A really small game with even smaller mazes. All of them are based around a different mechanic, each more intriguing than the next. There's no time limits or enforced play order. Most importantly, I'm proud to report that I solved 18 of them without looking for help. If you've got an hour to spare and want to get your brain working, this is the game for you.

This one had to wait its turn for a while now, ha! It's got a separate slider for meowing, which I turned down… maybe a little more than I would have liked, but I couldn't be bothered to tweak the settings again. The ability to "find" seagulls is funny, and various random things making their own sounds when clicked on is a nice touch.

Despite my mixed feelings towards Figment, I couldn't help but pick up the sequel right away. This time, all the locations create a cohesive whole, if only because the overarching puzzle mechanic lies within the Perspective Switch, which allows you to change the state of mind from close-minded to open-minded and back again when needed. Both states have a distinct look and sound to them, and listening to various Opinions to see how they change between them is entertaining. There's a lot more fighting this time around, with much more variety in enemy types and movesets (with another point for cohesion, they're all presumed to have been planted by the villain, matching their theme and color scheme), as well as the option to strike harder right after a dodge. You can now also collect smaller health points dropped by enemies after defeat, in addition to the pre-programmed big ones. The puzzling aspect has also gotten an upgrade - it's no longer only about figuring out the right order to push buttons or switch levers to get to the next part of the world, but even when it is, it feels more inspired than in the first game. Lastly, there's the Ethics Maze. It (and consequently, The Ditch) stand out as the only locations with a distinctly different visual style. At a certain point of their journey through it, Dusty and Piper fall down to The Ditch and have to find their way out of it. As the name might suggest, The Ditch is where Opinions that were unable to reach the end of the maze have made their dwelling and right away, they don't make a good impression on the main characters. At one point, a choir of these Opinions forms to sing a song about what it is they believe in that The Mind at large doesn't. Between some inconsequential and more ridiculous ideas ("Pineapple pizzas rock" - please let this 'argument' die already; "Video games can't be musicals" - I don't know who told the devs that, but they're clearly proving those people wrong), and the very obviously harmful thoughts ("I can still drive, 'cause it's only my fifth beer", "Having another child will save this relationship"), a certain one stands out. "Vaccines cause autism" is now a rejected opinion of The Mind; what character development! It's possibly the greatest upgrade to the franchise, but it doesn't excuse The Plague's song from the first game entirely. Also, the sense of humor could use some work. Dusty is still mean to Piper for no reason (as if Courage and Optimism can't coexist?) and some of the puns, while creative, just aren't all that funny. All that's left for me to play now is Back to Bed, the earlier, unrelated game.

