5-12 hours to complete, Doors: Paradox is a point and click casual puzzle game in which the puzzles are themed doors, and you are trying very hard to open all 58 of them. There are three chapters in total with about 20 doors each, and light story elements involving a mysterious shadow cat that is definitely not an Agent of Chaos.

Genuinely a fantastic puzzle game! I spent a lot of time pondering, as many of the solutions were not immediately obvious, which made it quite a pleasant challenge. There are quite a few puzzle door themes, and I’m really happy with the variety; the developers must have such lovely minds. My favorite themes were the horror doors, and while it was difficult to narrow them down, my top three doors were Infernal Fire, a spooky door with a really fun mechanic; Murder Motel, where you need to play detective a bit to figure out the solution; and Telephone Thriller, featuring a mystery and a lovely telephone booth. As an honorable mention, there is a Door called Assembly Escape, which is just as interesting as it sounds! While not complicated, the entire door was an assembly line, and it was very creative!! I really suggest playing Doors: Paradox if you like puzzle games and want more games like The Room series, and if you end up picking up this game and enjoying it, I strongly recommend the developer’s other game I’ve played and liked, Boxes: Lost Fragments.

6-8 hours to complete, Fallstreak is a dark fantasy VN that takes place in Socotrine, a country surrounded by a barrier of hazardous mist and recently recovering from a horrific disaster ten years ago, later called The Fires of Collapse. While most of the game is you seeing the world through the nine-year-old protagonist’s Aelise’s eyes – her not having a mother, her older schoolmates living with their disabilities, most of her friends being orphans – the other half is flashbacks and glimpses into Socotrine’s history; a mother trying to protect her children during the Fires, the proceeding famine, and the witch hunts. It’s a gruesome novel that really talks about how far humans would go to save themselves, but it’s also a well written, interesting perspective of humanity through stories.

While Fallstreak is absolutely not for everyone, I did really like learning about this world the writer is creating. Fallstreak: Requiem is significantly more gruesome, it’s about the country “ULs”, outside Socotrines protective yet debilitating fog, where constant war and child soldiers are commonplace; and it really makes Socotrine look like a utopia, although an unstable one. The art is digitally hand drawn and everything is well written, so sometimes it comes off as an oddly professional fantasy-flavored breakdown and documentary on human behavior in some segments. It’s an uncomfortable, bleak, and oddly interesting VN, and I really wanna see where this story goes. Play it if you want?

8-15 hours to complete, Fallstreak 2: Traum is a Dark Fantasy VN that continues from the first free visual novel, Fallstreak, and continues the journey of our young protagonist Adelise. After the fall of her paradise and learning more about the secrets and consequences behind her Golden Dream, Adelise and her friends make a treacherous journey beyond the mist that cradled Socotrine into the beautiful and horrifying world of the Fae. As she gathers her strength and learns to use her magical abilities, where will her heart lead her?

Fallstreak 2 is an incredibly tragic novel I would never willingly gift to someone due to its heavy themes and incredibly high number of character deaths, yet it’s a VN I still recommend because the novel is skillfully crafted with love and care. There is a significant shift in tone from the slice of life elements from Fallstreak, with Fallstreak 2 being a stronger, faster paced novel with action and more details. As a note, I suggest playing Fallstreak: Requiem for my Homeland before Fallstreak 2 or directly after it, as there are some re-occurring characters and provides additional background info regarding some situations our heroine finds herself in.

35-180+ hours to complete, SAO: Hollow Realization is an almost fully voiced singleplayer game that mimics the anime’s VRMMORPG skill trees, weapon logistics (weapon skills, weapon EXP, secret skills learned via specific actions, etc…) , raid boss mechanics, party synchronization, item usage, and social dynamics more than any other previous title before it. Except this game takes place in an alternate world where, while exploring the city, your party meets Premiere – an obviously important looking NPC with a broken questline. While initially, Premiere’s glitched quest chain was something fun to poke at during the downtime of clearing floors, it quickly gains priority as the NPC is so oddly lifelike and her questline has some startling Implications that interact more with the world than anyone could have ever realized.

