Lyssa Greywood's Reviews
There are things I would like to see improved in Nivalis Nights. The tutorials need more explanation, the map needs to be more useful, and the quest journal and indicators need some work. The romance system could be clearer, fast travel can be inconvenient, and the metro is a nightmare. There are also some glitches and crashes that need a little more polish. None of these issues stopped me from enjoying Nivalis Nights, but they did make some parts of the game harder to navigate than they needed to be. What I really enjoyed is how much there is to do. You run your business while trying to make money, grow ingredients, complete quests, build relationships, and figure out what is happening around you. There is absolutely no way to turn your brain off, but that is also part of what kept me playing. I came into Nivalis Nights expecting a very particular combination of things that I happen to love, but what I didn't expect was how it would enthral me.
While it’s playable, it does not feel polished enough for a 1.0 release. Right now, it still feels like it’s in beta. The fact that the developers announced a patch just four days after release makes me hopeful they’ll address some of these problems, but I don’t believe one patch will fix all the errors and design issues. There is something here worth building on; I just wish I had found more of it during my time with the game.
Dressmaker is an adorable, true cosy game where you step into the shoes of a dressmaker running a business in what appears to be Regency England, but there's no specific date to the game, even in the newspaper you occasionally get to read. Customers wander into your shop with all sorts of requests, from a young lady possessed by dual spirits to an older gentlewoman who brings three pigeons along as companions. If you do a good enough job on her dress, she may even leave one of those pigeons behind. Naturally, I was sold. It's a warm, relaxing game about making beautiful clothes and getting to know the strange people who walk through your door. The dressmaking itself gives you plenty of room to experiment, while the story adds a lovely layer of gossip and odd little mysteries. It has a few quirks, but it is an easy game to settle into.
People have called Welcome to Elderfield the spiritual successor to Graveyard Keeper, but I think it deserves the accolade of being called the spiritual dark successor to Stardew Valley. Stardew Valley is considered the gold standard for narrative-driven farming sims, and in my opinion, Welcome to Elderfield has shown that it has what it takes to stand alongside the greats. It also feels perfectly placed for autumn and Halloween. This is the kind of dark cosy game that could easily pull in horror RPG fans, cosy gamers and people who simply want something a little stranger from their farming sim. Given the follower numbers before release and the hype already gathering around it in the cosy community, I would be very surprised if a bunch of streamers and content creators do not flock to this game.
Tiny Eden doesn't throw a huge story at you straight away. Instead, you spend your time growing crops and herbs, fulfilling orders, and slowly opening up more of your apartment and the building around you. You also have an AI drone helping you figure out how to open your own lab, while most of your contact with the outside world comes through email, aside from the few humans who live in the building. The more time I spent in Tiny Eden, though, the more I started to feel like I had read this story before. Around the 10-hour mark, I suddenly realised that this self-contained block of apartments, rooftop garden, almost empty atrium, and strangely lifeless residents reminded me of High-Rise. It has that same idea of a building that has become a kind of self-contained utopia, where people barely leave or choose not to leave at all. Tiny Eden turns that idea into a cosy game about growing plants and selling them to your neighbours, but you literally can't leave the building. I actually wish the game had leaned further into this dystopian feeling, because I think it could have given the plant-growing simulator a bit more of a story behind it.
Servant of the Lake is a strange little puzzle game that sits somewhere between dark, cosy, and quietly unsettling. You play as a newly hired housekeeper at the Vanderboom estate, spending a weekend completing tasks for the man who lives there and his visiting family members. At first, it all sounds rather ordinary. Then the house reveals things a normal housekeeper probably wouldn't expect. Servant of the Lake is weird, creepy, and occasionally downright disgusting, but it has a wonderfully distinctive identity. Its puzzles can be genuinely difficult to crack, and the game loves hiding its clues in places you might never think to look. I found myself frustrated more than once, but I enjoyed the challenge even when I was smacking my head off my keyboard. It's a particularly good fit for players who enjoy dark, atmospheric puzzle games and don't mind getting a little gross along the way. I wouldn't call it my perfect puzzle game, but there's something really compelling about how confidently Servant of the Lake commits to its strange little world.
