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Root Film tells a wonderfully winding, thrilling mystery in a true Edogawa Ranpo style, but what's more important is that Root Film is a gorgeous visualisation of an often-ignored but deeply valuable part of Japan. If you walk away from this game with a deep desire to see Shimane for yourself, then you've played it the right way.
At the end of the day, it's a collection of nonograms, which play well on Switch. However, factor in that there are so many of them, that they're presented in an engaging and interesting way, and you're rewarded with something meaningful for every single puzzle completed, and Hatsune Miku Logic Paint S is well elevated beyond being "just" well-made nonograms. The Picross titles on Switch offer well-made nonograms. Logic Paint S is so, so much more than that.
I'm not sure why the developers figured they'd give the Nintendo Switch a crack with Noble Armada: Lost Worlds. When your game picks up just four user reviews on Steam in three years, it's clearly not resonating, and throwing a clumsy port onto a console isn't going to change that. If this kind of game does appeal to you, then I highly recommend Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock instead. It's on Nintendo Switch and it is infinitely better than this in offering the same kind of miniatures wargame in space theme.
You've just got to persevere with Battle Brothers to really appreciate it, and it really is the epitome of the saying "it's a marathon, rather than a sprint". Once you've overcome the horrible excuse for a "tutorial" and onboarding process, you've then got to deal with some really repetitive quest design and an astronomically unforgivable difficulty curve. But, slowly, the game starts to open up, and before you know it, you realise that you're really enjoying this thing. It's expansive, it's complex, it's nuanced and it puts complete control over the story and quest in your hands. It's everything good about Mount & Blade, but in a more compact, turn-based format. It's no wonder the game has become a beloved hit on Steam, with fans pouring hundreds - if not thousands - of hours into it. It's not quite the same experience on Switch, and yet I can't see a scenario where I tear myself away from it, now I've pushed through its various walls. A truly fascinating example of a game that's just worth the effort.
Ultimately, Saviors of Sapphire Wings and Stranger of Sword City Revisited form a welcome package that’s sure to delight fans of dungeon crawlers. I like the way that Sapphire Wings’ moderate difficulty and focus on narrative serve as a good introduction before throwing players into the much more punishing Stranger of Sword City. I’m glad that Experience Inc.'s western partner, NISA, is seeing the value in releasing these niche games to a Western audience, and the added appeal of playing these games on-the-go is a plus for the genre. And speaking from a purely value-for-money perspective, you’re getting two full length, lengthy games for the price of one, and you’ll be happily dungeon crawling for weeks and weeks if you choose to pick this one up.
A-Train: All! Aboard! Tourism is the same wonderful blend of genuinely enlightening and deeply rewarding simulation gameplay that will both make you realise the value of mass transit, and help you to understand just how hard it is to get all of it right. Even the cute anime aesthetic, which initially seems so out of place for something so complex, eventually makes sense, too.
For a homage to a game from the 80's, faithfully recreating a gameplay system that was invented 40 years ago, Bishoujo Battle Cyber Panic! feels like a modern, funky game. The anime aesthetic is gorgeous and current, although perhaps a little too safe given that Azur Lane: Crosswave borrows from the same aesthetic while upping the fan service ante significantly. However, Cyber Panic! also has plenty of replay value and an excellent leaderboard system for such a minimal price. Most compelling of all, though, is the fact that the game is an uncomplicated and well-done take on Qix. Qix the kind of game that doesn't need developers to mess around with it, and to the great credit of Bishoujo Battle Cyber Panic!'s developer, they've let the base game stand for itself.
Gnosia might not be a new concept – there are so many video games out there that feature death games with deception at the core of them. Last year’s Quantum Suicide even set the scene in space and had a less-than-benevolent AI pulling many of the strings, just like Gnosia does. But Gnosia is something rare: it is really, truly different. The developers wanted to take this common-enough concept and craft something that was truly their own, and not only have you got here a game that you won’t forget in a hurry, it’s also going to have you actively thinking about just how smart it is for some time to come.
Dry Drowning reminds me a little of another game that I went into with absolutely no expectations, and went on to become one of my favourite games of all time: Tokyo Dark: Remembrance. Both are heavily inspired by noir and horror elements, though Tokyo Dark is Lovecraftian and Dry Drowning is more cyberpunk. Both games share a bold willingness to discomfort the audience, an interest in social commentary relevant to the real world, and an unrelenting intensity and urgency in the storytelling. I very nearly missed Dry Drowning because it very much looks like the low-budget visual novel that many other critics have accused it of being. I'm not sure what they were playing, though, because if you actually listen to what the game's saying, and pay attention to the literary genres that it belongs to, this is really quite a remarkable experience.