.

.

I enjoyed this game, and I enjoyed it in a unique way that no other game has interacted with me before, which feels odd to say. For all intents and purposes, this game is a single player MMORPG that does its absolute BEST to make you feel like you are genuinely in a game with other real-life people, while keeping you as its protagonist. The social dynamics are honestly kind of insane, and I can only think of why the game is so in-depth in this regard is because the developer team loved SAO dearly, not because it was easy to implement, otherwise other games would have tried this before. You can talk and raise social interactions with every single NPC, including shopkeepers. You can add pretty much ANYONE to your party, you can, if you wanted to, turn this entire game into a dating sim with every npc in it. You can sit down in all the chairs, eat and order food at cafes, go on dates, hold hands, physically pick literally anyone up if they like your company enough, sit on random benches, whatever. This game is a gigantic sandbox with what must be over eighty hours of voiced dialogue in this regard, and I haven’t even gotten into how your social standing can influence combat, or gotten into how complicated the combat system is.

.

.

There is a four-party system and combat is pretty lively. There is a huge variety of enemies and enemy types, you gain skills based on what weapons you are using and those skills have their own EXP of a sort that improves through use, unlocking more skills connected to them in the skill tree and you can do specific actions to gain hidden skills, like dual wielding. There are passive abilities as well, and even after the main storyline is done there is a lot of post-game content where difficulty can ramp up fairly quickly giving you a lot of things to work towards. Switch skills are in team play, meaning you chain skills with your party members to interrupt boss attacks to extend combo windows and keep enemies staggered for long periods. Fighting with your party members increases your familiarity with them, you can assign roles, and during large raids, merge with other NPC parties to coordinate attacks or signaling everyone to Back Off/Defend when a raid boss does an AOE or something. There was one feature I particularly disliked – you can’t charge your party members equipment unless you reached affection level 4 or 5, which becomes a huge pain when their stats are garbage and they won’t accept something better regardless of their personal level.

.

.

Overall, I had a fantastic time playing SAO, though I don’t suggest trying to 100% it. The DLC admittedly wasn’t as good as the main storyline and I feel like post-game overstays its welcome by about 50-70 hours if you’re trying to do everything available to you. I wish there was more weapon crafting in the game, though the enchanting system is pretty solid. If you like SAO and want to immerse yourself in a long game, Hollow Realization is absolutely the way to go about that; there are a hundred maps, thousands of characters, a weather and day-night system, numerous voiced lines of dialogue wrapped in a fun world that’s rewarding to explore and entertaining to do so. It’s not GOTY material, but it’s absolutely worth playing if you enjoy the SAO series or spending multiple hours in huge fantasy world MMO’s.

3-20+ hours to complete, Jumpbound is a smooth 3D platforming game where you jump, dash, and collect upgrades as you make your way to The Beam in the final area – all without a single loading screen as the entire game takes place on one map. The gameplay feels pretty great, the visuals are lovely and I’m a huge fan of the massive intricate megastructures with optional little collectables tucked away within the pathways or on side paths. You can choose between three modes – Chill, Exploration, and Iron Man – which don’t change the map but DOES change how the checkpoint system works. In chill mode, every platform is a checkpoint and you have no fear of falling, in exploration mode, you take and place your checkpoints where you want + when you get an upgrade, and then Iron Man takes all that away!

.

.

I ended up enjoying Jumpbound more than anticipated, and even ended up making a guide for it! Gameplay is pretty smooth, and the only bug I’ve experienced was falling forever at two specific locations, but considering that issue only appeared with the newly released “chill” mode and the devs are still active, I honestly don’t expect it to be a long-term problem. It’s also worth noting that people who are prone to motion sickness will probably struggle with movement, although in the settings there is a “remove blurring” option as well as a choice to add a dot in the middle of your screen to help with that. Regardless, it’s a well-made jumping puzzle platformer that I found was really fun to play around and explore in, and if that interests you, Jumpbound is worth your time.

.

