Tenkai Knights: Brave Battle is not broken. But it lacks even the slightest hint of creativity or effort within it. To say corners were cut to quickly cash in on the license is an understatement, and by extension this is nothing short of sheer exploitation. That's offensive.

The unfortunate thing about Battalion Commander is that if it was one of those free-to-play mobile games, I’d probably have fun with it I could see some others even enjoying it enough to toss it a couple of coins in support. Sitting on trains or in doctor's waiting rooms, or standing in queues, I often go to my phone to keep me occupied and this kind of game would have fit the bill perfectly. But if I am to sit in front of my PlayStation 4, I’m not going to want to play something that requires minimal effort, no narrative and five minutes of my time. Simple as that.

Yes, this kind of game is better in multiplayer, but if you’ve got any sense, you’d grab Brut@l for an action-roguelike experience, or Gauntlet or Diablo 3 for multiplayer heroics. Even for groups that are willing to go into Dungeon Bros with the right spirit, I seriously struggle to imagine a scenario in which this game has any longevity to it.

The Dresden Files: Cooperative Card Game is such a fundamentally flawed concept, and the execution is so lacking, that it offers nothing whatsoever of value.

There was no reason Story Mode couldn’t be a wonderful extension of the Minecraft world, but instead all it succeeds at is pushing me away. After this experience, my desire to play any other Telltale game has gone from high to non-existent.

Handball 17's problem is that the developers might be fans of the sport, but they haven't got a clue how to do the sport justice as a game. Last year I was willing to give the franchise a chance, hoping against hope that, it being the first game, future editions would be better. I am under no such illusions this time around.

Silent World is, mercifully, over quite quickly. It's a real pity that the game hasn't turned out better - there's a nice art style in there and aside from the monsters, the sound effects and ambiance shows what the game might have been. Unfortunately there was no clear vision driving this game and without the vision all that's left is a bunch of elements thrown together without any cohesiveness.

So this is a very short review, but since the developer doesn't have enough respect for players or the source material to include a core part of the original experience, I'm going to show them as much respect in return.

Neither the competent structure nor reasonable aesthetics are enough to save Beach Bounce Remastered. Once again: fan service is great, when it's in service of something. A game like Max's Bigger Bust, despite being all-in with the fan service, writes in plenty of excellently Australian humour to contextualise it. Date A Live: Rio Reincarnation is one of my favourite visual novels of all time, and it, too, is very heavily focused on fan service, while still giving me a reason to actually want to see the girl's skirts blow up (I heart you Tohka). Beach Bounce Remastered has absolutely nothing going for it, other than those spread legs. It's utterly boring.

This is a game by Peter Molyneux who, for all his misfires in recent years, remains a guy who is fiercely intelligent and deeply committed to creative game development. The fact that he allowed this game to fall into such a cynical monetisation model shows just how enslaved developers and publishers have become to free-to-play games, and that makes Godus a symbol, but for reasons that Molyneux probably didn't anticipate; it's a symbol for just how infuriating free-to-play has become.

Concealed is visually impressive and borrows intelligently from the aesthetic of manga books. I also know from piecing the narrative together that in its native language, the story is both chilling and effective horror. This game therefore could have been great in English too, and it’s such a tragedy that the single most important quality of a visual novel was overlooked in the way that it has been.

There's simply no reason to play something so utterly bereft of thought as Narcos.

I never thought I’d see Cricket Captain on the Switch. Cricket Captain 2023 should have stayed on platforms where I wouldn’t have been tempted to pay for it. What a waste of money.

It's a horribly generic platformer that tries hard to be some kind of homage to the genre's greats, and ends up being a pale imitation of them all. Sure it's cheap as chips on the Nintendo 3DS, but that doesn't mean its worth the time investment.

Concave have made a game which, while it isn't broken by any means, just barely meets the tenets of its genre and rarely aims to go past that. In being no-nonsense, Pulstar also throws away its sense of individuality and its lasting appeal, making it a hard sell unless more content is added in the future.

