Lord of the Rings: Gollum struggles under its own weight from the word go. Any benefit from a grimmer, more unvarnished look at the characters of Middle-earth from an atypical perspective is immediately undercut by a bevy of technical issues, clunky controls, unexciting game design, and stilted presentation at constant odds with the player. When you get down to brass tacks, Gollum feels undercooked from all sides in its attempt to snatch the One Ring, leaving it with no recourse but to plummet straight into the mouth of Mount Doom.

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.

Putting an actual number to this is more difficult than for most games. I enjoyed my time with Komorebi, but was left disappointed at the same time. Everything I loved had some small detail to criticize, and every criticism I had was tied to something I loved. Overall I would say it all depends on your perspective. Some people like the bottle episodes more than the season finales after all. If you prefer hanging out and getting to know people with a splash of sci-fi dystopian-ish intrigue to give them something to talk about, this will be right up your alley. If you’re here primarily for the sci-fi dystopia and seeing the characters bond over their shared struggle is just a bonus, you’ll probably find it a bit lacking. Still, at the end of the day, if my main criticism is simply that I preferred the previous entry… that’s probably saying something.

I am really happy that I stepped outside of my comfort zone and tried out this title. It has a lot of charm and I can openly admit that by the end of my playthrough, I was a fan of the protagonist, the cast, and even the villain a little bit. It’s obvious that Whateverland has a story it wants to tell and it leaves it up to you how you want to go about that experience.

Ultimately, RoboDunk is a pile of pieces that all work together in the strictest sense, but they don’t enrich one another. I enjoyed it well enough, but I never felt compelled to go back by anything in particular. It’s just… if you want a basketball-ish roguelike, this is definitely it, and it does everything right enough. But I can’t see you being blown away by it.

The overall gameplay is quite decent. But the bizarre design decisions regarding flight, settlements, and NPC interaction, coupled with some annoying issues, like lack of fast-travel or tutorials, leave you with with a blend of both fun and frustration that just doesn’t quite payoff in the end. I can see a niche audience for a game like this. But to have a broader appeal, I think Airship: Kingdoms Adrift needed more time in the oven to expand its feature set and create a good on-boarding experience.

While it certainly exceeded my expectations in a number of areas, Of Blades & Tails still has quite a few areas it could improve on. It’s an awfully rough start and the middle needs some work narratively, but it nails the landing. With over 20 hours to beat, a charming aesthetic, and a variety of ways to tackle combat, there’s a lot to sink your teeth into here. I just wish this wasn’t a case of “Yeah it gets good ten hours in.”

HunterX: code name T is a middle-of-the-road experience. If you’re looking for a new metroidvania to sink your teeth into, your attention would probably be better spent elsewhere, and that’s a shame because there are some solid ideas here. The inclusion of a notable parry system that decreases enemy stats while increasing your own isn’t enough to stave off the exhaustion that creeps up from the game’s other aspects. Enemies, bosses, and areas all feel the same to go through, and this eventually builds to a point of exhaustion—even in this shorter metroidvania. It could have been excellent with more refinement, but as it stands, HunterX: code name T remains simply functional and little else.

From the bit I was able to play of it, I think that Paper Ghost Stories: Third Eye Open has a bright future ahead. After all, titles that look to tackle interesting themes from a different perspective are the sort of freshness in storytelling that every reviewer lives for. Couple that with the fact that the game looks and sounds great just means that I will be one of the first people to pick it up when it officially releases.

Sadly, problems begin to arise after you’ve spent a few hours with the game, largely due to the fact that it doesn’t take much time to see a majority of the content Astro Duel II has in store for you. What’s there is fun enough, but it’s hard to fight the feeling that it would be vastly improved by having more to play with—ships and stages specifically, but a more traditional story mode wouldn’t have gone amiss—to prevent things from getting repetitive as quickly as they do.

Classic gaming enthusiasts will definitely applaud this game seeing the light of day again, but it doesn’t come out of the era unscathed. Shinyuden’s work done to do just that is worth complimenting to some extent, but it doesn’t erase how rough this game can be for some. Aero the Acro-Bat shows flashes of a good platformer, but the foundation laid by its original developers might be too big of an obstacle for some modern gamers. The door price may be low, the rest of the franchise is on the way, but this game isn’t going to please everyone. If you can stomach the rough edges it comes with, there is enjoyment to be had. Just don’t go in expecting it to meet the level of the more legendary platformers of the era.

If you are a big fan of tower defense, you will get a kick out of the game. You’ll probably have fun with it for a bit, and if you make sure to just have fun until you’re bored, step away, and then come back to it a couple months later? It’s probably going to keep your affection. But it’s perhaps not as fully-featured as it being a standalone game might suggest. While Flash is gone, it doesn’t mean you can just port games that worked in that format all into being standalone titles. Terrorformer TD has a fun gameplay loop for brief jaunts, but it goes from excitement to tedium faster than I would like.

