Afil games publishes no-frills puzzle games, like Sokobalien. Honeyland is no exception. In this ,your goal is to get your bear to its Honey. You do this by playing cards with direction arrow and a number. The bear moves in the direction of the arrow, relative to how it is facing. The number corresponds to the number of spaces the bear moves. The goal is to play the cards in the right order to get the honey, and that is it. Later on, special cards, like jumps, are introduced, biut the idea is the same. Play the right cards in the right order to get the honey.
There are thirty increasingly tough levels, and nothing else. Still, Honeyland is not a bad game. It is only five dollars, after all. You could much worse for the money. I give this a Recommended with a seven back end score. I could continue and ramble on to meet word count, but after a recent disaster of a review, I’m going to play its safe for awhile.
Overall: Honeyland is a no-frills puzzler that delivers a decent puzzle game, and nothing else.
The Japanese indie developer SAT-BOX is getting lazy in my opinion. I have given them two must plays in the past, one for Extreme Bike X and one for Sushi Shot. However, they increased their pace to two games a month. As a result, their usual decent quality is slipping drastically. How do I know? Enter Sushi Drop, which uses all of the same assets as Sushi Shot, including music, sushi and UI. This is on top of the fact the game is a mediocre stacking game, where you drop sushi into order to build a high tower of sushi.
There are two main modes in Sushi Drop, Score attack, where you just build as high a tower as you can, and Battle, where you take turns dropping sushi until one of you drops a sushi off the board. The problem here is the physics, it sucks and makes no sense. Why does some sushi stick in place and other pieces do not? Don’t know. See the yellow egg sushi about the salmon piece in the pic above? Normally, it should slide off, but it does not. Therefore, The physics inconsistency sinks the game instantly. This is regardless of how good the rest of it, and the rest of it is honestly alright.
SAT-BOX needs to slow it down and take their time. Sushi Drop is mediocre at best, and I know they can do better, they have done better. This gets a Not Recommended with a five back-end score. If they patched the physics to make things consistent, I’d probably give Sushi Drop a much better verdict and score, but as it is, it gets what it gets.
Overall: Sushi Drop could have been a lot better, and should be a lot better. But terrible physics sinks it. SAT-BOX, do better!
Trinity Fusion has an interesting premise. Three universes were created, the underworld, overworld and hyperworld. They all went wrong. The beasts of the underworld went feral. The machines of the overworld rebelled And the humans in the hyperworld transcended into a new species called the Ewer. You are Maya, a woman who can travel between universes, and needs to save them. You play three versions of yourself, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, Altara, Kera and Naira. You can even, at points, fuse two versions together to get special abilities.
Trinity Fusion is a rogue-lite. The game is divided into runs in procedural generated levels in each of the three universes. Each universe has unique biomes and enemies. Each level has two exits. One to an in-universe biome, or one to a place called the In-Between. In each level, you’ll find amplifiers that you give you in-run buffs. Stack some of the same buff type, you get an even more powerful buff. There are psychic amplifiers you can get that give you permanent buffs, like an extra 10 health.
Combat in Trinity Fusion is your have a melee weapons, and a powerful energy weapon that is powered up by melee attacks. To get around, you’ll slide, jump and dash, plus abilities specific to each character, like wall jumping for Naira.
I have two complaints about Trinity Fusion. First, loading takes forever. Second, the teleport function in the hub, Prime, is broken and doesn’t work(or at least I can’t figure how to use it). Other than that, Trinity Fusion is a stellar game, fun, absorbing and inviting. I will give it a solid Recommended with an eight back-end score. The is solid fun and worth the time invested.
Overall: Trinity Fusion is an interesting rogue-like where you play three separate characters in three different worlds and is overall very good.
I’ll be honest, Tomba! Special Edition(Tombi! in the EU) is not for me. It just is not. I tried it, twice, just never clicked with me. Cannot put a finger on exactly why. I should like it, its a 2.5D platformer where you can traverse the foreground and background, but I didn’t care for it. Maybe because it plays more like a point and click adventure. You see, in each area, you get various quests to complete, like find baby chicks or feed a monkey, go do that, the story story progresses. However, if you don’t even find the monkey, the story stops dead as you cannot move forward, so you have to go read a guide. I shouldn’t have to read a walk-through for a port of a 1997 platformer, but you kind of do for Tomba! Special Edition.
The monkey is in the tree, but good luck getting to him.
Tomba! Special Edition has nothing particularly wrong with it. It is well made, allows you to save anywhere, has lots of behind the scenes stuff. I just don’t like it. And that’s just fine, somebody else might. So playing a pink-haired cave-man fighting pig men sound appealing, by all means, play it. This is why the Your Mileage May Vary verdict exists, for these types of games. I shouldn’t have to suffer through it just for a review, so I’m putting my foot down. Tomba! Special Edition gets a YMMV with a seven back-end score. Again, there’s nothing wrong with it, it just was not for me.
Overall: Tomba! Special Edition is a remaster of a odd platformer from another age that some might enjoy even though I did not.
The most read review on my site, by a thousand views, is the abysmal Hentai Golf, quite possibly the worst golf game ever created. So in comes Easy Come Easy Golf, which is absolutely delightful, but flew completely under the radar. I had never heard of this 2022 title until I randomly found some guy on X who talked about completing it recently. At his word and recommendation, I bought it, and after putting several hours into it, it is completely worth the money. Its not like a PGA tour game, its more like Hot Shots Golf, which is made by the same developer of that series, Clap Hanz. .
The catch to Easy Come Easy Golf is that each hole requires a different character. You start off with 4, the rest filled with a generic “mini-golfer” and over the course of the long campaign, you will unlock thirty in total. Each character has their own strengths and get more powerful by leveling them up via play. You unlock new characters by winning regular tournaments, which spawn matches against characters. Win those, and characters get unlocked. In additions to tournaments and match play there are distance challenges that unlocks character colors and outfits(which raise character level. New courses are unlocked with tour rank, which is raised once you win enough tournaments, which spawn the boss battles, and you win.
The golf itself is great, not surprising given the pedigree of Easy Come Easy Golf. Its easy to pick up, hard to master. You get a choice of two shot types, either flicking the right stick, or the the three tap system. I used the stick system, but either work. The game is gentle early on, but packs a punch later once you level your team and learn the mechanics.
The meat of Easy Come Easy Golf is the single player campaign. However, there are numerous online modes where you take your leveled team online and face others. But I have to wonder how easy it is to find others, given the game’s age and low visibility. My only other complaint is that the loading takes a long time, longer than it should anyway.
Easy Come Easy Golf gets a must Play with a nine back-end score. It is truly is a delightful golf game and should be as popular as Hentai Golf sadly seems to be. There is a serious golf game here that fans of Hot Shots Golf, or golf in general, will love.
Overall: Easy Come Easy Golf is a Hot Shots Golf spinoff by the same developer. Given that pedigree, its not surprising it is great!
Landnama bills itself as a “non-violent, roguelite survival base builder.” In this, you play various Viking clans settling Iceland in expeditions. To win an expedition, you must successfully colonize six areas. In each colony, you start off with a central hub, that needs to get upgraded 4 times to win. It get upgraded each time you reach a level of heart production, five, fifteen, twenty-five and thirty. To produce hearts, you explore the area, unveiling tiles and building various buildings that either produce hearts or modify those that do. You also need to build houses, which raise the total amount of hearts you can store. The survival aspect comes in the winter toll, which will take away a random amount of hearts. Lose all your hearts, you have one do over. Fail again, colony over. Fail colonizing three times and the expedition ends.
The trick in Landnama is to balance exploration and building with heart generation, so that you always have enough hearts to survive the winter. You also need to build strategically, as certain buildings can only be placed next to other building or certain tile types. In addition, there is a reputation system. Every successful colony gets you reputation, which can be used to unlock new clans, and bonuses. The harder the difficulty of expedition, and of the colonizing itself, the more reputation you will earn. And you’ll need a lot of it since everything is pretty pricey. But it does force you to get good real fast.
About 3 seconds away from winning ^-^
I liked Landnama, enough to hand it a Must Play with a nine back-end score. It’s a simple game at its heart, and each game takes only a few minutes. However, it is a game that I found engaging and you’ll want to play again. I’ve reviewed a whole lot of crap lately, and the eShop is flooded with it. It is nice to stumble upon a well-made game like Landnama and I whole-heartily recommend it for those look for a good time-waster. This is not a grand-strategy game, but it stands on its own well enough to be worth it.
Overall: Landnama is a simple but engaging strategy game of Vikings colonizing Iceland that is worth a play to anyone looking a great time-waster.
And there it goes, any good will Big Way earned with the surprisingly good Love Island. Lovely Crush is their follow up and while it isn’t bad, it isn’t particularly worth a purchase either. This is a pop blocks-style game where you pop connecting blocks. I’ve reviewed a bunch of these, including Eroblast. Lovely Crush simply fails to distinguish itself game-play wise from similar cohorts, and honestly, I found it rather boring. Just board after board, with similar power-ups and obstacles. There is no tutorial, but you do not need one. You know exactly what to do here, as you’ve done it before.
The real draw, if you want to call it that, is to unlock pictures of anime cat-girls. Except they are AI-generated. Not only that, there are nude anime cat-girls on the Switch in the form of Neko Secret Room and its sequel Neko Secret Homecoming. Both those games are trash, but the images aren’t ai-generated and they’re nude. No such luck with Lovely Crush, which gets a T rating. In there end, this game has been done elsewhere and done better, both in terms of the puzzle game play and the anime cat girls.No reason to buy it. No reason to play. Lovely Crush gets a Not Recommended with a four back-end score.
You can tell it is AI by the lack of hands.
Overall: Lovely Crush is routine block-popping puzzler with AI-generated cat-girls. Both halves of this game have been done elsewhere, and done better.
This is partially a review of No Man’s Sky/partially an editorial. No Man’s Sky just had its 5.0 update, Worlds Part 1. And I went back to it on my Xbox. And I marveled at how good it has become. But it still isn’t perfect, as it has a fatal flaw, one that sunk Starfield. It is that because No Man’s Sky is nothing but procedural-generated content, its wide as ocean, but puddle-deep. I have 160 hours on my save, and the only worlds I remember are the ones I have bases on. The rest have faded from memory because they weren’t distinct. Sure there are awesome vistas, because there isn’t much to do on any particular world. Land, catalog minerals, flora and fauna and move on. Each world is larger than some open world games, but there’s nothing to do on them. But let’s back up.