15-30+ hours to complete, Dungeons of Hinterberg is a Dungeon crawler/Life sim about Luisa, a burned out junior lawyer who takes a break from her job and heads to the scenic, mountainous town of Hinterberg. Famous for its history, hot springs, and magical anomalies, the whole town is a huge hotspot for magic to the point dungeons, monsters, and magical reagents spawn, with Hinterberg holding the record for 25 dungeons at a single time making it a popular place for thrill seekers and tourists looking for a “Slaycation!” Sword in hand, Lusia is ready to start her own.

Overall, it’s a pretty great game and I had a fun time playing. There are a ton of characters to meet and plenty of rewards for getting to know them, lots of activities outside the dungeons, minimal repetitive dialogue and actions, and lots of shopping to do. Dungeon-wise, most of them are pretty unique and some are more puzzle heavy than others. Even at the end of the game higher level dungeons had new mechanics tied to them. Combat is fast and stylish; you have a lot of flexibility between sword abilities, charms offering various passives, and magic spells, which change depending on what area you happen to be exploring that day. There is no time limit, which originally made this a pretty fun and satisfying game to complete. I say originally, because the ending was so weird and odd, it brought my personal high rating for the game down a good couple of notches, and the fact there is a singular achievement locked behind NG+ which was annoying to get. Overall, Dungeons of Hinterberg is still well worth playing, and it’s fine to dive in with high expectations.

5-8+ hours to complete, Deliver Us the Moon starts off on a dry, desolate Earth stripped of its resources - and one of humanity’s projects to save it was to build a colony on the moon to harvest a new, incredible type of energy and send it to Earth. For a long while, this plan was working as intended; however one day without warning, the power stopped, all communications were cut off, and the moon went dark. So starts the story of Rolf, a man who has taken up the distressingly dangerous mission to solo pilot a ship to the Moon, guided only by a lone friend on Earth, to uncover what happened to the hundreds of scientists who vanished, and hopefully, restart and resupply energy and send it back to Earth, so it can start recovering again.

So, a couple things first; the Walking Sim tag is a filthy lie – the developers love to strap a timer on your back – literally – on every chapter and give you timed challenges to push the story forward, which earned my ire since I despise countdowns on exploration. Second, there is no traditional saving and loading, it’s all chapter selects which means if you exit the game at the wrong time, better BEST be prepared to be backtracking. However, despite my initial strong dislike of the start of this game, the storyline is pretty good, the ending is phenomenal (stick around after the credits for some extra scenes), and I loved how the developers shared it with you, via recorded holograms from a friend. Another thing is that this game is pretty short and could, (and should, honestly) be finished in one sitting. I’ll probably be picking up the next Deliver Us game in the series because I really wanna know what happens afterward, despite it likely having similar mechanics.

11 – 13 hours to complete, Meteor World Actor is a fully voice acted Noir Detective VN set in a Dystopian city, but combined with the fantasy genre adding races such as Elves, Pixies, etc… and magical abilities! Centered around the National Police Agency’s 13th Division, a dead-end office full of oddballs and misfits that can’t be easily placed in other departments; Ruka is worse than your average cop. Hardly tolerable to his own co-workers, regularly insubordinate and barely hanging onto his badge with his laziness and terrible track record; but at night he turns into a serial killer, investigating a Cult Massacre closed case that happened ten years ago. While hunting down and executing cult members is not the least of his problems, Ruka needs to be faster and more ruthless to destroy the organization quickly – he’s only got about a year left to live, after all.

I really enjoyed playing Meteor World Actor: Badge & Dagger, the voice acting was pretty high quality and the writing was top notch! Initially I didn’t like the protagonist very much and was annoyed at once again reading about a perverted living garbage detective, and while Ruka is that, he’s got some serious character depth and background that got me really interested in his character. There are a few cons though I absolutely need to mention, Badge and Dagger is a SEQUEL, the second game to a series, and the first one is not on Steam. You don’t need to play the first game to play this one, but after playing, you will certainly want to! Secondly, this game is completely linear with only one route, unless you install an 18+ patch which unlocks another character’s route that was removed from the game. Overall, I still suggest picking this game up, the quality is too good, but do beware the cons before buying.

