As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned how funny grief can be. You can be sitting at your desk, watching a show, and a thought enters your head: “I’ll never watch this with my dad again.” It doesn’t matter how long it’s been; the passage of time may help grief not dominate your life, but grief has a funny way of appearing when you least expect it. Fishbowl is a game that depicts trauma, grief, and regret, and it’s one of the best to do it.
Fishbowl follows a young Indian woman named Alo, living away from home and grieving the recent death of her grandmother, Jaja. This has caused her significant strife, and combined with feeling like an impostor at her job and struggling to create the poetry she used to love, getting out of bed each day proves to be a struggle in itself.
Alo’s struggle with grief is the central focus of Fishbowl‘s narrative.
While settling into her new home, Alo spends the next month slowly but surely unpacking her grandmother’s possessions. With each box, the player solves a simple slide puzzle game to uncover everything, journaling about each item. One such item is a toy fish in a bowl that inexplicably speaks to Alo, trying to help her remember happy memories and avoid sad ones—although as anyone who has gone through loss can tell you, happy memories can also be the saddest.
Though her grandmother’s death is the main focus of Alo’s grief, there are many other struggles she has that make it worse, including her fears that she is not good enough for her job and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in the game’s story that has everyone self-distancing. Like Alo, a lot of my hardest moments happened during the peak of the COVID-19 lockdown. There’s no worse company when you’re grieving than your invasive thoughts.
The lockdown also manifests in ways outside of Alo’s grief, with one character struggling with the fact that many kids in her town lack the technology to do remote learning, a very real problem in India during the lockdowns. COVID-19 is a subject I so rarely see depicted in video games, so it’s nice to see it executed so well here.
Fishbowl features a diverse cast in a setting rarely seen in video games.
I appreciate a lot about Fishbowl, but in particular, it’s nice to see more diverse content and creators in the industry. It feels so rare to see a video game focus on Indian people and their culture, and so accurately to boot! Not limiting itself to just the representation of Indian culture, the game features a character with vitiligo. As someone with a similar condition, I do enjoy seeing it normalized in media.
Fishbowl relies on good dialogue, characters, and storytelling to create its intriguing experience, but the two-person development team has done a good job of making an interactive experience out of it. Many actions are accompanied by quick-time events; for example, when Alo is brushing her teeth, you have to hold a button to apply toothpaste, move the toothbrush in a left-right-left-right motion, and then in an up-down-up-down motion. Others have a more complex series of inputs.
Each day, Alo does different tasks to attempt to improve her mood, including brushing her teeth, taking a shower, drinking water, and eating. You can also have her binge-watch television or doomscroll on her phone, though these seem to only have a negative impact, and I’m frankly unsure if there is any reason to do these unless you want her to feel worse! Then again, I still try to have Alo write every day despite knowing it will only hurt her mood more; even if she never got the good feelings from writing again, I would be remiss if I didn’t try my best to give the spark back to her.
The editing mini-game is both enjoyable and finicky.
In addition to her self-care, Alo has a job to do: video editing. Each day she works, Alo has at least one vlog that she has to edit. This is done through a cute little mini-game that involves sorting elements into their proper categories as they approach them. It’s nothing incredibly exciting mechanically, but it does well enough to make me feel involved in Alo’s job. The only sticking point I experienced with it is that the somewhat stiff controls can lead to frustrating mistakes, even if the narrative does not treat one or two mistakes too harshly.
Alo has several people she can speak to over video chat, including her mother, childhood friends, and co-workers. These calls can improve Alo’s mood, but may also worsen it. I really enjoyed watching these calls, as it was nice to see how she interacted with different people in her life. Her relationship with her mother was particularly sweet, as their love for each other was evident.
Despite my enjoyment of the game, Fishbowl feels too long. While I never felt weary of its story or characters, Alo’s routine becomes tedious, perhaps intentionally. Early on, I questioned what the challenge was, as the tasks never took long and were simple. Yet, just like in real life, the struggle is motivation, not the difficulty of the task. The fact that more tasks are introduced as the game progresses certainly doesn’t help. There’s no actual punishment if Alo skips showering when her mood is already high, so perhaps it speaks to my attachment to Alo that I had her do them anyway.
Fishbowl’s dream sequences contrast strongly with Alo’s normally colorful home.
In terms of presentation, Fishbowl‘s environment is cozy and colorful. This aesthetic feels like a visual representation of masking, a coping mechanism to blend into the world around you. Alo’s depression manifests either in grayscale nightmares or darkness creeping into the environment, expressing the contrast between between her mask and her true feelings. The music also reflects Alo’s state of mind, its low-key beat and soft melody evoking a sense of melancholy.
Playing Fishbowl caused a lot of uncomfortable memories to emerge, though by the end, I felt thankful to have played it. The game feels like a response to the excellent visual novel To the Moon, an emotionally brutal story exploring themes of struggling to cope with loss and regret. Fishbowl is also an exploration of regret, but instead of Alo fighting it, the game emphasizes the importance of her living with the truth of her regret.
Where To the Moon spoke to me when I struggled with the looming risk of my father’s death, Fishbowl speaks to me as I struggle to come to terms with it. I’m thoroughly impressed that two first-time designers made such a good game, especially during a pandemic, and I hope to see more in the future.
Capturing a moment in a photograph preserves a fleeting glimpse, tangible proof that an event occurred or that someone was present. However, photographs cannot keep what we cherish truly close. Instead, they provide a frozen image of a beloved person or memory, prompting us to reflect on and understand our history. Photographs highlight the impermanence of life, yet gain emotional strength by allowing us to hold onto memories, encouraging personal growth if we recognize their significance. OPUS: Prism Peak is a beautifully heartfelt graphic adventure centered on self-reflection, the attempt to understand others through the lens of the camera, and the dual themes of life’s uncertainty and enduring hope as we grow older.
OPUS: Prism Peak starts with forty-year-old Eugene driving back to his hometown for the funeral of a pivotal figure in his youth, his paternal grandfather. Once a photojournalist, Eugene has suffered a series of setbacks. He even sold his cherished camera before heading home, feeling especially disillusioned. As he drives, the weather worsens. When he enters an underground tunnel, he is involved in a terrible car accident and ends up stranded in peculiar terrain.
It isn’t long before Eugene meets a mysterious girl called Ren. Together, they are drawn deeper into a fantastical world of talking animal spirits and places both alien and eerily similar to the real world. Eugene again receives a camera. Ren is determined to reach her home atop a distant mountain few dare to climb, and Eugene agrees to help while searching for a way home himself. Meanwhile, a supernatural force called the Shade is destroying the world around them and seems strongly tied to Ren. Racing against time and equipped with only a camera to unravel the world’s mysteries, can the pair follow in the footsteps of spiritual guide the Seer to the mountaintop before Ren disappears forever?
The dynamic between Ren and Eugene becomes a truly heartfelt one as the story progresses.
I honestly wish I could talk more about the storyline for OPUS: Prism Peak here, because there are so many insights and plot reveals throughout that I could gush about it for hours, which is saying something given that the game is roughly eleven hours in length. The narrative beautifully weaves flashbacks of Eugene’s life into the present-day journey, with the animal spirits he encounters representing people who have influenced him.
Part of the player’s goal of uncovering the story is determining who each spirit represents and whether Eugene ultimately sees and/or comes to understand them through their current interactions. The memories and emotions these individuals bring up are often messy, reflecting life in general. Sometimes Eugene was inadvertently treated badly by someone in the past; other times, he was the one who failed to be there for someone else. It isn’t so much a harsh critique, but rather a reflection on and an attempt to understand the different ways people perceive things.
The characters have astounding depth and are all too human in their reactions. Eugene starts as an outsider but becomes more involved as events unfold, and his connections grow clearer. Ren is an anomaly, with no memory beyond her drive to return home. She can’t be captured in photographs and faces the threat of fading away, underscoring her fragile existence because she lacks an ‘anchor.’ The bond that develops between her and Eugene is a powerful symbol. I’ll just say I didn’t see many of the later twists involving her, which made the ending of their quest all the more impactful.
Conversing with spirits helps uncover plot points and allows Eugene the chance to better understand them.
From a gameplay standpoint, OPUS: Prism Peak combines elements of the visual novel and graphic adventure genres. Flashbacks are largely presented in black-and-white VN form, while the exploration and story scenes in the fantasy world are 3D affairs. You control Eugene during these segments as you navigate the terrain, every so often coming across objects or characters of interest to interact with. Eugene can access his camera with a single button press, unless the script dictates otherwise. The game switches to a first-person perspective when he prepares to take a photo, and later, you can adjust settings like focus and shutter speed to get clearer shots.
Once a picture is taken, you often have a variety of things you can do with it: “showing” a photo to a sacred flame to see if it fits an earlier clue, using a photo to fill in sections of a game notebook/log to help you keep track of what you’ve uncovered, or showing a photo that reveals a spirit’s true name. Every once in a while, you have to use cleaning kits to maintain your camera, and you later receive equipable camera filters to help you get different types of shots, such as one that allows you to make out more of the faded murals and decoder stones you find.
The photography is a compelling gameplay mechanic that you’ll use quite often. There are even intense “action” sequences where you have to precisely time taking a photo of the Shade in order to temporarily chase it off.
Taking pictures of animal spirits will often reveal their true name.
Taking pictures and using them to advance the game and uncover story points through the notebook is reminiscent of SEASON: A letter to the future. OPUS: Prism Peak even includes a bike sequence. The two games share some thematic elements, but OPUS: Prism Peak feels especially personable, even within its fantastical world. Depending on your choices and discoveries, you can unlock different endings, adding replayability. Players are likely to interpret the game’s events and conclusions differently, which enhances the story’s beauty and thoughtfulness.