At first glance, Capy Castaway feels like a gentle exploration game. Its bright colours, cute animals and soft presentation reminded me a lot of Little Kitty, Big City. However, the further I played, the more I realised that Capy Castaway was trying to tackle some surprisingly serious subjects. Grief, anxiety, strained relationships, death and identity all feature in the story, and that contrast became one of my biggest points of uncertainty with the game. Not because I think these themes have no place in a cosy-looking adventure, but because I wasn’t always sure that the game knew how to bring its softer presentation and heavier ideas together. It looks like the perfect cosy adventure about a cute capybara, and there are plenty of lovely ideas here. Some of the heavier moments simply don’t always sit comfortably alongside the game’s bright, child-friendly presentation, while the writing sometimes struggles to connect everything together. I wanted to love this little adventure, but I often found myself wondering who Capy Castaway was really made for.
There are very few games that leave me sitting at my keyboard at 4am, trying to convince my co-op partner that we really should go to bed while secretly hoping they’ll say, “one more puzzle”. Big Walk did exactly that. Four days and around 20 hours later, my friend and I were still finding new places to explore, new items to play with, and new reasons to laugh at each other as we accidentally threw ourselves off mountains or picked each other up instead of interacting with an object. Going into my Big Walk review, I expected something that sat somewhere alongside PEAK. That’s an easy comparison to make given they’re both cooperative exploration games, but after spending so much time with both, I don’t think they’re trying to achieve the same thing at all. PEAK leans heavily into survival exploration. One bad climb can end your run, and every mountain feels like something you have to conquer. That’s not something you have to worry about in Big Walk. There are chairlifts, trains, winding hiking trails, forests, coastlines, and countless places where you can simply stop and appreciate the view. Even within the first couple of hours, I was already thinking this was a solid 9/10. Every session introduced another mechanic, another secret, another item, or another reason to keep wandering. By the time I sat down to write my review, I realised I’d spent four consecutive late nights and early mornings exploring the island...
There is something incredibly satisfying about watching a plant slowly emerge and grow, and then seeing a customer walk in and decide it is exactly what they have been looking for. Leafy Corner takes the simple idea of a plant shop and turns it into a cosy business management sim that is easy to lose hours to. Instead of chasing profits through stress and time limits, it lets you learn about real plants, decorate a beautiful little shop, and enjoy the quiet rhythm of running your own business. Few cosy management games make learning feel this natural. Leafy Corner quietly teaches you about real plants while giving you meaningful choices about what to grow, what to sell, and how to build your shop. It is charming, thoughtful, and surprisingly relaxing, even when a few of the ruder customers decide your recommendation was apparently the worst thing they have ever heard...
When I first sat down to write my High Times review, I wasn’t sure what I’d make of the game. It’s a dating sim, a cooking sim, a visual novel, and a surprisingly thoughtful queer game wrapped up in a neon, psychedelic café where you make mood-altering doughnuts for a living. It sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous, but somehow it mostly works. High Times is one of the most ambitious indie dating sims around. Beneath its colourful chaos is a genuinely fun cooking system, excellent voice acting, and refreshingly gender-neutral character design. The writing does not reach the emotional highs it could have aimed for, but it’s an enjoyable casual dating sim that took me back to the yaoi/yuri visual novels of the 2010s.
DAVE THE DIVER In the Jungle doesn't feel like a DLC; it feels like the kind of expansion games used to get. It slips naturally onto the end of the base game, respects the time players have already invested, and expands the world without changing what made it special in the first place. Instead of feeling like a separate product, it feels like coming home after a long trip and discovering there are new rooms in a house you already love. I spent days playing, writing guides, cataloguing fish, and exploring every corner of Utara Lake. By the time the credits rolled, I realised something unusual had happened: At no point did I feel like I was rushing through content. Instead, the DLC kept introducing new activities, new characters, and new surprises at a pace that made me want to keep playing just one more in-game day.
Swan Song is a cosy puzzle game that feels like an adult version of a child’s shape sorter puzzle. It’s nostalgic in that way; it feels familiar even if you’ve never seen a set of puzzles quite like these. The game takes place almost entirely inside a magical music box, where your job is to guide a small swan to safety by placing musical notes in the right sequence and manipulating the tiles to create a functioning path. Beyond the box, Swan Song tells a story about grief that feels painfully real, even when one of its characters makes choices that are particularly hard to forgive. The puzzles become more complex with each chapter, but the emotional weight behind them never disappears. Although the writing sometimes falls short of its potential, Swan Song‘s journey undoubtedly offers a worthwhile experience.
