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And a couple more failed attempts to play games.

Persona 5 Strikers is the least fun I've ever had with a Warriors/Musou game. It has the same agonizingly slow pacing the mainline SMT/Persona games frequently do (and Metaphor too, judging by the demo), which works for some people but is totally incompatible with my ADHD. And then even after like 40 minutes straight of dialogue (in a supposed action game) the gameplay just doesn't do it for me at all in any way. I award you no points. Get off my computer. Somehow the only SMT/Persona-adjacent games I've actually enjoyed are still Tokyo Mirage Sessions and BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle.

Also Once on a Windswept Night is another victim of "second person is not a valid point of view". I wish I could set up custom filters to block that stuff like on AO3, because it's just not my jam. I will give it points for being the only thing I've ever played on the Steam Deck that somehow broke the keyboard overlay so badly that I couldn't even close or hide it long enough to force quit the game.

I like it more when I don't live up to this blog's name quite so well as I have been this week. Maybe I'll have better luck next week.

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I had a couple aborted attempts to start playing games recently, each for different reasons.

One was Trails in the Sky, which I've been meaning to play for ten years at this point and never got around to. Falcom keeps doing good stuff with Ys the past several years though, and a lot of time has been freed up in my JRPG schedule now that I've given up on the entire Final Fantasy series for good.

I liked but didn't love the first couple hours of it. It definitely seems promising, but it also feels pretty dated, and I have a surprisingly low tolerance for that in a lot of games like this these days even though I started playing them like 30 years ago and should be extremely used to it. The tutorial is pretty questionable, and the UI is usable but not great. I don't love the Xenogears-ass camera either, although they do generally have much better camera angles than that did and better level design that accommodates the camera more.

I do always like it when girls are gremlins, so I wouldn't mind spending more time with Estelle, but with a remake coming out next year I think I'll just wait for that and 20 years of QoL improvements, since I've seen the difference that's made for the Ys games already. Either that or maybe start with one of the later arcs of the story if I catch them on sale at some point.

The other one was Neva, which I was really looking forward to because Gris was amazing. I think it might be one of my biggest disappointments of the year.

I made it through the first season and a little bit of the next, and it completely failed to win me over in any way. Sure it's pretty, but in a way I don't personally like as much a what they did with Gris, so that wasn't motivating me. And what story there was up to that point wasn't really doing much for me yet either.

My experience generally improved whenever I got separated from the titular wolf dog antler creature, because at least then I didn't have to wait for them to catch up with me or sit through the same petting/interaction animation for the sixth time while trying to coax them into doing something.

And I don't think the addition of "fine, I guess" tier combat really added anything to the formula. Every time I had to fight anything I liked the game less.

I'm sure it probably manages to do something interesting later on, at least narratively, but I probably won't ever find out, because I'm straight up not having a good time.

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Ok, I know this is an extremely unpopular opinion, and I wish I'd had a different experience with it, but Ode to Castlevania is quite possibly the least fun I've ever had playing Vampire Survivors. Part of that isn't really its own fault, because it's very jarring going back to it right after playing Halls of Torment, which does a lot of stuff better than it does, but part of it is definitely just that I don't like it very much. It's kind of a bummer as someone who's really enjoyed Vampire Survivors in the past and who's played Castlevania games on and off since the NES.

Probably one of the biggest internal issues I have with it (i.e. not comparing it to external stuff in other games) is that it's one of only two DLCs that just dumps all the new content on top of everything else already in the game instead of having a self-contained adventure mode. My previous least favorite DLC? The other one with no adventure mode.

When done well the adventure stuff is great at bringing back the sense of progression the game has without having to wipe your entire save file and start over, and it's also great for highlighting the new content and letting it shine on its own. It's also a good way to teach people the new, larger maps in more approachable chunks and give some direction for how to start tackling them.