This is by far the worst anime/ manga game I've ever played, and a real tragedy, because it manages to look appealing from start to finish, and could well have been a definitive Dragon Ball experience.

It’s probably just as well Sony gave this thing away for free with PSPlus memberships. It’s the only hope the game has of actually keeping an audience (because it’s a multiplayer-only game, it needs a large and sustained community). But if David Jaffe genuinely wants to make a transgressive game, next time he should pay some attention to how actual transgressive artists like Goichi Suda and Yoko Taro do it.

In other words, it’s a RTS game without any strategy, and a town building simulator with endless timers to deal with.

This is the kind of indie game that hurts to review, because the intent to do something fun is clearly there, but it’s just not a good game at all.

It costs $15. That's the most galling thing of all. This thing is free on mobile, and yes it supports microtransactions, but for people who just want to play a cheap and nasty clone of Monopoly once in a while, "free" is about the right price for it.

It's never fun to play a game that's so fundamentally uninteresting that you really struggle to even watch the screen as you're playing.

There are exceptional options for chess on the Switch. Pawn of the Dead, meanwhile, is one of the poorest games on the console.

I love that Netflix is investing in game development, because many of its properties could potentially use the medium to enhance the overall experience for fans. It needs to do better going forward though. Stranger Things 3: The Game is trash that does more harm to the property than good. It was almost quaint going on a memory trip back to when video games were used to churn out cheap bonus money grabs every time a major film landed, but the industry has moved on from that nonsense, and there's nothing about this game that is acceptable in this day and age.

Kemco produces JRPGs on a budget that are designed to give people a momentary throwback to the 16-bit era of the genre, and while I don't expect anything mind blowing when I do go into these games, I find things this soulless and unimaginative very, very trying indeed.

This absolute travesty was the maiden game by Big Deez Productions. It’s never a nice feeling to be this critical about something, because people did put hard work and passion into it, and as a critic I feel like I’m being cruel to say that something is completely irredeemable. But what Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn is: irredeemable. This is 2018’s most cuttingly unpleasant game to play. And I'm one of those that played Agony.

If you're going to make a game where it's (apparently) possible to fail 1,000 times in a couple of minutes, then you need a really strong reason to do so, and Spectrum just doesn't make that case.

Re-playing Blades of Time in 2019 is surreal. There are assuredly many better games from the previous generation of consoles that deserve to be on Switch ahead of this one. I can’t even imagine the developers have any hope of using this re-release to springboard the franchise back as they work on a sequel, because no one is going to want a sequel after playing it. Time hasn’t been good to Blades of Time, and and other than for the morbidly curious, I can’t see anyone being masochistic enough to derive any value out of it.

The end reality is that The Girl and the Robot is like what would happen if I tried to write a Shakespeare play. People would pick it immediately as a (deeply) inferior pastiche, because it might emulate the style of its inspiration, but it would be a faint imitation in every way that actually counted.

This game is a false promise and a poorly executed mess.

Even if I could forgive the presentation and bugs, though, the reality is that is a gacha game without the real money involved, and to me, that's a bit like playing a video game version of a poker machine. The moment you take the excitement of real money being part of the experience is also the moment that you realise that these "games" are pathetic, and indeed the polar opposite of entertainment.

I realise that Asterix & Obelix isn’t as commercially valuable as, say, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars or the Fate anime property. It’s never going to attract a major project from a top-flight developer. Nonetheless, there are small developers who have taken the iconic French comic and done something that shows respect; at least they have done their best. There is nothing like that in Asterix & Obelix: Heroes. It’s a cheap and tacky cash-in, and everyone involved in it over the years (the 40th book in the series comes out this year!) deserves better than this.

Despite falling neatly into typical fantasy locales (forest, volcano, snowy mountain), there’s something unique about Eekeemoo’s levels, and they inspire plenty of curiosity. Sadly, those feelings are quickly laid to rest by every other aspect of the game. Despite its potential and the love poured into it, Eekeemoo: Splinters of the Dark Shard is a broken mess that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone.

