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Uhhhhhh I agonized for a long time whether to give it a thumbs up or down, but the verdict is down. Consider this a rant, since I'm still playing the game, but very frustrated at this point and there's still so much game left.

Aeterna Noctis has SO MUCH POTENTIAL, but I feel it was squandered by trying to be too much for too long. If you know nothng about the game, imagine Hollow Knight meets Celeste but not as good as any of the inspirations. It prides itself in being a precision platformer Metroidvania, but the platforming is not as good as Celeste, and the combat is not as good as Hollow Knight. It tries to do both, and to a certain extent it succeeds, but it lacks the grace and expressiveness that each of its inspirations show in their respective subgenres.

Platforming here is not great because you don't have the same level of midair control or wall control that Madeleine has, and you frequently don't have visibility over your platforms. Screens here are huge, both vertically and horizontally, and while that's great for an exploration-based metroidvania, it's awful for one where you're suposed to land precisely on platforms that disappear after one second. So, so many of the puzzles require projectile control, which is also awful. I don't mind the idea behind the arrow and the teleport arrow, but they are not smooth to aim and to use, particularly when you have to use them repeatedly in the same platforming challenge. In Celeste, you could always see your whole screen so it was effortless to mentally map your route and execute it. Here you only see chunks of the challenge, have to pray that you'll land where you want with little mid-air control, and if you get it wrong enough times, you're sent back. Also, late game time trials are available and splinkered throughout the world, which makes extremely frustrating when you can't get a single bronze medal in any of them. Gate those things for NG+ or for late game, for Aeterna's sake, since this is not part of the main path which is already long enough as it is. Add the fact that Temple Trials are not only extremely punishing, but they are also required since many critical-path skills are locked behind them, and you have a game that's super punishing even in the easiest difficulty and even before getting to the optional content.

Platforming is so hard and punishing that I was pretty much forced to always have the gem that prevents you from losing souls when you die and the one that slows down time when shooting arrows, because without these two, progress is effectively impossible. Even with the souls gem, levelling up was incredibly, incredibly slow, gaining less than one skill point per hour usually, and with good upgrades locked behind 20 or 30 skill points. When you're forced to waste two of your gem slots just to stay alive and be able to cope with the normal platforming challenges, you're left with very little room to experiment with the remaining gems.

Then there's combat. It's not …. bad. It's just also not good. The dash doesn't truly connect, your jump usually is too short to avoid threats, the weapons you acquire throughout the game are mostly gimmicks, and your base damage after 20 hours of game is mostly the same as when you started …. it's just weird. Enemies become progressively more spongy and come in bigger packs with more tricky attack patterns, but it feels you don't become more skilled or more apt to deal with them, you just become more tanky and able to soak damage while trying to outdamage them. Hollow Knight excelled at boss fights. Boss fights here are, at best, good (never great), usually boring (basically outcompeting DPS), at worse grating like the Phoenix or the Underground Fortress AI, one of the most grating combat encounters I can remember facing on a Metroidvania.

And my last complaint is that the game refuses to end. It just can't take no for an answer. I'm 21 hours into the game, and at that point I was already on the final stretch of Hollow Knight and was already deep into Chapter 9 of Celeste. Here I'm barely over 50%, and I can clearly see there are huge areas in the map completely unexplored. Every area is bigger than it has to be, and require more backtracking than you would like. Fast travel is limited and usually forces you to keep redoing the same stretches over and over and over and over. Mapping is a chore - if you miss the cartographer when you arrive at an area (highly likely as most areas have multiple entry points and branching paths very early on), then you're navigating blind for a good hour or so until you find him, if not more.

And everything I said is such a shame, because if the game just was a bit tighter, shorter, with faster progress through the upgrade tree, more of these platforming gauntlets placed after the credits roll or on optional late-game areas, this could potentially be one of the best metroidvanias I had every played. For my first 5 or 10 hours I thought this looked better, sounded better, was more interesting and more fun to play than Ori, for instance. The visuals are incredible, with beautiful areas, a lot of parallax, variety in the environments and enemies, and lots and lots of good visual effects. The piano track is haunting like the world we inhabit, but each area has its own energy and pace. The plot truly is interesting and go to some wild places when you less expect. It's a hauntind and beautiful world with intriguing lore.