9 – 30+ hours to complete, Song of Farca is a point-and-click interactive novel set in a Cyberpunk (lite!) Dystopia, where you play as Isabella Song, a talented hacker and Private Detective who takes on cases ranging from locating missing pets, settling inheritance disputes, to tracking down suspects and investigating crime scenes, but there is a catch! Isabella is under house arrest and monitored by the police; she can’t set foot outside her apartment without her parole officer knowing about it, so all her work must be done by her PC and through the use of Drones and hacking into cameras. Carefully consider your choices, and make sure not to lead anything dangerous to your home.

I really, really enjoyed Song of Farca, the really cool storyline and hacking gameplay had me hooked, and I ended up playing six hours straight on my first playthrough, and the twist at the end made the build-up and finale deeply satisfying and had me wishing for a second game in the series. However, this game does have its flaws; the replayability is limited, and it’s admittedly much, much more enjoyable with a guide since Song of Farca is autosave only – no saving and reloading! There is no way to get any of the endings easily since it’s determined by your previous cases and their resolutions, in spite of the chapter select. Overall, I still really suggest picking this game up if the storyline sounds interesting to you, especially if it goes on sale, because at that point, you’re just missing out!

5-7 hours to complete, Cavern of Dreams is a short 3D platformer game that uses deliberately outdated DS era graphics to get that cute pixel nostalgia. You play a Fynn, a baby dragon who enters the Cavern of Dreams to rescue his stolen, unhatched younger siblings from a mischievous little bat. There is a central hub world that branches into four themed areas, all managed by a mysterious sage who both watches over your rescued siblings and grants you new abilities as you progress through your journey. While there are plenty of environmental hazards, you won’t encounter any enemies to attack or jumpscare you.

The experience is generally very cute and easygoing, which reflects in the pretty whimsical soundtracks; that said, “generally” is the keyword – while the game starts simple, the last section of the game introduces weirdly punishing platforming sections. On top of having difficult controls, commands don’t always input smoothly, making some abilities either straight up not work, or go after a 1-3 second delay, making the game way harder than it should be. (Specifically, I’m calling out the ability to launch yourself with your tail after rolling, which I never could apply reliably!) There is also one weirdly placed timed segment in the game that’s particularly frustrating, as it hinges on finding a hidden item in the map and then rushing to it the second the timer starts – making it actually impossible to complete your first few tries until you discover it. Compared to the smoother pace of the previous levels, it’s a pretty noticeable difficulty spike. Overall, I still recommend Cavern of Dreams; even though it can be complicated, you have infinite lives to throw into the literal fire until you do the sections right.

4-5 hours to complete, Pilo and the Holobook is a hand-painted adventure game with sticker collecting! Play as Pilo, a cookie-loving red panda who was raised by a human Professor and inventor, Chiron. His latest invention is called the Holobook, a journal with the ability to scan objects and create stickers based on them to document various worlds and, more importantly, show off Professor Chiron’s ingenuity to the scientific council. As his fluffy assistant, it’s your duty to actually use the Holobook and fly to various worlds to record and learn about the planet's history and uncover the secrets of some really old civilizations, and – hey, what’s this weird purple stuff?

Ok! Storyline out of the way, Pilo is a cute, easy game with a surprisingly solid storyline, a satisfying ending, and some pretty engaging environmental puzzles. I honestly didn’t expect much out of a sticker-collecting game, but a lot of love and effort clearly went into coding, painting, and overall creating this interactive tale that you can finish in one sitting. I didn’t run into any bugs, and the only con I was going to write about was addressed in the last update. Anyone of any age can enjoy this, but younger kids may have difficulty solving the desert planet’s environmental puzzle by themselves. (Especially if they don’t know what a compass is, or have general knowledge on how it’s used.) Highly recommended!

