Sitting at 28hrs, i’ve finally beaten FH6 (Legend island reached + all stamps collected). There’s still collectibles to find, and races to complete, but i’ve seen enough to write down my final thoughts. I’ll split this review into 3 categories, to sum up my feeling neatly.

The positives:
The game is overall, really great, if you’ve played any other Horizon game, this is not going to be that much different of an experience (for the good and bad that it brings).
The map is a massive step up from FH5’s flat and dull map, in verticality, roads, and the overall scenery.
Seasons are back, properly this time.
Career is so, so much better than the previous few entries, it’s still definitely far from FH1 levels (you still get showered with wheelspins and free cars), but it is night and day compared with before. The races having actual car class/type requirements means you actually have an incentive to drive different cars you wouldn’t have had any reason to try before, and that is enough to make the progression feel actually meaningful, and keep the races exciting.
The handling model has been improved, cars feel heavier overall, and are harder to recover from spins.
The characters you meet are much, much less grating than the FH5 cast. The writing is still pretty meh, but at least we are back at FH4 levels.

The meh:
Some of the new additions are just… pretty forgettable.
Aftermarket cars sound nice, but you realize a few hours in that the game showers you with so many cars from wheelspins, that there’s no reason to ever interact with this mechanic, since you’re pretty much guaranteed to always have an eligible vehicle to race with.
Car meets are just plain dead, every single time i’ve been to one it’s been totally empty, because instead of putting you in a new session filled with participating players (like they do with stunt party), it relies on people in your current session coming to the car meet and parking up. So we get a chicken and the egg situation where nobody comes to car meets, because they’re empty, and because they’re empty, nobody comes.
The customizable garages are nice, until you remember that you’re not going to be spending that much time in your garage. It’s going to get some use by photographers certainly, but most players probably won’t see them much.
Fast travel is now free and unlocked from the start, and the fast travel bonus boards are instead replaced by more XP boards. Kinda meh, the reward of getting free fast travel was a pretty big incentive for smashing boards, XP/mascots isn’t really much of a replacement.
The car list has been sliced and diced in half, removing some pretty basic cars that you’d expect in a Horizon game. I expect these to be drip fed back into the game over it’s lifespan, but it’s still somewhat annoying.
Trees are now made of paper mache, on one hand, this means that the tree density is increased considerably making for nicer looking terrain, but on the other, it just feels weird how they don’t even really slow you down.

The negatives:
The trailblazers have been butchered completely. Instead of getting a start and an end point and trying to find the fastest path like before, you are now basically guided down a straight line, with trees cut out so you know exactly where to go. It’s just now another turn off brain, go fast, type of stunt.
The showcase are pretty mediocre, and the last one is especially horrible, with it basically being “You recognize this name don’t you? Now clap”.
The soundtrack is, overall, pretty mediocre. This is very subjective of course, but there’s been a noticeable dip in quality between FH4 and FH5 for me, and this is more like FH5’s song selection, than FH4’s and before.
While the career is overall much improved, the constant showering of free cars means you are never forced to spend your hard earned money on new cars for races, so you end up sitting on piles of money just like in FH5.
Tuning and liveries still feel like it’s 2009. While you can at least tune your car out in freeroam, you still can’t do it on the pre-race screen, nor can you apply liveries or bodykits in freeroam (but you can apply bodykits through player-made tunes, make that make sense). The fact that you are also forced to sit through the downloading and applying of a livery just to preview it is just unacceptable, especially since if you do it through the autoshow there is no applying process, and you can preview liveries much quicker as a result. It’s baffling how even TCM has figured out a proper livery preview, but not Forza.
Player-made tunes locking you into a specific bodykit on a car is also quite baffling, i understand locking down the performance parts and pro settings, but why are we punished for using player-made tunes, with the inability to put on bodykits to our liking?

Now, while i just listed out quite a few complaints, they are all rather minor stuff in the grand scheme, as overall, the game is superb. Easily a straight up improvement over FH5, and feels more like a proper sequel to FH4, highly recommend!

TLDR: Yet another superb Horizon experience, but unfortunately, still riddled with minor issues that have been present with the series since it’s first entry.

The new Hitman trilogy is well and truly amazing, the gameplay is great for those that love stealth, and those that don’t care about because it’s made in such a way where any approach works.
However, this comes with a big but, and the reason why i’m giving it a negative review. IOI has handled the selling of the game in the worst possible way possible. Forcing people who bought Hitman 1 and 2 to have to rebuy them to play their content here, making confusing packages which make it a hell to know what version to buy, and having absolutely no way to transfer your progress cross-platform.
Shame on you IOI, because the game is truly amazing, but i can’t with good conscience give it a positive review when you continue to spit on the playerbase like this.

