Screen Hype
HomepageScreen Hype's Reviews
When I first sat down to write my High Times review, I wasn’t sure what I’d make of the game. It’s a dating sim, a cooking sim, a visual novel, and a surprisingly thoughtful queer game wrapped up in a neon, psychedelic café where you make mood-altering doughnuts for a living. It sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous, but somehow it mostly works. High Times is one of the most ambitious indie dating sims around. Beneath its colourful chaos is a genuinely fun cooking system, excellent voice acting, and refreshingly gender-neutral character design. The writing does not reach the emotional highs it could have aimed for, but it’s an enjoyable casual dating sim that took me back to the yaoi/yuri visual novels of the 2010s.
One of my favourite elements in Helix: Descent N Ascent is the arcade machines. You find them dotted around the world, and completing their levels rewards you with access to new areas within your environment. Every level has the same premise: make your way to the other character on the opposite point of the screen. Each machine offers its own twist, based on the abilities you have been learning within that section. It mirrors the base game in a compact, stylised form. I like how this not only changes up the style of gameplay, but offers inadvertent insight into the character you’re seeking. In the world you’re in, the other character crops up on occasion, withholding the way forward. Catching up to them only causes them to push you away. In the arcade games, they make a consistent appearance, and reaching them spooks them into high-tailing it outta there.
Cat Mail Co. delivers a charming and relaxing management experience filled with adorable cats, satisfying organisation, and plenty of cosy moments. While some areas could use a little more polish, especially when it comes to Steam Deck optimisation and certain controls, the overall experience is still enjoyable. The simple gameplay loop of sorting packages, restoring the post office, and discovering pieces of its history is surprisingly satisfying. The lack of time pressure makes it easy to settle into your own routine, and the small details, like the funny customer names and decorative stamps, add a lot of personality.
Kioku: Last Summer is a fairly simple game. You spend your days exploring Kioku Island, completing activities, collecting items, and building friendships with the other characters. The mechanics are easy to understand, and the overall gameplay loop fits well with the game’s relaxed summer setting. Unfortunately, my biggest issues with the game came from the technical side of the experience, which significantly impacted my enjoyment.
DAVE THE DIVER In the Jungle doesn't feel like a DLC; it feels like the kind of expansion games used to get. It slips naturally onto the end of the base game, respects the time players have already invested, and expands the world without changing what made it special in the first place. Instead of feeling like a separate product, it feels like coming home after a long trip and discovering there are new rooms in a house you already love. I spent days playing, writing guides, cataloguing fish, and exploring every corner of Utara Lake. By the time the credits rolled, I realised something unusual had happened: At no point did I feel like I was rushing through content. Instead, the DLC kept introducing new activities, new characters, and new surprises at a pace that made me want to keep playing just one more in-game day.
Swan Song is a cosy puzzle game that feels like an adult version of a child’s shape sorter puzzle. It’s nostalgic in that way; it feels familiar even if you’ve never seen a set of puzzles quite like these. The game takes place almost entirely inside a magical music box, where your job is to guide a small swan to safety by placing musical notes in the right sequence and manipulating the tiles to create a functioning path. Beyond the box, Swan Song tells a story about grief that feels painfully real, even when one of its characters makes choices that are particularly hard to forgive. The puzzles become more complex with each chapter, but the emotional weight behind them never disappears. Although the writing sometimes falls short of its potential, Swan Song‘s journey undoubtedly offers a worthwhile experience.
There was a point during my Coffee Talk Tokyo review where I realised I had stopped thinking about the game as fiction. I was playing at around two or three in the morning (as is usual), making drinks for tired strangers, listening to people talk about grief, chronic pain, loneliness, love, anxiety, and all the tiny ways people try to survive the world, and I realised that I had seen all of this, so much of this, in the people around me. Coffee Talk Tokyo feels soft, but it's so incredibly real. While uncomfortably close to mirroring our reality, the quiet support its cast of characters offers each other is where the game makes its biggest impact. Coffee Talk Tokyo understands that connection matters, even more so now, when people feel more isolated than ever.
There’s a quiet confidence to Aphelion that I didn’t expect, paired with a stubborn refusal to make things easy for the player. It takes story, platforming, and familiar sci-fi ideas and creates something that feels thoughtful, yet oddly punishing. It pulled me in, pushed me away, and then pulled me back again just when I thought I was done with it.
Sintopia looks playful, but nothing feels simple. You juggle systems that don’t always want to cooperate, and trying to reduce the Sins of your Humus when they enter Hell quickly spirals out of control. It’s like having a queue of people who want to get on a ride that never ends and never gets shorter. All the while, everything else in the Overworld, above Hell, continues to spiral out of control as monsters attack and set things on fire. It’s funny, overwhelming, and it definitely left me feeling like Hell was managing me instead.