As a fan of Scrabble - and board games in general - I like the idea of having it on the Switch for on-the-go play. But when the AI is about as interesting as a parrot with access to a dictionary, a UI that actively wants to stop you playing the game, and a complete absence of anyone online to play with, I was left speechless, that a developer in 2019 was somehow capable of making a worse version of Scrabble than what we had on the Game Boy back in the 90's.

There are bugs (because of course there are), and very long loading times, but on the plus side there is a multiplayer mode. On the downside I never managed to actually get someone to play this with me. They took one look at the single player game, with all its misfiring attempts at nostalgic glory, and begged me to play something else instead.

Should the very negative impression that Alone Musc levels be tempered by the fact that the credits list just four people? Perhaps, but then perhaps those four people should have worked on something more in-line with what they had the resources for. Alone Musc is, by a long way, the poorest rhythm game on a console that has a lot of excellent rhythm games, and unfortunately, for a genre as straightforward as this one, there was nowhere for this team to hide their inability to compete with the other developers working in the genre.

The problem is that it’s not a game that will convert anyone who isn’t already a fan of the sport, and fans of the sport will really struggle to enjoy a game that ultimately fails to capture so much that is core to the essence of their sport.

The Nintendo Switch has been blessed with a number of good single-player card games at this point. Whether it's Shadowverse, Lord of the Rings, or The Witcher spinoff, Thronebreaker, players have plenty of deep, rich, highly strategic card games to choose between. Cards of the Dead, meanwhile, is about as engaging as Solitaire. Sure, I've played a game or two of Solitaire in my time when I'm that utterly bored, but that was when I was on a work computer and relying on pre-installed games, or on a boat with nothing but a pack of cards. If you've got Cards of the Dead on your Switch, you've also got a thousand alternatives for single-player games, and most of them are more worthwhile than this.

Taking a mobile free-to-play game like this and copying it wholesale to the console was a ridiculous error in judgement by the developer. Someone in the team should really have understood better the difference in what works for console compared to mobile, and understood that this kind of game just won't sit well with the kinds of people that like playing console games.

Demon Sword Incubus may technically work. But it’s not inspiring or interesting. It’s not even good. Most egregiously of all, though is that it lacks the one thing people bought the game for. In a very real sense, buying Demon Sword on Switch is like buying a porn DVD with the nudity and sex cut out. What’s left when you do that?

There’s nothing to actually recommend about Chronus Arc. Fans of 16-bit and earlier JRPGs won’t get the nostalgic rush they might hope for from this game because it’s so artificially put together it feels more like an insult to the memory of those games than a celebration of them.

It remains utterly soulless, and a completely useless product.

Real Boxing 2 is everything wrong with mobile gaming, and while it's free of the microtransactions on Nintendo Switch, all that it has to offer is an endless parade of matches that display no personality. I'm no expert on boxing, but I know enough about the sport to know that boxing fans aren't going to find this satisfying on any level.

So with New Star Manager you get poor on-field football action, and poor off-field management. Throw in the cheap "typical mobile game" aesthetics and design, and it's hard to understand who would want to play this. People who simply like football would go for FIFA. People who want a management simulator would go for the densely rewarding Football Manager. Both of which are already available on Switch.

There's no soul to Falling Skies. It's a generic, cheap turn based tactics game. It lacks any identity of its own, fails to represent its license, and fails to understand what made the game it copied its base mechanics from so great. And as such I can't really recommend it to anyone.

Honestly, Fragment’s Note+ comes across as what would happen if someone who smooshes dolls or figures together to make them kiss were to write a visual novel. There is a lot of talent that went into making some of the elements of the game. The art is nice, and given more narrative context the “steamy” scenes would have been so much more fun. The localisation is also far better than the game deserves. It’s just that underneath it all is a ridiculously, stupidly juvenile story, and there’s no saving that.

It saddens me to say that even though Afro Samurai 2 had potential, it felt rushed and may be one of the worst games I have played this year. It's poor enough that even die hard Afro Samurai fans should stay away from this mess of a game.