So… coming into this after playing Call of the Sea i was really not expecting much, but i’m happy to say that OOTB Games’ second game is a massive improvement over their first outing in basically every way possible.

The sluggish movement has been mostly fixed, the story now is actually interesting and genuinely hooks you from beginning to end (though it does still suffer from too much hand-holding) and the characters are actually enjoyable.

It’s of course not perfect though, and i do have two major gripes with it:
First, the game really does a terrible job at showing the player which objects are movable and which are not, making for a horrific experience in some puzzles until you figure out that you can actually move this one specific container when you couldn’t move any others.
Second, the cutscenes/dialogue is still unskippable and that drives me up the wall. If i fail a puzzle, i don’t want to see the same cutscene again, or have to stand still while some dialogue is playing, just let me skip it, or stop playing it after the first fail, please!

Overall though, the game is really great, the problems are somewhat annoying and bring the whole experience down a few points, but it’s still a solid 8/10. Recommend picking it up!

I can’t say anything that other reviews haven’t already said, so i’ll just say, i really enjoyed my 1.5 hours spent with Minit. Highly recommend it, especially at that price!

Trauma is certainly a vibe, and an immaculately crafted one at that, similar to something like Salad Fingers, slightly off-putting, yet extremely engaging. Considering it’s price and lenght, i won’t delve much into the details and instead i’ll just say, you should play it, it’s really damn good.

I was deliberating for a long time whether to give Cyberpunk a positive or negative rating, it was a really hard choice.

On one hand,
The story is great, the ending genuinely made me stop and think for a while, and the DLC was pretty damn good as well, the moment-to-moment gameplay is really fun, running around blasting people with a shotgun, or slicing them up with a katana, and it’s just overall a fun open-world to mess around in.

But,
Even 5 years after release, multiple patches, and a DLC release, the game is still so fucking buggy that it completely soured the experience for me. Every time when i was starting to get into it, i’d get hit by some random game-breaking bug, causing me to either have to reload my earlier save and lose some progress, or alt-tab out of the game and search for help on the internet. Not to mention the countless minor visual/gameplay bugs which ranged from somewhat funny to downright annoying. It just really put a dent in the whole experience for me, and they were so common that i can’t just put them aside.

Overall, at it’s core Cyberpunk is a great game, but it’s still a technical mess, even all these years after release. It’s like being offered the best candy in the world, but to get it, you have to eat through a whole turd. For some it may be worth it, but i… just can’t in good faith come out with a grin after it.
The game is definitely worth playing through at least once, but i think it still requires more time in the oven, wait a few years, let CDPR fix some more things, let modders do the rest, and then give it a proper try, it’s worth it.

Gato Roboto is a decently sized, short and sweet, yet quite challenging metroidvania. Overall for the price, definetly worth picking up! My first run took around 3hrs, if you look to complete 100% it will probably take even longer, good game!

Mom can we get Forza Horizon
We already have Horizon at home
Horizon at home:

Fairly enjoyable survivors-like with some questionable boss balancing, butt-clenching bullet hell sections, and interesting story elements. Worth trying out if you’re into these sorts of games.

It’s suika game but pool, nothing more, nothing less. Kinda expensive for what you get, but worth it on sale for a chill experience.

As the title suggests, Minit Fun Racer is indeed a rather fun (if a bit too short) racer, with the gameplay loop of race, upgrade, race further, which is pretty easy to get sucked into until you buy out the entire shop, plus there’s also a bunch of challenges if you’re into that. The game takes about 20 minutes to beat, though you could get another 30-60 minutes out of it just trying to complete all the challenges.
Is it worth the price? Well… i usually don’t mind short games, but this is extremely short, and the price is a bit much considering what you get out of it, however the fact that all the proceeds go to charity, makes it a much easier pill to swallow. Think of it more as a donation to charity, with a fun game as a bonus, rather than the other way around.

TLDR: Very short, but still fun, recommend!

RDR is a game i’ve tried to finish multiple times previously, but always gave up somewhere through the story due to finding it extremely boring. Now that it’s come to PC (and after really enjoying RDR2), i thought it might be the time to finally give it a proper start to finish attempt. Especially since it’s been years since i last attempted it on the PS3 and i was way younger back then.

And…. no, unfortunately my younger self was right, RDR1 just isn’t that great, especially for a Rockstar title. The story is extremely predictable, all of the characters are one-note stereotypes that for the most part just aren’t all that interesting or funny (except Uncle, still the GOAT) and the map isn’t that great either. The fact this was released two years after GTA IV doesn’t help either, it feels more like a PS2 era Rockstar game with next gen graphics rather than an actual next gen experience, like San Andreas set in the Wild West, minus the funny characters and car crashes. I just genuinely can’t see the appeal in playing RDR1 if you’re not wearing nostalgia glasses.

