I haven't had a game in which I've had to pull myself away from playing it for a while, but I spent a Saturday basically playing The Caligula Effect 2 and only stopping for supper. I really hope a lot of the other RPGs coming out before the year's out on Switch can elicit that level of devotion.
I didn't mention it during the original game's review, but a good portion of its playtime was while waiting for power to return after my hometown got clobbered by the remnants of a hurricane; this time, the worst it got was some pretty heavy thunderstorms. And just as the weather wasn't as extreme this time, nirvanA Initiative gets close to the levels of the original but just falls slightly short.
If you're going to get into Witch on the Holy Night, perhaps while waiting for someone to tie George R. R. Martin to a chair long enough to finish off their magnum opus, it's going to be a commitment. 20+ hours of either nudging an analog stick to stop the system from going into screen saving mode or jamming A will get you a well-written story that sets up a lot of things for the future.
I don't regret taking a few hours to read Seventh Lair, though I did need several minutes to collect myself at the end of the tale. With some cleaned up text, it could be an all-time great visual novella - but for now, it's a solid one with some things worth discussing.
With the focus on game preservation that we've seen in recent years, I never imagined that the Etrian Odyssey series would be preserved anywhere close to its original form. The fact that they thought it worth bringing to Switch is amazing, and though it didn't come over entirely clean, it's still worth bringing back Fight, Heal, and the rest of the crew for one more dungeon dive.
) I don't think the backlog will ever let me see every suitor's ending in Jack Jeanne, but the ones I did reach were worth the extreme amounts of effort I had to put in. And it's nice that we have a proof of concept for "replicating physical performance in a rhythm game" like I asked for last month. Still, hopefully there's a nice long break before the next rhythm novel because I definitely need one.
My personal frustration with Clustertruck shouldn't take away from the game. Landfall and tinyBuild made a good game, even if there were times that I thought they'd owe me either a Switch or a TV. And I had plenty of occasions in which I nailed a tricky series of jumps or managed to overcome a tough level and felt amazing. The run eventually comes, and if you can tolerate not knowing when that is, Clustertruck could be for you.
It’s hard to deny that Gurumin has some technical problems, but there’s a lot of charm under the surface. It’s fun to rebuild the town piece by piece and see more of the map unlock as the prince’s evil mist dissipates. Here’s hoping we can drill into some more Falcom games on the 3DS soon.
I wish I would have gotten an opportunity to meet more of the Has-Been Heroes, like the anthropologist who became a luchador, and someday I will get there. Most roguelikes cause me to give up in frustration, but Has-Been Heroes is fun enough that I want to keep playing and someday have "teh urn".
Superbeat XONiC is stepping into a growing genre on the Switch, but its musical variety and ability to play on the TV will help it stand out even if it did cause me to look up if the Wii U's Pro Controller can work on Switch. The included soundtrack in the physical copies is a steal on its own, but this is a solid game even if you're eShopping it.
Pillars of Eternity's reputation for quality is well deserved. It's definitely worth checking out, whether on other platforms or when the Switch version is fixed up. For now, the version on Nintendo's latest is an interesting curiosity with some pretty heavy issues. And it's not the first time I've seen that phrase used in relation to an Obsidian-developed game published by another company.
If you're OK with dealing with text issues—or will speed through too fast to notice—then Collar X Malice is going to hook you. The themes may be disturbing to some, and the M rating the ESRB gave it is definitely deserved, but it left me thinking for a long time after I hit the title screen for the last time. Sometimes, that's just what I need.
There's a solid game in Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus, even if it's not an environment I don't want to spend any more time in. If you're in the mood for a little sci-fi strategy and are cool with a game featuring heavy doses of faux-religion, then be sure to enlist in the Mechanicus army.
A lot of the world-building in tabletop game universes comes from a DM, and the Draw Distance visual novels aim to create almost a one-on-one story. They've done well in the first couple of attempts this year, so if you're looking for an entry point into Vampire: The Masquerade, Shadows of New York is worth staking out.
It won't take long to play through Flipon if you just want to say you beat a game in 2020, and the core gameplay is addictive enough that I'll probably keep the game on my Switch in the same way I kept Puzzle League Express on my 3DS. There's some technical troubles, and I'm still trying to get used to the chain timing, but someday I'll manage to clear that 200,000 point in five minutes wall Flipon threw at me.
I've usually been able to play through otome games around holidays, and the batch this year have been great ways to lose entire days. If you're ultra-paranoid about typos Piofiore is an offer you'll have to refuse - but if you can push past that, it will be an emotional roller coaster.
As the year of romance concludes for Aksys and Otomate, it goes out on another solid effort. Café Enchanté doesn't break a lot of new ground in its genre, but it's a well-told romantic story and would be a great way to wile away an upcoming long weekend.
And honestly, what Runner has done now is made me look forward to the Switch port of Runner 2 coming next year, because I prefer its art style and it has checkpoints. Even if they are optional. Runner's still my favorite of the original BIT.TRIP series but if you pick up Runner you get a big discount on the other ones so it may be better to explore those instead.
When you're going back-to-back-to-back with one genre of game, they can start to run together. I'm glad Dairoku: Agents of Sakuratani avoided the urge to lock portions of the game behind completion, and hope this happens more in the future-though hopefully the next romance game I play will have a little more sunlight in it.
I can see why Amnesia: Memories ended up as a breakout hit for the developer, even if I had to bite my tongue for most of an evening working my way through a route. It contained a lot more of the little quality of life items I took for granted in their later works, and if you're curious about romance games, this is a fine starting point.