No Man’s Sky’s Rocky Start
WEEEEEE!
Eight Years ago, No Man’s Sky was released, and it was hated. Sean Murray of Hello games made lofty promises about what the game would be, and it was all a lie. No multiplayer, no base building and planets didn’t rotate. But a funny thing happened, Hello Games didn’t make many excuses, they went silent and got to work. And over the last eight years, made No Man’s Sky into a juggernaut. with a team the fraction of the size of most AAA games. There is multiplayer, deep base building and the star systems acts like star systems(though you do have to warp between them). There’s also settlements, pirate battles, pirate systems, pet breeding, a new secret robot race, sentinels, ship building, expeditions and the list goes on. Because its so free-form, Hello Games can cram random stuff in, and it works. And none of updates cost extra.
Pretty vistas abound!
Its easy to label No Man’s Sky the greatest game comeback in history, even eclipsing Cyberpunk 2077 IMO. Cyberpunk’s comeback is certainly impressive, especially with the Phantom Liberty expansion, but CD Project Red stopped development after four years as its vision for the game was completed. Hello Games has been at it for eight year and sees no signs of slowing.down. But even if they continue for another eight, there’s one problem they can’t fix.
The Fatal Flaw
Hello there generic NPC #94302103
As I said in the opening paragraph, No Man’s Sky has an infinite universe, but not that much to do on any particular world. There are missions you can do, and there are navigation points on each world. But each giant planet ultimately fells hollow and generic. The Worlds update certainly helps, and I can’t wait for part 2, but does the universe need to be nearly infinite? Once you leave the starting Euclid Galaxy, good luck finding a star-system that has already been discovered. I haven’t seen a single other player outside of the Anomaly. Maybe that is the point, a feeling of solitude on an alien planet. And on certain worlds, there is that feeling. But after 100 star-systems everything feels the same.
To infinity and Beyond
What is the solution? I’m not sure there is one. Procedural-generation just can’t match hand-crafted content, Just ask Bethesda how well relying on it went with Starfield(hint: it didn’t go very well). But Starfield is an RPG, No Man’s Sky is an exploration sandbox. Flying into the unknown is the point, even if what is there doesn’t exactly wow most of the time. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying No Man’s is a terrible game eight-years on, just the opposite. It is just that there’s a limit to how far things can be refined in a game like this. And that’s alright. Now if you excuse me, I have to find this underground rare creature…
DarkStar One is a 2006 space sim that won’t die. I’m serious, I bought it in 2006 and they keep resurrecting it every couple of years since. You play this guy who his given your father’s experimental ship and you search for the truth about how he died. First you go here, then you go there, then you go to this third place where you get a lead that sends you to the fourth place. I’m serious, you get your copilot in a scene that goes:
Her: I have information you need.
Him: Ok cool, welcome aboard.
Its not Shakespeare, its not even pulp-level storytelling. Its elementary school storytelling. But that’s not why you are playing this. The point is to pimp your ship, the titular Darkstar One to get from point A to point B.
Guy with eyepiece goes, “I don’t have you need. Bye!” Then your copilot walks in.
First, to pimp the Darkstar One, you need artifacts. These are sitting around certain systems in asteroids. Just fly up and collect them. Then you choose to upgrade your hull, wings or engines. This will upgrade various stats. Then on Trade Stations you buy new weapons, systems and equipment. This part all revolves around credits of course, which is earned by killing pirates, completing missions and trading/smuggling goods. Early on, you’re mostly upgrading your jump drive to get father, but you’ll need to upgrade everything to survive. This is because danger lurks around every corner, usually in the form of those pirates who show up to die.
Controlling your ship in Darkstar One is pretty good. Its nice to play this on a controller rather than a mouse and keyboard. Everything is intuitive, except landing on trade stations. You see, you’re either going 100% fast, 150% fast or stationary. You can also back up. Become speed is regimented, its often hard to navigate into the little docking bays. This is especially true with cargo in tow, though that is mitigated with ship levels. Combat though, is smooth like butter!
The biggest drawback of Darkstar One, besides the horrible story, is that what you’re doing gets repetitive quickly. The game loop is essentially upgrading your ship to get to the right system to advance the story, which always involves ship combat. The systems are all the same, the trade-station missions are all the same. You start off in Terran(human) territory, then you go to Mortok territory, and everything is still same game play wise. I got bored, quit and went to write this review. Maybe the game throws curve balls later on, but I’m not sitting through hours upon hours of identical game play to get there.
The game map is huge, but shallow.
Darkstar One is not a bad game, just extremely generic. There is a meaty game of pimp your ship here, but everything surrounding it is a snore-fest. And trust me, the game did not exactly stand out in 2006 either. So, there is a game here, but its not exciting enough to recommend to anyone but those who are most curious. Darkstar One gets a Your Mileage May Vary verdict, with a six back-end score.
Overall: Darkstar One is a port of a 2006 space sim that should have stayed in 2006. Totally generic, boring and not really worth it.
In 444 Switch reviews over the last 2 years, I have never cursed once. That will end with number 445(this one). WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?! Basketball Anime Girls is so bad, It would get #1 on my upcoming Year 2 Best/Worst list, if it weren’t for The Love not working, so this game will get #2. There are no redeeming qualities, and I wasn’t laughing, so it’s not getting a Hilariously Awful verdict either. I guess the best way to explain this piece of shit is to post this minute long video, which also debuts a logo video made by the very talented Laura Stevia(which was for a Patreon that never materialized).
So, Basketball Anime Girls is a basketball game where you run around with the ball trying to get near the basket and dunk(but somehow miss the net). The opponent is trying to do the same. The only problem is the AI is garbage. The opposing girls run straight at you, but once they get the ball by touching you, they either run for their basket, or run around at random. The girls on your side will do the same, either run around at random or straight for the basket, its a coin toss which one they’ll do. Each basket you score is one point. Each one the opponent does subtracts one. You need five points to win.
It entices you with AI-Generated Basketball Anime Girls!
Basketball Anime Girls does have unlockable girls, balls, and courts. But why suffer through it? This game is shit, pure unadulterated shit. Even the marketing blurb is shit:
Step into the world of “Basketball Anime Girls” a captivating 3D basketball simulator that combines the excitement of real-life basketball with the vibrant charm of anime style. Choose your favorite anime girl skin and hit the courts for an immersive and thrilling experience.
Its all lies, all of it. It is not captivating, thrilling, charming or exciting. It is Garbage and will get a one back-end score. Heck it’d give it a 0.5 if I could. Do not buy this game. Do not go near Basketball Anime Girls. Let me suffer so you don’t have to!
Overall: Basketball Anime Girls is an awful, awful game that is neither fun nor charming. Stay far away!
Somequest, makers of the Beauties Unveiled games, has come out with Fantasy Beauties, a jigsaw game with a twist. You get a jigsaw board and an empty space will light up. At the top are six pieces. You have several seconds to put in the correct piece. What’s nice is, you can actually place any piece, not just the one being lit up and it’ll count. As you put in pieces, your powerup meter will fill. First it will fill to auto-put one piece, then three pieces, then five. Fail to put a piece in time, the meter will reset and the pieces at the top will change. When you complete the picture in Fantasy Beauties, you get stars based on if you completed it and how fast you did it. You can always look at the completed picture by pressing Y.
The boards will get a lot bigger.
Fantasy Beauties is a fine little game, except there is a little problem. The DLC. Yes, there are already six DLC beauties to download(with three boards each). Three are free, three are two dollars each. They all should be free and in the game to start with it. There is no real excuse for this and I see it as slimy. I’m imagining somequest is going to do the RedDeer Model and release bundle after bundle. Let’s hope not, as they didn’t do it for previous games, but I put nothing past them or any developer anymore. Therefore, I will dock a point from the score, giving Fantasy Beauties a Recommended with a seven back-end score. The game is good and even addicting to a certain extent, but the developers sinking to scummy levels just does not sit right with me, especially when the game is priced at twenty dollars base.
Overall: Fantasy Beauties is a fine little jigsaw puzzle game, but the pricing and DLC doesn’t sit well with me.
I’ve touched on RedDeer Games, or Red Deer.Games, before, namely in the Midnight Works article. But I’m going to rag on them specifically because they’ve perfected a method of crapping up the eShop, especially the version of Switch. You see, on the Switch eShop, a bundle of game and DLC is counted as a new game. Nintendo has done a decent job of filtering them out of the Web eShop, but the Switch eShop is the Wild West. SwitchStars has done a video on them where he says, at the time of the video release, that RedDeer Games is most prolific publisher on the eShop, constituting 3% of the total games released. I believe it.
The most insidious thing about the practice is that the bundles are the exact same packages repackaged over and over again. The Complete and Definitive versions of Hentai Golf above are the exact same bundles, but counted as a new game. RedDeer Games really has no shame, though if you think about it, there’s a logic here. If you keep releasing the same game over and over, it keeps it at the top of the heap and never sinks into gaming slush pile, never to be seen again.
RedDeer Games isn’t alone
But if you thought RedDeer was alone in this, you’d be wrong. Baltoro is also notorious for this, among others. Though in Baltoro’s defense, the games they keep releasing tend to be of a higher quality often than RedDeer Game’s stock, and generally released at a slower rate.
Nintendo needs to fix the Switch eShop, it is damn near unusable at this point, and the bundles are a huge portion of the reason why. But here’s the thing, they wouldn’t be doing this if it did not work, Still, like all the other scams, asset flips and AI generated garbage, this stuff clogs up the eShop, and pushes the worthwhile indie games off the page. Its gotten so bad I have to rely on Keymailer to find worthwhile games to review, unless I stumble on something like Epyx Rogue. RedDeer Games and the others won’t stop unless Nintendo changes the eShop, but at this point, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Probably it’ll only change when the Switch 2 comes out.
NeoSprint is a top down racer for Switch, Steam and other platforms. I reviewed the Steam version for this review. I found it fun, thought rough around the edges, too easy spin out and lose the race. But lets back up. There’s single player and multiplayer. In multiplayer you have a campaign mode, a gran-prix mode, free-race and obstacle races. The campaign is the meat of single player. There are three campaigns, made up of sixteen tracks divided into 4 sets. In each set you have three regular races, and then a must-win duel with the area’s champion. The gran-prix is just four race sets of any tracks you like. Obstacle races are time trails, except there are obstacles you must avoid, hit them and lose seconds.
