SaGa Emerald Beyond is a game that pushes the boundaries of player patience with its complex systems and lack of coherent storytelling. While it innovates with its combat mechanics and the breadth of worlds to explore, the game struggles to provide a cohesive and engaging narrative experience. Characters feel underdeveloped, and the story is often confusing, leaving players to piece together the plot without much guidance. Despite these challenges, the game offers a depth of strategy that may appeal to hardcore fans of the series or genre.

Everything in Kawaii Deathu Desu is hidden behind a repetitive mechanic that forces you to level up characters to progress. The lack of accessibility options for this console port is a considerable oversite and makes navigate any menu within the game a chore. Sure, the character sprites are cute, but that’s no reason to endure a cramping wrist for hours of clicking. You’ll more than likely break the shoulder buttons of your Joy-Con long before you unlock everything this game has to offer.

Neptunia ReVerse is a title that sticks too closely to its roots to be a standout, next-gen experience. Despite the presence of a moderately entertaining gameplay loop, decent mechanics, and delightful character banter, the embarrassingly feeble graphical quality, lack of innovation for the series, and disturbingly overt reliance on old systems from a Vita remake from over half a decade ago brings this experience down more than a few notches.

Olympic Games Tokyo 2020: The Official Video Game is a functional and serviceable sports video game at best. While it features various events, the play mechanics and controls are too basic, so there isn't much long-term replay value. The biggest problem here is that the experience sits somewhere between a sports simulator and an arcade game, and it doesn't succeed with either approach.

Sailing Era is a beautiful game where the developers put a lot of thought into its presentation and historical enactment. Still, unfortunately, this title is constantly held back due to its frustrating gameplay loop, combined with a highly awkward machine translation. Unless you have a walkthrough on hand or have an immense amount of patience to fight your way through sheer trial and error, by the twelfth time you reset your save, you probably would’ve wanted to set aside time and play something else at that point.

Narin: The Orange Room is a short but visually striking indie horror puzzle game that captures attention with its strong atmosphere and distinct art direction, though it struggles to fully deliver on its narrative ambitions. While its moody environments and evolving puzzle design show clear promise, issues with pacing, localization, and storytelling cohesion prevent it from reaching its full potential, making it an intriguing but uneven debut.

Yes, Your Grace’s clean presentation and likable plot elements do a lot to win over the player, but it’s not enough to stomach the bad taste left by vague objectives and arbitrary fail states.

Ruined King: A League of Legends Story is a competent narrative adventure for fans of the base game, but it barely scrapes by as a standalone game for newcomers to the series. The turn-based combat mechanics are refreshing, and the story elements are there. Still, the number of outdated gameplay components and flagrant unpolish that make progression borderline impossible ultimately makes this an engaging spectacle than an enjoyable playable experience.

The Villainess Is Adored by the Prince of the Neighbor Kingdom offers a charming love story with beautiful illustrations, but it’s held back by poor translation quality, a lackluster interface, and limited narrative depth. While fans of isekai romance may enjoy Tiararose’s journey, the title falls short of genre standards in both writing and presentation.

To truly do this game justice, mechanics needed to be updated to make the overall experience more enjoyable. Faster pace and more fluid gun gameplay could bring new audiences. The game should be played by anyone who has never experienced the series and are interested enough to visit the Darkside themselves. I’m sure longtime fans will feel that nostalgic love, playing this occult hit exactly as it was published two decades ago but personally, I feel it could have been left on the shelf.

Milky Way Prince: The Vampire Star uses an experimental visual style to tell a story about a topic that is very tough to talk about. While it exceeds in conveying these themes, it feels empty and pushy. All of the actual content in the game is condensed into the first few hours, and then there’s really nothing more to it. I enjoyed the artistic approach and themes, but the execution makes it tough to recommend.

Reverie: Sweet As Edition is a cute 16-bit game. While its presentation has everything you’d want from a retro-inspired adventure, its systems sadly don’t hold up. The entire experience is over before you know it, with the credits rolling to an unfulfilling conclusion. Regardless, the price is right for this release, but I can’t help but urge you to play something else.

This is the Zodiac Speaking is a decent psychological thriller significantly hurt by the Switch’s underpowered hardware. The narrative is there, but everything else falls short in terms of visuals, graphical glitches, and sound. There are some nice features here, but I urge you to play the PC version if you can.

Spiral Memoria manages to be a competent otome game, doing everything that is expected from the genre, but in the process fails to make a distinctive experience, leaving the game entirely forgettable. The story is generic, the structure is inherently flawed, and the presentation is average. If you’re simply looking to have pretty boys romance you, then you may be okay with what this game offers, but the premise seems to be pulled right out of a standard list of what makes an otome game.