But then there's also external comparisons to make, since I've been playing other stuff in the same genre that's improved on some stuff, and I'll use Halls of Torment since it's what I've played most recently. It's also another strictly 2D game that's heavily referencing classic games with its aesthetic and some of its design (specifically stuff like the first couple Diablo games in this case), so it's a more direct comparison in some ways than some of the fancy 3D games in the genre.

Visual clarity is so much better in Halls of Torment. Like holy crap you can actually tell what's going on so much better even with ridiculous late game builds and hundreds of enemies on the screen. With the exception of certain elemental DoT setups I can pretty much always see everything going on on the screen and the background level art, and even all the enemies well enough to navigate a path through them.

Vampire Survivors tends to deteriorate into having a zone of death around you that's mostly clear, and then the entire rest of the screen is the visual equivalent of unintelligible gibberish. It's still playable like that, but I can't actually see any of the fun Castlevania references in the level design or even the enemies half the time, which is half the point of this DLC.

The UI is also much better in Halls of Torment. There's so much more information easily available, especially in the pause screen. It's kind of annoying in VS having to just remember what has to be done for the next set of unlocks, while I'm HoT you can just pull it up in the menu at any time. Want to see what stats actually affect your weapons? In VS it sort of tells you in the collection, which you can't access while playing. Otherwise go look it up online. HoT again just has all this stuff in the menu.

And speaking of challenges/unlocks/achievements, the VS ones aren't usually all that interesting most of the time and just amount to "play the game with this character or weapon or whatever". The ones in HoT are easily the best I've ever seen in the genre, and probably some of the best I've seen in any game in a while. Some of them are also just "play the game and it'll happen" ones, but a lot of them are little mini-puzzles where you have to figure out a moderately clever setup you might not have otherwise tried to be able to pull things off in a single run.

There are other differences that are mostly just design decisions that aren't inherently better one way or the other, like the mutually exclusive upgrade paths for things in HoT that let you significantly change how a character or weapon plays from run to run, but that isn't anything wrong with VS, just something I appreciate about HoT.

I guess what it comes down to is that Halls of Torment has a lot of QoL features I miss, and it's built a lot of interesting stuff on the foundation from earlier games. Vampire Survivors was already getting kind of bloated, and the lack of adventure mode to give a more curated experience of the new content really kills any motivation I have to play through the rest of Ode to Castlevania.

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I guess while I'm at it I can update my list of things I'm in the middle of and plan to finish or at least play more of. Some of them I've been in the middle of for multiple years, but that's just how it goes sometimes.

Starting with the 3DS:

Radiant Historia is one I really should've finished already a while ago because it's great, but I just keep not being in the right mood for it when I occasionally remember it exists. I really should try to prioritize it though because it's not even that long.

Fire Emblem Fates I guess technically can go here because I'm still pretending I'll do Revelation even though I gave up on finishing the paralogues in Conquest. I might stop pretending at some point though. I like it but don't love it compared to ones like Awakening or Engage, and it's been dragging out over multiple years at this point.

Moving on to the Switch:

Astral Chain is really one I had wanted to finish this year, the same year I started it, but I'm not sure that's happening. I don't like it quite as much as Bayonetta 2, but it's still up there compared to most other Platinum games I've played.

Valkyria Chronicles might just get restarted at some point because I was only an hour or two in before getting sidetracked for like a year or two. Seems pretty promising from what I saw of it though.

And finally PC/Steam Deck:

Wylde Flowers is another one I wanted to finish by the end of the year, and this one might actually happen. Definitely one of my favorite things I've played this year, but I played so much at once I started getting a little burned out, and then my couple week break accidentally turned into four months.

In Stars and Time hasn't quite grabbed me yet, so I've been slacking on it. The first hour or so sure took it's time actually doing anything to draw me in, but it did get significantly more interesting in the next couple hours after that. I just haven't touched it again yet in the couple weeks since then. It's hinted at having enough potential that I should though.

Slay the Princess was supposed to be an October thing, but I somehow managed to start it the day before the announcement of the huge anniversary update, and deciding to wait for that totally killed my momentum. I'll get there when I get there, I guess.