Game play on steam is with the keyboard. WASD or arrow keys plus right shift for hand-brake/drift. However you can change them if you like. Driving is easy, hard to master. My problem is that is too easy lose a race with one mistake. In the campaign, there are only three retries available in each set. Good luck! Still I had fun with NeoSprint in the time I played. Its not too taxing and you’ll want to play more.
Finally, you can build your own tracks in NeoSprint. however, I found the editor nearly unusable. There’s no mouse support, so placing tracks is with WASD keys, and precision placement is night impossible. But if you want to try your luck, I’m sure you can create masterpieces. Overall, I give Neo Sprint a Recommended Verdict with a seven-back end score.
Overall: NeoSprint is a fun-little racer that is rough at times, but overall I found it fun! I gave it a Recommended verdict.
Ecchi Time is the most pointless thing I have ever seen on the Switch. Sure there is there is AAA clock with 55 versions, including the 99 dollar AAA Clock Gold, but at least there are mini-games in it, or so I’ve been told. This is nothing but a rotating series of images of one of five girls, as the background of a clock. And that’s it. What’s worse, the backgrounds are all Stable Diffusion created, and not good images either, as in some the hands are messed up royally.
All you get.
The insidious part of Ecchi time is the excessive DLC. There are eight different extra women, all for $2.69 each. Add them all up, you get around $21, three times the price of the original of $7.69. There’s no reason these extra images cannot be in the original game. Its not like it cost anything extra to create them. All this is, is a cash grab by the developer, nothing more, nothing less. Bottom barrel garbage to take up space in the eShop. Ecchi Time gets a Garbage with a one back-end score. I mean the 55 version of AAA clock are a travesty, but at least there is a mini-game to justify its existence. No such luck here. .
I do have to wonder though, will there be eighty versions of Ecchi Time? We’ll see… Actually, I guarantee that’s exactly what is going to happen, Yabai.Games, RedDeer.Games… hmm… Could there be a connection? Probably not, but they’re all extremely scummy anyway.
Overall: Ecchi Time is nothing but an evil cash grab. There is no point to this. Just use your phone for the same effect.
YEAH! YOU WANT “THOSE GAMES,” RIGHT? SO HERE YOU GO! NOW, LET’S SEE YOU CLEAR THEM! 2 is the sequel to YEAH! YOU WANT “THOSE GAMES,” RIGHT? SO HERE YOU GO! NOW, LET’S SEE YOU CLEAR THEM!. I will just refer to them going forward as Those Games 2 and Those Games 1. This series takes those ubiquitous fake mobile games ads and turns the fake games portrayed into actual mini-games. I reviewed Those Games 1 and the review did pretty well. So I’m reviewing the sequel, which brings four new games and one returning one. Like the last review, I will review each of the games.
Those Games 2: Knock-Back Shooter
Knock-Back Shooter is a game where you have to bounced a bullet off the walls and hit your target, without hitting yourself. You have a certain number of shots. The less you use, the better your score. I found it fine for what it is, but there are better games in Those Games 2.
Draw & Guard
Draw and Guard is where you draw a line to save yourself from bats. The hook is that the line becomes a physical object and can be pushed by bats. The goal is to survive ten seconds. I found this the easiest in Those Games 2 because the answer is often self-evident based on the stage layout, as seen above.
Those Games 2: Spellbinding Scroll
This game is the one usually as your character shooting things, like zombies or monsters. Here you’re a women shooting arrows to enchant men. Each arrow has a value and you must shoot enough arrows to fill the heart. If you get hit, you lose whatever the value of the heart was. Hit 0 points, game over. Things get more complicated later with gates that affect your point values, and negative arrows flying at you. I think this is the best game in Those Games 2, I loved it.
Pull the Pin 2
This is the returning game, this time, instead of surviving monsters, you are delivering embers to a an oven, or water to a glass. It was great in the last game, and still great here in Those Games 2, and puts up a real challenge at times.
Number Dungeon
This is a twist on the tower mini-game from last game. This time, you’re in a maze and have to attack the monsters in a certain order to beat the final boss. It is good is all I can really say about it. I played this the least, but that doesn’t mean it is bad.
Rest of Those Games 2
Like the last game, Those Games 2 has missions to beat, both daily and general. You will get coins from puzzles and missions. These are used in the “Gotcha” machine, which gives you a nameplate and/or title. There’s also word-wide challenge mode with a leader board for added longevity. Overall, its a good mini-game collection, but I don’t think its a Must Play, because outside the games, little has changed. This gets a Recommended with an eight back-end score.
Overall: Those Games 2 is a mini-game collection of fake games from mobile game ads. Pretty good like Those Games 1!
Rogue-like is a genre comprised of games characterized with randomized levels, and permadeath. But how many people have played Rogue itself, the game that spawned an entire genre? I’d wager not that many in recent times. So along comes Epyx Rogue, a version of the original game, well the graphical version by Epyx anyway(the original was ASCII graphics). In it, you play a rogue who travels through the Dungeons of Doom looking for an amulet. There are two modes, a standard which allows saving, and Iron Rogue mode that doesn’t. Either way, the game is merciless, and obtuse, it is an eighties game after all. Still, I prefer Iron Rogue as that’s really how the game is meant to be played.
Not ,much to look at, but neither was the original.
Most of what you’ll be doing in Epyx Rogue is walking around levels, picking up items, and fighting monsters by walking into them. The rest of actions are all listed on the screen, or via the action wheel. Still, things can get overly complicated. Take drinking a potion. Press R, Press Y, then press A on the potion screen. Then when it asks you to selection a potion, you use the letter wheel to select the appropriate letter corresponding to an item. If you’re lucky, it’ll be a good effect. If not, you’ll die. Everything is done manually, including equipping weapons and armor. Like I said, Epyx Rogue is an eighties DOS game transplanted to modern controllers. Fortunately, there is an extensive instruction manual in-game to help you understand things.
You’ll be seeing this a lot.
New to Epyx Rogue is one of three soundtracks: Dungeon Ambience, Dark Music and Epic Music. I choose the ambience, but any of three are fine(or none). There is also a few visual options(like CRT or Soft). As for longevity, Epyx Rogue is Rogue, you’ll be at this for awhile, especially when you die on Iron Rogue mode. Now the score: Epyx Rogue gets a Must Play verdict with a nine back-end score. Why? It’s Rogue, its a classic that spawned a genre. Yes, its extremely difficult, unfair even at times, but that’s kind of the point. You play this because you are glutton for punishment and will continually come back asking for more. And if you’re a fan of rogue-likes and don’t like Rogue, are you really a fan?
Overall: Epyx Rogue is a faithful translation of the classic eighties DOS game that spawned an entire genre, warts and all. A must for Rogue-like fans.
Rainbow Ascend is like Onlyup!, a game where you… go up, except it is somehow even worse. I don’t know how the developers did it, but they created pure unadulterated Garbage. You’d be excused for not thinking its crap by the story artwork, or stationary screenshots. But it is when you start playing that you realize how horrible the game is. Rainbow Ascend starts off with pretty artwork and forgettable story line about a sick grandmother and a map. It pretends to be deep, it really is not.
None of this drivel will matter!
You then start off running and jumping up a path made up of a variety of objects floating in the air. It is here where Rainbow Ascend comes crashing down. You see, the controls are awful. You’ll plunge to your demise easily because you stepped in the wrong spot, and have to start again from the checkpoint. Then you’ll try, try again, and eventually give up as I did. Remember the ascent to the Wind Temple in Tears of the Kingdom, and how awesome that was? This is the exact opposite of that section. No fun, all frustration.
At least there are panty shots… I guess.
Rainbow Ascend: Anime Girls Go Up will get a Garbage Verdict with a three back end score. At least the game is functional, barely. But the lure of anime panties does not mean one should purchase this game. Just the opposite. Run from this game. You’ll fall to your death so many times because of how bad the controls are, you’ll throw the Switch in frustration. It just ain’t worth it.
Overall: Rainbow Ascend: Anime Girls Go Up has panty shots, and that’s all the game has going for it. Go play something else instead.
To understand Toilet Hero, one must understand Skibidi Toilet, which involves disembodied heads coming out of toilets and talking. But I’m not a pre-teen so… I don’t get it. Toilet Hero is meant to capitalize on Skibidi Toilet’s popularity, without mentioning the name exactly. This is because there is a very similar Skibidi Toilet Game on the PC. I have played that game and this. This seems to be a downgraded port of that game, though the exact pedigree is strange on this. Either way, this is garbage. about on par with Midnight Work’s titles. This is published by 17studio, made by Ultra Action Shooter Games, which doesn’t even have a cool looking logo. Just the name in white text on a black screen. The game is just as bad.
You start out, walk forward, get a gun, and then fight toilets. And this is where the problem is. The toilets just come straight at you and drain your health, and you’ll die quickly. Fortunately, killing a toilet will get a bit of health back. Then you continue on in these ugly, badly put together levels full of amateur texture work, fighting more toilets. The levels look like they were put together by Skidibi Toilet’s target audience, 10-year-olds. Just look at this, it’s absolutely ugly as sin:
Toilet Hero is not fun. It is not exciting. It is 100% pure garbage, really the worst of the worst. Whoever made this should be ashamed of themselves. This is a complete ripoff in either version, which ropes in clueless kids and serves them crap. I’m not a fan of Skidibi Toilet, but fans deserve better than this, which is downright malicious. Toilet Hero gets a Garbage verdict with a one back-end score.
Overall: Toilet Hero is a port of the Skidibi Toilet FPS game on steam, and is meant to entrap children and serve them garbage.
Love Island is by Big Way, makers of such trash as Hentai RPG Isekai Journey and Hentai Uni. Its a match 3 dating sim in the vein of the classic Hunie Pop on steam. And you know what? After playing it a bit, its good! Yes, Big Way made a game that’ll get a Recommended verdict! I was shocked at the quality of this. Let’s dig in:
In Love Island you play a horny guy traveling on vacation to an island resort where you get to screw 5 lovely ladies: The receptionist at the resort, a lifeguard, a maid, and a drunk tourist, Beat them, and you’ll unlock the fifth lady, a DJ named Cumchita. They each have three progressively harder levels that act as the framework for a very basic story. Like the receptionist plays out in the lobby, her office, then a secluded beach spot. Screwing is represented by lots of hearts on a black screen, and a jingles. Now for the game play itself:
Love Island’s game play is very similar to Hunie Pop, crossed with Isekai Journey. The red, yellow, blue and orange tiles fill the seduction meter on the right. The green martini’s fill your health. Above the challenge meter is a counter that counts down to when the girls challenges you(“You have a small dick” ect.). This takes away a certain amount of your health. Matching four a kind gets you a heart box that fills your energy meter. The energy meter is used for the lips(Health), gag(seduction points) and the Champaign(shuffle). On the left are three items: The strawberry gives health. The flowers are seduction points. The rings act as extra lives(and will be needed later on). Beating a level gives a choice of one three stat boosts that you’ll need to beat later levels. Lose health its game over and back to the start, like it was in Isekai Journey. Overall, Love Island is good!
