Gabriel Toschi

The Case of the Worst Day Ever - Review

2026-06-06T00:00:00Z

"Fill-in-the-blank" became a staple on mystery and detective games in recent years. In a way, it's a simple but effective interaction to ask the player if they really solved the puzzle when still giving it a little bit of help. Sometimes, you are completing a data structure - like Obra Dinn's notebook or Roottrees' family tree - but you can just fill in paragraphs about the plot. Probably not the first to do so, but the Golden Idol series is probably the responsible for popularizing the "retelling" gameplay.

When I saw The Case of the Worst Day Ever for the first time, the comparison with Golden Idol was obvious and interesting: it looked like the same gameplay, but instead of magical objects killing people, your quest is to understand what happened on a bad day of an ordinary family. And, to be fair, the atmosphere of the game is really that, and when I've realized, I was two hours in trying to understood how a teenage break-up shaked up the whole school that day, and it was really funny to be a "detective" on those type of cases.

My main problem with the game was with the puzzle philosophy that it presents to you after the first 2 or 3 cases because the atmosphere can be cozy, but the challenge is totally not. Instead of being based on a continous narrative, every person had their own separated thing happening that day, and besides some text messages shared between levels, there's no knowledge you can bring from a stage to another. Every new "investigation" is a blank slate, on a new environment, with new characters and set pieces, what's not wrong by itself, but it does not help on the complexity level for each case.

On other games of the genre, you have a hard-to-complete paragraph to fill, and then other "extra" puzzles to solve that helps as a guide, like finding all the names of the people involved, for example. Those puzzles act as a "logic checkpoint": they are easier, but gives you direction to understand the scene and what's happening. After you finish them, you have enough context to look at the level again and really get the plot that is being told. It's a way of guiding you without giving you hints or answers.

The Case of the Worst Day Ever has the same elements, but their roles are... reversed? These name lists are the true challenge, but they also feels like a more obscure Logic Grid (or even a clue Sudoku). The amount of cross-references you must have to solve a name, trying to make logic jumps to get a conclusion, is insane when you realize you're trying to discover the name of the dog that poops strange, you know? And then, the "plot paragraph" is mostly an afterthought or just describes the scene - a lot of times, I knew what to fill immediately, but the game decided to obscure the names just because they can.

The atmosphere is nice, and I can see people that wiil like the challenge it proposes, but The Case of the Worst Day Ever wasn't for me. The philosophy behind the puzzles didn't sparked great moments and made me, strangely, feel overwhelmed and bored at the same time. I truly believe that good mystery games doesn't need to kill someone to be interesting, but I think there's probably better ways of making me discover the gossip of a bad day.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Elementallis - Review

2026-05-03T00:00:00Z

I know that the "third dimension" was a big step on videogames, but I still have a corner of my heart to keep loving 2D top-down games. There is something about how approachable and dynamic those games are that the complex 3D cameras never really got it. Maybe this is the reason I follow Elementallis since its announcement in 2020: a 2D top-down game that is trying to bring something new to the table.

Before starting talking about the game, yes, Elementallis is inspired (a lot) by older The Legend of Zelda games. The world that keeps opening, the sword and shield combo, the dungeons with boss keys and special items, the pushing block puzzles, the heart containers, the bigger wallets, even some types of enemies. Specially on structure, this game feels like a love letter to the 16-bit Nintendo classics and, to be fair, it's a really competent one. There is nothing mind blowing on dungeon design or something like that, but the team knows what 2D Zelda does better and found their way to do it.

Now that's already said, let's focus on what makes Elementallis an unique experience, starting by the presentation of its world. Visually, the game is obviously inspired by the limited palettes of yesterday, but doesn't follow those restrictions as rules. The world of Elementallis is pretty, specially when colorful lights shine through the pixels. Although every biome is fairly common place - like a desert, then a cold mountain, then a volcano, etc. - the connection between them in the world map is a really cool touch.

That said, the most unique artistic aspect of the game is the narrative. Instead of being an acclaimed hero, the last hope against The Evil and loved wherever you go, you are actually a misfit, moved by shame. Elementallis is set after a cataclysm that destroyed the elements of nature by some rogue elementalists, a group of people that studied and controlled their power.

Wherever you go, the locals still blame them for the state of the world and this reflects on how your character also fits in the story of each region. There isn't a lot of big setpieces, but there's some cool takes on how different groups of people behave when faced with a disaster, according to their laws and beliefs. Even with small dialogues, I felt invested to understand the story behind each village and how the element changed their lives.

Gameplay-wise, the great selling point is, of course, conquering the elements! Inside each temple, you can find the power of a different element - like fire, water, wind or ice - that can be learned by your elemental and used as part of your arsenal from that point in the story. Think of key items you find on Zelda dungeons, but a level above: all elements are useful both for battling and for solving puzzles or just traversing the world.

Since the announcement, this was the feature that got my immediate attention and now that I played, I feel that this build-up of years didn't helped a lot, although the implementation is fair and interesting. Some of the elemental powers really give you ways to experiment and try new things, both in traversal or battling. I loved to use my fireball as a ranged weapon, freeze enemies with heavy shields to backstab them or dashing through the map as a feather in the wind. Although the game doesn't particularly encourage it, combining elements also create interesting effects.

At the same time, most of the powers could only be used on specific targets or are too situtational to be used freely on battles. Like, it's great to break rocks now, but it's strange I can only break one specific type of rock, you know? Those situations aren't too much different from Zelda items, for example, what makes me a little disappointed. Seven years ago, when I saw it for the first time, I think it was cooler, but nowadays it can feel a little bit underbaked - specially with other games on the market doing the "combinatorics of elements" so well like the indie game Rhell or even Nintendo's own Echoes of Wisdom.

If you want to look into it just as a Zelda love letter, it's a really good one. But Elementallis must also be praised for what it does on their own terms. With an interesting narrative point-of-view, beautiful visuals and a well-implemented element system to help you traverse the world, this team knows what makes a great 2D top-down adventure game. It may not have been as impressive as I expected seven years ago, but it's definitely as much fun as I imagined.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Gecko Gods - Review

2026-04-22T00:00:00Z

Climbing was always a common verb on platformers, mostly as a goal or a challenge to be conquered. In the modern world, however, climbing became more of a system in itself. You approach a steep mountain and a small, green circle appears at the side of your character and starts decreasing: now you are on a resource management minigame. "You can climb everything...", they say, just before showing that you will need to think every meter to not fall and die.

That said, Gecko Gods tells "you can climb everything" with a period at the end. A small period on the format of a cute, small gecko that can actually climb everything. On the quest of awakening old reptile gods, you just look at any surface and go to it, probably pressing the Run button to go faster. Our little gecko can attach even to the ceiling, or dash through small gaps to keep going.

And it's weirdly satisfying to do so! Because climbing is so easy, the game becomes less of a puzzle on how to get somewhere, but a constant quest for exploration: "What's behind this pillar?" and you just go because you can. This freedom is intentional, and the game also has a lot of collectables to find, like colored insects, hidden relics and runes that you can use to change the color and pattern of your gecko skin.

What's on Gecko Gods besides a great climbing mechanic and a cute protagonist? Unfortunately, not much. Although you play on an archipelago with different themed islands, they are look mostly the same with light brown rocks and old ruins, what makes it even harder to localize yourself in the map sometimes. You can encounter some cool setpieces, like an isle focused on boat navigating, but it's hard to not look into the huge world in front of you as a big stone blob.

Gameplay-wise, I don't think it had found many ways of using your gecko powers and it repeats itself really fast. You have some specific puzzle types - like 8-piece sliding puzzles and magnetic ball pushing - but it seems the game was stretched to be bigger than necessary. Even the dash is "re-used" as a battle system of sorts that isn't deep enough to be interesting and becomes just a minute of button mashing. Even the good climbing gameplay became a little bit boring after hours of exploring the same environments over and over.

At the end of the day, Gecko Gods is a really cool game that goes against the flow to give climbing on videogames a new and interesting meaning, but I would not ask you to force it to the end if you think you've already had enough fun. Find the collectibles you want, color your gecko as much you like, and no wall will be a real obstacle if you know your tail enough. But the gods of those islands can wait for you to keep back to the game one day, it's fine.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Neopets: Mega Mini Games Collection - Review

2026-04-13T00:00:00Z

As a kid that actually used a lot of time on children 2000s MMO games, Neopets was a household name for a while. Even before Flash appeared in the scene - but embracing it beautifully later - the World of Neopia was part of childhoods across the globe. The Altador Plot, the Puzzle Adventure PC game, NeoQuest, the Moltara discovery, the now-defunct Key Quest... So many!

But, as it would be common for all those children 2000s MMOs, capitalism got in the way. Neopets was sold to a company that imploded the game from inside (and even tried NFT bullshit at some time) before it was sold back to actual fans and old employees that had the mission to keep Neopets alive. For my experience some years ago, I don't think they actually know what to do with the game, though.

A lot changed in the past 30 years: small, vertical screens are the default, Flash (and all the content made with it) is essentially gone, and the user base is divided by old players that accumulated a lot of Neopoints and rare items and new (or returning) players realizing that getting those resources is mostly impossible nowadays. How to make Neopets work in 2026 where most of your content is gone and you don't know exactly who to target?

Neopets: Mega Mini Games Collection - The Neopian Arcade Odyssey is their next try, with a huge title and a huge promise: a collection of the most beloved (and now "lost") Flash games of the website, remastered for PC and consoles. This new software allows you to connect to NeoPass, the new account system for the Neopets brand, and send your scores to the website as you would to in the past. Essentially, instead of remaking those games for free in the web, they package with a little bow as a sellable product.

At a bare minimum, the concept works. Apart from some strange bugs, yes, you can play 25 original Flash games from Neopets.com that aren't available anymore officially. You have some classic favorites like Usuki Frenzy, Snowmuncher and Extreme Herder, and I would lie if I said that my inner child wasn't happy playing Spinacles again. Some of other games are just "legally distinct inspirations": Meerca Chase is Snake with steps, Kass Basher is just YetiSports and they actually ported their Mahjong Solitaire too. I think they just chosen the fastest ones to port that could be controlled with a D-Pad.

The collection also features "new, exclusive content" that also doesn't justify as selling point at all: Starlight Symphony is a really bad Guitar Hero clone (Club Penguin did it better decades ago), Turmac Roll 3D is the result of a "I remade Neopets on Unreal Engine 5" YouTube video and the story mode is, at its best, forgettable. If you are going to buy this, you are probably going for the old stuff.

It's also important to talk about what isn't present in this collection. I wasn't expecting a level of care and extra content as Digital Eclipse's Gold Master Series, but as a Neopets fan, the Mega Mini Games is disappointing. Nothing besides the actual gameplay moments were ported, and this means that even the main menus of the minigames were replaced by boring, yellow buttons. Those versions aren't a 1:1 recreation either, and the original version of those games aren't available, not even on the PC version.

At the end, you have a collection made of small Flash minigames made with little care and being sold as a full premium price point for consoles. I don't think the new generation of players will choose to play a Snake clone instead of any other game, and old fans can be a little happy before finding all that's missing. Not even the argument of making those minigames acessible again works: a lot of the games chosen for the collection are already available in HTML5 form, for free, right now, like Hasee Bounce, Destruct-O-Match, Ice Cream Machine and the original Turmac Roll.

Who's buying this, then? Half of the games aren't impressive, the new content is just a joke, it doesn't work as preservation and online players can already play a lot of them anyways. It's hard to not look into Mega Mini Games Collection as an easy cash grab for people that remember Neopets from decades ago. Although I think a little bit of care is put into this, the lack of priority and focus makes all things Neopets, including the brand as a whole, still lost in a modern world. I really wish to Neopia to be back as a great place to play and have fun, but we are not there yet.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Review: Mika and the Witch's Mountain (early access)

2024-08-21T00:00:00Z

Some games need to show me something so hype can start growing — a screenshot, a cool GIF or maybe a trailer — but a privileged group of titles can make me excited just for telling me the concept. Like, how not to love the idea of being a little witch that does deliveries with her broom? From the devs of Koa and the Five Pirates of Mara (a cool and competent 3D platformer that I liked), it comes Mika and the Witch's Mountain, for now in early access.

The story follows Mika, an apprentice witch that felt down a big mountain and needs money to repair her broom and go back to the top. The only way to get a salary down the island is starting a delivery job, an adventure that also makes her learn a lot about the villagers. The plot of Mika and the Witch's Mountain is cute like a children cartoon: Mika, of course, is the best developed character (and I really love her), but the others, although they talk about important things (like their insecurities), are mostly NPC footnotes.

"Easy but fun" is the best way to describe the gameplay of Mika and the Witch's Mountain. Mika's broom is totally focused on horizontal movement through gliding. The whole idea is learn to use the wind to go to higher places, but it gets specially interesting when you start upgrading the "vehicle" allowing for small vertical boosts that can be used everywhere. Although simple to control, the challenge of not bumping into an obstacle with a box (and then breaking it) is interesting and even a little hard until you learn the layout of the island.

The map is way smaller then I expected, but it needed to be because of the tiny scope of the game anyways. After the first hour, you already start to recognize the place and learning new shortcuts — it's rewarding as mastering the controls. The extra deliveries and collectables available to find (and drop) are the only "extra challenges" you have outside the main path, but at least they ask for this knowledge of the island and the characters you gather during the game.

It can be strange to see a game so complete like this being on early access, but it make sense when you see how much content is available right now on Mika and the Witch's Mountain. The main story is complete and you can finish it in a couple hours, even collecting all the extras. But there's so much more I would love to do here, like exploring the ruins! Fortunately, this and a lot more is already confirmed in the EA roadmap, so I can only wait to see what more adventures Mika will have in the future.

Mika and the Witch's Mountain is a small and cozy adventure that feels eve more magical and relaxing experience than some of other of its type. Mika is lovable, and controlling her through the skies is even more lovable. There's no difficulty on the quests here, and you would want to look somewhere else for this type of challenge, but if you only want to relax, I ordered a magic game for you and I'm just waiting for the delivery girl to show up flying on her broom...

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Review: House of Golf 2

2024-08-17T00:00:00Z

I shit talked about golf so many times in this blog already, but I cannot stop myself: with all the respect for players of the sport, I think golf is really boring. But mini golf is a whole other story! Smaller, faster, funnier and crazier, this is a thing that I really wanted to try in real life, but I'm always down to try a new digital version of mini golf. It's like pizza: not always great, but almost always OK and enjoyable. House of Golf 2 is too much like a not-great pizza.

It's easy to summarize what House of Golf 2 has to offer: a 3D mini golf simulator "themed" around being really small in a common house, playing on rooms like a kitchen or the garage. You start with only one course, but you can unlock more getting trophies by achieving good scores — in true golf fashion, you want to finish a hole in less swings than the hole's par limit. The only way you can progress here is by getting mastery of the controls and nothing else; or you will be stuck with the three beginner courses forever.

My problem here is how bland the game feels, from the visuals to the gameplay. Yes, it's beautiful to see photorealistic cans of beans and frisbees, but not even the raw power of Unreal Engine 5 can compensate the boring art direction from House of Golf 2. On paper, the concept of looking into a house from the "really small" perspective can open a world of possibilities — Mario Party DS have done a soap surfing minigame in 2007 and it's still one of the best things of the franchise — but here it's just a excuse to have random props scattered in the floor to act as obstacles.

To be fair, not even as obstacles sometimes. The gameplay on House of Golf 2 is simple but works, with easy to learn controls and a good camera, but the course design was not my cup of tea. There's a lot of ways to get "Out of Bounds" and making the ball restart, specially when it happens because the ball slips through obstacles. As I said before, the game forces you into this state of mastery: if you don't play well, you cannot have a way to learn with your mistakes than just replaying the same boring course ever and ever again.

At its best, House of Golf 2 is a working piece of game software that you can use to play decent 3D mini golf in pretty but uninspired environments. At its worst, the game doesn't do a good job of take advantage of the potential of your theme to attract attention, provide ways for different types of players to enjoy your content, or even have levels that don't just look like a bunch of objects thrown on the floor. It's like an OK pizza, if you are in the mood for it.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Review: Slash Quest

2024-08-14T00:00:00Z

Although as an fully adult human I understand why exclusive games exist and how it still is and will always be a way of getting funding, I'm always sad when a title is behind a service or a platform, specially when it's not tied to a specific control scheme. Of all the subscriptions we have today, the one I most ignore is the Apple Arcade, because I don't have an iOS device or a Mac, so I need to wait the games to break free from their monochrome prison to enjoy them.

The last one going out was Slash Quest, released originally in the service in 2020 but it was only now being live on Steam. It was actually created by two Brazilian dev teams during a game jam — Big Green Pillow (from 2015 multiplayer Porcunipine) and Mother Gaia (from the awaited Posthumous Investigation) — and I was really excited to see what all of those people could do together.

Spin and grow

Slash Quest tells the story of Shepherd, a little farmer boy that finds a magical talking sword called Swordie (!) and goes on a quest to find the blade's missing queen in a world full of monsters. From the start, the charisma from those two characters (and, to be fair, the whole cast after them) got me totally engaged with the game, even more than the plot itself. It's so cool how Shep is naive and only "talk" using emojis, but Swordie can't stop speaking about how it is a royal weapon and must be treated as such.

It's impossible to start a review about Slash Quest without talking about controls. The whole idea here is that Swordie is the "hero" of the adventure and Shep is just going along to move it. Instead of just using a directional input, you use the shoulder buttons (or the analog stick) to spin Swordie in a circle and a button to make Shep run forward. It feels like old tank controls, but more fluid, dynamic and a little bit slippery.

Almost all of the fun in the game is understanding how to control the duo, what makes even some mundane levels into something worth of trying. Another really satisfying aspect of this movement is there's a lot of destructive elements in the scenario, so even you fail to move them in a straight line, you still feel good cutting trees and signs while listening them pop like a bubble.

The "magic" behind Swordie, besides not being able to stop brag about itself, is the other gameplay gimmick of Slash Quest. Although the blade feels small when you start a stage, Swordie gets bigger for every enemy you kill, at the point it can actually kill all enemies in the screen in just one rotation. Although it adds to the controlling challenge — every time you crash into a stone, you lose a bit of size — there's not a lot of uses for this besides the simple combat parts.

Cutting layers

Slash Quest's main story is, to be fair, relatively easy, but not in a bad way. You have 16 levels and 4 bosses, split in 4 worlds with some generic themes, like "the lava one" and "the ice one". The moments change between small combat arenas and some puzzles that requires using Swordie itself — like pushing levers to open paths or put the blade on fire to burn obstacles. The progression is linear and, besides getting in a bit of trouble to solve some challenges in the last world, it felt more like a cozy adventure, perfect to relax after a day of work.

But rushing out to finish a Slash Quest level is the worst thing you can do. The best part of playing is trying to find extra paths and treasure chests that give you gems to personalize the duo (or money to buy and upgrade other gems). There are some passive and active abilities that can be useful on combat, but 80% of the unlockables are customization options for Shep's outfit and Swordie's swoosh trail. Every stage has at least six chests and some of them are actual cool challenges to overcome, specially if you think the main story feels lackluster.

If you still need one more step on complexity, Slash Quest still has a lot of extra challenges to be played that will require a lot of mastery of Shep, Swordie and the strange controls. Some are high scoring minigames, but some of them are hard tasks to be done in special maps, like surviving a specific amount of time with too much enemies in the screen.

Although the prize for finish them were even more customization — including some seasonal event ones, I got a lot of sport gear because of the Olympics —, it's definitely not cozy as the story levels and I didn't engaged that much with them (besides the reflective arrow minigame which is really cool). That said, I can see how many people will love this more than the rest of Slash Quest content for sure.

Without cutting out (!) too much details, I really enjoyed my time in Slash Quest. It's a nice package of mechanics and charisma that isn't always spectacular, but knows how to utilize its gimmick well enough to create a fun, engaging and really cute adventure, with a lot of layers that allows players to choose how much they want to go deep in the game without blocking progression. I really happy this snobbish sword is finally free to have quests outside the Apple realm, and if you just want a cozy time with it, I just ask that you hold on tight and take your dizzy medication....

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Review: SCHiM

2024-08-09T00:00:00Z

There's a lot of ways of discovering games nowadays. Amid so many conferences, announcements and digital stores, one of my favorites is just finding a cool GIF on social media — and that's how I and half of the web came across SCHiM. Created by two Dutch developers, Ewoud van der Werf and Nils Slijkerman, reverses what you probably think about a 3D platformer: instead of the objects themselves, what if you could just only jump on the shadows?

We are presented to creatures called "schims": they are the soul and the spirit of everything that exists, living in our literal shadows. They never should be separated from their owners but, during the story of the game, we follow a schim that was separated from their owner, a young man with a lot of problems in his personal and work life. Your goal is to help the schim reunite with the human, going along with his journey of adulthood and self-discovery.

The main mechanic to achieve this goal is, well, jumping from shadow to shadow. Controlling the schim feels great, and after the first contact, I was already in a rush, chaining a lot of jumps with no problems. Instead of freeing controlling the camera, you always have four fixed perspectives to change — and some of them will not help you — that you need to constantly be changing to see the path forward.

Moving the shadow creature can be fun, but I was presented to SCHiM because of the visuals and they definitely exceeded expectations. The vibes are perfect and each map feels almost a Tetris Effect-like game of the classic Frogger. The contrast between light and shadow are presented in a full color palette, with the tones changing constantly while it remains very beautiful to look at. The soundtrack, made by Brazilian studio Moonsailor, not only fits very well with the game's proposal, but it will also be a good choice for moments of relaxation in the future.

It's strange putting this way but... my big problem with SCHiM is that there's too much game to be played. Yes, it's great to move the little creature and seeing beautiful pixels in the screen, but the game drags on a lot without presenting enough content for that. I loved when I find a new object to interact, and some special moments in the game are really creative, like the nighttime levels, for example. However, new things were so scarce that it felt like I was living an eternal loop inside my own shadow.

The monotony was present even on the scenarios themselves. The game goes from some really interesting concepts — like trying to understand how the shadows work in the sea at the beach — to the 10th city level in a row. Like, it felt like half of SCHiM is just jumping into cars' shadows and crossing the roads of an orange city. Those waves of being surprised and bored were really strange, and not even the story was really being developed in most of those times.

At the end, I just wanted SCHiM to be a shorter game. The visuals are truly perfect, the controls are great to learn and going with, and the story, although a little too much abstract, was interesting too. But all of this lives in the shadow of a repetitive set of levels that I couldn't jump off from. There's a lot of good things to experience here (specially if you like relaxing titles), but this is a game that will be best served in small portions during a week instead of a long session.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Review: Harmony's Odyssey

2024-07-30T00:00:00Z

I love puzzle games, but not every puzzle game I like needs to be big and complex. Sometimes, I only need a simple jigsaw puzzle to solve when I listen to a podcast and zone out after a stressful day. Beautiful pictures, a good interface, no timers and I can chill connecting pieces as this was the only thing I have to do (it isn't). Harmony's Odyssey has almost all of that, but not in a pleasing package.

There's a small story being told here: a little witch girl had a cat problem with her magic wand and all the world was broken into scrambled pieces. Your goal in Harmony's Odyssey is to click in pairs of blocks to swap their positions and remount the dioramas using only the broken objects as clues. To be fair, it works but nothing really gets your attention. The scenarios are really colorful (sometimes too much colorful) and it's easy to solve each puzzle.

The real problem of Harmony's Odyssey to me isn't that core gameplay, but the bad decisions that were used to wrap it. I'm a huge fan of interfaces that only uses symbols to convey all the buttons and actions, but I still can't understand what some things mean here. Is this a bonus level or a required challenge? Am I buying an upgrade or unlocking an achievement? Where is the next puzzle to solve??? I wanted answers, but only got frustration.

And when I think I found my way through the bizarre UI, I found minigames in Harmony's Odyssey. Trusting your classic game knowledge (because all of them are inspired by old magazine puzzles), the game doesn't have real explanation of how they work. I know there was a "spot the differences" minigame, but apparently I can't miss a click? And you can get upgrades to help you, but they only works in some specific styles? Once again, I wish I had understood what was happening there.

Even if you're not bothered by the confusing interface or frustrating minigames, all you'll get in Harmony's Odyssey is still mediocre jigsaw puzzles. The dioramas themselves are cute and colorful, and solving them isn't necessarily bad, but I believe there are best options in the stores if you just want to put some beautiful pieces together. I was expecting some magic in my relaxing time, but I don't think this magical wand is my type.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Review: Lorelei and the Laser Eyes

2024-07-28T00:00:00Z

It's hard to me to point out a favorite game development team, but a huge contender would be Simogo. In 2019, this Swedish team released Sayonara Wild Hearts, a pop music interactive album that was so cathartic of an experience that I couldn't get enough words to describe how much I loved (besides being the best game I played on 2022). Perfect aesthetics with perfect gameplay, this combination made me follow the team and wait for their new creation in the future.

And then, five years later, what I played was completely different and outside of what I expected to come from them. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes doesn't have the same amount of colors, beats or frenzy action from Sayonara, but the mystery I encountered on this black-and-white hotel was, probably, one of the best video game mysteries I solved in years, specially for the part of me that loves puzzles and escape room.

There isn't a former introduction to the world of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. You start the game and you meet the woman you will control during the game, outside her car with a big mansion in the horizon. The controls are really simple — just a directional input and a button being used in different ways through context — but your goal in the game is not. Until my second hour, I was just walking, solving puzzles, collecting documents and assimilating a lot of the concepts presented in the narrative.

The real truth is that I shouldn't say too much about what happened in that hotel, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a game to be experienced, not told about. But, even if I wanted to, I don't think I could. As good mysteries are, this one has a lot of pieces, but how they match and what's their true meaning is your job.

There are some interesting themes discussed during this non-linear narrative (like what means to be an artist or the power of true memories), but what really happens is to you to discover. Seeing theories from other players in the web, and realizing how different they were from mine and how they make sense even so... It's great how the same game can make us find our own truth.

If I can't talk a lot about the plot, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes also shines in its marvelous gameplay. Taking inspirations from different types of puzzle and exploration games, you will be presented of a scenario really close to an escape room. During your journey through the hotel, the woman get items like keys and, but also find a lot of books, notes and other documents. And, obviously, locks from different types, including ones that will only open with the right number or word.

As a big fan of escape rooms myself, I truly enjoy the puzzles that were presented in the game. The Simogo team had an amazing job of connecting them in some way to the plot (or at least, the themes that are presented during the story), an amazing feat of a genre that is known for out-of-place enigmas. No puzzle felt unfair, and the game awards the ones that pay attention to every detail you encounter. Even if you are a master of puzzles, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes will have something that will make you surprised.

For example, one of the first moments that got me unprepared is how the game breaks one of the golden rules of escape rooms — a key or code is used for one lock only, and can be discarded after it. But not here. There are some important names and dates that aren't only crucial to the plot, but also the starting point for solving a lot of the puzzles presented. Once I realized that and started paying more attention in the actual answers I was getting, a whole new layer opened up for me.

The fame Lorelei and the Laser Eyes got was "the game that you will take notes" — and it's true, but not that much more than others in the genre. Of course, you will probably find more plot connections between the puzzles if you write everything down, but the game itself has a lot of quality of life features to help you with the enormous amount of things to remember. You can look into every document whenever you want from the "Photographic memory" option, and the game register all your dead ends in the "Mental notes" section.

And I need to be careful not to spoil the surprise (and believe me, they are incredible surprises), but one of the highest moments in the game for me is how Lorelei and the Laser Eyes present the players with different and remarkable interfaces, inviting you to explore the same location (and more) in new ways. This not only just stacks one more layer in the already amazing storytelling, but also allows for more puzzle types to be included in a natural form.

I don't like to write about Simogo games because they always get me with no words at the end. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a unique experience that uses the medium and the genre at maximum to tell pieces of a mysterious and interesting story — and asks you to fill in the missing parts. With perfect aesthetics that keeps getting better and fair puzzles that never underestimate the players, I don't think I can recommend enough a stay at this hotel: for those who like to put their minds to work, or at least for the ones that can't sleep without finding the truth.

Review: Halls of Torment (early access)

2024-07-04T00:00:00Z

Although I always say that mechanics and rules are the most important part of games to me (and it's true), I never forget the power of well-done aesthetics. Sometimes, I can see a title that I probably would love to play, but I don't because of the visuals or the story not being exactly my cup of tea. Fortunately, there are also moments that I can jump over my preconceptions and try something really new to me, and this was the case of Halls of Torment.

In early access for more than a year already, anyone who sees a screenshot of Halls of Torment can remember of some classic dungeon crawlers of the past, specially the first Diablo game from 1997. From the isometric hellish maps to the gray, golden interface (and the big red sphere for your character's life), it's all there, and, at the same time, it's also easy to see a modern game underneath this blanket of nostalgia. I never actually played the Diablo series, but I always loved old PC games; even if conquering the layers of Hell isn't my first choice for a vacation, pre-rendered graphics have a special place in my heart.

That said, Halls of Torment can be defined as a loot-chasing, action game with procedural levels, but not in the way you expect from Diablo. In fact, it is a bullet heaven game, inspired by other modern classics like Vampire Survivors, where you have small runs of constant character evolution and content unlocking — this was what got my attention to the game in the first place. And, to be fair, I think it is one of the most impressive in the genre that I ever seen, specially in its quest to find its own mechanical identity.

The most defining aspect of Halls of Torment for me is a greater focus on action gameplay rather than creating builds. Yes, you still need to choose a character to start, and then keep choosing what attributes to improve when you level up, but that idea of getting a new set of crazy weapons every time and becoming the "source of the bullet hell" isn't really true. In fact, I think that I got less options that I wanted in each run, and they started to feel too similar after some hours. New powers are way rarer, and the choosing is more between "+3% Range" or "+0.1% Critical Damage".

But, at the same time, when controlling the character themselves, this was the hardest bullet heaven I ever played. In Vampire Survivors, it was important to keep moving and learn some crowd control techniques to win later levels, but here on Halls of Torment, if you stop moving, you will die. Enemies not only can catch up to you easily, but a lot of them have special techniques to damage you even from afar. All the bosses have ranged attacks that you must avoid at all costs, to the point where dealing damage ends up not even being the priority. It can be a bullet heaven on paper, but you will feel itself in a bullet hell easily (pun intended).

To my personal taste, this was not really my preferred concept in the genre, but it's because I mostly play bullet heaven games to disassociate from my real life problems and relax while I see pretty lights flashing. If you always felt that those games could be too boring, Halls of Torment probably is what you looking for. With more focus on how you perform a run than the build you choose to create — including options for manual aim and attacking — I think the game lies down on the other side of the genre's spectrum and I love its existence because of that.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Review: POOOOL

2024-07-02T00:00:00Z

When two similar things touch, they become a new one, probably bigger. There isn't any innuendo here, I'm just talking about one of the most prolific game mechanics of the casual market in the past years. I can almost remember the feeling of me as a teenager getting 2048 for the first time and just bragging with my friends, and now Suika Game is a world fever — I personally prefer the more polished and space-y Cosmic Collapse, though.

One of the most interesting takes on the collision merge formula that I played was POOOOL, created by game creator Noah King. Instead of watermelons or planets, your job is to combine colored billiards balls to get bigger ones, with the main goal of merging two largest pink balls before the table gets full. A new ball appears at the bottom of the table every turn, and you can use the mouse to control the direction and speed to send it to collision course.

Talking this way, it's hard to understand at first why POOOOL isn't just one more Suika clone. In the original watermelon game, all you can do is drop the fruits and expect them to shift positions as gravity wants to — probably the most frustrating part of the game for me. Here, because you have the power to send new balls wherever you want in the table, you can do a lot of trick shots and interesting plays to get even more combos.

Playing it felt way more engaging, because each new action could result in more points if I planned correctly. Seriously, I had just started the game just to see if it would run well on my computer and two hours passed in the blink of an eye. I still haven't been able to put together two pink balls, but I will keep trying.

That said, I think POOOOL has a lot of room to improve too. I found some strange bugs concerning screen sizes (that I think are already being addressed by the dev) and the game lacks a lot of accessibility features, like remappable controls and colorblind support. I would also love more challenges to overcome than just getting higher scores every time. All those things don't got in the way of my experience, but they could be a problem for other people.

Among all Suika-like games available today (and, to be fair, even counting the original 2048 and its clones), POOOOL is probably my favorite. The idea of merging objects by colliding them is still addicting as you may expect, but the freedom you have flinging the balls through the table makes every moment engaging. All I need now is a mobile version so I can play when I'm on the bathroom and my life will be completed.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

My 10+ favorite games from Steam Next Fest / Summer Showcases 2024

2024-06-17T00:00:00Z

Oh my God, I forgot how packed June was for gaming announcements! Even with the death of E3, the month still is a moment when dev teams around the world, big and small, show how their projects are going (and hopeful some launch dates too). Although a lot of people is excited for new things from Xbox, Ubisoft or who just paid Geoff Keighley the most money, the indie showcases is what sells the month from me.

Like, I almost wishlisted half of this year's Wholesome Direct, loved to see the amazing works showed on Guerrilla Collective 2024 and I was a proud Latino seeing our people saving the gaming industry on the amazing Latin American Games Showcase!

And, as the cherry at top of a delicious chocolate cake, the Steam Next Fest gave me the opportunity to try a lot of those games (and many others) and get a glimpse of what the future reserves in the next months and years. I even played some demos that aren't in the event, but were showed in other presentations too!

So, let's start my recap of June 2024's Next Fest + all the summer showcases! Of course, this list will reflect my personal taste on games, so please check the Next Fest page on Steam to more demos, and GamesRecap to every other event you may have missed. I'll be focusing more on the demos I've played, and finish with some extra games that had trailers.

LOK Digital

Letibus Design/Icedrop Games/Draknek & Friends, releasing in 2024

I discovered the original LOK last year and the concept of a physical word search book about little creatures delighted me — that said, LOK Digital is gonna be the perfect adaptation of the concept! In each level, you have to find some special keywords and use their abilities to cover all the grid (like LOK, that allows you to fill another any cell). New rules are added in a great pace, and you have to discover some of the interactions by yourself too. This will be one of the greatest puzzle games of the year, no doubt! Launches in 2024 for PC.

SCHiM

Ewoud van der Werf/Nils Slijkerman/Extra Nice/PLAYISM, releasing in July 18th 2024

I actually had the pleasure of play an Exclusive Preview of SCHiM, a 3D platformer where you control a creature that can only jump into the literal shadows of the objects that are on the map. You probably have seen a GIF of it on social media and the game seemed really cool, but I can affirm now: playing it is also marvelous! There's a puzzle aspect involved of finding the right path through the shadows, and the story that's been told during the levels feels interesting too. Launches next month on PC, Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4/5.

Mythwrecked: Ambrosia Island

Polygon Treehouse/Whitethorn Games, releasing in Q3 2024

Being stranded in a mysterious island, trying to explore to know its secrets and find a way to go home? I'm interested. But also your isle friends are Greek gods with amnesia, and you need to help them recover their memories? SIGN ME IN! I've been following Mythwrecked: Ambrosia Island for a while now, and I was really happy to get a sneak peek of the gameplay on the demo. It's really exploration-focused (what I love) with some puzzles here and there. Totally a game I will play in the future. Launches in Q3 2024 on PC.

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo

Pocket Trap/PM Studios, Inc., releasing soon

This was one of the big surprises of the month to me! Created by Brazilian team Pocket Trap, Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo doesn't hide its Game Boy Advance influence, and it can look like a modern-day spiritual successor to Zelda: Minish Cap. That said, Pipistrello is way more fast and fluid than Link ever was: the yo-yo attacks are not only great for combat, but a great tool for environmental puzzles. There isn't a launch date yet, but I know that I'll be there to fight crime with my yo-yo.

WHAT THE CAR?

Triband, releasing 9th September 2024

The team at Triband lives in my heart since they transformed the most boring sport ever in one of the greatest video games that I played in WHAT THE GOLF?, and this is their next step! Breaking free from Apple Arcade prison, WHAT THE CAR? has simpler controls, but the demo has all of the non-sense jokes and concepts that made the first game awesome. Without a par score in the levels, exploring the stages as a two-legged car is more cool than ever, and I loved it. Launches this September on PC.

Lost and Found Co.

Bit Egg Inc./Gamera Games, releasing soon

I'm always down for a new hidden object game, specially if it has personality, great visuals and a cute story. Lost and Found Co. has literally all of those things and finished the package with good character design and a lot of extra challenges that feel fair and fun. I never would think that find lost things as a duck that became a teenager and a dragon trying to regain her power would be that cool, but we live to be surprised, right? No release date was revealed yet, but the game will be launched on PC.

Asgard's Fall

Soulpotion/Assemble Entertainment, releasing Q4 2024

Bullet heavens became my guilty pleasure since I discovered (and finished) Vampire Survivors, so it's great to see new ideas inside the genre! Inspired by Norse mythology, Asgard's Fall was my favorite from all the showcases. Great visuals, easy to learn controls and an interesting level up system, where you alternate between getting new weapons and use currency to give stats boosts in your character. The game launches on PC at end of this year.

Mythmatch

Team Artichoke, releasing soon

From one European mythos to another, Mythmatch was my big surprise from Wholesome Direct this year. I'm always looking down for creative ways to bring overused mechanics to life and this take on match-3 puzzle games is truly interesting. As Artemis (before she becomes a god) trying to get her place at Olympus, putting three equal items together transforms them! Add this with fast movement and you have a really dynamic match-3 that I will look for more. No release date yet, though, but the game will be available on PC.

Blue Prince

Dogubomb/Raw Fury, releasing soon

It's hard to define Blue Prince in a single line: a puzzle-filled, tabletop-inspired escape room roguelike experience, where learn about your surroundings is more important than advance physically sometimes. Every time you enter in the mansion, the map resets and you can start filling it with new rooms and challenges — at least, until you still have steps to go inside each one. No release date yet for this genre-defying adventure, but it will be available on PC in the future.

Fishbowl

imissmyfriends.studio, releasing soon

If it's already difficult for a game to make me cry, imagine the emotional burden of a title that made me cry just with the demo? Fishbowl tells the story about a young adult that is living through a pandemic, trying to connect with family and friends during isolation. Although the visual is great and the minigames are cool, the sensibility and the respect built in the story were the ones that deeply connected with a version of myself that I thought I had already overcome. The game will be available on PC and PS5 in the future.

MORE games to look and wishlist

A Little to the Left: Seeing Stars: one of the greatest cozy puzzle games ever created will receive a new DLC focused on levels with multiple solutions (my favorites!). And it launches next week already!
Escape from Ever After: a Paper Mario-inspired RPG about fairytales fighting against capitalism. Exploration, action commands, turn-based battles and proletarian unity is everything I ask from my games.

SOPA: Tale of the Stolen Potato: as a Latino myself, seeing this game already connected with my heart in so many levels, and it's also promising in the gameplay and fantasy departments. A game just named "SOUP" can't be bad.
UFO 50: the long awaited collection of 50 (FIFTY) small games from the creators of Spelunky, Downwell and more will finally release this September. It will be impossible not to like at least half of the experiences in this package, to be honest.
Squeakross: Home Squeak Home: a cute nonogram/Picross collection about puzzling your way into make furniture to a rodent pet. More cute and made for me, impossible. (and from the team of The Spirit and The Mouse, that I also love!)

Temtem: Swarm: a pocket monster bullet heaven is a million dollars idea, and I'm happy that someone is doing it, and even more happy that Temtem is the one creating it. If this game manages to mix these two worlds well, I might need an intervention...
On Your Tail: an interesting detective game that incorporates "find the difference" puzzles into the investigation process. I also loved the Italian-inspired setting and the characters, and it has everything to be a great title.
Castaway: inspired by Link's Awakening (one of the best Zelda games in my opinion), this tiny adventure game has everything you love and expect from a castaway action RPG experience. And even an infinite, roguelite mode, if you like it.