I’m hard-pressed to find much to critique in OPUS: Prism Peak. You have to rely on auto-saving instead of a manual option, so you might need to play a bit longer than intended if you can’t trigger an auto-save at a good time. There’s no real “game over” unless you flub an important decision point. Even during the “intense chase” scenes, the game loops to an earlier part if you fail.
Some might find this makes the game too easy, but I prefer it over constantly reloading from the main menu and breaking immersion. Reaching a main ending unlocks extra menus with event logs you’ve found so far. My personal favorite is the “Behind the Scenes” audio logs, where the developer explains the creative thought behind the game’s elements.
The flashback memory sequences are insightful and add further emotional layers to the overall narrative.
OPUS: Prism Peak is aesthetically gorgeous. The VN sequences and CG illustrations are beautiful. The visual imagery throughout the fantasy world is incredible. Vibrant, colorful settings and expressive, detailed character models permeate much of the 3D graphics. However, darker, more unsettling imagery sometimes appears, depending on the situation or terrain, with the Shade being sufficiently nightmarish. The character designs, visuals, and symbolic storytelling could even draw comparisons to some of Studio Ghibli‘s more fantasy-based works.
The soundtrack is cohesive in its themes and contains moving tracks, as this emotive sample illustrates. The sound effects are realistic, especially those involving the camera and photography elements. I played the game with English voice acting and found the performances strong and fitting for the characters. Both Eugene and Ren’s voice actors deserve special mention for their deliveries. Despite being a fairly text-heavy game with differing dialogue and responses, the script is also wonderfully translated.
OPUS: Prism Peak is an outstanding adventure. Like its spiritual predecessor, OPUS: Echo of Starsong, it pairs a thought-provoking, emotional story with polished gameplay. At times haunting yet hopeful, it reflects life and reminds us how we grow from experience. I teared up often—sometimes from sadness, and sometimes from the bittersweet yearning to reach for something more, no matter the winding paths we take. The open-ended resolution of Eugene’s journey is moving and lingers with me. Developers SIGONO has once again created an artistic video game masterpiece with OPUS: Prism Peak.
Cooking and RPGs aren’t something I’d usually pair, but Dosa Divas, a smaller JRPG from Outerloop Games, has tried to change my usual diet. The story of three sisters trying to come to terms with their pasts and their futures attempts to combine deep revelations with irreverent humour and whimsy. Unfortunately, the final mix of this JRPG doesn’t quite come together: the bland world design, and the sometimes-infuriating combat and recipe systems get in the way of this dosa going down smoothly.
Dosa Divas tries to tell a heartfelt story blending elements of sci-fi adventure with themes of food, culture, and family. The plot follows sisters Samara and Amani as they reunite and travel across a fractured world in a sentient food mech, working to undo the damage caused by their estranged sister Lina, whose powerful fast-food corporation, Linaworks, has erased traditional cooking and cultural identity. Along the way, the sisters battle corporate forces, cook meals for communities, and rebuild connections with others while confronting their own complicated past.
Despite its ambitions, Dosa Divas’ story struggles to land. It’s cool that the story tries to use food not just as a gameplay mechanic but as a symbol of memory, identity, and resistance, even if the sci-fi elements involving the food mechs and their history feels tacked on for the sake of a more mythical bent. The script and dialogue never quite reconcile the sisters’ emotional core—particularly the reasons behind their original departure and Amani’s subsequent return—with the game’s more irreverent humour. Scenes often clash in tone: light, playful banter with a boastful elder can sit awkwardly alongside a genuinely tragic situation involving a villager’s family.
Some characters make this worse. The recurring shopkeeper, for example, leans heavily on innuendo and flirtation, and his constant come-ons toward the sisters feel more questionable than charming. He comes across as unsympathetic, despite Dosa Divas seemingly positioning him as comic relief. When the robotic Diva characters take on a larger role, their narrative becomes even more muddled, adding but never fully integrating ideas.
Even the presentation struggles to lift things. Key dialogue receives voice acting, but the uneven script undercuts most performances, making it difficult for any real emotional depth to emerge. The music hints at a more distinct cultural identity in its opening moments, but the soundtrack settles into a loop of light, bouncy rhythms and plucked guitar that rarely enhances the atmosphere.
You wouldn’t think he’s a letch just looking at him, would ya?
Exploring the world aboard Goddess—the sisters’ food-themed mech—gives the game’s cartoonish art style plenty of room to shine, but the results feel uneven. Characters lean into exaggerated designs, with oversized limbs and unusual facial features, while the wide, often clashing colour palette makes it surprisingly hard to distinguish one NPC from another. The style is certainly distinctive and may appeal to some, but it often undermines the emotional weight the story tries to build.
The environments in Dosa Divas don’t do much to compensate. You move through a small set of familiar locations—a cliffside village, an underground tree root settlement, and a lakeside area—without much variation or sense of scale. The absence of more expansive wilderness spaces makes exploration feel repetitive, even within the game’s relatively short runtime. As you progress, Goddess unlocks traversal abilities like a hookshot and a drill to open new paths, but these additions rarely lead anywhere surprising. Instead, they loop you back through the same environments, adding utility without meaningfully expanding the sense of discovery.
When the sisters and Goddess face enemies from Linaworks, Dosa Divas shifts into a turn-based JRPG system—with a few added twists. You still select standard attacks and skills, but both offense and defense add timed button inputs. Land these correctly, and you boost your attacks or block incoming damage more effectively. Combat ties directly into the game’s food-based elemental system. Each attack carries a flavour type—Spicy, Sweet, and so on—and enemies show weaknesses to specific combinations.
When you identify and exploit those weaknesses, you deal increased damage and begin to break down an enemy’s shield. Once that shield drops, the enemy enters a “Stuffed” state, dramatically increasing the damage they take. Combat carries a strong sense of pace and visual flair. Watching Amani charge up oversized fireballs or Samara bounce attacks around the battlefield looks great in motion, and the system has a clear sense of rhythm.
Enemy design is… different.
Unfortunately, the rhythm quickly gives way to frustration. The constant QTE inputs wear thin, and with no option to automate them, every encounter demands the same level of precision. Some prompts—especially when blocking rapid, multi-hit attacks—are difficult to read or perfect, making success feel inconsistent. I also struggled to initiate fights on my own terms, often taking the first hit before gaining control, though that may come down to unclear input or feedback.
On Dosa Divas’ normal difficulty, missing a block or mistiming a boost can have severe consequences, and the limited healing options only amplify the problem. Recovering small amounts of health from the odd food item means that a couple of mistakes can quickly spiral into a game over, regardless of preparation. Over time, the system starts to feel less like a test of skill and more like a battle against unclear timing windows and underdeveloped feedback. A more readable interface or more generous input cues would go a long way toward smoothing this out. Easier modes soothe the difficulty somewhat, but not the timing frustrations or sense of skill gap.
Dosa Divas’ standard enemies come from Linaworks’ ranks—lawyers, laptop-toting admins, and security staff—which gives encounters a playful edge. Their animations carry a lot of personality, and they consistently raised a smile when they appeared. That said, even these goons can prove awkward to handle, especially when full enemy groups combine with the game’s inconsistent QTE demands.
Boss Divas push the system further. These fights test your ability to break shields, exploit weaknesses, and manage resources with an even smaller margin for error. They introduce more complex and demanding real-time inputs, particularly when it comes to blocking. Unblockable attacks and status effects add further pressure, forcing you to rely more heavily on items and prepared food to stay alive.
The cooking dimension is an unusual conceit, for sure.
Ah yes, the food. As Samara et al. travel around the world of Dosa Divas, they constantly find and stock up on different loot components, from produce such as bananas and caught fish, to flavourings such as red onions or rock salt. Once they collect these, Samara and Amani can access Goddess’ dosa-making facilities, presented as a sort of cooking mini-game dimension. Here, produce can be combined with flavours and seasoning to prepare and experiment with different meals, both to fulfil orders for NPCs and to create items to enhance stats in battle or replenish lost hit points and the like.
Much like combat, the actual cooking in Dosa Divas is represented in a series of QTE activities, such as rapidly hitting buttons for shaking salt, or rotating the thumbstick at a given speed for smearing oil over a dosa pancake. More difficult ingredients demand tighter timing, or the UI could fade away, forcing you to memorize the correct timing. Achieving a higher rating produces more of the thing you’re making, so there’s an obvious motivation to trying your best each time.
It’s nice to see how some of the actual recipes, mostly focused on dosas (surprise!), aren’t too far removed from what you’d expect to eat in each dish. As an eater mostly unfamiliar with dosas, or any sort of similar cuisine, I felt at least a little more educated.
The problem remains in the QTEs, which although not as consequential as those in combat, are still quite basic, and creating the same foods, multiple times for quests or items, does become a slog. It’s a pity it’s not more refined, as the actual recipe-building and the degree of customization does show promise.
The Dosa Divas crew boosts their attack, health, and skill potency by defeating enemies and levelling up in a standard manner. However, their core skills and Ultimate abilities remain locked behind village affection. You can raise this level by destroying Linaworks’ propaganda, defeating enemies, or cooking for villagers. Because both powerful abilities and story progression depend on this system, these tasks are somewhat mandatory—and the repetitive cooking to order feels like a chore by the endgame given the issues described above.
Furthermore, the game offers almost no character customization; skills unlock at fixed points and cannot be modified or swapped. Goddess can collect various skins for her mech parts, and these can be swapped in and out individually, but it’s a minor cosmetic.