TLDR: Skip unless you’re looking for a nostalgia hit, the cut multiplayer doesn’t help either. Just go play one of the other superb Rockstar games instead.

Sonic Frontiers is a game that manages to snatch mediocrity from the jaws of greatness, and it’s so upsetting, because it comes so damn close to it.

The first two islands are simply great, but then you get hit with the dreaded Chaos Island, and it’s like the level designers forgot how to design levels for a 3D open world. It’s filled with random booster pads that lock you into a 2D section you can’t escape, and they’re scattered everywhere so you’re guaranteed to hit one by accident, and get slightly annoyed. Times that by 100 and you start to understand why it’s so horrible. By the last island it gets back to it’s footing, but it’s kinda too little too late by that point to counteract the horrible experience of the Chaos Island.

Not to mention, the simply horrible pop-in issues, platforms will only appear once you’re standing relatively close to them, so you can never see them from far away. This is simply unacceptable in the modern day, especially on maxed out graphics settings and makes traversal a chore sometimes, because you have no idea where the platforms you need will be.

But, and this is a big but, i can’t understate how fun Sonic is just to run around with, especially on the first two islands. The levels are fun, and the bosses too in their own ways, even though they are total pushovers. It’s enough to make me positive on the game overall, and hopeful for a sequel some day, but not enough for me to recommend this wholeheartedly to everyone. Recommend picking up on sale, and just trying to speedrun the 3rd island as fast as possible.

TLDR: A good game, brought down by a horrible 3rd island. Mild recommend.

If i were to sum up my experience playing If Found in one word, it would probably be “Meh”.

The artstyle is really nice, same for the music, but the main meat and potatoes of any visual novel comes down to it’s story, and in this case also it’s gameplay.

Let’s start off with the gameplay, to advance the story you have to erase each page before moving onto the next, and while seeming like a cool idea at first, it grows old very fast and just becomes extremely annoying to deal with while trying to read the story. It’s really the main reason this review is negative, rather than a mild positive.

Now the other main part, the story. This part is always rather subjective, but it just didn’t click with me that much. It was plain alright, slightly emotional at the end, but i can’t say it was worth dealing with the annoying erase mechanic just to read it.

To sum it up, If Found tries to reinvent the wheel for the visual novel genre, and utterly fails, making it’s alright story take a back seat to a frankly terrible gameplay mechanic. Maybe worth it on sale if you’re really intrigued by the story, but in my opinion an easy skip.

Rack and Slay is…. alright. Which is somewhat unfortunate, as the base gameplay is really fun at it’s core, but it’s just not that fun to replay, you’ve seen all the game has to offer on your first run basically, there’s a few items which make each run a cakewalk, and the rest is forgettable, and not to mention, the runs are just way too short, with not much variety between them (i.e. room layouts, enemies, items etc.).
Now all of these negatives have to be kept in mind with it’s pretty low price, which is a huge counterweight to most of these issue, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t solve them, and unfortunately just leaves you with a really fun gameplay concept that has rather shallow execution. Mild recommend.

The Complex is plain okay, akin to a 5/10 movie, only really saved by the great performances from the actors involved. The sound mixing is pretty terrible, the plot is predictable and some of the writing is really weak but it’s not outright unwatchable either, just really forgettable. Not really worth it, even on sale, i think you’d have more fun just watching a decent movie.

CODE Bunny is fine, and that’s about it. It doesn’t really outshine others in it’s genre, nor is it horrible to play. It probably would have gotten a thumbs up were it not for the terribly designed last level.
The whole story takes about an hour to do, two if you do both characters, and you can get a few more hours out of the speedrun mode if you’re so inclined.
As for the actual game, let’s start off with the positives:
The soundtrack and art are both great, the movement is really fluid and it feels fun to jump around, bounce off enemies and use abilities, in general you can tell a whole lot of love and effort went into it.
However,
The difficulty is just a joke, the first four levels/bosses are absurdly easy, like “just spam one button and win easy”, and then the last level and boss are such an absurd jump in difficulty that you are just left wondering “what the hell happened”. Yliaster Core decides to introduce insta-kill red walls, that once touched bring you back to the checkpoint in the midway of the stage, and they are dropped everywhere, often in places you can’t even see until you’re close enough to be dead, it’s not fun to deal with, and is just a pain. But that is nothing compared to the final boss, which introduces two insta-death pits on either side of stage. When the best way to deal with bosses is to dash into them, you can imagine how annoying it becomes not to die because you failed to miss an enemy attack, but because you accidentally dashed into a death hole, again, and again, and again. This might have been passable had the difficulty been increased gradually, but instead we get this.
Honorable mention to the story which tries to be emotional, but fails horribly. 1 hour is just not enough for me to care about any of the characters, even more so their relationships and backstories.