Much like Her Story, this game tasks you with finding out what happened to the person of interest by watching a series of videos. Here, it's established that you work as a data decrypter (which is alluded to as not being a particularly cheap service) and help people learn more about why they might have chosen to leave this world behind. Jessika is one of such people, with her father blindsided by her passing. After he gives you her login credentials, you're free to start looking. After watching the first few videos, you're going to want to look up keywords to find more, but to me, this system is somewhat busted. I can kind of understand that searching for pronouns yields no results (it could be a preventative measure against being handed everything on a silver platter), but then some videos don't appear at all for certain keywords even though they contain them and vice versa, and some keywords have to be input in plural form, otherwise they don't work. The game was originally made in German, along with all the footage, which doesn't bother me, but the English dub track… I switched to it for just a second and it sounded like an afterthought, as if the actress shut herself in a closet with a mic in one hand and the script in the other. An English translation for the game is available, and as weird as this may sound, I'm glad that visually there's nothing important to pay attention to in any of the videos, because the translations are provided not in the form of regular subtitles, but a thin textbox to the side of the media player, which expands vertically as the script appears; this is bad enough by itself, but it's also not at all timed to match the footage. I did consider at some point that this was a design choice, given that the icon for the translation is an outline in the shape of a globe, implying the appearance of a real-time translation plug-in rather than embedded subtitles (which make sense in Her Story, thanks to the setting). While that's neat as an idea, I feel something like this is absolutely worth sacrificing the "immersion". Another "preventative measure"/mechanic (?) is that all the files are categorized by varying degrees of encryption, with gray files being the least heavily encrypted and red files being the most heavily encrypted. This is just kind of dumb, because it's not like there's any way to learn which keywords are needed to unlock which files, so the only way to play the game "correctly" is to bookmark each and every locked video and check back up on them from time to time; not to mention that it's pointless to lock videos with content that isn't particularly deep into the story, when just about any other FMV game in a similar vein will be open enough that you'll get to the very last video (and get the option to finish your playthrough) before you watch all the footage anyway. I mentioned pronouns already, but some verbs don't yield any results either, and when I looked at the guide, I realized I wouldn't have come up with a bunch of the keywords anyway. I tried my best to pick out three, four words from each and every video I watched at some point, and not even that was enough. Another thing that I feel is worth mentioning is the overstimulation caused by everything secondary to your goal. In Her Story and Telling Lies, your goal is to find and watch enough videos to learn what happened in the characters' lives; besides that, there's a simple game resembling any other casual game one would expect to come with a new computer - you might want to play it for the achievement tied to it or you might not care about it at all, but the choice is yours. In Jessika, the moment you hear something interesting in a video you're watching, you're either going to get prompted to tell your colleagues about it, receive another vague, anonymous email, or get startled by the screen glitching out for no reason (someone on the dev team must have liked SIMULACRA a bit too much); sometimes, those things happen almost at once, which is extremely distracting and, in the end, does not influence anything. And then there's the actual story… oh, boy. In short, Jessika is a story about how drastically the hardships one goes through can end up altering their life. For Jessika, parental neglect and sexual assault may have very well been the catalysts for falling in with the wrong kind of people, and ultimately, growing into a radicalized outlook. However - and I'm merely echoing what I've gathered from the negative reviews I've read - the approach taken here culminates into somewhat of an unfortunate tool for further radicalization. Jessika is presented as someone who's easy to relate to or sympathize with and at no point is there any attempt from any of the other characters to decidedly condemn her beliefs. To add insult to injury, though I can't compare this against the German script, the translation for one of the videos contains the N-word, with a hard R, uncensored. There really is nothing to gain from not censoring a slur, but if you feel you must use it (which I realize is messed up to say, I don't mean to pretend like the concept of "giving/getting a pass" is anything that should be genuinely exercised), then at least censor it properly. TL;DR: The devs saw the success of Her Story and SIMULACRA and said "bet", ended up mishandling a subject requiring careful approach.

I don't know that I know when the last day of spring is supposed to be, anyway. I completed the first one on June 21st, this year I raced to complete the sequel before June 22nd came to an end… either way, it's hard to comment on how the story progressed (sorry not sorry, devs, I don't replay prequels, no matter how long it's been), but it's just another game from Sapphire Dragon Productions - if you played one, you've played them all. The character art in this one is vastly different from the prequel and the standout of the whole thing, but that's about it.

If I remember correctly, this is one of those games I saw in the store one day, wishlisted based on the concept alone, then went on about my day. At some point, it came out, then eventually became free-to-play, and now, I've played through it. Since I'm not necessarily interested in playing my own music or challenging friends to a match, this game took so little time to complete I'm glad I didn't have to pay for it. The premise is interesting - playing ping-pong against physical manifestations of the five stages of grief - but there's barely any more story than you'd get from solving a maze printed on the back of a cereal box. As for the gameplay, I think it's really good, the timing is very tight and there are some cool modifiers at play. I was initially discouraged from trying the game out by the negative reviews that focused on how hard the game is, and I'm not sure if the timing got adjusted later or what, but I didn't feel like it was unacceptably difficult. That being said, I would definitely change the order of the levels, so that the fox's level comes before the monkey and the manatee, 'cause it's a lot easier. And even more importantly, though it might look cool, I think the menu screen should include words that actually tell you what is what. There is a "No Fail" mode you can turn on in the settings if you're struggling, but I misunderstood the option, and as I realized later, I had played through most of the game without it… so after I turned it on, I went ahead to play the last stage and didn't need it at all, 'cause it was so easy. This same dev has released another sports-themed rhythm game, which they also later made free-to-play, so I'll probably be playing it soon.

Okay, I was way too harsh on the first game back when I first played it. Who cares that it's easy as balls? The art style isn't bad, either. I decided to pick this one up while waiting for my friend to finish her game, and it turned out to require the perfect amount of time and level of engagement. Samantha thought she just completed a solid project, but oh, no! She worked for the wrong person! Because my write-up on the previous game was so crap, I have no chance of recalling who did or didn't appear before and what's happened since then, but what's important now is that she has to work against her new enemy and to bring them down, she needs to travel all around the world, collecting fragments of the Heart of Midas, as well as other artifacts associated with the king with a golden touch. The main drawback of this version (and the source of most negative Steam reviews) is that the .exe does not launch/run properly; to make the game work, you need to download a different .exe file, kindly linked in the forums, and replace the original one with it. In case anyone's wary of things like these: that's what I did; the game worked fine and I got no malware. After this one, two more Samantha Swift games were released, but neither of them are available on Steam, so who knows if I'll ever play them.

