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Degrees of Separation is a 2D puzzle platformer, like so many that came before it. There's something about indies and puzzle platformers, isn't it? Anyway, what sets this one apart is its focus on co-op, and its narrator. You're got two characters, one from a warm land, and one form a very cold, and they bring some of their land with them. Different levels handle things a bit differently, but the core of it is that you use the hot and cold aspects of the characters and lands they bring with them to change things in the environment. On most levels there's a divide between the characters, half the screen will be in the warm land, and half in the cold, and as you move relative to each other the line dividing these will move as well, so you can use the cold part to do things like create large snowballs that you can use as platforms, or freeze water, while the warm land can unfreeze water and light lanterns that create hot air and make platforms rise.

The puzzles are for the most part somewhat easy, but there's a few annoying ones mixed in. One of the biggest offenders here is a puzzle in an early level where you're pushing a snowball for a far too long distance. The narrator can also at times be a bit overly saccharine, but at least it adds some personality to the game.

Overall a pretty good puzzle game, though not a must play.

GOTY 2020? Maybe. It's at least really good.

I've never played a Dragon Quest game before, despite the series having been around for pretty much as long as I've been alive. So it was fun to finally be able to do so.

Dragon Quest XI is a JRPG. It's one of the most JRPG JRPGs to ever hit the market. That was probably what surprised me the most, the game felt very conventional. Instead of doing like Final Fantasy, which keeps re-inventing itself with each major main-line entry, Dragon Quest XI felt like it had just been refining the same core gameplay that existed back in the NES days.

In DQ XI you're playing as a young man from a village who's been living an idyllic life up until this point, but one day it turns out that he's the chosen one and has to go and save the world from a big evil guy.

Yeah, this game is not getting bonus points for originality. In fact the main story felt rather cliché. That's not to say it was terrible though, it was surprisingly well told, even if it was one of the most cliché stories I've seen in a long time. It's also quite obvious who's bad and who's good, and there's next to not surprises to be had in the story.

The gameplay is as conventional as the story, but there's no random encounters at least, every enemy is visible on the map, and you can avoid most of them. Once in combat things work just as you would expect if you've played an NES or SNES-era JRPG. Which is to say you and the enemy takes turns attacking each other. The combat feels very polished though.

I love the art style of this game, and all the little nods that they're making to how the games used to look. I might not have played any past DQ games, but I've seen screenshots, and I like how the enemy poses match that of their old sprites, even if they can look a bit goofy at times.

The localization team did a wonderful job with this game. I don't speak Japanese so I can't tell how accurate they were, but they managed to inject a lot of personality into this game, with people from different regions having slightly different ways of speaking and different accents. There's even a town where people speak in haiku, and the localization team managed to capture this.

Overall I was impressed by this game. It's not a game I'm likely to ever return to, but it's really impressively well made. My only major gripe with the game is that it feels a bit padded at times.