This game should be used as a supplement for neurodivergency tests. I was expecting a nice little game of putting stuff away neatly, in order of size or color, and it's not that I was completely bamboozled, but other solutions range from elaborate to "why the hell would you be doing this in the first place". Straightening photos, sorting documents, even organising your seashell collection is par for the course, but you can't convince me that there are people out there aligning their clocks' handles with the shadow of the tree outside their house or arranging the flies on their beloved spider's web in a symmetrical pattern. But if there are… please, seek help, and I do mean that genuinely. Go to therapy, hang out with your family or friends, take up a new hobby. Life doesn't have to be this suffocating. It's also beyond me that the main character has a cat. How on earth can you be this married to the idea of keeping every little aspect of your life this tidy, and yet have a pet that will come and ruin all of your work just for fun? Anyway, this one goes out to all the people who still think cats are getting a bad rep in media; there are so many games out there that treat cats like four-legged gods, and this is definitely one of them. Also, the only reason I haven't finished this game yet is the stupid "daily tidy" - a selection of 20 (or so) levels from the main game with some slight visual changes here and there that rotates daily. That by itself would be okay, but the achievements want you to do these for a hundred days… I'll take "PADDING" for $200, Alex. At first, these were frustrating because I didn't get into the main game, now they're just frustrating because it's all the same stuff, every day.

I haven't seen a lot of the show, but I've heard that it's gotten popular for being all about having fun and enjoying life with your family and friends organically, no electronics involved, so I'm intrigued. I can't afford to subscribe to the service that offers the show in its entirety, though, so I figured I might as well play the game first. There are four short episodes to play through as sort of a story mode, each of which unlocks a new location to run around and play at, plus a fifth one for completing all episodes. Each location has an assortment of collectibles to find, as well as stickers for your sticker book. Finding those collectibles and playing minigames (unlocked during the story) leads to unlocking various hats for the Heeler family, and there's a load of them! And oh yeah, you can choose to play as any member of the Heeler family, at pretty much any time, which is fun. Also, don't forget about watering the plants! That was a thing introduced during the story mode, but I somehow blanked it out until right near the end of my hunt for all the collectibles and that became a pain in the butt. I also found the achievements for completing the minigames five times in a row rather redundant, it's not like anything in the game changes after you do that, and if you've done enough other stuff before that, you won't even get any new hats for it. All in all, though, I can't judge it too harshly - Bluey is made with kids in mind and I feel like - however ironic it may be - this game will keep all the little fans (and their parents) busy for a lot longer. It may also be worth mentioning that even though it's published by Outright Games (because of course it is), this game isn't broken. Or, well, it's just a bit borked, but that only gives it charm and doesn't actually impede the gameplay in any way.

This game absolutely owns my baby bitch ass. Since I got myself a Game Pass sub again recently, picking it up from where I left off two years ago was very much on the table, and so I assumed I could just pop in for two hours a day… boy, how wrong I was. There was so much to catch up on that it became a timesink right away. I opened it up for the first time and ever since then, April has become a black hole. I can finally write about it, though, as I have officially completed all story quests, and in turn, beaten the game. (That was, like, 25 hours ago…) From now on, it's pretty much all cosmetic - critter feeding, crafting, buying out Scrooge's store for the day - and slowly, but surely, I'll be working my way towards the rest of the achievements. I will say, though, I caught up just in time for the new update that came out today… and I'm ready to get into it right after I post this.

This is one of those games that's been somewhere at the back of my mind since I learned of it before its release. Now that it's out and on Game Pass since day one, and it's really short (1-2 hours, according to HLTB), I knew I had to play it ASAP. Well… it's a walking simulator, which is a-okay with me, but looking at the gorgeous character art, I was expecting something more than a few short animation loops during conversations. In any case, you play as 16 year-old Tess Devine, and along with your mom, Opal, you're cleaning and packing up to move out of your grandma's house after her recent passing. After getting prompted to check out the attic, however, you uncover a secret that grandma Helen has kept for decades. Exploration is great, there's a lot of stuff you can pick up, even though it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things (possible alternate title 1: "Ashtray Pickup Simulator") and the locations themselves are full of life, but whenever you need to find something to proceed further, it's never a challenge of any sort. Half the gameplay is asking Opal about all the interesting stuff you find and whatever conversation or story comes out of that (possible alternate title 2: "Hey, mom!" Simulator"), and it genuinely miffs me that whenever you pick something up and it's just Tess commenting on it, Opal absolutely never chimes in - that's just unrealistic, considering it's her childhood we're investigating here and makes the game feel more empty than it already is, considering you don't get to see the characters occupy the space they're in unless they're talking to each other. Also, if you ask Opal to elaborate on an item you just picked up, you can see it locked in mid-air in the spot where you were looking at it seconds ago. Clearly not supposed to happen, but still funny. There's no satisfying climax or conclusion to the secret or what might happen to Tess and Opal after they move out, but alas, that's very much like real life, I suppose. It may not have been nearly as wondrous as What Remains of Edith Finch, but I still enjoyed the journey aspect of it. I saw a little bit of myself and my mom in Tess and Opal, and I feel like that's enough to still keep this game in the back of my mind, just in case I might manage to get my mom to play it one day. All in all, it was engrossing enough to play through in one sitting, but it's definitely too expensive for how short it is, so once again, I'm glad that I got to play it through Game Pass. (Also, maybe this is more of a me issue, but even though the voiceover is only available in English, the game language was set to Polish by default, and I couldn't change it back to English? Other choices included German and Russian, which makes total sense, and then… Brazilian Portuguese, for some reason? Seriously, the lack of a choice to go back to English is just confusing to me.)

This ain't my first rodeo… so I got my friend to watch me play it. I've only beaten it while streaming it for her, cause after that there's really nothing new to unlock… yet still a bunch of achievements left to obtain. Well, what can I say… it'll get repetitive from this point on, but I still love this game. It hits the cozy spot like nothing else, and after I complete it here, I will have completed it three times, each one on a different platform. Looking forward to trying out the sequel in the future.

Now that I'm branching out to all the other copycats, I've noticed there's an overwhelming amount of these made with just… well, cats. So to postpone that for a bit, I chose to play this one instead. The underwater kingdom location looked pretty cute and the BGM was nice, too. 's just a shame it was so easy.

I appreciate that this one used pictograms as hints. My favorite part was definitely "embassy" being lumped in with words starting with the letter U. Only one more to go now.