Hey Poor Player
HomepageHey Poor Player's Reviews
I’m not sure I’ve ever related more to a character in a video game than I do to Kay. Our experiences aren’t identical, but her pain is mine, or at least it’s close enough that I can feel it. Norco isn’t able to fully give her the healing she’ll always want but never fully achieve, but its understanding of pain, loss, and the need to keep moving are a remarkable achievement which helped me process some of my own feelings as well. Any fan of adventure games should absolutely check it out.
Cursed to Golf is a brilliant little golf game. Its smart design encourages creativity, and its roguelike elements, while harsh, aren’t brutal enough to derail the experience. It’s astonishing how well the individual parts from different genres mix into a cohesive whole—or should I say “hole”? More than anything, though, it’s just fun. That’s all there is to it: it’s just a fun game that deserves your attention.
Even days after seeing the credits roll, I can’t quit IMMORTALITY. I want to understand more, dig deeper, and find more clips. There’s so much to see here and so many mysteries hidden inside this game, seemingly just one moment of intuition away. I enjoyed Sam Barlow’s past work, particularly Her Story, but I was unprepared for the depth of feeling I found within IMMORTALITY. What he and his team have created is nothing short of a masterpiece.
Arcade Paradise is a fantastic management sim for those who love the genre. It may be asking a lot of players to prioritize other people’s laundry over games upfront, but the payoff is a literal heaven for those who have always wished to build their own arcade and play every game within it for free. If you enjoy a good management sim and love the idea of hopping from game to game to game as a major mechanic, Arcade Paradise is worth its weight in quarters.
The developers of We Are OFK don’t even pretend to care about making a traditional video game. It’s clear that instead, the entire goal here was to tell a story, and that’s incredibly well done. Not perfectly so. I don’t love where We Are OFK leaves one of their characters in particular, and the ending feels rushed. After spending hours with these four characters, setting up conflict, it feels like a lot of things get pushed aside to get to where the game needs them to end up, almost like the development team ran out of time. With deep character writing, fantastic voice acting, and killer visuals, though, I’d recommend We Are OFK to anyone who is okay with this being a story first, a vehicle for releasing music second, and barely a game at all.
Unless you’re a well-meaning-yet-misguided parent from the 80s who magically found themselves transported to the year 2022 (in which case there are other things I would be worrying about), you really have zero reason not to play this game. Cult of the Lamb is the evil-worshipping, cult-building, god-slaying video game with a perfect creepy-cute aesthetic that I never knew that I wanted—and I’m so incredibly glad that it exists.
If you’re expecting Destroy All Humans 2! – Reprobed to be more of a remaster of the original game than a remake, you’ll likely be happy with the results. The game looks great and feels extremely faithful to the time it was released. Those with nostalgia for the original will get what they need out of it. After finally spending some time with it, though, I can say confidently that this was only ever an okay game, featuring the same lack of content and empty areas that open-world games of that era were known for. Today’s open-world games are better at creating an overall experience worth your time.
Honestly, even though I wasn’t really familiar with Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid before playing Burst Forth!!, I might be a fan now. This is a solid Shmup with good graphics, compelling gameplay, and a shocking amount of replayability. If you enjoy the series or the genre, I’d say this is well worth the price of admission. In the meantime, I might start looking into this quirky little anime.
Thymesia embodies the ever-rising popularity of the Soulslike genre incredibly well. As an indie Soulslike, it knows it can’t necessarily be as big and as bold as its source material, but it also doesn’t want to simply be written off as a sub-par copy of something that’s already been done. And the end result is something kinda-sorta in-between of those two things. I can appreciate Thymesia for what it does well—namely, its hauntingly beautiful visuals and fine-tuned combat basics—but its more creative endeavors felt more like the game trying to be different just for the sake of being different. I’m not sure that Thymesia is going to be at the forefront of its given genre, but it’s still a pestilence-ridden egg worth cracking open for those hungry for some new Soulslike action.
