One of the biggest factors I always rate games on is whether they are fun to play. A game could be the most mechanically polished, gorgeous, epic game, but if I didn’t have much fun playing it, that would impact my score dramatically. So, while “fun” is entirely subjective, I just had absolutely no fun whatsoever with …If Found. As a side note: I completed this game is entirely under two hours. While that isn’t a problem for me personally, some gamers do make a cost benefit decision based upon length of content. So, it is something to be aware of.

The Longing is one of those video games that dares you to see it through. Guiding a barely mobile creature who can’t be bothered to pick up the pace a little seems so nonsensical and completely antithetical to fun but if you’re the kind of person that likes to find their own unique brand of fun in video games - like following the rules of the road in Grand Theft Auto - then The Longing is bound to trigger some sort of positive electrical charge. And because much of the game can be accomplished while you’re away, it’s the kind of game you can have going on in the background as you sit through the latest Zoom meeting. Given the uniqueness and special circumstances of reviewing The Longing, Darkstation does not give it a score.

The unfortunately named Enhanced Edition fails to make a compelling case for its existence in any meaningful way, especially when you consider its asking price of twenty bucks can net you both the original Baldur's Gate and the far-superior sequel from a site like GOG, and downloading a few free mods that make them really shine takes mere minutes of your time. I would highly recommend that course of action instead.

Mushroom 11 does a great job of realizing a concept and sticking to it, it’s just too bad that concept falters as much as it does, making the game feel like a big miss instead of an indie darling.

Little Red Lie is depressing and misguided. However, it curls up so much in its self-pity and vitriolic hate towards everything that you can’t take it seriously anymore. And the game is meant to be taken very, very seriously. Not all entertainment is meant to make us feel good, but Little Red Lie pushes the envelope. At the very end, the game even falls into mocking at the player who has suffered the self-indulgent boredom of it all. I’m not sure that’s a good sales pitch for Will O’Neill’s future projects… I played this game through for you, and I hope you won’t ever make the same mistake. I’m sure the author meant for us to go all reflective on ourselves at the end but the game didn’t make me look into the mirror. I’m better than that - and so are you. And I’m not lying.

There are some things you expect coming into a Square Enix produced JRPG. You expect some grinding, you expect some weird dialogue, you even expect it to take a while to get going (I’m looking at you Final Fantasy XIII and the 30 hours it took to get good). What you don’t expect is for the game to feel like it’s just going through the motions with its story, for the central class system to not feel worthwhile, and for the battle system’s main claim to fame being you get to skip your turn to go later. Turns out Defaulting on this one is the right move.

Unfortunately with reviewing this game I have to think of it in terms of should someone spend their hard earned money on this game and that hurts Dear Esther in a regrettable way. It tells a very interesting story in a mysterious and ambitious way and stands out as a risky decision on the developers but manages to be at least a little entertaining for how shallow the gameplay is. At a ten dollar price range I feel like I may have over paid a little and would have felt more comfortable with a price half that.

Beneath what I had originally found so interesting I found a game frustratingly vague, that held for me no wonder, nothing that drove me to want to explore or survive.

It didn’t give me anything positive to hold on to. Maybe it is just the style of the game that gave me a bad taste, maybe it’s just not my cup of tea, maybe it is your cup, or maybe, the tea just isn’t very good to begin with.

The game is intriguing and offers a unique experience; however, none of its well-executed ideas are worth anything if the game simply doesn’t function properly.

If you’re looking for a game with good music and not much else than Beatbuddy is your jam. Otherwise, look for the soundtrack and skip the frustration.

Due to unfortunate design choices, I just wanted to rush through everything and couldn’t exactly enjoy my time with the game. In short, Ancestors Legacy felt too much like a chore to play. Saying this doesn’t bring me any joy because the Middle Ages setting and the presented factions were actually cool. The idea to make a history-based, story-driven RTS title with dynamic features could have been great, but all these sides didn’t mesh well here. I really wanted to get into the gameplay, but the best I could muster was excitement for engaging cutscenes and disturbingly alluring images.