TLDR: Nothing special (except the absurd difficulty jump at the end), worth buying if you’ve already played through all the greats, otherwise skip.

Call of the Sea is, at face value, an okayish puzzle adventure game with a somewhat interesting plot. However the longer you play it, the more it’s issues become apparent, and turn into a slog that you just want to end as soon as possible.

To preface this, let’s start with the good: Semi-interesting story that pulls you along for the first half of the game, some of the puzzles are really fun to solve, the VA and music is really good.

Now, the bad: The story somewhat falls apart in the final-half, becoming quite predictable, and the main character going “huh, what’s going on” in every location after everyone and their mother knows what’s going on gets really old. Some of the puzzles are just terribly obtuse and require you to interact with basically everything in the environment so you can get the clues in your notebook and be able to actually solve the puzzle, not too fun. And this is all summed up by the biggest issue in the game, which is the sluggish movement and animations. They make it so that most of the time, you’ve already solved the puzzle in your head, and are just spending the rest of the time “running”, swimming or climbing up ladders to get to the other part of the puzzle. It’s not fun in the slightest, especially since there is nothing to do in-between puzzles, so the slow movement makes it that much more of a chore, and probably elongates the game time by about an hour. This was a painful experience for free, and for the full price? Don’t do it, get something else.

I have to say, games like Children of the Sun hurt the most to play. It’s one thing when a game is irredeemably bad, and you can tell that there was no saving it, but here, you can tell passion went into it, and the actual core idea of the game is great. Unfortunately, the execution leaves a lot to be desired, and ends up completely ruining what good ideas there might have been.

Now before i start, let me go over the positives:
The artstyle is absolutely superb, i love every bit of it, same with the music, fits the game perfectly. The idea is also really fun at it’s core, and in the few levels where it’s actually properly used, it’s really fun.

And with that out of the way, time for the main meat and potatoes of what made me despise this game by the end.
To start off, the story is just downright bad, it’s like a teenager in their edgy rebel phase got tasked with writing and designing it. You can just see the edginess dripping off it, and it’s not done very well either, completely squandering that whole part of the game. By the end, i was just skipping the cutscenes entirely, and that actually made it slightly more enjoyable.
The levels are also randomly broken up by utterly horrible minigames, that control terribly, have obnoxious SFX and UI, and just aren’t fun to beat at all.
But these are just minor issues compared to the next one, which is… the level design for 95% of the game. You’d think a game where you can control a bullet and have to kill every single person in one shot, would be all about trying to figure out the perfect path, and executing it, right? Well, i thought so too before playing it, but no. The game is actually Where’s Waldo, trying to find all the hidden enemies around the map, and once you’ve found them all, you can pretty easily beat most of the levels first try. I don’t understand at all why the main challenge of the game was turned into finding enemies hidden in random obscure spots, instead of making levels where you can easily see where everyone is, but have to figure out a path to get to all of them. It completely squanders any potential that the game had with it’s (pretty damn interesting) idea, and it hurts even more because there are 2-3 levels late in the game that do actually play out like this. You easily see all the enemies, but just have to figure out a path that weaves inbetween all the obstacles, and guess what? They’re really damn fun, and easily the best levels of the whole game, which just hurts even more.

TLDR: It’s not worth it, not even on sale. Hopefully someone takes the idea from this game, and lets it shine to it’s full potential, but this… this ain’t it chief.

Being free is probably the only redeeming quality of this game. Unfortunately it plays like a poor man’s rip off of The Stanley Parable/Superliminal, in the most literal sense of the word. There’s a lot of jokes that are just straight up ripped 1 for 1, some with slight changes, some with none at all. All of this is summed up with a main storyline that is ok at best,”bonus” content that is painful to play through and a DLC that is less of a DLC and more of a “here’s the rest of the content that you were blocked from playing for no reason”. Really not worth wasting your time on, just play one of the other games i’ve mentioned, even if they’re paid, they are well worth it, unlike this.

Potatoman Seeks the Troof is genuinely atrocious, and does not hold up one bit for the present day. It’s the exact game you’d expect with from the early 2010s, rage platformer that’s clear youtuber bait with “rawr xd aren’t we so quirky” writing. Just skip, unless you’re really itching to go back to the 2010s.

Pure unreal engine slop that does a worse job at showing off games than any trailer showcase has ever done.

Genuinely quite terrible, and even if the dev is self-aware, that doesn’t change much. A boring endless runner with flappy bird-esque controls, with it’s only saving grace being a free Steam key to another game. Hard pass.