There are minimal diversions in Dosa Divas. Apart from finding and creating different recipe orders, and completing all objectives for maximum village benefits, the only other options are exploring each area for new pathways once Goddess’ transport options open up. Even this is often done in service of the goals above, although most of these paths contain Legendary scrap boxes for loot too which is needed for unlocking better upgrades.
Unlike the full-fat, meaty behemoths of the JRPG and item-crafting genre, Dosa Divas provides a lighter bite, but in mixing so many different flavours together, it doesn’t quite offer a meaningful memory. The story has real thematic potential, but an uneven implementation sours this aspect. Combat and recipe systems can be infuriating, and given so much of the short run-time is these systems, the frustration never fully disappears. Art and sound direction are mixed, and will be off-putting and samey for some.
Ultimately, Dosa Divas is aiming to be a snack-sized delight, but like an amuse-bouche, it still needs to offer enough flavour and texture for you to come back for more. You may find yourself leaving this one on the plate.
A dark, stormy night. An old plantation house sequestered in a dark swamp. A wheelchair bound colonel sitting on a fortune and hosting a visiting family of opportunistic gamblers, alcoholics, and profligates. Though this could very well be the setup to an Agatha Christie novel, this is how the classic murder-mystery graphic adventure The Colonel’s Bequest opens. And based on that premise, it’s likely that whatever bequest the colonel is bequeathing will not be of his own accord.
As a person who was not yet alive for the 1989 release of Sierra On-Line’s The Colonel’s Bequest and the point-and-click adventure boom surrounding it, I’ve been having a blast learning about games from the likes of Sierra and LucasArts—and, erm, having a slightly less explosive blast actually playing many of them.
At the top, I’ll say that The Colonel’s Bequest fits in that category; the way it fulfils the puzzle, narrative, and conceptual promise introduced in director-designer (and underappreciated auteur) Roberta Williams’ 1980 debut Mystery House is very impressive. It surprised me with its clever and detailed design even thirty-six years on. However, the way the game’s plot progresses, or, more accurately, grinds to halting stops, tested my patience rather than my deduction skills.
Peeping Tom Simulator 1989.
Players control Laura Bow, a twenty-year-old detective and journalist in training. Laura is a guest of her friend Lillian, niece to the curmudgeonly colonel (because who wouldn’t invite their college buddy for the reading of their uncle’s will?). Laura has nearly free rein to explore the mansion and its surrounding grounds, interacting with and eavesdropping on the colonel’s relatives and, soon thereafter, witnessing them mysteriously die one by one.
What surprised me was the clock-based structure of The Colonel’s Bequest. Finding clues and having or witnessing certain conversations trigger the clock to move forward in fifteen-minute spurts, occasionally progressing to the next act, wherein another body is likely to turn up and the cast of characters will shift around locations. In this way, the world and characters of The Colonel’s Bequest felt shockingly alive. Everyone seems absorbed in their own agendas, be it conniving, surviving, or *bites pinky* murdering, perhaps.
There are a handful of frustrating combinations of time progressions that may softlock progression towards getting certain items and clues, such as my endlessly frustrating attempts to befriend the cook to get a bloody carrot (bloody in the cursing sense, mind you). Ultimately, nothing will lock you out of the two possible endings, either of which comes down to a split-second decision involving a loaded gun.
So many things to investigate, so many things to get stuck on!
My main gripe with The Colonel’s Bequest’s structure is that much of the game requires semi-aimless wandering and retreading of the mansion and its secret passages, at first thrilling and soon tiresome. There’s no sense of pathing when you click a spot for Laura to move to. She’ll move straight towards her destination and get stuck on the smallest of furniture or foliage, requiring lots of clicking and repositioning in order to interact with items or navigate screens.
Though there is a certain logic to some of the characters’ movements between acts, The Colonel’s Bequest‘s trim three-hours-or-so runtime can become bloated due to slow, choppy navigation. Sure, you may laugh the first time you get a silly and mostly random Sierra death scene like falling through a rickety balustrade or getting snapped up by an alligator, but as soon as you realize you forgot to save for the past fifteen minutes, hoo boy.
To interact with characters, items, and the environment, players must type verb-dependent phrases like “talk colonel,” “ask ethel about colonel,” and sometimes even “smell colonel.” In a way, I wish these text-parser commands (a remnant of text-adventures) could be used for easier navigation. Half the time, typing “open door” earns a a sassy “Do it yourself!” response, and yet at other times it’s required, provided you’re in the pixel-perfect correct spot.
Generally, though, the logical text parsing was my favourite aspect of The Colonel’s Bequest, with plenty of detail and funny rewards for verbal exploration. Insisting on taking a shower late in the game is met with a death scene referencing the iconic shower scene in Psycho. Then, there are lots of “Chekhov’s Gun” moments of setup and eventual payoff for those who keenly scan each room. Then, too, there are some slightly randomized elements, like multiple possible locations to find certain mutilated bodies. Fun!
The graphics also still impress today, thanks to a colourful palette of greens, purples, and oranges. Small touches, like mysterious silhouettes passing through background windows, add to the chilling atmosphere, and the various screens in and outside the plantation skillfully establish scale and location. Audio touches like bug chirruping, ticking clocks, and thunderclaps maintain the eerie tone, and the soundtrack (however farty-sounding) is used sparingly but effectively to enhance key discoveries. A part of me wishes I could have been a twelve-year-old terrified by this ominous and at first glance impenetrable game.
Would I share this screenshot if I got anything lower than “Seasoned P.I.?” No, I wouldn’t.
For those willing to stick through the dated and often aimless pace, The Colonel’s Bequest offers a delightfully hackneyed 1920s murder mystery that continually impresses with its deep interactivity. Rolling credits and seeing the game hint towards its yet unfound “Super Sleuth” requirements really made me appreciate the experience’s longevity. Whether you pick up the magnifying glass yourself or watch someone else’s playthrough, The Colonel’s Bequest is a significant keystone in PC adventure game history that deserves preservation and play.
In recent years, there’s been an influx of stories across media set in magic academies, where those gifted with magical talent hone their skills. Role-playing visual novel Arcadia Fallen IIhas players step into the academic shoes of a student in their final year at the fantastical Seven Winds Academy, an institute where mages are ranked by their grades before setting out into the world for the supposed betterment of society. But, in a fantasy realm where captive demons are treated as power sources and magic itself is strictly regulated and monitored, the world is not as peaceful as the students’ isolated upbringing at the academy suggests. With worldwide conflict brewing outside its hallowed halls, it isn’t long before the staff and students of Seven Winds Academy are forced to face it themselves.
Arcadia Fallen II is set seven years after its predecessor. Players with personalized playthroughs of Arcadia Fallen can alter key carryover story data from that game as they wish. The available choices approximate how later DragonAge titles continue each player’s plot. That’s a nice bonus for returning players, showing how choice-heavy Arcadia Fallen is from the start. At times, the narrative references events in Anemone Valley and features some returning faces. However, it’s equally easy to approach Arcadia Fallen II as a self-contained story. Returning players will love the Easter eggs, but prior knowledge isn’t required to enjoy the game.
Sometimes, you’ll be given character/personality-defining choices that impact story direction later.
Right from the start, you find detailed customization options for your protagonist. We call them Scarfy in this review, as referenced by a dragon in the game. You select their voice, name, hairstyle, eye color, clothing color, and gender—including a nonbinary option, which reflects the Arcadia Fallen series’ commitment to an inclusive LGBT+ setting. While the character customization is simpler than in games like Code Vein II or Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection, it remains impressive for an indie VN. Next, you select Scarfy’s roommate from two childhood friends: Soren, who is passionate about broadcasting, or Nina, who is interested in journalism. You also pick a magic major for Scarfy. There are four majors in total, but the game offers a choice among three: Tinkers, who invent magical devices; Illusionists, who use magic for creative arts; and Menders, who heal. Scarfy’s chosen major will unlock different dialogue options and branching story paths.
Arcadia Fallen II plays very much like an interactive piece of fiction, with roleplay mechanics and plenty of choices to determine how the narrative unfolds. You often choose where to go from a detailed point-and-click map of the academy, noting the locations of important characters and points of interest. You see a scene play out or talk to characters, and then you choose either specialized reactions to an event (such as attempting to heal someone who is hurt if you’re a Mender) or emotional/personality responses that determine how scenes and potential later events transpire. For example, you can steal an item needed somewhere else in the Academy, or you can come clean about needing it to its owner and why, getting rewarded with very different outcomes.
You have many opportunities to craft your in-game personality.
Most dialogue/reaction choices offer multiple options, so it does not feel overly limiting when approaching issues. Binary choices that might set events on a certain path are duly noted and have no clear “right or wrong” answer either, like forgiving someone or not, or nudging another character towards a future goal they might not have thought of before. The sheer number of permutations and outcomes guarantees that no replay will be exactly the same as the one that preceded it. I was honestly astounded by how even some of my earlier, seemingly insignificant decisions could come back in rather meaningful ways, such as my more civil treatment of three haughty noble mage students dead set on being rivals to my friends throughout the plot’s early stages.
The romance and platonic friendships that can develop between Scarfy and some of their closest companions are believably developed, too, with plenty of realistic hurdles to overcome that showcase how the characters grow. I wasn’t sure at first what to make of flirty Mender Elias or the entrepreneurial Tinker Puk, but later story scenes showing how the initially forced-upon-them group dynamic warmed up won me over by the time the credits rolled.
The rapport between Scarfy and company was great to see, but I also enjoyed how their interactions with other characters in the cast also changed in light of everyone else’s personal developments. I ended up developing a romance with the gentle Nature/Spirit Mage Kim, who might be a familiar face to those who played the first game, and was pleasantly surprised by how touchingly sweet and heartwarming their bond was. I appreciate that you can tailor your romance responses to your personal preferences without settling for a right or wrong answer. You can play it cool or joke if you’d like, or blush and be bashful, with any outcome still advancing the romance.