I have to commend Big on improving. Love Island is a good game. It won’t last particularly long, but that’s alright, its fun while it lasts. Now what keeps this from a Must Play is that the girls are stereotypes and not endearing, like the Hunie Pop crew was. Still this gets a Recommended Verdict with an eight back-end score. Its not a classic, but it sticks the land quite nicely. Now if Big Way can keep the momentum going, that’d be great!
Overall; Love Island is a match 3 Dating Sim that is Big Way’s best game, and is actually solid.
I wanted to like Roxy Raccoon’s Pinball Panic. A story-based pinball game sounds kind of cool. The issue is, other, better, Pinball games exist; Pinball FX3 and Zaccaria Pinball, to be exact. The tables you have to play on are simple and not very interesting, and I played on more than one. They lack the bell and whistles of those other tables, and lack complexity. Let me show you:
This is just plain old boring!
This table is what you see is what you get. The table is spartan and fairly straightforward. Granted, it bares a resemblance to the older Zaccaria tables, but that’s the point, the genre has moved on, Roxy Raccoon’s Pinball Panic has not. Sure there’s a story about a witch trying to destroy the world and the raccoon standing up to her, but its just window dressing for severe boredom. To be fair, there are a lot of tables and modes, including a side mode with special tables like skeeball or “Pinchinko”, but its simply not enough to hold my attention.
The “arcade” tables are the highlight.
But what really sinks Roxy Raccoon’s Pinball Panic is the slightly delay in pressing the flipper buttons and the flipper flipping. I lost a lot of balls because the flipper didn’t flip fast enough. But even without it, the tables aren’t interesting and the whole thing lacks a coat of polish that is necessary in today’s ePinball. I just can’t recommend this. It was a valiant effort, but required a few more months in the oven. Roxy Raccoon’s Pinball Panic gets a Not Recommended verdict with a four back-end score.
Overall: Roxy Raccoon’s Pinball Panic is an ambitious story-based pinball game, except the pinball is stuck in the past and the whole thing lacks polish.
Longtime readers of this site will be aware of my verdicts; Garbage, Not Recommended, Your Mileage May Vary, Recommended and Must Play. But there is a sixth verdict, that in roughly 400 reviews, I have given a grand total of three times: Hilariously Awful. These are for games so inept I can’t hate them. The honorees are: Mini Kart Racing, Martial Knight and Flannel Amethyst. Now a fourth has entered the area, Counter Force Tactical Warfare. It is a shooter so inept, I played it for over an hour! Buckle up, because this will be a longer one!
Gotta love the amazing graphics!
I’ll start off with a video of Counter Force Tactical Warfare, to give you an idea of what you are dealing with. It’s level twenty-three, nine enemies, and auto-shoot on. Yes, the game plays itself. Once you get your enemy in the cross-hairs, it will fire. You can turn it off, but it doesn’t make the game any easier than it already is. And yes, they all stand in a line and shoot at you(more on that later).
The announcer says “Let’s Go!”
Now, you’ll notice you have two health bars armor and HP. Armor does not work in Counter Force Tactical Warfare, as getting hit only drains HP. You do have limited ammo, but you’ll never run out as the levels are incredibly short, literally taking around twenty seconds each. The first took five seconds. I was shocked it was over so fast. Up at the top, you have your money which are used to buy guns, These guns:
There are several lovely weapons in Counter Force Tactical Warfare, but none of them matter, the starting Ak-47 gets the job done. This because the enemies are all one hit kills. They also don’t put much of a threat as they all run directly at all you and shoot. They’ll even nicely clump together for easy killing. If you’re missing one, just look at the radar, you’ll find them.
It’s oops!
Counter Force Tactical Warfare takes itself so seriously, with its grand menu music, to the announcers, to the jingle when you win. But its completely inept. The in-level “music” is just gun fire in the background. In one level, you can see the seams in the sky box. Or you can take the barrel that clips through everything:
Or the health pack dangling in the air:
Demenci tried so hard, and got so far, but in the end, they fell flat on their faces. They wanted to create something special, they just lacked the collective talent to see it pulled off. I mean this game could have been far worse than it is. Imagine no jingle at all. Imagine no auto-shoot. There could have improved ever so slightly that it was no longer a Hilariously Awful, but just plain Garbage. That’s how much of a fine line it is. So step up , Counter Force Tactical Warfare, and take your prize! You’re still getting a one back-end score, because you are still awful, but at least you have something shiny to show off. Well done!
Overall: Counter Force Tactical Warfare is so bad, it became only my fourth Hilariously Awful verdict. Still crap though.
Gran Turismo is an immortal series car racing games on the Sony Playstation series of consoles. I’ve only played the PSP version of it, but it was very good! Gran Carismo is attempting to fool people with a similar name(Like the horrible Call of Honor), but fails miserably. This is because it is trash. The graphics are trash. The sound is trash. The game play is trash. It all starts with the help menu:
This is engrish, written by people for English is not their first language. All that boils down to, win the races in Gran Carismo to win money to buy cars and tracks. But there is a little problem, winning a race is extremely hard. Winning is extremely hard not because the game is so good and requires great driving. It is because the AI is shit. On my first race, cars crashed and I crashed into crash.
One race I was in first place,and a car came the opposite direction and slammed into me. I’m sort of joking, the second place just ran into me. Gran Carismo is that bad. It is entirely devoid of worth and reason to play. I could go on into great detail about how bad it is, but I just don’t feel like it. But please trust me when I say there are no redeeming qualities. If you want a good racing sim on the switch, this is not one of them. Try Grid Autosport instead. That is a very, very good auto simulation, everything Gran Carismo is not.
Overall: Gran Carismo is not Gran Turismo, missing absolutely everything that made that series great! Avoid at all costs.
There’s No Socks is a free hidden object game with a four locations where you find a random assortment of twenty socks out of sixty socks… and that’s it. That’s all there is. Find socks in black and white environments. For $2.49 you can buy The Extra Challenge, which gives you a dark mode and five extra levels. So really the game is not really free if you want the whole experience. Plus get it if you don’t want to be done in twenty minutes like I was. Its fine for what it is, and it was enjoyable for what it is, but run out and get it? No real hurry. This is especially true when you learn that this a series, with titles like, There’s No Dinosaurs. The game is just there.
There’s really nothing else to say here. There’s No Socks gets a YMMV with a 7/10 Back-End Score.
Overall: There’s No Socks is a hidden object game where your goal is to find socks. Its fine for what it is.
The invention of AI imagery has done a serious disservice to gaming, as it allows unbridled laziness to take over. Case in point: Pakotime and their games. Another case in point: Cyberpunk Paradise Elysium: The Visual Novel. It is a visual novel made up largely of AI generated cities and buildings. The character cutouts are probably also AI generated as well, if the lack of hands in the generic cutouts are anything to go by. I can also tell by the lack of specific imagery within the game. For example, take this:
Show, don’t tell! Writing 101!
In a normal visual novel, you would see an image of them escaping through the secret exit. But not in Cyberpunk Paradise Elysium. But everything is told, not shown. Oh they’ll tell you what happens, amazing things, but never show in any images of the action, because its all generic AI generated garbage. But the rot goes far deeper than just the AI generated imagery. It extends to the story itself.
No… really? I could never never guessed that.
The writing in Cyberpunk Paradise Elysium is bad, really, really bad. The visual novel tells the story of a protagonist and her allies taking on a giant corporation that is kidnapping people, for reasons. It’ll tell you the corporation does bad things, but never spell it out:
What? What did the evil corporation do? Tell me!!
After awhile, Cyberpunk Paradise Elysium turns into some thinly veiled leftist anti-corporate manifesto about resistance or something and I checked out. I didn’t care about any of the characters, it gave me no reason to. And because I didn’t care about any of the characters, I didn’t care about what they were doing. Since I didn’t care what they were doing, I didn’t care about people rising up against the evil corporation. And because I did not care, I just quit and never went back. When a porn game handles this stuff better, you know you’ve done messed up.
She went to a liberal arts college, I know it!
Cyberpunk Paradise Elysium is a visual novel that fails at all levels. Its fails in the visual part, as its all generic AI images. It fails as novel, with piss-poor writing. There is no reason to play this. The story is nothing you haven’t read before, and done much better. The visuals are all generic and frankly could have been left out, and little would have changed. This gets a garbage with a two back-end score.
Overall: Cyberpunk Paradise Elysium is a visual novel that fails at the visuals, and as a novel.
Pakotime has been shitting up the Eshop for the last 5 months with generic Hentai Girls games like Sweet Doctor. Today, it released a game called Sugoi Girls Lovely Wife, same game just with bare boobs. Pakotime has been releasing the games every two weeks. They all have the same game play and UI. How does Pakotime get fifty images so fast? By generating AI images. But for the longest time, I never knew where. Now I do. It’s a site called OnlyWaifus.Ai, where you can generate unlimited waifus. It is a paid site, and for this editorial, I went ahead and bought the platinum plan for $23 to get the maximum quality images. I think its worth it, because I have Pakotime’s number now.
Let me show you a random Onlywaifus image I generated.
The key here is to look at the chin, its identical in both images. It is quite obvious to me that Pakotime is using OnlyWaifus to generate its images. But let me do this: I will take an image off the eShop site for Hentai Girls: Naughty Gamer and compare it to an image I generated. I’ve never played Naughty gamer, but look at the results:
Pakotime’s Image is on the left. My Image is on the right. They’re made by the same engine called Onlywaifus!
Don’t Buy Pakotime Games!
Why should you care if Pakotime is using OnlyWaifus to make its images? You should care because there’s no reason to buy their games, not when you can make infinite identical Waifu images tailored to your liking for fourteen or twenty-three dollars a month. The Eshop is already cluttered with trash, I have already covered Midnight Works and Artem Kritinin. Now it is a Pakotime’s turn to get the hammer dropped on it. This company should go out of business for being cheap lazy assholes. Never buy their games, ever. You know their secret. You can create the identical artwork. I sincerely hope their days are numbered!