I love the classic Dragon Quest titles with a passion, but there is nothing that redeems these poor ports. They fail as an archive of classics, since the redesign fundamentally changes them. They fail as pieces of entertainment, because they're so ugly and poorly made. Finally, they fail as Dragon Quest, because Dragon Quest fans will be insulted by this trash being passed off as their memories.

There's nothing of value in Wonder Boy Returns. It's the weakest platformer I've played for years, and were it a free Flash game, as it so closely resembles, I still wouldn't recommend it.

I’m glad that I played SkateBIRD, and it hurts that I’ve had to give it this score. I firmly believe that as games are an art form, game developers should be trying things, even if they don’t ultimately succeed. SkateBIRD is a brilliant idea and it takes a big, heaving swing at it. Sadly, though, it’s a strikeout. However, with that being said, if the developers get another innings, I would play a SkateBIRD 2 without a moment's hesitation, and I would fully expect that the developers would deliver having had this experience.

I love the classic Dragon Quest titles with a passion, but there is nothing that redeems these poor ports. They fail as an archive of classics, since the redesign fundamentally changes them. They fail as pieces of entertainment, because they're so ugly and poorly made. Finally, they fail as Dragon Quest, because Dragon Quest fans will be insulted by this trash being passed off as their memories.

Niche sports are difficult. Sports are always complex, demanding things to code, and everyone expects their favourite sport to get the FIFA treatment. That level of experience is just not possible with an audience as limited as Pickleball is. However, it’s not unreasonable to expect the game to at least try to look and feel like the real sport. PPA Pickleball Tour 2025 doesn’t even come close.

I love the classic Dragon Quest titles with a passion, but there is nothing that redeems these poor ports. They fail as an archive of classics, since the redesign fundamentally changes them. They fail as pieces of entertainment, because they're so ugly and poorly made. Finally, they fail as Dragon Quest, because Dragon Quest fans will be insulted by this trash being passed off as their memories.

It's a B-grade Dead Space clone that follows the "rules" of horror without actually understanding any of them. Sure, it's a good thing that developers want to continue that "horror in space" tradition of Dead Space, but this team simply wasn't up to the task. On any level.

It’s genuinely sad to see NinjaKiwi like this. I wonder if the studio’s founders realised that, ten years down the line, they’d have an international company gouging players for microtransaction money, and re-releasing empty husks of old games onto the Switch for the chance at even more revenue.

Blade II is a great example of what happens when you let a content-driven business make a content-driven game. There's plenty in there to do, but doing any of it is a complete waste of time. Sadly, games like Blade II are far too common, and happen right up and down the industry, from the tiny indies making mobile titles, right through to the biggest companies churning out the blockbusters. The contentification of video games is a plague, and Blade II is one of the most egregious examples of that.

But there’s not a single picture in the dozens and dozens of puzzles the game boasts that you’ll actually want to put together. Universally the pictures look like the developer got colour-by-number books, filled them in, and scanned them into the game.

Why a small team thought it could make a grand open-world RPG is beyond me, but Skylight Freerange 2 demonstrates the horrible consequences of vastly overreaching what your resources and skill level allow. Full props to the developers for trying - the game is oddly fascinating in just how badly it has failed -, but make no bones about this, if the screenshots and video haven’t proven it to you: this game is an utter travesty.

Nothing redeems this game. It's ugly as sin, it fails to understand what made the original classic compelling and though it includes the original classic, it is a neutered version of it.

To finish with a comparison: A game like Light de Deux highlights what can be achieved when an indie developer properly scopes out their resourcing limitations and works within that. No AI, no case of scope overwhelming the capabilities of the developer. It was a smaller-scale game, but a complete, lovely little thing to actually experience. Lovecraft wrote many smaller-scoped stories and the developers of Innsmouth 22 could have retold. It might have been a better idea for them to work towards Innsmouth 22 over a period of time after first starting with some smaller efforts that would get their creative processes, art assets, and cash flow working first. Sadly first impressions count, and no matter how intriguing the game project, if this developer makes a second I’m going to be much more wary about giving it my time.

