Nostalgia is a tough thing. I remember being absolutely blown away by this game back in the day, with its big, wide and detailed levels, the riddle-based goals that lead you toward the hearts, the overall badass vibe, the combat, and the movement.

Well, 20 or so years later I decided to go back to it, and it wasn't a pleasing experience. Take combat -- it is very simple, you have no defensive options, and limited healing options mostly involving getting life back after defeating enemies (which can be an issue when the health pickup falls out of the map). And it's repetitive, throughout the game it never improves or gets better than the first level, and the game overuses flying enemies which are just annoying.

The movement system is actually pretty good, but not without flaws. The first being depth perception, with many platforming sections requiring precise positioning but being very hard to read. The second is that the same key inputs are used for both long jump and high jump, which makes it less than ideal to switch between the two and makes what could have been a very satisfying system into something clunky.

The levels, in retrospect, are smaller than I remember. I think they are indeed detailed and verticality adds a lot of fun to it, but you navigate them too quickly to modern standards. Most goals are well signaled so you generally have a good idea about where to go and what to do, but every level has a sundial goal that is generally a pain to find, a bigger pain to solve the sundial dimension which tends to be a platforming gauntlet without context. And that brings me to possibly the biggest flaw in the game, the lives system. It adds nothing, just wastes your time.

The game has transformations, but only two and they are sparsely used (each used maybe 2 or 3 times throughout the game). It's a sign it was abandoned before being fully done. There is some lore but it is very skippable and contributes little to nothing to the game in the end.

In summary, this game helps to explain why Acclaim went broke after releasing it. Acclaim was all the rage during my SNES years, it was incredible, but then it clearly became less relevant during the PSX years, and if a game like Vexx was the one supposed to put it back on the map, I understand why it floundered. Vexx was supposed to be a bad boy with attitude, but just wasn't a really good game after all

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The Adventure Pals was a game that I enjoyed and was delighted by …. for the first 8 of the 9 hours it took me to beat it.

It is a game that hits on that saturday morning cartoon nostalgia. The artstyle, graphics, animation, effects, humor, sounds, everything is crafted towards a very specific vision, and damn, it pays off. It's a great game to look at, and it's one of these games I know will never look dated, because it's a timeless art direction. It's more like Adventure Time than some Adventure Time games hahahaha

The gameplay is also nice, with some caveats. It's mostly an action platformer, with many segments of jumping and dodging intespersed with combat segments. The combat is … bad. It's just too messy and hectic, and the screen frequently is too cluttered to allow for satisfying encounters. It reminded me a lot of Guacamelee, which in my book is not a compliment. Each biome has five levels, each level has five stages, and each stage has a hidden collectible that is generally easy and fun to hunt for. You have consumables that can change the tide of a battle and a score based on how fast and thorough you were during your exploration, and many other hidden collectables through the world and the side quests and the arenas.

And if that was the whole game, I would say it's a charming game that starts strong and loses momentum until it's finally over with a little steam left. But ….

Now, after reading all of that you might be wondering -- geez, how do you justify a thumbs down? Well, two factors were decisive. The first was a softlocking game bug I encountered in the fourth world, Crablantis. I beat the first level, and then another level unlocked. Unbeknownst to me, that was the third level, and once I beat it, the game was softlocked since I hadn't beaten the second level (it was never enabled) and could not proceed further. This game was released near a decade ago and I'm not the only person that experienced the bug, so the fact it wasn't fixed yet indicates to me it will never be fixed. And that's a shame, because that softlock prevented not only progress, but also achieving a side-quest that I fought for (the Crystal Skull near Stoney Head).

The second was compounded by the first. If everything has been fine in terms of softlocking bugs, I probably wouldn't have complained about the pace dying near the end of the game. But when I finally got softlocked I realized how repetitive the game had become. And while the gameplay loop is fine at first, I realized it hadn't improved much for the previous 10 hours, and I suddenly lost all the urge to beat it.

And that's such a shame, because it's not everyday you find these sweet works of passion. But at the same time, our time and money is limited, and the small things that are bothersome in this game are bothersome enough to prevent a recommendation.