Please, don't forget to wishlist your favorites on Steam (and all other platforms). This helps a lot the developers to get more attention in the stores, and you can keep updated about their latest news.

And that's it! If you want my full curated list of games from this summer, go to this Backloggd list. And, if you like to play in your PC, you can also subscribe to my Steam curator page and receive my next recommendations through there too!

Review: Duck Detective: The Secret Salami

2024-05-31T00:00:00Z

I have a sweet spot in my heart for animals talking and doing crazy things (for an animal). Like, yeah, it's just a cat, but this cat can speak with an Aussie accent and play mini golf, this cat is awesome! So, when I was looking through the demos on the last Steam Next Fest and they gave me a noir duck with a deep voice solving crimes, I knew that I could only expect a great ride. Duck Detective: The Secret Salami can be a short adventure, but my God, how charismatic this game is!

When we talk about gameplay, there isn't a lot to see here, honestly. The title is a short and streamlined adventure game, where you control the titular Duck Detective trying to solve a bizarre case about salamis in an office. Your main goal is to complete your "Deducktions", puzzles in form of phrases that can be completed with information you collect talking to people or investigating clues. Solving them advance the story until you finally can bring everyone to your big reveal at the end.

Those enigmas were OK. I don't think they were amazing to solve, nor so easy as to be obvious. A lot of them really requires you to connect small bits of information, and that's cool, but some of the conclusions were too far for me (and even reminded me of classic point-and-clicks and their impossible puzzle solutions). The "hint system" was too enigmatic and didn't get me a lot of help, so, if you get stuck in any of the Deducktions, it's fine.

That said, I don't think you should play Duck Detective: The Secret Salami purely because of the puzzles. If this game was just a short film or an audiobook, I would still have loved it, because of how charismatic and fun all the characters are in this small story. Starting from the Duck Detective itself, from the hilarious takes on how he is addicted to bread (instead of cigarettes), until how he gets carried away and becomes more excited about the case as new clues appear. I just loved the character and I need more adventures with him!

The rest of the cast is also amazing and too damn funny — as I said, how not to love quirky animals with quirky personalities? The strange geek alligator, the old penguin that hates teens, the cute sheep that probably listened too much true crime podcasts... My favorite is the workaholic cat trying to balance stress and the clients she needs to talk to (too relatable). The scripts and jokes are great, but the work done by the voice actors was responsible for, at least, 50% of my love for those characters.

After some hours in this office, I just wanted more of that little world and those strange animals. Duck Detective: The Secret Salami isn't exactly a masterpiece in gameplay — although it even does its job of offering interesting challenges —, but it shines with their amazing cast of characters and the story by itself. I don't know what the team at Happy Broccoli Games is planning next, but I think that our Duck Detective needs more money and I would love to join him on some more cases.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Review: Pine Hearts

2024-05-26T00:00:00Z

If I had a nickel for every time I played an emotional game about climbing a mountain, I'd have three nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's really interesting that it happened other two times before I discovered Pine Hearts, the last game by Scottish team Hyper Luminal Games. That said, the only thing that those three games have in common is a big cliff, like my feelings with it: in this adventure game, the simple but touching story made me cry at the same time that playing it made me really bored.

We start the game following Tyke, a little boy that is traveling to the Pine Hearts Caravan Park, a beautiful place at the foot of a large mountain — and his goal is to finally reach the peak, a thing he never could do when visited the park as a child with his dad. In fact, your travel companion is Tyke's old diary from childhood and also our main vessel to understand the backstory of what happened in that fateful summer when the boy and their dad visited the park for the last time. Getting there, you learn that climbing requires equipment and you don't have any, so you start helping everyone in the place to get what you need to be ready for the challenge.

Tyke's story is what really hooked me up during my playthrough of Pine Hearts. The main collectable of the game are some blue droplets, that you can get by solving quests for others or just exploring the place. They are the key of unlocking the boy's memories, shown to us players as beautiful little interactive scenes, where the low-poly colorful map of the park gets populated with cardboard monsters and creatures representing little Tyke's imagination.

I love when games use the fact that we are controlling the character to put us on actions that help the storytelling process, and the good way the devs did this here was the probably the fact of why I was crying at the end. Telling a story of loss is always difficulty to do with respect, but Pine Hearts do this with the kindness that it needs to also transforming it in a touching narrative.

But as I said, there was something missing in Pine Hearts and I felt that way during all the time I wasn't in a flashback, because there isn't a lot to do when you are actually playing the game. The store page promises a mix of ""Souls-like level design", "the item-based progression of Zelda" and "a focus on puzzles". At least I can give them the first one: the main thing you do in the game is walk in a huge and mazelike map, collecting items and completing fetch quests. As you progress, new shortcuts are open and you start to grasp the interconnection between all the areas in the park.

But the other gameplay promises are just... not there? Instead of inventive items that can works like a toolbox like in Zelda, Pine Hearts use new equipments and abilities just as simple key-and-lock systems. It's nice that I have a hammer, but the only action I can do with it is break a specific type of rock that appears a dozen of times blocking my way — it reminded me more of a metroidvania, but without the fun of give new meanings to places in the map. About puzzles, I truly only counted TWO during my whole playthrough, and all other different "minigames" are just about pressing the buttons on screen.

This approach made the experience of playing Pine Hearts really repetitive and even boring sometimes. I was happy that the game only lasted about 3 hours, because I don't know if I would play even one more area full of the same fetch quests. Like, the characters are cute, the themes around my goals were a bit funny, but it was just solving an easy labyrinth every time. If the devs have gone to a more narrative approach since the beginning, focusing more on Tyke's story instead of the dull exploration mechanics, I would have had a better experience, even if it was shorter.

Even if the game isn't complex at all, I need to finish praising the team at Hyper Luminal for the huge focus on accessibility in Pine Hearts. Besides the more common features, like control remapping and simplified actions, I really liked the "color blocking mode", where all the interactive objects in the map are painted in specific shades and the background goes on black and white to help with contrast. Accessibility is something really important for games and players, and I'm happy to see more of it even on smaller titles like this.

Playing Pine Hearts is like eating a tasteless cookie with an impressive and amazing filling inside. I really liked how they developed Tyke's story about loss in such a brilliant and sincere way, and even using the video game medium as a way to support the storytelling. But the boring mechanics that surrounded it made me play on automatic just waiting for the next flashback. It's hard to recommend the whole thing just because of the little good inside, but maybe you can enjoy your journey through this park as well as I enjoyed my destination at the mountain's peak.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Review: Cozy Space Survivors

2024-05-23T00:00:00Z

Every time I talk about bullet heaven games here, I always discuss a little about my favorite aspect of the genre: that sensation of rediscovering how much powerful you can be. It's not only because of the flashy particles, but the feeling of getting into a run without knowing what is your ability maximum is fantastic. My problem with some of the new titles that are coming out is exactly how they try to do this but fail, and it feels that the experience of playing them lacks this exciting spark.

But it's great to see a game trying to do something different with the formula, and that's the case of Cozy Space Survivors. Instead of a title full of secrets to discover, the developer Simonschreibt was more focused on creating a cozy and simple experience than a power creep machine. Your job is to survive for 10 minutes in a pocket universe full of robots that are trying to destroy your ship because of a bug, and help alien creatures with their own problems in the meantime.

Because of the simpler approach, Cozy Space Survivors' mechanics doesn't have a lot of the depth you may expect of the genre: less weapons and upgrades make all possible builds feel similar, there isn't a lot of variation on enemies or strategy and advanced players can finish the game in 2 hours easily. The great addition to me were the quests you can encounter in the map that adds small challenges to overcome and makes you look at the game with a different point of view. (More bullet heaven games should have little quests during a run like this!)

It's funny because, even though the game didn't give me that feeling of power scaling, I really enjoyed my time on Cozy Space Survivors, mainly because it didn't try to create that feeling in the first place. The idea here was just create a small and quirky sci-fi map that I can navigate and relax for a hour, and it delivered very well. Of course, I would have loved more synergies and secrets to find, but the snappy controls and the cute art style were enough for me. I like when genres are twisted to give different experiences, even if the final product ends up distancing from its inspirations.

Cozy Space Survivors isn't the next step of the genre, but it definitely can be your first step into the world of bullet heavens. Players that already know all the evolutions on Vampire Survivors can look into this game and speak badly about its shallow mechanics, but their idea of creating a autoshooter that can also be cozy and wholesome worked very well. If you always wanted to try a game like this and was intimidated to do, or just want to relax for a hour or two, you will have a good time here.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Review: Word Trip

2024-05-17T00:00:00Z

People assumes sometimes that I'm a great word game player — just because I created a popular version of Wordle in Portuguese doesn't mean that I'm good at those challenges. To be fair, I'm even worse on those games in English, and that's part of why I created a localized version of Wordle in the first place. That said, I have a lot of fun with those games and my last travel in vocabulary lane was Word Trip, a simple (and sometimes hard) exclusive word game for the Playdate, created by Shaun Inman, the same person behind the awesome Season One adventure Ratcheteer.

In a game of Word Trip, you have a 4-letter word at the bottom as your destination, and you start in another 4-letter word at the top. Your job is to use 3 letters from the current one PLUS 1 letter from the destination word to form new 4-letter words until you can create the final word itself. And then, a new word is chosen for your next goal and you keep going until your time (or fuel) is empty. If you can't find a word, you can press both buttons on the Playdate to get a pit stop and restart the timer, but those "life savers" are also limited.

It can appear simple, but Word Trip's gameplay is more interesting that I was expecting, even for me who doesn't speak English natively. The "change one letter at a time" concept reminded me of Lewis Carrol's word ladders, but the idea of using the letters out of order inserted an anagram aspect to the game that I really enjoyed. The complexity curve goes all over the place in the modes, though: you probably can get to the destination in 1 or 2 steps in Easy Mode, but I sweated to get any points on Hard Mode.

The road trip theme doesn't have a lot of impact in the actual play, but I found it really cool, actually. Seeing your little car traveling in the infinite map and changing directions when you find a new word is a cute detail — and using the crank after the game ended to review your path is a perfect Playdate moment. I think this would be the perfect opportunity to have a Challenge Mode with "fixed travel itineraries" and to hook me even more to the game, but Word Trip works even with a more arcade, high score chasing approach.

I love small concepts being well executed and Word Trip is exactly that. The game is easy to understand but, even after some matches, you can still find a word combination that will need more brain power to solve. Visually, it's cool and cute, and the theme complements the experience with small details. Of course, the game could be way bigger and interesting, but every road trip can be cool with the right mindset. I would even love to see this game outside the Playdate (it would work perfectly in mobile platforms), but for now, you can get a lot of use out of it on the little yellow device.

This review was only possible by the access provided by Panic and the Playdate team to this game, available at the Catalog. Thanks for the trust!

Review: Crow Country

2024-05-12T00:00:00Z

"But, Gabriel, you are the most scared person that I know, how did you play AND LOVE a survival horror game?" Yeah, everyone said that to me the past week. I always loved the work of the team at SFB Games since I played Tangle Tower, and when I've seen their next game would be Crow Country, a PS1-inspired survival horror game, I got mixed feelings... On the one hand, it seemed very well made, but at the same time, so far from the kind of things I like to play. I love being able to sleep at night, you know?

It's because this is a survival horror game that doesn't have to be a survival horror game — if you don't want it. I explain: Crow Country has an amazing feature called the Exploration Mode, that disables enemy attacks and turns the experience into a "puzzle adventure game". The moment I saw this, I knew that Crow Country was my opportunity to experience a little bit of a genre that I always was too scared to try. And, as a designer, I was curious to see how the thing would work without half of its premise!?

This review is all based on my experience of the game in the Exploration Mode being a person that never played survival horror games before, but well-versed on puzzle solving. And as you may already assume by the scoring, Crow Country is a great puzzle adventure game, even if you don't kill any monster along the way.

Always an abandoned theme park

In the first scene we are presented to our protagonist Mara Forest, a policewoman going into Crow Country, this small abandoned theme park that was closed two years ago. Its owner, Edward Crow, has been missing since then, as well as more information about the incidents that resulted in the place being forgotten. Mara's quest isn't only discover more about the park and its secrets, but she is determined to find Edward and the truth.

The atmosphere created by the team is truly amazing and exactly what I was expecting since the first trailer. The park seem to be scary even in its better days, with big crow statues and trash cans, and its thematic areas going from bizarre fantastic forests to straight-forward haunted mansions. But the abandoned state of the place, with trash all over the floor and blood messages in the walls of narrow corridors, really make me intrigued for what was going on.

To be fair, I think that was the first impact I had on my game because of Exploration Mode. This option doesn't only remove the combat, but also all the monsters, traps, jumpscares and everything that can hurt Mara, essentially. Besides the "friendly" NPCs, Crow Country is completely empty and it felt almost like a liminal space. A place that should be full of kids laughing and running was a decorated void and this fact created one more layer of mystery to me, actually. Specially when you realize that, instead of killing the monsters, their bodies just appear dead in the rooms but by someone that isn't you.

I know that I had an non-canon guarantee that no creature would kill my character and it probably helped me to feel more safe, but I wasn't really scared of exploring Crow Country. The plot that you start to unroll in the first minutes has confusing elements, that keep expanding and connecting in themselves during the game. It felt like I was on the aftermath of a tragedy and my job was to collect the pieces and give some peace to anyone who survived the catastrophe.

In this process, I also discovered that I don't hate horror the way I imagined, because the atmosphere of the game is still very "spooky" even in Exploration Mode. You will still see dead creatures in the floor, enter creepy buildings and find disgusting things. If those things are not interesting (or, at least, intriguing) to you, so removing the jumpscares and the combat won't be enough, and that's fine, Crow Country is still a horror game after all.

Visually, the team at SFB Games nailed the early 3D game aesthetic in the perfect way possible. I don't think that a PlayStation or a Nintendo 64 could render any of the game's scenes like they were presented, but Crow Country is exactly how your inside child remembers those games to be. The scenarios are detailed enough so you can see items to collect or even clues for some puzzles easily, even on the "low resolution" style. I'm still impressed.

Solving the Crow's mysteries

The atmosphere is top notch, but how Crow Country plays when you remove combat? It can be shocking, but... it feels like a puzzle adventure game! You explore the place, find secrets, collect items, solve puzzles and advance the plot until you finish it and understand what's going on, in a linear (but well made) progression. You still have a gun — and some puzzles are only solved with a good shot — and you still can collect med kits and antidotes, but there's almost no use for them, given that Mara can't be harmed in any way during this mode.

Puzzles on Crow Country are inspired by different types of games: some of them are more like point-and-click games (where you collect items and use them in a different place), others are more like escape room games (where you can use the surroundings as clues to find a code). They aren't that much complicated and this isn't a problem, but the amount of pointers that you have for each one is.

A common source of information in the game are notes left by park staff in the walls, and sometimes you have 2 or 3 different ones just talking the same thing about the same puzzle. I imagine that in the original survival horror mode, your exploration radius would be smaller and you couldn't find all of those repeated tips, but in my playthrough, it felt too much guided. This doesn't get in the way of feeling great when solving the interesting puzzles available, but advanced players can be a little bit annoyed.

The inventory also works a bit differently of what I was expecting. Instead of being consumable objects, all the items you find are permanent tools that will be used multiple times (besides ammo and med kits, obviously). For example, if you find a key, you can bet that you have at least two doors to open with it. I personally liked this approach and helped me to understand the map more like a Zelda dungeon, where each new item can expand your ways to interact with the world, instead of being just a one-use thing.

At the end, I'm still impressed that I didn't miss the horror aspect of the game when opting to the Exploration Mode. After beating the story, I've watched some gameplay videos of the "original experience", and I didn't think that I missed a lot (for my personal taste). If you like shooting monsters and scarce resources, you definitely should go for the Survival Horror Mode, but Crow Country is an amazing puzzle adventure game even without it.

Playing Crow Country was liberating for me, because it was essentially my proper first "horror" game, but it was also an irrefutable argument of how good game design can help a game to find a new audience. Yes, the Exploration Mode can miss some of the shooting fun, but the intriguing mystery, the cool characters and the interesting puzzles were enough to not only create a good experience, but stick me to the screen for some nights. Maybe those changes aren't enough for you to get less scared, but it was enough to me, and I'm glad I tried.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Review: The Lullaby of Life

2024-05-07T00:00:00Z

If there's one question that humanity tries to answer since the beginning, it is "Can it run DOOM?". When people fail to answer this one, they go from a more simple one: "Where we came from?" How the universe started, how life came to be, what was the first step? Everyone believes in a different theory, but The Lullaby of Life tells us that it all started... with a particle and a sound wave. I'm not smart enough to prove its truthfulness, but I can say how this theory turned into a beautiful and fun puzzle game.

There's no complex lore in the game created by the Mexican team at 1 Simple Game: you are literally a particle in what seems to be the primordial soup that gave origin to life at Earth billions of years in the past. But, instead of just being a set of atoms living in the universe, you rapidly conquer the special power of producing sound waves, that are mapped to 3 different buttons in your controller (or keyboard) and 3 different symbols in your "body".

You also start to befriend smaller particles that can only produce a single sound, but can follow you to desbrave the unknown if you help them. Every sound has an unique symbol attached to it, what's great for readability and accessibility.

Although the game sells itself as a "musical game", I think it makes more sense of talking about The Lullaby of Life as a puzzle game about sound waves. Yes, each note you produce using the particles creates a bit of melody, but you will always be more focused on seeing how the waves are propagating than the music itself. Every level is sort of a maze, where you main goal is to fully awaken a "creature" call Dormant Elder. In a way or another, all the obstacles can be solved or traversed using the sounds you have at your disposal in the order shown at the screen.

For example, a common puzzle in The Lullaby of Life is finding a closed passage that requests a sound different than those three default ones you have in your particle. You then need to navigate the level, find a companion and use the sounds indicated by their symbols to awaken them. At this time, they follow you, and you can use the fourth button in the controller to use their sound and open the passage. This simple lock-and-key mechanic is the basis for all the gameplay and gets more complex and layered in later levels.

Although the concept feels too primitive (heh), the way the game use it as a foundation to show new mechanics and build complexity from the combination of those factors is really cool to experience. Right at the beginning, for example, you can encounter some objects that looks like guitar strings that can be used to resonate sounds in unreachable places. This idea is used a lot since this moment, and it's always from a different and interesting perspective, as a lot of other concepts introduced during the levels.

I loved how visually The Lullaby of Life goes full on abstract instead of trying to be scientific and inspired by chemistry. Specially when looking into the start of the universe from the lens of a singing particle, I want to see a world that blooms different colors, shapes and eyes. If the universe is infinite (at least on potential), representing it as a strange and different place is the best way to go for me.

Except for a small part at the middle of the game (when it becomes an action sequence for no reason), The Lullaby of Life creates a relaxing and interesting experience from a concept that could easily be boring or repetitive. Of course, the overall complexity of the puzzles aren't that big — puzzle experts will definitely find the game too easy —, but the devs found a good balance between a challenge that is relaxing without getting frustrating or monotonous. This probably isn't how life came to be, but following the sound waves of those abstract mazes was a cool experience.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Review: Mars After Midnight

2024-05-04T00:00:00Z

I'm a little ashamed to reveal this, but I had never played a Lucas Pope game until now. Yes, I know that his games are praised for years now, but it never felt the right time to do it. Papers, Please has an amazing concept, but the theme was too heavy for what was happening in my real life in the past years. And I still want some vacation days to only dedicate on solving Return of the Obra Dinn's puzzles. Who knew that the Playdate would be the place where I would finally discover by myself how amazing is his work?

That said, Mars After Midnight isn't exactly you expect from a Pope's creation. From his own words, this game is "a little more light-hearted, something his kids might like". It uses the core idea of Papers, Please of being the one behind a door, but puts you as the host of a Community Support Center. For aliens, in Mars. You have to plan the sessions every night, accept only the right martians inside and even manage the free food table you have as refreshments to the attendees.

This three-part mechanical loop is the core of Mars After Midnight, and the main bit is the process of seeing aliens and trying to find the right ones for tonight's session. Depending of what you planned, you may want different martians attending — only sad cyclopes or only the ones with cracked skulls, for example — and you use the Playdate's crank to open the little hatch to see more of the candidates. This can feel a small job for the crank that is so talked about, but it's the perfect one. There isn't a lot of depth in here (like you would expect in Papers, Please), but it's so fun to play that I always ended up with a smile.

Truly, I love how Mars After Midnight is silly even on the gameplay, and I don't mean in a bad way. All the aliens are strange but friendly, and half of the sessions requires "special equipment" that can be used with the B button (like a magnifying glass to see which tiny bugs actually have a knife). In one of the levels, they give me a horn and I passed 30 minutes just pressing the button and showing everyone THAT I HAVE A HORN. I'm the idiot person that goes to the pet shop and squeeze every dog toy so I can make sound, so, yeah, my wife got really mad because of the horn but I was very happy.

The other parts of the gameplay aren't that silly, but they work as intended. After you accept an alien, they can eat the free food and your job is to clean and re-arrange the plates for next creature, like a simpler Hanoi Tower puzzle. And after a level is finished, you can choose what to do in the next day, planning the session, where to put posters to promote it in the colony and what will be the refreshments. And then, you repeat this cycle until you can help all the martians.

The best way to enjoy what Mars After Midnight can offer is definitely in small sessions, because the gameplay can feel really repetitive if you tried to do five or six nights at once. The lack of a more complex plot also doesn't help, and even the funny moments can get a little boring if seen in one go. But the game was perfect to play in breaks during a job day: sending aliens to the air with a giant spring is always what I need after a boring and complicated meeting. At the end, using those martians as serotonin pills was more effective then trying to help everyone in only one afternoon.

Even without a deep story, this game is so charismatic that looking into the details to appreciating them is the best way to experience Mars After Midnight. From the alien speech that you learn during the levels, to the dreams that our protagonists have after a night of work and the details at the back of the street... Even on the small screen of Playdate, it was good to help those Martians, however necessary.

I don't know yet who loved more this game: my inner child who laughs like an idiot at a horn, or the tired adult that liked the breaks in a work day to help some martians. Lucas Pope's ability of transforming a boring job into an interesting game is still amazing, and even if there isn't the same depth of his past games, the light-hearted premise made it an unique experience. If you have a Playdate and a silly game catches your attention, Mars After Midnight is a must-play.

This review was only possible by the access provided by Panic and the Playdate team to this game, available at the Catalog. Thanks for the trust!

Review: Bem Feito

2024-04-27T00:00:00Z

Bem Feito is one of those games that the less you know about it, the better your experience will be. But I still need to write a review about it, I cannot just write a single phrase and get away with it. So, without spoilers, let's talk about this mysterious small game that, although it has a lot of qualities, maybe promised too much and couldn't get me that excited for the whole ride.

This title is actually an "expanded port" of a game called Bem Feito, supposedly launched in 1999 by Brazilian company MEGASOFT as the only title of its portable gaming device, the Jogaroto (yes, this is fictional, but let's roll with it). You follow Reginaldo, a little boy living in a little planet, doing his chores and meeting some new friends. During each day in the game, you have a list of tasks to do, and this includes exploring the place and making some choices to progress the story.

At this point, you can imagine there's more than meet the eye in this little old ROM to discover (or you just read the content warning in the Steam page). All I can say is that the process of finding this new layer behind the life simulation game was really interesting and compelling, that glued me and my wife for 2 hours at the TV just trying to see how the story would unfold. The way the controls work could be a little better too, but nothing you can't learn with some simple trial and error.

Visually, Bem Feito also does its job really well. It's great how the game uses a monochromatic palette to invoke a Game Boy-like retro style, but the purple tint and the perspective camera make it a strange (but totally intentional) uncanny valley, where you know this couldn't have been possible in a 1999 portable, but the mere existence of it creates a mystery by itself.

The experience of exploring a strange lost media game is perfectly made here, and I would love if Bem Feito was only this, even if this resulted in a smaller game. But there's more, not in the same level of quality. You can also get access to messages and documents that have information about how the game is created, who was involved and why it was forgotten by the general public. I don't dislike the concept of expanding the lore, giving you more to theorize about, but the execution was really subpar.

Instead of rewarding a good exploration of the ROM, or smart players that connected the dots, 90% of this part of the game is just... reading? All the passwords you need to access locked information are on the game achievements' names, and even you can find a secret or two by yourself, I don't think it was satisfactory. Without this lore dump, the adventures of Reginaldo were truly a mystery with a message, but now, it feels something too artificial. I know that every theory in our heads are better than all the true stories we learn after, but the riddle was so plain that I wish I hadn't tasted it.

It's strange to say like that, but I wish Bem Feito finished early when I was playing it. It understands so well the idea of what is the core of a gaming creepypasta, but fails on complement with a mystery that, to be fair, didn't need to be explicit to pass its message. I hope to not have damaged the experience of the game to you, but I hope to have aligned your expectations so you can enjoy the best parts of this amazing work. And, if you really want to meet Reginaldo and his friends, remember: you become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Review: Tell Me Your Story

2024-04-26T00:00:00Z

I believe that not every puzzle game have to be that hard, and I mean sincerely. Us thinky games fans love a challenge that make their brains boiling for hours, but every one of us started somewhere in a more simple enigma. To be fair, not only are games that doesn't are too deep on complexity good for introducing the genre to new people, but they also are the best for advanced players to just relax and clean the brain. I play nonograms to get sleepy, and the fact they aren't super difficult is the reason that works.

All of this was written to make you understand that I was truly excited to play Tell Me Your Story: a cute and simple puzzle game, with beautiful visuals and an intimate theme. Who doesn't want to hear some cool stories from the grandma, and even solve some enigmas in the process? Unfortunately, the bad design of its challenges made me so frustrated that I couldn't even enjoy fully all the rest the game had to offer.

Geographically confused

In Tell Me Your Story, you follow the little Amelia during a vacation in Grandma Rose's house, just to discover that her granny was a globetrotter adventure in the past and have visited a lot of countries to learn about their cultures. All the chapters in the game are based on Rose's stories mixed with Amelia's imagination, collecting stickers to put in the girl's diary. Visually (and even for some of the "puzzles"), the feeling is that I'm playing with a digital pop-up book, where every drawing is beautiful and interactable.

It's a cute story that allows a lot of different scenarios to be shown, and it works... most of the time. In the first chapter, Grandma Rose is telling about her days visiting the Amazon Rainforest — most than half of its territory is in Brazil, where I was born. During the puzzles, you can see in a map the path that young Rose take on Latin America when exploring the Amazon... that goes completely OUTSIDE the Amazon.

Even if you argue that she is very, very old and she visited way before colonization, the rest of the country has other biomes! Like, the center of Brazil is known for the Cerrado and the Pantanal, and they are fundamentally different from the Amazon. Any Brazilian (or even Latin American, to be fair) you show the game's Amazon map would have spotted how wrong it is in seconds.

I don't know exactly a lot of about the other countries shown in the game (because I don't live there), and I also know this could have been just a confusion on the part of the dev team... but for a game that will totally be targeted for children, get this type of error is concerning, at least for me. Yes, I want you to Tell Me Your Story, and it's fairly cute to see grandmother and granddaughter bonding, but I would love if you didn't treat my country (and continent) as a big and uniform magical forest, thank you.

Mechanically frustrating

Well, if the theme is nice, what's the real problem with Tell Me Your Story besides bad geography knowledge? And my problem with it was on the mechanical meat of the game: the puzzles. Remember that comparison that I did with pop-up books? Some of the "levels" in the game really feels you are just interacting by the sake of seeing cute things moving in the screen — what's totally fine for me. It's not that innovative, but this idea of a "interactive comic" works both for the theme and the promise.

That said, there also real puzzles presented in the game, and although some were fine and had the complexity level I expected for the relaxing experience they were promising, some of them were just... not puzzles? Like, there's no enough clues to solve some of the levels on Tell Me Your Story rather than pure trial and error. The only other way is asking for a hint (more like an answer sheet) and then going backwards and try to understand if something was so hidden that you couldn't find. Spoiler: most of the times, the solution really felt arbitrary.

For example, there's a level where you have a lot of leaves in a tea garden and a basket. The hint only shows you to move the leaves to the basket. I tried for 10 minutes to find a rule for this movement, because they keep resetting positions. When I gave up and looked to my phone, I've seen, in the corner of my eye, a leaf vibrating every ~20 seconds. Yes, the solution was only to catch the vibrating ones. Why? I don't really know, the hint even less.

Some of the worst puzzles I encountered in Tell Me Your Story reminded me from the organization challenges in A Little to the Left, whose goal was finding patterns between objects and organizing them, like similar colors/patterns or matching shapes. Those patterns didn't exist here, the objects were just there, no further information. In a level where I needed to organize some macarons, I tried to organize them by color, because it was the only distinct feature in them. The solution? Making an arbitrary pattern that wasn't shown anywhere.

Again, I don't think that an easy puzzle game is a problem. I love those, specially with cute art like Tell Me Your Story. The problem here is these "puzzles" are so bad designed they not only feel unplayable, but also makes you more irritated than relaxed. Really, I got more tired trying to understand the impossible rules of some of those levels than I did for finished other harder titles. When your puzzle design goes totally opposite than your game's vibes, there's something wrong with it, and I don't think that good grandma stories are enough to compensate it.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Review: The Scrolling Enigma

2024-04-24T00:00:00Z

Experimental games are THE thing that excites me most in the entire industry. Yes, I love to play an awesome sequel from a established franchise that is perfect in every way, of course. But nothing compares of encountering a new premise and going with it until the end, even if isn't perfect like everything we try for the first time. The Scrolling Enigma, made exclusively for the Playdate by the French team Lugludum, is a perfect example of this type of game, building from escape room common places in a tiny but interesting crank-focused title.

As you may expect, you don't have a room to escape of in The Scrolling Enigma. Instead, you have an infinite newspaper that you can scroll through using the Playdate's crank. Every section is, actually, a puzzle to be solved used the different inputs of the device, and getting all the keys at the end of each enigma is necessary to finish the last puzzle. The complexity of those puzzles varies over a wide range — some I solved by accident by toying with the Playdate, but one of them got me thinking for 10+ minutes. An extra bit of general gaming knowledge can also help.

The trick on the whole "scrolling" situation is that, although the newspaper loops itself, every time you get back to the start of the page, new hints are unlocked to the puzzles you didn't solve yet. It's interesting that it uses the scrolling concept for different purposes, but I would have loved, though, to have received a warning (or a indication) that the "end" of the page was coming... In my first time scrolling, I got hints by accident because I cranked too much (ops).

The themes in each section of the newspaper are also metaphors about game development in general, like search for funding and motivation. The Scrolling Enigma succeeds on being exactly what its subtitle suggests: an allegoric game development diary, showing some dilemmas that the Lugludum team (and all of us devs, actually) encountered when creating games. There isn't a lot of depth to those subjects, but it's a nice way to round up thematically so many different puzzles.

The Scrolling Enigma is far from a perfect game, but it's too interesting to let it pass by. Some of the puzzles are really clever, the scrolling mechanic can be a perfect structure for future titles, and the experience doesn't drag itself more than it should. Depending on the amount of hints you got, you can finish the game in 40-50 minutes — the game doesn't save progress, so I recommend finding a free hour to dive in at once. My feeling at the end was that I wanted more, so I think we have the start of something special in this experimental success.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Review: stitch.

2024-04-23T00:00:00Z

People can't show me a colorful abstract puzzle game and expect me to not go completely crazy wanting to play it. In last week's Nintendo Indie World Showcase, I was presented to stitch., a game that was going out from Apple Arcade and finally going a version to the Switch. Your goal is to fill numbered grids to make beautiful images on embroidery hoops, the perfect mix and match of mechanics that helps my brain relax.

Looking into some screenshots of the game for the first time, you may think that stitch. is just a variation on nonograms (or Picross, for the Nintendo fans out there). In this case, you are wrong, but not too far. The team at Lykke Studios was inspired by another pen-and-paper Japanese puzzle called Shikaku — created by the famous company Nikoli, the ones responsible for popularizing Sudoku! — where the numbers are inside the grid, not outside.

In original Shikaku rules, your goal is to the divide a figure into rectangles, and each rectangle need to have only one number inside it, that will indicate how many grid cells are inside that specific shape. For example, if you see a number 6, the correct solution will have a 6x1 or a 2x3 rectangle with only this number 6 inside. Although stitch. follow all those rules, and even give you a classic Shikaku puzzle every day to solve, their approach to this formula make it a little bit easier, but more accessible and relaxing.

Getting inspiration from the embroidery theme, every level in stitch. is called a Hoop, a big figure that you need to sew with colored threads. Instead of showing you all the numbers from the start, the game divides the whole picture in smaller sections, each one with its own Shikaku puzzle. Some smaller Hoops will have 20-30 sections, but bigger ones have more than 100 little parts until you complete a full drawing.

As I said (and you may imagine), this simplify a lot the process of solving a Shikaku puzzle because most of its complexity is in all the possibilities that can happen in bigger grids. It's like stitch. is confirming your tries step by step, instead of making you a lot of progress without knowing if you are going in the right direction. If you get stuck, though, you can also use hints in any part of any Hoop.

If you are already a fan of those pen-and-paper puzzles, stitch. will seem a little to easy and maybe even boring. But for me, that literally plays Picross to get sleepy, allowing me to complete those amazing drawings without a lot of complexity was a perfect way to relax when listening to a podcast, for example. That said, here's a tip: some hard Hoops can need from you way more brain power than the rest of the game.

Having actual figures to complete and not just random grids are also a plus for me, because it gave a sense of really cool sense of completion, that I think combines really well with the whole sewing theme. Some of them are really beautiful also, an amazing visual job by the team. My favorite part is that some of the sections are a little bit curved to help create more interesting pictures, but still following the orthogonal rules of Shikaku.

Talking about content, you will have a lot of embroidery to finish if you want to complete all the challenges in stitch. The base game have 180 Hoops to play, and a new Weekly Hoop (inspired by current events or holidays) every 7 days help to increase this number. Even though it's a port of a mobile game, there is no ads or microtransaction locks: when you finish the tutorial, almost all the content are automatically available to you to tackle. You can even recolor your favorites in Free Stitch mode, if you are more artistic capable than me (it doesn't need much).

It easy to see what is the target audience for stitch. already completing the first level. Their goal wasn't to create a digital version of Shikaku for experts, but use the amazing rules of this puzzle to make a relaxing and visually appealing game to people that likes to turn off their brain with those types of challenges. As a declared fan of Picross, I can only say that those Hoops became also my favorite, and I just hope to keep sewing for much more nights before bed. (Yes, I'm asking for the sequel, I finish those games fast...)

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Review: YOYOZO

2024-04-21T00:00:00Z

I have a strange relationship with pure arcade games. I like playing a lot of them, but getting high scores isn't an incentive that works for me. Give me some skins to unlock, an achievement list, an upgrade shop, and I will dive hours and hours into an arcade game, but only getting a big number in the screen isn't enough to bring me back after some minutes. Why I'm saying all of this? It's because it has been an week that I'm coming back to play YOYOZO again and again, and that's because how smooth and good its gameplay are.

In this already-a-classic Playdate game from Matt Sephton, you control a "space yoyo", a ship that is attached to a big ball by a sci-fi elastic. Your goal is to use the ball to catch circles (called "stars") in the screen, BUT you can only move the ship, not the ball. So, most of YOYOZO lies in your ability to control this contraption and use its properties to rack up points. You don't use the crank in this title: all movement is done by the face buttons.

Like I said in the beginning, it's so good and fluid to play YOYOZO. Even if I'm not trying to get a better high scoring, moving the ball is a difficult and cool challenge to face, even though it never seems impossible. A game of YOYOZO (at least, my games) don't exceed two minutes, so it's also really easy to find a time to play it a little more. Yes, I would love more ways to "progress" in the title, but as its simple premise goes, it does really well.

BUT you are not me, right? (Maybe you are, hi, me!) Maybe you love getting even bigger high scores, proving your own mastery of controls and physics. In this case, YOYOZO is perfect to you. As shown in the game's manual PDF, your points are determined by three key factors — how long the elastic is stretched, how fast you are catching the stars and what's your current combo — and some secret elements, if you want to go deep one more layer in the "advanced technique lasagna" ready to be tasted.

Portables can give deep and long experiences, of course, but they are perfect for small bursts of fun. From all that's available now on the Playdate, I truly think YOYOZO is one of the best of its kind. You can start a match for the first time and get the concept in literal seconds, and you can also play for 10 hours and discover so many techniques that it becomes another game completely. I may not be the biggest fan of pure arcade games, but I really can see the space yo-yo becoming one of the permanent residents of my yellow little brick.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Review: Botany Manor

2024-04-20T00:00:00Z

I don't think it's a surprise for anyone how much I love escape rooms. The loop of collecting clues, trying to find patterns and solving puzzles, mixed with a good narrative and some friends, is one of the most fun activities humanity has ever created. Even then, I'm always trying to find new ways of experiencing the genre, and Botany Manor called my attention since its announcement for one little detail: you won't be escaping any rooms here.

You start the game playing as Arabella Greene, a 19th century England botanist, that is trying to complete her book about forgotten and strange flora. Your goal in Botany Manor isn't only found the seeds for each plant, but also collect clues from the mansion and understand what each one of them needs to bloom — and because every pot has an escape room in itself, you need to match really specific conditions in soil, temperature, light, etc. I need to say: seeing a beautiful flower blooming and filling with life that almost-empty house was a way more pleasing reward than just opening a door or a chest.

Overall, Botany Manor was the coziest "escape room" experience I ever had. There's no time pressure and you can explore the clues as many times as you want, establishing itself as a good first experience for new players in the genre. In fact, the game does a constant job of avoiding showing you more than you need to solve the current puzzles, including not having red herring clues whatsoever — for example, if you find a big book, the game will only shows the 2 or 3 pages you need to read and nothing more than that.

Even if the manor is full of mobilia, it's clearly indicated what objects can be manipulated, and they will always serve a purpose (for blooming a plant or expanding the storytelling), a philosophy that the puzzles in the game also follows. Although this helps to create a welcoming experience for new escapers, advanced players can be a little disappointed. Not because the puzzles are bad (on the contrary, they are very well thought out), but that fun of trying to find patterns and uncover what in the "room" is needed for each puzzle is so streamlined that you will be doing it almost by accident.

I need to talk briefly too about all the great accessibility options present in Botany Manor. I always loved how publisher Whitetorn Games take the matter seriously and it shows also in this title: no puzzle is totally dependent of color and there are a ton of configuration that you can use to create a more pleasing experience. My favorite one though was a text overlay that you can use in any clue to read all the written text in a more readable font and background. Even I didn't need it to play the game, sometimes it was more pleasing than trying to read cursive letters with low contrast.

Along with all the clues and puzzles, you will also find documents that will help understand more about Arabella's life and her passion to botany. The game touches in important themes with love and care, but there's not a lot of implications of this story in the rest of the experience. In addition to giving a little more context to the final scene, most of what you will learn becomes little footnotes and very little of this information is used in any puzzle. There's nothing wrong with Botany Manor's storytelling, but it isn't the strongest feature of the title.

The only aspect I really think that can be improved is the hint and clue interface. You don't have an inventory in Botany Manor: you need to write down somewhere to remember specific numbers or you will be walking in circles multiple times to remember everything. But, in the pages of Ms. Greene's herbarium, you can see what clues you have found and match them to a specific plant, if you want. The only utility of this is knowing which information matters for each plant (because the game confirms when you put the correct set of clues), but they are so easy to connect normally that I just ignored the feature completely. Seeing Arabella having actual notes in the book as a pseudo-inventory would be way better.

There's nothing new or innovative about Arabella's quest to fill her herbarium, but Botany Manor is a impressively pleasant experience. Accessible to all types of players, even if you never did an escape room before, its puzzles are interesting to solve and the plants are also cool to see grow. Although there are always something to improve in any game (and here, we could have had a better interface, per example), I just loved my trip to the manor and I'm excited to see more adventures made by this team. Oh, if taking care of my plants here at home was as easy as solving a puzzle...