Star Ocean: The Divine Force seemed pretty decent from the first half dozen hours, but I got distracted by other stuff that was more immediately compelling. I'll get back to it during a slower period maybe.

Boyfriend Dungeon is actually something I finished right at launch, but I still haven't gone back and done the extra post-launch stuff they added even though I really liked what they initially released. No idea why I haven't touched it in three years, because it'd only take a few hours.

Tales of Berseria has also been stuck a couple dozen hours in for three years at this point too. It was genuinely a lot of fun though, and I could always use more Magilou being a gremlin. Any day now I'll pick it back up.

And then there's a little stuff that I'm either completely done with or close enough but haven't made posts for yet like Ys X and Halls of Torment (both great).

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It might be time to quickly run through a few things I was playing at some point in the past year or two and meant to go back to but at this point have to acknowledge that if I haven't by now I'm probably not going to.

I guess let's start with the Switch since it's right here.

Bio Prototype does some really cool things I haven't seen much or at all in other bullet heaven games, and the flexibility to customize everything in a build goes far beyond most games in most genres. It's just a little jankier than I'd like, and it's not quite satisfying enough to play for me to really want to push past the few hours I already spent on it.

Dragon Quest XI S probably goes here too. I was really having a great time with the demo on Steam a few years ago, but having to replay like a dozen hours of stuff and it being fairly limited early on before it opens up has really killed my desire to play more of it. Maybe some day, but probably not.

Final Fantasy XII, Echoes of Wisdom, and Disco Elysium are also close to making this list, but I'm still pretending I'll finish them. Disco Elysium has the best chance of them of getting finished, especially if it runs better on the Switch 2 or I restart it with the PC version.

Might as well do the 3DS too while I'm here.

Fire Emblem Echoes is finally definitively going on this list. Everything about it is great except for actually playing it. I've tried going back to it a couple times, but I'm just not into the map design at all, and I'm not going to make it past where I stopped in act 4 before.

Project X Zone also gets to finally go on here. It's fun, and I was enjoying the nonsensical crossover, but it just keeps going and takes forever. There's like 40 chapters in the story, which is like if every paralogue in a Fire Emblem game was mandatory, but also each map feels like it takes twice as long, and at some point I just got burnt out on it. Might try the second one some day, but we'll see.

Shovel Knight sadly also goes here too. Great game, but it's been forever since I last touched it, and the mood keeps not striking me. After this long I think it's just not happening. Definitely made by people with a lot of experience with and love for old 8-bit performers though, and it captures that really well.

And finally a random selection of PC games.

A Slug's Dream is a neat little puzzle game, and I like the ideas in it and the presentation, but I just kind of drifted away from it partway through and never went back. This will be a recurring theme in this section.

Puddle Knights: see above

Please Fix the Road: see above

Atelier Ryza has one of the worst-paced intros I've ever seen, then gets surprisingly good a few hours in, and now I can't bring myself to finish it right near the end. The in-game references are pretty decent, but after not playing for months and needing to do a full overhaul of all my gear, it not being willing to say specifically where I need to go and what I need to harvest or kill to get more of certain things has destroyed any motivation I have left. It's been like five months, silly game. A general location and a vibe isn't enough to go on.

Words Can Kill, Peglin, CATO: Buttered Cat, and The Knight Witch are all close to joining this list, but they can stay where they are for now I guess. I like what I've played of all of them, but I don't see myself finishing any of them at this rate.

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I'm not really sure what prompted me to finally play The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe today, but I finally did, and it was pretty good.

I originally played The Stanley Parable way back when it was still just a mod, then the demo for the full commercial release (which had totally different content from both the original mod and the full release), then the full actual game, and you'd think after I played all of those when they were new and enjoyed them all I wouldn't've taken a couple years to get around to this one, but here we are.

It's hard to say too much about it without getting into tons of spoilers, but I'll do my best to dance around it. Of the two things I can think of that I played this year that are about the nature of retelling stories that have already been told and how audience expectations play into that, I definitely enjoyed this one a lot more (the other was FF7R, which I really liked what they were trying to do but really didn't like it overall as an actual game).