P.S. I was not paid by OnlyWaifus to write this editorial!
Sugoi Girls Lovely Wife is the next generation of Pakotime, famous for the Hentai Girls line of games. I know what happened, after releasing ten titles in 5 months diminishing returns set in to the point where I doubt they were selling enough copies to justify making them. Never mind that I guarantee that those cost peanuts to make. So Pakotime changed the name of the series, and brought along bare boobs. Yes there is nudity in this. No, it does not justify buying this, because the art is AI generated.Yes, even the boobs in Sugoi Girls Lovely Wife are AI generated by something called OnlyWaifus.
But the problem with Sugoi Girls Lovely Wife is the problem that plagues all these games, why? You can find AI generated porn images online, I already linked where Pakotime gets their images. All you’re really paying for is the ridiculously easy “puzzle game” that is the same game in 90% of these. I imagine once Sugoi girls line reaches diminishing returns, Pakotime is going to pull a hot love dreams and bare all. And it will sell for a few weeks until Nintendo gets around to pulling it. Then I don’t know what Pakotime will do. Probably fold, and the eShop will be a hundred times better for it. Do not buy these games, they are bottom barrel and terrible. The worst of the Nintendo eShop personified.
Overall: Sugoi Girls Lovely Wife is Pakotime bringing the bare boobs, but still not bringing a reason to buy it.
Musashi vs Cthulhu is a glorified rhythm game where you must tap the correct buttons at the right time or you will die. You are Musashi, a famous warrior in feudal Japan, and you must do battle with the forces of Cthulhu, who come from the left and the right. Each enemy requires the right button press to die. There left upper, middle and lower attacks, and right upper middle and lower attacks. Each attack fills your spirit lantern. When full, I believe it slows enemies down. A hit will drain it, even if its just charging. You get hit when you miss, and three hits and you are dead.
If you read my Conarium review, you’ll know HP Lovecraft is one my favorites. Musashi vs Cthulhu certainly has the right idea. Cthulhu in Feudal Japan is awesome. It looks good. It sounds good. There’s a very good tutorial. There’s an online leader board. The issue I have is the game play is disappointing. I didn’t find it fun at all. Rhythm games are great, I used to have an expensive DDR mat(still do for Xbox 360). Musashi vs Cthulhu misses the point I think by having completely one note game play. There’s no real progression. No unlockables. No other playable characters. Only five different enemies. The Steam reviews are positive though, so people do like this.
Honestly, Musashi vs Cthulhu is too an awesome an idea to waste on such one note game play.But buy it if you want to. This gets a Your Mileage May Vary with a six back-end score.
Overall: Musashi Vs Cthulhu is too awesome an idea to waste on the uninteresting rhythm-game like game play.
Dungeon Arsenal is a roguelike card game. You pick a character and climb a tower of five sections made up of 10 floors each. Each section contains a treasure room with contains items, relics and gold. The treasure room is almost always directly followed by a shop, which sells weaponry, health restoration, and a relic(more on those later). Floor 10 is always boss room. The rest of the floors contains an assortment of cards. There are weapons cards, items cards, stairs up, and gold(for the shop). Also contained are enemy cards. They will attack your hero for a defined amount shown on the card. You attack them with weapons for a defined amount, that last also for a defined amount. If your hero runs out of HP, its game over. And back to the start you go for another run.
After each boss in dungeon Arsenal, you get a choice of a relic, which has a defined effect(like pointing out an enemy card), a permanent health increase, or gold. I find that the permanent health increase is the most beneficial to get. Aside from relics, you can unlock more characters, card backing(which have effects) and special weaponry. There are also four different difficulty levels.
My only complain about Dungeon Arsenal, which keeps it from a Must Play, is that it really was not optimized for the Switch. As you can see, there’s a cursor, and the layout looks like its for a PC(steam version is here). The nice thing is though, there is a touch controls, which help immensely Other than that, this is a fine roguelike card-based dungeon crawler that I found enjoyable. This gets a Recommended with an eight back-end score.
Overall: Dungeon Arsenal is a rougelike card based dungeon crawler that I found enjoyable. Is more at home on the PC though.
Playing Puzzle World Neko Girls gives me new appreciation for Neko Secret Room and Neko Secret Homecoming, as bad those games were, and they were both awful, at least the anime cat girls were nude. No such luck here, with the game being rated E. You just get cutesy, fully clothed (though busty) anime cat girls. Its certainly creepy to an extent, but not as much as say, Princess Maker was. As for the game play, the market blurb describes the game as:
Try yourself in Puzzle World – a unique puzzle game that stands out from ordinary puzzles with its unconventional mechanics.
Puzzle World Neko Girls is different from similar games in that you simply rotate the pieces, and later on, mirror them. The game is harder than its siblings. It will even provide hints after solving a percentage of the puzzle(three in total). You might even need the hints if you get stuck, However, the difficulty doesn’t make it a good game. Just a little bit more tolerable, even though the art is AI generated like its siblings.
In the end, what is there more to say about Puzzle World Neko Girls? I guess, I wonder who this is for? It is not necessarily for horny thirteen year old boys, they’ll got for the harder games(like Neko Secret Homecoming), or go look at Hentai. Still, you could look at this as “baby’s first lewd game, getting you hooked to level up to the Hentai titles. In the end, begin slightly more tolerable isn’t a reason to get this. Pass on this anyway.
Puzzle World Neko Girls gets a Garbage verdict with a three back-end score. Note that threes usually get Not Recommended verdicts, but going forward, I will decouple the verdict and scores as need be.
Overall: Puzzle World Neko Girls is more tolerable than other games of this type, that does not mean you should plop down your money!
The key to enjoying Hand In Hand is not to play solo under any circumstance. I mean, you can play solo, it’s just completely unintuitive, and so my brain broke while playing it. No seriously, I have now have a headache trying to play the game. You play as as a guy and a girl soulmates who are separated by an evil entity and must reunite. The guy on the top screen is controlled by the L stick and jumps with L and attacks with ZL. The girl on the bottom screen is controlled by the R stick, jumps with R and phases with ZR. Phasing allows you to pass by hazards or make certain objects appear and disappear. Playing solo in Hand in Hand, you will be controlling both at once, and good luck to you!
My brain broke here. I couldn’t do it.
As I said, you will need to control both characters and solve puzzles that will effect each other’s screens. Usually, you can get away with one at time, except in cases like above, where I got the headache from. I’m sure Hand in Hand is a long and lovely puzzle game, I just don’t have anyone to play with to control one of the characters, so I’m stuck. Therefore, I’m going to score this Recommended* which I haven’t done in awhile. The * stands for “Assuming ou are playing with another person.” Alone, I’d give this a Not recommended with a three, but I’m not going to be cruel here. This is a well made game, its just best played with a friend.
Yes, there is female Celtic wailing, so you know this an indie game!
Hand in Hand gets a Recommended* with an eight back-end score.
Overall: Hand in Hand is a decent game that should be, under no circumstances, played solo.
Awesome Pea 3 is a platformer like Saomi, N++ and Celeste. You run and jump through challenging stages to reach the end. Awesome Pea 3 looks and sounds great. It also plays great… except for one fatal flaw, no tutorial or explanation for anything. I couldn’t get past level 2. Now before you claim I’m Dean Taskahasi playing Cuphead, let me explain why using the level itself.
The level in question.
Ok, so in Awesome Pea 3 level 2, you start on the platform to the far left. Simple jump to where I am in the image. Now, to get to the next platform, you must air dash. Does the game tell you how to air dash? No. It’s the Y button, but I had figured it out by button mashing. The I’m on the far right platform. I assume you have to wall jump to get the key, except how do that is not explained, and nothing I did seemed to get me high enough to get me the key. So I gave up after half-an-hour and went and wrote this review. And no, the answer wasn’t hidden in the settings menu. Bad game developers, bad, bad.
I would’ve loved to have gotten to this level.
Awesome Pea 3 should be awesome, but its missing documentation on how to play or even a simple controls screen. I don’t care that this is the third game in the series, absolutely no excuse for base-level things. Even some of the worst games I’ve played told you the controls. I shouldn’t be stuck on level 2 because the developers forgot to tell you how things worked. Maybe you can past level 2 and enjoy the game more than I did. I’m moving on. This game gets a YMMV with a six back-end score.
Overall: Awesome Pea 3 would have been awesome if the developers didn’t forget to tell you how anything worked.
3 minutes Mystery 2 is the sequel to a game a called 3 minutes Mystery. You may notice some bad grammar with the title, that’s because 3 minute mysteries was already a thing. The game is a localization of a Japanese game released by developer Tokoyo-Tsushin(TT), who is prolific in Japan, not so much here, and impossible to track down for a review code. anywhere. So I bought it and played it. The game is sixty short mysteries. You have a set up and four questions about the mystery, all solvable somewhere in the image.
It doesn’t matter if you get the answer wrong in 3 minutes Mystery 2, you just try again. Also there’s a hint which clues you in to where to look. That doesn’t mean the answers are necessarily straight forward. Sometimes the game will ask you infer something that isn’t necessarily seen in the image exactly. Like in one puzzle, you are asked to find something that identifies the victim. The answer is the ring on her finger, because there was an engraving of her name on the ring on her finger. Or then there’s the one where they ask what gives you the clue to the the time of day. The answer is this:
I don’t even know what morning glories are, so I just got the answer by chance. 3 minutes Mystery 2 reminded me sometimes of Encyclopedia Brown, where the key to solving the mystery is some roundabout thing like: “I know the guy committed the robbery because he asked for more items to get so that the victim would spend more time checking out at the grocery store because he couldn’t use the fast lane!” 100% true example! Granted, the answer may not hard to find, but the logic involved stretches credulity.
3 minutes Mystery 2 is a casual game, it is for people like your grandma, and that’s perfectly fine. There are sixty mysteries in total, so she’ll get a good 2-3 hours out of it. Despite the logic issues, the game is fine for what it is. I give 3 minutes mystery 2 a Recommended with seven back-end score.
Overall: 3 minutes Mystery 2 is a casual find-the-object game for your grandma, and that’s perfectly fine. She’ll enjoy it.
I tried with Tales from Candleforth. I really did try to get past Chapter 1. I tried playing three different times, and lost interest each time. But since I got the game free from the publisher Feardemic, I sort of have to cover the game. The game is a point and click with escape room mechanics. There are puzzles, there are inventory items, and your goal is to solve the room and move on to the next chapter. The story is centered around this book of dark tales, and the first tale is a tale of Sarah, a 16 year old girl with powers, or something, I really didn’t pay much attention.