The Playdate is unlike anything you've ever seen (+all Season One games)

2024-04-18T00:00:00Z

I never believed in "love at first sight", but I know how to recognize when an idea was made for me. This feeling of yes-give-me-this-now-please was the only thing in my head when I saw the Playdate for the first time. This little gaming device created by Panic — a company who may know as the publisher of Firewatch and Untitled Goose Game — impressed me on how different it was compared to the current industry standards. In a decade dictated by frames per second and ray tracing capacities, pitching a black-and-white portable with a crank was truly bold. But making it a reality was just madness, and I loved it.

However, I'm just a latin american guy and getting a Playdate in this economy was impossible. Probably the shipping costs would be even greater than the device itself, and converting from US dollar is always a nightmare. Yet miracles can come true and a great friend of mine gave me a Playdate as a wedding gift last year! (thanks, Hugo 💛).

So, as you may have expected, I dove head first into all the Playdate could offer, including all the 24 (TWENTY-FOUR) games included with the device... and I decided to make this mega review of the Playdate itself and all of those games! I hope to give you a great introduction of how fun cranking is, what it's already possible in the small screen and who the device was created for.

(all that said, because I got the device as a gift in a specific situation, I won't comment on the question of whether the Playdate is worth the price. That said, I hope that this article helps to show you the pros and cons from the device so you can have your own conclusions about this!)

More than just a crank

Holding a Playdate for the first time is a really cute experience. The device is small, light, thin, toy-like and really, really yellow. Even the USB cable is yellow. And a good shade of yellow, it's needed to be said. Its design won't get comfort awards, but it feels good to play even in long sessions — at least, it's more comfortable than playing with my smartphone or the Nintendo Switch in portable mode. All the buttons are snappy, good to press and really responsive: besides the Lock and Menu buttons, you have a 4-direction D-Pad and the classic A and B buttons.

Oh, yes, the crank! Having an actually, usable crank as the analog input is probably the better (or, at least, the silliest) selling point of the Playdate and the big surprise is that... using the crank is fun! It's easy to undock it from the device (and when it's docked, it doesn't disturb the gameplay), and it feels good to turn it to control things in the screen. My only nitpick is when some games ask you to use the crank AND the A Button simultaneously, because it's really uncomfortable to my big hands — however, this is not considered a good practice by the creators of the Playdate and ends up being more the fault of certain games than the hardware itself.

The Playdate also has an accelerometer (similar to what your phone has) that can be really useful in some games, but I didn't played a lot of titles that use it yet. When researching for this review, I also discovered that the device ALSO HAS A MICROPHONE? I need more Playdate mic games now ASAP.

Another important part of the device is the black-and-white screen. Very different than a blocky Game Boy, Playdate's screen has a way higher definition that I was expecting and becoming the frame for some of the most beautiful 1-bit art that I ever seen. That said, like the original Game Boy, the screen isn't backlit so I need constantly to find a light source to be able to play. I always loved to play on my 3DS in the bed after my wife was already asleep and the Playdate didn't filled this need for me. Playing it on the balcony hammock with that Brazilian sun in my head was amazing, though.

It just feels fun (and inclusive)

Do you remember how fun video game operation systems seemed before? The first time you created a Mii and it became your version in that playful world? The first time you put a different theme on your 3DS HOME Menu? The first time you don't turn on a console and it just happened to have the most boring and sterilized interface ever? The people at Panic does remember because the Playdate have the most charismatic gaming OS of the decade.

When you boot up your Playdate for the first time, you have an amazing animated intro, with a banger soundtrack, that doubles down as a "tutorial" of how you can interact with the device — this intro is even better in color, just saying. And after that, every time you want to unlock it, you press the Lock Button twice, and a little robot eye opens up with each click. Each new app comes to you as a gift (with a personalized wrapper) that you open like it's Christmas day, and they can have special animations when booting up to visually integrated with the menu.

Those little details aren't the only things worth to talk about the Playdate OS. It also works really well, even with simpler options. Managing your installed games (and the ones available to be downloaded) is really easy and fast to do, even compared with other portables of the past. There's no SD card slot on the device (so you are stuck with the 4GB memory), but the games are so light that you will need do install dozens of them to start running out of space. The USB port is made to easily connect to any computer, so you can get your screenshots out of the device or put new files for games that are compatible with extra content (like the nonogram collection Sketch, Share, Solve).

But the best and more important feature of the Playdate for me is sideloading games. Instead of following the industry and creating another DRM to lock game sources (like any console out there), the amazing team at Panic decided the Playdate should be DRM-free. Yes, you can buy the games from the official Catalog (on the Web or in the device itself), but you can also get Playdate games from literally anywhere and they can be installed officially on your portable machine.

And it's not a hard thing to do: you can go into the Playdate official website, upload the files and and they are automatically available for download on your device. I literally did this from my phone during my honeymoon with some free games available on itch.io using our hotel's bad Wi-Fi and it worked! Even on my homebrewed 3DS, the process of installing a fan-made game is so complicated, but here is just not only easy, but friendly and encouraged!

Not only that, but every Playdate is also a developing kit for the system. You don't need expensive licenses or getting a specific machine to test your games, everything you need to start coding to the Playdate is available for free. To be fair, you don't even need to know computer programming, because Panic also created a simple game maker called Pulp that runs in your browser and exports Playdate game files. It's so refreshing for the industry seeing initiatives like this and I cannot be happier to see a healthy developer community being grown with this little cranky device.

The debut season

But what is a video game without... games! Instead of having the players going after their own software, the Playdate had an interesting strategy called Season One. On your first 12 weeks of having the device, two new (surprise) games will be installed in your Playdate for free. Besides some free games, those twenty-four games were mostly all the experience I had with my cranky machine until now and the rest of this review will be talking about them in a little bit of detail.

There are two interesting observations to do about this package of games. The first one is how wide the titles are, from genres, concepts and even uses of the Playdate features. Some of them are fully narrative, others are pure arcade joy. Some of them were created because of the crank, others ignore it totally. There are a lot of games in the Season One that I would never buy because they weren't my jam, while others hit so hard that I keep replaying them from time to time. So, even if I didn't like a game of the list, you still have a big chance of loving it.

The second is how they have that feeling of "early games" that you always have with launch titles of any console. All of the games available on Season One were commissioned by Panic before the device even released to the public. If you look now into the Catalog, for example, you will see games way more produced and inventive then most of these early ones, but this is just part of the nature of having a collection on day one. I don't think they represent the full capacity of the Playdate (and, to be fair, I don't think we reached this point yet), but they still are your first look into the device.

Now I present: all the games on Playdate's Season One on launch order (with my mini review for each one of them)!

Week 01: Whitewater Wipeout

I admit that it felt strange the choice of Whitewater Wipeout for the first week. Created by the team behind Cursed to Golf, the idea here is to use the crank to move a surfer and add up a lot of points (and combos) in pure arcade fashion. It's cool to show how the Playdate is a perfect vessel for this type of game, but the controls are really strange and hard to even understand. I know that a lot of people really connected with it and has a lot of tips and tricks for the game, but there are better arcade games in the next weeks.

Week 01: Casual Birder

Now we're talking! This duo in the first week shows how wide the Playdate games can be, and Casual Birder became one of my favorites since then. It's an adventure game about a bird photographer that want to expand his picture collection while dealing with bad guys that dominated the city. The crank is used to adjust the focus of your camera when taking photos of the birds during the game: it has some little bugs but it's a really cool gimmick overall. Some of the birds are almost puzzles to decipher, that adds another layer to the experience.

Week 02: Crankin's Time Travel Adventure

Co-created by Keita Takahashi (the mind behind Katamari Damacy), Crankin's Time Travel Adventure was a cool idea that overcame its welcome. The idea is using the crank to make time go forward and backward and help sleepy Crankin to find his lover before it's too late. Some elements of the level aren't affected by time travel, though, so you need to time Crankin's position to dodge all the obstacles. Yes, it's fun, but not for more than ten levels until it becomes too repetitive. Test it, have some fun with the concept and than go to another game.

Week 02: Boogie Loops

Season One was a way to show all the potential of the Playdate and having available a software that isn't exactly a game is important when thinking about this showcase aspect. Boogie Loops is a music creating app with cute animals that dance and I cannot talk more about it because I never understood the interface fully. I pressed some buttons, some noise came out of the device and I moved on.

Week 03: Lost Your Marbles

Visual novels are not exactly my type of game, so Lost Your Marbles was most an experiment to me than a title that I enjoyed. The whole idea is that you use a "marble machine" to help you having decisions, that it's just a crank minigame you have to do when choosing the outcome of a fork in the story. The characters were cute, the marble thing wasn't that good, but you have a scientist cat and everything is fine. If you like the genre, there's something here to you.

Week 03: Pick Pack Pup

If you've read 2023's Played of the Year ranking, you may already know this but Pick Pack Pup isn't only my favorite Playdate game to date, but probably the best match-3 game I ever played. Your goal is to help the good dog Pup in his first days at an employee of a cruel fulfillment center, while following a good story about how capitalism is the burden of our species.

Gameplay-wise, the idea is that matches don't disappear automatically: instead, they are boxed and become obstacles for future matches until you ship everything (and gets a bigger combo if you manage to ship a lot in one go). The story mode is short but really well-made, introducing new mechanics and flavors to make the game feel fresh. The game don't even use the crank, showing that the other limitations of the Playdate can also help great minds create innovative and fun titles.

Week 04: Flipper Lifter

Another arcade game in the Playdate line-up, Flipper Lifter feels like a Game & Watch Gallery minigame that jumped off from a GBA (or a WarioWare boss stage). You use the crank to move an elevator up and down, bringing penguins to the levels they want. I liked it when I was killing some time in the toilet, but in later stages, the Playdate small screen makes it hard to understand what's really happening. If you like arcade games, I think it's worth a try.

Week 04: Echoic Memory

The concept on Echoic Memory is really neat: a small story about futuristic personal assistants, our relationship with our own memories and a literal memory game that uses only sound. Your goal in each level is to listen musical cues and find what button can play the same song, using the crank as a modulator/tuner. It's more gimmicky that it sounds (!), and it was fun for some levels, but it got repetitive really fast. The story seems interesting, though.

Week 05: Omaze

The best definition of Omaze comes from the official page: "an ode to circles". One of my favorites from all the Season One and one of the only platformers in the list, everything in this game is a circle, from the protagonist until the elements in the screen. You use the crank to move the little circle and try to get at the goal point, avoiding spinning obstacles and using the other buttons to change directions. The "adventure" is really abstract, but I had a lot of fun with this one.

Week 05: Demon Quest '85

Demon Quest '85 was exactly the type of game that I would never have played if it wasn't part of a bundle like this. In a mix of visual novel and puzzle, you became a teenager trying to summon demons from hell to help you became more popular in high school. The story is short and not always landed for me, but it was fun studying the clues to find the best music, smell and vessel to attract each demon. An interesting idea, with a cool execution and some great 1-bit art. One of my favorites!

Week 06: HYPER METEOR

If you still need to be convinced that the Playdate is a great home for arcade games, HYPER METEOR is the title you need to play. Purely collecting points isn't exactly my jam, but the gameplay here is so fluid and good to experience that is hard to stop playing. Like the coin-operated games from yesterday, your job is to move a ship and break meteors — but you don't have a gun! The only way to rack up points is colliding with the white parts of the rocks, while avoiding the darker sides. This visual concept isn't only pleasing to see, but does wonders in the small screen. If you can't have a Playdate now, you can also play a colored version on Steam and Nintendo Switch.

Week 06: Zipper

The name Bennett Foddy can be associated in your head with QWOP, Getting Over It or just pure frustration, but Playdate owners have another game of this creator to play, directly available on Season One. Zipper is a giant, one-level quest of a samurai trying to get revenge. Inspired by MSX classics, I tried a lot to understand how the enemies worked and what would be the best strategy, but, surprising anyone, was too frustrating to my taste. The visuals can be good to look, but they are the worse when you trying to see what's going on. Maybe you like it! (maybe not)

Week 07: Questy Chess

Questy Chess almost got me, because it does a lot of things right to my taste, but it fails on some details. You assume the role of the "chess program v1", trying to fight your way in the system and stop an update. I love this concept of creating worlds inside a computer, and mixing it with a classic board game makes it even better. In each level, you go on this "RPG", moving your piece as chess' rules determine and fighting other pieces. Unfortunately, the way you access other movements besides the pawn is done by consumable items, that you will need to boringly grind to solve the puzzles. I truly believe that allowing those abilities as permanent upgrades or level-based mechanics would result in a better experience.

Week 07: Executive Golf DX

I talked in the past about how I think that golf is the most boring sport ever made (for me), but mini golf video games were also cool and the Playdate could be an amazing vessel to them. Executive Golf DX tries it, but I think it misses the hole by a lot (pun intended). Although the corporate theme got my attention, the 2D side-scroller gameplay, the focus on verticality and the huge amount of obstacles weren't a good mix. Maybe the title is for someone, but I only got frustrated. (Do you want an interesting Playdate golf game? Check out Fore! Track.)

Week 08: Saturday Edition

Saturday Edition was one of the biggest surprises for me in Season One. This narrative game puts you in the life of John Kornfield, a man who was abducted in the past — and when the aliens apparently are coming back, an important key to solving the mystery. The game plays like a slow and simple point-and-click adventure, where your actions are basically talking to people and showing things from your inventory to them. The pacing was a little off too me, but the story intrigued me enough during all the playthrough. Even if you aren't a fan of the genre, I think you should check this with attention when the package arrives in your Playdate.

Week 08: Star Sled

The first Season One game made in-house by Panic, Star Sled also has the space-themed arcade machine as its inspiration. Here, instead of shooting, your goal is to capture Sparks creating a circle around them with your ship. BUT cloistering any enemy is an immediate Game Over, so you need to be really careful when flying and using your boost. I think this is one of the most satisfying uses of the crank in the whole package, although the small size of the objects in the already tiny Playdate screen was a problem to me. I wanted to play more, but I'm bad at it and got stuck on Mission D.

Week 09: Spellcorked

Spellcorked is the most gorgeous game in the whole Playdate's Season One, end of line. Your job is here is run a potion shop but without knowing exactly what each ingredient does at the start. You get orders from your laptop and uses trial-and-error to find the best way of doing the mixtures through simple but cool minigames. The team behind the game paid a lot of attention to the details — like tilting the Playdate vertically to bottle up the potions — but there isn't a lot of depth to the mechanics to keep the discovery process always fresh. A little repetitive, but always beautiful.

Week 09: Inventory Hero

Too repetitive and even a little forgettable, Inventory Hero was Panic's great miss on their own games for Season One. The concept is you are the inventory manager of an automatic RPG hero, using and discard items when needed. Luck was too present to the mechanic depth shine, and I just got bored after two matches. Not for me.

Week 10: Snak

I'm always amazed by how simple and smart Zach Gage's games are (and I'm talking as a person who has a big streak on Puzzmo!). His Playdate debut is also a simple but smart idea: Snak, in his own words, is "Snake plus jump". Yes, you can press a button to make the snake's head jump for some seconds, allowing you to avoid collisions with some enemies and even with yourself. There isn't a lot more to talk about, other than the game is really fun and perfect for small moments.

Week 10: Sasquatchers

I love stupid premises in my video games, so Sasquatchers got my attention since I opened the app for the first time. Here, you got the role of planner to a team of cryptozoologists, trying to take photos and videos from (supposed) fictional creatures, like a sasquatch. But you do this in a tactical RPG fashion, Fire Emblem-style: moving your units, uncovering terrain and avoiding being attack by the beasts. The crank is only used when you are actually taking a photo to get the best angle, that creates a new dimension to the game. Unfortunately, I'm the worst tactical RPG player ever lived, so you will enjoy this more than I did.

Week 11: Forrest Byrnes: Up in Smoke

Do you remember when portables didn't have the power to have the same games as their console counterparts, so you would have smaller titles of those franchises to compensate? I truly think the Playdate is the perfect modern vessel to those spin-offs to shine again! Forrest Byrnes: Up in Smoke isn't an amazing example, but I think it's the proof of concept. Featuring the unsettling mascot from Firewatch, this 2D platformer has a random level each time you starts running away from fire. With a ton of collectables but strange controls to find them, it wasn't for me, but I like the precedent.

Week 11: Battleship Godios

Changing fire bullets to balls that ricochet the screen is apparently a must for black-and-white portable devices? Battleship Godios is a side-scroller shooting game that only gives you a limited number of balls to destroy all the enemy ships and finish a run. Since you go back to the beginning of the game every time you die, the "trial-and-error challenge" became just pure frustration to me and I moved on.

Week 12: b360

Breakout is a classic, but it never impressed me in its original form. That said, variations of the brick-breaker mechanic are always welcome! The last game from Panic itself in this list, b360 is literally a full rotation in the idea (pun also intended): you use the crank to spin your paddle around a circle, bouncing the ball in all the directions. The game also suffers from small sprites in a even smaller screen, and some levels are specifically hard, but if you liked breaking bricks in the past, you will like to do here too.

Week 12: Ratcheteer

If you consider Ratcheteer the season finale, what a banger they reserved to finish Playdate's Season One! Inspired by some Zelda portable games, our hero is an apprentice mechanic trying to find their master in a cryo-colony in a distant, post-apocalyptic future. Exploring the overworld, crawling through dungeons and finding new items to progress are the basis of this adventure, that also uses the crank in clever mechanics. Some quality of life features were missing (even comparing with Link's titles on the Game Boy), but this is the perfect way to show how the Playdate can also be the home of bigger and more dense stories.

Who is the Playdate for, after all?

This was the question I asked myself since the Playdate was announced: who is it for? In an industry that is full of live service games, big 4K machines with ray tracing and 300h repetitive RPGs, why create a small portable device with a crank? Well, after a lot of hours in those Season One games, I think I found an answer. The Playdate was made for who likes experimental and different premises and games — and I'm happy that I'm one of those people.

I can have some issues with the hardware itself (yes, I really wanted a backlit screen) and the Season One games could be just the surface of what is already available, but I can see myself playing in the Playdate for years and years to come. Seeing this community grows around an inclusive concept, transforming limitations into greater ideas, and understanding why cranking is great... As everything that is new and strange, this device is always be a place to try new things and evolve what gaming is (even in black-and-white or with only two buttons).

At the back of the box, the first thing you can read is "We made the Playdate just for fun". And after having one, I believe them. And it's great to be part of it.

Review: The Magical Mixture Mill

2024-04-11T00:00:00Z

Among all aspects of fantasy magic, my favorite is probably alchemy. Maybe it is just my scientific brain tickling inside the concept of mixing things and seeing a potion explode (or transform someone in a chicken), but it's just a really cool idea that is often well translated into video games. The Magical Mixture Mill, that exited early access some weeks ago, is another try of putting on the player's hands the infinite possibilities of alchemy, mixing it with some exploration — and would have way more successful if you didn't have a little obstacle in the way.

You start your adventure on The Magical Mixture Mill as, of course, an amnesiac person. The only two things you know are: you can't actually drink mixtures or you pass out... and you are the new trainee in an old lady's potion shop! The job is simple: go out, get some ingredients (and other materials), make some potions and sell them to your clients. (when I say clients, there are only six people that buys your potions during the game, and this is just too funny to me)

Your game loop is made by two distinct but well-integrated parts: collecting and mixing. Your day will always start going outside to get ingredients for your mixtures, but also materials to create flasks and upgrade your potion machines. In my opinion, there isn't a lot of depth here, specially when you understand how powerful your special abilities are — my character was a wizard and I could use a big wave to fill my inventory using just one button. Unless you are exploring a new area, this become repetitive really fast.

But, in the other hand, mixing and experimenting with potions is really fun! The game has an interesting alchemy system that is way more complex that I expected. Each ingredient can give one of five types of essence, in a different potency and with a different flavor. To create the "optimal" potion of each type, you need to experiment mixing distinct essences in different ratios, and using other types of food (like fruits and insects) to flavorize them correctly. All of this are recorded in-game so you can keep learning whenever you unlock a new machine or ingredient.

On top of that, The Magical Mixture Mill also has a whole factory management puzzle, similar from what you would expect from games like Factorio. You don't create your potions by hand, you can create machine chains that will extract, distill, ferment, flavorize and bottle your mixtures. Once they are done (and with a little bit of goblin magic), they start working by themselves and all you need to do is provide the ingredients. Early in the game, you start also to get ways of creating your own flasks, charcoal and metal ingots to improve other parts of the workshop.

Yes, The Magical Mixture Mill have a lot of fun... if you have the time and patience to unlock them. You see, even if you collect a lot of resources, every small upgrade or discovery is locked behind Gold. The only way to get Gold, wherever, is to selling potions to those six clients every day (or completing quests, that doesn't happen a lot). But, because you are only paid at the end of a day, there were a lot of times that I just ignored 2 or 3 in-game days to get some cash and unlock the next upgrade.

I understand that the shop concept is the glue between the story and all the other mechanics, but just locking ALL steps of progress behind it totally took me away from the game. Even if I tried to just "use the time" to get resources, besides being an even more repetitive task, I just started to hoard wood, stone and ingredients at the point of discarding them. This "artificial" barrier was definitely a strange design choice and became the big challenge to overcome when trying to have fun in The Magical Mixture Mill.

One decision can change completely an experience and I think The Magical Mixture Mill is a good example of this. Collecting things in the woods is OK at best, but the whole idea of experimenting with the ingredients and creating your own alchemy machine chain is so fun and well-made. It's a shame that the pacing (with the gold unlocks), instead of creating a fun goal to achieve, just made the repetitive parts of the game even more tiring than they should be. If you are willing to go through this loop of monotony to find when this title really shines, I think I have a job for you in that old lady's potion shop...

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Storyblocks: The King

2024-04-03T00:00:00Z

Yes, I like huge adventures, with a lot of systems and mechanics, and a deep story that will make me cry; there's some moments that all I want is to submerge in a big game and have fun. But, specially nowadays working 40 hours per week, I also have my time to relax, put a podcast on and just play a small and cozy puzzle game. The concept behind Storyblocks: The King was really cool, but the execution was so bad that I just came disappointed after some hours.

In theory, Storyblocks: The King is a choose-your-own-adventure game (where you choose how the story can continue) mixed with a block placement puzzle, what is genuinely a good idea. CYODs are commonly more focused only on the narrative, so having a more thinky element there could be really cool. The presentation here isn't the best, but works as a generic medieval setting, what can also be said about the plot and characters too: most of them feels like an mediocre children book.

In reality, nothing really works that well. The "puzzle" is just connecting two points in a grid using dominoes and the "challenge" is create a path big enough to use all the pieces available. There's no actual mechanics being introduced, you just put the blocks in a void until two cubes are connected. Sometimes, you have two "goal" squares and the one you choose to connect indicates where the story goes. No, you don't have any information about those "options", so you just go on pure guess.

I imagine that on PC, using a mouse, Storyblocks: The King has a better usability, but playing it on the Nintendo Switch was also a nightmare by itself. The control choice is strange — it isn't okay to use Y instead of the Home button to open the menu, you know —, all the grid navigation is cursor-based even on a joystick and you can't even use touch controls on Portable Mode. Play this game is a challenge by itself, and if you want to find other "complete stories", you need to repeat the first levels every time you start a new "run".

As a fan of low-budget cozy puzzle games, I'm really disappointed. As I said, Storyblocks: The King has a great potential conceptually, but the execution is far away from a pleasant experience. The stories are generic, the "puzzle" is repetitive and lacks any kind of depth, and the controls make it even hard to get any fun from the package. I know that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover (or by a review from a blog), but you are probably better going after other stories.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Lonesome Village

2024-04-01T00:00:00Z

It's really fun when you start to follow the games from specific devs and see how they are improving with each new game. I discovered the work from Mexican team Ogre Pixel with their last title, A Tiny Sticker Tale — a small puzzle adventure about stickers so good that found its way to my POTY last year. But only now I could play Lonesome Village, their first non-mobile game released some years ago, and it's interesting to see how they delivered a fun ride even with a less experienced team.

In Lonesome Village, you follow the steps of Wes, a traveler that found a strange town that was completely empty and haunted by a big and creepy tower. With the help of a good fairy, you start to climb the floors of this ominous building, freeing the villagers and starting to understand what happened there (and why you are the only that can save them all). It's not the most incredible plot ever made, but it's good enough to make the game runs and give some meaning to what you do in each chapter. The game looks very very cute though, with well-made, hand-drawn visuals that already became part of the studio's identity (at least for me).

Mechanically, you have two distinct gameplay loops combined into one linear progression. First, you have the tower, with each level presenting different puzzles to solve and new villagers to save. And then, you have a very light life simulation experience in the village, doing quests and collecting items (and hearts as gratitude tokens) used to unlock doors in the tower. It feels like two separate worlds in Lonesome Village and I would say that they were different games if they weren't connected story-wise.

And because those two "parts" are so distinct, I think they also succeed differently. The puzzle tower is the best gameplay of Lonesome Village to me. The difficulty curve sometimes have quick ups and downs, and I don't think all the enigmas have the same inspiration behind them, but I had fun doing a lot of them. Each level is completely different from one another and you have a cool variety of challenges, like spatial puzzles, memory tests, mazes and even some 2D puzzle platforming.

The "life simulation" half of Lonesome Village, though, feels like a hyper simplified (and sometimes generic) version of Animal Crossing. There's a lot of different things you can do when you start to get new tools — digging, planting, harvesting, fishing, mining, crafting, decorating — but there isn't enough depth to make them really interesting. Most of time you just be using them to do some fetch quests to get what you need to advance in the tower. I think that an approach closer to an adventure game (even including some puzzles there) would be a better use of those resources and creating a more satisfying experience.

A general impression that I had through my time with the game was a lack of polish in a lot of the small interactions with the world and how they feel a little off sometimes. There's no bugs that stops your progress, but the strange interfaces and some character interactions can be little bits of frustrating that will accumulate after some hours. However, knowing the team's most recent work, you can see how much they've managed to improve since Lonesome Village.

If you want to do everything, you won't probably be amazing in anything but all you do will be probably fine. Lonesome Village suffers of this lack of mechanical focus and ends up with several bits that didn't match the quality of the others. I would love to play more puzzles like those in tower (like you literally can), but I don't think the life simulation is enough to sustain a playthrough alone. Fortunately, this gameplay combination, together with cute visuals and story, creates a package that is fun to experience, even with its flaws.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Bounties of Babylon

2024-03-27T00:00:00Z

I wrote some weeks ago about how digital versions of board games can help to expand an already good experience now that the game can use the help of algorithms and computers. But what can be possible when a board game is digital from the ground-up? With no restrictions on physical components or human brains, designs can be even experimental and different, right? Unfortunately, Bounties of Babylon isn't a good answer of this question.

Your goal in a run of Bounties of Babylon is get an amount of victory points in each round, traveling through an hexagonal grid that is expanded each turn. At the start of a turn, you choose tiles to expand the map (and the river your ships can traverse on), in a Carcassonne-like experience. After that, you roll the dice to move and try to get extra artifacts or find merchants to exchange goods for victory points. There's also a need of creating paths through tiles that produce the same thing, so you can collect more in the end of the round.

There is a lot to say about the odd design of this game, at least for me. Although a "full run" of Bounties of Babylon can have seven-ish rounds, everything is reset from one round to another — except for victory points that you accumulate for a high score. It's always a new map, with new goals and an empty inventory. The problem happens when some of the rounds have only 2 or 3 turns: there's no time to actually do any type of strategy when you have so little time to act. It felt like a bad designed procedural puzzle at times.

And then you have an unexpected participation from the Roll and Move mechanic. If you are from the board game hobby nowadays, you already know how much I'll trash talk this now, but, why, in the year of 2024, ARE WE STILL USING ROLL AND MOVE THIS WAY? Even if you did well in the tile placement, your ships will only move based on dice rolls. And, because you probably only had 3 turns, there's also no time to correct yourself and recover from the bad luck. Strange on paper, frustrating on reality.

If those strange design choices weren't enough, Bounties of Babylon's visual presentation isn't really on the side of good readability. The game looks fine with its low-poly graphics, to be fair, but it's so hard to visualize what's happening in the game sometimes. For example, the only way to know if a tile will produce goods at the end of a turn is if some of the objects (like coconuts) are blinking white. With an interface like this, my turns doubled on time so I could read the board and the game situation.

I truly believe that the digital media can be an amazing tool for game designers to bring tabletop gaming to another level — not only as a "second option", but also as a medium to reach the (until) impossible. Bounties of Babylon, although, with its odd design choices, outdated mechanics and bad presentation, cannot be used as an example for good use of this medium. At best, it felt like a half-baked puzzle that was frustrating to play and hard to recommend, even for fans of Carcassonne, Catan or strategy games.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Puzzles for Clef

2024-03-23T00:00:00Z

Puzzle design is way more complex and embracing than you might expect. There are so many ways of creating those enigmas that even puzzle masters are mostly focused on some types of challenges. That said, if you look into design classes, you will find one golden rule as an incredible and unexpected consensus between designers. There are many names used to it, but I like to call them "Eureka Moments".

You remember that sparkle of geniality, that moment that all the synapses in your brain decided to happen, the point in time where all the cogs align and the puzzle you are trying to understand just... isn't a puzzle anymore. You solved it, you did it, this is your Eureka Moment and no one can take it from you. This feeling of being smart is the main goal of a well-crafted puzzle, and probably why you try to solve them in the first place.

I know that "rules are meant to be broken", but I also believes that you need to understand them really well to start cracking them. Puzzles for Clef knows what it's doing with its puzzle design — and I felt smart multiple times — but its troublesome structure makes those bits so rare that the experience is way less interesting than it should be, even having a good presentation.

A magical treasure hunt

The story behind Puzzles for Clef is, in fact, really cute and even relatable to me. Instead of a great and ancient mystery to save the world, we follow the little girl Clef visiting her ancestors' island to solve a birthday mystery hunt made by her big sister Cres, learn more about her family's legacy and find a way to make all the ancient bells ring again. I've created puzzle hunts for my friends at college (and even my little brother) in the past, so it's really fun to see this as a game background now.

Visually, the island you explore during the playthrough is really gorgeous. Every area has a different vibe and color palette, without losing the general idea of a magical place. Sometimes it's hard to understand what are actual platforms you can walk in, and what it's just the background of the level (and some puzzles depend on this), but it's a rare situation and you start to just guess better when you get more used to the game.

The "ringing bells" theme also is really well used during the game. Not only it's your main goal on Cres' treasure hunt, but it's also the main instrument you can hear in the soundtrack for any of the areas. Magical colored bells also are the Clef's main ability to solve some puzzles in the game, using specific songs to uncover secrets or creating a spotlight. You play them as Link's Ocarina of Time, pressing specific buttons in a specific order.

Sincerely, when I started playing Puzzles for Clef, it had all I could wanted for a game: a cute sincere story, beautiful visuals and interesting puzzle material. But, as I said before, all of this was overshadowed by the monotonous wrapping that is around the core mechanics of the game.

Smart or bored?

The first thing that needs to be said is that Puzzles for Clef has a good of smart puzzle ideas. Some of them feels like a proper puzzle-platformer, others feel like escape room puzzles, where you have to use some clues to find a "password". The bell melodies also acts as tools and are used more times during future chapters, what is also really cool. Clef's diary acts as a mix of an inventory and clue system, but doesn't works really well in any of those functions sometimes.

Without giving much spoiler about puzzle resolutions, I can say that a lot of moments in Puzzles for Clef made me feel smart. I always had a notebook and a pencil in my desk to take notes of details and solve some of the puzzles, like the best games asks you to do. But all of those small geniality bits were just sprinkles of a giant and boring mess of tireless walking and backtracking.

Although the game is broken in areas, they are maps that needed to be traversed as Clef, that can only walk slowly and jump once. And the puzzles always asks you to walk through ALL THE MAP MORE THAN ONCE to get one item, or flip one switch. The Eureka Moments are there, but there so much walking really slowly through one point to the other that you forgot that you should feel smart. If only the movement mechanics were also interesting, but no, things are far away just for world building, I guess.

Another great problem with the game is how big the puzzles are and how that takes away the feeling of the Eureka Moments even more. As an example, there's a point in the game that you need to put pipes in the wall (saying more than that is too much spoilers). You need to do this SIX times in a big map. Every one of them includes a new rule, or asks the player to have a new perspective on the puzzle's mechanic? No. It's mostly the same, but you need to do it again and again. I already got it, I already solved it, why can't I progress? Why make me just repeat myself SO MANY TIMES?

This monotonous and repetitive structure steals all the momentum that I had solving the actual puzzle and just makes playing Puzzles for Clef a boring experience. Even if I knew that an enigma can really be a blast to solve, I also know that I'll pass triple the time just walking, and then had to make the puzzle four other times to advance. I wanted so much to enjoy more of the incredible atmosphere, or just imagining myself in a cozy and fun treasure hunt... but if my brother made me walk in circles that much, I would have given up a long time ago.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story

2024-03-13T00:00:00Z

I already talked how much video game preservation is important to me when I was talking about The Making of Karateka, the first volume in Digital Eclipse's Gold Master Series, a format of interactive documentaries about videogames and their stories. Having old games playable on modern systems is really important, but having the context of their creation (and also the wisdom and knowledge from who made them) helps me to look into those titles in a different way, specially when they didn't aged that well.

As I didn't had played Karateka before going into its museum, the announcement of Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, Gold Master Series' second chapter, was the first time I ever heard Jeff Minter's name. Although I played a lot of old PC games in my childhood, I started my journey on the early years of Windows — "Commodore 64" was a name with no meaning in my head for years. But, fortunately, going into an exhibition without knowing nothing about it creates even more possibilites of being surprised and inspired.

Authentic in its purest form

If the past Digital Eclipse title was based on telling the story of a single game from start to finish, Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story focus more in creating a profile of Jeff Minter, a British game maker that is the founder, programmer, designer and the soul of Llamasoft, a indie software house that created some of the most experimental games you could find for 8-bit computers in the 80s. From his love for llamas (and other ruminants) to his never-ending quest for innovation, it's impossible not to be amazed by his games.

Content-wise, there's way less videos and documents than I expected in the four "chapters" of Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story. No game is really explored in too much depth, and they are most cited in groups representing both Jeff's and the industry's state year by year. Some specific stories are told in more detail — like the drama between Minter and reviewers that hated Mama Llama, or how shareware and the community saved Llamasoft in the 90s — but the goal of the content is more to give context to the games than the opposite.

Some of them got me surprised by how cool is to have access to those things in a collection like this. For example, looking into full quality scans of Steinar Lund's original arts for Llamasoft covers is so impressive! They are an incredible surrealist mix of animals and colors, and a delight to see. And probably my favorite non-game bit in the collection, I loved reading all available issues of Nature of the Beast, an actual, physical, mail-sent newsletter that Minter wrote back in the 80s to get in touch with the Llamasoft community. It so amazing to see how he was close to his fans the same way we do nowadays with Discord servers or Patreon campaigns.

And, to be fair, the contrast of the young Jeff Minter that was writing about his games month after month and the more older (and wiser) Jeff Minter we see in the video interviews also shows how much he learned, by doing the things the way he wanted. As a young game designer myself, it's really inspiring to see someone with a legacy so great, that impacted so many people, created from his own force of innovating and doing something different and unique.

Looking into the Llama Library

If this collection has way less documents to read and videos to watch, at least they have a LOT to play — and, to be fair, playing is the only way to try to understand some of Minter's ideas sometimes. Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story contains 42 games in its library, spanning through eight different platforms and almost two decades of history. Because of this ratio, you'll be using way more of your time with the title playing games instead of reading or watching videos.

Not every game is a hit for me, of course. Sometimes you got a game like Iridis Alpha or Sheep in Space and even after 30 minutes I couldn't understand what is going on; but in the context of a museum, it's just like finding an installation that doesn't click with you. In a lot of the titles I could understand the concept of it, but it felt too ahead of its time and too complex for the limitations the Commodores or the Ataris had. I would love to see a lot of those concepts reimagined for modern systems.

That said, some of the games were just... really good? Of course, they are mostly 20-years-old shooting games, but when Minter's design and coding was the right spot, great experiencies emerged. Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time (yes, this is the name) have a really cool geometric puzzle in how you can shoot. Llamatron: 2112 was a frenetic and completely crazy experience that I would love to see rethinked as a bullet heaven. Even the light synthesizers like Psychedelia were fun to toy with.

In some of the Llamasoft's biggest successes, you can also see how a concept evolved through the years and how each platform brought new elements to the mix. Gridrunner was one of my favorite Minter games and every port has a different vibe. In the VIC-20 it felt too much frenetic, but the Atari ST version was more slow and methodic. The best version though is Gridrunner Remastered, created by Digital Eclipse to this collection, just showing how much incredible some of those concepts can be outside the limits of yesterday.

It's sad though that the gaming library stops in 1994, with the amazing Tempest 2000 for the Atari Jaguar, truly one of Minter's masterpieces. Maybe for licensing reasons, emulation problems or just design impossibilities — a lot of Llamasoft recent work are virtual reality games — but I would love to see how Jeff would understand the modern scene of game design and adapt his own style on it.

Building a different type of narrative than the previous chapter of the Gold Master Series, Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story shows how wide and amazing gaming history can be. Learning more about Jeff Minter's work wasn't just inspiring for me as a designer, but just presented to me cool concepts and mechanics that were lost forgotten to a big part of the gaming community nowadays. If you like shoot'em'ups, or just want to know more about a crazy British dude that makes games about llamas, the exhibition is already open and you don't want to miss it.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Quilts and Cats of Calico

2024-03-12T00:00:00Z

Both as a player and a designer, I truly believe that playing a board game physically is an irreplaceable experience. Sitting with friends, laughing a lot and just having fun with some paper and well-crafted rules is one of the best things that you can have being alive. But it's so hard to find time to get everyone together nowadays that digital versions of board games became an essential part of my experience in the hobby. I can count how many days I could play a physical game in a month, but I lost count how many times I was on Board Game Arena to beat my friends on Ark Nova, for example.

Translating a tabletop game to the digital medium isn't just a matter of coding some buttons and call it a day. It needs to create an atmosphere that represents well the original title and it's also an opportunity of expanding what is possible with the design and find new ways to play it. Quilts and Cats of Calico, made by Monster Couch (that already worked on the digital version of Wingspan), does those two things really, really well and probably created the best Calico could be in digital form.

Cats know what they want

Launched in 2020 after a successful Kickstarter campaign, designed by Kevin Russ and illustrated by Beth Sobel, Calico is one of the cutest board games I ever seen. Your goal is to place hexagonal tiles with different colors and patterns to sew a beautiful quilt that will please all the cats in the world. You get points following tile combinations around special hexagons, sewing buttons in color groups or creating pattern clusters that attracts specific kittens. All you do in your turn, although, is placing one tile from your hand and getting a new one from the market.

Instead of having a lot of restrictions on where and how you can place the tiles, you can just put them on any empty space in the board and that's fine. Calico seems easy to play (and it is), but this game is really hard to master (or just being good). Every hexagon, every color, every pattern has to be really well placed so you can optimize all of the 3 scoring methods. It's a really satisfying puzzle, but I think you need to be a veteran player to learn how to filter the huge amount of options you have at your disposal already in the first round.

If your friends don't know that much about the game too, everyone will have some trouble to manage all the scores and it's fine. But you can expect some long turns if someone at the table likes to act in analysis paralysis — a simultaneous action system may have solved the problem, specially because the interaction between the players is minimum. All that said, doing just one combo is enough to get that satisfying feeling of being the master of quilts.

Although it can be hard to get a high score, I like how Calico is accessible, even if you didn't understood all the rules from the beginning. The visuals are so amazing and colorful that I can see the game getting in the table really easily because of cats and quilts alone. All that said, I love how the game allows a "family mode" that removes the special hexagons, that can be really hard to understand from the beginning, and creates the perfect atmosphere to enjoy the visuals.