The best, most well-resourced developers in the world would struggle to make a quality simulation game with online sharing, VR support, and the ability to fully explore and interact with your creations. This is the work of a small indie developer that should have focused on getting a few things right, than throwing in everything and failing at it all.

I don’t like being particularly cruel in reviews, but IronFall Invasion never needed to leave the 3DS. It was bad enough there thanks to its totally worthless storytelling and generic, bland gameplay. With the Switch it doesn’t even have the distinction of being one of the more technically impressive tech demos on the console. It truly has nothing going for it.

Top that all off with vehicles that control like flies trapped in syrup, a gross lack of interesting weapons, and only a couple of different vehicle types. Once you’ve had your fill of laughing at Planet 2000’s low-budget oddities, you’re left with a mess of a game that’s just tedious to play.

An example of what happens when a developer takes Minecraft and clones it in such a manner that is loses everything that made it something special in the first place.

Anyhow, I digress. To come back to where I talk about the grift. The grift here is that each of these titles offer platinum trophies that can be "earned" with no effort required whatsoever. You'll sit through a laboured and completely ineffective 10-20 minute sermon on nonsense, play it through a couple of times to meet all its conditions, and then you'll get your trophy. I don't know if anyone still actually cares about those things, but as pathetic as it is as selling point for a pathetic series of games, it actually works. If these games didn't annoy me so much I'd be making a joke about how Sony's allowing hardcore Christian content onto the same platform where they've turned into puritans over anime boobs.

The House of the Dead is a classic and monumentally important video game. I didn’t even bat an eyelid when this popped up on the eShop. Even knowing that as a Forever Entertainment project it probably wasn’t going to be all that, my fierce loyalty to the brand caused me to buy this instantly. As I wrote in the introduction to this review, however, The House of the Dead Remake makes Uwe Boll’s film seem like a masterpiece by comparison. At least Boll had the good sense to put gratuitous B-genre exploitation nudity and unintentionally hilarious directing in his film. His film was a thing you could enjoy drunk. You play this game and you’ll just jump straight to the hangover.

Anyhow, I digress. To come back to where I talk about the grift. The grift here is that each of these titles offer platinum trophies that can be "earned" with no effort required whatsoever. You'll sit through a laboured and completely ineffective 10-20 minute sermon on nonsense, play it through a couple of times to meet all its conditions, and then you'll get your trophy. I don't know if anyone still actually cares about those things, but as pathetic as it is as selling point for a pathetic series of games, it actually works. If these games didn't annoy me so much I'd be making a joke about how Sony's allowing hardcore Christian content onto the same platform where they've turned into puritans over anime boobs.

Anyhow, I digress. To come back to where I talk about the grift. The grift here is that each of these titles offer platinum trophies that can be "earned" with no effort required whatsoever. You'll sit through a laboured and completely ineffective 10-20 minute sermon on nonsense, play it through a couple of times to meet all its conditions, and then you'll get your trophy. I don't know if anyone still actually cares about those things, but as pathetic as it is as selling point for a pathetic series of games, it actually works. If these games didn't annoy me so much I'd be making a joke about how Sony's allowing hardcore Christian content onto the same platform where they've turned into puritans over anime boobs.

It wasn’t disappointing in that it was every bit as terrible as I was expecting. This is the worst visual novel I have ever experienced. It’s tempting to say it’s unplayable, in that I can’t have it on for five minutes before wanting to give up on games forever, but that would be inaccurate, since a visual novel just involves scrolling through text and performing basic inputs on to the screen. So instead I’ll just a far more accurate pejorative for this kind of game - Parascientific Escape is illiterate.

Dementium is not even slightly entertaining and all the developer has achieved with this re-re-release is broadcast that their original game wasn’t ever anything more than a gimmicky novelty. What an incredible own goal when Dementium did actually have something of a legacy from people nostalgic for the DS.