I think I might've liked this a bit more than I did if it had a bit better of a balance between being silly and being thoughtful/having something to say about the nature of itself, but overall it worked out well enough, especially considering all of the new stuff had to be built on top of the stuff from the previous version, which was trying to comment on somewhat different ideas. There were some parts that didn't quite feel like they were contributing all that much to the overall experience and message to me, but there were enough very good moments and additions too that overall I liked what they did with it.

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I'm apparently better at Thumper than all but one person on my Steam friends list (and she's a modestly successful streamer and has been a game dev in the past, even if she mostly writes books these days), but I don't love actually playing it.

I like the idea of it and what they're going for, with the heavy music and harsh noises and everything always looking and feeling like it's about to vibrate itself apart or fly off the track. It's a very particular vibe you don't tend to find in rhythm games much, if at all.

I just feel like it either needs slightly faster reaction times than I'm capable of at the moment (maybe partly because I'm not a teenager anymore, but definitely also because of assorted health stuff making brain no worky) or I need to be able to hear the audio cues better. The former isn't getting fixed any time soon, and probably the later isn't either, because my ears literally haven't stopped ringing since 2003, and the headphone jack output from my Steam Deck is possibly the only one that's even lower quality than the headphone jack on my Switch, and that's already borderline unbearable.

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I just realized today that I only had one game left on GOG that I'd actually been meaning to play (unlike the few other random free/extremely cheap things that I haven't ruled out but probably won't ever get around to), and it's been malingering in my library for over a decade and been nearly 20 years since it came out. So I played it. For a little while anyway.

I've been intending to see what the deal is with Neverwinter Nights 2 for a long time, because a decent number of people used to say that Mask of the Betrayer, one of the expansions, had some of their stuff Obsidian has made/written in it. I wasn't expecting to actually enjoy playing the game itself though, because 95%+ of the time I bounce hard off CRPGs, and the original NWN is still memorable more than 20 years later for being one of the worst UI/UX experiences of my life. So, I wasn't getting my hopes up.

Messing around in the tutorial was actually a bit of a pleasant surprise. It's still kind of janky and has way too much fiddly stuff that could and should be massively streamlined, but it was still a huge improvement over what I remember of the first game. I don't actually like any of the UI or controls or the camera very much, but they're at least functional and mostly usable, so that's nice.

The real problems came after I finished the tutorial, and it dumped me directly into real combat. I was immediately reminded how much I dislike D&D as an RPG system for anything outside of actual tabletop gaming (I think the only video game version I've genuinely enjoyed is probably KOTOR, and I can't even get back into that anymore when I've tried replaying it more recently than 2008). It also was a good refresher on how much I hate RTWP. I know some people apparently like it, but for me it just manages to combine all the worst aspects of both turn-based and real-time combat into something substantially worse than the sum of its parts.

So yeah I pretty quickly uninstalled that one at that point. No point in continuing to suffer through something I'm having that much of a bad time with. I also demoted any remaining RTWP/D&D CRPGs from maybe to no for good measure just to be safe, because I don't need to make myself miserable, and no one else needs to hear me complaining about them either.

I love you random name generator for calling my half-orc cleric Birk Wogsher though.

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It gets so lonely here is written in first person though

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Ok, one last Spider-Man post and I'm done.

The first few hours managed to slightly restore my faith in AAA games, but by the time I stopped playing it had instead motivated me to go hit the ignore button on every other PlayStation-published game on Steam and purge most of the handful of remaining AAA games on my wishlist (Cyberpunk 2077 might be the only one that survived, because I've liked all of CDPR's other stuff over the past couple decades).

The further I got into the game the more stuff it introduced that I just wasn't having fun with. Some of the research stations were fine, but some were pretty terrible. And then the challenges unlocked too, and I was straight up not having a good time.