Shin-chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation -The Endless Seven-Day Journey- is an easy recommendation to any fan of Shin Chan, but also to those who love slice of life comfort games. You don’t need to be familiar with the franchise to enjoy what’s on offer, but those who are will absolutely adore this outlandish adventure featuring the beloved and crude kindergartener. If you’re ready to spend your summer vacation catching bugs, fighting dinosaurs, and taking in the beautiful sights this quaint Kyushu village has to offer, Shin-chan: Me and the Professor on Summer Vacation -The Endless Seven-Day Journey- is just a train ride away!
When everything comes together, Rollerdrome feels incredible, but too often, things get buried under the weight of its many systems. While even at its worst, there is definitely fun to be had here, this feels like an incredible concept for a game where the developers needed to spend a little more time workshopping what aspects of it were really needed. It’s still a good game, though, and the foundation is in place for a sequel to be truly incredible.
Super Bullet Break uses its difficulty and gacha mechanics to truly great effect, elevating what would otherwise be a fairly standard deck builder, into something that is fiendishly addictive and easy to dump hours into. Sure, the early game can be brutally difficult, and some may find that off-putting, but stick around past those early stages, and Super Bullet Break’s moreish gacha systems will almost certainly suck you in, due to the way in which the randomized systems bring the creative options for deck building to the forefront.
What the Saints Row reboot truly reminds us is that — whatever situation they may find themselves in — the Saints do it for each other. 2022’s Saints Row is less about reeling it in and more about coming home. And in the house that Santo Ileso’s Saints built, “damn, it feels good to be a gangster.”
At the end of my hauntingly simple mission, I really wanted to walk out liking SENSEs: Midnight more than I did. There’s a great aesthetic, cool ideas, and some real potential with the fixed camera angles, but it’s all buried by bad stealth mechanics, a puddle-deep story, and horror disarming bugs and hiccups. Still, for its price point, consider giving it a whirl, at the very least to give some money to the developers because they seem like they really wanted to make something great here. I do hope to see a much more refined sequel in the future.
Soul Hackers 2 made some interesting decisions—some of which I don’t totally agree with. But, even with whatever grievances I might have, I can’t deny that the game was ultimately both incredibly fun and well put-together. Devil Summoner might not carry the same weight as other spinoff series within the MegaTen universe, but Soul Hackers 2 is one heck of a ride from start to finish.
Midnight Fight Express has a lot of personality and can be fun for a bit. However, when a game is built almost entirely around combat, you need that combat to feel great, and here it just feels okay. Its various attempts to provide some variety are noble, but meet with mixed success despite some really cool set pieces. A great soundtrack kept me going until the end, but those wanting an irreverent brawler aren’t lacking choices in recent years, and Midnight Fight Express never fully manages to stand out from the crowd.
While it doesn’t end as well as it starts, that doesn’t ultimately change how much I love Xenoblade Chronicles 3. With fantastic characters, deep combat, and an enormous world to explore, it was more than worth pushing through those final hours to see the ending to one of my favorite RPGs in years. Monolith Soft have the Xenoblade series back on the right path, and I can’t wait to see where they go next. I just hope next time they have the confidence to end their game when it’s ready to end.
I had an absolute blast with GigaBash. Despite this, solo players need not apply. There just isn’t enough content here to justify the investment. Still, that’s not who GigaBash was made for and for the target audience, Passion Republic Games have delivered. If you regularly have friends to play with, there are few games released this year I would say are more worthy of your time and money.
While it isn’t going to be an easy sell for many due to the difficulty spikes that arise in the form of its demanding bosses, I ultimately came away from Book Quest satisfied with the final product. Sure, it wasn’t the laid-back, Zelda-clone I was expecting and presented a challenge that came as a shock, but that was ultimately the best thing about it. If you can look past the, at times, inconsistent hitboxes, and frequent audio bugs, then Book Quest provides a satisfying evening’s worth of, at times, hardcore action that I hope finds an audience.
Ground Divers’ cute looks hide a game with surprising depth. While there aren’t very many stages, they quickly start to require a great deal of strategy and planning which can be a lot of fun. It isn’t a must-play, but those looking for a charming puzzle game where resource management is key, and they’ll need to use their heads should give Ground Divers a look.