There was a point during my Coffee Talk Tokyo review where I realised I had stopped thinking about the game as fiction. I was playing at around two or three in the morning (as is usual), making drinks for tired strangers, listening to people talk about grief, chronic pain, loneliness, love, anxiety, and all the tiny ways people try to survive the world, and I realised that I had seen all of this, so much of this, in the people around me. Coffee Talk Tokyo feels soft, but it's so incredibly real. While uncomfortably close to mirroring our reality, the quiet support its cast of characters offers each other is where the game makes its biggest impact. Coffee Talk Tokyo understands that connection matters, even more so now, when people feel more isolated than ever.
There’s a quiet confidence to Aphelion that I didn’t expect, paired with a stubborn refusal to make things easy for the player. It takes story, platforming, and familiar sci-fi ideas and creates something that feels thoughtful, yet oddly punishing. It pulled me in, pushed me away, and then pulled me back again just when I thought I was done with it.
Sintopia looks playful, but nothing feels simple. You juggle systems that don’t always want to cooperate, and trying to reduce the Sins of your Humus when they enter Hell quickly spirals out of control. It’s like having a queue of people who want to get on a ride that never ends and never gets shorter. All the while, everything else in the Overworld, above Hell, continues to spiral out of control as monsters attack and set things on fire. It’s funny, overwhelming, and it definitely left me feeling like Hell was managing me instead.
Fishbowl is not an easy game to pick up, and it’s not always one you want to play. The discomfort of the game is seemingly intentional, asking you to sit with Aloo’s grief as she lives through this part of her life. You can’t run, or hide, or distract yourself. As the days pass, Aloo confronts more of the memories she thought she’d forgotten, and, in doing so, she starts to heal.
Life is Strange has always been about consequence, and Reunion leans into that more than anything else. The game opens by grounding you in Max’s history: her childhood with Chloe, the storm, the impossible choice, and the grief that follows, no matter what you originally chose. By the time you reach Reunion, Max is still carrying all of it. Whether you saved Chloe or the town, that decision has shaped her adulthood in a way that never really settled. I do not believe that there could be a game anymore deserving of Chloe and Max's ending than this one. Life is Strange: Reunion builds on every major choice from Max's games, and it doesn’t ignore the major decisions that players made. Your past actions shape how this story plays out, from who Max has loved to who or what she’s lost. It's a story that we've been watching for over 11 years.
Neopets: Mega Mini Games Collection brings back the games we grew up with, and for a moment, that’s enough. You feel it straight away — the charm, the challenge, the familiarity of it all. But the longer you sit with it, the more the cracks start to show. What should have been a full return to Neopia ends up feeling like a smaller, quieter version of it, missing some of the heart that made it special.
Cairn may focus on Aava, seasoned climber that she is, but it's not just about her. Cairn is about everyone who is attempting to summit Mount Kami, a mountain that has killed over a hundred people and remains unconquered. Aava is sponsored, yet she wants nothing to do with any of it. She destroys the camera off-screen before you ever start playing as her, and she screens calls from her liaison. She climbs because she has to, not because anyone is watching. As you ascend, the mountain tells its own stories. You find abandoned backpacks, bear-proof supply boxes, lonely Climbots without their climbers, and campsites left behind by people who did not make it back down. Some discoveries are quiet, but others are devastating. You'll find letters from climbing partners, notes from couples who returned again and again, inching higher up each time. But you'll also find bodies, and that will remind you how thin the line is between progress and failure... The mountain feels crowded with absence.
There’s a huge lack of customisation across the board. Character customisation is almost nonexistent. You get four characters. Three of them are men. That’s it. In an industry where one-dev cosy sims let you change hair and eye colour, this feels dated. World customisation is also missing entirely. You can’t tweak hunger, stamina drain, bug difficulty, loot drop, or day-night length. You can’t even increase enemy spawns if you want more challenge. Games like Enshrouded, Grounded, and Satisfactory set a standard here. StarRupture doesn’t meet it yet. The building and inventory systems are rough. Rails can vanish when connecting buildings. Buildings refuse to place due to “collision” when they clearly aren’t colliding. Crafting doesn’t pull from storage, which means wasting hours shuffling items. You can’t shift-click. You can’t store similar items quickly. Carrying 24 single items fills your inventory completely, which forces constant backtracking. It’s exhausting. ...the rupture feature saves this game. Before I experienced my first one, I was pretty much ready to write the game off, but they are chilling. After running to your habitat, you can watch the blaze occur, and then witness “night” fall upon the planet, everything going from golden to fiery red to charcoal in mere moments. Walking outside once the temperature drops feels… Sad. It feels sad. There isn’t much life on this planet, but the ruptures reduce it to rubble.