I was willing to accept just not getting any of the upgrades that require tokens from the things I wasn't enjoying and just rush through the rest of the story instead, but then even that stopped being fun. Please never put mandatory unskippable stealth sections in games that aren't stealth games. Optional? Sure, that's fine. Some people like that. But if you force it on people in a game where it's a minor element at best you're just going to ruin a bunch of people's day. This has been known for 20+ years at least, so I don't know why people keep doing it.

After one too many stealth segments in quick succession I got to one I had to retry a few times to get past, and I was so sick of it I just closed the game in the middle of it and immediately uninstalled it, which was pretty refreshing.

I guess that follows the pattern that's been developing where there's definitely a correlation between how big a game's budget is and how much I dislike it. It's not a hard rule or anything, but it keeps happening that stuff like this manages to irritate me while I have a lot more fun with weird indie stuff these days.

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I accidentally wrote a post into Discord (i.e. rambled long enough that it turned into one), so I'll put it here too:

It's funny how most of the time everything in Spider-Man is blandly inoffensive to pretty decent, but when it escapes that range it's Not Good

The writing is usually pretty alright, nothing amazing but the characters are handled reasonably well and the plot moves things along

And then they briefly forget how real actual humans work

And do something that makes the standard making-fun-of-the-MCU's-dialog lines like "so that just happened" look good

Also people do literally say the lines people make fun of the writing in the MCU for word for word with no self awareness

I've also managed to glitch it into a state more than once where some map markers just don't show up on the map, or the map is fine but the object or trigger fails to load when you get where it's supposed to be

Quitting out of the game entirely and reloading it fixes everything, but it's still annoying

Someone should make actually good DC games that I like instead of the Arkham stuff, because I've always preferred DC over Marvel

Just reuse the DCUO hybrid universe with everyone's favorite versions of all the characters mashed together instead of being dark and edgy like the terrible movies or all the Batman stuff

I really do keep thinking "wow this game is extremely ok" though

😐👍

Never bad enough to stop playing, never good enough to really be excited about it

It also might be the most Liberal game I've ever played, or at least in a long time

Like there's heavy handed environmentalism all over the place and feel good helping homeless people and basically turning JJJ into diet Alex Jones, but then also being super pro cop and not really envisioning anything outside of the real world status quo being able to be anything other than bad/evil/criminal/etc.

Which is really kind of uninspiring after some of my favorite stuff from the past couple years has been either explicitly revolutionary/anti-cop like 1000xRESIST or Vengeful Heart, or a little further back implicitly like XC3, where fear of change and preserving the status quo at any cost is literally the antagonist, who you have to build mutual aid networks to defeat

For real though, I'd love a single player offline game with the tone and bright colors and greatest hits vibes of DCUO (which I haven't played in several years at this point), even though it'll never happen. And I also wish big budget stuff like this could be as provocative and thought-provoking as something like 1000xRESIST or Vengeful Heart or more quietly subversive like Xenoblade Chronicles 3 instead of being so risk-averse. I really should be spending my time on more stuff like that, but I guess this works for now while there's still construction going on nearby and it's harder to focus on more involved things ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Spider-Man and Ys X might be opposites in a way.

Traversing the map in Spider-Man is easily the best thing about it. The movement options are great and usually pretty satisfying to use, and the presentation is very slick and extremely high budget. All the other stuff when you get where you're going is the epitome of "fine, I guess" though. The combat is underwhelming (although to be fair I've never liked the Arkham style much to begin with, and this is extremely an Arkham game starring Spider-Man), and the other minigames and map objectives so far have all been inoffensive but also relatively uninteresting. It feels very "we have to appeal to the broadest possible audience to recoup the $14 trillion budget of AAA games these days", but at least it's more enjoyable than my other attempts at playing stuff like this in the past couple years.

