Recent reviews by HarVeeGee

I like this because it evokes nostalgia for an era I am nostalgic about (the stuff you're nostalgic about sucked though).

Official Animal Well animals tier list:
S: Doggies (with one exception); Chinchillas
A: Squirrels; Bunnies; Penguins
B: Kangaroos; Ostrich; Egrets
C: Guard Dogs; Chameleon
D: Seahorse
Shadow Realm: Crows (absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥)

I played Inscryption before playing this. A later game from the same developer that, for my money, renders Pony Island totally obsolete and unnecessary.

In my opinion, a really good game, but not the genre-redefining, bar-raising masterwork the reviews and broader gaming community reaction are holding it up to be.

I can't help but think the sheer magnitude of the praise is as much to do with two outside factors as its inherent quality:

1. the majority of players not having played Divinity: Original Sin 2, which is really a lot like this (but far more polished after years of patching + IMO better as a tactical turn-based RPG), but more importantly;
2. widespread community frustration with how bland, soulless and consumer-unfriendly the broader Western AAA space is right now - this is unquestionably a feature-complete game at launch made with much passion and a generous ear towards community feedback, the new standard bearer for 'what gamers want'. The louder you love this the more you send a message, I suppose.

But honestly, this is quite a flawed game:
- The writing is of, to put it very generously, varying quality. To put it less generously, a lot of interactions are quite sophomoric, and it's crazy how often you're given a bunch of dialogue options you just don't want to say, or only given binary options like 'flirt' and 'be an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥' with no middle ground.
- One core traversal mechanic which is used everywhere (jumping) is really clunky and never fun to do.
- AI pathfinding goes nutso frequently - whether it's your companions running halfway across the world when you climb a ladder instead of following you up, running directly through the lava you just jumped over and dying, or one of many other potential annoyances.
- The UI is something out of a nightmare, especially the wonky cursor (love too accidentally close doors I'm trying to walk through, constantly fail to click on the 1 pixel on the screen which will let me target the correct thing, or accidentally direct my guy to fall off a ledge into a pit of spikes).
- There's way too much looting to do.

I could go on.

But even leaving all this aside, I do really like this game and, unquestionably, the combination of scale, modularity and player agency on display here is quite an accomplishment. If you're in the market for a massive, complex, compelling CRPG with seamless multiplayer integration so you can play it with your significant other (or worst enemy, I don't know what your deal is), it's hard to find anything better... unless you haven't already played Divinity: Original Sin 2, that is.

A rich man's Cookie Clicker.

Go in blind and enjoy one of the best pieces of interactive art ever made.

Flawed in the ways you'd expect a fairly meaty, visually ambitious game developed by three people to be, but excellent writing more than makes up for any issues I could raise. Relatively chill by the standards of other time loop games, this one doesn't ask you to do precisely the right thing at the right times on precise schedules as is common in the genre, nor are the puzzle solutions ever particularly obtuse. The Forgotten City mostly wants to just be experienced, for you to immerse yourself in character, world and themes, and I found it rewarded that investment with interest.

There's balancing issues with the combat, certain aspects of it seem a little unfinished or rushed, and more than half of the characters you recruit feel pretty inessential to the story... but this game explodes with charm that you just don't see in games from AAA studios. Indivisible is a mash-up of a platforming game with light (story-based) Metroidvania progression with hybrid RPG/fighting game combat heavily inspired by the PS1 game Valkyrie Profile. These two flavours don't sound that great together, but it works.

The story is some fairly generic "open the three special gates in order to fight the world-threatening elemental evil" ♥♥♥♥, but with personality layered on top of it which makes it more unique than you'd expect. A lot of this comes down to the game's heroine Ajna, who's a bit of a Naruto-like shounen protagonist, but the story plays the question "what if an impulsive idiot whose solution to everything is whacking it with a stick was the only person who could save the world?" completely straight. That leaves you with some fun story scenarios where Ajna makes progress towards saving the world, but her wilfully ignorant approach to heroism leaves chaos in its wake. She may be saving the world, but that doesn't mean she can't ruin some lives. So that's fun, I like that.

Besides Ajna the characters are not all winners, but the interjections of the likes of Razmi, Nuna, Baozhai and Dhar consistently put a smile on my face.

It's a good game, you should play it.

It's a Celeste/Katana Zero-style "repeat till you do it right" action platformer, but in first person. The controls can be a bit finicky (found the wallrunning a bit inconsistent for example) and having no peripheral vision means you'll often get killed by stuff you couldn't see, but when this game is good, it ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hums. Parrying cyborg ninjas before decapitating them, dodging bullets in mid-air before slicing your foe in half, that ♥♥♥♥ is peak video game cool; the satisfaction heightened by the extra immersion of the first person perspective.

The story is dumb and predictable, but if you care about that, go read a book.

This game feels so much like Shinji Mikami played a few bland American cover-based shooters, said "I bet I could make this fun" in Japanese, and then tossed this together in fairly short order. It's a 5-7 hour game which combines the basic framework of a Gears of War-like with a handful of other key gameplay ideas which add speed, tactical depth & rapid decision-making to the experience, making it so much more interesting than the standard whack-a-mole gameplay the genre is known for. The game has you explore the mechanics over a series of varying combat scenarios and then, just before it wears out its welcome, it's over. Incredibly linear and very stripped down, there's little in the way of exploration or interesting upgrades, and no RPG mechanics - the only person "levelling up" is you, as you get better at the game. The plot & storytelling, as with all Mikami games, is ludicrous and horribly cheesy, but that's part of the fun. This isn't the Schindler's Lifts of video games or w/e but it's a pretty good time, and it's on sale a lot.