Visual novel choices are so hard to balance right. You need to have enough that the player feels like they have agency and control over the outcome and events to an extent, but you also don’t want to barrage them with mindless choices that don’t do anything, either. I hate when they fake choice and you can reload and…

100% agreed. This is literally the discussion my husband and I were having. He doesn’t really watch anime (except when I rope him into it), but despite being a superhero fan, he’s said he’s been very burnt out on them lately because there’s been so many of these big movies. My Hero Academia is the first anime he has…

I’ll have to check it out! The context and setting reminds me a bit of Recess from when I was a little girl... where you had the tribes of kindergarteners, the Big Kids, the Ashleys, the Diggers, etc. Granted, Recess never (or at least very rarely from what I can recall) dealt with any serious issues. You had clever…

I think the grossness of other situations can be effective as well. For instance, a lot of what you feel yourself “forced” to do in Papers, Please really underscores the point it’s trying to make. Obviously the whole point of the game is to keep your job by not letting anyone into the country who isn’t legally allowed…

This game is SO weird but also SO brazen and unapologetic about it, I love it. There are so many insane details I overlook a lot of the flaws and just kind of enjoy it for the spectacle.

Yeah, I don’t know how anyone could possibly look at these two and think that one wasn’t lifted from the other. Type/punch out imagery has obviously been used before, the font, format, colour, and overall style is near-identical.

Do we know if it was verified purchases? As a player, that would be most useful to me... knowing someone had actually bought the game before reviewing it, and, ideally, seeing time played for context.

Parasite Eve was great. The sequel was fun, but I felt it really fell short on characters and missed out on all that great mystery/high-stakes escalation. There were so many great scenes in that game and fantastic atmosphere. Plus, I love how the gameplay experimented with classic mechanics and new ideas... it wasn’t…

I never know how I feel about media where like... the female’s power hinges on the male’s ability to control/access it. I read an otherwise great book recently where I realized that literally everything about the heroine’s great power and her saving the world is tied to the men in her life... her father literally…

I would also say Ark: Survival Evolved, actually. My husband and I have been playing on a private server I run for us since day one. It’s a lot of fun to work on growing and taming our little world together, and since we play side by side, and I like to adventure while he likes to build, I get to yell, “BABY! A…

Sure! The basic gist is that over ten years ago, there was a fanfic called My Immortal that was notorious for being a fairly over-the-top “Mary Sue” piece full of spelling errors, and bizarre changes... some characters were vampires, I think Hagrid was a student, there’s a time machine that’s also an iPod, the main…

Between this and that Harry Potter fanfiction, it’s been a weird few years for “reclusive creators of notorious cult classic nerd works coming out of nowhere”, so at the very least, it’ll be curious to see how this pans out, and if the original developer truly is involved.

Baten Kaitos is SO underappreciated. It offered some truly excellently handled story twists, had a bangin’ battle soundtrack, and managed to combine JRPG style combat with cards and deck building in a way that felt fun, fast, and dynamic. It makes me so sad there weren’t more than two of them.

Wouldn’t... the spoons get all mushy after a few bites in anything liquidy and start falling apart?

Disgaea 5! It looks GORGEOUS on there. Colours are so vibrant! And I’ve sunk so much time into that endless huge-stat RPG goodness.

Hmmm... pulling from my Steam list, Bastion, Crashlands, Torchlight, Dust: An Elysian Tale, any Tales of game, NEO Scavenger, Recettear, XCOM. Totally would pay again to take those with me.

Mmh. I think I’ll hold off. I’ve never played Destiny, but it’s one of the most commonly recommended games people throw my way. I was looking at it because I was hoping to find a cooperative online experience like Defiance used to have (game was clunky and flawed, but the major Ark Falls were lots of fun), but the…

Wow, that IS nice. Given that most fan content tends towards “super straight and sleek, fashionably mussed, or artfully wavy”, it’s great to have more options.

It’s not the same thing, but for a minute I thought we were talking about a mechanic like Persona 2's rumor system. In Eternal Punishment (which is in my opinion criminally underrated for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being you get to play as a woman with a big focus on her best friend as an ally), the key…

It’s only complicated if you’re interested in min/maxing every aspect of it. The beauty of Stardew is that you basically go at your own pace. There is no way to fail it. You’ll learn the ropes, and then you can discover everything else at your own speed. Could have planted more beans at the start of spring for higher…