Victor Vitório's Reviews
Cats and Seek: Dino Park is another game about finding cats hidden in large illustrations. That's enough to know that the game offers casual, calm and enjoyable fun, recommended for anyone who wants to spend some relaxing time looking for cute hidden animals.
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With a modest production that adapts the 2019 series material well, Carmen Sandiego serves its young target audience well, alternating geography- and history-based investigation and simple minigames. For older audiences, however, the educational entertainment essence may have less appeal, as the simplicity in the mechanics and initial enigmas make the really good challenges show up only in the second half of the campaign.
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Momodora: Moonlit Farewell is a modest but worthy farewell to a series that has always been humble. The concise campaign focuses on what works and gets straight to the point, with a good pace of exploration and progression, but its basic metroidvania mechanics fail to impress, both in the simplistic traversal abilities and in the merely satisfactory combat. Fortunately, the aesthetics refine the visuals with good effects, making this a game that, despite being unpretentious, is fun, enjoyable and very beautiful.
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Tails of Iron 2: Whiskers of Winter makes up for it with its impressive combat, detailed visuals, interesting medieval fantasy with animals and a narrative that heightens the atmosphere. However, the game fails to build on the achievements of its predecessor and suffers from superficial systems, bland level design, unnecessary backtracking and repetitive and unbalanced fights. The new epic of the rat kingdom may please with what it has good, but it will not impress those who played the first one.
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With a manor and its surrounding gardens, Arabella has more than a roof of her own to cultivate both fantastic plants and scientific treatises. Botany Manor uses the historical context of a Victorian female scholar to build an ingenious exploration puzzle game, delivering the satisfaction of solving riddles while illustrating a clever historical insight represented by the protagonist's overlooked intellectual life. Both narrative and gameplay are bounded together in our minds by their clues and fragments, making this game a beautiful and worthy whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
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Though ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist plays it safe by being too similar to its predecessor, it also surpasses it in every aspect. It's a challenging, beautiful and melancholic metroidvania, but also heartwarming in its emphatic narrative tone and quality of life upgrades — especially the excellent mapping —, along with the difficulty management.
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Basureroes: Invasion has a simple pixel art and level design. However, with different character gameplay and game modes, it knows how to extract more than we realize at first glance and proves to be a competent action platformer, especially since it allows up to four people to play and also has numerous deadly arenas for versus mode matches.
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In yet another great science fiction with deep humane themes, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector improves on what its excellent predecessor achieved and expands the campaign structure. This time, we travel to various locations in outer space in a ship, following Sleeper and his crew through an RPG with dynamic systems and vital choices. The cohesive sum of its parts makes this work a greater whole, one that is memorable and necessary for our times.
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Like a dream come true from the 1990s, Gimmick! 2 has beautiful, lively visuals, clever and challenging platforming, and plenty of charisma, although it doesn't try to expand the game's identity beyond the cute design of Yumetaro and his adversaries. Even though it can be frustrating due to the many instant deaths on spikes, the simple and straightforward campaign will please 2D platformers admirers.
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In the end, Eternal Strands is a good game with good ideas, but it doesn't have the right structure to make the most of them, stretching its use until it becomes completely repetitive and compromising the strength of its dynamic action proposal with magic and physics. While the free-climbing exploration, the chaos of magic and the confrontation with colossal enemies offer a lot of fun, especially for those who want an action RPG that breaks away from the soulslike trend, what will make the difference in the long run of the campaign will be the involvement with the detailed world-building narrative and each player's perception of the impact of repetition when enjoying the game.
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Mika and the Witch’s Mountain is an unpretentious fable about the practical and emotional value of work done for the good of a community. The message is distilled into a simple but effective form, scattered throughout every corner of the fetch quests and dialogues that form the essence of the game. There is no significant challenge, but those who want a lovely broomstick ride while exploring the small and pleasant open world of the Windy Island will have a few hours to relax and find the purpose of the little delivery witch.
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Artistically, Symphonia is one of the most beautiful examples of the precision platformer genre. Its musical themes are engaging and as efficient as the level design and gameplay progression, although the controls are not always as precise as they should be and an absence of an extra area to make the game a more robust and varied package. These questions, however, do not cancel out the harmony of this orchestra that is worth listening to.
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Petit Island is the pleasant adventure of a loyal granddaughter visiting the land of her grandfather's youth, in a story of memories, family relationships between different generations and welcoming the elderly. The visuals are lovely and the island is well designed, but the sequential chapters and insistent objective markers get in the way of the sense of freedom and discovery that the cozy open world could offer.
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Brutal in both its narrative and combat, Nine Sols stands out for its aesthetic richness and for allowing harmony between game and player by allowing for meticulous difficulty adjustments, establishing a flexible experience that can be memorable depending on each player's skill and disposition, without overshadowing the numerous qualities of this exquisite work.
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Impressive as a solo developer project, Codex Lost is a vast action RPG that stands out for the most intricately interconnected world design I've seen in a soulslike, a beautiful invitation for fans of exploration guided by curiosity and discovery. The artisanal aspect and the lack of polish in some areas may keep part of the public away, but, despite the limitations, genre enthusiasts will be rewarded with a wizardry experience that is worth getting to know.
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Developing a work from intentional, inherent limitations is a beautiful creative experiment, especially when the result is as efficient and fun as Micro Mages. The 2D platform's simplicity can be too simplified for people wishing for something more elaborate, but the agility, retro challenge and four-player fun can be enough to attract people who like what they see.
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Awaken: Astral Blade has managed to grow as a satisfying game, but still with obvious limitations to its production ambitions. Thus, although it cannot stand out above the average of action metroidvanias, it also does not fall below this level and caters to those looking to explore an unknown world of sci-fi in command of an anime girl.
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Abstract, beautiful and challenging, Ynglet combines platforming, puzzles, physics, dynamic music and explosions of color to paint a vibrant experience. It is a work of art that knows how to take advantage of simple lines for aesthetics and deep gameplay. In the original release, it was a short game, but the two additional campaigns added make it a much longer and more intriguing journey.
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Leaning on a narrative of affective contemplation, guided by the poignant emotions of music in perfect tune with each moment, and built on visual art of profound beauty as few games achieve, Neva is an essential unit, a meaningful experience that does not focus on platforming action, but employs it as a small part that makes up an indivisible artistic whole, determined and hopeful.
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Nikoderiko: The Magical World runs the risk of looking like a mere Donkey Kong Country clone with elements of Crash Bandicoot, but it has the merit of being competent in all the main aspects that made these series worthy of fame, despite some technical flaws. With always beautiful and interesting stages, the campaign is fun to play alone or with others in local co-op. Whether you're a fan of the famous mascot platformers or someone newer to the genre, Niko and Luna have an adventure that's worth enjoying.
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