A concise meditation on memory, dreams, and the act of retrieving them. The game pulls from and directly cites conversations director Julian Palacios (which you can read about here) had with their grandfather who passed away by the release of the final build, but the product is a generous collection of spaces to reflect on even if the approach isn't totally within my taste. Promesa is more similar to looking at a painting than any other game I've played, which carries many negative and positive complications for me. Worth the 40min to clear once and certainly will call for your time afterwards, even without hitting every possible scene. For fans of LSD Dream Simulator looking for the Pixar Animated version of that game.

There aren't many puzzles and what's there is very boring. The witch trials start as a really interesting turn on the Ace Attorney, but they begin to drag quickly and are missing some excitement without the investigation step. The whole thing starts to overstay by the end, but holy shit is the high from Professor Herschel Layton and young Phoenix Wright pointing at the same time completely unrivaled. The game is pointlessly too long, but it's also a totally sufficient thing if you pretend it's manga (it is).

A crumbling and obtuse beauty, Xenogears sticks most of its small character beats in ways that elude NPC writers still today while evading legibility on most of its other parts. This game is many piles of half finished ideas in combat mechanics and world map progression dressed dressed up with a phenomenal soundtrack and the best game-original mecha I've ever seen. The vision is here and, despite absolutely hating the bioessentialist turns of the last act, many narrative turns in general, and the moment-to-moment play of most of the game, I find -gears to be well-rounded and exciting RPG until your personal crumbling point. I think the jump to long form narration is actually fantastic and the Disc 2 issue is moreso that the game forgets that RPGs need to have an intentional route through gear and skill progression.

The ways that this game is all over the place is really enlightening as to why the Xeno- enterprise was conceived as many episodes. I think this game, the rest of the Xeno- project, and Takahashi as a maker overall would largely benefit from doing many 2 hour-ish episodes instead of what happened with Xenosaga or whatever is going on with Xenoblade.

Proudly declaring that the max jetpack, the bubbler, and the fire were the greatest buttons to press in Cave Story. The greatest moments for me are really intense about examining those tools, but the mostly pantomimed plot and lush set pieces are also total home runs. Addresses the problem of Cave Story's true ending being behind very difficult content by making the additional story content extremely slight instead of making the play less difficult. I think this move says very constructive things about access and capability.

An extremely pastoral and methodical take on the adventure-mystery game where the mystery is the melodrama of AnoHana with a bunch of 30 year olds. The sheer amount of areas to scroll through (thanks Matsue tourism board) and a lot of UI oddities can produce some frustration, but the meat of this game is an earnest mulling over the slowness and the arbitrary nature of meeting people, growing up, and growing apart. The routing of the game is mellow while the logic steps of being super confrontational with people you only know via 15 year old written descriptions is right parts absurd and exciting. Max mode is goofy but so is the rest of it. I think the game really didn't need multiple endings and could have been a much cleaner thing if the normal ending was the only ending with some expansion, but you gotta get the VN trash ppl in I guess. Don't bother playing the bad routes, they're not as absurd as some other places on the internet would make you believe.

An adventure mystery game with a healthy breadth of verbs boiled down from a text command released for early home PCs. Portopia, in its verbage and roundabout area connections, come together to articulate how miserable casing people and points of interest as a beat cop would feel like. The short form writing of the era effortlessly conveys the NPCs' insistent lack of cooperation while the few images of the game still call upon the cinematic in their simplicity. The point is friction. The game is not poorly composed, it is a singular jigsaw puzzle with a very specific solution, completely indifferent to your victory. The maze is odd, but obviously serves to express a great final challenge in an otherwise sparse system and isn't very hard if you just bust out pen and paper (or just check the guide because we live in the future and you can do what you want). I'd also say the obtuseness of the pixel hunting is incredibly overstated if you spend at least a couple of minutes (in an extremely short game) poking at the obvious locations. The nature of finding truth is all trial and error, so persevere.