Please consider liking my review on Steam - it means a lot to me!

One of the best puzzle games I've played in recent memory. What shines for me is the simplicity of it - every level consists of a 5x5 chess-like grid, and you receive anywhere from 1-5 pieces that need to be placed in order to power up or fuel up all your buildings on the map. And on this extremely basic premise, you have loads and loads of mechanical modifiers that ensure not only that each level is unique, but that each stretch of the game is unique as well.

Some stretches will have you dealing with spikes that come up and down on alternate turns, some will have you dealing with red crystals that prevent piece placement, and some will have you dealing with glitched patches that grow like a cancer, to name a few. The optional puzzles keep adding new mechanics, and the game is graceful enough to end before it becomes dull.

One of the things I loved about it is that, while some puzzles can be hard, there are just enough options that you can bruteforce the ones that stump you. Sure, it takes a bit of time and patience to do so, but it's better than getting stuck forever on a few levels like happened to me on Snakebird or Baba Is You.

All of that is wrapped in a game with a simplistic but confident art style that is charming and unique at the same time, some sound design that is arguably limited, but fits the atmosphere incredibly well, and some wordless environmental storytelling that works much better than it should.

How this game hasn't become a puzzling benchmark is beyond my understanding, but I hope my review at least help some people who are curious to finally give it a go!

Please consider liking my review on Steam - it means a lot to me!

After playing Technobabylon, a game I enjoyed a lot, I made a point of trying to play every Wadjet Eye games I could get my hands on, and Blackwell Legacy was the first one that I was able to. Well …. I'm certainly less excited about their back catalog now, let's put it that way.

First of all, Blackwell Legacy offers an experience that is much more akin to old school point & click games. Luckily the runtime is quite short, and there are few moon logic cases (I found two during my playthrough, which I won't spoil here but one involves Ouija Board connections and the other involves telephone shenanigans), but considering Technobabylon had none, this is a bit frustrating. It's an open world-ish game (to the P&C standards at least), meaning you could be stuck in a certain point with only possible option of what to do to advance the game, with no idea of where to go, what to do, who to talk to, what to say, what items to combine with what or to use where. Technobabylon solved it by 'locking' you in a small area with only items that are required in that area, reducing the amount of permutations possible. This is a great design choice that unfortunately the Blackwell Legacy lacks. This game still relies a lot on slow-traveling all over the place, some pixel-hunting, and trying everything everywhere if you get stuck, just in case.

While that's a low, some of the other things that made Technobabylon great are still on display here. You've got strong writing, superb voice acting, charming pixel art, and a well-realized world, albeit the one on display here is more mundane and less exciting/unique when compared to Technobabylon. Also, the pacing is a bit off, the game ended before it really got going, it feels there's very little in the way of a climax to the story, and that the credits roll before you have done what you were supposed to do. I don't know, it's weird.

If you're a hardcore point-and-click fan, you will probably like this one, but if you're casual about them maybe you better avoid it. General consensus is that the series picks up pace from here so I think I'll still try them, but it's very hard to really recommend this one as it is.

Please consider liking my review on Steam - it means a lot to me!

Every Metroidvania's fan wet dream. Proof that PICO-8 is a freaking powerhouse in the hands of skilled developers

Please consider liking my review on Steam - it means a lot to me!

It's everything everyone has said before. I struggle to say something original or unique about Disco Elysium, but it is a great game if you enjoy reading and roleplaying, which can easily be compromised if you decide to save scum or become a completionist. You walk around, you decide how you want to behave in this world starting from a shell of a former character, and you basically exist while also trying to solve a murder case. The whole gameplay is dialogue, and deciding which thoughts and skills to invest your hard-earned points on for the chance to unlock different conversation paths.

And it is incredible at that. The writing is of course the highlight, but I could not forget the voice acting, which is probably the best I've seen in a videogame, or at least in the Top 3. I literally cannot get EGG HEAD yelling HARD-CORE from my head

Instead of focusing on the highlights, I'll just point out two things I thought worked pretty poorly. The first is the Skill Check Lock system, which prevented me from experiencing two storylines I was invested into. Basically if you fail a White Check, you can retry it after investing points on your skill. I failed a 97% Suggestion with Lilienne and already had reached my 6-point cap in that skill, making it impossible to progress in that storyline. Maybe I could have forgotten old Thoughts, learned a new one, and increased my cap, but I could not know which one until I've done so and I didn't have so much free time and points around. A similar thing happened when doing the nightclub quest, where I failed the Physical Instrument check to open the fridge and had already hit my learning cap, effectively locking me out of a very interesting quest. I was still able to beat the game, but it left me a sour taste that the game softlocked me out of these quests - either give me alternative routes to progress, or give me a permanent fail state, but don't give me this partial failure that I'm unable to act on.

The other poor thing was the whole clothing system. Dressing HDB was lots of fun, and the reaction I got from some NPCs with my outfit was always solid, but it felt really time-consuming and unfun to stop conversation with White Checks in order to browse through my entire outfit to find that one or two pieces of clothing that will give me a boost. It was a waste of time and a break in immersion. It would be much better to leave clothing only for self-expression and flavor dialogue, and instead, have stat boosts linked to items that were always on, and that could be pawned for cash (which could then be used to buy other items with other always on boosts). That requires some balancing, but of course, the clothing system also needed some, it was just poorly implemented.

In summary, great game, incredible VA, it's long but it really hooks you in, and it is a fantastique experience most gamers (and all readers) will enjoy