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What a wild ride. I've been hearing about this game for a while, but just managed to get my hands on it a week ago, and damn son, the hype was real.

DOOM 2016 plays like FPS games haven't played in a while, and I say that as the biggest form of praise that I can give. It's all thrills no fills. You boot the game, 1 minute later you're opening a demon's jaws open with your bare hands and the pace never drops. Level after level, you're constantly getting new guns and gun mods, new runes and new suit upgrades, to the point you eventually become an unstoppable force of nature.

Level design is literally perfect, with an incredible mix of cramped and open arenas with a diverse range of monsters set for you to obliterate. The levels look good, play good and sound good. The difficulty ramps up but you never feel you're lacking the tools to best any encounter. It's a freaking crescendo of gore and skill that is always accompanied by heavy metal riffs that amp up the action to 11.

No time and nowhere to hide. No regenerating health. No cover shooting. It's you, them, and your full arsenal until your ammo depletes, you chainsaw demons in the face, and the whole valsa repeats. No ammo? Get out of jail free card with the BFG.

If you care about secrets, it's always good to take a deep breath and calm down between fights, but if you don't care about them, the game lets you RIP AND TEAR non-stop for almost freaking 12 hours. Movement is a treat, your jumps are heavy, your ledge grabs are hefty and the Glory Kills are juicy.

Too bad it took me 10 years to play it, but I'm glad it didn't take me an extra second. If you have the chance to play it and haven't done so yet, stop everything else you're doing and go play this NOW.

I'm not stuck here with you. YOU are stuck here with ME! RIP AND TEAR SONNY JIM

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Harvestella is a game that might be worthy if bought on a deep discount, but not full price.

Imagine a PS2 game that was forgotten in a closet for two decades and then released as if no one noticed. The game has incredibly beautiful environmental art and the music is top-notch, but the praise kind of stops there. While you eventually end up building a daily rhythm to your progress, at no point the game truly feels satisfying -- everything you do in the game is a bit worse or more tedious or more slow than it had to be, and I think a lot of that comes from the fact the game still has design conventions from the early 2000s, but in the early 2020s. The graphics, animations, textures, sound effects, menus, everything feels like it was meant to be from 3-4 gaming generations ago with no good reason for that. We as gamers demand a bit more today, and this game simply fails to deliver in so many aspects that I find it very hard to recommend.

Take farming. It is bare bones. You have three tools, a choice of a few seeds every month, very limited planting room, expensive upgrades, crops that are not profitable, high cooking requirements (which incentivize you to hoard ingredients instead of selling them), and a massive range of transformation machines but which usually only have one or two inputs. You eventually unlock biomes, but they add very little to the overall farming. It looks like a lot, but it's so incredibly basic that each day I would be done with farming by 8AM, even when I had a lot of stuff to do. It is not enough to keep you hooked, but many other gameplay systems rely on outputs from farming, so you have to put some effort into it.

The crops you harvest during farming are really helpful for cooking, which is your main way of progressing through dungeons (since stamina drains absurdly fast). Which takes us to combat -- a MMO-style combat with no block and an uneffective dodge, limited healing and no tanking. Which means combat is a DPS rush against enemies. You're supposed to combo weaknesses to achieve breaks, but the elements and weaknesses is poorly communicated and you don't have access to all jobs and elements without first going to a save spot, meaning you either cheat and read online about the upcoming encounters in order to be prepared for them (as I did), or go blind into battles, die, waste your time and money and then repeat them. There is close to zero skill involved in combat, and your AI companions are close to useless most of the time. Anytime you encounter a FEAR enemy, expect a fight that is harder than the mainline bosses.

If the game was mostly farming and combat, it wouldn't be a great game anyway, but it would be a better game than it is. But there's also story and side-quests, and here's where the game biggest issue lies. The side-quests are an incredible, incredible pacing drag. Everytime you trigger a new quest, expect 10-15 minutes of unskippable cutscenes with no voice acting, which very quickly becomes insufferable. The scenarions and NPCs might even be interesting, but the whole stop-start nature of these interactions gets very old very fast, to the point I started mashing X while reading on my phone just to get through with those interactions. Even worse, they unlock a lot of passive combat buffs and much-needed money and seeds, so you are incentivized to suffer through those. To hurt the pacing even more, sometimes the game brings a cutscene, gives back control, asks you to walk 3 meters, and takes back control for another cutscene. Another common time-wasting tactic is giving you dialogue choice, which you think might matter, but always lead to a same generic response that applies to both of your answers (which usually are the same thing said differently), and them the game just goes back to being linear. It's deceptive, it's a pacing killer, and just made me slowly hate the game.