I don’t think I’ve ever played a more pointless game than R.B.I. Baseball 17... I just don’t see how anyone, anywhere, could possibly want what this one is offering.

I understand the impulse to throw down a couple of bucks for a game that features pretty girls in swimwear. A bit of fan service can be fun and all that, and for a couple of dollars, you’re not going to expect a masterpiece. But for fan service to work, you’ve got to be a fan in the first place, and the complete lack of character and purpose in Beach Girls means that it doesn’t work as fan service either. The fact that even Steam isn’t getting laboured with stuff like Beach Girls, or Hentai Uni before it, suggests that Nintendo is perhaps being a little too open with its open platform.

The game has an intriguing premise and I want to believe the developers had some intelligent ideas behind what they're doing, but between the painfully shallow strategy, the laboured (via translation) writing, the mundane, uninspired presentation and the shonky interface and UX, there was nowhere left for me to go to find something I admired about this game. For story-driven roguelike strategy, I highly recommend Thea: The Awakening (also available on Switch). Mittelborg is a different game to it, but the energy and intent does cross over between the two. It's just that Thea is also made exceptionally well, and this is not.

Candy Match 3 truly offends me. It's a nasty, exploitative game that contributes nothing to this industry beyond taking money from consumers that could have gone to a game that deserved the support.

I can't make this clear enough; Snakes & Ladders is a terrible, terrible game.

There is nothing that redeems Excave II: Wizard of the Underworld.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with mobile games ported to console – I’ve played a number of good ones myself. However, Pascal’s Wager is the wrong kind of mobile port. In a genre that demands precision, responsiveness and a clarity of vision, this is a bungled mess of janky, unresponsive controls, shoddy presentation, and little meaningful thought put into why the game even exists. As such, it is the perfect example of every mistake to avoid when making these things.

You just need to look at something like Theatrhythm Final Fantasy to realise that when people really love a franchise, taking the music from that franchise and turning it into a rhythm game can be a magical experience. But then people pay a lot of money to go to symphonies of Final Fantasy music. As my old mates Dunning and Kruger would always say: people should know their limits. The Legend of Dark Witch franchise is far too limited and nowhere near of the standard where its music is ready stand alone, and Rudymical is just not worth playing on any level.

Even if the game ran at a slick 60 frames per second, or whatever number is meant to be standard these days, Skeleton Rider would still be a mess of a game.

Lula's just trash. It's not satirical or insightful. It's not really funny. It's certainly not sexy. It's just not that interesting.

It’s stuff like this that gives artful (or sexy, or just plain fun) fan service a bad name.

I appreciate that Kemco does its business by tapping into people's nostalgia for games from the SNES and PlayStation One era, but insulting fans that have fond memories of those games with trash like Antiquia Lost needs to stop.

I'm all for adult games, and I'm all for the use of sex and sex themes within a game. Seed of the Dead could have been something really great; the idea of mixing the violence of Killing Floor with the sleazy, trashy humour and theme of a School Girl / Zombie Hunter, taken to the next level, could have made for something extreme and interesting. But Seed of the Dead doesn't work on any level. It's not erotic, it's not exciting, it's not interesting, and it's only just playable.

Steel Rivals is irredeemably flawed and should never have been made. I try to find the good in games, even when they are bad – if a game doesn’t work, I like to think that perhaps the concept is sound but poorly executed, or perhaps the development team is young but shows signs of promise. But Steel Rivals has none of that.

I wasn't expecting much from Space Stella. It's a Trooze-published game, after all. But what I actually good exceeded my expectations in the most wrong way possible. I don't like bandying around terms like "unplayable" much, since "unplayable" implies that the game cannot be completed, and most of the time it's juvenile hyperbole for "this is just a game I don't much like playing because it has some flaws in it." But Space Stella is genuinely unplayable. Even if I could handle the sickeningly janky gameplay (which I can't), I have a visceral desire to avoid playing a game so shallow, uninspired and downright empty as this one.