A story for my own cats

Remember, in the start of this review, when I said that a digital version of a board game is the perfect moment to expand the experience? Quilts and Cats of Calico could have been only the tabletop game with a cool UX and online multiplayer, but I love they aimed to create a more complete video game package. The presentation is perfect: every tile feels like fluffy fabric, you can pet all the cats that walks through the board and Paweł Górniak's soundtrack feels cozy and relaxing.

The most surprising feature for me is the cat maker. In the original game, you choose some cats (and their pattern groups) that can give you points. But, here, you can create your own cats inside the game and play with them! I have three cats in my house: recreate them was easy and playing with their avatars was marvelous. You can even put them in cute clothes or fantasy colors and make your dream kittens. They know exactly their demographic and I'm always down for feline fan service.

But the greatest new feature of Quilts and Cats of Calico is the story mode. You are a quilter going back to your hometown Tomkitty, a place where cats are venerated as lucky charms. Your goals in the city are many: you want to establish yourself in the society as a couturier, find your missing dad and face a strange and advanced sewing machine. The portraits are beautiful, but there's not a lot of depth in the story — that said, I'm impressed of how many elements they created in a little plot for a board game adaptation.

Mechanically, Quilts and Cats of Calico's story mode is full of... puzzles! Most of the "quests" from Tomkitty villagers aren't full games of Calico. Instead, you have a small group of tiles and a specific task to do — like getting 5 buttons/color groups using only 9 specific pieces, for example. Those little puzzles are really fun, and you probably could create a game only with them. I think that, because of the reduced choice, they are less tiring than a full game of Calico sometimes too, and it's a great way to experience the mechanics in a single-player form.

That said, you also have full games inside the story mode (the first one that appeared to me was already in the middle of the story, however). Remember when I said that the game is hard if you want to get big and win? Well, trying to win against the AI was really hard. I played every encounter at least twice to get a nice score, specially because they also have special conditions you have to do in addition to get more points. The puzzles are cool, but I don't know how much they prepare you for a full game, so those moments can really be a peak in the game's learning curve.

Playing a board game digitally isn't the same thing as the real deal, but a good adaptation can create an unique experience too. Quilts and Cats of Calico not only adapts perfectly a tabletop game that is easy to learn (and really hard to master) perfectly, but goes way beyond the basics to make it interesting not only for cat lovers and new players, but also for veterans that want to see those colors and patterns in a new way. Whether visiting Tomkitty or putting your own kittens in the board, you'll probably have a good time here. May the Calico kitties love your quilts!

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Sixty Four

2024-03-06T00:00:00Z

I can say that one of my guilty pleasures are idle/clicker games. If you take them for face value, it's just numbers going up trying to get your money through microtransactions. But there's a little task of optimization and evolution that always catch me, at least for some weeks until I got bored. I replayed Cookie Clicker way too much in my life to get here now and deny the fun I had.

Sixty Four called my attention when it promised a different take on the genre. Not only the game would tell a story — like some of my favorites, Spaceplan and Peter Talisman — but it would incorporate strategy and planning elements that could remind you of some management games like Factorio. In theory, it does all of this, but it wasn't enough to be interesting enough for me.

Let me explain. The world of Sixty Four starts only as a blank void with a mining machine at the center. If you keep clicking on it, the device starts to bring minerals from the depths in the form of black big cubes. If you click some times in the cube, you got some smaller cubes you can use as a resource. And then you keep doing that in clicker fashion until you got enough resources to build new tools around the mining machine.

Those new devices can automate some processes, like extracting minerals or breaking the big blocks, or just make them faster. After some time, the big black cubes will have more colors: when broken, these new pieces will became advanced resources that can be used to create more devices. During your slow progress in Sixty Four, you will start with a lonely machine and, some hours later, you'll be managing three different resource types.

The big problem is all those "automations" are also powered 5by the resources you are collecting and you need to fuel them manually every time. Even some more advanced devices will work for just 10 minutes until their power source runs out. And, because all of the processes in Sixty Four are connected in some way, the bottleneck is always the weakest machine. It's the first idle game that I know that you need to check every minute to keep it idle.

I played Sixty Four for at least 20 hours, but most of that time all the devices would be in a halt because I forgot to click in a machine every 30 seconds. Even the most bizarre mobile clicker games, with an enormous amount of dark design patterns, allows you to be away from the game for half an hour to live without stopping your progress. This isn't possible here, at least, not during the enormous amount of time I was still excited about finding out what the game was about.

Not even the narrative that tries to glue all of that together was enough to get me engaged. The mystery behind a white void that spawns black cubes from nowhere is cool — and as far as I know, the plot itself goes to interesting places at the end — but the pacing is one of the worst I ever seen. For a ridiculous amount of time, all you can see is chat messages between two people who cannot, for the life of them, describe what is happening. The abstract atmosphere also makes it difficult to understand what to do next in Sixty Four, and the game doesn't do a good job to show you the next task.

For a genre that always gets a bad reputation of being too simple to be that addictive, I'm impressed how Sixty Four is an idle game that made me less excited the more I played. This package is full of content, way more that a lot of other clicker titles — a mysterious story, some puzzling mechanics, a lot of resources to manage — but, at the end, the experience is so boring that I can only recommend it to those who are really big fans of the genre. Sometimes less is more, but I don't think this little amount of fun is worth the enormous amount of hours this white void asks from you.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Penny's Big Breakaway

2024-03-01T00:00:00Z

Expectation can really change how you experience anything, including games. Sometimes, it's because of external factors — who didn't have a movie that a friend hyped for MONTHS and when you watched, it was just OK? The film was probably good, but you were expecting even more of it. But, sometimes, the expectations come from how a product is presented to you in official marketing material.

It was clear to me what I was expecting from Penny's Big Breakaway, the debut title of Evening Star (a studio formed by Sonic Mania devs) and published by Private Division. The game was announced and shadow-dropped on Nintendo Direct, on the house of some of the most accessible 3D platformers even made.

It featured animated sequences and funky music, and some of the most cartoonish original characters the genre have seen in recent years. When talking about the game, the narrator invited me for a great adventure and said to me that my "speedrunning soul" would love the Time Attack mode, so there should be something for everyone, right? ...well, I was wrong.

What I was expecting

OK, that's not exactly wrong as the game really has beautiful animated sequences: they help to tell a not-so-great story, but also are a vessel to show great character design! Penny is so expressive that I want to have a figure of her in my living room. After she makes a blunder in front of Emperor Eddie, she becomes a fugitive that needs to run from a lot of stupidly cute penguins until she can finally get her big break. Her only companion is Yo-Yo, a sentient dog-like yo-yo (!) that is used as the main gimmick to move and grab things (and was also the one who ate Eddie's pants, so it's their fault).

The game is also really colorful as seen in the trailers (even too much sometimes). It's great to have those scenarios popping up in the screen, but I found hard to differentiate some of the worlds in the game. Mostly are just the same floor with a different tint and one or two new gameplay elements. That said, Penny's Big Breakaway knows how to be a visually gorgeous game, doesn't matter when you look at it.

The best thing this game does to create the atmosphere of each world is the music. This soundtrack is already one of the best of 2024! Every song is a banger, and sometimes I just stopped moving Penny with the controller just to keep hearing it. Tee Lopes, the composer of other great gaming soundtracks, had made one of his best works to date, and it's great to see him showing his power outside the Sonic the Hedgehog motifs. Sean Bialo, I didn't knew you until then, but I already love your work. You two were amazing.

So, if Penny's Big Breakaway looks great and sounds amazing, what's the problem with it? The moment I started playing the tutorial and those first levels, I understood who was the target audience of this game and what was my problem with it.

What I wasn't expecting

I played a lot of 3D platformers in my life and mostly of them focus a lot on getting a great way to movement your character. It's the main action you'll be doing during the whole game, so it's make sense. In game design, we can call many of those possible interactions between the player and the mechanics as verbs. For example, in Super Mario Odyssey, the most simple verbs you can have when moving Mario is jump, run, and throw the hat.

The greatness about those simple verbs is they are probably the only ones you need to use to finish the main story, but also, at the same time, ingredients to even more complex and advanced interactions. You can jump on a ladder step by step and go to the top, or you can do a triple jump, throw the hat, jump on it and then dive. This flexibility not only can help pace the goals and challenges through levels of mastery, but also allow players to control the complexity of their actions.

Of course, Mario is the king of platformers and it isn't that fair to compare with him, but a lot of games goes with the same idea: simple verbs that are the source of a complex tree of actions and possibilities. Penny's Big Breakaway, though, goes on the opposite direction. Already in the tutorial, the level zero of the game, you are presented to a lot of complex actions, with little details that can change completely the outcome of Penny's movement.

For example, you have a button to jump, and if you press it again, you can double jump... but this double jump doesn't really get you a lot of height (unless you are close to a platform, than you can grab on it and push yourself up). What you need to do is use the yo-yo button to lock it in the air and hang on it, and then jump again when you reach the peak. But, you need to do this fast, because as you are hanging, you keep losing height.

I need to think of all of those variables just to cross a long gap. It's not that difficult to do, but it feels way more complex that should be!? Another example is when you press the trigger button to "ride" on the yo-yo to get faster... only if you already had enough momentum to start it. You can charge the move, but it only works if you are completely still. Otherwise, you mount the yo-yo and stops moving, it's even a little funny.

How those actions are mapped to the controller is also really strange. The yo-yo button, when pressed on the ground, is a whip-like attack. But if you press it twice, Penny does a dash so fast it's hard to change your direction. So, when a swarm of penguins goes into your direction, and you try to attack them multiple times, you always will activate the dash and probably fall. In every level, you need to get all of this (and more) in consideration, independently of how much you want to invest in mastering it.

Reading all of this you can only concluded that I think the game is badly done, but isn't exactly that. The devs knew exactly what they were doing in Penny's Big Breakaway. Once you understand this complex system of actions, and can start to improvise and chain them, you will feel like a kinetic god. Just look at any "max combo" videos of any level and you will be amazed on how far someone with mastery can go. Combo counters, point multipliers, lives, distant checkpoints, point goals: every other mechanic in the game is there to encourage you to master the movement (or punish if you don't).

And that's fine! There's definitely an audience for this type of challenge. But I wasn't expecting this game, the one announced on a Nintendo stream, the one with cartoon characters, to be a "pro-focused" platformer. This can be done — Cuphead is considered a hard game and it's literally inspired by old cartoons — but this also need to be communicated well in the product and it wasn't. I've seen so much comments about the game labelling it as "confused and frustrating" and that's what happens when the learning curve starts too high and you didn't do a good job of letting your players know that.

What no one was expecting

OK, let's say you are the perfect audience for this game, is Penny's Big Breakaway a pro 3D platforming masterpiece? I don't think so. The level design isn't bad, but there isn't much memorable passages or setpieces besides the bosses (and even some of them are subpar). When you start to get some combos going on, Penny feels like it's using speedrunning techniques, ignoring whole parts of the level with her yo-yo shenanigans.

There are some power-ups that can be found during the levels that changes Yo-Yo's abilities, like a chili pepper that allows for fast riding, or a hammer to break stone walls. They are fine most of time, but some of them have an one-time use AND a time limit to activate... so you need to run to use a thing you can only use once, and I didn't understand why yet.

But the biggest problem for me, and to everyone that plays it regardless of player type, was the bugs. I know (and expect) that most of them will be fixed soon in some update, but it's bizarre how much Penny's Big Breakaway is bugged right now. Besides the full crashes, sometimes the level's geometry became a mere suggestion for Penny, that would pass through walls and floors as it was nothing. Getting stuck in any object and be forced to restart from the last checkpoint was less common, but it happened enough times that I need to comment on it.

The worst bug for me was during a chase-like boss fight in which I, when trying to attack penguins, dashed instead and fall into the abyss. BUT THEN the game respawned Penny OUTSIDE THE PLATFORM multiple times, with no time to react. Yes, I lost all my lives, and the game just restart the fight from the beginning. No matter your skill level with the controls, frustration will get to you somehow.

If you are a 3D platformer specialist, or loves to understand and master complex action systems, or just has fun trying to rack up a big combo, you will be able to get over the bugs and have a great time in Penny's Big Breakaway. Not only the title was made for playing this way, but you also will enjoy the great visuals and amazing soundtrack it has to offer. But, if you was looking to a more chill experience, with a more balanced learning curve, you still can have fun, but not without a sprinkled and constant frustration. There are more inviting platformers in the market for you and this one doesn't seem to spin out to a broader audience.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore

2024-02-24T00:00:00Z

If you know your gaming history, you remember the Philips CD-i, a commercial failure so big that it is only remembered today because of some bad The Legend of Zelda games. Yes, Nintendo can be too protective with its IPs today, but back in the 90s, they have partnered with Philips to create a never-released CD add-on to the SNES, and rights to use Mario and Zelda characters in original productions were put in the contract too. If you ever have seen a video of Link: The Faces of Evil or Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, you quickly realized why those titles became a joke in the internet.

I think that everyone that knew this story was really surprised (including me) when Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore was announced. They cannot say (for legal reasons), but I can: this game is a spiritual successor of the bad Zelda CD-i games. I love the idea of "spiritual successors", because they are just fans that loved a thing so much that wanted to create their own take on it, but cannot use the original IP. But it's the first time I see someone trying to do more of a thing that everyone hated and mocked for decades.

And even before I start talking about the game itself and why it's not perfect and all of that, I need to be completely honest: they nailed it and I loved it. I don't know how they could create an experience so faithful to its inspirations and, at the same time, being that good and fun to play. Yes, I think it has some flaws, but saying only that Arzette is better than a Zelda CD-i game is being unfair for the work made by the team at Seedy Eye Software. Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore, going against everything expected, is really great and I'm grateful it exists.

Back when CDs were cool

In a spiritual successor, getting the right vibe from the original material and build from there is essential. Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore does this perfectly in every part. The plot isn't that far from some 90s games: you get the role of Princess Arzette, a swordfighter heroine that needs to find all the pieces of the Jewel of Faramore to seal an evil wizard. There's a lot of characters to meet during the journey, and most of them would have a small quest to Arzette in exchange for items or information. Magical beacons and candles can also be found to open new areas in the map (or find new paths in the levels).

This loose story is the perfect vessel to bring different characters with different and comic personalities, that are really explored during the game. All interactions in Arzette are done by hand-drawn, fully-voiced animated cutscenes, heavily inspired by the ones found in the Zelda CD-i games, and they are probably the best part of the game for me. The strange perspectives that changes every time, the over-the-top voices and performances, everything has a perfect charm to create a unique atmosphere to the title. Even the voice actors of Zelda and Link from the old games came back as narrators!

To be fair, I think "charming" is a great adjective to describe everything you can see and listen in Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore. The characters and enemies are made in pixel art, but the scenario by itself looks like they were a digital oil painting. All the songs, besides being automatic bangers, uses synthesized instruments to create a specific musical atmosphere, the one that some people in the past would call "CD quality" with no doubt. Even the dialogues are a little cheesy, but they match so well to the rest of the game.

It's so great to see a game being inspired by an infamous art style and being no afraid of embracing it totally. I never had a Philips CD-i in my life, but I played a lot of CD-ROM games in my childhood, so I have a strange nostalgia to this style, I guess? Even the little details — like showing the cutscenes as transparent videos at the top of the game, and stopping the music to play the voices because of the limitations of CDs — were made to be the most faithful possible. I don't know if the CD-i could run a game like this, but you can easily pass a screenshot of Arzette by a 90s CD game. What was once technical limitation, here becomes a strong and well-made design.

Sword swings and secrets

Another inheritance of its inspirations, Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore plays as a side-scroller 2D platformer and Arzette's sword is the main way to interact with the world, for killing enemies or just talking to the locals — I love how they explain it on the lore with the concept of a sword that knows who is good or bad. The combat in the game was the weakest mechanic for me: too simple to be interesting, it felt more like obstacles than a fun challenge to overcome.

In the Normal Mode, fighting was just obnoxious and it was too easy to die and restart the screen. But, in Casual Mode, you get so many heart pick-ups that it's virtually impossible to die if you spam the sword button. There's no real "middle" option, with some challenge and some pick-ups, you know? At the end, I just stayed in Casual Mode to not be too much frustrated and focused on the other aspects of the gameplay.

Exploration was the key to fun in Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore. The game is structured like a metroidvania — where you are constantly getting new abilities to reach more parts of the world — but in linear small levels instead of a big, interconnected map. Some levels have boss fights that give you jewel shards, other ones have a light beacon that opens new levels, and some of them have just important items to collect. Every new equipment you get (like the a "color magic" gun that can shoot red or blue things) opens, at least, 2 or 3 new paths in different levels (e.g. red blocks are only destroyed by red magic).

The most strange in this concept is how much you need to repeat the levels to get all the items you need during the adventure. I had to go to Durridin Forest, the first proper level, at least 6 times, each time looking for a specific obstacle that now I could get through. There are some shortcuts, and you start to get really powerful to just ignore (even more) the enemies, but this backtracking of linear levels starts to get boring at the end, even though the stages themselves are not that large.

All that said, getting more powerful is more organic than I expected. Instead of a experience bar or a generic skill tree, every upgrade or weapon is hidden somewhere, or offered by an NPC if you help them. It's fun to remember who needed an oil, or where I can use this special key, and then get rewarded for that. It makes this charismatic world even more alive and creates an interesting narrative that gives you more purpose to revisit a level than just finding another collectable.

And just as a side note, each stage also has a bonus level that gives you more Rubies (yes, it's the same currency as the Zelda CD-i games), and they are just really fun! You have some that are more common like breaking targets or solving a maze, but nothing has prepared me for a HOTEL MARIO MINIGAME! Yes, the only Mario game released for the CD-i had Mario and Luigi closing doors on "Bowser's hotel chain", and they just made it as a bonus level on Arzette. Who knew Hotel Mario would get fan service one day, right?

Fans does what companies don't want to do. ROM hacks, ports, fan games, spiritual successors: doesn't matter if it's a famous oldie or a cult classic, people will remember those stories forever. But Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore isn't about remembering what was good, but imagining a future where the bad things never happened. They not only understood what the Zelda CD-i games had to offer, but used it as a foundation to build an original and impressive adventure. If this is what we can get by giving the bad games of the past a second chance, I'm totally on board for more redeeming in the future.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Promenade

2024-02-23T00:00:00Z

Even though we use the name "platformers" for games in 2D and 3D, and they have a lot of common, it's easy to say those two categories are essentially different genres. When looking in two dimensions, you maybe can think of more traditional level-to-level titles, like Super Mario Bros., or games with big maps and unlockables to traverse them, like early Metroid or Castlevania titles.

But, in 3D, if you are not talking about some hack'n'slash shenanigans, you are probably looking at games where you collect A LOT of things. It can be just a goal to a platforming challenge (like Crash Bandicoot's insane boxes) or the main objective of the protagonist's life. Who would be Banjo and Kazooie without their Jiggies? What Rosalina would have done without Mario collecting all the Power Stars?

The art of collecting (in 2D)

Yes, I love a collectathon, but basically all the adventures focused of hoarding items to save the world are presented in three dimensions. Until Promenade, at least. The debut game from French studio Holy Cap, its main selling point is exactly mixing those two worlds so close but so far at the same time. What a 2D platformer would look like with a structure closer to 3D collectathons?

Promenade doesn't spend much time with a deep backstory. You control Nemo, a little kid with an unnamed poulp as companion, in a quest to reclaim all the cogs of the Great Elevator, a... gigantic elevator that acts like the main hub of all the worlds in the game. The main villain seems to be a "dark feelings version" of Nemo, that wants to break all the cogs? I didn't get a lot of the plot, but playing the game is more important here.

Nemo can run and jump, but the true star of the Promenade's mechanics is their octopus friend, that can be launched as a grappling hook into enemies and items. When they bring back the object, Nemo can launch it downwards to do a double jump, Klonoa-style. After some levels, they can also attach themselves to hooks scattered through the map, transforming the platforming in a momentum-based challenge really quickly.

It's not hard to do all of those things, even not being very good on platforming challenges like I am. Although, there's something strange in Promenade's controls. It's not exactly an input lag, but more about the animations: they always feel some frames off, doesn't matter how I played or what I was doing. After 1 or 2 hours, I was already used to the controls, but I couldn't get energy to master them to finish some time trial challenges. It's not that bad, but it's a little strange.

Fun in every floor

But even with this setback, I was really happy when exploring the different worlds that Nemo needed to discover. In the same vein as Super Mario Odyssey, your main collectable is cog pieces, that can be used to fix the different levels of the elevator. Each "level" — in fact, every level has an entrance to a new one too, so it's always 2 for 1 — had a good balance of platforming, puzzles and exploration.

For example, every world had a portal to a special world, "The source", with pure platforming challenges using a gimmick introduced in the level — like Mario Sunshine's secret courses. At the same time, you always have one or two fetch quests, that asks you to find items hidden in the level to bring to a NPC. And you can also expect a lot of puzzles: some of them are so good that I could seen it on a Professor Layton game. There are some recurring characters, like a penguin with a jetpack that wants to race you, but most of the content in Promenade changes a lot in every new world.

I want to give special praise to Promenade's version of dungeons, that were, essentially, a linear set of rooms that develops in a specific type of puzzle until a "boss fight" that is, mostly, the final challenge of that puzzle style — and I loved all of them. One that features some skyscrapers was specially my favorite (and I can't say more without going into spoilers). It's sad that the end level of the game were more focused on platforming (with way less checkpoints than normal) and not a great mashup of the puzzles on the bosses.

The hub world by itself, The Great Elevator, is also a big puzzle, with a lot of cog parts to find and collect. Unfortunately, although you have some great arcade-inspired minigames, you also have the constant need of bringing specific objects from different parts of the map (or even from inside the worlds) to specific points. And you can only carry one of them at a time, so it gets very boring very fast. Fortunately, you don't need to collect 100% of the cogs to finish the game, so you can just do what you think it's fun and go for it.

You create a 3D world with cool challenges and puzzles and a lot to collect, put me in there and I'll probably love it. But I didn't really expected how much I loved having this experience in 2D when playing Promenade. Despite some strange controls and some boring backtracking, Nemo's adventure in the floors of The Great Elevator filled me with joy for days. Every good puzzle that I solved, every new character I met, it just shows how much gaming as a medium has yet to offer if we try new combinations. I would love more 2D collectathons, please!

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Geometry Survivor

2024-02-19T00:00:00Z

Although I like the name "bullet heaven" for automatic survival shooters like Vampire Survivors, I understand that people prefer other denominations, like "horde survival" or simply "survivor-likes", and it's fine. But I never understood why people call those games roguelites.

Yes, you start a new build every time you play, but the goal of the game isn't finish a "complete run", but unlock all the options and complete the maps in different ways. For me, at least, this sense of progression and discovery is one of the reasons that bullet heaven games amuse me, opposed the mastery through repetition that comes from roguelikes.

It was expecting this feeling that I started playing Geometry Survivor and I was surprised of how the game, in fact, had way more inspirations in roguelikes that I imagined. Your main goal is to finish a 20-minute run in the only map available, collecting experience points to get new weapons and abilities from a limited pool of options. Unless you are already a master of the game, you will not do this in your first time, so you can use credits to get permanent upgrades (or different ships).

Talking like that doesn't show any problems, but there is a lot of content missing to be able to assume any of the definitions with quality. For a bullet heaven, having only one map and no unlockables besides bumping up some basic attributes makes the experience too monotone, with no tangible progression between matches. For a roguelite, there's not a lot of options to differentiate one run from another, with too similar challenges and builds. It feels like Geometry Survivor is a demo version of a bigger game that never existed.

The sad thing about all this is because playing a run of Geometry Survivor is really fun! Different from others in the genre, you already starts a run with a lot of speed and power, what helps to create a more incisive and direct approach when destroying the first enemies. The idea of special mines dropping in the map, that can be exploded as the last resort against an enemy wave, is really cool too and incentivize the player to be more aware of the map instead of just running.

Visually, I also loved the neon aesthetic and the inspiration in vector games. It helps a lot to see what's going on because of the black background, but the lack of detail makes hard to differentiate enemy types. I would love to see the game going further in the geometric theme, having different arenas inspired by shapes and other concepts like parallelism. Or even inspired by old vector games, like an Asteroids one? I can only dream.

One of the worst feelings as a player is seeing a game that's good to play, but in a hour you already has seen everything it has to offer. Geometry Survivor has all that needs to be a sprout of a great title in the bullet heaven (or roguelite, if you want) genre, but the lack of content and depth makes it really easy to forget about. Of course, you can just love how the gameplay feels like (because it feels really good) and keep replaying the same level until you finish a perfect run, but with so much more complete experiences in the market, it's hard to recommend it.

The team behind this game sent me a press key so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Professor Layton and the Curious Village HD

2024-02-16T00:00:00Z

If you look at any page of my blog, you can see how much I love puzzle games. For some reason, the concept of solving logic conundrums is really fun to me, and it always has been. But between my bad games of Tetris and a lot of Flash escape rooms that I solved, no puzzle series had a impact on me than the one started by Professor Layton and the Curious Village. Launched in 2008 for the Nintendo DS (but now available for Android and iOS in this "HD for Mobile" remaster), it's not only the start of one of my favorite franchises in gaming, but also an amazing concept that is almost perfectly executed.

An activity book that makes you cry

The best way I can explain what is a Professor Layton game is as "an activity book that makes you cry". Half of the time you will be solving a lot of enigmas and tricky questions, but the rest of your game will be a story full of mysteries, incredible characters and a need for a little bit of suspension of disbelief by the player. The plot starts with Hershel Layton, a professor of archeology and puzzle expert from London, and Luke Triton, his loyal apprentice, being invited to solve a strange case of inheritance.

They were invited to St. Mystere, a curious village where the late Baron Reinhold lived until his death. Instead of going direct to the family, his immense fortune is promised to the one that can found an artifact known as the Golden Apple. Invited by the widow, Layton and Luke must explore the village, find its secrets and understand why everyone is so obsessed with puzzles.

The story is mostly shown in the veins of an adventure / visual novel game: you can walk through the village, talk to people, find some items and solve a lot of puzzles in between. Key moments, although, are shown in gorgeous animated clips, that were burned in my memory for years. As the player, you cannot solve the mysteries per se, but the hints of what's going on are revealed through each chapter, culminating in an shocking ending. (It isn't the best ending on the series, but it's one of my favorites!)

Every puzzle has an answer!

But, well, this amazing plot can be the wrapper, but inside there's a lot of questions to solve and think about. Curious Village has way more content that I remembered: 100 puzzles in the main game (plus 20 extra ones hidden in the scenarios), and even more in post-game content. When solving some of them, you also get items for 3 different minigames, including a painting jigsaw and a room decorating mega-puzzle.

Instead of falling back of a dozen concepts and iterate on them, you can expect a LOT of different things when solving the puzzles in here. For better or worse, they are not really integrated into the map: when you find a new enigma to answer, you go to a different screen, with a text introducing the problem. Some of them are interactive (like my archenemies, the sliding puzzles), but a lot of them are multiple choice questions or expecting a number as an answer.

It's important to say that this variety is one of the highest points of the Layton series for me, but it's also a thing that can bother a little. Having so much different styles of enigmas is fun, but you are probably will encounter some that you gonna hate forever. Also, it's hard to connect all of them to what's happening in the plot, so the pacing of Curious Village can be strange: situations like "you are at the middle of accusing someone of murder but now you need to answer this math question" are kinda of common. For me, it's part of the franchise's charm, but it also can disturb some players.

To balance out this mechanical diversity, two systems are present in the game. The Hint Coins are a limited currency used to, well, getting hints on the puzzles! They are hidden in the background in specific spots (like boxes, windows or cracks in the wall) and they needed to be touched to be collected — what can be a little grindy if you only choose to touch every corner of the drawing. The other one are Picarats, a type of ranking points you gain from submitting right answers. Each wrong try on a puzzle decrease how much Picarats you gain from it, a way to avoid trial-and-error, but having less Picarats will just get you less concept art at the Bonuses section, so...

A lot of the puzzles involve diagrams or math, so the game also has a Memo function in each puzzle, that helps you draw in the screen as a draft for your thinking. There isn't a lot of functions, but you can sketch at the top of the puzzle image, that helps a lot when solving mazes, for example. I didn't need to use pen and paper not even once!

Revisiting St. Mystere in HD

This is a peculiar situation for me because I don't usually replay games. But I was introduced many years ago to this franchise with a Nintendo DS cartridge of Curious Village as a gift from a huge friend and, since then, Professor Layton became one of my favorite series in gaming. So, replaying the game years later in the "HD for Mobile" version was really an interesting experience.

The content was mostly the same, as you may expect, including the Golden Apple mystery that is one of my favorites in the entire series. The puzzles, though, I had a little bit of mixed opinions about them. I didn't remember how many of them are just tricky questions: they put a lot of numbers, but the real answer is based on one detail in the text. But a lot of them are really great to solve (even having solved it once before) so it was also fun!

A cool thing they did and I didn't expected was porting all the Weekly Puzzles to this HD version. Back in 2008, players could get an extra puzzle every week through the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, that was already shutdown when I played the game on the DS. So I got 27 puzzles that I never had seen before! Always cool to preserve all the content for a game in new releases.

Another adaptation they did in the HD version was related to the Secret Door. The original Layton games were planned as a trilogy from the beginning, so you could unlock extra content in Curious Village if you input a code from the sequel. Now, you can find Puzzle Charms — for some reason, inspired by the Layton's daughter's anime — together with Hint Coins to unlock the same content. I didn't wanted to get them all, but they are there.

Besides that, it's Curious Village in HD and it's a blast to play it in the phone. The HD cutscenes (including some original ones) are great and can be seen in landscape mode, writing in the screen using the finger is way worse than using the DS' stylus, and I loved to experience it all over again.

Even though the series' formula will only reach its potential in the sequels, Professor Layton and the Curious Village is still an amazing game. Inside this strange concept, you will encounter lovable characters, a crazy mystery and way more puzzles than you expect to solve. It has it's problems, but I can see myself going back, once more, to St. Mystere in some years just to find, once more, the Golden Apple. I'm really happy to see how great this HD version is, and I hope it helps to having Layton and Luke's adventures to be more accessible than never.

CLeM

2024-02-09T00:00:00Z

It's fun how the internet deal with spoilers nowadays. Some people watch hours of theory videos to know as much information as possible before a thing comes out, and some believes the fifth horseman of the apocalypse is called Spoiler. I actually in the middle here: sometimes, knowing a little bit more is important to hook me up into the story, but some secrets are better hidden until it's the time to reveal them.

I started playing CLeM without knowing a lot about its plot and I'm happy the game falls onto the second category. You awake as a plush doll that gained life, with a mission of "bringing beauty" to someone and a strange notebook with the word "CLeM" in the cover. There isn't much in the notebook besides alchemic concepts, symbols and related insects. Now, your goal is to explore the house you are in, trying to understand what it's going on and who you are.

I will not talk much more about the plot of the game, but I can say that I really liked how it develops during each new discovery. New characters are slowly included, things start to get clear with new information... It's not mind-blowing, and I got what was happening a little before the end, but I was intrigued by what's happening. I was a little worried at first because I get scared easily and some imagery can be a little out of place, but there's nothing worrying in this regard.

Well, if I didn't knew nothing about the story, what picked my interest on the game, you may ask? CLeM titles itself as a "puzzlevania": a mix of puzzles and the concept of a metroidvania, an action game with an extensive maze as a map and abilities that helps the player to navigate on it, opening new paths. CLeM has a lot of elements you can see working in this scenario — like magical toys that functions as tools to open locks or reveal secrets — but it fails to bring the same exploration feeling from Castlevania or Metroid.

Truly, the game is extremely linear. Instead of using the abilities and puzzles to naturally unlock parts of the house you are exploring, the plot is divided by well-determined cycles and goals. Once you accomplish the current goal, the plush is sent back again to the place it awakened and a new cycle starts, with a new room open in the house to explore.

You can collect some items that only can be used in future chapters, but there's nothing too much different from other point-and-click games. Exploring the house in this context also didn't get me that feeling of uncovering secrets, and just became a boring and slow backtracking in some parts. There's one puzzle involving books, however, that uses the concept of a connected map so well that I can't stop thinking about the wasted potential of the idea.

BUT if you go to CLeM without expecting this "puzzlevania" thing to work, it becomes an interesting and well-made puzzle game. Some puzzles are more in the veins of adventure games — like finding items in a room to combine them in another room — while others feels like out of escape rooms, with ciphers to decode and patterns to find.

There isn't a proper hint system, but your notebook gets automatically completed with puzzle (and plot) information when you get in contact with objects, being more as a "fast guide" for data you already have. Not that you would need a lot of hints anyway, most of the puzzles have well communicated rules and interesting (but not frustrating) solutions.

It's so interesting to see a team missed their initial goal but creating an incredible experience anyways. For me, a "puzzlevania" is still a good idea that I wanted to see well executed. Even so, CLeM was a really good puzzle game, with enigmas inspired by a lot of different genres. From the one-off inventory combining to the ciphers and patterns, and even coming to the tool aspect of the magical toys: CLeM could have a linear progression, but thinky fun is sprinkled all through it. And the big mystery of all, "what's happening here?", hit me so hard that I needed to finish it in one night. If you are also curious, you may wanna see what's inside the pages of this intriguing notebook.

The team behind this game sent me a copy of the game so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

My 10 favorite games from Steam Next Fest 02.2024

2024-02-08T00:00:00Z

I never really was a person of downloading demonstration versions of games to be sincere. My backlog is always getting bigger, and playing an incomplete piece of a title wasn't my favorite choice. But, in those past years, because of my gaming review renaissance, I started following devs from all over the world showing their ideas and prototypes, and I finally understood the appeal of demo versions nowadays.

They don't only serve for checking if your PC has the minimum requirements to run the game, but to get excited for a new title and learn way more about it than GIFs or videos. So, with a new Steam Next Fest coming this February — a celebration of upcoming games and exclusive demos made by Valve in their store —, I not only played a LOT of demos, but wrote about my favorites so you can also wishlist them.

Of course, the event's full list has way more games, but those probably also reflect my personal taste in games, a thing that you probably are already used to when reading my blog anyway.

Pine Hearts

Hyper Luminal Games/Little Nook, releasing in Q1 2024

I actually got access to Pine Hearts' demo some days before the Next Fest started and really enjoyed this little cozy adventure. The gameplay is mostly focused on puzzles and fetch quests to keep unlocking new tools and abilities: it's Zelda overworld exploration without combat. The start of the game (and what's available on the demo) was too linear and I would loved to have more freedom on what items to collect and what puzzles to solve, but I'm looking forward to more of this world. The game also looks so cute with those cylindrical little people, I want a plushie of them.

Botany Manor

Balloon Studios/Whitethorn Games, releasing in Q2 2024

There are some games that I start playing the demo and learn immediately how much I'll like it when it comes out. Escape rooms are my jam, and there are even more to explore in this concept when you are not literally escaping from a room. In Botany Manor, your job is to make some special plants grow (and learning how they grow, using cryptic clues and strange contraptions). A cozy and beautiful atmosphere for interesting escape room puzzles to shine in different ways. You can bet I'll review this one when it comes out this year.

The Posthumous Investigation

Mother Gaia Studio, releasing soon

Machado de Assis is one of the most important writers in Brazil's literature and Mother Gaia just decided to adapt all of his work in... a visual novel game!? Playing the demo for The Posthumous Investigation was a delight: it's so good to see so many characters that I studied in school together, in a time loop detective story that I could interact and solve... It's so fun. If you never read The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, maybe this can be your starting point in Brazilian classic literature. I don't even finished the demo so I could get less spoilers, I really want this game!

Mika and The Witch's Mountain

Chibig/Nukefist, releasing in 2024

After Koa and the Five Pirates of Mara, Chibig probably have another really interesting game coming this year. The demo for Mika and The Witch's Mountain is really small, but shows what to expect from the title: a delivery-focused 3D platformer with a witch learning how to fly and do magic. Flying with the broom is already so good, and the characters have a lot of charm. I'm still on the dark about the delivery challenges themselves, but this has a lot of potential. Who not want to be a witch, right?

Duck Detective: The Secret Salami

Happy Broccoli Games, releasing in 2024

You make a silly detective game with a deep-voiced noir duck and didn't expected me to love it? I remember seeing a trailer for Duck Detective: The Secret Salami and finding it cute, but this Next Fest demo also showed me the great humor that is present in the story. It has some simple deduction and investigation mechanics, but the dialogues, characters and voices were what grabbed me. The demo is really short, but I want to play the full game when it releases.

Mizi NO!

DU&I, releasing in 2024

I didn't knew about this game until I looked through the Next Fest list, but I'm already in love with it. Mizi NO! has such a simple premise that is hard to not like it: Mizi, the cat, is pushing all the things to the floor and you have to fix them as jigsaw puzzles. The interface is great, simple and easy to use: way better than other games in the genre available now. Cats, puzzles, good UI and handpainted visuals: I'm looking forward to this one.

Spilled!

Lente, releasing soon, now on Kickstarter

I've been following Spilled! development for some time now because, since PowerWash Simulator, I've been really looking for more cozy and relaxing cleaning games. This seems to be a tiny, but well-made idea in the genre: using your boat to clean up ocean waste. I love those feedback loops of getting resources and immediately upgrade, so, yeah, one more game that I didn't finish the demo to enjoy more in the full game. If you want to help the development of the project, you can go to its Kickstarter and help fund the game!

Rusty's Retirement

Mister Morris Games, releasing in Q1 2024

Idle games are kinda of my guilty pleasure, specially without microtransactions and dark design patterns. Rusty's Retirement seems to be a really cool one in those lines, with always-living robots working in a cute pixel art farm. The whole idea is that you can keep it open in your computer when working or doing other tasks, but my attention span would love to have it as an app on my phone instead. The amount of content in the demo is really big, although, so if it's your thing, you are (organically) well served here.

Geometry Survivor

Brain Seal Ltd, releasing on February 21th 2024

Another surprise from the Next Fest list, Geometry Survivor caught my attention with the concept of a bullet heaven inspired by old vector arcade games, like Asteroids or Tempest. It controls amazingly well, with a fast and agile ship since the first minute. The visuals also helps the enemies stand out from the background, a thing that a lot of others in the genre fails to do. The progression system seems to be too basic (with mostly upgrades to finish the same 20-minute level), but for a small price, I think it can be a great time killer. Looking forward to it.

Dad's Coming

Cold Lahmen, releasing soon

I'm not impartial when talking about Dad's Coming (because the devs are friends from college), but I liked what I played in the demo! Following the steps of Overcooked and similar games, here you and a friend are siblings trying to tidy up the house before your dad comes home. And, of course, you do this launching objects from one room to another and removing the cat from the table. Playing it alone was really hard, but I can see its potential to a multiplayer game with a lot of chaos and laughs.

That's it! There's a LOT of other demos to check in the Steam Next Fest page and, if you like to play in your PC, you can also subscribe to my Steam curator page and receive my next recommendations through there.

Slipstream

2024-02-05T00:00:00Z

Nostalgia is an important factor to understand the game industry nowadays. Of course, new IPs and concepts get released every week, but we probably never had so much new titles looking to the past as an inspiration (or, sometimes, just as a selling point). I'm not talking only about ports, remasters or collections, but also about all the sequels and spiritual successors we see today. At this point, being "retro" is almost a genre in itself, for indie devs or big companies.

Some of them just use this as an excuse to use outdated design principles (without understanding why use them) or weak pixel art visuals to falsely appeal to an audience that misses the old times. Slipstream is the completely opposite of this. Created as a love letter to the 16-bit era of racing games, this title created by the solo Brazilian developer ansdor understands and respects the nostalgia of Top Gear (and lookalikes) to create something original but extremely familiar.

