With a grim mystery, vividly violent world, interesting side quests and minigames, impressively real animal characters, and multiple endings to experience, you’ll struggle to put Into the Hive down once you pick it up. The story of Into the Hive is fresh enough to stand on its own, but with endless ties back to the first game between characters and references, the experience of playing both weaves together a horrifically beautiful story of inequality, crime, and style that sticks with you long past the ending.
In all, every group of friends will have their favorite games in the Jackbox Naughty Pack, like all the other Jackbox packs. We probably won’t go back to Let Me Finish, but Fakin’ It and Dirty Drawful both got lots of belly laughs. Some of the people in our group were meeting for the first time, and nothing bonds new friends together quite like having to justify why you picked a trumpet emoji when Fakin’ It asks about your sex life. The game will go over well with some folks, and I did enjoy my time with it, but if you’re friends with people who already find ways to make every Jackbox pack into a ‘naughty’ pack, then being forced to do so may sometimes feel a little constricting.
If you loved the story of Persona 3 Reload and you’re hungry for a little more time with the members of SEES, the Episode Aigis - The Answer - DLC is more than worth it, providing about 30 hours of additional gameplay that shakes up the formula you perfected back in February. The characters feel like faithful progressions of themselves, and as long as you can forgive Metis prattling on about doing anything for her sister, I can’t recommend the DLC enough. I never got to play it back in the PlayStation 2 days, coming into the series far later with Persona 5, but with P3 fast becoming my favorite since then, I feel like it’s the most natural conclusion we could have asked for to the bittersweet story of Persona 3 Reload.
I left the demo at PAX East eager for the completed game, and now that I’ve played it, it delivers well on the idyllic simplicity of building ponds and befriending frogs, even if the simplicity is a bit too simple at times. I’ve never seen a game put so much effort into making an actual statement on ecology and biodiversity, but Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge shows a cute game about photographing frogs can be so much more than that.