Don’t get me wrong, Tales from Candleforth is a perfectly fine game that does all that you’d expect from the escape room genre. The puzzles are often macabre and wrapped in a horror theme. People who enjoy this sort of game with have a lot to like here. The game just didn’t click for me, and I honestly can’t say why. It just did not, that is fine. But you might enjoy it more than I did, so if this sounds the least bit interesting, check it out. I give Tales From Candleforth a Your Mileage May Vary verdict with a seven back-end score.
Overall: Tales from Candleforth is a decent escape room style game that I didn’t click with, but someone else might.
The succubus, a mythical female demon that seduces men and drains their life force. She is a lot like Succubus with Guns, a 2022 game published by Sometimes You that is so shitty, it drains your will to live. We’re talking Soulsland bad here. I’m only reviewing this so it can get a proper ranking on SwitchScores. no other reason. It is not sexy. It is not fun. It is crap. Let’s begin.
Succubus with Guns starts with a cut scene of a bunch of anime kids trying to summon you, but the summoning goes wrong very wrong, and they all turn into in undead. Then you start the game proper, which is a wave shooter. You go from arena to arena and killing enemies, including undead schoolgirls, shirtless fat guys and skeletons with bows. At your disposal are several guns, including a machine gun, rocket launcher, and pistol. These get taken away after the first arena by a bug(I think), forcing me to face everyone with a sword. I quit after that. And I was not going to trudge through the first arena again to find out if it was a bug.
Succubus with Guns simply is terrible from top to bottom. Aiming your guns sucks, you’ll waste valuable ammo missing. The enemies clip through everything, as do you. The graphics are amateur and ugly. There’s no music and the sound effects are all generic grunts and hisses. At random, your succubus will speak a random line that makes no sense, like, “I love you!” What? Believe me when I say I’d rather be drained by a real succubus than play this again.
Succubus with Guns get a Garbage with a one back-end score. Sometimes You doesn’t always publish winners, but this was a major misfire.
Overall: Succubus with Guns is a lot like the mythical succubus in that it drains your life force and will to live. Avoid at all costs!
Arcade Archives: Sunset Riders is a rerelease of a 1991 arcade game set in the Wild West. You play one of four gunslingers and fight through eight levels and eight charismatic bosses, including a guy on a horse called Dark Horse, a Mexcian guy with a whip called El Greco, and and a Native American who throws knives called Chief Wigwam. The bosses are the highlight of the game, and really the only reason to play. The run and gun portion of the levels in Sunset Riders are short and kind of forgettable in my humble opinion. The game was kind of a classic in its time. But has it stood the test of time? Read on.
Bury with my money!
In this Arcade Archive release of Sunset Riders, you get the Japanese and American versions both in two and four-player versions each, for a total of four version of the game. I played through the 2 player North American version pretty quickly, it is a short game. What made it possible is the L button, which adds credits. And you’ll need them, as this game can get hard. Also remember that arcade games like Sunset Riders were designed to suck quarters out of you, so it is hard on purpose. It is also a simple game mechanically, because arcade games were also designed to be pickup and play. You shoot, you jump, that’s about it.
Well done!
This being an Arcade Arcade Archives release, there are tons of features and options, but I did not touch one of them. They are almost irrelevant. So is Sunset Riders worth playing in 2024? Not really. That seems harsh, and it is harsh. But the game is relic of the past. With infinite credits, the difficulty disappears, and you will see how short and bare bones the game really is. Sunset Riders was a good arcade game for its time, but it hasn’t aged well, in my opinion. You play through once, you’ve seen all that it has to offer. There are nice details, like El Greco giving you his hat which you through the rest of the game, but it is simply not enough to carry this.
Chief Wigwam would not fly in today’s PC culture(nor would most of the bosses, honestly).
I’m giving Sunset Riders a YMMV with a six back-end score. I wanted to give this a higher verdict and score, but I’m not sure it deserves it anymore, especially with infinite credits.
Overall: Sunset Riders was a classic in it’s day, but it’s a very short experience with little replay value. It just hasn’t aged well.
Dark Fantasy Epic Jigsaw Puzzle is the third iteration of the Dark Fantasy Jigsaw Puzzle franchise. Yes, there are three of these jigsaw games with sexy dark fantasy women. You can find the first and second on Steam and on Switch as well. It is important to note the original release dates on the first two on Steam, 2018 and 2019, pre-AI. That means the artwork is custom in those. The artwork is also custom here, meaning no AI. The artwork is very good. The game itself is more or less a standard Jigsaw game. There are six difficulty levels; twelves pieces, twenty-four pieces, forty-eight, Ninety-six, one ninety-two and for the masochists, three hundred eight four pieces. Unlike the awful Jigsaw Puzzle Fever, the pieces sit on the sides of the board and you drag them in. You can’t lose in Dark Fantasy Epic Jigsaw Puzzle, which is nice!.
Now the buttons at the top left of the screen: The eye drops a little picture of the finished product, which is helpful. The button next to it changes the background to one of several types. On the right side, the right hand button, outlines the pieces in white. The big question mark automatically puts a piece in place, but doesn’t add to your score. There are twenty-four images in all in Dark Fantasy Epic Jigsaw Puzzle. They are played in order. However, playing one unlocks the next for all difficulties.
Dark Fantasy Epic Jigsaw Puzzle is a tough game to give a verdict for because games like this are critic-proof. It has its audience, and they’re playing for the sexy pictures. Still, the jigsaw action itself is one of the better renditions I’ve played. Work went into the and it shows. I’ll give the game a Recommended with a seven back-end score.
Overall: Dark Fantasy Epic Jigsaw Puzzle is a jigsaw puzzle game with sexy dark fantasy woman, and nothing more!
There should be a regulation on the books, that if a game is released in the United States with the words “Hentai” in the title, there should be sex and/or nudity in it or it is false advertising. Hentai Dating Stories Brazil is a case a point. No nudity as it is rated T. Probably implied sex at best. Unlike Retro Mystery Club, which was Japanese people writing about Japan, this game is Eastern Europeans writing a story about a Japanese guy going to Brazil to chase a girl. They have probably neither been to Japan nor Brazil. It reads like what a foreigner would know about Brazil off a google search. It name drops the food(see below), Carnival and Samba in the first ten minutes. Whether or not it takes ten minutes depends on how well you get through the sliding tile puzzles. The game shows the mixing up, and you can endlessly press B to reset. This means you just press B until get a favorable mix up, and backtrack.
Coxinha are chicken fritters, and Pao de Queijo is cheese bread.
Hentai Dating Stories Brazil is honestly boring, the Japanese guy is your typical wood plank hentai-hero, and the Tainara is what a foreigner imagines a Brazilian woman to be like. Now, I have never been to Brazil, but I am a writer, this is not how you write an interesting 3D dimensional character you want to get involved in. Also, the world building is inconsistent:
This sign shouldn’t be in English.
The sign above should read: bem-vindo à nossa casa, or something else in Brazilian Portuguese. In short, Hentai Dating Stories Brazil will get a Garbage Verdict with a two back-end score. I am sure there are more coming and I bet they’ll be equally terrible. For example, I’m sure in the theoretical upcoming Australian edition, it’ll be a woman who talks like Steve Irwin, has a kangaroo as a pet, and eats Vegemite Sandwiches. God help us!
Overall: Hentai Dating Stories Brazil is what you get when you have foreigners writing about a place they’ve never been to. Also it is crap!
This is not my usual review. I don’t review fifty-dollar Nintendo published titles. I bought this for myself to play for fun. But with Endless Ocean Luminous getting a 63% percent on Metacritic, with IGN giving it a 4/10, I felt it is worth putting my two cents in. Will this get read? Probably not, but at least I can put this into the ether and see what happens. So anyways, Luminous is the third entry in the Endless Ocean franchise, after the first and Endless Ocean: Blue World. You are a diver in the mysterious veiled sea, and your job is to save the “world coral” by scanning tons and tons of fish, to get light that transfers to the coral. The game is divided into three parts: Story, Solo Dives and Shared Dives.
Endless Ocean Luminous’ story is really not important beyond giving you a point for being there. After chapter one, each section is locked and is unlocked by having a set number of scanned fish in solo or shared dives. Each story section is short and really not that interesting. I see as more of glorified tutorial(at least chapter 1 is). The meat of the game is in solo and shared dives. You swim around scan fish and pick up the occasional salvage. The maps are procedurally generated, and many reviews knock that. I don’t have a problem with it as the maps for the first two games weren’t exact that interesting either. Besides, the maps here are huge and filled with tons of fish from around the world, current and extinct, and even made up.
Endless Ocean Luminous’ Heart
The point of the game is to explore a map, scan fish and pick up salvage… and that’s it. There is nothing else. No dolphin companions, no above ground, no island hubs and no upgrades(all from Blue World). Endless Ocean Luminous is solely focused on scanning fish and picking up salvage. You can dive deep and never run out of air. The money you get is solely used on cosmetics. Many of the user reviews on Metacritic absolutely slammed this as a “soulless husk,” and yeah, it could be seen that way, especially when a Japanese Crab and an American Lobster are sitting next to each other on a rock(the fish are randomly scattered each map).
But I think people forget the first game was pretty shallow and boring itself, only a little more than scanning fish to fill a book. Blue World was great, and the slim-down from it is disappointing, but I don’t think it kills Endless Ocean: Luminous. That just makes this a very specific title for a very specific kind of person, and that’s fine. For example, on Twitter yesterday, I saw this:
Lemme tell you, yesterday, when going to Gamestop. I saw a father and his young daughter looking around. They later came up to the register as I was chatting to my friends and were asking about the new Endless Ocean game. She got sooooo excited and started talking about all sort…
— Rad Dad Redemption (@Rad_Dad_Redempt) May 3, 2024
Basically the girl was excited about the fish she was going to see in Endless Ocean Luminous, and so the game is made for people like her. As for me, this game is a perfect game to play while listening to a podcast, something the requires less focus and the sound can be more or less turned off. Its a vibe. I will give Endless Ocean Luminous a YMMV with a seven out of ten. Its good, but not great. And Your Mileage Will Vary. I can’t say if you’ll like it or hate Luminous, that’s solely depends on if this game is what you’re looking for. It is for me, but may not be for you.
Overall: Endless Ocean Luminous is all about swimming around and scanning fish, and nothing else. Whether or not you will like this is solely up to you.