(a personal note: we, Brazilians, sometimes grace a thing made outside our country with a "Brazilian culture honorary title". we did this with El Chavo, we did this with Woody Woodpecker, and we definitely did this with Top Gear. if you see a project inspired by Top Gear in this decade, you can bet there's some Brazilian involved, and I'm always happy when I remember this)

Content-wise, Slipstream is a really simple arcade racing game. You choose a car, some options (like manual or automatic drifting), and a mode to play. There is some classics of the genre, like time trials, single races or 4-race Grand Prix, but you also have some different ones, like a Battle Royale mode. My favorite, though, was called Grand Tour: you have a big panoramic trip between five different stages (that you can choose during the race), and you get points trying to surpass a rival in each sector.

Mechanically, it also pay homage to the old games, but, to me, this isn't for the best: it's a too simple experience for an arcade racing game made for a modern audience. Turning the car and feeling the acceleration is great and responsive and really well-made, and there's some cool accessibility functions, that can also be used to personalize your experience if you are not too familiar with the game's style. If you are really bad though, you have a rewind function that can be used after crashing (that mostly put me in a position to crash again, but still).

Besides that though, you can only drift to pass hard curves and get more speed getting behind another car — also called "slipstream", this can give a huge boost if you don't crash too much. With most of the stages being completely flat and hard to distinct between each other, I was expecting that the gameplay had the same variety than the visuals. It was good to play, but the experience became repetitive too early for me.

BUT TALKING ABOUT THAT, SLIPSTREAM IS A GORGEOUS GAME. I'm so glad that my Switch was docked when I started the game for the first time, because the visual work of this title is genuinely beautiful. All the colors and pixels just popped from the TV, and for the first races, I was just losing positions to just appreciate those graphics. Instead of limiting itself with the capacities of a Mega Drive, for example, it just had gone beyond the past and put it on the screen what every 90s child really imagined the games were at the time. The VHS effect on the rewind was a really nice touch.

I truly believe that new games that uses nostalgia as a starting point mustn't just gave me more of the past. If I want to play those games again, I will just play them again, you know? Slipstream have some flaws, but does an amazing job of bringing the same vibe and feeling in a new and original game. Mechanically it isn't that great, but visually it just transforms memories into pixels in a screen so beautifully. For the 2020s, it can be a little repetitive, but there's no doubt that in an alternative reality of the 1990s (and in the heart of those that lived it), Slipstream is already a classic.

The team behind this game sent me a copy of the game so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Paperman: Adventure Delivered

2024-02-01T00:00:00Z

For a long time, 3D platformers were mostly perceived by the public through some icons from big companies, specially those that survived after the boom the genre had on the 90s. Everyone likes when Mario goes to deep space, or if Crash Bandicoot is doing his thing, but, nowadays, an amazing 3D platformer can come from anywhere, most thankfully to indie devs around the world. I'm always ready to try a new one, specially if comes with different characters or concepts.

I became interested on Paperman: Adventure Delivered in this faith of probably discovering a hidden gem (or, at least, an interesting game). The character design of the protagonists is what caught my attention in the promotional art: I believe that you can put cartoony eyes in any object and it will be cute. Yes, Paperman himself can be confused with a mascot from a delivery company, and Express (the envelope one) is literally the old face from a Brazilian paper brand, but they are cute anyway.

Unfortunately, what I received in this package was, mostly, a huge wasted potential. Except for collectibles being delivery things (like letters or brown boxes), there isn't much of "Paperman" in his own game. The story has a generic dragon stealing some golden envelopes, and then the heroes need to go through three not-really-interesting worlds that are not appealing visually or mechanically to rescue the items. I was really expecting something inspired by writing, arts and crafts or just anything related to letters or delivering.

From all the inspiration they could get from the old classics, they chose one of the most infamous ideas ever made in 3D platformers. Do you remember Donkey Kong 64, a game that had FIVE playable characters (with a cool design), but that also color-coded obstacles and collectables to EACH ONE OF THEM? And then you had need to go to specific locations in each stage to change the Kong, get back to the place where you need to use an ability, and keeping doing that to progress in the story?

Paperman: Adventure Delivered does something similar, but not that strange (all collectables can be collected by everyone, at least). Each one of the paper heroes here has a special ability — Paperman can throw letters and be transported to them, Express can dash, Carl (the cardboard box) can push heavy objects and Scrolly (...the paper scroll) can use wind tunnels to jump higher. But, as in DK64, you need to go to a mailbox to change between them, creating a scenario of constant bits of backtracking, just to collecting everything you need in the level.

With smaller and more linear stages like those present in Paperman, this shouldn't be that big of a problem, but playing the game is a challenge by itself. The software never exactly crashed, but the bad performance started to bother me in the first few minutes of gameplay. All the actions felt delayed, the characters didn't seem to respond well to the analog movement and the camera loved to clip through the level's geometry. I don't know if this something only on the Nintendo Switch version (that I played), but it didn't helped to improve the experience.

If Paperman: Adventure Delivered was at least half as good than the character design of its heroes, I would have had a good experience with it. I truly believe that no team wants to make a disappointing experience on purpose, but, as a player, it's hard to recommend it. Even the small qualities aren't enough to compensate the bland scenarios, the constant backtracking when changing characters and the poor and frustrating performance. Maybe this package can be better in the future, but, for now, I'm returning it to sender.

The team behind this game sent me a copy of the game so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

The Cauldron Kids: The Summoning of Mr. Vermicelli

2024-01-21T00:00:00Z

I've always had a soft spot for small stories about children things. Not stories made for children, or those stories where the little girl has to save the whole universe and do all the adult things being only 8 years old. I'm talking about those intimate and sincere anecdotes about kids doing kids' things, like playing make believe, or discovering the world. They always make my heart happy and remind me how beautiful and interesting everything can be, specially if you are learning things at the first time.

I'm also always loved shorts in general, in movies and, specially, in games. Not every story needs hours or days to have an impact in me, and sometimes is even better to be small and direct to the point. The Cauldron Kids: The Summoning of Mr. Vermicelli, the debut game of Pet Golem Games, is both of those things: a short story about kids having fun when their mom is out... but their mom is a witch, and their concept of fun is casting a spell to give life to their favorite plushie.

I can't really talk a lot about the story of this game because any spoiler would really hurt a experience that is already short, but I can talk how much personality every character has here, already in the first lines of dialogue. The two protagonists, Cassie and Layla, can be only 6 years old, but they have so different ways to look into the world that seeing how each one reacts to the events is fun by itself. Mr. Vermicelli is also a cute plushie, and that's everything I'll talk about it.

Even in a 2-hour playtime, there's a lot of events happening at every moment, going to places that I wasn't expecting. However, the plot is fairly linear: cool to see and experience once, but there's no much room to replay it, even if the game's achievements asks you to play again with a different sister to get some of the badges. Like an animation short, it wants to tell a tiny story, and it does this really well.

The game isn't just a visual novel though. The Cauldron Kids intercalates those narrative pills with some simple but funny minigames. They are not that impressive, but they are well made and easy to control. There's a lot of variety in them too: you have racing moments that asks you to beat your own high score, a maze-like section with a little bit of exploration, and even some rhythm mechanics sprinkled through a chapter. They are far from being hard, so it's more like an interactive book that you are the one that makes the story goes forward.

I need to also point out the huge amount of accessibility toggles to a fairly small game made by a small team. You can rebind keys or deactivate some visual artifacts that can be uncomfortable, for example. You can also make the already easy minigames even easier, a probably good idea to allow small kids to experience the story without getting too frustrated. It only shows that putting accessibility first isn't just a question of money or resources, but first a matter of principles and priority.

Short, cute, silly, sincere: I have so much adjectives to define The Cauldron Kids: The Summoning of Mr. Vermicelli. There's nothing groundbreaking here, but Pet Golem Games were really happy in their decisions and created a little story about kids and magic that warmed my heart. If you are also looking for something radically different than your typical AAA game... well, Mom's only get home at night, and whoever gets the hat is the leader! Now it's time to start our master plan...

The team behind this game sent me a copy of the game so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Electrician Simulator

2024-01-16T00:00:00Z

Simulators weren't exactly my favorite genre, but, in recent years, some of them surprised me. I like the idea of getting a mundane task and using the "power of video games" to create a digital and fun experience inspired by those occupations. Because I passed most of my childhood watching my dad fixing things (from electronics to our house's electrical wiring), I was really excited when I've watched the trailer for Electrician Simulator.

The game is exactly what you expect: you start your career as an electrician, learning how to fix lamps, outlets, electrical devices and go on. You have your own equipment, and need to test everything to see what's broken, what can be fixed, what needs to be replaced or, even, find wires that were just put together wrong. You also need to turn off the energy in the fuse box if you don't want to get shocked — and considering the amount of times I forgot to do this, I'm really happy this is just a game...

For me, my problem with Electrician Simulator is that what I cited is just what the game is, no more, no less. There isn't a lot of really cool puzzles using electrical wires, or even cool mechanics to "gamify" the experience. As you are fulfilling customer orders, you don't have any room for customization or player expression of any kind. The game doesn't even works as an educational tool, because it simplifies a lot of the process of being a real electrician. After some hours into the title, I was just clicking in the buttons indicated by the interface with no thought in my head.

A good example would be the workbench tasks, that appears a lot during the early game. I helped my dad to fix things every week for decades, and it was an actual interesting task. Here, you just click on screws to disassemble the thing, and then click in every piece on the board to get a "this is broken" message. You cannot see a real multimeter, you cannot test actual electronic pieces. At the same time, because you need to read a lot and find little spots in the pieces to click on, the game wasn't mechanical enough to be a "podcast distraction" for me. Nothing worked.

At the top of this mediocre experience, the controls on the Nintendo Switch port (the version that I played) were really bad. I lost the count of how many times I was just flicking the analog stick to try to align the pointer to a small screw that I needed to interact with. The touch screen only worked in the workbench, and it was passable, but the rest of the game was only in the buttons.

If you are really into the work an electrician does, I think you also will be disappointed with Electrician Simulator. When you transform a thing into a video game experience that is more boring and soulless than the actual thing that people does as a job, there's something wrong with that. Technically, the game does nothing wrong, and you can buy and play through the end (with some strange controls in the process), but I don't know exactly why you would do that. You will have more fun going to a junkyard and just disassembling real devices for fun, trust me.

The team behind this game sent me a copy of the game so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Cosmic Collapse

2024-01-15T00:00:00Z

Every now and then, the internet allows us to witness its power of getting some old thing and make it the trending topic that everyone talks about. At the risk of dating this text, I'll talk about one of the most recent "viral hits" in the gaming space: the watermelon game, or Suika Game, as it's really named. Created in 2021 as a built-in app for a Japanese digital projector, now "suika-likes" are a genre on its own, with parodies and different takes in the concept of the puzzle.

I played the official Nintendo Switch port of Suika Game some weeks ago and I can see why it became viral, with a cool concept and an OK execution. The idea of having a physics-based puzzle (like a Tetris with circles and gravity) mixed with the possibility of merging pieces (like 2048, another viral game from the past) is really neat, but I couldn't play a lot without getting tired and somewhat frustrated.

Fortunately, people are not only creating joke suika-likes, but also interesting (and enhanced) versions. Cosmic Collapse, created by Swedish developer Johan Peitz, is THE BEST SUIKA-LIKE I played to date. Instead of random fruits, here you are dropping and merging planets, trying to create bigger celestial bodies until you can merge two units of the Sun.

The best change to the formula that Cosmic Collapse brings is a better physics system. I remember to be really frustrated in the original Suika Game when trying to push fruits using other ones, and just seeing they stacking with no reason. Here, the planets appear to have real gravity force, and you will constantly be sending small spheres to tight gaps, or using the force from merging to push more planets together. As an extra action, you get a missile every 1000 points to remove a planet that are blocking your game, that can be a game changer if you know how to use. (I don't know that well yet, sorry)

My goal in those types of games (including the already mentioned 2048) is to get the "final piece", in this case, the Sun, but if you are the type of player that wants the high scores, there's also a combo system easy to understand, multiplying points in merging chains. Understanding how to combine those new physics, the missiles and the combo, you will probably be in arcade heaven in no time.

I was really impressed by Cosmic Collapse not only by the final result, but also how it was made. The game was created on PICO-8, a fantasy console made for small pixel-art games (that you may know as the engine where the original Celeste prototype was made). Even with all the limitations from the system, Peitz not only made a better to play Suika-like, but also gorgeous pixel art to look at. The only thing missing is a list of evolutions to know what planets are created from merging, but nothing that you won't learn after some plays.

If you have seen people talking about the watermelon game and you want to jump in, I can only ask you to jump even further until you reach outer space. Cosmic Collapse isn't just a really well-made Suika-like, but also an addictive, forgiving, beautiful and fun little arcade game. I'm waiting forever for a mobile version of this, because when that happens, I won't be able to stop playing. Sometimes, a simple thing made with love and care is enough to make me happy, and I can't stop talking about them — so, I know that I'll keep talking about those planets for months to come.

The team behind this game sent me a copy of the game so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Bowser's Fury

2024-01-14T00:00:00Z

I'm excited to the next 3D Mario game as everyone else, you know? Mario Odyssey is one of my favorite games of all time, but it was launched in 2017! I graduated, married and created three new blogs in this time. Will the new game just be Odyssey 2, with new kingdoms and the same capture mechanic? Will Super Mario Bros. Wonder change how a Mario game is made forever? Will we see a full graphical change in the franchise?

In the past days, I came back to 2021 to play what is, probably, the most reliable clue about the future of 3D Mario we can get (and because I hadn't a Switch before so I'm catching up anyways). Bowser's Fury is the "extra content" of the Super Mario 3D World port for the Nintendo Switch and couldn't be more different than the original adventure: a small, self-contained, structuring experimental platform game with a single-player focus.

We are presented to Lake Lapcat, an huge archipelago of small islands, all inspired and populated by cats — and the home of the Giga Bells, huge versions of the cat power-up that are resting in some isles. And, of course, a dark version of our biggest enemy: Fury Bowser, since the Koopa King became possessed by black goo that is polluting the water. With no hope of saving his father alone, Bowser Jr. asks Mario for help to collect the Cat Shines to use their power to save Bowser.

When I started playing Bowser's Fury, I was a little confused about how the shines were organized. There weren't linear levels like 3D World, and it wasn't exactly the sandbox concept of Mario 64. Here we have a big map with small clusters of challenges with similar mechanics and themes. It's like you take a whole world in Super Mario Galaxy, stitch them together in a free-roaming map and sprinkle some Odyssey moons between them. You can be focused to "finish" a cluster, and then you just wander off, get some extra shines in the way and find a new isle to play.

In the first 10 shines, I was already a fan of this new idea. For me, it solves a lot of problems from other games. I didn't like Galaxy that much because, although it had amazing scenarios and planets, it was too linear and no much room for exploration. And even though I love Odyssey, a lot of the moons are just... there. No cool puzzles or platforming challenges, you just see a yellow dust, ground pound there and it's done. With this new concept, Bowser's Fury manage to create an always-interesting map, with cool scenarios that can also be explored in different ways.

And if those islands are the cogs of the game, connected perfectly to form a seamless transition of platforming challenges, Fury Bowser is the motor of the machine. They could just have made a big map and call it a day, but the constant attacks of the possessed king creates a sense of unity and greatness for the quest. It's a constant remainder of why you are collecting the shards and exploring Lake Lapcat. Bowser is also a great mechanical change for the pacing: I was constantly changing my position in the map or the way I was playing when he was awake.

A thing that I wasn't expecting of this whole idea is how inviting the game's progression is. Parts of the lake are revealed with a good pacing, when you probably already did most of the challenges available. In the post-game, with the map upgrades you get — showing where are the remaining shines and allowing you to fast travel in the lake — it's way less frustrating to discover what's still there to play. I never finished a Mario "world" at first, but I couldn't stop playing Bowser's Fury until I mastered it.

I can completely see the new bigger 3D Mario game following the steps of Bowser's Fury. Give me five or six "worlds" like this, with different themes and "big problems" to solve and I'll be really happy fan. I love how some games in the franchise (like TTYD or even Odyssey) use different narratives in each of their chapters, and I think this cluster-based way of organizing the collectables would be a great way to pull this off.

Bowser's Fury as a game by itself is not perfect. Using the 3D World engine was not the best decision for me, and the classic power-up system was more of a pain to manage. The distribution of this short adventure is also a problem by its price tag, specially if you already played its parent game on the Wii U. But I can't stop praising Bowser's Fury as a blueprint for Mario titles in the future. Although it can seems strange in the beginning, this new way to present the game was more inviting, interesting and intriguing even than Odyssey's kingdoms or Galaxy's planets. I can't see the future (and I don't have an uncle that works at Nintendo), but I can only hope that the future of the Italian plumber can learn more with his cats.

Froguelike (early access)

2024-01-10T00:00:00Z

Of all the recent gaming trends, the one that got me was the bullet heaven genre (or horde shooters, or survivor-likes), popularized by the crazy and deserved success of Vampire Survivors. Featuring a reverse bullet hell concept, where your character is the source of all the bullets, in timed runs with random builds, it's really fun when you understand the mechanics behind it. Since then, I'm looking for new iterations of this idea made by other teams, in different levels of success.

The last one I played was Froguelike, a two-people work launched in early access by the Swedish gaming incubator Spelkollektivet. Instead of monsters, weapons and fantasy scenarios, you are a frog, doing froggy things, like extending your tongue and eating a lot of bugs. And when I say "a lot of bugs", I'm being serious: following the bullet heaven idea, giant hordes of mosquitos, flies and butterflies are ready to take you down if you aren't hungry enough.

Before talking about how is the gameplay, can I just say how happy I am to see a different theme in the genre? Yes, killing skeletons is fun, but I think that because of Vampire Survivors, a lot of the games inspired by them got to a similar fantasy (or sci-fi) setting. I love the concept that you are not really just "destroying enemies", but eating them, as a frog should do. I'm always down for strange themes to recontextualize mechanics that I already like.

It's hard (and not that fair) to talk about a indie game this way, but Froguelike follows the "bullet heaven" checklist so well that I would understand if people tag it "derivative" sometimes. Besides the curious theme, you choose a frog (that has its own status and initial tongue), go to the map, (def)eat enemies, get experience, level up, upgrade your tongue(s) and passive abilities, and keep going until the end of the run. With the gold you get, you can improve your base status to the next runs. Even some abilities names are familiar.

The biggest difference of this new iteration (besides the frogs) is how runs are broken into random chapters, like a more simple "choose your own adventure" book. Instead of choosing a different map, you choose a chapter and starts a 5-minute run to survive. In the end, your health is replenished and you can choose another one to keep the run alive. Each chapter has different enemies, pickups and ponds in the map, but I honestly expected more changes to differentiate them.

I can be a reviewer, but first, I'm also a player, so I need to talk about something: there's more content in Froguelike that I haven't played, but I didn't think it was worth it to search for it. One of the most impactful things in bullet heaven for me is that feeling of always surpass what you believed was "powerful". You start with one weapon, and then you have a lot of them, and you feel powerful. But some runs later, you tested more builds and made some upgrades, and you are EVEN STRONGER! This always consistent crescendo of awesomeness is the core of having fun with those games.

I didn't felt more powerful in Froguelike, not even after 10 or 15 runs. I didn't have a lot of options to test and find synergies, the upgrades are really simple and didn't changed a lot and the gold ratio by run is way more scarce than what I was expecting. I know there's more content in the game (the achievement list always remember me of that), but I, sincerely, couldn't find energy inside me to keep playing those repetitive levels to try to find them.

When you buy in an early access game, you invest in a promise with potential. To me, Froguelike has a lot of potential! The frog theme is welcome in a group of similar fantasy games, and the chapter structure can be really interesting, specially if they start to use it to tell different stories depending on what you choose. But, for now, I can only recommend it if you are a fan of the genre (of a frog fan in general). I hope to get back to this lake in the future and being hyped to eat bugs again.

The team behind this game sent me a copy of the game so I could play it and write my review. Thanks for the trust!

Backfirewall_

2024-01-08T00:00:00Z

I'm always fascinated by how much deep the human imagination can go when confronted by the unknown. For example, the Tron universe was always SO COOL to me. I was 12 when Tron: Legacy came out, and I didn't care much for the plot, and years later I tried to watch the original Tron and I slept through half of it. All that said, this cyberworld of neon discs and motorcycles, with heroes made of software and villains being literally the "Master Control Program" is incredible. I was always a kid that loved technology and related things, so it was specially cool to see that world.

If even today people think that computers are magical machines, in the 80s, of course they would create a whole society around half a dozen of tech terms and words. Today, as a person that studied computer science for almost a decade, I look into it more as a sci-fi scenario that happens to be in a "virtual world". Nevertheless, Tron is cool and I need to play more of its games in the future.

But for now, I want to talk about Backfirewall_, a short adventure made by the Swiss team Naraven Games, and published by All in! Games (that also published Ghostrunner and Tools Up!). You can see the premise and think that it's just too derivative from Tron: a story inside a smartphone, where all the apps are living creatures and the system is a society by itself. But instead of a sci-fi neon odyssey, it goes more to the idea of a tragicomic digital plot, where there's no good or bad, and apps just want to save their own life from deletion.

In this story, you are the Update Assistant, a new app that only objective in life was make possible the operating system update process. The old operation system personification, OS9, isn't really happy with the idea, because they will be completely deleted in the process... and you too, because your work would be done after all. All that happens after that is just the adventure of those two apps, traveling through the smartphone, triggering errors to reboot the system before the update finishes.

I don't think the plot by itself was amazing: some jokes don't land, and the only moment that was really emotional (and got me with surprise) didn't had a lot of repercussions. But the whole world around it is SO interesting that I just couldn't stop playing it — I actually started and finished it in the same night. Most characters are fully voiced in English, that helps a lot of putting charisma and personality to them. OS9, the soon-to-be-deleted operating system (and the player's partner during the game) is an obvious favorite, but there's a lot of other characters to be loved, like Social Media F's insecure persona or my great pal Wat, how someone can't like Wat?

The scenarios themselves were also really interesting. Yes, I'm a computer science bachelor and every well-made reference to technical things gets me every time — I still like the Geocities joke in Ralph Breaks the Internet —, but a lot of Backfirewall_'s world was made by someone who understand the bits and bytes behind a computer. How a system update is a death call for the old OS, how much they love and worship their user as a goddess, and even the small things in the dialogue! One of my favorite side stories is Social Media I's saga to get the access of the user's photos, fighting with the gallery app or appealing to annoying push notifications. There is a lot of poetic license involved, of course, but it feels more "digital" than Tron ever did.

Unfortunately, playing Backfirewall_ is way less interesting than its world building. Half of the time you are on scripted sequences appreciating the story, but soon you are invited to free-roam rooms in the phone. OS9 gives you a checklist of errors you must trigger in that part of the system, and your job is to explore and interact with the objects and characters until you got them all to progress. Those puzzles are really easy — and those that doesn't involve talking to anyone are mostly boring.

Your main way to interact with the world is through "cheat codes", that, in paper, would allow you to manipulate the system and everything around you. In reality, you just change the gravity, the color or remove objects. This idea of changing reality has a lot of potential — and, in a digital world, it's really easy to put into the lore. But here, you just click a dozen times and you can go to the next part of the game.

What surprise me the most was the shit ton of collectables you can get in Backfirewall_. A LOT, REALLY. The only ones that has something more than an achievement is some user messages (that tells the side story of what's happening with the owner of the phone) and a lot of smaller apps you can help during your journey. Everything else is just there for the sake of collecting. I love finding bits and accumulating them, but when they are really hidden, there's no hints and you cannot go back to previous areas, it just becomes frustrating.

Balancing the pros and cons, "watching" Backfirewall_ was worth it, although playing it wasn't that good. It has some forgettable puzzles, some misses in the story and a frustrating system of pointless collectables. But around that, you have one of the most interesting worlds created in the premise of "what happens inside a computer" that I have seen. You have charismatic characters, some good jokes and a more believable (and technically accurate?) concept of a digital society. It's not cooler than Tron's light cycles — there aren't a lot of things cooler than Tron's light cycles —, but the OS9's saga to survive was really fun for some hours. Maybe you also (don't) need an update too.

The Making of Karateka

2024-01-04T00:00:00Z

Although I was born in 1998, my first gaming experience was with Atari 2600 games, on an emulator in the house PC, that helped me for years to play old titles in similar programs (or even those made on DOS). And since then, I think I developed an interest for the history of video games. I love watching the showcases full of trailers and announcements every year, but there's something special about learning how everything started — and how it led up to today.

So, in recent years, I started getting involved with gaming preservation initiatives, like the Internet Archive or the Flashpoint Archive. Games are the perfect thing to became lost media, because of the dependency on computers and machines that became obsolete faster every decade. So, preserving, making them available, is a way to keep the memories of those games (and of who worked on them) alive forever.

But even I have my problems when playing old games sometimes. I know that it's important to considerate the time when it was produced, and the technological limitations those developers and artists had... but some games feels really weird to understand and enjoy nowadays. Maybe it is my own personal experience, or because I'm used to more recent designs, but I would start one, play for 2 minutes and would give up. Preservation is truly important, and I will defend it until I die, but sometimes it's not enough.

A museum isn't just a big room with scattered relics from yesteryears. Context, people, storytelling: there's way more behind an old object if you want to understand its history. If I've played Karateka in a Apple II emulator, I would just dismiss it in seconds. But in the virtual museum built for The Making of Karateka, I could understand how the game isn't just a classic, but a breakthrough for game design, game production and gaming history.

This package created by the Digital Eclipse team is way more than just a collection of old games in a emulator for modern screens. The amount of video documentary recorded for it would probably be worth of a streaming big launch if you edit all together. It's really interesting not to only see people involved in Karateka's creation, but also big names in the industry that were just players at that point. Those testimonies help to put how amazing Jordan Mechner's work was at the time.

The best videos for me were from Jordan himself with his father, Francis Mechner, that was also the original composer of Karateka's soundtrack. I know that I'm talking from a place of privilege, but seeing a dad and a son working together and talking about it fills my heart with joy (and reminds me of my own papa at home, love you!).

As a game developer myself, it was really interesting also to see all the production history about Karateka that I couldn't even have imagined when playing it nowadays. So many things we get for granted! Seeing the rotoscoped animations being hand-made, or even the prototype evolution, following the publisher's feedbacks. My favorite, though, was the 30-minute podcast analyzing the soundtrack composed by Francis and its use of leitmotifs.

Like, I'm trying to not give a lot of spoilers about it, because, in a way, The Making of Karateka, in addition to show documents and software prototypes, also tells an interesting story. A story about a world whose possibilities of game creation were expanding, how arcade games weren't anymore the only path, and how a young developer would help to boost them even more. And then, after all the diagrams, all the videos, I played Karateka and... didn't liked, but I could appreciate it, at least, for all it have done.

I need to also talk a little about the "extra" new games in the collection, made with so much care and attention to detail that it became another favorite of mine in the package. Karateka Remastered isn't the definitive edition of the game (because I believe that history shouldn't be rewritten in that way), but seeing all those neglected ideas reborn in a version with modern controls is probably the way to go if the original isn't for you.

And then we have Deathbounce: Rebounded. After playing so much prototypes that were never finished, it's so cool to see a finished version of Deathbounce (the lost game Jordan made before Karateka), and playing it was so cool that became my favorite playable bit. Every idea that Mechner had at the time to convince the publisher was mixed in this version to became pure arcade fun. I would play a "sequel" to Deathbounce with a more refined concept, no doubt.

Not every game has a cool story behind it, or would have the audience to justify this amount of work, but I'm so happy that Digital Eclipse finally found the definitive way to create gaming documentaries. Context, storytelling, people and interactivity are not only the key features that makes The Making of Karateka so interesting, but they are probably the most important parts of the process of understanding video game history.

If I was billionaire, I would pay so much money for more Gold Master Series. But I'm not, so all I can do is wait for the next. It's so good to love gaming history, and now it's even better.

Escape From Mystwood Mansion

2024-01-02T00:00:00Z

Of all the things that I spend my money even if I don't need it, the one that makes me happier is escape rooms. Getting with my friends through a puzzle hour, finding keys, solving enigmas, laughing a lot... There isn't a lot of them near me, but I'm always down for play a new one when I can. For years, all the contact I had with this style of game were those point-and-click games made in Flash: they were cool, but isn't the same.

And I'm not even talking about the obvious difference: physical escape rooms are way cooler because they are real life, of course, but there's some design problems in most virtual ones to me. Digital escape rooms aren't bound by real physics, so everything can happen — and I end up finding puzzles and contraptions that doesn't make any sense, using trial and error to just understand how to operate them.

Nonetheless, in recent years, new digital games are being released trying to create virtual escape room experiences that brings more of the real life rooms' design philosophy. Escape From Mystwood Mansion isn't the best out there, but it's a really cool, well-made and recommendable game if you want to learn what is a real escape room (or if you miss going to one).

There isn't a lot going on for the plot here: you are a delivery person that is trapped inside a strange mansion full of puzzles. Some cues of a hidden story are here and there, and you even have a secret ending to discover, but don't create expectations about it. All you need to know (and expect) is five original escape rooms, themed around big house's chambers, like a wine cellar or a winter garden.

I'm trying to talk about Escape From Mystwood Mansion without giving much spoilers, but the puzzle design is the greatest achievement of the game. Some of the challenges would not be practical in a real life room (that needs to be reset every hour), but I can see every contraption being implemented in a physical escape room with few adaptations. Most of them is focused on finding patterns and getting codes (THE escape room default pattern), but they are well-made and fun to decipher. I recommend having pen and paper to take notes during the gameplay, though.

The hint system is also functional and easy to access, without penalties during the game or any annoying cooldown to get a new one. I didn't got stuck a lot, so the hints were enough me to progress in the game without being frustrated. Escape From Mystwood Mansion, though, is really language dependent (in the puzzles and hints), so, if your English is not very good, you might end up getting way more stuck trying to translate everything. (Or can be a new layer of challenge too!)

As a video game per se, there aren't remarking features to be talked about. The game looks OK, not incredible, but does the job even on low visual quality. The soundtrack is also just noise to solving the puzzles, so you can go with a podcast if you like. The most intriguing fact for me was the absence of an inventory to keep items, like every other game in the genre. It was cool, though, to use the floor as a way to organize the objects, similar to what I would probably do in the real life... but dragging items one of a time through the room was really boring. A container-type item or a multiple selection option would solve this.

It isn't the best out there, but Escape From Mystwood Mansion does an amazing job to bring the magic of real life escape rooms to a virtual space — and learning that it was the debut game of a two-person team makes it even more impressive. There isn't multiplayer options, but the game is so straightforward that you can just share your screen with some friends and have a lot of fun. I paid way more to way, way worse rooms in my life, and this pass to the Mystwood Mansion is a really good deal to escape room fans and first-timers.

The best digital games I played in 2023

2023-12-28T00:00:00Z

Four years! Four years that I restarted playing games again, and reconnecting with a hobby that I like so much. And it's so good to keep writing about them — now more than ever with this new blog. 2023 was a crazy year, specially on my gaming tastes. I played way more new releases than before, mostly because of my new focus on writing reviews (that I hope to do more here next year).

I also got a Nintendo Switch and a Playdate as wedding gifts, so me and my wife were playing a lot this year too. Specifically, I need to play more Playdate games in the next year to do a major recap, but Nintendo games were a jam in those last months at home.

But the year is coming to an end, and it's time to my already classic Played of the Year! Welcome to POTY 2023, my own personal list of the best games I played this year. It doesn't matter if the title was launched decades ago: if i'm discovering it for the first time now, it counts.

This year we have 25 (TWENTY-FIVE!) titles in the list because I had a lot to talk about! You can also see the lists from past years (2020, 2021, 2022). Let's start!

25) subpar pool

PC/Switch/Android/iOS, grapefrukt games, 2023

I'm always down for a well-made game to be in my pocket, and subpar pool lived in my phone for some months. The mix of mini golf controls with pool levels is amazing, with a lot of interesting mechanics and new crazy ideas. The progression through quests wasn't my favorite, but it was perfect to play a match when waiting in line or in the bathroom throne. The visuals are top notch, and the overall cute but strange vibes are perfect for some uncompromised fun.

24) The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo

PC/Switch/PlayStation/Xbox, Nacho Rodríguez/Gammera Nest/Meridiem Games, 2023

In this bad future we are heading towards with AIs creating all the "art", it's so refreshing and beautiful to see a game with hand-made animation beautifully done. The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo doesn't have the most simple and easy to understand puzzles, and it had a lot of bugs at launch... but Mr. Coo's worlds were so amazing, surreal and interesting that makes all worth it. (There was a lot of behind-the-scenes problems with the developer regarding this game, so I'm also using also the space to support all the effort done by Nacho Rodríguez and his creative team during those hard times. Hope to see a better future to the yellow guy!)

23) Venba

PC/Switch/PlayStation/Xbox, Visai Games, 2023

I was really excited to play Venba since the first time I saw a trailer. The puzzles are in a smaller amount than I expected, but the idea of cooking and discovering the recipe at the same time is smart and fun. Venba is also a great story about Indian and immigrant culture, and how family changes over time. I'm not a immigrant myself, but only connecting with those characters as a "far from home" person was enough to make me cry a little. It's also really short, perfect for a one-shot game night with someone you love.

22) A Tiny Sticker Tale

PC/Switch, Ogre Pixel, 2023

As you gonna understand more and more during this list, short puzzle adventures are my jam. A Tiny Sticker Tale is a simple idea well executed: everything can be a sticker, and can be transported to other parts of the world. This focus gave me almost an escape room vibe, where finding patterns and experimenting with the rules is half of the fun. The story and characters weren't much memorable to me, but after the Paper Mario disaster, I finally have a "sticker game" to praise.

21) Koa and the Five Pirates of Mara

PC/Switch/PlayStation/Xbox, Chibig/Talpa Games/Undercoders, 2023

I'm not a great fan of pure platforming challenges (I like my games spiced with a lot of exploration), but sometimes all you need is a small girl running and jumping to have some fun. Koa and the Five Pirates of Mara isn't the most innovative in its genre, but it knows how to use its small scope to create a great experience. It's relatively short, easy to play if you just wanna relax, but also has a speedrun focus if you like these things. May the winds of Mara be kind to you!

20) Super Mario Bros. Wonder

Switch, Nintendo, 2023

Of course, Super Mario Bros. Wonder is the best 2D Mario game since the Super Nintendo days. And there isn't a doubt that Wonder is a great platformer, with a lot of good ideas and understanding what is fun in its pure form. But I think, after three decades of impressive games being launched, that my expectations were too high for what Nintendo showed us. Most of the Wonder Effects would pass as "common mechanics" in a lot of other titles, including Mario past adventures. It's a marvelous game and I loved it, but wasn't that wonderful for me.

19) WarioWare: Twisted!

Game Boy Advance, Nintendo, 2004

Finally an old game in this list! Thanks to the all-powerful 3DS homebrew, I could play WarioWare: Twisted! the way it was intended, with real motion controls. And it just works really well!? It was a little bit clunky, and sometimes the concept of turning the device bugged me, but it's amazing how they did this in 2004 without many flaws. The microgames were crazy and perfect as always, and I can only hope they put Twisted in the Nintendo Switch Online service so more people can experience it the right way.

18) The Spirit and the Mouse

PC/Mac/Switch/PlayStation, Alblune/Armor Games Studios, 2022

I asked for exploration platformers and I was served! The first on the list is the charming The Spirit and the Mouse, featuring the cute Lila, a mouse with electric powers (that doesn't violate copyright!) in a quest to bring back happiness to a French village. With limited movement in vast levels, my brain have gone almost to a positional puzzle, trying to find the best way to get to a certain place. With a lot of collectables and a cute story, I totally recommend it.

17) Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

Switch, Nintendo/Bandai Namco/Sora Ltd., 2018

How not to mention the biggest crossover on entertainment in my POTY when I had the chance? After so many years, I finally played hours and hours of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate — specifically doing 100% on World of Light, the adventure campaign. I know that a lot of people disliked WoL, but I absolutely loved! It has that crossover feeling at the heart, like the gaming franchises were just LEGO pieces that could be mounted and remounted to play make believe. The fact it is, beyond all that, an almost perfect platform fighter is just the cherry on top; even to me, the worst Smash player on planet.

16) Storyteller

PC/Mac/iOS/Android/Switch, Daniel Benmergui/Annapurna Interactive, 2023

Sometimes I think of a good puzzle, but I don't really know how to make it a reality. Storyteller is a game I wish I had thought, and even if I had, I wouldn't have known how to make it. The concept of creating stories using logic blocks in comic strips is just marvelous, easy to learn and always intriguing to play. Sometimes, it can became a little too obtuse (specially in the extra objectives), but being a storyteller never was a easy job anyways.

15) Mario Kart 8 Deluxe: Booster Course Pass

Switch, Nintendo, 2022-2023

I generally try to put DLCs only in the honorable mentions, but this Booster Course Pass was basically a new game! I don't think that Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is specifically a better version of MK8, but with the strongest basis in the series, it's hard to mess up. Even in the weaker courses (like most of the city stages from Tour), it was fun to ride. The levels were doubled, they gave me Pauline and it was part of Nintendo Switch Online. Best expansion Nintendo ever made.

14) Bang-On Balls: Chronicles

PC/Switch/PlayStation/Xbox, Exit Plan Games/Untold Tales/CouchPlay Interactive, 2023

I would NEVER guessed a game like Bang-On Balls: Chronicles would be in my POTY, but the world is round, and it spins, just like those balls. After I passed that first layer of "hey, it just a meme game?", I was shocked to find a 3D platform that is consistently wacky and stupidly fun. BoB is way more combat-focused that I tend to like, but the amount of collectables and the historical theme got me. There isn't a lot of games that allows you to be a Brazilian-painted ball with Nordic clothes helping in the Cold War, so...

13) Pick Pack Pup

Playdate, Nic Magnier/Arthur Hamer/Logan Gabriel, 2022

I played way less on my Playdate than I wanted this year — and I'm promising here more content about it in 2024 — but Pick Pack Pup wasn't just the best Playdate game I played so far, but, probably, the best match-3 game that I ever played. Limitation is the spark of good ideas, and that trio made a miracle here. Instead of fighting with the small screen, they found a good mechanic to overcome it and fix a lot of problems that I had with the genre. If you have a Playdate, this game comes in Season One and you NEED to play it.

12) The Making of Karateka

PC/Switch/PlayStation/Xbox, Digital Eclipse, 2023

If I've played Karateka in any emulator, I would dismiss it in 10 minutes. Yes, people said it was important and I believe them, but its time has passed, right? Fortunately, I played The Making of Karateka instead. Digital Eclipse not only created an amazing game collection, but set a new standard for gaming documentaries and preservation. Even I didn't like to play the titular game, understand the historical context and all that happened during development was the perfect lens to the past to appreciate Karateka and Jordan Mechner's legacy.

11) The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening

Switch, Nintendo/Grezzo, 2019

All that Zelda fans can talk nowadays is about breathing wild and crying kingdoms, but I need to confess: I love The Legend of Zelda in 2D. Just give me a cute world, a quest to slay the darkness and a little boy in green and I will be happy, I promise. Link's Awakening's remake does all of this and way more! This Link is the CUTEST EVER, the diorama visuals are incredible and it has great dungeons, characters and stories. I would be even happier with an original game in that style, though...

10) Rhythm Heaven Megamix

3DS, Nintendo, 2016

This POTY's top 10 starts with a second chance. I had already played Rhythm Heaven Megamix in the past — in fact, it was my first experience with the series. But, then, I became stuck in that cursed Lockstep level and gave up. But then, after many years (and two other RH finished), I discovered I could have just skipped the minigame. So I tried again, AND BEAT IT. In the meantime, I also played the definitive edition of one of the best rhythm game series ever made. If you have a 3DS laying down, put it on homebrew and go in this journey with me.