But unfortunately, by trying to be too much for too long and failing to land its main hooks (combat and platforming), Aeterna becomes a chore that refuses to end, but also refuses to let you reach the ending through punishing platforming and unexpressive combat. Buyer beware.

The first Call of Duty game I ever played, and frankly, it's easy to see why this became so popular. The campaign is electrifying, with lots of variety and almost never missing a beat. I played it in close to two or three sittings just because of how good it was. The settings are interesting, and the gunplay is also satisfying. I particularly loved how aiming down the sights with your advanced weapons was so much better than hip shooting from the weapons you got from enemies on the ground. The few levels with varied mechanics such as the choppers ones were also pretty creative and entertaining, and a good timer never fails to make you act recklessly and enhance the tension. Quite short campaign but I get why people loved this back in the day and why this launched the era of modern military shooters. I have MW2 and MW2 on the Xbox launcher so will try to tackle them soon, backlog permitting

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When I first booted Garden Story, I got the impression it would be a pretty average, generic little game. And while I'm not completely wrong, it turned out to have a lot more charm than I anticipated.

The basic gameplay loop of Garden Story is a mix of exploration, combat and resource-gathering. You use these resources to improve your village, which in turn unlocks better tools that make combat and resource-gathering more efficient. And it's in this interplay that you'll get hooked. At first you are overwhelmed by the amount of resources, the difficulty of the combat, and the number of locations available to you. Slowly, it all becomes familiar and trivial, and by the time you're getting used to your surroundings, the plot forces you to go to the next village and restart the process from scratch. It's a surprisingly effective loop, and I blazed through the game in a few days while having a lot of fun.

None of these gameplay modes is particularly deep. Resource gathering is mostly using the right tool at the right object, sleep for the object to respawn, repeat. Backpack and storage limits prevent you from doing too well here and forces you to keep coming back for more. Exploration is fun at first, but once you've mapped the areas, it is mostly gone, but the game gates you out of enough areas that you always have a new carrot to pursue. Combat is simple, but different enemies require different tools to deal with and prevent you from zoning out. The use of estus flask for healing and staming management give the whole thing a Souls-lite flavor, and some bosses can even be difficult the first time around.

There's light gardening and base-building and crafting and daily missions and library-cataloguing and upgrade trees for your weapons and for your healing and for your repair box, and NPC favors, and just a lot of modern systems that games throw at us, and I think that's why I dismissed this game at first. But having 100% it, it does a pretty good job with all these systems and is well worth buying at full price in my opinion.

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It's quite a miserable experience to run this game on modern hardware, and even more miserable to attempt to beat it given the brutal difficulty curve, but I would be remiss if I didn't recognize it does more things well than poorly.

To be fair, I don't see myself playing it anymore. It didn't really click with me. The humor and lore/plot are a bit cringey and get old very soon. It's not terrible, just not great either. But what really didn't land with me were the controls, and consequently, the combat. Magicka's spell system is really, really intricate and deep. This means expert players are capable of bending the elements at will, casting shields, imbuing weapons, placing grenades, using projectiles, beams and AoE attacks when they want. But it requires so many button presses that are placed so close together that it felt like my fingers were playing DDR. In order to keep alive and the DPS decent, you have to type faster with your left-hand than a Twitch mod banning slur during a CoD livestream. Half the time I was using memorized spells, the other half I was dead. It is a deep system, but really hard to grasp and too much for my smol brein.

That said, it's a game that looks and sounds lovely, and while the challenge level is high, it's also somewhat fair and varied for skilled players (I can attest seeing pros playing on Youtube). Multiplayer coop must be a lot of fun. But it's hard to recommend this game given the instability issues, the arcane controls, and the overall frustration that comes with it. Buyer beware, this might become one of your favorite games, or something you simply hate or play out of spite

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Pumpkin Jack is an extremely mid game - it does what it does well, which is not much. As a 3D platformer and collectathon, it's pretty decent. There's platforming, exploration, combat and some puzzles, with no area being excellent but all being serviceable.

