If all you want is fluff and an easy but very long read, Celestia: Chain of Fate may be something worth looking at. Personally, I do not think a replay is in the cards for me. Once was more than enough.

If the premise sounds fascinating enough to you that you want to muddle through it? I don’t blame you. I don’t hate the time I spent trying to muddle through it, and in contrast to a lot of visual novels which I feel lean far too heavily on the “novel” part it felt like a fun game to play from start to finish. Just be aware that as it stands now, you’re going to have a rough time with the localization.

All in all, this was actually a very bittersweet review for me. I am a huge Rune Factory fan and have been excitedly waiting for this new entry in the series. Unfortunately, I can’t say that it met my expectations. The good news is Rune Factory 5 is a familiar experience for those who are used to the genre. The love interests are a bit cringy, and it has god-awful graphics, but if you have a bit of patience and don’t nitpick as much as I do, it will be a mostly enjoyable experience. The combat is easy enough to get into, there are a ton of things to do, and some of the supporting cast will make you smile. I clocked about 64 hours into this game and I’m pretty sure I could have done more, so it’s at least a bang for its buck if anything. I’m just hoping that if Marvelous Inc. makes us wait another ten years for a new entry, it is of a higher quality.

I don’t want to come off as overwhelmingly or unnecessarily negative about KarmaZoo. At its core, this is a weird game trying a weird new idea in a way that I can respect. The problem is just that I think most of its swings don’t actually work, and the net result is more mildly frustrating than innovative. It keeps unfolding new ideas, but each new idea strikes me as kind of mid-tier. It grows in depth, but none of those new depths ultimately work for me. I think that if you have a dedicated group to play the game with, you might get a fair bit more out of it. If you don’t have that, though? You can probably keep this one locked in its cage.

Thanks to sparse placement of save rooms and challenging enemy locations, the player will be constantly hitting walls to their progression and replaying the same paths repeatedly (and in both directions). Tragically, the only reward for triumphing over these is often a predictable, meager upgrade or another equally difficult stretch of rooms, thus forcing Astronite to be a monotonous experience. The quality boss fights simply aren’t plentiful enough to make up for its shortcomings.

The game isn’t terrible, but it’s a bit forgettable. It comes out on the right side wherein you can have some fun with it, especially if you really like strategy games, but it doesn’t really feel like it works very hard to do more than just be good enough. If you’re in the mood for a strategy game but don’t want quite so much strategy, it’ll fill you up, but it’s not going to delight you in the process.

While it’s not much of a game for solo play, if you have the right kind of group who wants to play something frantic on the couch together, Fueled Up is the kind of game you can really enjoy for a good long while. It’s not perfect, but it offers all the frantic patch jobs you could ask for.

I want to like this game, I really do. When it works, it works really well. The core gameplay loop is satisfying, the two ideas mesh believably, and figuring out how best to manage the species on a given level is like a fun little puzzle. Actually reaching later planets makes me feel like Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill, with the content I’m repeating feeling no different than it did an hour ago when I started my last run.

The game that we ended up with is one that will sate the appetite of fans of the original, while also likely irritating the many that are interested in the multiplayer component. The online multiplayer feels very much tacked on and could have used more time to make the experience more friendly. Hopefully they’re able to make adjustments post-launch. Ultimately, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered Edition is a game that, mechanically, shows its age, and even its newest features don’t feel quite as modernized as they probably should. By that rationale though, maybe the game will end up being exactly what you remember it as.

After so many Dragon Ball games repeating the same story arcs and putting players in control of the same characters, it’s a fun and refreshing experience (at first) to see what events on the scale of Dragon Ball Z would feel like from the perspective of a regular joe shmoe on the street. It’s a novel enough concept that makes for some great fun in the first few days of play, but it doesn’t take much longer for the cracks to start showing. This take on the asymmetrical multiplayer genre makes sense and there’s some appreciable execution outside of it simply being a Dragon Ball game, but it’s hard to see The Breakers really grabbing players thanks to its dearth of content, multiple grinds, and matches that start to feel a bit too familiar once you get past the new player experience.

Still, if you really like tactical RPGs like this, it’s a different style of play and it has some noteworthy potential in how its gameplay is delivered. I don’t dislike the game; I just wish it did a little bit better on delivering on its promise. That’s by nature going to be a very subjective statement, and it isn’t a bad game, but I think anyone who isn’t looking for a new strategy RPG experiment will find this one a bit underwhelming. But hey, if the narrow options and the promise of roguelike gameplay interests you, this is one to check out all the same. It’s not bad, by any means. Just doesn’t really light you on fire.

Battlefield Waltz could have for sure been much more than it was. It suffers from bad storytelling and bad pacing, but the characters had so much potential and were so fun that this didn’t have to be the case. On the bright side, you probably won’t notice or care all that much about the story’s flaws if all you’re looking for is a gushy, tamed, romance sort of game. It does do its job of offering romance with likeable characters, and doesn’t fall short of the sweet moments we all look for when playing otome games. So if that’s what you’re after, I do feel OK recommending this to fans. I do hope that in the future we are given what we’re promised with these sorts of stories, because frankly, the genre needs the evolution. Overall, I’m not sad I played Battlefield Waltz. After all, I did have fun. And as always, I look forward to seeing what’s next from Idea Factory’s otomate line.

Its plot goes in one ear and out the other, its visuals are nothing to write home about, and its combat is more shallow than its highly customizable stats system implies, but it’s still an enjoyable enough action RPG at its core. Trinity Trigger fits the bill if you’re looking to turn your brain off and save the world for a jaunt, but don’t expect it to leave a lasting impact.

