Neon White is everything you want from a speedrunning game: fast, super precise, well structured and built around short and various levels. This alone would be enough to recommend it, but the package is completed with a unique artistic style, a valuable writing and a clearly original and strange game design that mixes together visual novel, dating sim, first person shooter and platformer. Some very small technical uncertainty in the repetition of the attempts does not affect the overall quality.
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Souldiers is a solid metroidvania, built around all the typical stylistic features of the genre. However, it struggles to find a distinct identity and carries a bit of technical and gameplay problems that negatively impact the experience. The inventory management, key mapping and save system in the game affect accessibility quite strongly, and the plot itself has never great peaks of originality. Still, Souldiers remains a fun game, with good ideas in variety of builds and situations.
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Seven new levels in the company of Hel, a new character more mobile and more fun. Too bad again for the excessive try & retry.
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Elden Ring brings the "soulslike" formula into a new context, broad yet coherent and cohesive, and from this point of view it is a very successful new beginning for the genre for which FromSoftware has become famous.
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A narrative adventure that succeeds in a truly remarkable feat: inserting good and not repetitive environmental puzzles into the adventure while keeping the experience simple and approachable. A simple but solid game, not too long and not too short, that only fails in not being able to best tell its story. SCARF remains a product that will make you spend 4-5 pleasant hours, and it's enough.
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A very pleasant management sandbox with a very relaxed pace that in the long run suffers from some gameplay uncertainty and too much micro-management.
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Yet another masterpiece by Kan Gao, probably the most solid and balanced overall. The story of Quincy and Lynri passes through regrets, remorse, fears and IF. Gao's writing is always impeccable and is capable of never falling into the banal, even when it touches themes already abused in the medium and in narration in general. So far my very personal best game of the year.
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GRIME is an excellent soulslike metroidvania. Starting from a solid and consistent base layer that takes heavy inspiration from Dark Souls and Hollow Knight, it brings to the table its own ideas and concepts in order to offer an experience with its own rich personality. Inspired bosses, especially in the second half, and an excellent gameplay complete the package. Highly recommended.
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Vesper is a little gem. On an old-fashioned (but functional) gameplay Cordens Interactive builds a work of art with great authorial value. Simple but effective puzzles and a well-constructed environmental storytelling pair with stunning art design and great sound design. Sadly stealth and puzzles are both a little too simple: it never deepens its mechanics. Knowing you don't have to expect a challenging game, it's one of the few, beautiful, Italian productions. And that's enough. Highly recommended.
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A nice tribute to the JRPG with a personality all its own and a beautiful story, which however lacks depth and fails to give the right weight to its most peculiar mechanics.
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A classic new metroidvania inspired by Hollow Knight. It brings nothing new in the genre, but it makes no errors resulting in a very solid game with well crafted and various mechanics. It will lead you for more than 25 hours through an interesting realm hiding a fine story in it. A gem that simply deserves a place in the Olympus of metroidvanias.
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A great new take in the roguelite world. Skul: The Hero Slayer is a must-have for all roguelite lovers, with so many balanced builds and combinations. Suffers from an high difficulty spike in the first hours and a not so great level design, but it's surely worth a try.
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In a beautiful mix between 2D e 3D, a little girl and her shadow show us the fragility of the human mind, between fears and anxiety. Along many psychological sessions, the two characters try to cooperate to solve a large number of puzzles based on light, shadows and gravity. A little gem.
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Drawn to Life: Two Realms loses some of the series' most characteristic traits while attempting to gain new ones. The result is a mixed bag, combining interesting levels and an overall pleasant narrative department with many technical flaws, unjustified difficulty spikes and a game that often seems to aim at the wrong target audience.
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Horace is a piece of art: music, story, ideas and design of the robot are gorgeus, even if gameplay and controls lack in polishness and the entire experience is a bit too long. Be read to shed tears for Horace. It'll be worth it, expecially in this Nintendo Switch version.
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After two beautiful shorts, Bithell Games returns with a new take in the solitaires world. The Solitaire Conspiracy, unfortunately, doesn't fulfil its promises: the strategic part of the card game is poor and the story is far worse than the average Bithell story. The core gameplay is ok for a three hours game, but struggles to hold the replayability for too long.
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A beautiful piece of craftsmanship. Spelunky 2 is all a sequel should be: polished, refined, bigger. A game of learning, a game of death, a game of emergent beautiful gameplay. Every second in this game is pure art: it will frustrate you, but in a positive way in which you will shout at the TV and then smile and retry. Just to die again, until you'll learn enough.
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With its perfect controls and its intriguing mechanics, OkunoKA Madness is a love letter to all recent high-precision platforms, like Slip, The End is Nigh and Super Meat Boy. A true hardcore platform, with a lovely speedrunning twist that guides the player in a deep loop of tries and learning. A very good take, despite some too frustrating levels.
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The musical dystopia of No Straight Roads is the way Metronomik uses to face the authoritarianisms as a whole. Themed bossfights and beautiful art style create a potentially explosive recipe, but the monotony of the enemies' attacks and the low quality of the platforming negatively affect the experience.
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An interesting, but too short, adventure about a kid searching for hi lost dad. A very good tribute to classic LucasArts games from a promising studio. Unfortunately the ending of the game is somehow rushed, with linear progression and simplified puzzles and situations.
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