Platforming sometimes require a level of precision the games does not provide, with Jack's jumps being floaty and slippery. Exploration is mostly okay, you'll be on the lookout for crow skulls but other than that levels are extremely linear and there's nothing else to look for. Combat is basic and hectic with no skill involved, just button mashing, but the game keeps it fresh with enemy variety. Puzzles can be fine or awful, but they never go for long enough to bother you. Levels are mostly uninspired, dialogue is unnecessarily bad, graphics are generally good and the music starts off well and gets worse as the levels go by.

All in all, it would be a decent game to spend one or two afternoons with if you paid no more than $15, which means at least 50% off. That said ….

It gets a thumbs down for how poorly optimized/ported it is. My rig is not an incredible rig, but I can play Elden Ring, The Last of Us and Red Dead Redemption without hitches. Pumpkin Jack on minimum with all possible effects disabled barely went over 38 FPS for me, all the while frying my GPU. If you die and the level has to reload, or during cutscene transitions, it changes resolution, which can go from fullscreen to borderless to windowed without you ever asking for it. I play on a BenQ projector and it would cut the video output for 2 or 3 seconds as it did so, only to return with a wonky resolution. I don't expect AAA graphics, I just expect a game to run after being installed without requiring over an hour of tinkering.

And for that reason alone, it gets a thumbs down. As a dev, you cannot release a product in this state and call it a day.

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It's so good that you wonder why no one has done it before

Sleeping Dogs might look slightly dated from a graphical perspective, but it still plays like a good wine. You have the open world formula popularized by GTA (in particular Vice City and San Andreas) with a location that is more charming and full of character than anything that Rockstar was ever able to pull off. I've been to Hong Kon 12 years ago, and it was uncanny how many memories were brought back by the setting alone. Sure, it's not always fully realistic from a geographical perspective (I thought it was a bit weird that you don't have Hong Kong Island separated from Kowloon by the Victoria Harbour), but if it fails on that it succeeds entirely on the way it captures the vibes. I of course don't remember specific streets from my time there, but I remember the feeling of being there and Sleeping Dogs captures that feeling exquisitely.

Other notable differences from GTA are the focus on melee combat instead of mostly guns, and the acrobatic nature of movement (in particular considering earlier GTAs barely allowed you to jump). Driving and gunplay are as good as you'd imagine, and the world is peppered with fun side-activities to keep you busy when you need a break from the main story. Speaking of which, it is so good. It's a good mix of The Departed with Infernal Affairs, and most characters carry their weight in the plot and in the worldbuilding. The story is serious and deals with some serious trauma, such as drug addition, double life, cold-blood murders, etc, but all the while keeping things light on the side with some dating missions as well as missions where you escort celebrities for a night out. It's a good mix that keeps things fresh, moving and interesting.

Some of the side content can get a bit repetitive, but at least you have tools to keep them more manageable (such as location trackers on your map). Driving can be slippery until you get used to it, and once you start unlocking the fancier cars and tougher races, it's so satisfying. The auto-aim (playing on controller) made shooting good enough that it kicks Max Payne's ass while delivering blows and environmental kills that put Batman to shame. And don't get me started on freaking jumping from a moving car onto another just because we can.

Sleeping Dogs is an extremely solid open-world game owing nothing to the games that came before or after it

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This is my first time playing a text-heavy, choices-matter kind of game, and I loved it. Although I never played a Telltale game in the past, I know Oxenfree devs used to work there, and it makes me very excited to play more games in that vein in the future.

It's not only about choices mattering - it's all about how natural and flow-y the conversations felt. No long videogame silences in the middle of a conversation, just a bunch of teenagers doing what teenagers in the US do and reacting to unexpected events in a hearfelt way. I've seen a lot of people complaining about how sometimes your choice of dialogue interrupts other people - which feels a lot like real life to me. Or how the game gives you very little to choose from and develops from there - again, which feels like what happens in real life. By taking these mechanical quirks (that some people might see as bugs, but I see as features), this feels less like a videogame and more like an interactive novel, which is something very refreshing to me. There are some minor mechanical interactions with your radio, but that's almost always a secondary mechanic to the primary mechanic of conversation as a problem solving tool.