It’s a very level game—enjoyable at first, but not very exciting after you’ve spent several hours with it. When you combine this with its emphasis on replayability over length and a paucity of mechanical revision, you get a lacking game with a highly contradictory price tag. These drawbacks are hefty, and they cause 2023’s Colossal Cave to be a difficult recommendation for those who aren’t already enamored with its text adventure roots.

Bottom line: Fight Crab offers an entertaining, and refreshingly unique experience and is certainly worth a look for that. But the game feels very rough around the edges and I think it needs some more time to have its flaws ironed out. If you don’t expect too much from it, you’ll definitely get your money’s worth of entertainment. But the game is at times sloppy and unprofessional, even for an indie title, which does harm the experience to a noticeable degree.

I wanted to like this game so badly. I’ve been a fan of Devolver-published games for a while, and I came away from the preview with high hopes. Unfortunately those expectations did not match my experience playing through Bleak Sword DX for real. For all the intensity the difficulty brought, I nevertheless found myself bored at basically repeating the same thing over and over, and found the story to be an active detriment. That’s not to say there’s nothing good here, however. It’s a solid foundation, but where other games would strive to build something on that foundation, Bleak Sword DX unfortunately just leaves it as a slab of concrete.

Souls of Chronos is a sloppy and in some ways surprisingly wane little thing, a bunch of ideas that don’t ever fully coalesce into a satisfying whole, but there is a value in that. If dodgy translation, somewhat bland combat, and an erratic art style don’t dissuade you? You’re going to have fun with it. I had fun with it. But I also had fun with it while wishing it were just a little more cohesive, a little more polished. I don’t regret giving Souls of Chronos my time, exactly, but I wish it had been a little more appreciative in turn.

If you’re a fan of the franchise or you want something that feels a bit like a good old-school hack-and-slash platformer, you’ll get some enjoyment out of the game. But it ultimately feels like a very pretty and well-intentioned game that made itself too easy and ultimately lost out on its main appeal.

There’s a lot to love here, but I don’t think the main mechanic works very well. Which is sad, because I wish it did. I want to love it, but ultimately I just found it frustrating, and watching the credits roll felt like a compromise. So be fairly warned before giving it a shot.

Infinite would be an easy [70]…if parts of its platforming engine, parts that are mandatory to complete the game, didn’t rely on a coin-flip to determine whether they would actually work or not. With important functions being so obviously broken, I can’t in good faith give out anything more than a middling score.

If it weren’t clear by this point, I did not care for Card-en-Ciel as an aggregate. Not because it’s a bad game, because the core game parts are actually pretty good… but every single part around that game makes me not want to bother engaging with it any further. I like the ideas on display but I also do not want to play this game. The annoying stuff makes it feel actively hostile and unappealing. It’s easier to just not. That’s kind of a shame, and I suspect – or hope – there are people who can look past the melange of stylistic issues that made me dislike the game and enjoy the pretty good card battles at the heart of the title. But for me? I just wanted to be done with it. If you like card battling, I hope you either like the style or can overlook a lot of potential irritations.

Now, I don’t want to sell it too short here. The right kind of person can certainly appreciate this sort of thing and those people might enjoy this a lot more and make it worth buying. But for the rest of us, the gameplay just isn’t remarkable enough, and I don’t think a bucket of humor dumped over the player’s head is what the doctor ordered. This earns it a score that reflects the niche audience that can appreciate the game for what it is.

At this point, you know what you’re getting into when you sit down to play a Jackbox game. Even with this concession, however, it’s a bit too easy to find The Jackbox Party Pack 10 lacking. The tunes and aesthetics are great as always and the narrators do an equally decent job but—with the exception of Timejinx—it feels as though every new game has a significant snag that heavily drags it down. Either the novelty wears off after only a few sessions (Dodo Re Mi, FixyText) or the game simply runs on too long (Hypnotorious), and Tee K.O. 2 is exactly what it says on the tin with only minor improvements. With everything accounted for you’re still in for a fun time with friends, but it nevertheless remains a weaker experience compared to previous Jackbox offerings.

Resident Evil Resistance is an interesting addition to the series. It’s not great, but it’s also much better than 2016’s Umbrella Corps for those looking for a multiplayer experience set in the Resident Evil universe. Fans of the series will no doubt have some fun playing a few matches and tinkering around with abilities and cards, but beyond checking out an occasional update, I don’t know that I’ll personally be playing much more of it in the future.

If you’re really into management sims, you’re going to get something out of the game. But otherwise, as much as I love the look and charm of the title and the concept, this is probably not going to find a forever home in your library.

This is a unique and sometimes even a wondrous experience. In Other Waters is a perfect example of why independent game development is so important to the ecosystem. The ideas these developers have are fantastic and important to gaming and this is an experience I wasn’t going to get anywhere else. That being said, it is impossible to ignore some of In Other Waters’ most glaring flaws. As much as I’m willing to sacrifice depth in gameplay for a satisfying story, I should never feel frustrated as much as I did while playing this.

Tedious amounts of fetch quests, clunky controls, sloppy presentation/execution, outdated visuals, and a mediocre soundtrack are really hard things to ignore, especially when considering the $29.99 price point. All in all, I’ve heard a lot about SWERY’s games and was looking forward to this experience, so it’s a bummer it fell short.

The Complex is an interesting experiment that sometimes yields the fruits of its labor. More often, though, it reveals precisely why developers stopped using live-action video as a means to tell an interactive story. With a minuscule budget and equally small ambitions for its narrative and characters, The Complex just doesn’t replace the gaping whole that TellTale left behind. I don’t want to discourage Wales Interactive from continuing down this path, however. While it didn’t shine often, there were glimpses of a world in which this can work and work beautifully. I just hope they can secure the funding necessary to achieve their ambition.