Sense: A Cyberpunk Ghost Story succeeds as far as a "ghost story" is concerned. It offers up some good and creepy moments to go with some nicely classical point-and-click adventure elements. It struggles as cyberpunk though, failing to engage with the themes that make cyberpunk a distinctive, interesting genre, and proving unable to integrate those cyberpunk elements with the horror. I'm glad I played Sense, but there are too many inconsistencies for it to be something particularly memorable.
Abyss of the Sacrifice is close to being something special, but its little irritants around presentation, puzzle consistency and design, and localisation mean that you'll need to be pretty far down the visual novel rabbit hole to want to play this. It wasn't long ago that Root Double was debuted on the Nintendo Switch, for example, and that game too takes place in an underground facility that the characters are trapped in. It might lack the puzzles, but it is incredibly well written, and as we see with Abyss of the Sacrifice, sometimes a VN is better off without the puzzles anyway.
Choices That Matter's big problem is that it's so easy to overlook, as it doesn't screenshot easily. A black screen with a paragraph of text, unfortunately, is not going to excite a significant number of people (you'd wonder what such people think of books, but you just know that a lot of gamers aren't readers). For those that do spot it and give it a go, however, it really is a special kind of experience. From the opening paragraph the atmosphere, tone, and structure of And Their Souls Were Eaten makes it simply impossible to put it down.
I was genuinely excited to play Lily of the Hollow - Resurrection. It seems like such a beautiful little visual novel and while I wasn’t expecting a masterpiece of localisation based on its low price, I was expecting to be able to read it. But that just cannot be done. Developers from Japan, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, and every other emerging game development centre through Asia-Pacific, listen to me carefully: You can have the most beautiful aesthetics and a heartwarming concept for your game. If the localisation isn’t going to be good, though, do not bother with an English release, because it is going to get reviews like this one. Make “invest in proper translation” your big resolution for 2021. I do not want to play any other games like Lily in the Hollow - Resurrection ever again.
The Nintendo Switch has plenty of excellent board games already available on it. Wingspan is one of the best, if not the best of them. Admittedly the developers were fortunate in that they had the most beautiful, well-designed base material to work with, but rather than do a pedestrian copy/paste of the game to make for a boring digital release or, worse, somehow mess it up by trying to change the game in some way, the team has shown some real respect and appreciation for what makes Wingspan a special experience. Without changing the fundamental appeal of the game, the developers here have taken advantage of the video game medium to enhance the experience in all the right ways. Wingspan, on Nintendo Switch, is nothing short of perfect.
Nekopara is what it is. As a highly fanservicey, comedy-themed visual novel, it's hugely entertaining and delivers on all of its promises. The fan service is excellent thanks to the superb art, and the humour is there - it's silly, but you won't be able to help yourself but giggle along with it. If the pornographic scenes that are available on the PC version of the game are of interest to you, then the Switch port's going to feel like it's missing something. It's still more than fanservicey enough, however, and I actually think the narrative and thematic elements are strengthed in the restraint. Couple that with the portability of the Switch form factor, and I think this is the best way to go for Nekopara Vol. 4.
I am happy to see that Drawn To Life is still mulling around in the minds of the creators. I'm not the world's biggest fan of platformers, but I greatly enjoyed the playful creativity and customisation that the original games offered. That Two Realms has somehow pulled back on a concept that even primitive DS and Wii titles managed perfectly well is very disappointing, but I hope that the low price point means that this was just a token first effort that will lead into a more substantial, and conceptually true, re-boot down the track.
Criticisms aside, Football Manager Touch 2021 is impossible to put down. The bugs and crashes don't matter. The presentation doesn't matter. It also doesn't matter that this game is so dangerously close to crossing the line to become actual work that I wouldn't be surprised if the developers actually collect people's play data to pass on to the real-world managers to give them ideas for their actual decision-making. Football Manager is emergent narrative brilliance, and Touch 21 doesn't let us down there by any means.
As a relatively low-price collection of three retro JRPGs that will last you for a long time (if only because each offers dozens of hours of classic grinding), the Collection of SaGa is obviously niche in terms of its demographic, but these are games that are very easy to love. It would have been nice to have some of the features that more comprehensive retro collections have – digital art books, histories, music players and so on, but no-frills or not these are valuable, pioneering pieces of video game history, and they’re both worth owning and persevering with.
Not every game needs to be infinitely replayable, though. Crawlco Block Knockers is perfect as a little diversion in-between bigger games, or because levels are short, it's the ideal time-filler. I would have said that it would be ideal to take on the commute, too, except that other people would most certainly judge you for playing this in public. It really is good fun though.
