Video Game Reviews

Direct and engaging, with a nice digestible length. But I can’t help but feel like the Metroid formula needs to shed some legacy baggage.

Just… so many good feelings from this game. I’ll cherish it forever.

There’s some interesting ideas and clever mechanics here, but I could never get past the clunky, sluggish controls. Movement expressiveness is limited to such a degree that neither platforming nor combat feel good.

In just a few short weeks, this game took me from sudoku dilettante to completing Sunday “Pro 💀” puzzles in 20 minutes without hints (if I’m feeling patient enough). Good Sudoku has taught me more about sudoku than I ever thought I’d want to learn.

Jan Willem Nijman said it best:

This game is incredibly cyberpunk, like you just slam a new ai deck into your neocortex to kick ass at sudoku.

It’s cool, but I’d rather just play Tetris.

I love me some Picross, but they really phoned it in with the UI and controls in this one. No touchscreen support and no option to use the right stick means you can never really play one-handed, and that’s just incredibly frustrating for such a simple game.

Not many games have rewarded me with such a deep sense of accomplishment. Celeste gives me life.

I wish I had been able to play this back in 2017, as it might have felt fresher. In a post-Breath of the Wild world I sometimes find it hard to appreciate linear experiences without wondering how much better they could be if they just let go of my hand. This game triggered that feeling a lot.

Comparing it to Gone Home, a lot has evolved, but this game still feels stuck in the same uncanny valley: it’s not a true interactive experience as much as it is a museum exhibit. While that can be super interesting, video games seem capable of so much more. And now that Return of the Obra Dinn exists, we know that the valley can be crossed. I’m hoping that future “walking simulators” keep going in that direction.

As fun and timeless as ever. Nostalgia factor is huge with the new wireless SNES controller. But I’ll never rate this game five stars because I was a Sonic kid during the 16-bit era. No matter how many times I play it, Super Mario World will always feel somehow foreign, as if I’m still only allowed to play it for a little while at a friend’s house.

I played more as a tourist this time. I wanted to explore more than to be challenged, and I wanted to get to 100% completion (which I’d never done before). So I used the rewind feature in the Switch emulator liberally. It’s funny how “lazy” you get once you can instantly fix your mistakes. It deeply changes the experience for some games.

This is the worst-sounding video game I’ve ever played; the sound effects are frankly ridiculous. The visual design is also quite poor and hard to parse, with enemies, bullets, and background all blending together. And the later levels are extremely punishing. No checkpoints? Okay… But is that testicle/bird final boss even supposed to be beatable by a human? I’ve never used rewind so much in any other classic title. Nintendo, bring us good SNES shoot ‘em ups, please.

Cool premise, but lacks depth. I hate playing armchair designer, but I think this game needed a few obvious extra features:

• More achievements for each city. Why make lists called “Achievements” if they’re all limited to one item? I was expecting more stuff to unlock as I played.
• A gallery of what your cities looked like at their peak, and a way to share that. When you lose, the camera zooms in, so you can’t even take a screenshot of your glorious metropolis.
• A free build mode. Let me just play around without risk of failure, and let me place buildings myself. The more I played, the more I wanted to just put in a cheat code and build without restrictions, SimCity style.

This game is awesome and what phone games should have evolved into all along. Loved it.

Now I’m only missing the hidden achievement and I’m sure it’s got something to do with that fart card probably

A charming little game that got me to smile a lot for the duration of a well-spent hour.

Is this a dig at Silicon Valley techbros? I love it. Reminded me of an old New Yorker cartoon:

“Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”

Short and sweet, full of personality. The kind of game that makes me want to make games.