Meanwhile moving around the world on your ship in Ys X might be the least satisfying gameplay in any of the modern Ys games (8 and onward). It's not bad, but it's not very good either, and it makes the pacing of the game a bit wonkier than in 8 or 9. Wherever you end up going you'll have a good time though. The combat is very tight and responsive and flashy, the exploration on foot feels pretty satisfying, and I've been enjoying the characters and larger number of interactions with them more than in Spider-Man. And it does all that on the kind of mid-tier budget that doesn't exist much anymore between small indie and huge AAA games.

Even if I think overall I'd say I like Ys X a little less than 8 or 9 so far, I'm still having a good time with it. Spider-Man's "fine, I guess" enough that I'll probably finish the story at least, but I don't expect to have any interest in actually playing the sequels.

And maybe I should get back to doing posts like these in the middle of playing games like I used to instead of only when I'm done 🤔

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Four years and just shy of 200 hours later I finally finished everything in The Witcher 3 (except for Gwent, which I completely don't understand why everyone loved). I have some major issues with it. It's also one of my favorite games I've ever played and continues the record of one of my favorite series being consistently great overall.

Just right up front I think the worst thing about the game is the gameplay. Pretty much all of it. The combat is solidly mediocre and feels just a little bit too heavy and murky for my tastes (except for the brief sections where you play as Ciri, who's delightfully responsive and mobile), and at some point I got bored of it and turned the difficulty all the way down so I wouldn't have to engage with it as much.

I probably liked the non-combat gameplay even less though. The minigames are entirely something I could've done without. Gwent is more interesting mechanically than Dice Poker was, but I actually had even less fun with it, and I stopped bothering fairly early on. Horse racing is actively bad and way too easy to miss a badly signposted turn and get your horse caught on world geometry. Can't think of any one-off minigames/events I liked any more than those either.

Despite all that I otherwise had a great time with it. The writing is pretty consistently excellent. Even if it ultimately doesn't have anything quite as interesting to say overall as some other stuff I've singled out for great writing this year, the story is still compelling and well told, and there's a never-ending supply of complex and interesting characters with messy relationships. I'm usually a lot less likely to vibe with gruff and grizzled male leads in stuff like this, but Geralt is just such a fun character with so much history and backstory with all these people and places.

I played through it in segments, basically finishing one area of the game or one story arc at a time pretty quickly and then not touching it again for months, so I feel like I've actually played through several games and not just one. I guess the first Witcher game was actually a lot like that with how much it changed from chapter to chapter (which I enjoyed), except each "chapter" in this was much longer. I also kept my habit of reading every little bit of text that comes up in a book or whatever else, which I've been doing since the first one because it's surprisingly consistently interesting or entertaining.

Great game, great story, great characters, great writing...shame about actually having to play it though, which never really bothered me in the previous two games. Oh well. I got over it because it was more than worth it.

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A couple more quick ones I couldn't get into, instead of the longer post I should be writing about the one I did finish:

It gets so lonely here didn't last very long. Sorry, ebi-hime, but second person is not a valid POV. I'm mostly joking, and I can tell from what I read of it that it wouldn't work any other way, but I still don't like it. There's a reason I have a custom filter on AO3 to hide all second person/x reader stuff by default. That reason? I don't like it.

While I was at it I tried the demo for Metaphor: ReFantazio even though I could already tell I probably wouldn't like it, because so many people have been playing it and saying it was in the running for GOTY for them. I've bounced off every SMT/Persona game I've ever tried except for Tokyo Mirage Sessions though, so I wasn't getting my hopes up. Anyway, I'm impressed how many visual design decisions they can fit into one game that I really don't like. The actual gameplay was very "fine, I guess" for my tastes, but there wasn't much of it in the first couple hours. I feel like I played the first 40 minutes of a game, but it took 100 minutes to do it. I didn't dislike what was going on with the characters and story, but they also didn't do enough in that time to really win me over. Also I named the main character Dingus because he looks like a dingus.