Besides all that, you have incredible hand painted art, superb voice acting, and moody/atmospheric music that fits the vibe incredibly well. It's the full package. Maybe a bit short overall, but any longer and it would start to drag. $10 for this game feels super fair.

Going in blind and playing the game in a compressed timeframe (ideally one sitting, but at 4-5 hours that becomes a little hard) is the ideal way to savor this experience, and I'm very grateful for that.

PS - I've also seen people give thumbs down to this game because "it's tedious to play it four times for all the endings." Let me just remind these people that you don't need all the endings. You don't need all the achievements. It's your life and your time, and you have the option of enjoying a good story once or turning it into a chore four times. But don't blame the game on that, blame your life choices.

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Coromon is a good game at its core, but with layers of annoyance and frustration around it that drag the whole experience down. Were it streamlined and more focused it would be a strong recommendation from me, but the way it is now I can't seem to recommend it.

The good: combat is really, really solid. Not super complex or sophisticated, but it takes the basic Pokemon combat formula and modernizes many aspects of it. Like any good squad-based RPG, fights are super quick, with either you or the enemy dying in two or three hits max. With that pacing, buffs and debuffs are not super important, because by the time you finished setting yourself up, your mon is dead. It's a very different battle pacing than traditional party-based JRPGs like Final Fantasy or Battle Quest.

The enhancements to the Pokemon battle system include Traits (which add unique effects to each mon you own or is battling against), point allocation you can choose, free-form evolution and devolution, unlimited skill flashing, enabling and disabling skills at will, battles against 2 or 3 enemies at once, etc. Those are good additions and keep the combat system a bit more dynamic. Coromons are also varied, battle animations are fluid and smooth.

But, alas, the bad, starting with the combat: elemental damage is still king, meaning you can clear the whole fire-based dungeon with one mon, spamming one attack, including the boss in many cases. This makes progression a bit dull - just pick one mon from the element you need to clear that dungeon, rinse and repeat for all dungeons. The last dungeon introduces some additional complexity with a new elemental type, but there are few battles there and the last boss is just an endurance test where you can use all your items, so it's not the hardest thing.

The plot and the writing are just uninspired. It's clearly aimed at children, but it's childish to a fault. Pretty much no NPCs have remarkable personalities; the protagonist speaks and reacts enough to prevent you from feeling you're roleplaying, but not enough to have a solid personality; dialogue is shallow, as is the overall plot development, and you hardly feel invested in the world or the fate of its inhabitants. And the game is painfully linear, for no good reason that I could make sense of. Since the plot is so weak and disconnected, probably the devs could open the whole world from the beginning and let you choose your path, linking key plot development with each boss defeated. That would give the player a lot of agency on which dungeon he wants to tackle in which order based on the elemental makeup of his party, and would allow us to acquire, say, fire mon before we got to the fire dungeon (which is near the end of the game). Locking your choice of mons to the dungeons and limiting the order of those dungeons limits a lot player agency, and I cannot see how the game was made better for that. It would be justified with a strong plot, and that's not what we have here.

But for me, the biggest annoyance and the one that eventually brought this review to a Thumbs Down were all the tacked-on side puzzles that we must suffer through. Coromon sometimes forget that it's first and foremost a squad-based JRPG and thinks it's a smart puzzler, or a management simulator, forcing you to do stupid, senseless sokoban-puzzles or sliding floor shenanigans. The amount of times you're forced to stop fighting and enjoying the good parts of the game to do forced stealth on a palace, or a badly implemented obstacle course (don't touch the enemies) or a run from shelter to shelter (hot sand) - it's baffling. These segments are poorly implemented, dull, unfun, and too frequent. I'm not playing Coromon for the fruit-harvesting mini game, I'm not playing Coromon to customize my looks and outfits for 45 minutes, I'm not playing it for the cart-ride puzzles or the mushroom picking, cake baking, aroma making minigames - I'm playing for the combat and the monster capture! This lack of focus turns a short, weak, but focused squad-based JRPG into a grinding, dull, and monotonous unfocused mess that is a chore to get through.

Coromon is a classic example of less is more, but unfortunately the devs chose more, more and more