I first spotted this game when I noticed one of the curators I follow reviewed it and after a quick look at the screenshots, I immediately fell in love. A rhythm game with a pretty art style and gameplay reminiscent of Rhythm Heaven, and it's free?! I downloaded it right away. From the very beginning, it was a bit odd that the store page didn't have a direct download button. (I can only assume this is some sort of a region-lock issue? Even though the game itself is not region-locked?) Then, it immediately got so, so much worse when I realized the game doesn't want to play properly. (I still managed to get two achievements before I got it to work, though.) Thankfully, there's an easy enough solution mentioned in the forums (for Windows, at least): setting all available language options to one and the same language (for me, this was American English). It worked, but I had to restart my laptop maybe three times for the new settings to work. And when I finally got to play… the game really is pretty and the gameplay is akin to Rhythm Heaven, though it only uses one button, but… I was struggling to get down the rhythm of a few of the levels so much, I had to turn off the music to hear the SFX and the (optional) metronome. It's utterly crazy to me - to play this rhythm game perfectly, I had to turn off the music; y'know, the one thing that's the core of any rhythm game? Yeah, don't play this if you care for achievements and/or struggle with good rhythm games, it's just not worth it. I was led to believe I'd get about half and hour's worth of bouncing along to the rhythm as I ace everything in a few tries, and I ended up with the BGM off, watching the animation frames to make sure it was the correct moment to press Space. Bleh.

Lately, I've been trying my best to catch up with a bunch of series/franchises I kind of left behind (but never forgot about) and work on having made some progress each and every day. The pressure got to me… and I ended up playing this on my birthday despite hating the previous episodes. I'm not gonna be nearly as lukewarm about this one as I was about the other ones. By now, the main character has fully transformed into Purple Patriot, the "superhero" who can't do jack shit and spouts conservative rhetoric every chance he gets. Too bad for him it's so easily refutable (which Mel, Sam and Bleeding Heart prove time and time again), otherwise this would have been an exercise in misery… scratch that, it's not good enough when 99% of the "comedy" in this game is just that, personal insults and politics-adjacent jabs back and forth. It's "nose exhale" at best and "clutching my head, wishing for it to be over" at worst. I can only vaguely remember one joke that wasn't about politics or the faults in any character's lifestyle. Gameplay-wise, I can't tell which is worse: the fact that 99% of this game hinges on you knowing who to talk to next (the "point-and-click" tag is doing some heavy lifting here), or the fact that when you get to the point-and-clicking, you've forgotten how to use the damn inventory menu all over again. Okay, let's assume you've listened your way to the end… the established problem is resolved, the narrator teases some kind of future development… and then it's all over. This is the last available installment. What happened? I haven't looked into it closely, nor do I care to, but I seem to have caught a glimpse of someone in the forums saying that the devs bounced, possibly due to a lack of funding for future episodes. (Something something, they might have tried to release a comic instead?) A quick look at the store page for any of the episodes reveals they came out in 2015, which, unrelated as it is, brings to mind the idea that whatever force allowed the three available episodes to get made ultimately gave in, much like the teen dystopia books (and their subsequent movie adaptations) of the early 2010s would give way to fantasy romance novels; in the first half, the fantasy of bonding together to overthrow the government (in the teen dystopia stories) or owning a conservative was just that, a fantasy. But as 2016 came around and an absolute joke of a president got elected in the US, an unjust/conservative government was no longer a distant thought; it became reality. As satisfying as it may seem to concoct a plan of rebellion or use facts and logic to obliterate an all-righter far too self-obsessed and stupid to fight back, fiction is meant to be escapism and no one wants to engage with things that hit too close to home, so to speak. Purple Patriot's supporters have diminished and I, for one, am glad. (Seriously though, I would like to not be getting political, but these games were all about politics. Yuck.)

This is another game about clicking a button for achievements. However, there's a catch to this one: while every click gives you one point, every point raises the probability of your score resetting by 1%. The game has been out for a little over a year by this point, and still, nobody has reached 60 points (for the record, the high score was 58 when I played). It's a free and simple game you can play if you need something short to kill some time with and want some easy achievements, but it looks really nice (as in, it's dumb, but not shitpost-level dumb). The popular video game quotes that were reworked to include buttons were a nice touch.