Puzzle sequences can be entertaining to figure out.
Alongside the ever-present reaction and dialogue choices, there are also simple point-and-click puzzles. For example, one side quest has you gather data about the academy’s feline residents. You can also return lost items to owners, which may reveal plot details or unlock future dialogue options. Due to dragon Ragnar’s chaotic magic, Scarfy and friends traverse school interiors via directional puzzles. In these, you connect a start and endpoint by sliding tiles or having someone, like Illusionist Hannah, stand in as a “connection point.” Hannah can bridge two otherwise unconnected tiles. These puzzles are enjoyable, provide a break from story scenes, and add interactivity without being too challenging or feeling forced.
All in all, the story and characters of Arcadia Fallen II—and the variety in how they develop—are the game’s strongest selling points. If I had a complaint, it’d be that the narrative is slow to hit its stride. Early on, one might think it’s simply teens facing school drama and studying magic. However, familiarity with the previous game or subtle lore points hint at darker aspects beneath the surface. The story doesn’t truly amp up and take an unexpected turn until nearly halfway through, which can make the initial chapters seem deceptively slow and misleading. Once the game reaches that point, though, momentum truly builds!
You’ll often overhear rather insightful conversations between characters while traversing the school.
Visually, Arcadia Fallen II stands out with bold lines and vibrant colors, similar to The World Ends With You. Its story is a darker fantasy like Dragon Age, but the comic book-inspired color palette creates a distinct contrast, making the visual novel’s darker elements less apparent at first. I enjoy the character designs, CG illustrations, and UI, although the characters could show more varied expressions. The background music enhances the game’s ambiance. There’s a standout vocal track in one fight scene that I wish I could have heard more of, along with more chances to hear the magical “Stepping Stones.” Voice acting is partial: some important scenes are fully voiced, while others use short soundbites. The performances are generally strong, especially the mechanical Librarian’s, though at times, spoken dialogue is delivered unexpectedly slowly. The script has a handful of minor typos, but given the heavy text and scene variations, this is minimal.
An average playthrough of Arcadia Fallen II takes roughly eleven to twelve hours. I genuinely had a blast with mine. Despite a slow start, I find Arcadia Fallen II to be even stronger than its predecessor. It brings us back into an evolving fantasy world where your choices feel impactful. The ending is satisfyingly conclusive and sets the stage for future adventures in a colorful landscape full of memorable characters and heartfelt bonds. Arcadia Fallen II is sure to delight both visual novel and RPG fans.
A popstar, a rocker, a DJ, and a rapper walk into a random encounter… No, this is not the start to a terrible joke, but rather the start of the incredible combat system in developer Iridium Studios’ cross-genre RPG musical People of Note. When I demoed the game and met its director, Jason Wishnov, at last year’s Tokyo Game Show, I was enamoured by its concept and was hopeful the full game would be deeper and more complex. Thankfully, People of Note is a virtuosic harmonizing of a whimsical aesthetic with ingenious turn-based mechanics.
Cadence, an aspiring singer in the pop music-infused city of Chordia, is tired of the same old. For years, bland boyband Smolder has won the citywide music competition Noteworthy, defining the prosaic pop that the citizens of Chordia eat up. When a faulty radio gives Cadence her first earful of rock music, she decides to journey out into the world of Note and amass a band that will bring a new sound to Chordia and break the walls separating genres.
The cities and kingdoms of Note represent supergenres of music, such as the rock-wasteland of Durandis, within which are areas for more specific genres—the metal, punk, and grunge districts. The first half of the game sees Cadence on a simple, if selfish, journey collecting a musician each from the Mad Max-ish deserts of Durandis, the EDM cyberpunk city of Lumina, and the rap kingdom of Pyre. All is not hunky dory, however, as Cadence slowly uncovers a looming conspiracy threatening to throw Note into chaotic disharmony.
Party on, Cadence.
People of Note‘s tone starts somewhere between a Disney film and Kpop Demon Hunters, appropriately shifting into a more mature, introspective mood in the story’s second half. I found the world-threatening stakes a bit too vague in the beginning, though Cadence is an interesting and relatable protagonist who buoys much of the heart. Any creative will empathize with her endeavours towards greatness. The rest of the cast is solid, such as playable rap prince Vox or the periodic boss battles against the four members of Smolder (think airheaded Backstreet Boys), though the highlight for me was the push-and-pull rivalry/romance between Cadence and the furtive violinist Arc.
Dialogue, conveyed through 2D character art, is fully voiced and well-written, striking the right balance between humour and pathos. Some line reads sound a little disjointed between characters, but they hit especially hard towards the game’s coda when the drama matters. Cutscenes in the form of showstopping musical numbers drop in at key moments, with characters belting out their dreams, anxieties, and (my favourite) apologies. These numbers are more theatre-kid approximations of rock, rap, EDM, and the other genres of Note, but there is a string of solid hits here.
See if you can guess who plays what genre based on their outfits.
The music that soundtracks exploration and combat is consistently catchy for all its eclecticism. A few standouts are the Kpop battle themes in a nightclub in Chordia, the siren-like enemy vocals in Choral Shores, and the bluegrass battle theme of the Homestead, cowboys from the country-country that seem intent on stopping Cadence. Most *ahem* notably, the music in battles shifts and gives buffs to musicians in your band (party) based on genre. Hearing, say, the bluegrass battle tune overlayed with pop vocals or crunchy metal guitars propels each round of battle forward and makes for some very interesting sonic and strategic combinations.
People of Note loves puns, which fits the musical theatre vibe, and I’m here for it. The game’s packed wall-to-wall with winks towards bands, lyrics, and general pop culture, so on-the-nose that it skirts obnoxiousness and goes right to charming. My favourite might be the armour “Simon Cowl,” or the boss battle where a cowboy goes “Super Singin’” and shoots out blasts of “Kamehameyeehaw!” Then, interactions with NPCs during exploration are rife with fourth-wall-breaking jokes poking fun at RPG tropes. People of Note got a lot of laughs out of me, and all of it complemented the musical integrity of its world.
Visually, People of Note imbues each genre with vibrant, painterly colours—you can even see the broad brushstrokes in its environments. Show me a colour and I could probably pin down where in Note it came from. Some side areas, like the woodwind-styled forest, feel a little half-baked, but that’s just a testament to how I want to see more of this beautiful world. Character models in battle jive and bob their head to the beat, though they can look a little stiff in the would-be-epic crossover attacks. Still, the characters look great in their 2D dialogues, and their cartoonish designs convey genre and personality wonderfully.
For all I love in People of Note, the combat takes centre stage. At first, given the Disney vibes, I thought this may be an onboarding RPG for players new to the genre. I had no clue how strategic and challenging the combat would be.
Time your inputs to add a little extra oomph.
Stanzas (battle rounds) are composed of numbered measures (character moves) clearly labeled on the bottom of the screen. The interface clearly labels enemy attacks, meaning you know whether to attack, heal, debuff, buff, or defend. Players can command their band in any order, provided every member makes a move. As mentioned, each stanza switches the musical genre and boosts one of your bandmates, meaning you’re better off having other members lay buffs on the current star, who can then attack.
In many RPGs, I strive for the quickest, most direct attacks to topple enemies. In People of Note, this gets you nowhere. Rather than have character classes, each of the four members has equippable and upgradable “Songstones,” some exclusive and others, like a simple heal, shareable. Songstone abilities require in-battle BP, which slowly replenishes each stanza, or with the use of certain abilities. Whereas a standard turn-based round in an RPG may look like “Attack, attack, attack, heal,” a late-game stanza in People of Note may include buffing your attacker, filling up their BP, attacking, and expanding the number of measures you can make in the next stanza.
Even random battles (not so random, as they’re accessible by a button push) feel more like precarious puzzles than a fight. Subtle, randomized elements of battles keep them fresh: the genres the stanzas shift through; varying enemy health; the number of measures allies and enemies can take; bosses gradually ramping up their “Crescendo” bar and becoming stronger like a beast at bay. Then, there are the timing-based inputs for each ability that greatly affect their potency. Each new weapon you find or purchase has a completely new overlay, meaning you’ll be continually reconfiguring your Songstones and moves as you get stronger. All of this to say, I absolutely love how engaging People of Note’s combat is.
The colours in the environment really pop (and rock, and rap, and…)
My feelings about the game’s exploration puzzles are more mixed. Each new genre/land Cadence ventures through brings a new type of puzzle, such as pushing bits of the environment to create a walkable path or bouncing music-ray-beams off mirrors and into receptacles. These start simple enough, but I was getting frustrated by some headier stacked mechanics by the game’s end. People of Note’s lands are rather small, meaning the game introduces puzzles too briefly and ramps up their difficulty before they vanish for the rest of the adventure.
One of the People of Note’s many thoughtful accessibility options is the ability to turn off these puzzles. For the sake of the review, I pounded my head against them, though the slog of puzzles towards the game’s final moments did hurt the game’s pacing. More enjoyable, if a bit underutilized, are the “puzzle battles” throughout Note that require certain conditions like defeating enemies in a set number of moves or simply surviving a punishing stanza. All content included, People of Note takes between fifteen and twenty hours; short but incredibly sweet.
Like a great album, People of Note is all killer, no filler. It’s an excellent antidote for RPGFans who may be tired of repetitive, overly long experiences. Don’t be fooled by its puns and Disney-ish charms—People of Note is thoroughly challenging and thought-provoking with its gameplay. I truly hope that when talk comes about for great turn-based combat, this game is in heavy rotation.
Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Daysis something of an odd duck in the Kingdom Hearts series. Taking place directly after Kingdom Hearts and running parallel to Chain of Memories, 358/2 Days instead focuses on Roxas, the briefly encountered protagonist of Kingdom Hearts II’s opening hours. 358/2 Days stands out in part because the full game remains exclusive to the Nintendo DS, releasing in 2009 and never receiving a complete rerelease beyond its cutscene compilation in Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 Remix.
Today, it remains sort of a forgotten relic, despite its importance to the series’ overarching narrative. That alone makes it worth revisiting, particularly for those who may have skipped it the first time around. From the jump, Roxas awakens in Twilight Town, where Xemnas, the main antagonist of Kingdom Hearts II and leader of the shadowy Organization XIII, takes notice of him. Taken in by Xemnas, Roxas becomes the Organization’s 13th member and is tasked with collecting “hearts” from the various Disney worlds’ Heartless enemies.
Much of the game revolves around Roxas’s growing identity crisis and a pervasive existential monotony, and there is a prevailing sense of isolation as Roxas struggles to find meaning and answers about his life and memories. During these tasks, Roxas befriends the Organization’s eighth member, Axel, and another girl taken in by the Organization, Xion, who is the semi-official 14th member. While I found these overarching themes quite compelling, pacing issues undermine 358/2 Days‘ story, and many of the game’s quieter, more introspective moments are ultimately too few and far between.
358/2 Days also suffers from having one of the series’ least accessible plots. While Kingdom Hearts II benefits from contextual information from the other games, I found myself more frequently questioning whether any of 358/2 Days‘ more esoteric plot beats would make sense without the backstory. Beyond understanding the plot, the worlds themselves are also sadly not interesting, mostly rehashing locations from prior games. This contrast is especially stark in 358/2 Days, as the Disney villains largely take a backseat to the shenanigans of the Organization, making the Disney world backdrops for each mission less cohesive than ever.
Clock in. Collect hearts. Eat ice cream. Repeat.
The game’s mission-based structure isn’t going to work for everybody, and it can definitely become repetitive, yet the droll monotony of the missions firmly establishes the game’s tone and Roxas’s personal plight, even if the missions themselves aren’t particularly engaging. This is truer for the missions where you collect “heart emblems,” with combat-based missions representing the stronger half of the gameplay.
Combat-wise, 358/2 Days is fairly standard Kingdom Hearts action RPG fare, with Roxas able to attack, sling spells, and utilize a powerful Limit Break attack. What differentiates 358/2 Days from other entries in the series, however, is its Panel system of character building and progression. In essence, Roxas starts out with a preset, empty grid, upon which he can customize levels, abilities, equipment, and even items. Panels are Tetris-like pieces, which you place on the grid and combine; for example, linking the “Fire” spell to Quadcast grants four extra casts, while linking it to Magic LV2 increases its potency.
Not only does the Panel system work wonders in establishing Roxas’s characterization as a blank slate, given his obscure origins, but it highlights the importance of strategically preparing for the particulars of each mission. As you progress through the game, you gain access to Slot Releasers that expand your grid, and gradually fitting as many abilities as possible into it feels immensely satisfying.
The availability, variety, and mechanical design of the Panel system are quite interesting as well. For example, Weapon Panels directly alter Roxas’s Keyblade and its available combos and attacks, rather than allowing you to equip Keyblades separately. Spell tiers, instead of being linearly powerful upgrades of the same basic mechanic, have unique properties: Fire is a homing fireball, Fira is a penetrative, exploding straight-shot, and Firaga is an arcing, homing artillery-like attack. I found experimenting with all of these particularly compelling, and it adds variety to Roxas’s skillset.
At least Mickey understands the assignment.
On the other hand, the actual implementation of mechanics in combat often leaves more to be desired. Many have criticized the Nintendo DS’s lack of a joystick and the controls in 358/2 Days, but I found them serviceable, with the camera operating just fine. Even better, the game never forces the use of the touchscreen or stylus. The bigger limitation of the DS shows in enemy behavior, with the AI often demonstrating odd lapses in aggression, especially when multiple enemies are on screen.
Despite being on the Nintendo DS, 358/2 Days looks remarkably good for its time. The worlds from Kingdom Hearts and its sequel are adapted quite well, and the 3D graphics are solid and charming. It won’t win any awards for originality or for being particularly impressive, even relative to contemporary competition on other systems, but it’s a great utilization of the hardware and one of the game’s most impressive technical accomplishments. That said, the DS is at its absolute limit, and there are numerous areas, especially in Neverland, where the frame rate absolutely craters when facing large groups of enemies.
358/2 Days struggles quite a bit more with its audio, though it again utilizes the hardware of the system about as well as possible. A handful of cutscenes feature voice acting, which is competently done and effectively raises the stakes of moments when Roxas, Xion, and Axel are all together. The game reuses much of the music from previous entries, and like those games, it is solid to excellent, albeit lower fidelity and noticeably bit-crushed.
Of note, however, is the original final boss theme, Vector to the Heavens, a mournful piano piece with powerful arpeggios, tempo variations, and striking melodic incorporation of several character themes. This theme elevates the game’s finale and its impact into something truly special and is once again a testament to Yoko Shimomura’s compositional prowess.
One searching for answers, one carrying the burden of them.
All in all, 358/2 Days is a solid entry in the Kingdom Hearts series, with some neat, if sparse, character and plot moments, even if their inclusion and the focus on the Organization alongside the Disney backdrops are more dissonant and jarring than ever. The pacing is less than ideal, and the mission structure won’t be for everybody, but if you care about the series’ overarching story, 358/2 Days is still worth revisiting for the way it fills in the gaps.
Ever since playing Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney in 2005, I’ve been hooked on adventure games and visual novels. Whether it’s Ace Attorney, Monkey Island, or Broken Sword, I can never get enough of them. The best way to make me fall in love with one of these games is by combining a strong cast of characters, a fascinating setting, and a gameplay gimmick that sets your game apart from the rest. Which is why, to this day, Gnosia is my all-time favorite game. So, when I saw the announcement of a mobile port, I stopped everything I was doing and bought it.
For those unfamiliar, Gnosia, set in the far future, puts players in control of a gender-determinate character in a seemingly unending time loop alongside fellow main character Setsu, a nonbinary character. In each loop, the cast has one goal: to identify who among them is the Gnosia, an infested imposter entity, and put them into cold sleep to protect the rest of the crew. Yet, for you and Setsu, the goal is to fill up an object called a Silver Key with knowledge, at which point they will be free.
The Silver Key serves as the focal point of the entire story.
Each time you loop, various details change, most notably who the Gnosia are. Essentially, Gnosia is Among Us in visual novel form, both games sharing the social deduction game Werewolf as inspiration. Like Among Us, you can also sometimes be the Gnosia, aiming to deceive the others and be among the final survivors. The gameplay loop of lying and killing without drawing suspicion is a ton of fun, although just like with Among Us, I couldn’t help but stress out about being caught!
The game starts simply enough, with people working to figure out the identity of the Gnosia by asking questions to one another. The player has six different stats:
Charisma: Makes you more convincing
Intuition: Helps you detect lies
Logic: Makes your statements more believable
Charm: Makes people more willing to ally with you
Performance: Makes you a better liar
Stealth: Makes you more able to avoid suspicion of being a Gnosia and being killed
Each character has a certain value in these stats as well; for example, Setsu has strong charisma, logic, charm, and performance but struggles with intuition and stealth and thus may trust the wrong people and be targeted more often. Your own stats can be upgraded over time, and becoming more adept at identifying liars and deceiving people feels so awesome. The first time I detected a lie was really energizing, though it wasn’t as simple as telling they were lying.
Gnosia‘s stat distribution helps tell a story about each character.
While the early game has you relying on hard evidence and the process of elimination, being able to eventually intuit who you can and cannot trust by catching people in lies adds a lot more depth to discussions. Of course, just because you can tell who is lying doesn’t mean you bested that person; there’s even a part of the game where a character tells you they’re the Gnosia and challenges you to get them put into cold sleep, which proves difficult, as pushing too hard on this character without strong evidence backfires very easily.
Gnosia becomes more complex as more roles are added. In most cases, special roles function between rounds. While the Gnosia picks a person to eliminate before the next discussion round, the humans have their own tasks, such as the Engineer, who checks the identity of another player, and the Doctor, who checks the identity of the last person put in cold sleep.
These roles add depth and fun for the human side, and playing the Engineer is particularly enjoyable, as your intel helps you know who to trust and who to accuse. There is also a role called Bug, which belongs to neither Gnosia nor human and whose goal is to avoid being killed or put into cold sleep—failure to do so results in the destruction of the universe. I find this role particularly stressful, as going against the humans and Gnosia makes everything so much more chaotic for me, but it’s fun nonetheless.
One thing I appreciated about Gnosia was its diversity. Not just in terms of having multiple LGBTQIA+ characters (including two nonbinary characters on top of being able to be nonbinary yourself), but also character concepts, ranging from an android to an alien-like human to an intelligent beluga whale. Every character is compelling, well written, and enjoyable in their own unique way. I’m especially fond of Chipie, a man who has a cat built into his neck as part of a procedure to let him inhabit the body of a cat by acclimating his brain to the cat’s.
Gnosia‘s cast is among the most conceptually diverse in games.