09) Vampire Survivors

PC/Mac/iOS/Android/Switch/Xbox, poncle, 2022

Last year, I tried Vampire Survivors. It was fun, but didn't caught me. This year, I tried Vampire Survivors again AND IT CONSUMED ME. When you understand all the cogs behind the progression in VS, you will understand why it is so fun. All the combos, evolutions, relics and secrets, laying in the center of a perfect game to turn off the brain and relax. Sometimes, all I needed was choose a podcast, begin a level and start leveling up. I cannot wait the next updates and DLCs (and even other bullet heaven games) in 2024.

08) Carto

PC/Mac/Switch/PlayStation/Xbox, Sunhead Games/Humble Games, 2020

In my first ever POTY, I talked about Carcassonne, a classic tile-laying board game. Three years later and I'm here again talking a tile-laying board game mechanic, but in a different and way more interesting concept. Carto is a girl with a magical map: if she changes the disposition of the cartography, the real world bends to its shape. Each chapter also increases how you can manipulate the map, bringing more depth to the gameplay. It such an amazing puzzle, and it is really well executed in a cozy story about a quest for family.

07) Smushi Come Home

PC/Mac/Switch, SomeHumbleOnion/Mooneye Studios, 2023

A 3D platformer, with focus on exploration, a small protagonist in a big world and SO FREAKING CUTE: Smushi Come Home was almost made to me. It is a short experience (compared with the genre average), but every detail was made to bring happiness. Every collectable is interesting, even if it's a upgrade, a skin or just a fact about mushrooms. Smushi is also the cutest shroom I ever met, with the attitude of a teenager that faces a problem and just asks "what I'm doing here, I'm only eight years old". My spiritual fungus.

06) Luigi's Mansion 3

Switch, Nintendo/Next Level Games, 2019

One more green brother adventure in the POTY! Luigi's Mansion 3 is the gameplay conclusion of a series that tried a lot. The ghost capture is easier, but more flashy and impactful (and also more fun, to me). The hotel is way better than Dark Moon's small mansions, and the new bosses have an amazing character design. Playing this in co-op with my wife was perfect, and we laughed a lot. Gooigi's lack of reaction against everything encapsulates a lot of me in Friday nights after working all week.

05) Katamari Damacy REROLL

PC/Switch/PlayStation/Xbox, MONKEYCRAFT Co. Ltd./Bandai Namco, 2018

Every POTY of mine needs a double feature... and this year, it came rolling! I cannot recommend enough Katamari Damacy. It was such a strange game, but it knows exactly the meaning of fun, and goes for it in every detail. The music is perfect, the wackiness is great, the story doesn't make sense, and you have to just keep rolling. It's my wife's favorite game, and now I understand why. This REROLL version is the most accessible nowadays, but it has all the glory of yesterday rolls.

04) We Love Katamari REROLL+ Royal Reverie

PC/Switch/PlayStation/Xbox, MONKEYCRAFT Co. Ltd./Bandai Namco, 2023

What's better than Katamari? MORE KATAMARI! Improving the original in a lot of ways, including new goals and ways to play, We Love Katamari is just perfection in a form of videogame. I know that the strange controls can turn some people off, but I beg you to try again. Yes, it seems weirder every second, but if you embrace it, you'll have a lot of fun. This REROLL version includes a lot of new things, but sticking to the original content is already an amazing experience.

03) Hi-Fi RUSH

PC/Xbox Series, Tango Gameworks/Bethesda, 2023

The bronze this year goes to the most surprising game of the year to me. A shadow drop from nowhere in the start of 2023, Hi-Fi RUSH is a masterpiece. I was never a fan of character action games, but mixing it with rhythm mechanics made it just perfect to me. And they even made a gorgeous world to look and explore, with that cartoon inspiration overflowing every dialog line, every animation, every object in the map. The story is great, the characters are so charismatic AND EVEN THE CAT IS CUTE, I LOVE 808! If you need to play just one character action game, this is your cue.

02) WHAT THE GOLF?

PC/Mac/Switch/PlayStation, Triband, 2020

I hate golf. Nothing against people that like golf, but I can't understand why someone likes a thing that is boring even in videogame form. Fortunately, there are people out there that understands me, and created WHAT THE GOLF?. The only golf thing here is the name: this is an incredible and always inventive physics puzzle that mesmerized me every level, no exception. The amount of ideas being executed all the time here is too absurd to be real, but sometimes miracles happen.

01) Kirby and the Forgotten Land

Switch, HAL Laboratory/Nintendo, 2022

I already love Kirby, and then you give me one of the best 3D platformers I ever played? Kirby and the Forgotten Land isn't just 3D transition well made, but a masterclass in set pieces, where every level is memorable and gets in the player's memory. All the Mouthful Mode is perfect (Car Kirby!) and the idea of evolving Copy Abilities ticked in my brain until I collected all of them. Surprising no one, Kirby and the Forgotten Land got the gold in my 2023 Played of the Year!

Honorable Mentions

Yes, I played Disney Dreamlight Valley all year. When an update dropped, there I was, ready to finish my new quests. I even bought the new expansion, A Rift in Time! I hope to get a full review of 1.0 version soon here in the blog (and the expansion in the future).
Dordogne is a short, but beautiful French story in watercolor. It isn't challenging, but it could be a good idea to relax at the end of the day.
Crime O'Clock is the most complete hidden object game I ever played. With a lot more story and plot than I expected, the time travel theme got me hooked for some days until I finished it.
Rytmos is more of a puzzle game about music, instead of a musical game. The challenge is fun, but discovering new genres and rhythms from all over the world is what makes it worth.
Puzzmo is what you need if you miss newspaper puzzles. I'm playing it for some months now, and the clue system in the crosswords made me smart again.
TYPECAST is a weird but fun mix of bullet hell and typing games. I would love to see more campaign-focused content in it, but as an arcade game, it is a blast.
Wanna a New Year's treat? Check those free web games that I loved during the year: Machine Yearning, Shape of Mind, Mystic Ring and Tricky Keys 2.

And that was my 4th Played of the Year! You can see a more complete list on my Backloggd, if you want. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and see you on POTY again next year!

Ranking every Club Penguin minigame (because it's Christmas!)

2023-12-25T00:00:00Z

If you ever talked to me about "my favorite games", I have mentioned Club Penguin, a Flash-made children MMO launched in 2005, sold to Disney in 2007 and closed forever in 2017. The idea was very simple: you create a cartoonish penguin as an avatar, got to a island full of snow, fun and regulated chat messages and had fun! Or, at least, moderated fun, if you couldn't have the paid membership at the time. Poor penguin cannot buy clothes with imaginary money because they can't pay real money too.

Even never being a paid member, I completely loved Club Penguin. Gabriel here was a rat of 2000s children MMOs and no one could get in my heart like CP did. For so many years, I logged in at least once a month to check the new items, parties and activities. In fact, I played a lot even past 2017, in a lot of private servers created and maintained by fans during the years. At least, until Disney started sending THE LITERAL POLICE to close down servers and making almost every one desist of the penguin dream.

I would love to play again, but I can't, so remembering is the best way to do it for now. And I can't remember about Club Penguin without time traveling to December 2008. The first non-English CP servers were being launched... in Brazilian Portuguese! I got an email from Disney Brasil's newsletter at the time, created an account and that's it. My first penguin was born, and I started my Club Penguin journey in Christmas Party 2008.

So, yeah, Club Penguin and Christmas are the same in my tiny brain. And the blog is mine, so my "holiday special" will be about my favorite part of the game: minigames! They were smaller games that you could play for coins, and they were well integrated to the bigger plot and scenario (instead of just having a page with them, like Neopets). At least, 50% of my CP playing time was just on them. Some were specially great, some were like a rotten hot sauce pizza.

I'm inviting you to a trip through penguin memory lane in a special, too personal Club Penguin minigame definitive ranking. I'm not counting minigames exclusive to timed parties (like the The Fair ones), console or mobile games (like the EPF duology or Game Day) or the Club Penguin app version (that I never used). Only common, always available minigames on the web version. As criteria, I'm just using my personal taste, really. You may have a different list, and that's fine. You're wrong, though.

31) Paint by Letters

To be fair, I just discovered that this game existed when looking at Club Penguin Wiki for writing this article. Apparently, Paint by Letters was a collection of three typing games in form of books at Coffee Shop's Book Room, where you type the story and, sometimes, choose what to type to change the plot. And maybe some small puzzles too?

This minigame was only available in the English servers in Club Penguin, probably because of the focus on language — translating it would be a nightmare. But I mostly played CP in Portuguese and the game doesn't even existed to me. So my ignorance about is what make it in the last place. Sorry :(

30) Card-Jitsu Snow

To be able to explain this one, I will need to advance some context about a game that is way higher in the list. All you need to know (for now): Card-Jitsu was a digital card game on Club Penguin with a ninja theme, where you compete head-to-head battles using colored cards and a rock-paper-scissors mechanic using 3 elements (fire, water and snow). Got it? Right, back to the worse game.

After the success of Card-Jitsu, CP staff wanted to expand on the ninja storyline and created three original "spin-offs", each one inspired by an element. Card-Jitsu Snow was the last one to be released (in 2013) and it's also one of the most strange minigames on Club Penguin.

Instead of a multiplayer competitive game that used the Card-Jitsu cards in different ways, they just created a way-too-simple tactical RPG — their own bad version of Fire Emblem! You started a level with other two penguins, each one in a role with different abilities, and then just attacked evil snowmen. The cards were only used as a charged final attack! IN A CARD GAME SPIN-OFF!

I was in my Club Penguin semi-hiatus when this released, but I remember looking at it and just not having fun at all. The battles were boring, the Card-Jitsu inspiration was only thematic and the game was way more resource-consuming than the rest of CP, my computer at the time just couldn't even run it properly.

It's a shame because they invested a lot on explain the Card-Jitsu lore, including the origin story of Sensei, the NPC responsible to bring the card game to the island in the first place (more about him later). There's even a true final boss! But with a mediocre game, I just ignored it. It happens.

29) DJ3K

Probably a lot of people have liked DJ3K way more than me, but it never got me mostly by its simplicity and lack of objective. Launched in 2008, it was the first Night Club minigame. You started it and got your penguin behind the DJ turntable in the club: when you pressed the buttons, sounds and music started to be played. You continue to press, the remix continued to happen, your penguin gets happy and you get coins. That's it.

It was fun for the first 10 minutes and than just became boring for me. If you were a member, you could record the songs and use them as the background music for your igloo, buy new records to use in the remixes and even bring your yellow puffle with you... But I wasn't, so just pressing buttons was not that cool.

28) SoundStudio

Well, at least they tried, right? The LAST game ever released on the original Club Penguin was SoundStudio, in 2014, as a replacement for DJ3K. The idea was the same, but instead of a skeuomorphic DJ turntable interface, SoundStudio was literally a digital drum pad with musical and CP samples. How you play was the same, but it was way better to understand how the music was being done.

The selling point of SoundStudio was the recording: instead of just listening in your own igloos, penguins could "publish" their tracks to a public queue, that would be used as the actual soundtrack for the Night Club room! Like, everyone there could listen to the songs created by other players, which was really nice and impossible to do in the early years of CP.

And then, they locked this feature (in-game and inside the standalone app) behind the paid membership. So the (teenager at this point) me couldn't even show my art to the world! So, yeah, if you get an OK game and even put it behind real money, I won't love it.

27) Card-Jitsu Fire

Do you want more penguin ninja lore? Snow was the last, but Card-Jitsu Fire was the first elemental spin-off, launched in 2009. In a concept way more in line of I was expecting from something derived from a card game, Fire was a board game! Your goal was to compete with other players for energy when walking in stones at a volcano. Card-Jitsu battles (using the cards) would determine if you gain or lose energy in each turn.

I love board games, right? So why this is so low at the list, you can ask me? From all the tabletop experiences already made in the history of humanity until 2009, why, in the name of sanity, THEY CHOSE TO CREATE A ROLL-AND-MOVE ONE? You got a number from a roulette, walk that amount of stones, play a card battle and hope to get energy. I tried to play it more during my time at private servers some years ago and I couldn't last 3 games. At least, the Club Penguin version of Monopoly is able to finish a match in less than a week.

As a personal note, I remember playing A LOT of Card-Jitsu Fire on the original island when I was a child. Like, it was boring and I didn't liked roll-and-move games at the time, so why I played it so much? Searching about it, I remembered: this game was member-only BESIDES TWO WEEKS IN 2011. During the Card-Jitsu Party 2011, the game was available for everyone. 15 days and it would be gone forever again.

So, I played ONLY CARD-JITSU FIRE (and Water) for 2 entire weeks in my life, trying to get all the exclusive items. Yes, it was made a open-for-everyone game in 2013, but who cares? A Club Penguin minigame gave me Stockholm syndrome and I don't know what to do with this information.

26) Sled Racing

One of the five original minigames in Club Penguin from 2005, Sled Racing was one of the games that were always there. You could go to the Ski Hill, choose a sled run, wait for more penguins to show up and compete! The game was a simple autorunner and your goal was just avoid obstacles to not stay behind it.

Like, there was nothing wrong with Sled Racing. It was always available for everyone, it was easy to find people to play with and it's really thematic with a snowy island full of penguins. But the game didn't have much substance after two or three races, the amount of coins you get was little... With so much cool games in the island, I just can't bothered to play it that much.

25) Dance Contest

Launched in 2009 to finally give Night Club a real minigame, Dance Contest was a pure and simple Dance Dance Revolution clone. Some colored arrows go up, you press them following the music and you get points! There was only 6 songs to choose, and half of them were member-only, so I could only play 3 of them (Epic Win was my favorite). Not only the songs, but only members had online multiplayer and purple puffles dancing with you.

Well, if it was just a DDR clone, why Dance Contest is the worst Club Penguin minigame? Some years ago, in a private server, as a Stepmania and DDR keyboard scholar that I am, decided to get the AAA grade in every song of the minigame. I even downloaded a software to remap my own keyboard and getting a Flash game recognize the patterns I used in other games. As the DDR person inside my friend group, I went directly to Expert difficulty.

And then, after the first song, I discovered that IN EXPERT, ALL THE ARROWS WERE COMPLETELY RANDOM. Not only the same song would have different maps (because the algorithm would choose them at random), but THEY NEVER FOLLOWED THE SONG BEAT. It's the ONLY THING a DDR clone needs to do: follow the fucking music! Of course, other difficulties had normal beatmaps, but I didn't knew at the time?! I don't know how they messed it up, but Dance Contest lost a LOT of positions because of that.

24) Find Four

Have you ever played a board game called Connect Four? It's a classic! You drop colored tokens in a vertically plastic grid, trying to get four of your pieces in a line to win. If you don't, you could just open Club Penguin and play Find Four in the Ski Lodge. It's literally the same game, and it's incredible how they got away with it.

Like, it's was fun, people seems to love it, but... yeah, it was only an old board game that I never played physically. There's another board game version in this list that I loved way more, so I hope to redeem myself soon.

23) Bits & Bolts

Are you ready for an arcade triple feature? Since 2005, Night Club's second floor had arcade machines with exclusive games (and, after 2011, it officially became the island's Arcade). I never really loved them, and I would ignore them even more after July 2010, when they LOCKED LEVELS behind the paid membership. Yes, everyone could play all the levels before, and now it's just for members. Top weird decisions of the CP team, if you ask me.

My least favorite of the trio was 2011's Bits & Bolts, the last arcade machine released in CP. The idea was being a math game, when you had a target number and you had to count how many bolts were in the tiles and click on them until you have the sum equal to the target. I made it look a boring Tetris-like? Because it was. At least, the visuals were really cute and nice (I love a good orange and blue palette well used).

22) Astro Barrier

Continuing the arcade journey, 2005's Astro Barrier has a really cool concept (specially for one of the first five minigames in CP history). It was inspired by old arcade shooters, but transformed as a puzzle that required forward thinking and precision. In each level, you had only one shot per target and if you successfully shot a target, it would freeze and becoming an obstacle to avoid further.

I think what didn't click for me was, essentially, the arcade vibe of it. Not visually, but the idea of losing all your lives and restarting from the beginning. Some levels were really hard and could be frustrating. But the staff at the time was thinking of it and blocked all but the first 10 levels to non-members, so I didn't had this problem anymore. And I also didn't played Astro Barrier anymore, but it was only a detail.

21) Thin Ice

The best Club Penguin arcade for me, though, was Thin Ice! Released in 2006 (and featuring the first CP original song composed by the legendary Chris Hendricks/Screenhog), your goal was to move a flaming black puffle through ice levels, melting the ice with each move. It was way inspired by those one-line puzzles, when you have to find a path that can go through all the board without repeating a tile or getting stuck.

Two things made this game so far in the ranking, one is the already mentioned decision to lock 50% of the game behind a paid membership — I really loved playing Thin Ice so it was a bit of a bummer to me. The other thing was the really open levels, that just consisted of moving the puffle in a big square for so much longer that it needed, and then discover you messed up. Not great, but in good stages, it was a blast.

(Someone needed to do a spiritual successor to Thin Ice. Maybe I can do that...?)

20) Catchin' Waves

Not even the best surfing game on Club Penguin, Catchin' Waves was released on 2007 and became the great attraction of the Cove until the closing. You get a surfboard and go surf through waves, doing tricks and just surviving. There was a tutorial mode, a freestyle arcade mode and other, more difficult modes that asks for more control of the penguin.

I understand why the game exists, surfing is cool and radical, and we are cool children! But the execution was not very good: the controls were always strange to me, they didn't make sense and were way too slippery. It was never my choice to play during my time online, and I didn't even care too much when they also locked half of the game behind the paid membership. Nice.

19) Puffle Roundup

Puffle Roundup was always one of the most strange minigames for me. It was released in 2005, during the first year of Club Penguin, and then it looked like a first-year activity forever. Your goal was to push puffles into a pen using the mouse, while the pets run away from the cursor in a chaotic way. If you get all of the them until the time goes out, you win and start a new level.

I played it some times even after years of Club Penguin, but it's so fun to be just a simple game, with simpler graphics, in a platform that tried to be bigger each year. They even updated it with new puffle colors when they were released! Not an incredible game, but it was for me like a small piece of history in an avalanche of change.

18) Jet Pack Adventure

I don't like it that much, but I can't deny how iconic Jet Pack Adventure is to Club Penguin. Launched in 2006, your goal was to get a jet pack at the top of the Beacon and use it to travel until the Mine, at the other side of the island, getting coins in the process. Avoiding all the obstacles was the real challenge and the reason why I failed it so much.

It wasn't one of my favorites (I prefer the DS version because of the touch controls) and they also blocked FOUR LEVELS OUT OF FIVE behind the paid membership in 2010... but it was interesting and fitted well with Club Penguin's vibe and lore. I always loved that you lose the game before the ending, you came back to the game in the room you were flying over.

17) Puffle Rescue

The first on a new trilogy of "puffle minigames", Puffle Rescue was launched in 2010 and could be found inside the Mine. The basis of it is being a Frogger semi-clone: you navigate grid-like mazes, dodging obstacles and trying to get to the puffles at the other side to rescue them. Three modes existed (but two of them were members-only): rescuing blue puffles in frozen water, pink puffles inside dangerous caves and black puffles underwater, at risk of drowning. At least, this time, they don't removed free content: pink and black levels were always paid.

I remember fondly how Puffle Rescue was the first Club Penguin thing that couldn't run well in my old computer at the time (just like Card-Jitsu Snow). They were starting the "next generation" at the time, that would implicate in a totally art style in the next years. This minigame was the first that I remember looking and having a strange feeling about it because of more modernized (and less Flash) visuals.

About the game, the free levels were fine. I don't love the Frogger mechanic, but it worked well with the rescuing theme. And you could unlock a secret room during the game, so, it was a nice touch.

16) Hydro Hopper

Our third original CP game in this list, Hydro Hopper is way older than even the first Club Penguin prototypes ever created. According to the Club Penguin Wiki, it was the first Flash game ever made by Lance Priebe (CP's co-founder), that named it originally as Ballistic Biscuit, a way funnier title! Your goal is to maintain your penguin being pushed by a motorboat, avoiding increasing obstacles by moving and jumping with the mouse.

Just like Puffle Roundup, it's easy to know how old the game was, even looking nowadays. The Flash sketchy graphics, the simplicity of the gameplay, the silly jokes between levels... It wasn't bad, I don't played it that often, but ended up being overshadowed by a whole list of more interesting experiences that came after it.

15) Card-Jitsu Water

To finish the Card-Jitsu spin-off trilogy, let's talk about my favorite of the bunch: Card-Jitsu Water, released in 2010. Mixing the board game motif from Fire and the video game inspiration we would see fully in Snow, Water is a real-time race tabletop-like game. Stone tiles with elemental obstacles would be floating down a waterfall, and the goal was to use Card-Jitsu cards to remove the obstacles and be the last penguin standing (or the first to play the gongo).

Besides the more demanding graphics, this game was fun! Maybe it was just the Stockholm syndrome attacking again (I also played this a lot in that 2011 party), but the concept of actually using the cards for something new made sense. The idea of having the game on a waterfall was well used too, instead of being just a thematic background. I wish the interaction between players were more easy to plan, but it was, easily, the best ninja game after the original Card-Jitsu.

Though, it was only for members for a long time and I would have got more nostalgia for it without this limitation. So, 15th is a good place for it.

14) Spy Drills

The only thing more epic than ninjas in Club Penguin are secret agents. If you are familiar with post-2010 CP, you can remember the Elite Penguin Force (EPF), the current special agency responsible to protect the island and keep it safe. Although it was created for a Nintendo DS game two years prior, they became an integral part of the main game, including their own minigames!

Originally, EPF agents could participate in an activity called Field-Ops. Each week, they would receive a message in their spy phones, hinting a particular location in an actual Club Penguin room. When their penguin found the place, the phone would react and unlock a sci-fi, hacking-like microgame. Winning the game would gave resources for unlocking secret agent clothes and items. For lore reasons, the Field-Ops ended in late 2012.

Then, in the next year, they came back from the dead in the form of an actual minigame at the EPF Command Room: Spy Drills! Instead of the weekly location hunt, all the microgames were now available in only one interface, like a common Club Penguin minigame. You could choose one to train it, or go to a Challenge, trying to beat three in a row without failing.

I made them sound way cooler than they really was... Some of them were actually interesting, like The Navigator — that asks you to program commands to beat a maze — or Code Break — a simple but competent Mastermind clone. But at the same time, you have a memory game, a mathematical angle quiz, a rhythmic Simon Says and other simple things. I liked it more as Field-Ops than Spy Drills itself, but I like the recycling process! Content is content, you know?

13) Treasure Hunt

Remember when I said that party minigames would not be in the list? Treasure Hunt is the exception to the rule, because it was just available during some parts of the year since 2008. Specifically, this game was played in the Captain's Quarters of the Migrator, the pirate ship commanded by Rockhopper, one of the most important NPCs in Club Penguin. He would dock in the island multiple times a year (mostly during parties), bringing exclusive items and this minigame!

Treasure Hunt was a 2-player, cooperative board game about dig treasures in a grid covered by sand. A player would only uncover rows in the grid and the other player, only columns. The whole thing about the game is that each grid space had TWO layers of sand; i.e. a thing could only be fully found if both players coordinate their actions to uncover the same square.

The most common treasures were 1x1 simple coins, but 2x2 rubies (and even emeralds) could be also found. The players needed to pay attention to shiny symbols when uncovering the first sand layer: this would indicate something was there, at least a coin. In Christmas, they even changed the game visuals, swapping sand by snow and the treasures by holiday candies and ornaments.

I always liked to play some games of Treasure Hunt, probably because of its sporadic nature and being always a "new" thing to try during an event. But there wasn't a lot of coins to get from it, and the game was heavily based on luck and your partner's moves, so it was easy to get bad games just because you (or worse, the other person) tried the wrong lines.

12) Mancala

Now we got to games that I really liked to play in Club Penguin and I miss every time I remember of my beloved island. And, yes, I loved to play Mancala in the Book Room back in the day. Giving you the context that I didn't have at the time, mancala is, actually, a really old game. Like, history date the first mancala boards to 700 AD's East Africa. Although variations and variations of the game are part of cultures around the world, Brazil was not one of those countries... so I discovered this ancient game through a Flash children MMO.

It is, indeed, a fun game! Most of the versions (including CP's Mancala) is played by two people competitively, moving their pieces in a circular board, trying to capture more pieces than the opponent. The key mechanic of a mancala game (and used in a lot of modern board games) is sewing: you get all the pieces on a space in your side of the board and start distributing then in the next spaces in order, one at a time. Depending where you place the last piece, you can do different actions, like capturing.

Mancala was one of the five first games on Club Penguin and I'm really glad they put it in. If they have chosen any other classic game, like checkers or chess, I would probably have ignored it for years. But when they can introduce a child to a special part of another culture inside a cartoon penguin simulator, it has a great impact.

11) Smoothie Smash

Smoothie Smash was one of the games that I liked to play, but couldn't play much at the time. Released in 2012 at the Coffee Shop, it was the last minigame truly original to be introduced in the original Club Penguin (after that, we only had an EPF game, a ninja game and SoundStudio). The concept here was to create smoothies bouncing with your penguin butt in fruits that were passing in a conveyor belt. At the bottom of the screen, a customer would show what fruits you needed to "smash" and in what order to increase your combo. Even a survival mode with obstacles was available.

First, I need to recognize that ALL THE EXPERIENCE HERE WAS FREE. It was the ONLY GAME in years to be released with all content for free and paid members, and it was just cool. Thank you, gang! Second, it was also one of the newest games, so my computer couldn't handle it very well... In a mechanic of rapid thinking and combos, it wasn't a good match.

But I played Smoothie Smash some years ago in private servers and it was genuinely fun. Trying to find the next fruit to bounce without losing the combo, trying to catch extra time, it was a blast! I would love to see this concept revisited by someone, including new mechanics in the mix (!) to make the experience more interesting after some time.

10) System Defender

At the time, I could imagine a lot of ideas for the first, exclusive EPF minigame... but I could never guess it was a tower defense. System Defender was launched in 2011 as the first storyline in EPF in-game lore, and could only be accessed in the EPF Command Room by secret agents. The idea was to simulate a defense system for the agency computers, using an almost cyberpunk aesthetic. In each level, your goal was help EPF agents to destroy bots that are trying to corrupt the EPF Mainframe using special tech cannons.

The best way I can describe System Defender is "your first tower defense game". You only had three types of cannons/"towers", three types of enemies and the bosses were just bigger robots. Energy was the main (and only) resource that could be used to build new cannons or pay high for a upgrade cog. They were even color-coded to help understand the synergy: the red cannon/robot had average stats, the yellow ones were faster and the purple ones were slow (but more powerful).

I really liked to play this game back in the day, even with half of the levels behind the paid membership. Secret agent things were my favorite at Club Penguin, and having the characters talking and discussing the attacks during the matches was the cherry at the top. My only problem is my completely incapacity of playing tower defense games, so I didn't finished most of the levels.

09) Aqua Grabber

Launched in 2008 in a event to rescue the parts of Rockhopper's ship when it collided with an iceberg, Aqua Grabber is, to me, one of the most complete mini-games in Club Penguin. Your goal is to use a submarine to navigate the seas under the island to get treasures, controlling the air inside it. Although a lot of levels were planned, only two were actually released (and one of them was also money-blocked in the 2010), what is a shame, because it had a lot of potential.

The exploration factor of Aqua Grabber was the best for me, with different objectives and ways to explore the same level. The gameplay was simple, but the controls were well made. I remember trying for hours to get a secret bigger fish in one of the levels, because you needed to get a secret bait, and then get a smaller fish, and then try to "catch" the big fish. Even for not-secret goals, there was some puzzles involved. I really wanted more of Aqua Grabber...

08) Pufflescape

In 2011 (at the middle of my CP frenzy as a child), they started a Beta Team feature in Club Penguin's website. The idea was to test features and minigames in a prototype phase together with the community. I played most of them at the time, and the only one I could remember of liking was Rollerscape, a puzzle-platformer featuring the recent discovered white puffles. Your goal was to control it inside a rolling ball to get all the berries in a ice maze. You could even use the mouse to open/close obstacles, or use the puffle to push boxes and open new paths.

Well, this was the ONLY thing that was actually was put in the game coming from the beta features! Now renamed Pufflescape (and part of the "puffle trilogy") and featuring any of the player's puffles if they wanted, it was really fun! The extra levels were only available for paid members, but I played them on private servers over the years and they had cool designs too. Some of them needed more polish, but for a CP minigame, they found a formula that worked. Another one that I could get a spiritual successor easily.

07) Card-Jitsu

And the end of our ninja journey is the beginning. Released in 2008 and making everyone really cares for the not-secret-anymore Dojo, the original Card-Jitsu was a 2-player competitive card game inside (and outside) Club Penguin. As I mentioned, during the turn, each player would choose a card with an element and a power value, and they would win or lose in a rock-paper-scissors fashion: fire melts snow, snow freezes water, water puts out fire.

What makes it for me more interesting than your more common trumps games is how you would win a game of Card-Jitsu. Instead of just winning a certain number of turns, each card also had a border color. To win, you needed to get three cards of the same element or one card of each element, but IN DIFFERENT BORDER COLORS. It wasn't the greatest strategic game ever made, but this detail helped to allow interesting decisions instead of just playing your powerful card in hand every turn.

Power Cards also were an important part of Card-Jitsu: they were really powerful, had original, exclusive animations and rules that affected the game, like blocking an element in the next turn, or making lower values win elemental ties (instead of higher). The only problem here is how you unlocked new cards during some years: you needed to buy actual, physical Card-Jitsu collection cards and use codes to unlock their digital versions. It was a little frustrating to play against an American child with money and see their collection of Power Cards...

Even with all that, Card-Jitsu was really fun! The progression in your "ninja journey", getting colored belts like some real martial arts, was engaging and a cool way to show your mastery to other penguins. To became a real ninja, you needed to beat the CPU in the form of Sensei, a really hard card duel. It was so successful that I understand why three spin-offs were released after that.

06) Cart Surfer

Now THIS is the best surfing activity in Club Penguin. Forget the water and go to the Mine, because Cart Surfer was always fun. Your penguin just go on a cart mine and your goal is to do a lot of tricks to get points, combos and coins. Released in 2006, it felt as a simple game (because it was), but has all the things that made Flash games addicting in the first place.

It had a easy game loop to understand, and less courageous people could just turn and finish the game without going after a lot of tricks. But understanding the 10+ tricks available, when do them to maximize the points and not crashing at the same time... uh, it was good! My favorite was Cart Grind, that you could do instead of turning. Simple, but effective: Cart Surfer deserves a spiritual successor too.

05) Bean Counters

Our top five starts again in the Coffee Shop for the last Club Penguin original game for the list. Bean Counters released in 2005 as an action-focused minigame, where your goal was to catch coffee bean bags being launched from a truck and stack them to restock the shop.

Of course, anvils, fishes and other strange obstacles would also be launched and needed to be avoided. If you stack a lot of bags in your penguin without unload them in the shop, you would also lose a life.

Just like Cart Surfer, it had this Flash game vibes with a simple gameplay and visuals, but it was really well executed. Using the mouse to move the penguin made it respond well in harder levels, when they are so much things at the screen. And I would love to have this same mechanic in a more intricate game, with more challenge instead of just catching the same bag...

...BUT WE HAVE. Bean Counters is one of the two only minigames in Club Penguin to have a "candy secret variant", activated finding a special button in the title screen. Introduced in 2011, Jellybean Counters have the bags full of colored jellybeans instead of coffee. Instead of just stacking them, you have to pay attention to the right colors too! Putting the wrong jellybeans in the stack would make you lose a life. This version was not that accessible (for colorblind people), but it was my preferred way to play.

04) Pizzatron 3000

Name a more iconic Club Penguin minigame than Pizzatron 3000. I'm not gonna wait because you can't name a more iconic CP activity. The heart of Pizza Parlor since 2007, this was always a blast to play (and SO HARD OH MY GOD). Empty pizzas were passing through a conveyor belt and you had to run with your mouse putting all the toppings correctly, following the recipe at the top.

It's hard to explain why this minigame was so cool, because it is a little too simple in concept. But after the 10th pizza, the belt starts to accelerate and you just ignore everything around you to get five squids and hot sauce in some seconds. It was really hard to finish everything without mistakes, but the fun is to try. Doing no mistakes would reward tips and more coins at the end.

But even harder is the Candytron 3000, the another CP's secret candy variation (in fact, this one came first). Activated in a hidden lever in the title screen, the machine starts making sweet pizzas, with chocolate, marshmallows and jelly beans. It was faster, but more rewarding. I never did a perfect game on the candy mode, however. One day, wko knows?

03) Puffle Launch

I know that I've been harsh about minigames with content locked behind the paid membership... but Puffle Launch was too cool to not be in the top 3. Launched in 2011, it's our last game of the "puffle trilogy" and one of the best ever made on Club Penguin. A red puffle want to recover all the berries stolen by Klutzy the Crab and is going fully radical to it: using cannons!

The easy way to explain is imagining a level full of those Donkey Kong Country barrels (that launch you in a direction), but with free air movement! When flying, you can change the trajectory of the red puffle, so you can do a lot of cool tricks bouncing in the obstacles. There's no place in a level you cannot reach with enough momentum and control mastery. And they know it, because there are a lot of berries on stupid locations, outside the main path.

To me, Puffle Launch is one of the only Club Penguin minigames that could be its own game and be an amazing package. Yes, it's foreshadowing again, because the game was released as the first CP mobile app later that year. In fact, that's how I started to love it! In 2022, I found an APK to the (now delisted) app and mastered it. It was an literal blast and I just wanted to play more.

(Someone MUST do a spiritual successor to Puffle Launch. Maybe I have to do that...?)

02) PSA Secret Missions

If I need to chose one thing to prove how fun and incredible was the secret agent content in Club Penguin, this (not mini)game would be it. Way before the EPF, there was the PSA, the Penguin Secret Agency. As old as the island itself, penguins could enlist to be a special agent and maintain the order. But, in 2006, everything change with the launch of the first PSA Secret Mission.

Instead of in-game events with little puzzles like the EPF had years after, all the PSA Secret Missions were point-and-click games! Looking into rooms, searching for items, solving puzzles, talking to other characters: Club Penguin did its own Monkey Island, in a smaller scale, of course. The agents even had their secret way of communicate in the form of the Tic-Tac-Toe Code, also used for puzzles during the missions.

Because of the heavy focus on story and plot of the genre, the lore behind the PSA and its agents were, for a lot of time, the most detailed part of Club Penguin. It was the first time we would be introduced to iconic characters, like the PSA scientist Gary the Gadget Guy — and even CP's own great evil, Herbert P. Bear, a polar bear destined to destroy the island at any costs.

Ten missions were released from 2006 to 2008, mostly focusing them on your start as a secret agent and the first attacks from Herbert. In 2010, the awaited Mission 11 was released as "The Veggie Villain", that resulted in a big impact in-game. No spoilers, but this was the last mission of the PSA, and after that, the EPF assumed the role of island protectors.

Those missions were so different and well made they even inspired two Nintendo DS games made in the Club Penguin franchise. The second one, Club Penguin: Elite Penguin Force: Herbert's Revenge, was literally based on the PSA missions: more than half of the game are just ports of the original PSA missions. I always find that really lame, but now, with the original CP popped out of existence, it's probably the most accessible way to try them.

01) Ice Fishing

Remember when I said this list was deeply personal? The PSA Missions were, by far, the coolest minigame in Club Penguin history... but if there is one that I played more than any others, it's Ice Fishing. Released in 2006 for the Ski Lodge, it was my favorite CP minigame and I even can't explain why!

Your goal was really simple: just fish. You could move your mouse up and down to catch the fish with your hook, and then click outside the water to remove the prey. Obstacles would appear to make you lose baits (your lives), and they would keep coming during 5 levels of difficulty. At the end, if you were smart, you could use a normal fish as bait for Mullet, the big boy!

It had that Flash game vibe so right, and it was so responsive to play. After some years playing it, I could do a lot of almost "tricks" with the line, catching a lot of the fish in situations that seemed impossible. In 2008, a members-only special fishing pole could be acquired, and harder gray fish would also appear. Fortunately, in my private server years, I could also play with them, and I love it. Ice Fishing is just so cool, and I would pay for a game that replicate that same feeling nowadays.

There was a lot, huh? If you played Club Penguin at some point in your life, I hope to have helped you navigate in memories, remembering the cool times in that loved island. And if you never played CP in your life and just read until here out of pure morbid curiosity... it's impressive and scary how much content a 2000s Flash online game for children could have, right?

I will talk more about CP in the future (because I miss it so much), but that's it for now. Happy Christmas for you, your family and our penguins. Waddle on!

Why creating a blog helped me find a digital identity

2023-12-15T00:00:00Z

If you are reading this, I finished a project that lasted a few months in my hands: I finally have a new, made-from-scratch blog / portfolio for all gaming and writing things that I love to do as a hobby. Yes, it's simple, there is no ads (and never will be), but I made it as my little space in the web and I'm really happy with it.

But when I look to the web around me, a old-fashioned collection of texts seems way off? The internet nowadays is more of a never-sleeping market, whose main products are your screen time and your data. Short videos need Subway Surfers gameplay so people can actually pay attention. A Google search is more of a minefield and you probably get what you want in the page 3, what would be unbelievable some years ago. And, of course, the constant thought of "is this made by an stealing-content AI?" will be asked forever until the end of time.

I used to see people discussing about how this late capitalism stage we live on forces you to transform your hobbies into business and work... but the Web is so strange that, sometimes, engagement is way more valuable than money. Win the social media algorithms just to connect to people, even if you don't want to make profit from it, is obligatory.

Doesn't impress me how much closed spaces are becoming for communities everywhere. If you wanted to find a place to talk about a subject some years ago, you would probably find an open, searchable forum, or even a e-mail group. Today, the best you can find is a Telegram group or a Discord server, that will be lost forever as soon as these companies go bankrupt in the future.

I didn't take so many months to program a simple blog. I really did it in one month, including a lot of the new articles. All of this time was trying to understand why I'm on the internet. I never really remember a time in my history that I wasn't online, but what this means to my adult self? Why bother to craft a special space for me in the middle of digital hell? This is the result of it.

Born with an e-mail account

I was born in August 1998 in a countryside city in Brazil. According to scientists (and Wikipedia), I'm a Zillenial: mostly I have dual citizenship in both generations and I'm both allowed to appeal to nostalgia AND be asked to fix my aunt's Instagram account. The tiny difference here is, when most of Gen Z started their lives with a mobile phone, I learned to type in a desktop keyboard before writing on paper.

People always get sad when I said that I never had cable TV or a video game console during my childhood, but I was really privileged to have access to computers and internet since I was born. Yes, it was a old computer with Windows 98 and a dial-up connection to be used only in weekends, but this is my oldest memory that I can remember. Me, as a toddler, sitting in a high chair, looking at my dad using the PC.

In a way or another, I grew up with the Web. When I was a little child, I got my first e-mail address, learned how to create account on sites for children. Every weekend, when I logged the web, the first thing I was obligated to do was download the Norton Antivirus update for my dad. I loved to browse freeware download portals, because I would love new games and applications to experiment during the week. It was also my first time experimenting with web page design: I used GeoCities, I just tried Microsoft FrontPage non-stop like it was MS Paint.

Imagine a time that everything on the web was static websites and the only thing that a viewer could change was a visitor counter, a world where your Favorites browser folder was a treasure to be saved for generations. A time when a famous Brazilian TV host could try a musical career and his flagship song could be having virtual friends. If I was older, I would probably would been a IRC user, but the only thing burned in my mind is my dad's ICQ notification sound.

(some old sites that I had during the years, from top to bottom, left to right: (1) my first GeoCities website that I did with my dad circa 2004; (2) my most serious attempt to create a humor blog in 2011; (3) the rebranding I did for the same site on 2012, drawing by Mitsujii; (4) a portfolio link aggregator that I did in 2016 when I tried to be a freelance writer)

And then, the internet started to change, and me too. As I started to enter my teenage years, the Web 2.0 started to really becoming a reality. I remember photo sharing sites becoming famous (like Fotolog, really famous on Brazil), and then the social media started to appear. I know that MySpace was the hot thing overseas, but here in my country, we LOVED Orkut. Did you know that for some time, Orkut was only really used by Brazil and India, and all the operations for the site have gone to Google Brazil? Even now, for most millenials, that pink logo is THE symbol of our 2000s Web.