Ultimately, it’d be wrong to say that Defender’s Quest II feels like more of the same; in visuals it’s very different and everything else feels like a distinct evolution from its original form. But it does feel like it has been made with the same sort of attention to detail and care as the first one. It carries all of the charm and memorability, and it also has that same addictive feeling of inspiring you to take on just one more round. In other words, basically everything I liked about the first game has been either preserved or expanded, and there’s just not much to criticize. This is an amazing package, every bit as good as its predecessor, and if you never heard of that game that means you have two great games to play. Go try it out, because if the idea of a tower defense RPG sounds like a great concept, I assure you that this one nails it just as well as the first game.

For fans of Uchikoshi’s works, picking up Never 7 is an interesting experience to see where he got his start, so long as you’re prepared for a twenty-year-old game with some questionable design choices. If this would be your first visual novel, though, I would recommend passing on this one for now. Pick up Ever 17 instead.

Even 23 years later, Ever 17 – The Out of Infinity still holds up. The quality of the narrative and the twists toward the end are not quite so novel in this day and age what with how many amazing visual novels have come out since then. But I found myself growing to love the cast, and the setting is absolutely genius in how it manages to keep giving the characters new challenges to overcome without feeling contrived. That all said, I don’t feel this is the best way to experience Ever 17, mostly due to the quality of the translation. I know it seems like a minor thing, but it causes me to question how much care was given to the writing across the board, and for a visual novel that’s more important than ever. If you have a way to try one of the other versions, give it a shot. But if not this is still a perfectly serviceable, and definitely more accessible version.

I should have expected a game called Dead Trash to be a pile of garbage. Most of the play experience is frustrating in a way that feels far from intentional, like the developers just didn’t test anything before deciding to ship it. I didn’t even mention every bug, just the most noteworthy ones. They nailed the aesthetic perfectly, but while aesthetic makes for an enticing Steam page it is not enough to carry a game on its own. “It runs” feels like the highest praise I could give to it, but given how much enjoyment I got from it I almost wish it hadn’t.

Alcyone is the epitome of a niche video game. I’m not a fan of mobile games but that really seems like it would be a better platform. If I could lay in bed under a comforter and nothing but lamplight and my phone I could probably play through it in one sitting. For now I just have bloodshot eyes and visions of a great new world that I hope to play again once I’ve recovered.

Pilo and the Holobook is a game that knows what it wants to be, and succeeds at it. It’s a cute and cozy little adventure aimed at a young audience, short and sweet with a price to match. There are a few snags here and there, some puzzles could be signposted a bit better and the secondary scenes could do with a better payoff. Still, at the end of the day the core of the experience is solid enough and there’s plenty of little moments that will make you smile.

This is a fun game, and while you can definitely tell that it’s not quite a full RPG in its own right, I still enjoyed it front to back. So if you want a somewhat romance-tilted RPG featuring a cast of women that’s on the lightweight side but still hits all of the major notes? This one is worth your time. Just be aware ahead of time that it is a bit lightweight, because otherwise you might be a touch disappointed.

Voron: Raven’s Story is certainly a flawed game, though to be fair it is an indie game largely made by one person and costs a mere $10, so one can only expect so much. The one thing the game truly has going for it, and what will determine whether you’ll enjoy it or not, are the unique flight mechanics. While I personally enjoyed it, I can definitely see it being a hard sell for most. I found the game was at its best during the challenges where I had to dodge obstacles and push my speed to the limit, but things fell off whenever I was simply traversing a large open area and gliding for long stretches. Still, if you’ve enjoyed the freedom of flying around in games and want a more relaxing and charming game about flight, Voron is certainly worth taking a look at.

Hamstermind offers a variety of unique challenges. Some work out better than others, but the experience is pretty high on the quality scale, for the most part. It’s an enjoyable romp, as long as you prepare yourself to get stumped, as the difficulty ramps up fast. You don’t see this sort of game too often these days, so if you’ve a hankering for games that really make you think, this could be a good choice. But maybe you could toss another hint or two my way, Righteous Tree? Thanks! Ahem.

GRIDbeat! has all the components of an excellent rhythm game: A unique aesthetic, addictive gameplay, a respectable difficulty curve, and (of course) a positively bumpin’ soundtrack. All of these qualities make it a relatively easy recommendation for fans of this genre, but each of them also has a depreciating caveat that lessens the experience. Somewhat samey level designs can occasionally cause visuals to lose their luster, a lack of meaningful change in the core gameplay loop, and very predictable difficulty spikes in each level are all snags that will come and go in different points throughout GRIDbeat! Everything mostly works the way it’s intended to, but it’s hard to ignore the missed potential. There’s no caveat for how enjoyable the soundtrack is, though. It’s just damn good.