Throw in the superior character portraits, art, and musical score and Mercenaries Blaze represents a confident step forward. Of course, it’s not of the standard of a Fire Emblem, Disgaea or God Wars, but for people that enjoy the core gameplay loop of the tactics JRPG – and it is a very compelling one – Mercenaries Blaze is a lean and effective example of it.
SEGA snookered itself a little with the original Puyo Puyo Tetris. The reality is that that game was so perfectly complete that whatever came next was going to feel slightly diminished because its core strength - the ingenious ability to combine two very different puzzlers in a cohesive manner - was no longer new and exciting. Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 does everything that original game did. It's every bit as charming, entertaining, and downright fun. The problem is, it doesn't have the same impact now, and if there is going to be a Puyo Puyo Tetris 3, the development team is going to need to come up with a new trick, else the prestige of the oddball crossover is going to start to fade.
The reality is that at this point Dragon Quest XI is an older release, and Dragon Quest XI S: Definitive Edition is itself not really that new. I have no idea what percentage of prospective Dragon Quest fans have somehow avoided playing this yet, but I imagine it's a now a very small number. With that being said, that "8-bit" mode really is a breath of fresh air to the original 3D game, so if you don't own a Switch and haven't had the opportunity to play this game that way yet, then it's actually worth the upgrade and replay even if you own the original.
Root Double lets itself down in the way it indulges nonsense like scientific explanations and science fiction when really it wants to be a taut psychological thriller about a group of people caught in a truly desperate situation. Thankfully, when it focuses on what it's best at it's a near-on perfect example of the genre. It can be both bewildering and exhausting, but one thing Root Double will never let you forget is that it is also compelling.
Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate was excellent on PlayStation Vita, and it remains excellent on Nintendo Switch. There are a lot of roguelikes available on this console at this point, but there's something about the classical elegance and adherence to genre tradition that makes Shiren the Wanderer appealing. It's a little like how some people still love the sound and experience of vinyl records, really. You're not going to be blown away by innovation with this game, but you may well find yourself in love with its sincerity and near-perfect refinement.
Anyhow, I digress again. LoveKami, for better or worse, is the kind of game that, for all its merits, is going to keep driving you back to its most overt elements; those giant cup sizes, and the costumes designed specifically to highlight them. That will put some people off immediately and irrecoverably. Others will come to the game entirely because that's what's on offer. In the case of both groups, there's an enjoyable reflection on a very Japanese way of thinking in the game that is going to be overlooked for interest in the fan service... but then I imagine that my efforts here of trying to intellectualise this game has been one giant exercise in futility.
There is no doubt that Project Highrise is a more dry experience. Its minimalistic kitsch is a stark contrast to Mad Tower Tycoon's bombastic colours and bright energy, and I'm certainly aware that there are a lot of people that would prefer the higher energy approach. Assuming, that is, that the game is patched to the point that it becomes playable.
That aside, Planet Coaster is indeed the best theme park creator we've ever had. In Australia, there aren't many theme parks left at all (can you believe that Sydney - a major global city - only has one theme park, and it's a tiny space that can be walked across in a few minutes), but there was a big one when I was growing up, and this game takes me back to looking forward to going to that theme park every so often. There are some UI issues, and one or two clunky moments within the management side of the game, but nothing that detracts from the sheer creative joy of playing around with those coasters and creating the park of your dreams. I can almost smell the churros.
I haven't been as conflicted about a rhythm game as I have Melody of Memory. On the one hand, the rhythm game action itself is wonderful and the music, across 140 tracks, is sublime. On the other hand, being forced to play through a truncated and baffling summary of the Kingdom Hearts narrative just to unlock those tracks has done little to enamour me to the series, and there are far, far too many little additions that distract from what the game does best (i.e. the rhythm action). The grand sum of it is that Melody of Memory is much more a game for existing fans of Kingdom Hearts than it needed to be, and once again Square Enix has struggled to fully capitalise on the rich opportunity that the Disney license provides them.
I wanted Replica to say a lot more than it did. We're living in a time where governments are becoming more aggressive in snooping into people's lives and for the first time since McCarthy, being branded as a "communist" is shifting from being someone who the right-wing impotently laugh at to someone who could be in some real danger. Replica does the right things in many ways, name-dropping real-world events and giving it enough context that the game is clearly anti-fascist in tone. Unfortunately, it lacks the intelligence and emotional resonance to be the interactive Orwellian experience that it wants to be.