Awhile ago, I was on a writing Discord, and I had the misfortune of reading some woman’s 300k word gay furry slice-of-life novel thing. There are no plot. There was no character development. It was just a series of scenes strung together, along the occasional butt love. It was horrendous. I asked her, “Who is this for?” She was like, “It is not for you.” And I replied, “But nobody will read this, so why even bother?.” She then she got angry and we stopped talking. What does this have to do with Hentai Tales Vol 3: Hitomi and Silent Space? Everything.
Like Vol 1 and Vol 2 before it, Hentai Tales Vol 3 is about this girl named Hitomi, who this time takes off in a space ship towards a planet.. and takes a bath(above), goes to sleep, dresses for the day, and tries on space outfits. I only lasted seventeen images out of fifty before I banged my head against the desk and went off to write this review. Like that woman’s furry novel, there is no plot here. Just a series of scenes strung together, usually to put Hitomi in skimpy outfits. I’m not sitting through fifty scrambled pictures, and you can’t make me.
Hentai Tales Vol 3: Hitomi and Silent Space gets a Garbage verdict and a one back end score. At least Vol 2 had a plot and was more compact. Vol 3 drags everything out and is the most boring thing I’ve played in awhile. All the games are trash, and Vol 3 is honestly the worst as its the longest. Avoid like the plague.
Overall: Hentai Tales Vol 3 is the largest of the Hentai Tales games, but that’s not saying much, as its garbage.
Risky Chronicles and the curse of destiny is not a very good game. The developer, Consulog, developed a shitty game called Mission 1985. It attempted to be an 80s arcade shooter but failed miserably. This is its followup and is somehow even worse. This attempts to be Indiana Jones’ Greatest Adventures, a SNES game that took players through the first three Indiana Jones movies. Risky Chronicles has you playing an Indiana Jones like character, who has a gun and bombs at his disposal. You start off in an Egyptian Pyramid fighting dudes that should be in the Aztec levels, and then you die and die again. You will die not because the game takes skill, but because the hit detection is horrible and traversal is a pain.
Wrong level, dude!
Risky Chronicles is just sloppy and poorly developed, like I think the Aztec guys in Egypt is a bug, because one time I spawn in and fought an Egyptian looking guy. And you see the saw? You can die not even touching it. Checkpoints are common as are extra lives, but I didn’t even want to get through the first level, of like ten. I mean I could have gotten farther since I’m reviewing this, but I’m reminded of something someone told me about books: If the beginning sucks, it doesn’t matter if later is awesome. Consulog could deliver nine banger levels, but the first one is so bad, I’m not sitting through this. I don’t have to. Risky Chronicles sucks. It gets a Garbage rating with a two back end score. The latest Indiana Jones movie is less painful than this.
Overall: Risky Chronicles is more painful to play that watching Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Steer clear of this!
Jigsaw Puzzle Fever makes Jigsaw Ice Princess look like a masterpiece, and that game sucked. I’m not kidding, this is atrocious. I failed the first puzzle, twice, because you can’t put the puzzle pieces back. You see on the bottom of the screen is a line of pieces, you pick up a piece and put it on the board, but it snaps into place. If it is correct, it shines few a second and becomes unmovable. IF its wrong, it just sits there, but you can’t move pieces off the board, nor can you switch them by dropping another piece on them. So towards completion, if the pieces are in the wrong place and there’s no place to move, game over and start again. Awful design choice!
Bad Game!
It is especially disappointing because Jigsaw Puzzle Fever has some good ideas, like some difficulties have you rotate the pieces into the correct orientation. However, that just gives you more opportunities to fail miserably here. Unless there’s a time limit, you should not be able to fail in jigsaw puzzle game. It defeats the purpose of being a jigsaw puzzle game, relaxing. There’s a decent amount of puzzles, but its so badly designed you’re not going to want to play it. No wonder the publisher gave out the keys freely on Keymailer, it is the only way people would touch it. Jigsaw Puzzle Fever gets a Not Recommended with a 3 back-end score. It only avoided the Garbage verdict because of the rotation feature.
Overall: JIgsaw Puzzle Fever is the worst designed jigsaw puzzle game I’ve ever played. You can fail the puzzles because the pieces are in the wrong place!
For the record, I do not own a PS5, so I am unable to play Stellar Blade, but I’m here today to talk about the discourse surrounding it, which can summed up as “If you like sexy women, you are a creep.” All you have to do is look up the comparisons to Hades 2 that can be summed up as “hotties for straight men bad, hotties for woke weirdos good.” But I am going to focus in on an article by Gamesradar entitled, Stellar Blade puts Eve in some incredibly stupid sexy outfits that hurt the game’s story, but despite the forced sex appeal I actually love her detailed design. It can be summed up as “Eve is a well designed character, but since she exists to appeal to the male gaze, she is bad.”
EVE is one sexy woman( andbased on a real one)
Stellar Blade angers Woke Game Journalist Austin Wood
The author of said article about Eve from Stellar Blade, Austin Woods, is an asexual male who has spent his life unlearning the male gaze. That’s not me talking, that’s him talking:
Oh it gets worse:
This article is not about me, but I should explain where I’m coming from. For me, romantic and sexual attraction are not only foreign but utterly undesirable. So more than with your average person, games like Stellar Blade bark up the wrong tree when they assume that I, as a man, am eager to gawk at and fantasize about characters like Eve. She’s hot! I like her! I’d consider myself sex-positive, but I truly, from the pit of my gut, do not care. I’m not put off by Stellar Blade’s ham-handed sexiness or its assumptions about me, but I am sensitive to and critical of tone in storytelling, and Eve’s treatment undeniably hurts the game’s voice.
Austin Wood, quite simply is the end result of Feminism’s attack on male sexuality, which can be seen through the fact this discourse over Stellar Blade’s Eve even exists at all(and is a diatribe that’d take up longer than we have here). Austin hates his own sexuality to the point he buries it and calls himself asexual. You can see that in this paragraph:
I like loads of details in Eve’s design. She has incredible brows and lashes. I love the little baby hairs by her ears, the subtly imperfect texturing of her skin, and the pores on her cheeks. I love that she has some natural belly fat while being slim. She’s a great-looking character, and it’s genuinely fun to put her in the many outfits, accessories, and hairstyles that Stellar Blade offers, some of which are plenty fashionable. I mean, of course it is; customizing characters is a video game staple. For my money, Eve is sexier and cooler in outfits that actually have enough material to embellish and accentuate her. She absolutely rocks a leather jacket and jeans, and that’s just the start.
He knows Eve is sexy. He even praises her sexiness, but he buries it and then proceeds to call it bad.call it bad because its divorced from the story or anything else.
The problem is that Eve’s sexiness is totally divorced from the rest of the game and her personality, and Stellar Blade wants to be taken seriously despite how strangely this comes across. I think this is why a lot of people don’t like how Eve looks. Characters like Bayonetta own and flaunt their sexiness, and games like Hades are inextricably sexy from corner to corner. That’s partly why they’re so beloved – this stuff is hard to pull off convincingly, and memorable when done well. Everyone being horny in, and for, Baldur’s Gate 3 comes to mind. But Eve’s amped-up sexiness is a weird outlier. She has next to no interest in her own appearance or sex appeal. At most, she mentions her hairstyle one time.
I read the rest of article and honestly, his argument only makes sense if Stellar Blade’s Eve’s sexuality is bad because it only exists to attract the male gaze. But Aphrodite from Hades 2 looks like this and is just fine because its the right sort of hot:
Please
The Self-Hating Man
I looked up Austin Wood but could find little that wasn’t on his Twitter Profile. But I’m venturing to guess Austin went to a liberal arts college where was brainwashed into hating himself. He even more or less admits it in the article(“Unlearning the male gaze.”) I, on the other hand, am not a self-hating man. I like looking at attractive women. It pleases me. It is hard wired into my lizard brain. Male sexually, in fact, is partly how we got to eight billion people on Planet Earth. Reminds me of an online exchange I read once somewhere where some guy was like. “Nobody want to see my grandmother naked,” and someone replied, “Someone wanted to see your grandmother naked, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.” That’s right, men being attracted to women creates babies!
In essence, Austin is grasping at straws to justify Stellar Blade’s Eve being bad because he thinks male sexuality is bad. Eve was created to appeal to the male gaze, and that is bad because reasons. Honestly, who cares if she’s sexy? If people want to play sexy characters, let them. But games journalism is infected by woke people, like Austin Wood. They must adhere to the message, even if it doesn’t make much sense with any scrutiny. For example Austin praises Bayonetta, but her design was criticized heavily for being pure male-gaze.Why doesn’t Eve get that pass? Is it because its the current thing? Probably.
In conclusion, I know that if this blows up, I’ll be called a creepy incel pervert. But am I? Or am I just a self-aware man who doesn’t hate his own sexuality like Austin Wood obviously does. Male sexuality good, woke weirdos bad!
This Mojito the Cat is technically for the Steam version, which released this month(April 16th to be specific), but released on Switch too back in 2022 and published by Red.Deer Games. I picked that up on sale and got farther than I did on the Steam version, for a reason I shall explain. Anyways, you are a cubed cat and you roll around a stage to pick a fish bone and yarn balls in a minimum number of moves. At the end of each stage, you get golden blocks. Just getting the fish bone, equals one block. Getting the bone and all the yarn is two blocks. Getting the bone and the yarn in a minimum number of moves equals three blocks, The game is divided into worlds of 10 stages each. In each world, get twenty blocks, and you can unlock the next world.
Switch Version
The main trick to Mojito the Cat are those arrow blocks, which literally the playing field. Early on, you’ll just flipping 180, aka upside down. Later, you may be flipping 90 or 180 in increasingly maze-like levels. There are also switches and breakable blocks to roll over as well. If you look in the screen shot above, you’ll see blocks that move once you roll over them. As I said, things start easy, but the levels get a lot longer and harder, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Steam Version
The reason I got farther in the Switch Mojito the Cat was because I had to use the keyboard on the PC, and honestly, wasn’t nearly as intuitive as the switch D pad. Also the camera was far easier to control. Either way though, Mojito the Cat is a good game and it will get a Recommended and an eight back-end score. If I had to pick, I’d say Switch(any one of the several versions that exist), but either version is really is fine. Finally, there are also downloadable skins for both. All are free on the Switch while some are 99 cents on the Steam page. Not necessary all around, but nice nevertheless.
