Vectronom is well made and attractive. It's got a strong sense of minimalist style, and as difficult as it is, it's also entirely fair, and once you've learned its rules and behaviour, it becomes comfortable, albeit difficult, to play.
I wish more horror games were like Layers of Fear 2. It's a mature and intelligent understanding of the deeper and more meaningful elements of horror, and while I can have as much fun as anyone creeping around a Resident Evil game and shooting the ugly monsters while being startled by the jump scares, it's something like this that I end up reflecting on well after I've finished playing, and this is the kind of game that I return to when I'm looking for an actual horror experience.
It's stylish, slick production that borrows from the classical masters of the crime fiction genre, while adding some genuinely creative approaches to the visual novel that help to make it both feel fresh and hard to put down. Even when I knew what was coming because I am far too familiar with how crime fiction works, I still delighted in the way that Alternate Jake Hunter presented itself.
I enjoyed Kotodama a great deal. It's just surprising enough to keep the narrative interesting, and the colourful humour and cheerful fan service certainly help make the game a delight to play.
I knew going in to Happy Words that it would be a Scrabble clone, and I was fine with that. As a fan of Scrabble - and board games in general - I like the idea of having it on the Switch for on-the-go play. But when the AI is about as interesting as a parrot with access to a dictionary, a UI that actively wants to stop you playing the game, and a complete absence of anyone online to play with, I was left speechless, that a developer in 2019 was somehow capable of making a worse version of Scrabble than what we had on the Game Boy back in the 90's.
Blood & Truth is on balance a very enjoyable, highly entertaining game, and this has the best chance that Sony has had yet to sell VR on the “AAA” community.
Observation is truly a thinking person's game... and it's a rare gem for that.
It's almost painfully delightful, warm, colourful, and completely charming in everything that it does, but its reliance on nostalgia and series tradition means that I'm just not sure that this will be one to win the series new fans.
Castlevania Anniversary Collection is an excellent, high quality retro collection. It is of a collection where too many of the games don't hold enough value beyond their nostalgia, and it's lacking titles I would have considered to be key. However, with a great set of features, and plenty of classic dark fantasy platforming, this package is a useful reminder of just how prestigious the entire franchise really is.
While the basic formula to Total War hasn't changed, Creative Assembly is genuinely impressive in the way that it manages to capture the subtleties of warfare in whatever era its depicting.
Time hasn’t been good to Blades of Time, and and other than for the morbidly curious, I can’t see anyone being masochistic enough to derive any value out of it.
A Plague Tale comes so achingly close to the brilliance of a Hellblade, but sadly where Ninja Theory's "blockbuster indie" project is a masterpiece, Armicia's story is "just" a page-turner.
World End Syndrome does more than enough as a visual novel - it's hard to put down, well written, and the art is gorgeous.
Fell Seal came out of nowhere. That's my fault because I don't really follow Kickstarter these days, and that's where this one got its start. But I'm so glad that I had the chance to play it.
Something about the survival genre has taken all those brilliant ingredients and spat out a failure of a meal, however, and that's an depressing reflection on the entire genre.
European Conqueror doesn't really work as a historical wargame. Its predecessor dealt with it loosely enough, but European Conqueror takes the abstraction one step too far for its own good. With that being said, this is still a very fine tactical wargame, with good scope, and certainly so much to do that you won't be putting it down in a hurry.
Shadowgate is still Shadowgate, and there's an inherent classic quality to this adventure that, coupled with the dark fantasy atmosphere and general difficulty, also makes it inherently rewarding.
What really lets Our World Is Ended down is its lack of narrative focus. On the one hand you'd got a compelling discussion about fluid reality - something that, much like AI and robotics, is quickly falling out of the area of "science fiction" and into "we actually need to talk about this, because it's happening" territory. On the other hand, you've got a lot of stories about a bunch of generally unlikable characters and their obsession with breasts.
When I think about the best visual novels out there - the likes of Steins;Gate and Danganronpa, VA-11 HALL-A shares many of the same traits. It's thoughtfully written, to provide some deeper insights and philosophical musics that help to elevate the game above being simple entertainment... but at the same time it does so in a vibrant and deeply entertaining way. And it is impossible to put down.
The result of all of this is a highly limited package that doesn't do Konami any favours. For a company to have such an incredible heritage - including two of the most influential games of all time in Frogger and Track & Field - and then to ignore all of that for a range of early era SHMUPs (and one platformer) that few will remember is bemusing, to say the least. There is some limited appeal in there for people who are fans of the one particular genre, but even then, the package does a very barebones job of celebrating that.