Gnosia continually surprises by revealing greater character depth, inspiring strong feelings, be they positive or negative, towards the whole cast. For example, Raqio, the haughty elitist, proves themself to be far more than that, particularly in how they treat Remnan, a traumatized young man. We get to see different aspects of people’s personalities play out when they are the Gnosia, notably in one instance where a character proves unable to fulfill their instincts as a Gnosia because they retained their dislike for lying. Interactions like these are among the most fascinating and profound moments I’ve ever experienced in a video game.
As much as I love Gnosia, it’s not all peaches and gravy. One quibble I had, especially around the middle of the game, was just how much of a grind it can be. The gameplay, while enjoyable, can get repetitive, especially when you’re nearing the end of the game and struggling to get all the information needed to break the time loop.
The discussion rounds could also stand to have more depth, as characters between loops have a somewhat limited selection of things they can say, meaning the gameplay becomes less surprising the longer you play. The gameplay also suffers from loops ending prematurely due to the Gnosia targeting you or getting doubted by others for seemingly arbitrary reasons. That being said, every time I replay this game, I find a scene I’d never experienced before, so at least it’s not fully devoid of excitement!
On a technical front, I’m in love with the art style. All the characters have fantastically unique designs, and the execution is perfect, courtesy of Gnosia’s artist, Cotori (who still does a ton of fan art for Gnosia‘s characters, which makes me very happy). The music did not quite live up to the quality of the visuals, but I still enjoyed many of the songs.
Shocking though it may be, Shigemichi is among the most normal characters in Gnosia.
Being a visual novel, Gnosia is a great fit for mobile platforms, circumventing the complicated controls that often malign mobile ports. The gameplay involves selecting menu icons with your phone’s touchscreen for the most part, with the only exception being two-finger swipe gestures to navigate menus. Its visual quality remains as strong as on other platforms, with the only limitations depending on the quality of your phone.
If you’re someone who has already experienced Gnosia elsewhere, the mobile port may not be worth it unless you’re looking for an excuse to replay it. $24.99 USD to double dip (or in my case, triple dip) is a steep price for certain, though I was more than happy to pay the price, as being on mobile hasn’t reduced its quality in any way.
For anyone looking to try a visual novel with a unique premise, cast, and gameplay, Gnosia is a great choice. It does require a fair bit of patience to make it to the end, as even if you know how to make progress, actually fulfilling the requirements can be quite difficult. But in my opinion, the highs are much higher than the lows are low.
Sometimes, all a game needs to work is confidence in its scope and vision. That’s the highest praise I’d shower on “15th-century Slovakia JRPG” Felvidek. Sure, it’s another turn-based RPG made with RPG Maker. It’s fairly short and doesn’t bring anything new to the genre mechanically. But what it does manage, I think, is just as special. It knows exactly what kind of world it wants to paint and knowingly plays with its engine’s possibilities and limitations to bring about that world with as much personality and charm as the developers can muster.
You ever hear about the conflicts between the Hussites and Ottomans in Central Europe and wonder: “What was that all about?” Well, Felvidek is the best answer you can get in turn-based RPG form. Not that historical accuracy is the main goal of the plot. The developer duo of Jozef Pavelka and Vlado Ganaj channel this period into a distinct low fantasy aesthetic using cultural panache and creative flourishes that make for a refreshing and memorable experience. What more can you ask from an RPG Maker passion project?
Felvidek’s main selling point is evident in screenshots. The game has an exquisite presentation that blends a handful of retro aesthetics into a look you perhaps wouldn’t think the RPG Maker engine capable of. The isometric viewpoint and character renders you see when exploring feel more akin to old Infinity Engine RPGs or a medieval-themed Hylics than anime-inspired pixel art.
The visuals are saturated in contrasting monochromes of yellows, greens, and purples that make the medieval setting feel slightly surreal and appropriately gloomy. Similarly, the OST’s raw instrumentals move between wacky electronic arrangements and somber guitar melodies. I can’t say I was expecting the game’s music to sound like this, as it certainly isn’t period-appropriate, but it’s a constant reminder that Felvidek is a fever dream variant of historical fiction—like Kingdom Come: Deliverance meets EarthBound.
Sir, do you have a permit for this baptism?
The tone Felvidek establishes is a joy to be part of. The writing fuses crude humor and dark bluntness seamlessly and with purpose. Dialogue blends verbose—sometimes even poetic—medieval dialect with a stylistically modern sense of comedic timing for often hilarious results. Its portrayal of a semi-fictionalized 15th-century Slovakia is one where peasants try to live their banal lives as religious zealots and mysterious cultists vie for power around them.
Felvidek’s world is unforgiving, exploitive, and violent in the local and larger political conflicts it is absorbed in. But the game never indulges in tragic drama or historical lore dumping. The realities of the period are presented wryly, matter-of-factly. The horror of monstrous rituals and relentless oppression is softened by farcical convolutions involving coffee beans and horny priests.
There aren’t many cinematic cutscenes, but the ones present are essential inclusions. They embrace a low-poly PSX aesthetic that melds perfectly with the gameplay’s 2D art. The opening cinematic shows our protagonist—the alcoholic and recently divorced knight, Pavol—sitting at a desk while rocking a wine bottle back and forth until he notices a fire blazing at a nearby ruin. It’s only a few seconds long and lacks dialogue, but it’s such a pleasant and focused mood-setter that initiates the plot’s mystery. These cutscenes don’t need to be anything more than they are. They are visually nostalgic without being referential, and they feel perfectly suited to Felvidek’s scope and atmosphere.
I’d hang screenshots from Felvidek’s cutscenes on my wall.
This is to say that Felvidek‘s scope is modest and the atmosphere is focused. It only takes around 5-6 hours to complete the campaign, but every moment feels purposeful. Each quest segment, NPC dialogue, and combat encounter is an important part of the worldbuilding, which even some top-tier RPG Maker games don’t quite pull off. The use of game space is smartly economical, made up of only 5 locations divided by a small overworld.
Multiple events occur in each of these areas throughout the journey, which helps bring the banal rural setting to life. You’ll revisit the roadside tavern multiple times for progression hint “rumors,” the starting castle to keep your lord updated on happenings, and the town to see how events continually affect the peasantry. There’s also a surprising number of optional events to uncover if you revisit areas more often than you’re directed. These satisfying discoveries can lead to alternative ways of completing a quest and can even result in variations to the game’s ending.
While the party size has room for four, the story mostly revolves around a core duo. The dynamic between the chaotic Pavol and the mostly straight-laced priest, Matej, immediately brings to mind Disco Elysium’s Harry Du Bois and Kim Kitsuragi. Pavol even seems to rock “The Expression” in his character portrait in what I took to be a knowing wink to newfound demand for stories about divorced middle-aged men with alcohol problems. Pavol and Matej’s verbal exchanges are always amusing and sometimes touching as the bromance develops. Aside from them, your lord will occasionally join the party or at least lend Pavol some soldiers, while other guests will come and go for particular plot beats.
The fantastic battle animations are another way that Felvidek avoids the potential monotony of standard RPG Maker combat.
This being an RPGMaker game, naturally, there are turn-based battles. The welcome difference is that encounters are finite, and most are naturally woven into the story progression. There is no leveling, either, with character growth relegated to new equipment and the occasional stat-boosting item (such as Jam, naturally). Finite battles mean finite funds and items to purchase, so digging through crates and whatnot around the world is important to obtain loose cash and goods. Personally, I love pushing against and mashing A around assets. And the lack of leveling did not at all interfere with a solid sense of progression.
This theme of scarcity supports the game world well and keeps the difficulty right where it needs to be. Felvidek is not a mechanically deep game by any means, but its systems convey the character of the game world. You have HP and Tools, the latter of which works as MP for skills you learn that are tied to equipment. There’s a handful of skills you can gain through equipment and consumable items to use, offering just enough strategic potential to experiment with throughout the relatively short playtime.
You can stun enemies with a Shield Bash, let off a powerful gunshot that takes a whole turn to reload, drink a bottle of Frndžalica and spit fire upon your foes, while Matej possesses an essential Prayer skill that provides group healing and buffs. I died a few times due to a lack of preparation, and there wasn’t a single battle that padded out the experience. I’ll say that again because it’s downright miraculous: this is a turn-based RPG without a superfluous encounter.
When it isn’t being ridiculous, Felvidek has a contemplative melancholy to it.
Although Felvidek’s design and storytelling are impressively focused, its writing doesn’t clearly communicate next steps. There were occasions where I had to meet with a character name I didn’t recognize or go to an inexact location, only to backtrack through a few areas until stumbling upon the necessary quest trigger. It’s possible the game—or even just the English localization—didn’t get enough QA testing for this. You should also be prepared for a fair amount of typos and a tendency towards proper noun drops that were somewhat impenetrable as someone barely versed in Czech or Slovakian history. And while none of the humor felt mean-spirited, some jokes border on racially insensitive and misogynistic.
As much as I admire Felvidek’s consistency across concept and execution, I do wish it took bigger swings in its design. It’s an RPG for players who appreciate the genre as a basis for vibes over mechanical evolution. This makes it an easy recommendation for such players and a tougher sell for anyone seeking a meatier game. As for me, I knocked it back like a bottle of plum wine, savored the distinct taste, and will look back upon its intoxicating experience fondly.
The journey that the Life is Strange series provides its fans has been a long and winding one, filled with storms both in-game and out. With the IP belonging to publisher Square Enix, we’ve seen development shift from French team Dontnod Entertainment (Life is Strange 1 and 2) to American devs Deck Nine for prequel Life is Strange: Before the Storm and everything since. Life is Strange: Reunion is Deck Nine’s culmination of 11 years of Life is Strange, pulling together characters and player decisions from both halves of the franchise and giving them—thankfully—a proper sendoff.
