This was just ok for me. I don't personally enjoy the 'clean slate' time looping mechanic, especially with such short loops, as the character development and dialogue feels shallow each time. Definitely prefer time looping mechanics where you get to keep more memories and build on that, but I get why it wasn't done here for the most part (they're retained within individual loops, but largely not across new loops). I feel like to counteract that though, the loops could have been longer, so you get more out of them.

You get a LOT of dialogue options, which was actually the biggest negative for me, as a lot of it just feels like filler and half of them feel redundant anyway, with only slight differences. Would much prefer like 3-5 dialogue options each time, where they are unique and each have a distinct impact on the story.

My highlight was the male VO, I loved his work with all the different voices. And that's pretty much it. Didn't hate it but didn't feel captivated at any point or inspired to do multiple playthroughs, which the game clearly encourages. More Scarlet Hollow to look forward to now that this is out at least.

This does a lot with very little, and the atmosphere and the way the gameplay builds kept me interested for the whole ~5 hour game time. The gameplay mechanics are ultimately just clunkier, unrefined versions of the ones in Yuppie Psycho, but I still found some enjoyment from this shorter, simpler game. The major issue that frustrated me playing this is that the MC is the slowest walker ever, and there’s no run option in the game. Seriously unbearable at times, but this is still worth a play if you enjoyed Yuppie Psycho and want more of the same, albeit a bit crappier in most ways. Ig this isn’t the most flattering review, but for $2 on steam this was worth a play for me and had more good than bad.

It’s here - Danganronpa 4, in a nice legally distinct package. And it’s about 40% gameplay and 60% staring at constant and unbearably long loading screens.
This is really only worth playing if you’re a Danganronpa fan, and if I had to rank it with the 3 mainline games, this would come last by a wide margin.

The game uses a ‘mystery labyrinth’ gameplay section, that’s essentially just the trials in Danganronpa. The trials in those games felt natural within the story though, and here the game bends over backwards to force the introduction of all the same trial gameplay mechanics. I got used to it as the game went on, but the initial introduction of the labyrinth in chapter 0 felt unnatural and forced, which put me off a bit. I don't know if Kodaka just wanted to make Danganronpa 4, but felt he couldn't due to the ending of 3, so he had to stretch this story into unnatural places to force the inclusion of those gameplay mechanics, or if he genuinely thought this was a good application of the same gameplay mechanics within a new story, but the way it was handled just really didn't work for me.

Chapters 2, 4 and 5 were enjoyable for me, but chapters 0, 1 and 3 were unbelievably tedious. Way too hand-holdy and you have no connection to the characters featured in those chapters. And of course, the performance is terrible. I know this is running on switch, but the loading screens are just crazy - even the chapters I enjoyed felt like a chore at a lot of points due to the endless loading screens that you have to endure.

Played on apple arcade on ipad. This is another harvest moon style farming sim, made by an Australian studio. It's fully voiced, which is impressive, although tbh I found the constant talking a bit annoying. I never really play mobile games, as I don't enjoy the format, but on ipad this was enjoyable, and felt like a fully-realised game compared to some other mobile games I have played in the past that felt lacking. I just picked this up to see if gaming on an ipad was any more enjoyable, and to check out apple arcade.
I did find the character style a bit offputting, like the style in those crazy 'Merge Mansion' style mobile game ads, but I got over that in a few hours. Playtime to finish the main story was ~40 hours for me.

It also has a feature to adjust the day speed, which was great. If you have ever felt like days were going too fast in farming sims, here you can set it to a slower relaxed mode. I ended up switching the speed a lot, often multiple times in an in-game day.

Overall, it's pretty good for what it is. I'm not the biggest farming sim fan, although I enjoy stardew valley and classic harvest moon, but if you are this has some interesting features, and works wonderfully on the ipad if you're interested in using one for gaming.

Man, sometimes a game just hits in all the right ways. This was just perfect to me, and I know I’ll be chasing another game I enjoy as much as this for a while. I picked this up in a sale nearly a year ago and never played it, I ended up starting it on a friday evening before a long weekend. My husband was out, I had a beer, no new games, and picked this one out of my steam library to try out. Within an hour I was starting to regret all social plans I had over the weekend, as I just wanted to play this game all weekend long. I really cannot recommend this enough to fans of both survival horror games and classic adventure puzzlers. It has been ages since I have been this captivated with a game.

It’s funny and absurd while still being tense and unnerving, with an engaging and lovable cast of characters supporting the game. The gameplay and story worked together in perfect harmony, nothing felt superfluous or like it dragged at all. Yes, there's some bizarre, kinda stupid stuff here, but it worked for me, and everything was just impressively well-balanced.

A few puzzles in this are challenging/unintuitive, but largely I don’t think you’d need a guide to solve anything. Without a guide though, you will likely miss a lot of stuff if you're moving along only where the central story is pointing you. This is a game that really requires a lot of unguided exploration to experience everything, and the completion of multiple endings to get the full story. I did one blind playthrough then went back and used a relatively spoiler-free guide to find everything I missed. This is a great game to replay/get all the achievements and endings for, as they all come together to help resolve the story.