Well, and then, everything happened!? Facebook starts taking over everything, YouTube gets a lot of traction and makes video sharing a true reality, Twitter just explodes and became the new sensation. During this process for us in Brazil, Orkut was really famous yet, and there's a lot of humor blogs, just creating first-generation memes and reposting cool videos from other humor blogs. I tried a lot to be part of this, maybe with a dozen different blogs and some YouTube channels. No, you cannot watch my teenager vlogs or I'll need to kill you.

Looking back, I really lived in the internet all of this time. If it was healthy, I can't say, but I definitely did. Most of my hobbies at the time was doing something in the computer, probably on the web. My favorite game as a child was Club Penguin! It's strange that children nowadays just are born with a smartphone in the hands — and I had a similar, but so different infancy. That's why finding my way on the internet is not just doing a hobby or creating an account: the Web is a integral part of my history, and my online persona is an important part of me.

Finding a digital identity

During all this time, I was just a kid with internet access doing kid stuff. Trying things, copying the trends. I never had any success or fame, probably because I was literally copying the blogs I read or the vlogs I watched. But starting in 2011-2012, I started writing about games for real in the Web, on sites way bigger (and more successful) than anything that I could do alone.

And, for years, I never stopped (all of them are in Portuguese, but if you want, I listed them as part of my project list). I started to get some followers in social media just because I was writing about games in a medium-size portal, and that was it. It was, at least, original articles! (Progress!) I was in high school during this period, and the internet was already algorithmic and more centralized from what I used to.

Suddenly, creating a thing by myself became a stupid idea, you know? Why bother to start from zero when I can just write in other people's spaces? That little amount of visibility — that I never had until that point — was enough to fuel my impostor syndrome. No one would follow what a stupid boy like me, I was just lucky to get a way to write and be known about this.

And, at the same time, I was starting my major in Computer Science. I'm really grateful that my university was public (and public colleges in Brazil are free for students), but I needed some money to get food and a place to live in a bigger city. Writing became also a way to help my parents to pay the bills and try to get a diploma at the end of this.

In a matter of years, that little child that sees the internet as an infinite playground was gone. I was just a recent-promoted-to-adulthood human being, worrying about money and entering in a spiral of low self esteem and burnout. I got some bucks doing copywriting for enterprise blogs and a really clickbait-y mobile app portal, but it was this. In some months, I started doing research and getting some money for that, and then getting a job as a web developer.

And then, I think I never understood what I want from the internet anymore. Besides like, being a "common" (but chronically online) user. For a person that created stupid projects in a monthly basis, it's a little sad. I know that, well, I was an adult now, with a job, responsibilities and mental fatigue, but something was missing. My internet persona was missing.

(one of my old board game prototypes that I failed to develop fully)

I kept writing for a lot of different portals, writing alongside really talented people, but I never was really happy with what I was doing? In just some months, it always became a mechanical, soulless job that I was doing for free to someone. Even when I tried to be a "board game designer" for real during the pandemic, I started almost a double work shift and the impostor syndrome attacked in the first refusal from a publisher.

Even this domain name, gabtoschi.com, was already home for three or four different websites in just a couple of years. I woke up and decided that a new blog will solve my creative problem. In a week, I had found a template in Google, modified some CSS and called it a day. Never updated or wrote anything until the next epiphany. Ad infinitum.

Growing up with the internet taught me how unhealthy was transform all of your feelings and opinions in social media big data. I simply can't share everything that I am as tweets or stories, it doesn't make sense to me. Somehow, I need to find who I want to be in the internet, what my creative outlet would be. In some ways, I want back the innocence, courage, sincerity and trust in my own ideas like I had as a child.

My new cozy webplace

At this point in my intimate reflection, you understand what I decided that would be my creative outlet. This website, made from scratch, by myself (with a great help from my wife). No more templates (for the site and for me). This whole text isn't just about to present it to you, but remind me why I had this in my mind for so many months.

I like the idea of creating a internet persona, for real. A version of me that I'm comfortable to be public and forever preserved on the Internet Archive (or a Russian database). I feel safer because my life and my family is preserved, and I can be connected with people all around the world from my home. That TV show host wasn't that far away, if you think about it.

The first thing that was really clear to me was understand that the internet is a hobby, and not a job. I already have a job — that is creating internet pages, don't even start to argument. Doing those things needs to be just for fun, to be silly, and not another pressure to get results, or engagement, or profit. I already have a lot of capitalism in my head every day, and I cannot choose (again) to have more.

But why? This was getting me for real. If not to be famous, or getting money, why create a blog to write nowadays? If I want just to put something out from me, I can talk to myself in the shower.

Then I realized the only thing that the Web never failed to me: getting people together. I have friends that I talk monthly (at least) for a DECADE. Some of them I would invite for my marriage (and I actually did). There's some people that I meet through messages and video calls that are more next to me than most of the kids I studied together, every day, for 8 years.

So, yeah, I will create a blog to talk about things that I like and find other people that also likes those things. I would love to have someone to talk, in detail, what is the better Club Penguin minigame, or how interesting is this Nintendo DS hidden gem only released in Japan. Or even, something that I already did a lot in other outlets, just talk about good games and help other people to find them! That's a nice goal, and I love it.

I think that writing is a good way to outlet ideas for me, personally. Not just because I do this for 10 years now, and I'm mostly comfortable to do so. But because I'm the master of starting projects, losing the heat and stopping them completely. If I can, at least, write about my attempt, maybe I can have more of the personal satisfaction that I'm looking for.

And also, it's so good to not be attached to a big company's platform nowadays. Yes, I'll probably need social media to find these people, but I don't need to worry that YouTube will delete my channel when I'm sleeping. Or that a social network that I could have invested time and effort would be bought by a stupid person and starting to crumble in front of my eyes. My content, my space, my control.

It's so fun that, for so much time, I was looking for a way to describe my internet persona. A web developer? A gaming-related writer? A game designer? And then I found three words: curiosity, creativity and chaos. Doesn't matter exactly what I'm doing: if I'm curious about to learn, creative enough to do something and chaotic enough to have fun, I'll be good.

Welcome!

That's it. At the end of the day, I just need to be more like myself as a child. There's no stupid ideas, there's no stakes. I always had fun in the internet, and I'll do again, but as a person that lived more, learned more and knows how to do more. And if you liked it, I would love to connect with you, through my articles, reviews, projects or stupid tweets.

If you just read something and want to comment, talk! Are you a content creator that wants to chat and maybe do something together? Get in touch! Are you a gaming developer/publisher/PR agency and thinks that I would do a good review of your game? Send me an email!

No pressure, just vibes. It feels like a new part of me is alive again, and I'm just so excited to have fun with this strange place again. Wish me luck!

Thanks to Super Snapper (on Unsplash) for the cover photo.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land

2023-12-13T00:00:00Z

I have a little contradictory love to Kirby. I love him. Kirby is the perfect video game character ever made. Kirby is round, Kirby is pink, Kirby sleeps and eats, Kirby defeats demons and gods with one poyo. It's like a cat, but without fur and with the actual power of copying the ability of everything it touches. It's impossible to not want to be friends with Kirby.

But, at the same time, I never really liked to play a Kirby game. Besides some spin-offs, every time I tried one, I mostly gave up before finishing. I don't have a problem with easy platformers, but Kirby games always felt "too much of the same". Even in Planet Robobot, probably the best 2D Kirby game, I can't remember much of it without mixing it in my head. It's easy to see why people love them, but it wasn't for me.

So, when I say that Kirby and the Forgotten Land is one of my favorite games of all time, I want you to understand how much powerful is this sentence. It's SO DIFFERENT of everything that came before, and, at the same time, so familiar to what to expect with a Kirby game. The whole idea of a Kirby game changed perspective to me when I started playing Forgotten Land.

...yes, it was a joke, it's the first 3D game of the franchise, like, ever. Actually, the whole 3D thing isn't that impactful for me. It was perfect, and they managed to translate the gameplay perfectly. But when you do the first 3D game of a franchise, and this isn't even the most impactful thing of the whole title, you know you created a masterpiece. And HAL did.

Strange horizon. Ready to go.

There is a concept in film making that is really important for true classics that want to be memorable: set pieces. The idea here is to invest a lot of money, production and time to create a scene so impactful, so incredible, that will be remembered even years after you watched it. If you want to summarize a movie with good set pieces, you will probably only cite them in order and everyone will remember what film you are talking about.

This concept can also be applied on video games, of course, and there's a lot of gaming classics that do this really well. For me, until now, Kirby games didn't have that much of memorable set pieces. If they had, it was like the lore dumping next to the end of the game — that probably was so absurd (with a big god-like creature and a tragic backstory) that becomes memorable by comparison. I would finish a Kirby game and all the memories became a mush in my head, always that.

Forgotten Land is the opposite. You can show me the name and title of any level on the entire game and I will remember something from it. In different levels of impact, every single stage in this game has a different thing to be experienced. Sometimes, it just a little gimmick, like a big enemy you can defeat. Other times, it's an amazing and beautiful set piece featuring a roller coaster (no more spoilers than this), so cool that me and my wife repeated it SIX TIMES, back to back, just to play it again.

Having a new setting helps a lot in creating these moments. As much as I love Dream Land's cuteness, I can't see a Green Greens lookalike and be excited, you know? But this "new world", this literal Forgotten Land, is so different and familiar at the same time. This idea of a post-apocalyptic place, abandoned by human-like and consumed again by sentient nature... And they double down on it, showing different town styles, creating levels around human-made structures, and probably way more shopping malls they needed.

And everything just followed along with the scenario to be even more memorable. Although the mini-bosses are still just "big enemies", The Beast Pack — the big bad guys here — are enormous, feral, literally wild. The soundtrack too is so good in this idea of mixing familiarity and curiosity. I know that my favorite song is the vocal main theme, but you have listened the King Dedede theme's remix for Forgotten Land? I can kill a beast with my bare hands just hearing this BANGER. ~~(no, I can't)~~

The finishing touch for the "new world" for me is Waddle Dee Town. I always loved the Waddle Dees and having them build a whole village as you rescue them is so cute! — and a great way to integrate all the extra content besides the main story. I really like this concept of evolving your status during a game (we'll talk more about in a second), it's so rewarding this process that becomes half of the fun for me. Going back from a stage and reading "There's new things in Waddle Dee Town for you!" always gave me a smile.

No one can hold you back. New fields full of mystery.

It's really nice to have an amazing scenario, but this is still a game! Those cool set pieces I talked about before are always interactive. Some of them is just good level design, but a lot of them have a great mechanic behind it: if the thing is too big, Kirby doesn't copy its ability, but instead became part of it in the Mouthful Mode! For gamers, it's like Cappy's capture power in Super Mario Odyssey. For 2000s cartoon kids, it's like the alien Upgrade from Ben 10.

So, if you find a cone, Kirby can swallow it and use its pointed side to attack enemies or breaking walls when ground pounding. Or if Kirby swallows a vending machine, he becomes a soda machine gun. OR IF KIRBY SWALLOWS A CAR, KIRBY CAR IS BORN. Car-Mouth Kirby is one of the cutest images ever imagined by humanity since the first person opened their eyes. My son will be called Carby because of him. I will protect Kirby Car forever.

Those small moments of gameplay change are really cool. Not only to allow more amazing set pieces, but to break the monotony of "barefoot Kirby" that can happen sometimes. There isn't a lot of Mouthful Modes available, and a lot of them are recycled during the adventure, but it's a really fun feature anyways. I can be Kirby and a car at the same time! It's perfect.

Now that I cited "barefoot Kirby", I think this is the game that made Copy Abilities really fun to me finally. In concept, the power of getting the ability of the enemies is amazing: you can get different powers every level, find your favorites and sticking to them (until a collectable forces you to use a specific Copy Ability). In practice, you see everything that is available in the first world of the game and keep using them until you finished it.

In Forgotten Land, the Copy Abilities can be upgraded and I've never been so happy in a Kirby game before. To start, the blueprints you need to unlock them sometimes are well hidden in the levels, doubling down as a cool collectable to search for. Then, you need Rare Stones from challenge stages as currency — I never cared for them before, but with the gameplay variety here, they just became little and interesting puzzles.

When you upgrade a ability, they doesn't lose their essence, but they got new visuals and extra abilities from there. The Fire ability makes Kirby breathe fire, but Volcano Fire Kirby can shoot flaming magma stones way much further. The new Ranger ability gives Kirby a Gun™, but Noble Ranger Kirby can just use those pistols as machine guns if he charges. The control scheme is the same, but the sense of power and discovery changes completely with each new evolution.

I don't want to spoil more of the game, but some of them are even inspired by enemies and bosses — getting them somehow seems even more rewarding. Games like RPGs have this concept of showing player's evolution in power, mostly connected to a lot of stats and formulas. But Forgotten Land just found an easy and visual way to make Kirby even powerful, allowing the player to experience it changing the most basic element in the franchise. The new clothes that Kirby get is 60% of the coolness, it's important to remember.

Feast your eyes on a new world!

I started playing Kirby and the Forgotten Land waiting for Kirby in 3D. Nothing more than that. A good time controlling the best character ever made. But I got so much more. An amazing world, with incredible set pieces and memorable characters. A soundtrack worth of listening in loop for days. An hilarious mechanic to allow new possibilities. An evolution system that no one really asked for, but changed the game for me.

I had so much fun that I literally played the game twice, at the same time. First as the Waddle Dee protector of my wife, than again as Kirby in another save file. I've done all the Treasure Roads, even finished the Colosseum mode. For a franchise that I didn't care much about, I'm as surprised as you on how happy I am now. If this is the new baseline for Kirby games, just give me more of my puffball and I'll love video games forever.

Doctor Who: 60th Anniversary Specials

2023-12-11T00:00:00Z

How many people can say casually that their favorite TV series is going to its 60th anniversary and still strong as ever? I'm one of them, because Doctor Who is one of the most special shows in the world's (and my) history. Since the first TARDIS materialization in November 23th 1963, our favorite Time Lord visited galaxies, met personalities and saved the day way more times than everyone can count.

Talking personally, I didn't really know what to expect for those 60th Anniversary Specials. The only "modern celebration" we had was 10 years ago, in the marvelous, intricate and already-a-classic The Day of the Doctor. This special was not only incredible as a multi-Doctor episode and a major retcon for the "revival series", but paid homage to so many characters, stories and themes of the past of the show. It was a concept that made sense at the time too, with a well established production team and a veteran face already in the role of The Doctor.

Now looking at retrospect, 2023 had a totally different context. A production era was coming to an end, with Chris Chibnall stepping down from the role of showrunner and the final scenes of Jodie Whittaker as 13th Doctor being shown. Russell T Davies was back with a lot of morale and trust from the BBC and the fans, a huge distribution deal with Disney guaranteed worldwide distribution of the new episodes and even a new face for the Doctor was already there with Ncuti Gatwa. There was no promises of a new DotD, there was no context to a celebration at the same tone, but I think everyone expected it anyway, including me.

SPOILERS, SWEETIE! This review has spoilers for all 3 specials, and some commentary about the plot of the revival series of Doctor Who (2005-2023).

This review isn't just about what I liked in those new Doctor Who adventures. But also how my expectations changed, week by week, when looking for answers. Why bring back David Tennant — as the new 14th Doctor and not the 10th? Why bring back Donna Noble, the only companion in the revival series that couldn't have been brought back? Why bring back one of the oldest and forgotten classic villains? It all starts with a spaceship crashing...

Special 1: The Star Beast

I know what was THE BIG THING on this first special, but can I start talking about The Star Beast recognizing it as a Doctor Who Magazine comic story brought to TV? The expanded universe was so important for the history of DW (specially during the 90s hiatus) and having it more present on the main show — in a way that everyone can enjoy — is so cool. With the whole Whoniverse thing going on, it would be nice to have more of these.

Now we can talk about the real star of the episode: Donna Noble is back! I always loved her interactions with the 10th Doctor and her farewell in Journey's End was one of the most emotional scenes in that era. Showing how she continued her life, forming her family and trying to live after donating the Doctor's money gift was really interesting — I don't know if being extremely rich would be a good character for Donna anyway. Shaun Temple is a good husband, Sylvia Noble is still terrified of everything sci-fi to protect her daughter and I can't describe how much I loved Rose Noble, portrayed really well by Yasmin Finney.

Money problems aside, Donna had everything for a happy family and life, but we Whovians know that there's a problem to be solved. The whole "we can just let it go" don't worked for me, and I really didn't understand yet how the biggest thing of a whole Series was solved in three lines and some VFX. But all that said, the idea of Donna AND Rose sharing the Meta-Crisis and helping each other was marvelous and so beautiful to see. The binary/non-binary reference, Donna's love for her daughter and how Rose can now be truly herself was perfect and a good ending for a frantic adventure. ~~(a little bit of foreshadowing too, huh)~~

Yes, right? The Star Beast is a hell of an adventure! This furry piece of shit Beep the Meep never got me (but got my wife and her reaction was memorable). A really good villain with a different backstory and powers than just "I'm big and bad" — the psychedelic sun hypnosis was a really cool touch. It's so cool to see how the Meep changes during the Doctor's improvised trial from a puffball to a unsatiable demon. A great monster that couldn't be lost in some old comic pages. As I said, the show needs to use more its expanded universe and if Meep isn't the example for that, I don't know what could be.

But for everything that happened in this first special, the most important (for me and for my hopeful conclusion of this review) is the Fourteenth Doctor. Yes, it's David Tennant again, and he's a top-tier actor as everyone knows, but I really love how it's a different regeneration of The Doctor. 10th was so much energetic and incisive, jumping from one thing to the other in a blink of an eye. 14th, however, shows how much they grew during the past incarnations: it seems to be a wiser, self-conscious and really traumatized creature.

Like, really, I think that every special on this run has at least one scene of 14th bursting in rage, specially in moments that someone would get hurt or die. The Doctor always reacted to those moments, but it really seems that this incarnation is at the brink of exploding every time. The Doctor isn't well after all he lost (and specially after a part of the universe being destroyed by the Flux). This is the 14th Doctor's personal journey for me, and I'll talk about it in a moment. First, however, we need to do a quick stop at the end of the universe...

Special 2: Wild Blue Yonder

I'm not the biggest fan of horror or suspense movies, so you can imagine that those episodes on Doctor Who weren't in my top lists (yes, I'm talking to all Blink fans right there). Wild Blue Yonder is a weird turn in the middle of those anniversary specials: it's definitely a great episode that even I could enjoy, but doesn't really add a lot to the overarching plot of the 14th Doctor.

With all that said, it was a really interesting mystery from start to finish: those "not-things" were terrifying, using the appearance of The Doctor and Donna to be deformed and scary. I think that the episode wouldn't have worked so well with original faces being copied instead of familiar ones. The tension of not having the TARDIS or the sonic screwdriver (after the materialized walls in Special 1) and having to find a way to get out of the situation was one of RTD best stories to date on the show.

But once more, 14th's overflowing emotions break through again, not only in his now-traditional rage scene, but in the dialog with "not-Donna". As a person that liked the Timeless Child concept from the beginning, it's cool to see that the revelation of past lives is still in The Doctor's mind, as it should be. More than ever and with an unexpected face, The Doctor needs to understand who they are and what's happening.

And there is it for me, not a lot more to say. Not my favorite, although one of the best "horror episodes" in the series. A special recognition for Bernard Cribbins' last scene ever, with one last and emotional appearance of Wilfred Mott, our loved grandpa. And that pun with Isaac Newton was gold, to be fair, I was so proud of those two.

(a digression about The Doctor's personal journeys)

Before I continue to Special 3, I need to digress a little to talk about how I always looked at The Doctor's personal journeys (or identity crises, if you want) in the revival series. I won't claim that I'm the first to think about that, but it's important talk about it to understand why I loved 14th Doctor's regeneration on the first place.

Regardless of era, showrunner or vibe of each series, I always loved how The Doctor was, since the fateful Last Great Time War, in a constant search for answers of who they really are. More specifically, the two keywords for me were "power" and "loss". In each new series, with each new Doctor, we have seen them realizing how much impact their actions had in the timeline — and how this power was not enough to compensate all the people they lost through the years.

Christopher Eccleston's 9th Doctor was the first to face this question, being the one immediately after the war and The Moment. One day, he just was one Time Lord, one creature of a big civilization, known for its influence and power throughout the universe. But now, he is The Last of the Time Lords. In the past, he was forced-regenerated, exiled and summoned by the High Council — now it's just him. It was only one season (so this was elaborated later), but 9th was the Doctor that understood that there was no one to stop him anymore.

David Tennant's 10th Doctor continued that to extreme levels. There wasn't a Doctor in the revival series that needed the companions to stop him more than 10. There wasn't an enemy that he can't defeat with menacing eyes and so much fury, he was THE ONE that destroyed Gallifrey to stop a war. There was only him, powerful than ever, so powerful that he thinks the Laws of Time were his, the Time Lord Victorious. He is also the Doctor that realized how much he lost friends, civilizations and worlds during all his lives. 10th was the Doctor that learned how to be powerful, but couldn't stop the losses with his power.

The debut episode of Matt Smith's 11th Doctor shows exactly who he is. "Hello, I'm the Doctor. Basically, run." is such a powerful line. He knows he's powerful and now feared through the galaxy. The Pandorica Speech, having every one of their enemies just fleeing in fear... The Doctor isn't just "a Time Lord" anymore, he is The Oncoming Storm, a good man going to war. It's even more easy to see when 11th is the most goofy Doctor in the revival series by the pure contrast of those two personas.

At the same time, he was the first to understand he was too powerful. His biggest enemy wasn't Daleks or Cybermen, it was the Silence, creatures whose only goal in life was to silence the Doctor. He had to fake his own death because he's "got too big, too noisy". The Doctor was always sad to lose a companion, but this Doctor tried to retire after losing Amy and Rory. The power was too much, the loss was too. 11th was the Doctor that realized something needed to change.

I think that Peter Capaldi's 12th Doctor had the most explicit personal journey in the revival series. The questioning feelings of his previous incarnation shaped who he is. He constantly questions himself of who he really is, if he is even a good man. Even his face was chosen to remember him about that. "I am an idiot, with a box and a screwdriver, passing through, helping out, learning.". I love how his last words are the essence of what the character is: "laugh hard, run fast, be kind". The Doctor understood himself again.

But I said there were TWO keywords for this journey and we haven't talked about how 12th reacted to the loss (and isn't very well). That speech on The Zygon Inversion shows exactly how much traumatizing the Time War still is for The Doctor. When he loses Clara for the raven, he goes to the extreme of rescuing her on her last breath because he can't face losing one more friend. For God's sake, Heaven Sent isn't just a cinematic masterpiece, but the most intimate episode of Doctor Who ever made. 12th was the Doctor that found their essence again, but accumulate so much trauma and memories.

Jodie Whittaker's 13th Doctor was born in those Capaldi's last words. She was always running, laughing with her fam and being the kindest Doctor in decades. Her personal journey, to me, was more of a test. Imagine finally finding your essence again and then discovering that you had ANOTHER LIVES, way before you imagined. When 13th looks to all the emotional charge of the Timeless Child and her Division's past lives and just buried it inside the TARDIS... she just confirmed who she is. She is The Doctor, the creature they always wanted to be, and it will continue to try. As they said once, "The name you choose is like a promise you make" and she doubled down on it. 13th was the Doctor that confirmed her essence and chose again to be in her promise.

But when she's got to regenerate, although... She not only lost so many friends and had to, one point, live with the guilt of destroying her own planet. Now the Flux also destroyed a huge part of the universe she promised to protect — and even she doesn't recognize or remember, her time at Division was the starting point of it. She knew who The Doctor is, but doesn't knew how to cope with all of the trauma. 14th starts his life with the wisdom and sadness that only someone that lost so much has.

Special 3: The Giggle

OK, it's the end of the recap and we're back to the present to talk about The Giggle, the last 60th anniversary special. And oh boy, this was THE EPISODE. Before entering in the subject of those personal journeys again, I just love it how adventurous and mysterious was the whole thing, even if we already know that the Toymaker was the bad guy behind all. I always love when a real historical thing becomes a plot point, and Stooky Bill — the real-world first object televised in history — would make everyone crazy even without the magic giggle.

Neil Patrick Harris as the Toymaker was completely amazing. I'm always insecure when a big actor comes to do a big part in Doctor Who, but NPH nailed so well that I'm really sad the Toymaker was banished from existence forever. His character is so strange sometimes: it's like the Toymaker is a "chaotic lawful" god, always following the rules of the game, even if this counts against him. From the marionette recap to the Spice Girls incredible entrance, NPH make an already good episode to an unforgettable one.

There's a lot of other characters really well presented too, what is a contrast of oh-my-God-this-is-one-more-thing-in-this-convoluted-story style of Chibnall during the 13th era. Kate Stewart is always badass (with an amazing, vulnerable performance by Jemma Redgrave), Melanie Bush is back and I already wanted more of companions in UNIT's paycheck and I'm really curious by the new scientific advisor Shirley Anne Bingham and what more she can bring to the show.

Yeah, The Giggle would be a great episode already, but we get it. A myth becoming reality by the Toymaker, we have the first (and probably only one) bi-generation in the history of Doctor Who! Instead of just a new face, The Doctor divided in two, granting us the first peek (and what a peek!) at Ncuti Gatwa's 15th Doctor. He's frantic, he's ready to take on the universe and he's strangely confident. Facing the Toymaker or talking with his past self, he seems to know more than we generally expect from a post-regeneration Doctor.

But the most beautiful part of this special, and the true story arc for the specials, is 14th Doctor's personal journey. As I said before, 13th was tested and confirmed her identity and values as The Doctor, but all the memories they had... was too much. It was so consistent in those specials: 14th was always in an emotional burnout, about to explode. Every provocation about his past, seeing the worst part of humanity wide open by the Toymaker. The Doctor couldn't do anymore. He needed help, and he chose the face who get most traumas to seek that help.

It was so precious seeing how the two Doctors interacted. 15th wasn't just kind to his past self, he was the only that understood. The only one who could know all the pain and loss he suffered, and how the sole thing that he could do was move forward, never looking back. For the first time in years, the 15th Doctor was not afraid of looking to the past. He was there to shelter themselves, to give a hug, to accept a creature that did so much and lost even more.

"I'm fine because you fix yourself. We're Time Lords. We're doing rehab out of order." This was the key dialogue for me. The trust in the 15th's voice when saying that showed to me the true meaning of the bi-generation. Yes, they could bring Tennant back if they can (and, to be fair, nothing ever stopped BBC to do that, all the Doctors are traveling in space-time anyway). But the bi-generation allows us to see The Doctor heal. Look into their past, understand what happened to all of his lives, the ones that they loved (and the ones that they lost). And, of course, without having a timejump or a hiatus, it's a time travel show! The 15th Doctor is not "a clone", he is The Doctor, but healed. 14th was the Doctor that finally stopped to face his past and his loss.

And seeing him, with his new family, just laughing and looking forward to retire, it's so meaningful and amazing. For all The Doctor did for the universe, he deserved some peace.

A new Doctor for a new future

Yeah, we didn't get a new "Day of the Doctor" after all. And a lot of people would say the specials were not "commemorative enough" — and they are also right. I would love to have seen a more cameo-filled episode instead of Wild Blue Yonder, for example. But, having watched all three, I think I can understand what was the goal of all of this.

The Day of the Doctor was all about celebrating the past. 50 years of a TV show that is still running, in the same continuity, is amazing and worth celebrating, of course. Those 60th anniversary specials were, instead, about preparing the future. Using figments of the past, stories that needed a conclusion, to help The Doctor do one thing that he never would do normally. 14th is fixing, so 15th can already be on Christmas, being The Doctor we know and love, and we will know even more and love even more.

The first time we got a reboot, its motor was a big war, with a lot of death, destruction and trauma. But today, the new generation of Doctor Who, the one that will travel through space and time for next 20 years, is different. The new Whoniverse starts with healing, kindness and maturity — and I'm waiting to grow, change and learn with it again, as I did in my childhood.

Born of Bread

2023-12-10T00:00:00Z

When I talk about something I love, I always fear to be way more verbose than I needed to be, you know? I love this thing, and I need to talk about every detail, every little thing that makes this special. A good example will be talking about Paper Mario, a RPG released for the Nintendo 64 you may have heard about. It was my first RPG, the acronym that my parents always said that was a devil's work in children's lives. (I love my parents by the way, and I know they were only trying to protect me with the information they had at the time, so I'm not mad...) but the cute and heroic Super Mario was OK for then, so Paper Mario became this starting point for me.

And I LOVE IT. I played non-stop for days until finish the game, struggling with walkthroughs because I didn't really knew English at the time. The action commands were a game changer for me: a turn-based battle system with them was not boring, but fun, and dynamic! And the plot, the characters, everything in this game was so cool! It was because of Paper Mario that I discovered RPG Maker, and then online communities, and then coding, and then computer science... OK, I just got verbose again. I love Paper Mario, and I know Paper Mario a lot, and that's what you need to know.

Because, just as it's hard to talk about a thing that I love, it's also hard to talk about a new thing that was inspired by something that I loved. For some months of my childhood, my small boy version was obsessed with Paper Mario, and now, even this is the review of Born of Bread, a NEW game made in 2023, I'll compare both, down to the smallest details.

This time, however, is not my fault. I'll explain.

Understanding the recipe

There's nothing wrong with creating a new game using a structure that even Nintendo abandoned for years. You may have heard of the "Paperverse", a cute name for a Paper Mario-like RPG. The most common features that are borrowed from the original game are, mostly, (1) a blend of 3D scenarios with 2D character sprites (as they were walking paper sheets); (2) a focus on simple exploration of the maps, using the character's abilities to overcome obstacles; and (3) a turn-based battle system using "action commands", small QTEs that can be use to power attack and defense. You can easily see this recipe on 2019's Bug Fables and future's Escape from Ever After, for example.

Born of Bread, created by the WildArts team and published by Dear Villagers, is a Paperverse game, of course. The star, instead of the red plumber, is Loaf, a bread golem that gains life during a riot at his kingdom by creatures from the past. His job is to find friends and save the world recovering pieces of a special gem, that was broken into pieces and long forgotten.

Everything that I listed before is in the game. The visuals are exceptionally gorgeous, with some detailed animations and really cool scenarios — I don't think if this justify the "next-gen" compatibility on Xbox and PlayStation although. The maps are small, but you are invited to explore them using Loaf (or their friends) abilities. And even the action commands are there, to press buttons at the certain times and do more damage. The recipe is there, and it's cooked.

But the devil are on the details, and as I said, I'll talk about details. There's a LOT of Paper Mario in Born of Bread, more than the usual Paperverse inspiration. It's not plagiarism by any means: all the content here is original and you can't patent game mechanics. But I couldn't imagine other way this game was made instead of a big list of "things that Paper Mario does and we need to do too".

Loaf's primary (and world map) attack is the same as Mario's Hammer. In the battles, you have a resource for health, one for special attacks and a third for even-more-special attacks (like Star Power). Those even-more-special attacks are unlocked in a plot basis, like the Star Spirits' abilities. You can collect boons to get passive abilities (like badges), and more spaces for them can be get in level ups. If you want to include The Thousand-Year Door: the partners also have HP and there's an "audience" that can recover some points if you succeed in the QTEs.

Even the "bad" things about Paper Mario are here! You can only save in specific points of the map (at least, my little dragon Dub — that I'll protect forever — is better than a rainbow block). Your item inventory has a really small limit, so you'll constantly will throw useful items away. The map in the menu it's still useless, and you still need to open a context menu to change partners. I really wanted a hotkey to change partners, for real.

I was playing a new game, with a new plot, interesting characters and a beautiful world, but I was still bothered by the same details that my 10-year-old self was too. They didn't need to be full on board with this "list", specially having less resources and a smaller scope. Because the list was not enough: there's a LOT of original ideas here, and that's other part of the recipe.

Flavors in quantity, not intensity

What I did wasn't fair: Born of Bread is NOT ONLY a rehash of a 2000 game. There is so much original ideas and concepts here, mixed together with the intention of creating a mechanic identity for the game. But if you use all the seasoning you have in your kitchen, it's not guaranteed to create a powerful flavor. If nothing stands out, your food will be a little bland.

A good example is how you can personalize the character's builds, including attacks. In the original Paper Mario, it was really simple: Mario can get new abilities by badges, and the partners finding special blocks in the overworld. It's straight to the point, and cannot offer a lot of strategies if we can be honest.

Born of Bread just goes over the top. Loaf has a backpack mechanic like a Resident Evil inventory, where every equipment is a shape that needs to be put inside a square to be available for battle. Each friend, in the other hand, has a full, exclusive skill tree, that can only be unlocked using Skill Points — THAT YOU NEED TO EXCHANGE to special souls you find in the overworld. Unlocking a full row in the skill tree (whose only one ability can be equipped at a time), that partner gets a HP bonus. And as I said, boons are also a type of equippable thing that can give passives.

The problem with having a lot of those systems is that no one is deep enough to allow for cool strategies. It's like juggle three different mechanics and they just don't stick. The backpack puzzle is too simple, the skill tree is grindy, the boons are way less interesting than Mario's badges. A part of me just wanted the backpack, but for every character. Just include more pieces in the puzzle (like adjacent bonuses? or put one-use items in the mix?) and it would be an important, dense and well made flavor for a game so inspired by others.

Another example are the action commands themselves. I was already tired of the same 6-8 QTEs when I was at the middle of the story, because a lot of good abilities just ask you to press a random sequence of buttons in order. The same QTE would appear in every character's build, sometimes multiple times.

BUT, at the same time, Born of Bread tries to be Pokémon and has a DOUBLE-LAYERED WEAKNESS SYSTEM. There are "attack types" in a rock-paper-scissors fashion, and every enemy has a type and ONLY resistance for one of them, but there also "elemental types" that uses a round robin diagram to allow ONLY weaknesses in enemies to double damage. You can't see those types during battle, you haven't a lot of those types until way later in the game. Confused? Me too. I just considered then random for the most part, because it was ONE MORE system to understand in a relatively easy game.

There's so much original ideas in Born of Bread, and I just cited some of them, but the lack of focus just undermine those cool flavors. If you can feel everything at the same time, and they don't harmonize together, you just feel "something" — and "something" is not that memorable.

A good package, undercooked

Why I would bother to write that amount of text just to say the game is kinda OK? Because I think that Born of Bread has a really good flavor in the middle of this bad-inspired dough. The plot is fun, some characters are cool, the backpack system is clever and play feel is on point (until the QTEs became more repetitive than they needed to). If I wanted to play more Paper Mario, I would play Paper Mario again. It's even available on NSO to be even easier. I was expecting to play a new thing, inspired by the adventures that I loved with surprises that I would remember afterward. Some of it is here, but not enough.

You want a pretty, funny and easy Paperverse RPG? Born of Bread is ready for you to eat and can be served in any digital store of your preference. But the strong flavor that only well-made and focused mechanics can give isn't in the menu, unfortunately.

This article was made using a review copy sent by the development team to CosmoNerd, where I wrote my original review about the game. Thanks for the trust, devs!

The best digital games I played in 2022

2022-12-28T00:00:00Z

It's already the third year that I've spent time in the last week after Christmas reflecting on the games I've played. For a type of leisure that I like so much, it's fun to have a diary of the things I played. It's really fun to reflect on the choices and experiences I had with my favorite games.

This year is not different, so welcome to the POTY 2022 - the Played of the Year! It was the year that I decided to clear half of my backlog, giving a chance to titles that had been molding there for a while. It was the year I played a lot of new games, given my current status as a "happy Xbox Game Pass subscriber". It was a year that I gave a chance to some modern online games that have no end. It was a year that I played a lot with my fianceé and created good moments together with the person I love.

This is my list of the best games I played this year. It doesn't matter if the title was launched decades ago: if i'm discovering it for the first time now, it counts. You can see the POTYs from 2020 and 2021 too, but let's go for the 2022 list!

20) Rhythm Tengoku / Rhythm Heaven Silver

Game Boy Advance, Nintendo, 2006

I love rhythm games and few are as unique as Rhythm Heaven. This not-so-famous-and-deserve-more franchise from Nintendo is capable of impress anyone who has the opportunity to play it. Last year, I played the Wii version and now I went after Rhythm Tengoku, the beginning of the series on the GBA, never released in the West. Because of an incredible fan translation, I could see that the magic was there from the beginning. Even on a portable from 20 years ago, the visual and musical charm of the series is impressive and worth a try for anyone who likes the genre.

19) Kirby: Planet Robobot

Nintendo 3DS, HAL Laboratory/Nintendo, 2016

In a strange coincidence of having two Kirby games at 19th place in consecutive years, Kirby: Planet Robobot was a pleasant surprise. As much as I love the puff pink ball and his little world, it was always difficult to me to engage on his platform games, either due to the lack of challenge or the repetition of content. Robobot manages to be almost an antithesis of other Kirby games (like Triple Deluxe, also on the 3DS): really interesting worlds, good level progression and a great idea with the mechas, a very fun gimmick to use every time it appears. If you only want to play ONE main Kirby game, go with this one.

18) Disney Dreamlight Valley

PC/Mac/PS4/PS5/XBO/XBS/Switch, Gameloft/Disney, 2022

From the bottom of my heart, I wish I hadn't liked Disney Dreamlight Valley so much. As much as Disney films were part of my childhood, today it's difficult not to have many (MANY) cons with the great mouse machine. Having said all that, I LOVED DREAMLIGHT VALLEY. It's a game loop similar to Animal Crossing, but less slow and with more things to complete, especially each character's missions. It's still in early access, but I've 100% finished the content of all the updates released this year... and I'll probably continue next year.

17) Horizon Chase Turbo

PC/Mac/Switch/PS4/XBO, Aquiris Game Studio, 2018

Horizon Chase is my favorite mobile racing game because of its simplicity and controls. Its "expanded" version for PC and consoles, Horizon Chase Turbo, definitely doesn't lose anything in quality. In fact, it's quite a sight to see the beautiful low-poly visuals on a big screen. I ended up not being able to try the multiplayer, but the World Tour campaign is still great and a lot of fun. It's really good to see good Brazilian games getting out there and becaming known for its quality.

16) Wii Sports Resort

Wii, Nintendo, 2009

Last year, I went back in time a few years to understand the magic behind the famous "Wii bowling". And didn't they manage to make an even better game? Wii Sports Resort not only uses Wii MotionPlus very well to improve the experience, but it also brings other much cooler sports. The Wuhu Island and the whole summer vacation vibes are also really cozy and welcome. I spent many hours on the new bowling, table tennis and archery trying to get the best scores and I always come back to play another round.

15) The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe

PC/Mac/Linux/PS4/PS5/XBO/XBS/Switch, Crows Crows Crows, 2022

The Stanley Parable has become a video game storytelling classic largely because of the innovative way in which it challenges, with each player's action, the common media narrative and the expectations present in our imagination. The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe will become a video game storytelling classic by challenging the one thing that wasn't possible in 2013: the video game storytelling classic The Stanley Parable.

14) Tangle Tower

PC/Mac/PS4/XBO/Switch, SFB Games, 2019

2022 was a year in which I played way more narrative games than usual, mainly about mysteries to be solved. I want to play a lot more next year, but Tangle Tower was easily a pleasant surprise. Even though its structure is linear, the game has a very interesting story, great characters, good puzzles and a very unique way of asking questions about the plot. It's a shame it's so short, but I was hooked for a few days until I got everything the game had to offer.