First, be warned of spoilers for the first Life is Strange (2015) and Reunion’s predecessor, Life is Strange: Double Exposure (2024).Life is Strange: Reunion opens by summing up the stories of these two games and asking players to reselect a handful of key decisions from their endings. Most importantly, from the first game: does your time-reversing protagonist Max Caulfield choose to save her best friend (and optional love interest) Chloe Price or leave Chloe to die to quell the massive storm that messing with time and fate caused? Save the girl, or save the town you both grew up in. Fans argued up and down about what the right call to make was, but that need has passed.
A decade later, Double Exposure saw Max merging two paradoxical timelines her time-reversing caused, setting off the potential that the universes where Chloe died and survived were both true. As its title suggests, Life is Strange: Reunion is the long-awaited return of Chloe Price, now struggling with the hunch that she just may be a walking paradox herself, as she seeks out her long-lost (girl)friend (but let’s be honest, in-game stats show that 95% of fans have Max and Chloe romance each other).
Yeah, her hair is green now.
Life is Strange: Reunion is set within the year after Double Exposure and so reuses many environments and characters from Caledon University. The strongest of that game’s cast, namely physics supergeek Moses and femme fatale Safi, feature heavily here as well. It would have been nice to introduce some new characters, or perhaps return to more characters from the first game’s Arcadia Bay (aside from a few passing references in readable text messages). Still, those others would only be overshadowed by the immediate chemistry between Max and Chloe.
Now a photography teacher at Caledon, Max is finally enjoying minor fame and a semblance of normality, only to witness a vicious fire engulf the university and all that she loves. For the first time since losing her best friend/love of her life, Max travels back in time through a photo she took just days before the fire. If stopping Caledon’s imminent destruction weren’t enough, Chloe returns like a literal ghost from the past to Max after years apart.
Despite the story’s constantly high stakes, I loved the cozy feeling I had while playing it, thanks in large part to the warm, autumnal visuals and gentle acoustic score (with some of Max’s favourite indie bands for moments of reflection). Even the pause and menu themes are gorgeously bittersweet. Life is Strange: Reunion is only around ten hours, but it rewards patience. Bee-lining for each objective will make you overlook interactable clues in the environment that may just save a life. More than that, the bulk of the game is hearing Max’s observations of the world around her—band posters, awful open mic performers, public art displays, and listenable podcasts. Though superfluous, they add colour and character.
I just wanna click on everything and hear Max’s witticisms!
For the first time, players also control Chloe. Her journal logs are messy, her phone screen cracked; rather than take collectible photos, she scribbles out quick doodles of what she observes. Chloe was a lovable if at times frustrating character in Life is Strange, but here she has outgrown her teenage slang (goodbye, “amazeballs” and “hella”) and most of her impetuousness. Even more than Max and her puns, Chloe is the heart of Life is Strange: Reunion. Fans of the series who were disappointed with how Chloe was cast aside for Double Exposure need not worry.
The slower pace extends to gameplay. There are few puzzles to be found in Life is Strange: Reunion, and I rarely even used Max’s rewind power beyond a few clever story beats. No bottle collecting or knocking over toolboxes here! This made the game rather easy, as even story choices seemed mostly obvious, and I ended the game with what I’d argue was the objectively best ending for all involved.
I’d say this is the most linear Life is Strange game, leaning more towards the writing and dialogue that fans enjoy over interactivity. Beneath its heady time-travel and mystery concepts, Life is Strange: Reunion’s dialogue is well-written, quippy without becoming too twee, and very well-acted. The impressive facial animations return here to breathe life and pathos into Max and Chloe, though some side characters can still come across as plasticky by comparison.
If only I, too, could afford a beautiful home by teaching five students once a week…
I love how the game lets its conversations take their time, lingering on and expounding emotions that players no doubt want to feel. Unlike the Twin Peaks-esque way the original game poked fun with its tropes, revealing dark secrets behind seemingly every character, Life is Strange: Reunion is tender-hearted and, as I said before, cozy, and works best on those willing to be lulled into its gentle rhythm.
For scenes where I controlled Chloe, I liked the risky feeling that my choices couldn’t be rewound. She even has a new “Backtalk” debate feature where quick dialogue decisions decide some rather large story revelations, though this feature only appears a handful of times. This could still be frustrating because the dialogue choices, mapped to face buttons, could be a little too vague at times, especially in conjunction with the lack of a readable log. During some important conversations, I froze, unsure how to respond, through no lack of attention on my part.
If I had one glaring complaint about the original Life is Strange, it’s that it was, frankly, ugly as sin. Life is Strange: Reunion looks lovely and runs smoothly. Caledon and The Snapping Turtle bar are thoroughly detailed with the idylls of a liberal arts student. The surrounding autumn foliage consistently gave me pause and made me, as Max, take my camera out to line up a screenshot. There’s just enough painterly flourish in the game’s art direction to eliminate any uncanniness and preserve it with an evergreen beauty.
A tale of two (paradoxical) Chloes.
The character animations, too, finally reflect the impressive cinematography that has always existed in Life is Strange. There is some texture and model pop-in, especially when the camera establishes a new setting, but all said, I’m glad to see the visuals and polish brought up to this standard in Life is Strange: Reunion.
In all honesty, fans were right to be concerned about Deck Nine’s stewardship of Life is Strange after Double Exposure’s disappointing finale and cliffhanger. Thankfully, Deck Nine righted their course and stuck the landing with Life is Strange: Reunion, which takes the best of both, er, dimensions: the beautiful visuals and warm aesthetic of recent games applied to the much-loved dynamic of Max and Chloe. Some may miss the time-bending puzzles, but I preferred the way the narrative threads and character moments pulled me in for an intimate embrace.
Despite how deliciously macabre and heart-wrenching noir can be, we see so few in the gaming landscape. Rich with rain-soaked, harsh realities, a down-on-their-luck detective battles their troubled past when a dame clad in fire-red walks through their door (dames—always dames). Well, have no fear, because Aether & Iron intends to contribute to the genre, though departing from the formula in meaningful ways.
We play as Gia Randazzo, a smuggler struggling to find work after she engaged in a truly heinous act that shot up her reputation like a Tommy gun. As fortune would have it, a notorious yet secretive fixer finds her a cake job: escort a young damsel from the Uppers to the Lowers. How hard could it be? What ensues is a tale of revolution, deceit, conspiracy, and a reshaping of New York City’s past-future.
“Past-future?” What am I even talking about? Aether & Iron takes place in the 1930s, but with groundbreaking technology in the form of a resource called “aether.” Much of New York is flying high up in the sky, and that’s thanks to the Well, a floating ball of tech that consumes aether. Aside from that, much of the setting feels like cliche 1930s fare, from the clothing to the accents. That’s not a bad thing, mind.
What kinda sicko is going to fight this guy?
Yes, we have a female lead in a noir, which, while not the first time it has happened by any means, is certainly not the standard. Gia and her voice actor absolutely knock the story out of the park, too. Aether & Iron is primarily driven by its strong cast, significantly comprised of females. One has to wonder why we don’t see this more often, or why it’s even noteworthy for me to mention it. The story here breathes new life into the gaming landscape.
Without spoiling too much, soon after meeting her escortee, Gia realizes that there’s more to this helpless walking brain clad in white than meets the eye. In fact, so much more that a mysterious bounty hunter in black finds the need to relentlessly pursue her and her research papers. What could possibly be so important? Her client’s nebulous research aside, Gia eventually finds herself working odd jobs for a rebel group to overthrow barons: tyrants who rule the city in the worst possible ways. These two story arcs, combined with Gia battling her own demons, make for a narrative that pivots seamlessly in a delicate dance until its thirty or so hours are up.
The voice actors enhance a script saturated in metaphors, analogies, and poetic descriptions of thoughts, feelings, environments, and observations. Somehow dense, yet accessible, Aether & Iron is one of the most well-written games I’ve played in a long time. Every line bears weight, yet the script never drags. Players’ time is respected, but Aether & Iron makes sure to welcome us into a world worth exploring. Relatable and human, its tragedies make us reflect on our own world. We root for the heroes not just because this is a well-written and acted story, but because we feel the pain of the oppressed.
I guess a success means that you persuade her through carefully chosen words, and a failure means actually physically pushing her.
Gia’s voice actor isn’t the only star, though. Almost every character, primary, secondary, or tertiary, enjoys powerful acting that oftentimes made me just want to sit back and listen endlessly. While the varying plots and drivers make Aether & Iron an adventure worth fighting for, some of my favorite moments are when the crew has downtime and all of the beautiful personalities come together at a bar to engage in low-stakes nonsense. If the personalities weren’t powerful and unique, this wouldn’t be so fun.
The music’s no slouch, either. Composed by two-time Grammy-winning composer Christopher Tin, as well as Grammy-nominee Alex Williamson, expect to be enthralled with music reminiscent of noir—lots of strings, horns, and light percussion. Performed by a live orchestra, Aether & Iron’s music would bring one to tears if the gripping narrative didn’t draw so much attention. Unfortunately, not everything meets the standard set by the story, music, and acting.
Buildings whip by during the the visually impressive combat, which uses cars as units on a battlefield-road that must be the longest straight-away in history. The cars are no gimmick: expect to run into passersby just trying to get from A to B during your reckless combat. Not only that, but accelerating takes way more action points than decelerating to the back of the large, grid-based rectangle.
Each car can be outfitted with an engine, repulsor, guns, storage, and armor, as long as you mind the weight limit. Light, small cars have limited cargo space and health, but make up for it with a variety of weaponry and the ability to zip around the field. Tow trucks offer firepower and support abilities, while vans and their ilk tank and dish out collision damage.