I have famously low demands when it comes to fan service games. I genuinely enjoyed Hentai Vs. Evil, and that is a game that you have to have an enormous tolerance for fan service to find entertaining on any level. I know who I am and I roll with it. But Waifu Impact is just beyond terrible. A beachy homage to Genshin Impact with bikinis and water pistol fights could have been a lot of fun. This, however plays more like a very first prototype of that excellent idea that someone actually dropped on to the Switch store about three years too early into development.

In the end, the started and overt point of Archlion Saga is that it was developed to introduce people who are less familiar with JRPGs to the genre. The developers failed in doing that, since anyone who plays this as their first JRPG won't touch another one for a very, very long time. No one likes having their intelligence insulted, even if they are completely new to something.

They hide behind nostalgic pixilated visuals, stick safely to existing game tropes, and are really quite culturally tone-deaf. While I love that digital distribution has allowed indie developers to create some genuine masterpieces that would never have had a chance otherwise, games like Kung Fu Fight! are the other side of that particular coin. If we didn’t have digital distribution there is no way a game like this would have ever been inflicted on us, and that wouldn’t have been a bad thing at all.

I don't think I've ever played a game as soulless of Jett Rocket 2.

This is going to be a short review, because Ayakashi Koi Gikyoku is effectively unplayable.

The story is overdone, the gameplay is bad, and the grammar is atrocious. Even the most dedicated of hidden object fans would be unhappy with this title.

Nothing redeems Asphalt 9. It's shallow, inferior game that has been built with the exclusive purpose of getting suckers to throw more money at it. This stuff should be left on mobile platforms or, better yet, never made.

What makes Gollum stand out is that most other developers and publishers then use their creative teams to try and hide the crass cynicism and capitalism. Daedalic didn’t bother with Gollum. This game represents the games industry with its mask off.

There is no respect from the developer in this game. Not for the genres, nor for the time that the game asks of its players. There is no greater insult that an artist can direct at their audience.

I was genuinely excited to play Lily of the Hollow - Resurrection. It seems like such a beautiful little visual novel and while I wasn’t expecting a masterpiece of localisation based on its low price, I was expecting to be able to read it. But that just cannot be done. Developers from Japan, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, and every other emerging game development centre through Asia-Pacific, listen to me carefully: You can have the most beautiful aesthetics and a heartwarming concept for your game. If the localisation isn’t going to be good, though, do not bother with an English release, because it is going to get reviews like this one. Make “invest in proper translation” your big resolution for 2021. I do not want to play any other games like Lily in the Hollow - Resurrection ever again.

I don’t have a problem with games that feature nudity and titillation. If a developer were to make a strip poker game then I would be all over that (assuming the poker played well enough). Bring on all the Gal*Guns and Dead or Alives that developers can produce. But for the love of Hatsune Miku, Nintendo, don’t let the eStore be flooded with this nonsense.

Let me introduce you to a game quite special. It's a game that is so offensive to the senses, and so utterly clumsily programmed, that it is genuinely unplayable. "Unplayable" in the literal sense that "I sure as hell couldn't finish it and I would be genuinely surprised if anyone actually could." Let me introduce you to Crimson Keep.

Anyhow, I digress. To come back to where I talk about the grift. The grift here is that each of these titles offer platinum trophies that can be "earned" with no effort required whatsoever. You'll sit through a laboured and completely ineffective 10-20 minute sermon on nonsense, play it through a couple of times to meet all its conditions, and then you'll get your trophy. I don't know if anyone still actually cares about those things, but as pathetic as it is as selling point for a pathetic series of games, it actually works. If these games didn't annoy me so much I'd be making a joke about how Sony's allowing hardcore Christian content onto the same platform where they've turned into puritans over anime boobs.

This game is a creatively broken, anti-intellectual insult. Bethesda spat in our faces and, because saliva is a kind of "content," figured that it could monetise it. Sadly, the success that Blades has seen on mobile - and will no doubt translate to success on the Switch as well - just goes to show that when it comes down to it, consumers actually like being spat on, because it means that they are getting content.