Dosa Divas ended up being one of those games that just… clicked for me. It doesn’t try to overwhelm you right away or throw everything at you all at once. Instead, it builds, layer by layer, until you realise you’re fully invested. In the story, in the characters, and in the gameplay loop that somehow keeps pulling you back in every time you think you’re done for the night. What really stands out is how well everything works together. The cooking, the combat, the exploration with Goddess, it all feels connected in a way that makes sense…even when it probably shouldn’t on paper. Nothing feels like it was added, “just because”. It all has a place, and it all works.
What makes the game a challenge, and this is where the core gameplay comes in, is the enemies throughout the dungeons. Hordes of various nasty hellspawn gravitate towards you, the skull, and your band of merry murderers. In Skull Horde, it’s a matter of getting from point A to point B without being overwhelmed and collecting enough resources to reinforce for the next area. Akin to Risk of Rain 2, Skull Horde uses a timer mechanic to gradually ramp up the difficulty of each run. So, the weigh up is: grind out enemies for more resources, but end up with significantly harder enemies in the next area, or rush through and end up underpowered. The final boss of each level is much more of a struggle when its minions are beefed up from a slow run-through.
At first glance, it might seem like just another game in a well-loved genre, but KuloNiku: Bowl Up! adds its own flavour with playful mechanics and a dash of personality that keeps things feeling fresh. It balances its narrative beats with hands-on cooking in a way that never overstays its welcome, creating a loop that’s as easy to sink into as your favourite comfort meal.
Fishbowl is not an easy game to pick up, and it’s not always one you want to play. The discomfort of the game is seemingly intentional, asking you to sit with Aloo’s grief as she lives through this part of her life. You can’t run, or hide, or distract yourself. As the days pass, Aloo confronts more of the memories she thought she’d forgotten, and, in doing so, she starts to heal.
Life is Strange has always been about consequence, and Reunion leans into that more than anything else. The game opens by grounding you in Max’s history: her childhood with Chloe, the storm, the impossible choice, and the grief that follows, no matter what you originally chose. By the time you reach Reunion, Max is still carrying all of it. Whether you saved Chloe or the town, that decision has shaped her adulthood in a way that never really settled. I do not believe that there could be a game anymore deserving of Chloe and Max's ending than this one. Life is Strange: Reunion builds on every major choice from Max's games, and it doesn’t ignore the major decisions that players made. Your past actions shape how this story plays out, from who Max has loved to who or what she’s lost. It's a story that we've been watching for over 11 years.
Neopets: Mega Mini Games Collection brings back the games we grew up with, and for a moment, that’s enough. You feel it straight away — the charm, the challenge, the familiarity of it all. But the longer you sit with it, the more the cracks start to show. What should have been a full return to Neopia ends up feeling like a smaller, quieter version of it, missing some of the heart that made it special.
At first glance, the game looks like a peaceful experience focused on tending and restoring a garden. Something slow, relaxing and easy to settle into. However, as I spent more time in the game, I realised there was a little more happening beneath the surface.
Honestly, I can’t recommend this game enough. It’s a perfect amalgamation of relaxation, whimsical joy, and heartwarming story beats. It’s a world that you feel compelled to return to again and again. The gameplay demands very little of you, and you can take everything at your own pace. It’s a delight of a game, and carries a very generous price tag.
Under the Island leans heavily into classic action-adventure design (parts remind me of Undertale), drawing clear inspiration from old-school titles. The moment-to-moment mechanics are easy to grasp, but the game’s limited guidance means enjoyment often depends on how comfortable you are with trial and error, and getting lost.
I was hoping for something fun and new with Crimson Capes. I am relatively fresh off SilkSong, which probably doesn’t help, but I didn’t go into it expecting something of that calibre. What I found was a game that could have had a rich world with interesting quest lines, innovative combat, and novel enemies, but really failed to deliver on every count. The world was empty, the enemies were a predictable grind, and the combat was uninspired. It’s just another 2D Souls-like that fails to bring anything new to the table.
Starsand Island was made for cosy gamers who want something familiar but softer, more modern, and more romanticised. The characters lean into a gentle shoujo anime/manga style, while the world itself focuses on atmosphere. Starsand Island is escapism in the quietest sense, whispering as the tide rolls in and the sun sets overhead. If you’ve played everything from Sun Haven to Coral Island, Fields of Mistria, Dinkum, Animal Crossing, and Disney Dreamlight Valley, you probably know the feeling I had coming into yet another cosy life sim. I wanted something new, but I also wanted to feel welcomed home. Starsand Island understands that impulse, and most of the time, it delivers.