Again, there are decent elements to the game, but overall it's not respectful of your time, and a game that could be over in 30-40 hours insists to drag itself for 70+ hours just because it thinks it's cute. There are much better farming sims, much better dungeon crawlers, and much better life sims out there. I am hard pressed to understand why anyone would spent $60 on a PS2 game released 2 decades after its time.

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If you're gonna have a game with silly controls, either make it funny like Octodad, or at least make it responsive and with fair checkpoint positioning. I ragequit the game after dying and have to re-do a section I had spent 15 minutes trying to beat. Looks good, but just isn't worth the price

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I played it for 8 minutes and felt it was more than enough. But it's free so really you can't go wrong

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Been thinking a lot about whether to give it a positive or negative rating, but at the end of the day, the lack of polish and the excess of unnecessary, unfun mechanics drag the game enough to go into the red territory. Seeing that the first trailer on the Steam page is a trailer with streamers should be the only red flag I needed to avoid it, but I decided to give it a chance anyway since the core mechanic looked fun, so the blame is entirely on me.

To be fair, the core mechanic is fun. Bouncing around giant beasts as a small critter uncovering and weakening cores should be fun enough to carry the game. And yet, despite that, the game isn't fun. The first thing you'll notice and you'll be unable to ignore is how unpolished the game is. Everything is 2D - so far so good, but the sprites are usually very low resolution, the poses are few and far in between, there's little animation to transition between poses, and the menus look like something made on MS Paint. I can respect a dev who knows that art is not their main strength, but I cannot respect a dev that knows that, and yet, decides to not hire or partner with an artist and instead, releases the game with Windows 95 UI. After a few minutes, everything starts to look static and samey, and within an hour I started regretting the money I spent on this.

The main good thing I can say about the music is that it can be turned off. It's generic and repetitive, and since there's no voice acting or important sound elements involved in the gameplay, you lose nothing by muting it.

Besides the titular beast battles, the game has a 'hub' like area where you interact with other characters VN-style. The characters are flat, unidimensional, and the dialogue is usually grating and long. The plot started out strong, but there are so many small missions and forced tutorial segments and introduction of new mechanics and items and effects and side-quests that you'll spend more time in menus and dialogues than you'll spend actually playing the game, and the game forces you to always try something new every time, to an extent every battle almost feels like the first since your kit will be completely different and will require a different strategy. I like when a game gives you a bunch of fighting styles and lets you pick the one you want, and rewards you for trying different combinations -- hell, look at what Supergiant did with Transistor, where using different skill combinations unlocked lore. It's brilliant! Here, the game forces you to switch constantly weapons like it or not, otherwise it artificially caps your progression. It's lazy. It's forced. It's not fun.

And this is what you are constantly bombarded with. Like fighting beasts with swords? Forget about it, let's force you to use a hammer. Don't have a hammer? Let's force you to grind for materials to craft one. Wants to grind for items? Well we'll make you do a stupid scouting minigame before EACH FIGHT. Sick of scouting? Well you should be, and we'll force you to read piles and piles of boring dialogue before you even get to that.

It's just a game that could be so fun with its core concept, but the presentation is so haphazard and unprofessional that the whole experience is diminished by it. Given how amateurish the whole package is, I wouldn't recommend it even for free. Buyer beware

I had been looking for so long for a game that scratches the same itch as GNOG. That game is Vignettes. A wordless, character-less sandbox where you rotate objects until they transmorph into unexpected, different objects. As tactile as puzzle games go. I had to resort to a guide towards the end when the game had already beaten me, but that didn't reduce my enjoyment of the game at all. Highly recommended. Also I love how the devs communicate with the players as we uncover more and more secrets!