13) Beacon Pines

PC/XBO/XBS/Switch, Hiding Spot Games/Fellow Traveller, 2022

In a double feature of narrative games, I also didn't expect to have swallowed Beacon Pines with the excitement I did. I never really played a lot of visual novels (specially if the Layton series doesn't count), but Beacon Pines was a great "first experience" of the genre, with a simple but interesting story, cute and charismatic characters and a smart way to give you pieces of the story while testing new narrative possibilities.

12) Codenames

Web, Czech Games Edition, 2020

I love board games, so having a good representation of the digital ones in the POTY this year makes me really happy, specially with a game so great as Codenames. It's easily one of the smartest party games ever made, with a high dose of interaction between players without getting boring or boring. Playing online doesn't have exactly the same magic, but it's a great option, mainly because it's free and there are cards in Portuguese now.

11) WarioWare: Get It Together!

Switch, Intelligent Systems/Nintendo, 2021

Is it any surprise to anyone that this crazy microgames thing is by far my favorite Nintendo franchise? Of course. But I also didn't expect WarioWare: Get It Together! would be so much fun in multiplayer. The game completely embraces chaos, switching characters all the time, and makes you happy for getting something at the last second (or laughing for not getting it anyway).

And I know it's a spoiler, but Penny's Song was one of the best songs ever made for a video game in history and anyone who disagrees is wrong.

10) Ynglet

PC/Mac/XBO/XBS, Nifflas Games/Triple Topping, 2021

One of the cool things about clearing the backlog this year was finding great games that were lost on my "one day I'll play" list. Ynglet was by far the best of them. With a super different "platform game" concept, it's really enjoyable to simply move through the levels, finding secrets and solving puzzles. Besides being very, very beautiful in its strange world of shapes and molecules. I wish more people played Ynglet and more games tried to be as different as Ynglet.

09) RPG Time: The Legend of Wright

PC/PS4/XBO/XBS/Switch, Aniplex/Deskworks, 2022

There was no way not to get emotional playing RPG Time: The Legend of Wright. It's the story of a child who wants to make games and wants to show you the latest ideas he has. It's not such a different story from little Gabriel, who cut paper and thought he was programming on the computer, you know? Furthermore, it's a fun collection of minigames, with a charm and sincerity that few games can have. RPG Time is about a happy child that wants to be a game designer and I couldn't connect to it more.

08) Meow Tower: Nonogram

Android/iOS, Studio Boxcat, 2021

Look, who knew, I spent a lot of time playing Picross for another year! Meow Tower: Nonogram is a great choice if you already love nonograms, or if you've never played it before. There are many many puzzles, it's available for free on mobile devices, without abusive microtransactions AND THERE ARE CUTE KITTENS. LOTS OF KITTENS. YOU TALK TO THE KITTENS, CLEAN THE KITTENS' HOUSES, THEY PUR AND THE KITTENS ARE HAPPY, PLAY MEOW TOWER NOW. For the kitties <3

07) Escape Academy

PC/PS4/PS5/XBO/XBS, Coin Crew Games/iam8bit, 2022

I can't say that Escape Academy is perfect, because it isn't. The visuals aren't incredible, the characters are a bit monotonous and the game's story itself is a bit mixed. But, even with all that, it's probably the best digital escape room experience ever made, and I say that as someone who loves and has even created escape rooms in real life. The rooms are incredible, the puzzles are very clever and even the hint system works well. If are your first (or last) escape room experience, this academy will be a great class.

06) PowerWash Simulator

PC/PS4/PS5/XBO/XBS/Switch, FuturLab/Square Enix, 2022

It's not a game for everyone, but PowerWash Simulator was definitely made for me. The proposal is simple: use a high-pressure water machine to clean increasingly crazy scenes and objects while actually following a story (yes, a story) that tries to make sense. In the end, it was just relaxing and rewarding to take a filthy place and make it shine again. Just remove the obnoxious water sound, put on a podcast and you'll be ready to relax.

05) Psychonauts 2

PC/Mac/Linux/PS4/XBO/XBS, Double Fine Productions/Xbox Game Studios, 2021

I haven't played the first chapter of this story yet, but Psychonauts 2 is almost a masterpiece in narrative, gameplay and world creation. Moving Raz is fun, exploring the increasingly wacky psychic worlds is fun, understanding the story behind the Psychonauts is fun. The only thing that didn't worked for me was the half-assed combat, but it was easily overcome by the accessibility options. You can clearly see that they did everything they wanted because they weren't expecting a third game, but I wanted Psychonauts 3 so badly...

04) SteamWorld Dig 2

PC/Mac/Linux/PS4/PSVita/3DS/Switch, Image & Form, 2017

I remember playing the first SteamWorld Dig on the 3DS when I bought the game as a self-birthday gift. I didn't expect to like it so much, but it totally became my jam: exploring, completing, improving and continuing this cycle in a beautiful world. SteamWorld Dig 2 managed to be better in ALL aspects. The movement is better, the gameplay loop is better, the story is better, the progression is better, even the visuals are more gorgeous (even on the small 3DS screen). If this is your type of game, you need to play SteamWorld Dig 2 NOW.

03) A Little to the Left

PC/Mac/Android/iOS/Switch, Max Inferno/Secret Mode, 2022

I started to believe in "love at first sight" when I saw the first trailer for A Little to the Left. Inspired by each person's quirks, the idea is to organize common everyday objects in the most pleasurable way possible. The puzzles are smart, new mechanics appear all the time and there's even a kitten causing confusion. I found the game so fun and enjoyable to play that all the anticipation waiting for it all year was worth it. It almost got the Top 1 on this POTY, but you have to try it.

02) Tinykin

PC/PS4/PS5/XBO/XBS/Switch, Splashteam/tinyBuild, 2022

Exploring beautifully crafted worlds — and building a game around it — is what makes Tinykin such an incredible and special game. Whenever I talk about this game, I use the concept of "dense worlds" because that's what Tinykin does: every room in the gigantic house you find is full of secrets, mechanics and missions to make the most of it. The movement is incredible, everything is very charismatic and it's a great injustice not to see this game on all the "Best of 2022" lists out there because it definitely deserves a place there.

01) Sayonara Wild Hearts

PC/Mac/iOS/PS4/XBO/Switch, Simogo/Annapurna Interactive, 2019

Thanks to a gift from a good friend, Sayonara Wild Hearts was the first game I played in 2022 and it has NEVER left 1st place since then. I cried at the end, so incredible was the experience I had in this catharsis of pop music and neon lights. I can't explain very well why I liked the game so much, but it manages to use the interactivity of the media to tell a great story, with great visuals and an impeccable soundtrack. Sayonara Wild Hearts got the gold position on my Played of the Year 2022!

Honorable Mentions

Didn't I start playing Pokémon GO again? It feels like a completely different game than it did in 2016, with many more options, features, and weekly events.
Half of the list were already Xbox Game Pass games, but it's still worth mentioning other really cool titles that I played there, such as Last Call BBS, Bugsnax, Costume Quest and The Gunk.
Some new rhythm games also came my way this year, like the Rhythm Heaven-like Melatonin, the Apple Arcade exclusive Taiko no Tatsujin: Pop Tap Beat and the meme you've probably seen that is actually a cool game Trombone Champ.
In a week off between jobs this year, I practically marathoned Bayonetta 2 on the Wii U and it was a much cooler experience than I expected. I should try to play the first game in the franchise next year.
In honor of the series' 60th anniversary in 2023, I began my journey of playing everything Doctor Who I could. While this led me to some interesting things, like The Lonely Assassins, it also led me to the two worst games I've played this year: Evacuation Earth and Top Trumps Doctor Who, both on Nintendo DS.

And that was my 3rd Played of the Year! You can see a more complete list on my Backloggd, if you want. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and see you on POTY again next year!

The best digital games I played in 2021

2021-12-26T00:00:00Z

In a world where time has no meaning, I even played a lot of video games! 2021 was a year full of surprises for me: if last year's list had several old games because I officially dusted off my Nintendo 3DS... this was the year for me to buy a Wii U! And that's how I spent the whole year playing things from the last decade (with a few indie games from recent years), but I had fun anyway. At the end of the day, what matters is spending a good amount of time playing games (to try to get away a little bit from the crazy reality that surrounds us).

But the year ended and with more hope to a better future, we also have my most anticipated award: welcome to POTY 2021, the Played of the Year! This is my end-of-the-year list of the best games I played this year. It doesn't matter if the title was launched decades ago: if i'm discovering it for the first time now, it counts. You can see the 2020 edition too, but let's go for the 2021 list!

20) Sally’s Law

PC/iOS/Android, Nanali Studios, 2016

At the beginning of the year, I decided to test Google Play Pass, a subscription service for apps and games on Android. There wasn't much titles that caught my attention (and I hadn't already played it) at the time, but Sally's Law was a pleasant surprise. A very short but very clever puzzle-platformer: you play the same level twice, with both runs complementing each other. Add a cute story, a simple and cute look and some collectibles and it's ready to start our POTY list.

19) Kirby Air Ride

GameCube, HAL Laboratory/Nintendo, 2003

With a little effort, you can run GameCube games on the Wii U and Kirby Air Ride is the first of several GCN titles that will appear on this list. In a never-repeated attempt at a pink mascot racing game, Kirby manages to have a totally unique racing game, with very simple controls and very different from what came before it (and even after!). While the main mode features races full of Copy Abilities and dashes, what really won me over (and this is a unpopular opinion, I know) was Top Ride, a racing mode on a single screen, looking like a slot machine with a little power. It's time for a sequel to this game for Switch now!

18) Florence

PC/Mac/iOS/Android/Switch, Mountains/Annapurna Interactive, 2018

A mix of a comic book, a visual novel and a puzzle game, Florence ended up being a pleasant surprise in the last week of the year. Telling the life story of a young girl, the title uses simple puzzles to reinforce her feelings and those around her in a very beautiful, elegant and smart way. In fact, speaking of beauty, the game is GORGEOUS, made with great attention to detail. It reminded me a lot of the storytelling style of What Remains of Edith Finch, another great recommendation from the same publisher.

17) Untitled Goose Game

PC/Mac/Switch/PS4/Xbox One, House House/Panic, 2019

This year I discovered that very few things are as fun as being a totally chaotic goose with the person you love. The hours I played Untitled Goose Game with my girlfriend were, by far, one of the moments I laughed the most this year. From the absurd missions to the 30-minute moments where we just growled at random people to make their lives hell, this game is amazing. UGG itself is really fun, but here's my very important recommendation to play it with someone else for a even more wonderful experience.

16) Nintendo Land

Wii U, Nintendo, 2012

Since the early days of the Wii U's life (which didn't last long, unfortunately), I watched Nintendo Land and it looked like the coolest game in the world. It wasn't the coolest, but it's definitely a lot of fun. With a focus on asymmetric gameplay and the smart use of the (previously new) GamePad tablet-like controller, the game manages to entertain while paying homage to classic franchises… almost always. While some attractions are incredible (like Donkey Kong's Crash Course, Takamaru's Ninja Castle and Metroid Blast), others leave a lot to be desired. It's not the best console introduction Nintendo has ever made, but it's a very competent one.

15) WarioWare: Smooth Moves

Wii, Intelligent Systems/Nintendo, 2007

It's no news to anyone that I love this series and WarioWare: Smooth Moves is exactly my kind of jam: random microgames, completely different visuals, completely adorable characters and stupid, funny stories. Like a good Wii game, the idea of using motion control for microgames doesn't always work, but when it does, it's extremely fun. Bonus points for the names and introductions of each way to hold the Wii Remote, which definitely didn't need to be like that, but had a “sexy-dumb energy” that definitely surprised me. May next year's list include the new WarioWare on Switch!

14) Tabletop Simulator

PC/Mac/Linux, Berserk Games, 2015

Digital platforms made me discover many new titles during the period safe at home and none did it better than Tabletop Simulator. By far it is the best 3D platform for playing boardgames digitally, with a very, very large list of mods made by the community with games and versions that you least imagine. It has its bugs here and there, but if you want to get started with modern board games, there probably isn't a cheaper and more accessible option right now than TTS. In addition to a friend with lots of board games at home, of course.

13) The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD

Wii U, Nintendo, 2013

My first The Legend of Zelda on Wii U wasn't Breath of the Wild, but The Wind Waker HD, a remake of one of the GameCube classics, which held me for a few weeks this year. The game is incredibly beautiful and wonderful, even more so in the HD version. Being able to play it lying in bed using just the GamePad made me understand the Switch's appeal. Many QoL changes made in this version (including the new sail on the boat) helped me better enjoy the delightful story of yet another classic in the franchise. I think the weak point is in the battle system and the design of the dungeons, but it's still a great game.

12) The Pedestrian

PC/Mac/Linux/Switch/PS4/PS5/Xbox One/Series X-S, Skookum Arts LLC, 2020

Another one that I didn't expect I would like so much, The Pedestrian is a very clever game. Its puzzle ideas are really cool and manages to break a lot of what is expected from a puzzle-platform, even if it has some difficulty spikes out of nowhere. Personally, I thought the game was beautiful, but what caught my attention the most was the incredible work done with symbology and iconography, creating a visual-mechanical identity for the puzzles that is very easy to assimilate and build upon. The end of the game is probably the most brilliant part and only lasts about 15 minutes? Yes, it's a shame, but it was still a really cool way to end a solid little game that I highly recommend.

11) Mario Kart 8

Wii U, Nintendo, 2014

Historically, Mario Kart for me was always just the battle mode, the one where you have to hit items on your opponents to pop their balloons. But with the lack of a decent mode like that in Mario Kart 8 (which was fixed in the Switch port), I settled for ordinary racing… and I LOVED IT? The eighth iteration of the franchise is, by far, the most enjoyable to play, both for the way you control the cars and for the possibilities of what to do with all their mechanics, from turbos to anti-gravity. Furthermore, the game is incredibly beautiful and seeing so many classic tracks (and even from other games, in the DLCs) remade in such a beautiful way makes my heart warm.

10) Kororinpa: Marble Mania

Wii, Hudson Soft, 2007

Being a Wii launch title, it's pretty incredible to see how precise and fun Kororinpa: Marble Mania's motion controls are. The idea of the game is very simple: move the Wii Remote to move a track where a marble moves, collecting all the crystals and reaching the exit. But he does it so well, in such a cute way, that I simply had me glued to the game for about 3 days until I completed all the levels. I also ended up trying Super Monkey Ball on Wii, but it didn't come close to the precision of Kororinpa, which I highly recommend if that's your type of jam. If not, at least watch speedruns of the game, which are incredible.

09) Luigi’s Mansion

GameCube, Nintendo, 2001

Dark Moon, on the 3DS, was one of the most fun games I played on the portable, but it's cool to see how the original Luigi's Mansion, on the GameCube, can be so different! At first, I was a little bothered by the small amount of collectibles (which there were a lot on the 3DS) and the confusing structure of the mansion. But, over time, you start memorizing the map and start to focus more on finding alternative paths and beating the big ghosts, which is the focus of the game. It's a product of its time, but it does a lot of different things and does them very well, in addition to having incredible charisma.

08) Unpacking

PC/Mac/Linux/Switch/Xbox One, Witch Beam/Humble Games, 2021

The only game actually released in 2021 on this list, Unpacking is a very different but extremely cozy experience. Not only because of the way she tells her story, but because of the simple but very relaxing gameplay ― except when it makes me guess by trial and error whether a cloth is a towel table, a dish towel, a bath towel or some clothing. A small but very fun thing in this game is the possibility of exporting images and GIFs of your tidying process, because seeing how differently people tidy things is a show in itself.

07) Assemble With Care

PC/Mac/iOS, Ustwo Games, 2019

Few games hit my emotions as hard as Assemble With Care. In addition to look amazing and having a very beautiful plot, the idea of a mechanic around fixing things hooked me into the game in a way I didn't expect. A lot of people talk about how simple the game's puzzles are (and they really are easy), but I think that's where some of the magic comes from for me: I felt like someone who really knew what they were doing, fixing people's things and discovering their stories. For someone who grew up with his father making repairs as if by magic this game was even more special.

06) Wii Sports

Wii, Nintendo, 2006

YES, I had never played Wii Sports until this year… why did it never look so cool? On a console with Mario, Zelda and Just Dance, why would my 10-year-old self ask to go bowling at someone's house? But then I played it and understood the magic of this business: there is no game that better reflects the philosophy of the Wii as a console than Wii Sports. It's simple, it's intuitive, it's fun, everyone can play, everyone can win, everyone can look at this and think that video games are for them too. Only my mother's happiness playing bowling alone made the game reach this position on the list.

05) Super Mario 3D World

Wii U, Nintendo, 2013

In a year in which I played Mario Galaxy, it's interesting to think that Super Mario 3D World is the game that starts the POTY Top 5. I loved the variety of levels and styles, with each one trying something different, sometimes with more personality than several galaxies in the other game. The idea of exploration is also very present in 3D World, with the search for green stars and stamps, which make you look in every corner of each level. On top of all this, I played the whole thing in multiplayer with my girlfriend and it was a really fun and funny experience with lots of great moments. 3D World is a great game, much better than its portable cousin and a great iteration of Mario in 3D.

04) Chibi-Robo! Plug Into Adventure!

GameCube, Skip Ltd./Bandai/Nintendo, 2006

Chibi-Robo! is a strange game in all its parts: you control a 10-centimeters-tall little robot that needs to be charged every 5 real life minutes, trying to clean the house and help solve the problems of a dysfunctional and almost bankrupt family. With mechanics that sometimes feel like a movement-based puzzle, sometimes feel like a classic adventure and sometimes feel like a survival game, everything about it makes me happy to simply exist. It's such a unique game, with so much personality, that it really deserves a remake to correct some issues that have aged poorly in this great little game.

03) Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective

Nintendo DS/iOS, Capcom, 2011

An absolute truth: very few stories ever told in ANY MEDIA are more engaging, surprising and crazy than the plot of Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective. A DS classic that was lost in an iOS port, it is an extremely unique and wonderful game. From character design to the sequence of plot events, I took advantage of my last two days off from work to just play this thing. I just played this game, for real, nothing else. As much as it has its problems, the innovative “owning objects” mechanic is an even more dynamic version of the point-and-click idea that also works very well.

02) Spin Rhythm XD

PC/Mac, Super Spin Digital, 2019

I'm an avowed fan of rhythm games, but I'm not the person who's going to spend hours learning how to do Full Combos. But in many games, on the simplest difficulties, that feeling of playing an instrument (or at least being one with the music) doesn't happen as much. Spin Rhythm XD managed to make me be in that state of flow even on lower difficulties, with very fluid and natural gameplay and a good selection of electronic music. The game is still in early access, but should be officially released soon. If you like music games like me, it's definitely worth checking out.

01) Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

GameCube, Intelligent Systems/Nintendo, 2004

The original Nintendo 64 game was already something very memorable for me, but Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is a masterpiece, remnants of a Nintendo that unfortunately no longer exists. Everything is different, it's strange, it's different, from the story to the characters and how that little world is built. Each chapter has a somewhat distinct structure, the mechanics have been improved and brought to near perfection. It's very sad to think that this game is stuck in the purple cube to this day, because it is by far one of the best things I've ever played and a perfect recommendation for those who like different RPGs. The Thousand-Year Door deserves my Played of the Year!

Honorable Mentions

I played a lot, a lot of Picross/Nonogram this year on the Nintendo 3DS, it was my thing when I was very tired. The best were the Japan-exclusive Club Nintendo Picross and the themed My Nintendo Picross: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Sanrio characters Picross.
My “mobile point-and-click franchise that I marathoned in a week” of the year was the bizarre Hidden my game by mom (available on consoles as Mom Hid My Game!). The games don't make any sense, the puzzles have absurd solutions, but it's very funny.
Rhythm Heaven Fever has one of the best songs in video games in the credits and I was finally able to play it until the end to see this masterpiece.
I didn't know there were idle games with a story, but this year I was shown Spaceplan and Peter Talisman: Lord of the Harvest. Each one in their own way, they have very different proposals in the genre that I find very interesting.
The three worst games I played this year were quite peculiar: the game with much more budget than it should have The Solitaire Conspiracy, the musical gacha Beatstar and the overrated adventure game The Dream Machine.

And that was my 2nd Played of the Year! You can see a more complete list on my Backloggd, if you want. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and see you on POTY again next year!

Not every game story needs to be about “saving the world”

2021-11-30T00:00:00Z

Without falling into too many generalisms, it can be said that many stories told in video games always have as their main figure a hero character. They are about to live an adventure to solve a problem that puts a lot at risk, such as the death of someone important or saving the world of a great catastrophe. Trials, challenges, losses and discoveries are part not only of game plots, but of many, many incredible stories in media, which have spanned generations and are still told to this day.

Which isn't necessarily a problem, right? The fact that Mario is going to save the princess for the 1000th time doesn't take away from the fact that this is going to be the beginning of a phenomenal game. Just because half of the medieval RPGs out there consist of a standard Dungeons & Dragons group looking for seven magical orbs to save the world doesn't mean that good stories and good games can't emerge in this context.

Surviving these last few months in the real world has already been quite a challenge, considering all the crises that Brazil is going through simultaneously. It's no surprise that video games were one of the escape valves that I used to get through the difficult days. As much as I like being a hero by pushing half a dozen buttons, I started to realize that I was becoming interested in things that just... didn't do that? I don't know if it was the anxiety and fear of these months or something else, but there were days when I just didn't want to save the world.

I know that several games can bring this feeling: abstract puzzle games like Tetris can be a great and calm pastime, and sandboxes like Minecraft or Terraria allow you to build your own path in that world. But that's not exactly what I want to talk about: I'm here to talk about simple stories, without many promises, but which in difficult times warmed my heart and I definitely want to see more of that in the future. Because I think I'll need it (and maybe more people will need it too).

A story about changes

The game that inspired me to write this text was Unpacking, released this year by Australian studio Witch Beam and published by Humble Games. I remember learning about this game through some GIF in a random tweet and its premise couldn't be more peculiar: a puzzle game about literally moving: taking things out of boxes and putting them in their rightful place when moving houses. I like strange and different games, I knew I would want to try it when it came out.

The puzzle itself was really fun, trying to fit everything into its place was very interesting. At least until the part where he made me decide whether a random fabric was a washcloth, a dishtowel, or a pillowcase. But anyway, playing Unpacking was a pleasant experience in itself.

I just didn't expect how completely invested I would be in the game's story. In fact, I didn't even expect the game to actually have a story! I could have sworn it would just be a series of rooms, with you trying to fit everything into place without anything left over.

But not! Unlike this, Unpacking tells about the same person moving houses at different moments in their life. Every new house, every new object you take out of a box tells a part of that person's story. I don't want to give spoilers about what happens, but if you're going to (re)play, I invite you to pay attention to them. From objects that are worn out or reused in other places, or even the houses you find and what they represent. Everything in Unpacking helps tell this story, painting this character's life in some way.

In the end, it's a short story about the changes in life that everyone goes through. Some of them bring good things, others not so much, but we correct them and move on to start the next one. For someone who is going through a process of many changes like me, I can't think of a better medium than the interactivity of a video game to tell a story in this way and I think Unpacking does a great job.

A story about discoveries

As I thought about other games that I could use as examples in this text, the first thing that came to my mind was the wonder that A Short Hike did in my life when I played it last year. Created by Adam Robinson-Yu, I ended up coming across the title during one of the free play weeks on the Epic Games Store and, after much praise from some friends, I decided to try it out on a night where I was tired, exhausted and very scared after the second month of quarantine.

I think I've had few happier experiences with video games than playing this game. The concept, as you might expect at this point, is very simple: you help the bird Claire explore a provincial park and manage to climb a mountain to get signal for her cell phone.

Before talking about the story, I need to praise how enjoyable it is to play this game. The movement, the flying, the exploration, the progression, the sidequests, the art style, the dialogue, everything in this game seems to have been made with so much care with the only goal of bringing a smile to my face. Playing A Short Hike is very good and would still be a wonderful game to play even without being as cozy as it is. But he does it and still manages to warm my heart.

Ultimately, this game is about a teenager who was pushed by her aunt to visit a mountain in a park for a week — and all she wants is to get a cell phone signal. After all, what kind of young person cares about a calm and peaceful stay on a mountain? I was once that kind of young person, I've met a lot of people who are still that kind of young person. But this game is also about her (and you) walking around the mountain, meeting people, making friends, exploring a different place and discovering new things.

Travel to a beautiful park, talk to people there, look for shells on the beach, learn to climb, fish in a calm lake: A Short Hike doesn't try to change the world, it just tells a story about discovering a new place and invites you to participate in it. I'm happy that this place is incredible, fun and did me a lot of good in a very difficult week. No wonder it made my POTY 2020.

A story about new beginnings

Another game that stood out to me these last few months was Assemble with Care, from the British team Ustwo Games. Originally an Apple Arcade exclusive and from the same creators of the mobile classic Monument Valley, this game had been on my wishlist for a long time. Not only because it's a puzzle game, but also because of the theme: you follow Maria, an antique-restorer, who arrives in a Spanish city looking for things to fix and earn a few bucks to enjoy the gastronomic festival at the weekend.

This game enchanted me in a few different ways. The first one was how fixing things in the game was fun and simple: the puzzles weren't very difficult, but they always brought new elements and were very interesting. Somehow, it was as if I could do the same things my father did when I was a child; I felt like I had the same skills as him, even if it was just for a few minutes in a video game.

But at the same time, the way this game presents its little world is also something that caught my attention: every object worth repairing is important to someone. As you get to know the people of the city and repair their objects, you will understand their problems and what those objects represent. I've always been fascinated by the stories that objects can have and how they can represent someone's (or a group's) life. Being able to somehow give these objects a new life and start a new chapter for these people was something very special.

None of the stories were really dramatic: they were just ordinary problems, faced by ordinary people. But they could be part of anyone's life, from the child who really likes their video games to the watch that has come passed through generations.

A part of me wanted this game to never end, that I could go to a new city, learn more about the lives of people and their objects. Maybe this game doesn't click with you as much compared to how much it pleased me, but a part of me wanted to be able to go around fixing things and discovering stories as simple, but as cozy as the plots of Assemble with Care.

A story about pranks

OK, I know it's going to seem a little out of tone talking about this game, but I think it's a good counter example to show that these games that I'm now a fan of don't just have to be about beautiful and intimate stories. Because I definitely also didn't save the world in Untitled Goose Game, developed by House House and published by Panic. If you've ever seen a GIF of a goose seeking to be the very incarnation of chaos, you know what game I'm talking about.

I really like thinking about the meeting where the idea for this game was discussed: “what if you could be the irritating goose on the face of the planet?”. And really, isn't that stupidly fun!? Even though the controls are a little strange and the missions can be frustrating at some point, I played this thing in co-op with my girlfriend and it was really, really fun. It was quite interesting how we would casually take turns which goose would do the game task and which one would just honk at all the humans to scare them.

I think my favorite thing about this game is the commitment to the simple, pure story they wanted to tell. You are a despicable goose who will do whatever you want to do. And that's it! At the same time, as you change people's lives, you begin to understand who they are, what the relationship is between those people and what their relationship is with the geese.

It's really good how the whole concept of the game is just an episode of an old cartoon like Woody Woodpecker or Tom & Jerry: animals destroying everything with minimal reason while we laugh a lot. It's cool how the tasks that the game gives you are not just objectives, but also serve to modify the world around you and help tell the story of those people that afternoon. And the ending, which is already mechanically very cool, also ties up the entire saga in search of absolute chaos. HONK!

The next stories?

Somehow, these may not be the most common in video games, but they are stories from our real world, emotions and moments that we all go through. In reality, I connected a lot with them because I am also going through moments of changes, discoveries, new beginnings ~~and the search for the complete chaos of the universe~~.

This post was written as a way to talk more about them, to inspire more people to look for new types of plots in the games they consume. If you already like this type of game, perhaps now you have some recommendations. If you've never thought about it that way, I hope one of the games here inspires you to try something new.

As for me, I'm rooting for a better future for all of us, but these games that warm my heart won't stay away from me. While there should be plenty more out there to try, there are plenty more coming out in the future that I want to be able to keep an eye on for them — like the dreamy rhythm game Melatonin, the Indian cooking simulator Venba, and the organization puzzle A Little to the Left.

In the end, these games aren't about saving the world, but being able to experience these stories saved a little part of my world when I needed it most. I think it was worth it.

The best digital games I played in 2020

2020-12-25T00:00:00Z

2020 was a tough year, without a doubt. And videogames seemed to be a great escape valve for all the pressure of the pandemic. It's been a while since I spent so much time playing games. Of course, I also started to learn about board game design, to rewatch Doctor Who with my girlfriend and even discovered new ones (Good Omens, I'm looking to you). But videogames were an essential technique to avoid going crazy staying in home this year.

I never was a person able to play all the new games that were launched every day... financially speaking. Although I played a lot this year, most of it was old games that were on my backlog for years now. But they also deserve a spot on my year's roundup, right?

So, this is, officially, my first POTY — the Played of the Year! I did some lists in the past, but now I have a ranking of the best 20 digital games that I played in 2020. There were not launched in 2020, but I played them for the first time this year, and that's how it counts in my heart. My pal Geoff can have his trophies, because now I have my own to give. Let's start!

20) Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge

Game Boy Advance, 2003, Rare, THQ

Banjo-Kazooie has always been a game that I played many times, but never finished. Getting to do this for the franchise's forgotten chapter is a funny fact. Grunty's Revenge tries to bring the idea of a collectathon to a 2D portable (much weaker than the N64) and... it works impressively well!? The game is obviously simpler and smaller, but it has its charm and it was really cool to get practically 100% on it. If you like 3D platformers in strange places, that's one to check.

19) Pikuniku

PC/Mac/Linux/Switch, 2019, Sectordub, Devolver Digital

I was tired, exhausted and going through a shit week when I played Pikuniku and it was exactly what I needed. A very silly and simple story, with cute visual and funny, easy mechanics: everything my mind needed to disconnect from the world a little and have a laugh. Maybe on a normal day I wouldn't have found the game so good, so here's my recommendation: try playing Pikuniku on a shitty day, when you just need to switch off and laugh at any nonsense. It's going to be a great night.

18) GNOG

PC/iOS/PS4, 2017, KO_OP, Double Fine Presents

GNOG was one of the games that I had never heard of, but that caught my attention while browsing itch.io's Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. The first of some point-and-click games on the list, GNOG is very simple and fun, but SO BEAUTIFUL and SO COLORFUL. It throws colors in your face to tell slightly abstract stories, focused on a large, complex object. It's like The Room (we'll talk about it later), but with a psychedelic art direction. It only took only two nights to complete, but it was a really cool and interesting experience.

17) Picross e2

Nintendo 3DS, 2011, Jupiter Corporation

If you don't know, Picross (or nonogram) is a type of Japanese magazine puzzle that is very famous around the world. It may look like Sudoku from afar, but is very different: you use numbers around the grid to form a drawing by painting the correct squares. 2020 was clearly the year that I embraced my love for Picross and this was one of the reasons: I spent two hours EVERYDAY lying in bed listening to podcasts and solving those puzzles. It was a really cool way to relax and disconnect from the always-ending world outside.

Picross e2 also included a new mode that I loved called Micross, which is a large puzzle divided into small parts, forming more complex images. I highly recommend it, mainly due to the quality that Jupiter Corporation puts into its games (a tip: look for the Picross S series on your Nintendo Switch).

16) Dedede's Drum Dash Deluxe

Nintendo 3DS, 2014, HAL Laboratory, Nintendo

The kind of game I wanted was bigger, because it ends very, very quickly. In fact, Dedede's Drum Dash Deluxe is a bigger version of one of the 3DS' Triple Deluxe minigames, but bigger (in this case) is still very small. Anyway, it was one of the physics-based rhythm games that I enjoyed playing the most! I never liked the idea of having to follow a character's actions to the rhythm of the music (I've always preferred more abstract games with less delay), but DDDD is very well made and fun to play, even when it puts you in some absurd traps during the levels.

15) Carcassonne

PC/Android/Switch, 2017, Frima Studio, Asmodee Digital

Maybe this game just falls under the board game quota that a list of mine should have, but it was really cool to play Carcassonne at a time when playing boardgames physically wasn't safe. Not only because of the game itself, which is really cool, with classic but fun mechanics, but because of the digital version itself, which makes counting points and reading the board a lot easier. It's pretty rare to say this, but it's probably better to play Carcassonne digitally than physically and that's definitely a reason for it to be on the list.

14) The Room Two

PC/Android/iOS, 2013, Fireproof Games

The Room is one of the best point-and-click / "escape room" series available today, from the construction of puzzles in super complex mechanical boxes, to the mystical setting of the entire plot. I'll talk about it again later, but The Room Two is very competent in bringing a good and fun experience. I recommend!

13) El Tango de la Muerte

PC, 2018, Hernán Smicht, YIRA::

Another hidden gem from the itch.io's bundle, I knew how much I would like El Tango de la Muerte just for its unusual premise: a 1920's Argentine soap opera about a forbidden love, filled with music and tango dancing, wrapping a sliding rhythm game with visuals based on old Monty Python animations. Few things make me happier as a player (and developer) than seeing different stories being told in the best way possible. It's not perfect, but it's definitely an experience I've never had and it's worth having too!

12) Super Mario Bros.

NES (Nintendo 3DS), 1985, Nintendo

Fight me if you want, but 2020 was the first time I finished a 2D Mario game — and it was the most classic of all. Really, even with the 80s controls, even with the simplest plot possible, it's incredible how fun and inventive Super Mario Bros. is. It shows how new levels manage to bring new features using just a few sprites and how it's possible to get really invested in a game from 35 years ago. SMB is not only a game that went down in history for the impact it had, but it is still a (not perfect but) really cool experience to have.

11) Frog Fractions

Flash/PC, 2012/2020, Twinbeard Studios

Frog Fractions is a short, strange, funny and memorable experience. Anything I say will ruin your gameplay, so just play now. Maybe using the "Game of the Decade" port available on Steam for free?

10) BOXBOY!

Nintendo 3DS, 2015, HAL Laboratory, Nintendo

My only problem with BOXBOY! is also the reason why I liked the game so much: it has SO MUCH content that it's tiring! Because it has such simple, yet cool and useful mechanics — being able to create blocks using the character you control —, you basically have hundreds of levels, on different difficulties. Without a doubt, it is a game that focuses on being a good puzzle platformer and it succeeds.

09) Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy

Nintendo 3DS, 2013, Level-5, Nintendo

Professor Layton is one of my favorite game series and the end of the original trilogy (Unwound Future) is one of my favorite games of all time. Azran Legacy, also in its role as the end of a trilogy, is not such an exceptional game, but it manages to bring new elements (and an ending) to the great story of the Azran, as well as concluding in an incredibly beautiful way a series that brought me a lot of happiness. We'll talk more about Layton on this list, so stay tuned!

08) The Room: Old Sins

PC/iOS/Android, 2018, Fireproof Games

As promised, we're talking about The Room series again, specifically the best game in the franchise. Old Sins not only takes the series' formula to a very high level of quality, but also brings different mechanics and ways of seeing the world, now interconnected. If the series was about unraveling complicated mechanical boxes, it is possible to see the entire game as one big box, a natural and very welcome evolution. If you like escape room games, you now know what to play next!

07) Picross 3D: Round 2

Nintendo 3DS, 2016, HAL Laboratory, Nintendo

And we will also talk about Picross again... kinda? When I tried Picross 3D for the first time on the DS, it had such different gameplay and the game was so busy with the different mechanics that I simply put it aside within a few minutes. However, Picross 3D: Round 2 does an incredible job of introducing those new mechanics, making the game way more cozy and relaxing. Before long, I felt more comfortable playing in 3D, especially in more difficult puzzles, as the idea of destroying blocks made more sense in my head sometimes. I need a new one on the Switch!

06) Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock

PS2/PS3/Wii/Xbox 360/PC/Mac, 2007, Neversoft, Activision

I'm a big fan of rhythm games, but I'd never actually played the famous plastic guitar franchise until this year — I was a PC boy and didn't had a PS2. However, after all, I have to say that Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock was the best way to start. Even though I'm not a rock fan, it was really cool to be able to follow the songs and get better and better on the scores, follow the band's story in career mode and even play with my brother. It took a while, but I finally understood why Guitar Hero was always so acclaimed (and why people miss it so much).

05) Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga + Bowser's Minions

Nintendo 3DS, 2017, ALPHADREAM, Nintendo

I've always been a big fan of Mario RPGs and Paper Mario will always be one of my lifelong favorite games, but I've never really had the opportunity to play something from its sister series on handhelds, Mario & Luigi. Starting from the beginning, Superstar Saga was an incredible start, in a remake with several changes to improve the game's quality of life without leaving aside the great story and battle system. My experiences with its sequels weren't so good, but this one is worthy of a Top 5 recommendation. (P.S.: Bowser's Minions is boring, I played 5 minutes and never touched it again)

04) Professor Layton and the Last Specter

Nintendo DS, 2011, Level-5, Nintendo

In the last double feature on this list, we're going to talk about Professor Layton again. Specifically Last Specter (or Spectre's Call in Europe), the first game in the prequel trilogy and the last one before the transition to 3D. I like it more on 2D, in fact: the games on the 3DS were slower, the puzzles were slightly less creative and the absurd focus on trying to take advantage of the 3D screen was a burden. That said, Last Specter doesn't hold a candle to the end of the original trilogy, but it has beauty in its visuals, in the story and in the creativity of its puzzles, being one of the best in the series.

03) A Short Hike

PC/Mac/Linux/Switch, 2019, Adam Robinson-Yu

Such an incredible game that entered this year's POTY as one of those moments in which I managed to forget the cruel reality that 2020 had in store for us and FINALLY was able to relax. A Short Hike, with its extremely beautiful visuals, its simple and fun dialogues, and a series of things to do on the island was my perfect escape valve. There's no way to play it and not enjoy the game, have lots of fun and be excited about what those 3 hours of play would bring. If you need a cuddle in some difficult times, I think you need to do this short hike too.

02) There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension

PC/Mac, 2020, Draw Me A Pixel

Ever since I first saw this game, I knew it would make this list (which is being written hours after finishing it). The first There Is No Game was an incredible idea, well executed within its small scope. Wrong Dimension, in other hand, expands the concept incredibly, both in story and gameplay, showing what is perhaps one of the most innovative and interesting point-and-click games ever made. A masterpiece made to be played without any kind of spoilers, it is a game that I highly recommend and made me finish the year very well. Some jokes are not THAT funny, but they can be perfect, you know?

01) PAC-MAN Championship Edition DX+

PC/Xbox 360/PS3/Windows Phone/iOS/Android, 2013, Mine Loader Software, Namco Bandai Games

And the 2020's Played of the Year goes to… Pac-Man. Amazing, right? Elegant games always fascinated me, it's so beautiful to use simple gameplay rules to awaken so many emotions. That's where my love for board games comes from: I'm fascinated by how paper and half a dozen rules can make people have fun for hours. PAC-MAN Championship Edition DX+ left me hyped and excited, with a crazy feeling of victory and fun using the rules of one of the most famous and popular games in the world. It's still Pac-Man, but it's the best Pac-Man can be and I loved it. May in 2021 I discover another game as elegantly incredible as this one.

Honorable Mentions

Cookie Clicker remains the best clicker ever made in history and gets even better when played on its mobile version.
This year I discovered and played several games from Rusty Lake, a team focused on making point-and-click escape games. After playing a dozen of them, my favorites were Cube Escape: Seasons, Samsara Room and Cube Escape: Paradox.
Incredibly, the "worst" game I played this year was also theirs — Cube Escape: The Lake —, by far the weakest episode in the Cube Escape series and one of the most boring escape room games I've ever played.
2020 was when I learned to play solitaire for the first time, actually! The one I played most was Solitaire: Decked Out on Android.

And that was my 1st Played of the Year! 2020 was a very difficult, complicated and painful year and 2021 won't start much different. At least, I was able to reconnect with a hobby that I really enjoy - safe at home, of course. You can see a more complete list on my Backloggd, if you want. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and see you on POTY again next year!