The additional enemy types and weapons are appreciated, but the gameplay is still riddled with bugs and performance issues. Given that it’s a standalone game priced at $20, I expected more content considering the full base game is priced at $40. For the amount of content offered versus the price, I suggest playing Serious Sam 4 first, which has been patched up since launch and is usually on sale. However, if you’re just craving more Serious Sam, well then, this game is for you.

Awaken - Astral Blade delivers flashes of promise with its boss battles and combat mechanics but ultimately suffers from repetitive enemies, lackluster exploration, and a weak narrative. While the game has its moments, it fails to reach the heights of other China Hero Project titles.

In theory, a co-op, loot-based isometric RPG like The Ascent has the potential of being a great cyberpunk-themed experience to play with a group of friends. The world-building is appealing visually and aurally, but it’s ultimately unsatisfying and often unrewarding during exploration. The lack of replayability, broken cooperative play, bugs, and unbalanced artificial enemy difficulty make it tough to appreciate its positive elements. It’s sad to say that The Ascent is another over-hyped cyberpunk game that is all fluff and no substance.

Kandagawa Jet Girls is not a good racing game, it’s not even a good fanservice game. Nothing from the developer’s previous works can be found here, and we are left with a dull and uninteresting experience. The quality animations and unlockable content can’t save this game, which makes me wonder why it was localized at all.

Anything good about the game is immediately overshadowed with the things that players need to look past, which is terrible because I really enjoyed the dark premise of this game. As unique as Arc of Alchemist tries to be, and as much as it stands out in the lineup of games that Compile Heart has produced, I believe this a huge step back for the developer. Still, if you are just trying to fight monsters and look at cute chibi characters save the world, then this is the game for you.

Charade Maniacs has so much potential, but the cast becomes bloated, and the conclusion comes way too early without any level of fanfare to cap off the routes. The narrative ends up tripping over itself as it tries to balance all the relationships, causing Sena to be more of an everchanging object for plot progression instead of her own character. The translation also comes across as questionable due to the inconsistencies within the cast. Sadly, the few memorable routes aren’t strong enough to carry enough the flimsy plot.

Death Note: Killer Within attempts to bring the tension and drama of the iconic anime into a social deduction game format. While it offers solid fan service with familiar characters like Light, L, and Ryuk, the gameplay feels overly familiar and limited, failing to innovate within its genre. Frequent technical issues, limited task variety, and an underwhelming use of the Death Note itself make it difficult to recommend, even to die-hard fans. There are moments of charm and humor, but overall, Killer Within struggles to live up to its potential.

The Fox’s Way Home is a decent dance experience. The low-stakes narrative and gameloop remove any tension or frustration you may have with a spot-the-difference game, and the cute fox girl makes it more worthwhile. You’ll know if this is a game for you after a glance, but whether you’re willing to pay full price now or wait for a sale is up to you. There are a few options and modes that I feel were left out that would make the post-game replayability easier to recommend, but as it stands, this game begins and ends too quickly

Seeing that Project Eden is designed to be a story-driven game, I could have overlooked these issues and took the game as it was meant to be. Instead, what I feel it was meant to be was a game that could have been more fleshed out with more weapons, abilities, and an extra round polish. Because for such a small team to develop a complete vision of a sci-fi world, it seems that all was needed was some more time.

To enjoy Sword of the Necromancer requires you to be invested in the narrative, but to do that, you’ll have to get through gameplay that lacks many refinements that a roguelike needs. The system of bringing monsters back alive to fight for you is limited because you have to manage only four slots of items, which often shadows the game’s most unique systems. As charming as this game looks, it doesn’t ever become a challenging adventure or an interesting experience.

South of Midnight feels like a game that wanted to soar but never really left the ground. It’s undeniably gorgeous and hints at a level of creativity that, under better direction, could have led to an unforgettable adventure. However, between the undercooked combat, stilted platforming, and a meandering story that can’t decide on its central theme, it’s tough to recommend without a few asterisks. Hazel deserved more, and so did we. For now, South of Midnight remains a curiosity—worth a glance if you’re keen on its aesthetics or folk-infused premise, but ultimately lacking the cohesion it needs to shine.

Utawarerumono: ZAN on PC delivers a visually engaging yet narratively shallow musou adaptation of Mask of Deception, best suited for existing fans of the series. While it features flashy 3D visuals and a solid soundtrack, its gameplay loop and storytelling fall short of the source material's depth.

Danmachi Infinite Combate is sadly not a good experience for fans or newcomers. It fails on both its visual novel and gameplay offerings with strange design choices and uninspired execution. Post-game offerings aren’t enough to warrant getting through this mobile-like game brought to console. Still, that may not stop the most diehard Hestia fans from enjoying some aspects of it.

Code Shifter is a game that had me extremely excited when I saw it but managed to not only dash my expectations but bury them six feet underground. Inconsistent hitbox placement, a lack of movement options, and a lackluster story made for a game with a whole lot of missed potential.