Just fantastic.

A psychological horror game centered around a woman, a cabaret dancer, on the cusp of turning 30. It touches on themes such as sexual objectification, fears about aging, expectations to start a family, and disordered eating, however I didn't feel these were explored in any meaningful way. I’m not necessarily looking for insightful, revelatory explorations of womanhood in video games, but something more than surface-level metaphors would be nice. It certainly wasn't the worst depiction of these themes I have experienced, and I appreciated that the game didn't feel self-important, but just don’t expect anything too impactful from this. My biggest gripe with the narrative was just that it dragged too much - the game took me about 7 hours, and 2 of those hours could have easily been cut. It felt like there was a lot of padding to the story, and I would have preferred a shorter game with a tighter narrative.

The art direction is absolutely fantastic, with unique art and incredibly smooth and expressive pixel animation, and a moody yet understated soundtrack that bolstered the game (with contributions from Akira Yamaoka). The game is worth playing for this alone in my opinion. Although, in the last couple of chapters especially, there are visuals and scenes that feel like they were included because the developers felt like they looked cool, and didn’t actually contribute anything to the narrative or themes of the game.

The actual gameplay is the major fault of this game. Gameplay here is minimal, which is fine, however when it’s included it’s quite clunky and jarring, feeling like it was shoehorned in so the game wouldn’t just be clicking through text. There are a couple of good, albeit simple, puzzles in this, I wish they added some more and dropped all the random, poorly-executed mini games featured sporadically throughout (especially the terrible and repetitive rhythm game that features several times) and just focused on puzzles.

Overall, I think this is worth playing if you’re a fan of horror games and are looking for a unique and visually delightful experience, just don't go in expecting to get a lot out of this story or scares wise.

This is an enjoyable horror visual novel so far - it’s still in early access and there are only 4 chapters out currently, so it’s hard to comment on it too much as it isn’t a complete game yet. I had been wanting to check this out for a while but the early access put me off, however, while this isn’t an anthology series and each chapter is part of a larger narrative, the chapters still feel largely self-contained and don’t finish on any huge cliffhangers, so I wasn’t that disappointed when I reached the end. The developers also give frequent updates on the game and what they are working on.

The characters and mysteries presented so far are engaging, I can’t get a read on exactly where the story is headed at this point but hopefully it doesn’t crap the bed later on, as it’s been well-written so far. This is also definitely a ‘choices matter’ visual novel, where these choices can affect the rest of the game quite substantially, if you enjoy that - I went back and replayed some chapters in different ways and got a bunch of different dialogue and scenes, so there is definitely replayability here. I haven’t found it particularly scary so far, but I think it’s still enjoyable for any fan of horror stories, but maybe not anyone looking for big scares in a game. There are also some fun references in background visuals to horror movies, such as The Thing and Noroi. Overall the art and writing is well done, and I’m interested to see where the story ends up,

This was passable, but nowhere near good. Even with a gameplay length of only ~2 hours I was getting bored and finding it a bit tedious before the end. The gameplay is just collecting items and running back and forth between characters to deliver items/messages - I found the controls to be quite janky, so running and jumping around was cumbersome and unenjoyable, which is unfortunate when that’s the entirety of the gameplay. I didn’t find any of the characters or dialogue engaging either. This could be good for a kid, but even then there are better ‘cosy games’ with similar features, like lil gator game.

Normally don’t complain about game price vs length either, as I prefer shorter games anyway and am happy to pay for a good one, but this was AU$23 on a discount as well, which imo is way too much for barely 2 hours of amateur, buggy gameplay.

The writing in this was so fantastic and evocative it somehow made me miss being a moody, awkward teenager. So many memories and feelings from that stage of my life that I thought were long-forgotten came back to me playing this game. The issues with this were purely with the gameplay. The story worked well in a click-and-point game format, but a lot of actions the game required you to take to move the story forward felt completely obtuse. I had to look at a guide a few times and would have never worked out I needed to do certain things without it. Interacting with the world was also difficult - objects seemed to have very small boundaries and I had to do a lot of pixel-hunting to find the exact spot to click that would let me actually interact with an object.

Overall a fantastic, immersive story with messy but relatable characters. Some janky gameplay but the story is worth it.

This game has heart and a lot of good ideas, but doesn’t execute them all well. A lot of the game was essentially just fetch quests, which I normally don’t mind, however they felt tedious and required quite a bit of backtracking. Pacing was a bit off around the middle of the game as well, which also dampened my enjoyment of the game. There were still some fun puzzles and I enjoyed the simple combat mechanic.

What I did love was the Indonesian setting of the game. I like when a game is set in a real place instead of an entirely fantasy location, and it was fun cruising around the streets in this game experiencing the culture. The mental health themes in this game also weren’t too heavy handed or overly sappy, and all the major characters were well-written and realistic. Ending was a bit cliche but I thought it landed well. It lost me a bit around the end of chapter 4, especially with the pacing issues over the prior two chapters, and I took a break, but came back to the game and did end up enjoying the last chapter.

Overall a generally pleasant, although sometimes tedious gaming experience.