Overall: Mojito the Cat is a fine puzzle game where you roll a cat cube around. Recommended.
To understand my review of stitch. you must understand Piczle Lines 2, which I argued 3 days after my review was written that it should be game of the year. It ended up not being anywhere on the list but still was amazing nevertheless. Anyways, in PL2, you draw colored lines to make pictures based on the colored number. If there’s a 10, the line is 10 spaces. The trick is fitting all the lines in, which can get really tricky, and really, really time consuming in larger puzzles. We’re talking a game with hundreds of hours of content. It was jaw dropping how big the game was. Stitch. is like a slightly easier, guided PL2. Instead of throwing you into the fire with the entire image at once, you are guided from area to area, to fill in the colored lines.
Also differentiating stitch. is that the lines don’t bend. They are all either straight, or quadrilaterals(when you have even numbers only). This is not to say things don’t get tricky at times, oh they do. For example, The number can also be anywhere on the line, so if its a three space line, the number can be in the center with one space on either side. But having a confined space and predictable lines helps. You also have unlimited hints, but you get a higher score if you don’t use any. Still, there is a rhythm to the game all you its own. You get into a mode and just go. I’ll provide a video to demonstrate:
Stitch. comes with 107 puzzles of various sizes, with DLC puzzles to download later on. There are also special weekly puzzles, and daily hard puzzles. Now the verdict: Piczle Lines 2 got a Must Play and a ten back-end score due to its jaw-dropping amount of content. Stitch. will get a Must Play with a nine back-end score. It really it is delightful to play and the rhythm is addicting. There sadly isn’t 100+ hours of content here, but the daily and weekly puzzles add legs. Therefore, I fully recommend this to those who wants a game like PL2, but was intimidated by the sheer size and scale of the larger puzzles. I also recommend stitch. anyway, because it has a spin all its own.
Overall: Stitch. is a kinder, gentler Piczle Lines 2. It’s still great with its own unique identity!
I have encountered the Sokoban puzzle plenty of times before, like Cubicban or Super Glow Puzzle. For those who aren’t aware, Sokoban puzzles are those block pushing puzzles you’ve seen around. Sokobalien is a farm animal pushing puzzle. You are big-headed alien and have to push cows and other farms animals like pigs and chickens into a ufo’s tractor beam. It’s pretty standard stuff you’ve seen a thousand times before, until you get to level 16, and they introduce disappearing floors controlled by buttons you have to leave cows on to materialize. Then the game becomes a lot harder and vastly more interesting. I could only get to level 22 before I was stumped, and the guide was completely wrong it is directions so i got stuck. I was disappointed really.
Level 22
In the end, I just scratched the surface of Sokobalien though, there are 100 puzzles in total and lots I did not experience, but for what I did experience, this is one of the better Sokoban puzzle experiences I’ve found on the eShop. The reason being, they attempted to move the genre forward a little with the floors mechanic. In addition to the puzzles, there are different hats you can buy with the coins you get winning levels. You can change the background at will to one of five different color schemes. Pointless, but it is nice that it was added. Sokobalien will get a Recommended with an eight back-end score. Must Play? Not really, these games rarely are due to their ubiquity, but if you want a Sokoban puzzle game with a twist, check this out anyway.
Overall: Sokobalien is a Sokoban/block pushing puzzle game that dares move things forward, nice!
You will buy Pretty Girls Escape Plus for one reason, and one reason only, so let me spoil it:
A rare sight in today’s gaming landscape!
Now that we have that out of the way, Pretty Girls Escape Plus is the sequel to Pretty Girls Escape, which I reviewed a long time ago and is pretty much the same game: You have the waifu blocks at the top(from one to three), and must get rid of the blocks below them to lower them down to the exits. You can only remove regular blocks in chains of two or more. You can shift blocks left and right if there is space to do, and everything moves. If there’s no blocks to stop the waifu block, it will go from one edge to the other(and probably require a restart). The main difference between the two games is that here there are 10 lovely waifus instead of 8, for even more puzzling fun!
The puzzles in Pretty Girls Escape Plus get a lot harder a lot faster than the did in its predecessor, which is not a bad thing. Though you’ll still blow through all 60 puzzles quickly. Getting the optional missions on each stage make take some more time. Plus there are also 20 challenge puzzles. Honestly, there’s not much more to say, this is simply more of the same good puzzling action as before. But like all pretty girls games, the real draw are the boobs in the dressing room. The original got a YMMV. This will get a Recommended with a seven back-end score. I’ve come to terms with what these games are, and I’m ok with that now.
Overall: Pretty Girls Escape Plus has good puzzling action, but like always, its about the boobs.
A long time ago, a game called Triple Town came out. You built a town by matching pieces, going from bushes to trees to houses, or bears to graves to churches. Village Match is a triple town-like game where you place pieces on an island to form towns. Match 3 huts to form bigger huts. Match churches to make cathedrals. Fields to make windmills, which then get surrounded by fields. It was apparently made by one guy on his computer and it shows. Its not bad game, I kind of like it. Except there’s no tutorials or anything. Just start an island and get going. It would have been nice if they you told you 3 big fields can only make a mill once, and once that’s made, you can only surround it with the same big fields. There’s also a limited number of tiles to place, but I’m not sure what exactly gives you more tiles.
Match Village has the basics down, but simply lacks some serious polish that something like Triple Town had. I mean one man teams have created glory with stuff like Balatro. This seems like a game Jam entry that was picked and put out for a few dollars. It seems to be a thing(like Shivering Stone as well). This would have been better with more polish and documentation. On Keymailer’s website it even says:
Hey, before you buy, know that this is an indie game, developed by a guy in his room. Don’t expect a AAA experience with hours of content in this game, ok?
That’s really not excuse for this lack of polish with Match Village. Calling it minimalist and simplistic doesn’t necessary help. Take Oxytone, which got a Must Play. Minimalist, and simplistic, but it had polish. Here, the game feels rough and needed a few more minutes in the oven. Besides, Triple Town was free, Match Village is not. This gets a YMMV with a seven back-end score. It only gets a seven because there is a game here that is complete and playable. It is everything else that is lacking.
Overall: Match Village is a fine one man game, but lacks polish so its rough around the edges.
Enter the crypt and defeat as many monsters as you can before they overwhelm you!
Cryptrio is a retro-inspired Tetris-like game. You have several oddly shaped monster pieces that you cannot rotate dropping from the top. You must match three of them to make them disappear. Every three a levels a boss will drop the will require several adjacent matches to make it disappear. There is one mode, and the goal is a high score. If anything the game is too retro, there is no “next piece view,” which makes it difficult to plan a strategy. As it is, the piece dropping might as well be completely random. Cryptrio is therefore ok, but I wouldn’t call it good or great for that one reason. The lack of rotation, however, does not hurt the game, because otherwise, it would make things way too easy.
The graphics are retro with a limited palette but it fits the tone. The music tracks are well done chip-tunes. Other than that, there’s not really much to say about Cryptrio because there is not much to this game. It is five dollars and has less modes than something like Sushi Shot, a comparable game via price and scope. So I’ll give this a Your Mileage May Vary verdict with a six back-end score. I guess I just wanted more than what is here. Plus the critical lack of a “next piece” view hurts this as well. I’m going to just end the review here and not pad it out because I can’t think of anything else to say or rant about.
Overall: Cryptrio is a competent retro-puzzler. I wish just wish there was more here and a “next piece” view.
Mimi the Cat: Mimi’s Scratcher is a puzzle game where you guide Mimi to her scratching post, usually floating the air and requiring a box or two to get there. There are jumps, specials boxes and box stacking(by pushing one into the other). The issue with the game is it was designed by amateurs. The Puzzles simply are not that difficult, and at points in the thirty puzzles, actually get easier not harder. Let me explain:
In the above puzzle in Mimi the Cat, I’m pushing the box down a narrow hallway. How will I push the box to the right at the end? Via the space at the left end. Mimi can only jump on the box when it cannot be pushed. So push it to the end, jump on, jump to the left space. Then I push the box to the right end and jump on to the end of the level.
Then there are the jumping puzzles in Mimi the Cat, like the above, where you don’t even have to push boxes around in most of them. In that one, just walk and jump. With these puzzles, they had an idea, but couldn’t follow through with them and then discard the idea completely. The puzzles overall do get trickier, yes, but nothing you can’t work out with your eyes. And if you do make a mistake, press the B button to reset.
Work this out with you eyes, you can do it!
Mimi the Cat is a disappointing game, much like Afil’s other recent game, Storyblocks: The King though for entirely different reasons. In that game, they didn’t modify the controls for the Switch. Here the controls are fine, just the game was “Baby’s first puzzler,” something like I’d create if I had to create a puzzle game. It reminds me of Shivering Stone, which was made in RPGMaker. If you want an easy puzzle game for a few minutes of fun, get this. Otherwise, there are far better puzzle games on the Switch. This will get a Your Mileage May Vary verdict with a six back-end score.
Overall: Mimi the Cat: Mimi’s Scratcher is a puzzle game made by amateurs. The puzzles just aren’t well thought out.
Oxytone invites you to explore the depths of your mind while offering a tranquil escape from the hustle and bustle of everyday life for those seeking relaxation.
Oxytone certainly is relaxing, if you want it to be. Or it can be a serious strategic hardcore puzzle game. The choice is yours. To better explain the game, let me show you a screenshot:
In Oxytone, you are the little beam of light off the side(not in the center). Your goal is to places the lined hexagons to form a path(in blue here). You rack up combos by making a path through multiple blocks at once, the longer the path, the higher the combo score. Reach a dead end or run out of tiles, game over. Now, each of the twelves maps has a set win score. Hit it and you unlock the next map in one of four sets. You can discard a tile you don’t like by pressing B, but you lower you tile count. You can refill the meter by filling a tile completely(using all the paths on it).
As I said at the start, Oxytone is what you make of it. It can be relaxing meditative game, or it could be a serious game of strategic tile placement for the hardcore. There are 99 challenges and twelve maps. There are also unlockable path colors, backgrounds and modifiers. Now, is this a Must Play? Honestly, yes, I think it is. It is a simple puzzle game, but because it what you make of it, more people can enjoy that than you’d think. Besides, this isn’t the only Must Play verdict I’ve given to simple games, Smashy Road and Cubic Light are two other examples. Not every game needs to be a flashy AAA to be good, sometimes the simplest games can be the most satisfying.
Overall: Oxytone is a puzzle game that either be relaxing, or hardcore. For that reason it earns a Must Play verdict.
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