Harvest Moon: One World is ultimately forgettable and limited, but I didn't regret my time playing it. Perhaps that is simply because I'm such a fan of these anime-casual farming sims, and have been since the "genre" emerged all the way back on the SNES, but as someone who has played an awful lot of these things, One World's effort to do something different by getting you to travel around, and the streamlining of the farming mechanics so you can focus on the best bits, is admirable. There's still a long way to go for Natsume and its development teams to catch Story of Seasons, and I question the wisdom in releasing this game to compete directly with the upcoming new entry in that series, but this is still a genuinely pleasant little world to lose yourself within for a while.
While I have some minor issues with Steam Prison, this is a glorious, thrilling adventure, told with expertise and panache. It goes to some very dark places, but never comes across as exploitative or "cheap" in how it does it. Backed up with gorgeous aesthetics and a distinct setting, Steam Prison blends some complex ideas together while ultimately keeping the focus on what people come to otome for - a great harem of men that are all so interesting that it makes choosing between them a real challenge.
Is Ghosts ‘n Goblins Resurrection for everyone? No, it most definitely is not. It’s a very deliberate game that demands to be played on its own terms. That means accepting Arthur’s slower, more deliberate movements, the realities of a single jump, fixed arc system for platforming, and a brutal difficulty curve that rewards patient play, all the while gently mocking you when you cross one threshold only to be ground into a fine paste by the very next trap.
You do have to reward creativity, and Legal Dungeon is genuinely creative. This is not a job or process that you would have ever imagined could be gamified, but there you have it. It tells a fascinating story, especially as an outsider to the Korean legal system, and while it's not a particularly comfortable experience on the Nintendo Switch, and perhaps a little imprecise for a puzzle game, it is very difficult to put down.
Littlewood is charming and bright, and wears its “indie spirit” on its sleeve. The developer has created something highly playable that also acts as a lovely homage to the Harvest Moon tradition. By all accounts, Littlewood has been a commercial success, too, on its prior release on PC. That success is deservedly so, but hopefully the developer can invest some of that into some refinements for whatever their next project is, but there’s more ambition in Littlewood than the scope of the budget allowed.
Maquette - and the development team - deserve better. There's some real talent evident in the unique, interesting, contemplative and rewarding puzzle design here, and that kind of quality occurs less and less frequently in this vapid and action-obsessed industry. The development team also know how to write interesting and emotionally engaging narratives - we don't see stories about love told with this kind of sincerity anywhere near often enough. Unfortunately, the one and only problem that the game has is also the thing that almost breaks it; the two elements that the entire experience relies on are at near-complete odds with one another.
You know what? I was going to give this game the respect of a full review. It's unmitigated trash, but I firmly believe that everyone's creative ideas deserve the respect of full and proper criticism. But then I kept playing and this game became too insulting to my intelligence to entertain the idea of giving it any respect in return.
Neptunia Virtual Stars is an intelligent, relevant, topical and timely satire. It does represent a new direction for the series, and is clearly an effort to find a way to stay relevant now that the jokes that previously provided the foundation for the series have lost their relevance. In doing so Idea Factory decided to experiment with the gameplay, and while that wasn't executed to a particularly fine degree, the heavier focus on narrative and the sheer energy of the whole package means that I found it impossible to remain disappointed by the game's rough edges. The rest of it was too much of a laugh-out-loud delight.
In many ways, it's a highly metafictional thesis that explores what people love about JRPGs, and what is genuinely important to the genre. In doing so the game has become this wonderfully nuanced, beautiful, entertaining and emotive experience, and in my book, that makes it a masterpiece.
Room to Grow is a game that asks to be played on its own terms. And while it’s unlikely that every player will enjoy staring at the same grid-screen as the minutes turn to hours, carefully checking every permutation of movements to finally find the one golden solution, when the game finds its intended audience, the design here really sings.
Really, though, Curse of the Dead God's biggest problem is simply that it exists in a ridiculously over-saturated space, and doesn't do anything meaningful to help it stand out. In a world post-Hades, it's hard to see where this one fits into the library of any but the most over-committed roguelike fan. That's not a fault of the game in itself. Once you understand how to play it and have learned its rhythms and studied its enemies, it's perfectly competent at what it's doing. It's just lacking a bit of verve and panache, so it will never have the same appeal as its already-storied peer.