (like the flint and the dog boots) that it removes the sense of danger. Other ones, like fishing pole, axe, and trap I only used once and didn’t need them by the time I got them. Ultimately my final run was my least favorite run, because much of the challenge was taken away and I had seen enough of the content that I skipped through a lot of the dead ends that eat resources.

The roguelike design also makes the story feel incredibly contrived. You can look at the real-life examples of people who leave for Alaska from Into the Wild or Grizzly Man and they’re marginal outsiders who still have survival skills and know the risks. This story is about a San Francisco doctor decided her pet dog was going to lead an expedition to a remote part of Alaska and only packs enough for half a day of food, 2 fires, a band-aid, and 3 bullets. It’s only due to last minute nightmares of getting slaughtered or dying from exposure that she remembers to pack things like an axe. Ashly Birch’s skillful delivery can only suspend so much disbelief, and the fact that the entire game is voice acted at all times, it gets repetitive after about an hour. The game fails to make any kind of statement about the type of people who give everything up, or if doing that is a good idea. The threat of bears, starvation, and lack of resources doesn’t go away for the character once the game is over.

Still, it’s an interesting game and I’m glad I picked it up on a deep discount. I liked it a lot more while playing it then I do while thinking about it in hindsight.