Aloy has successfully restored Gaia, and finally earned the recognition she wanted from her tribe. Along the way, Aloy made many friends built lasting connections, while uncovering her true identity and purpose – to protect the world just as her predecessors once did. But Aloy’s mission is far from over. To fully let Gaia do as she was designed to do, Aloy must venture out into the uncharted Forbidden West, seeking out Gaia’s missing sub-functions needed to heal the land and purge it of the spreading Blight. The fate of the world is still uncertain, and Aloy’s fight is far from finished!

.

.

30-100+ hours to complete, Horizon Forbidden West is a visually gorgeous game with rich storylines, an absolutely massive and immersive open world, lifelike NPCs and a huge variety of enemies. In many ways, it feels like a refined and upgraded version of Horizon Zero Dawn! I spent 90 wonderful breathtaking hours on the highest graphical settings and for a while, it was an incredible experience. However, the longer I played, the more the game’s performance deteriorated. Eventually, even on the lowest settings I faced severe stuttering, random black screens pausing my gameplay to let the environmental rendering catch up, and ridiculously long loading times – up to 10-15 minutes! While there were some temporary fixes, there were no lasting solutions and it felt like I was constantly patching a sinking ship just to reach the end of the main storyline and complete the Burning Shores DLC. My computer hardware is more than capable of handing a game like this, but Forbidden West was acting like I was trying to run it on a refrigerator! After browsing forums and reading about similar issues on the discussion pages, I’m convinced the issues lies in the poorly optimized PC port and possibly a significant memory leak issue.

.

.

Buyer Beware: Horizon Forbidden West is a fantastic game, but if you’re planning to play on PC, make sure your setup is WELL BEYOND the recommended specs – or better yet, experience it on the console it was clearly designed for.

.

30-100 hours to complete, TCG Card Shop Simulator is a first-person shopkeeping sim featuring Tetramon, a popular card game. As the storekeeper, hire employees and expand your shop and warehouse by slowly purchasing the buildings next to you as well as new licenses to stock popular products such as card sleeves, plushies, playmats, dice, and board games. Customers can play Tetramon inside the store as well should you place down gaming tables, and will use various purchased items such as playmats as you unlock them. Additionally, as Storekeeper and owner you have the fun option of scheduling tournaments, decorating your store by changing the walls and floors, or adding plants, posters, and large statues. You may also trade and buy cards to complete your own Tetramon collection!

Overall, I had a pretty fantastic time. Despite being early access, there is plenty to do and you can expect the developer to update the game about once a month. At the time of this review, I would very much consider this a full, completed game but the developer still has a bit of roadmap they would like to complete, such as Card Grading and actually being able to play Tetramon yourself which I am excited for! As for cons, I can only really think of two. The rent is really, really high and it doesn’t get better as your store expands – at max level, my rent, not including employee pay and reordering products, was about 3k per day which barely had me making a positive net income some days; and after playing 100+ hours I really do wish it was weekly as it’s a bit rough starting out. Second, employees should slowly gain experience over time and not maintain their starting speeds, and I really wish I could reward employees with card packs or free products as bonuses. Definitely consider picking TCG Card Shop Simulator up!

Two young girls from wildly different backgrounds meet and fall in love at the magical academy LeFay, a school for those seeking and pursuing the art of alchemy, healing, and controlling the elements. Audrey Clarey is a heiress who has always lived in the city of Castlecoast, her family famous for their transmutations into gold; while Marion LaRue is a rebellious girl from Doveport, a small town near the sea, seeking to hone her fire elemental abilities and earn her fame. It’s almost love at first sight, but their spark sputters out after their first kiss due to the completely separate worlds they live in. Can they get a second chance? Do they even want one?

Perfect Gold is a 3-6 hour Yuri slice-of-life visual novel that features animated character sprites and CGs in addition to its full voice acting, complete with character sliders in the settings. In particular, I really liked the art style; it’s super cute, and the animator did a fantastic job with facial expressions and casual movements. While I do think this VN is honestly kinda cheesy and can be a bit over dramatic, it’s absolutely worth picking up and playing if Perfect Gold even remotely interests you.