Jake Arias

“Feeling jerked around by a quest chain? Sidestep the entire thing by stealing the quest item you need from the character who won’t hand it over. Not enjoying the combat anymore? Create a stealthy build and sneak your way through the entire story without fighting a single enemy. Want to destabilize a faction? Craft or buy explosives, activate the bomb timer, then use your pickpocketing skills to plant the explosives on their leader. That was one of my favorite things to do in Fallout, and it’s arguably even more fun to do here.”

“I remembered developer Wooden Monkeys from Save Koch, their entertainingly ambitious (but confusingly unwieldy) previous game that similarly featured a character stuck in a room, and I was interested in seeing a more mature take on that concept. Song of Farca ends up being a massive improvement. By dropping Save Koch‘s randomly assigned villain and giving the player more agency, the story is able to zoom in on a small cast of interesting characters and develop in a surprisingly compelling way.”

“This is a game that gets a lot of things right—things that bigger teams often struggle with. At the same time, the game’s smaller scope results in a paucity of content/secrets and an overabundance of filler opponents who sabotage the pacing. I enjoyed my time with Guild of Darksteel, but it ultimately feels like a third of an incredible game let down by its limited scope.”

“Somehow, these two negative qualities balance out and allow Minute of Islands to tell a story about obsession and stubbornness that’ll resonate strongly with people predisposed to those traits.”

“How much of the bigger picture you’re capable of piecing together matters, with the fate of your job and the lives of numerous different characters hanging in the balance. Lacuna is a well-written, wonderfully reactive game where many of your decisions make a very real difference.”

“Legend of Keepers released into early access a little over a year ago, and I liked it. The final version is even better; whenever you see the name Goblinz Studio, you know that regardless of whether they developed or published the game, it’s all about numerous interlocking, straightforward mechanics from which a great deal of complexity can arise. Legend of Keepers is perhaps the best example of this to date.”

“Mamiya‘s writing style is difficult to describe, meandering through slice-of-life mundanities before something odd occurs. These strange occurrences eventually pile up, giving the more upbeat “normal” parts of the storytelling a shadowy, wrong-feeling counterpart that leaves you feeling like someone’s stuck their fingers through your eye sockets and started tickling your brain.”

“At the end of the day, How to Win is an amazing journey of people making insane suggestions and developers allowing those suggestions to shape their game in major ways. The same chaotic internet energy that birthed Boaty McBoatface was given free rein, and the pun-filled craziness that resulted is simply amazing to witness.”

“Each successful playthrough unlocks a higher “resilience” level that hobbles you in some way, and by the time you reach the maximum resilience level of 5, it’s possible for some starting characters to lose the very first battle due to RNG. There’s also a lot of repetition; phobias always use the same attacks in the same order and are tiered to create a difficulty ramp, so you’ll fight a lot of the same fights over and over again while trying to build a deck that complements your character.”

“I still have a small handful of complaints such as the uselessness of the “valor” stat and the arguably questionable balance of stat shifts on the noble route in general, but I spent time exploring different outcomes related to the inquisitor path that I had initially ignored and it ended up being my favorite storyline. The underlying mechanics feel significantly better when you can plan around certain stats required for specific outcomes, too, and now that my blind fumbling isn’t handicapping me, I’ve reached several different endings and realized that there’s more reactivity here than I initially thought.”

“Viola: The Heroine’s Melody draws inspiration from Chrono Trigger, Mario 64, and Cowboy Bebop, meshing all of that together into a lighthearted, uplifting game with a story about music and self-acceptance. All of these disparate elements somehow work when paired together, and while Viola doesn’t have the combat depth or staying power of the games it borrows from, its gameplay is clearly designed to play second fiddle to its memorable cast of characters.”

“I’ve covered hundreds upon hundreds of games, many of which were terrible at one or two things, but PUSS! manages to be terrible at literally everything.”

“There was a nonzero chance that I’d be so completely engrossed in Speed Limit‘s special blend of “just one more try” masochism that I’d forget to put up a review, and that speaks to what makes it so entertaining.”

“I don’t understand why this exists.”

“Calling this game unpolished would be an understatement (in many ways, it’s outright broken), but the story is filled with enough absurd turns to work as a semi-comedic adventure, and the mechanics blend several genres together into something enjoyably old-school. Rune II: Decapitation Edition took its lemons and made lemonade.”

“Sometimes, genre standards exist for a very good reason. Paw Paw Paw is an adorable beat-em-up about an animal resistance fighting against a king insistent on getting everyone in his kingdom into pants, but it makes the mistake of forgetting to include invincibility frames, which means that you can be damaged by several enemies at the same time, dying instantly to endgame opponents whenever they attack at the same time. This isn’t just possible, but more likely than not to occur every time you play through late-game levels thanks to the introduction of opponents who resist stun when attacked, allowing them to kill you instantly in the middle of your attack.”

“The original Planescape: Torment is the very first game I ever reviewed here. It was an awful writeup that was eventually wiped from existence. Now, eight years and 499 reviews later, I finally have the writing ability required to describe why this game is so important to me and many others.”

“Noita is a game that I generally liked when it was in early access, but the problems that I listed over a year ago have been exacerbated, and the parts that I liked have been minimized by a barrage of new content that makes it harder than ever to piece together a worthwhile arsenal.”

“It’s not that Ikenfell is outrageously bad or anything—at least, not until the very end—but it suffers from being unnecessarily cumbersome and tedious, sporting a lack of subtlety that eventually comes across as preachy. More than anything, though, I struggle to forgive the fact that it isn’t a tactical RPG at all. Ikenfell is a standard jRPG with a positioning system that barely matters thanks to long-range attacks and enemies’ penchant for moving large distances and teleporting you around.”

“It’s when you begin to view Fallen Angel as a gameplay-centric game that things begin to click; between the unexpected openness of the world and the new weapons, perks, and melee attacks that are constantly being handed to you, you’re always given more than enough to break the difficulty wide open. And even when you feel absurdly empowered, it’s still possible for Fallen Angel to humble you with unexpectedly close fights.”