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Time for a few more quick ones:

A Tower Full of Cats is more Devcats hidden object cat finding. Nothing too unexpected, but they get points for trying something a little different with the structure and progression. Loses points for being the only one I can remember that has small but noticeable bugs though. Oh, and I don't love the whole soundtrack, but parts of it are pretty fun, and I appreciate what they did reworking elements of it for the different eras. 1960s in particular was a highlight.

stitch. was kind of disappointing. The presentation of the puzzles is great, but the presentation of the menus displeases me and makes me feel like they tried to cram an iPad game into a Switch. Speaking of iPad game on the Switch, it kind of sucks to interact with in any other way than using the touchscreen (which at least works quite well). The biggest problem though is that the puzzles are just kind of vaguely ok. It's a puzzle type I'm familiar with from elsewhere, and they just feel less satisfying here. They're rarely actually very difficult at all, with the "challenge" mostly coming from there being no way to mark guesses/things you already know, and even worse some of them having multiple solutions. I think I said on Discord that after the initial charm of the presentation wears off it quickly descends into a kind of mediocrity that would make Nickelback jealous.

Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor was even more disappointing than that though. I can only guess that the reason it's one of the most popular games in its genre is the DRG name, because other than that and the mining mechanic (which is genuinely good) nothing really stood out to me. Way, way, way too many weapons and upgrades are just bullets/more bullets, and they look so uninteresting and feel so unimpactful. Every enemy feels like a bullet sponge, which is super weird in this genre, and metaprogression/unlocks are so, so, so slow, which hurts doubly much because they're such minor upgrades a lot of the time. It's not my least favorite game I've played in the genre, but it's definitely close to the bottom of my list. Oh, and this part is completely a matter of personal taste, but not a single dwarf said a single thing that was funny at any point, even though I'm pretty sure the people who wrote and performed their dialogue thought it was. Totally killed any interest I might've had in the original game.

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A Highland Song pretty quickly earned a spot as one of my favorite things I've played this year. What if a walking sim also had platforming and rhythm game segments, and also those were the least important parts of the game and take a backseat to the story where you're a teenage girl in Scotland running away from home and across the country to figure out who you are?

The writing is the star of the show, which is unsurprising considering who made it, but the presentation is great too. The art style really suits what they're going for with the story, and the music and voice acting are excellent.

There's also a lot more stuff to see and do than you'll encounter in a single playthrough because there are so many different possible routes. Everywhere you go, everything you interact with, everyone you talk to fills in more of the story or builds more of the world, and it all slowly starts to come together. I had to go through a second time to get the true/full ending, which was very worth it because there was a lot of stuff that was new to me, and I still haven't seen more than half of it, I think.

The only real issues I had were a little jank with some of the platforming sometimes and a couple times wasting some time when it wasn't very clear where I should or even could go next, but for the most part it was a pretty smooth experience.

I don't really want to get into spoilers because that's not what I do here, but if magical realism coming of age in the Scottish Highlands sounds like a good time it probably will be. A good time, that is.

Also I think it might be my second favorite rhythm game on the Switch now even if technically I didn't play it on there (and unless you actively follow what I've been playing, no the first probably isn't what you think).

[veebs-hates-video-games]

heya! came across your blog and i found it really refreshing how bluntly critical yet fair and not overbearing you are with both your wording and what you have to say as well. keep doing you!

also, if you take game suggestions – maybe check out in stars and time! i saw in an earlier post of yours that you said you were aro and isat has some aro stuff so yeah! anyways hope you have a nice day :]

I'm glad at least some of that comes across, since it's kind of what I'm going for. I don't want to pretend I liked something that didn't really do it for me, but as long as it's just a matter of taste and not because it's totally broken and doesn't work I try to stick to why I didn't like it instead of saying it's objectively bad and no one else should like it either. I probably do a better/worse job of that depending on stuff like my sleep and health and whatever, but that's what I try to do anyway.

And yeah, totally down for suggestions. In Stars and Time is actually pretty high up on my list already. I just haven't caught it on sale when I wasn't already in the middle of something else yet, but there isn't much else left I'm trying to get through by the end of the year, so there's a decent chance it'll happen by then.