Despite its problems, I really do like Guilty Gear. It’s a fun and well-designed fighting engine. Unfortunately, the actual product being sold is little more than a shell for this fighting engine. The lack of narrative explanation is very frustrating, even if you are familiar with fighting games. Because of this, I can only recommend Guilty Gear to those who just want a solid version of the game on modern consoles.

For being a flash animation that took three years to develop and then lose all other meaning behind it's saddening gameplay and all around lack of sheen Rocketbirds doesn't get a recommendation from me.

Armello has a lot of potential but the interesting bits never come to the forefront in any meaningful way, leading to a rather bland experience.

In a nutshell, Punch Club acted like a stamina-fueled boxer and wore me down. Over time I found myself loathing the training process I originally felt happy progressing in. What started as a fun progression from nobody to star became a tedious task of increasing numbers that may or may not affect the outcome of a fight.

A grim journey indeed. Letter Quest: Grimm’s Journey Remastered fails to make a puzzle game work the way that they should with messy RPG elements and difficulty based on an upgrade system rather than your own personal skill level.

9 Monkeys of Shaolin is not anything to write home about, nor is it a must-play rebirth of the beat ‘em up genre that the publishers and developers claim it to be. Although the game provides aesthetically pleasing environments and some enjoyable music, it ultimately suffers from an uninspired and one dimensional co-op beat ‘em up experience and is hamstrung by a vanilla cast of characters.

Despite how short the game is, it maybe emphasizes why the other games use this idea to break it up – the concept never really evolves or grows in any way, and with the platforming so basic, there’s really not much else here to dig into. It winds up being a rhythm game with disposable musical elements, a platformer with uninteresting mechanics.

It’s a shame that Team17 have found it hard to strike a balance between complicating things enough to keep Mugsters interesting but not too much to make it tedious and frustrating. The first few levels are a fantastic hook into the game, showing off its terrific abstract graphical style and some fun, yet simple puzzle mechanics, but the more you play, the more it gets bogged down by the burden of adding more. The multiplayer does add some fun novelty, but ultimately Mugsters probably isn’t a game you’ll feel like completing.

Pinstripe is a game that has such promise at its start but fails to capitalize on what makes it special by its completion. The simplistic platforming and combat take away from the game’s excellent atmosphere and world building and instead give the game this odd mix of tension in cutscenes immediately followed by easy-to-beat levels. While the minister was in Hell, facing the fears of humanity, I never felt like I was there with him. While the art and atmosphere are worthy of all the praise in the world, the gameplay and storytelling hurt the game exponentially, leading to a short and forgettable experience.

I really hope to see Membrane revisited at some point with a greater focus on making satisfying puzzles and using the mechanics to their fullest extent. As it stands, though, there really isn't much to go on here. Membrane's got great aesthetics and all, but there's nothing to really back it up, and so you wind up going through the game without feeling much like engaging in it. There are fun levels sprinkled throughout, but for the most part, I found myself wondering what the point was, and never wound up finding an answer.

No Man’s Sky is a missed opportunity to do something truly epic, and while the final game, when measured moment by moment, showed glimpses of something more than merely ordinary, the final result, was far less than. Promises aside, there’s just not enough to this universe to make it worth exploring.

Gauntlet: Slayer Edition is a passable action-RPG for those desperately looking for a dungeon crawler to play with friends but it doesn’t offer much in the way of replayability or unique concepts to really recommend past that.

Regrettably, despite my initial interest in Heavy Metal Thunder, and my high hopes for a piece of gripping and thrilling science fiction set in an inspired and fleshed-out universe, the final product failed to entertain me with every dull page-turn.

It's very important to understand what Hydrophobia: Prophecy is; literally, the third version of the same game with major technical and creative modifications made based on user feedback. With this iteration of Hydrophobia being riddled with issues, I have to wonder about the quality of the initial release and am curious about whether or not Dark Energy Digital will continue to modify it in the future.

Finding enjoyment in Unity requires a great deal of patience, more than anyone can afford. I want to like the game, and I do to some extent, however I cannot ignore that it’s broken. And there is no patch that can ever save Unity from its tarnished image.

It really seems like it would have worked better as a middleware physics engine, because it certainly doesn’t work as a game.