In our 1930s future, expect not only for smugglers and gangs to engage in firefights on the streets, but heavy metal to casually rain down from the sky.
So, what’s the problem? As novel and engrossing as this battle system is, it can feel half-baked. Some battles are an absolute pleasure to puzzle out, while one or two offer strange difficulty spikes, and several can be cheesed pretty easily. I also saw little incentive on Normal difficulty to change the gear on my cars. Theoretically, players can buy new cars, but I never saw much of a reason to do this. Money’s tight for the most part, which is great, but I’d rather purchase dialogue rerolls and repair kits than buy minimal improvements or completely re-tool my strategy just to add a point or two of damage to my clunker.
Other gameplay mechanics, like hiding illicit cargo from safety checks, only really come up in the first few hours, and quickly don’t matter. Heat is a mechanically neat stat players build for engaging in loud, risky behavior, but it doesn’t have a substantial impact on gameplay. A storage system exists, but I saw little point in saving anything for later. Aether & Iron‘s gameplay is filled with interesting ideas that ultimately don’t go anywhere or feel tossed at the wayside early on.
Character dialogue frequently requires skill checks, which can be built for each character on a variety of skill trees intertwined with combat abilities, and while it’s fun to roll the dice and see what success or failure results in, I rarely found successes substantially important. Mind, this is all from a gameplay perspective—the joy of seeing what a character says in response to a failure or success is always exhilarating, because the writing and voice acting always impresses.
In our 1930s future, expect ice cream for lunch.
One last quibble about the controls and technical issues. First, targeting with a mouse and keyboard feels most intuitive, but the various menus get in the way, giving me my fair share of misclicks. Momentarily frustrating, this is where the control woes end. Now, the technical issues—hoo boy. Aether & Iron is certainly playable, but it’s rough. This list is not exhaustive, but expect: incredibly slow load times, black screens, a bizarre save system that doesn’t actually save your most recent progress, actors misreading lines and then repeating the line with the correct take, and dialogue loops. My hope is that they hammer out these kinks soon after release, but those averse to these initial hiccups should be forewarned.
Aether & Iron rises above its quirks with sheer creativity and artistic expression. I love the hand-drawn world, the characters I wish I could engage with far beyond the credits, and the struggle Gia and New York City’s citizens engaged in. A story worth telling, it’s a cliche noir tale told from an entirely different angle and elevated by a cast that stands above most others. My hope is that we see more tactical RPGs with imaginative systems like this, with their creative visions better realized.
Round one, begin! It’s once again time for the kingdom of Kayu’s Tournament of Valor, in which every participant believes in the motto of might makes right. A young Daoshi-in-training named Shunlin accompanies her grandfather Lihong and childhood friend Haoran to the martial arts spectacle, but the trio is unprepared for the tournament’s shocking events. Will energetic Shunlin discover the truth and defend her country alongside a potential suitor in the romantic visual novel Otome Daoshi -Fighting for Love-?
Otome Daoshi -Fighting for Love- is an otome visual novel loosely inspired by the martial arts fantasy wuxia genre, and it’s visually reminiscent of the classic anime and manga series Fushigi Yuugi. That’s not the only nostalgic nod, though, as one could be forgiven for remembering the several martial arts tournaments that frequent shonen series with Otome Daoshi’s Tournament of Valor plotline. The premise is interesting and has narrative potential, though, sadly, plot reveals and twists lack the necessary gravitas, resulting in glaring narrative dissonance. For example, a martial arts master gets turned into a zombie puppet in one route, and the reaction of those who know him is so much of a “moving on now” vibe that it undermines any potential emotional impact the writers (hopefully) intended. Otome Daoshi-Fighting for Love- isn’t a bad tale by any means, but its depiction certainly leaves something to be desired.
Choose whatever your heart tells you!
Unfortunately, the game’s characters, while not poorly written or problematic, fail to stand out. Shunlin’s energy could be refreshing, but she often veers into ditzy or nearly blank slate territory, though she typically gains strength by each route’s end. The love interests are pleasant but not especially compelling; Yuhang stands out mainly because his tsundere reactions to Shunlin can be grating. Completing Yuhang’s, Haoran’s, and the abrasive Shaowu’s routes is necessary to unlock royal aide Longli’s and the fifth secret route, but none of these paths distinguish themselves. This is a rare case of all routes being created equal, as I have no strong feelings for or against any of them. In fact, Shunlin’s grandfather is the most memorable character to me because he avoids the tired “perverted old man” trope. Even the panda mascot brings little novelty compared to similar otome VNs. Ultimately, Otome Daoshi’s cast is adequate but unremarkable, which reflects the game’s overall narration.
Gameplay-wise, Otome Daoshi -Fighting for Love- is a traditional VN. Players advance through dialogue until presented with choices that raise either a “Romance” or “True Love” meter. There are no bad endings. The game skips typical worldbuilding features like an in-game glossary to peruse, but still includes text-skip and a CG gallery. Overall, Otome Daoshi feels bare-bones compared to other otome titles, which may explain its shorter playtime of around three to six hours per route.
Visuals are where Otome Daoshi -Fighting for Love- stands out most. The game doesn’t include animations compared to many other visual novels, but the character portraits are expressive enough on their own. It bothered me that not every character had a portrait, though, as even recurring characters were sometimes represented only by their voices. The imagery and art are incredibly colorful and vibrant, with gorgeous CGs. The game even creatively uses black-and-white manga/comic-style cutscenes to depict its more action-packed moments, which is fitting for the story’s martial arts focus! Enough so that I wished there were more of them spliced throughout, as I love the artistic presentation overall. It’s a shame Shunlin is only visible in select scenes, though. Also, the UI throughout the game has a flat, colorful, and simplistic style that clashes with the intricate character designs.
The visual storytelling is certainly striking.
Otome Daoshi‘s music is cute and catchy, especially in cases like the game’s opening song. The voice work is also well done, with the voice actors giving their all, even when the story itself rarely leaves the middle ground. As I mentioned, the game is relatively short to play through at around three to six hours per route, and I noticed that the script localization is pretty on-point and error-free. The translators seem to favor a Working Designs-style approach to modern lingo, and it works given the story’s lower stakes.
Otome Daoshi -Fighting for Love- is a visually impressive otome visual novel that, unfortunately, fails to stand out narratively or mechanically in the crowded Switch market. While the artwork is a highlight, and the experience may appeal to those seeking light entertainment, many players may find better value picking the game up on sale versus its standard $49.99 USD price. Given the genre’s high competition, Otome Daoshi is best considered as a secondary choice rather than a must-play title.
Revisiting older games can be sobering. Sometimes they age gracefully. Sometimes they reveal ideas ahead of their time. And sometimes they expose every compromise that once hid behind a smaller screen. Mega Man Star Force Legacy Collection stands firmly in that last category. This was my first time with the Star Force games, and I came in expecting a lost corner of Mega Man history. What I found instead was a trilogy that feels at odds with its new home.
As mentioned in my hands-on preview, there are technically seven Star Force titles included, but functionally this is a trilogy with alternate versions: Pegasus, Leo, and Dragon; Zerker x Ninja and Zerker x Saurian; and Black Ace and Red Joker. Just like different versions in the Pokémon series, the core progression and story within each pair and trio remain nearly identical.
These were Nintendo DS games built around two screens, stylus input, and the cadence of handheld play. On a large display, especially on the PS5, the translation is rough. One screen sits tucked into a corner, adjustable but never comfortable. Swapping focus between the two becomes a constant chore, and the interface rarely feels at home on a television. Even when the layout technically works, it does not feel natural. The friction never disappears. It lingers in every menu, every transition, every attempt to read information that was clearly designed for two tiny screens.
Playing this way turns what should be simple interactions into small annoyances that pile up. The UI and combat information live on one screen, environmental and story context on another. You toggle, resize, and re-center, always managing the presentation instead of simply playing. This kind of compromise might feel acceptable on a dual-screened portable device, but on a large screen, it becomes exhausting. I keep wishing I had a PlayStation Portal to try it on, though I’m not convinced even that would solve all the headaches.
The fate of the world… literally in your deck.
Underneath Mega Man Star Force Legacy Collection‘s awkward presentation sits a gameplay loop built around exploration, encounters, and deck-driven combat. You move between real-world locations and a parallel digital “wave” layer that overlays the environment, talking to characters, triggering objectives, and advancing the story. Battles take place on a compact three-panel grid viewed from behind Mega Man, with enemies occupying the space ahead. Movement is limited, and the focus shifts toward timing, positioning, and reading attack patterns.
Folder building remains at the heart of all three games. Cards collected from enemies and shops form your Folder, Star Force’s term for its deck, dictating your offensive and defensive options. During combat, a gauge fills, time pauses, and you draw a hand. Matching columns or duplicate names lets you string attacks together before returning to real-time movement: dodge, wait, draw, strike, reset. It is a clever idea, but it quickly becomes monotonous given the limited enemy variety.
The first game, Mega Man Star Force, establishes the series’ foundation. Its sci-fi framing leans heavily into wave technology and digital overlays, giving the world a distinct identity compared to other RPGs of the era. The story follows Geo and his transformation into Mega Man through contact with an extraterrestrial entity. The premise has potential, but the execution rarely capitalizes on it. Story scenes come and go without much impact, and the pacing often stalls between plot beats.
Mechanically, the first Star Force feels the most rigid. Folder building exists, transformations provide some customization, and enemy patterns encourage learning, yet encounters blur together quickly. Navigation can be unclear, and the game revolves around repetition. The three versions primarily shift elemental affinities and form changes, but the overall structure remains unchanged. By the midpoint, the sense of discovery fades, replaced by routine.
The sequel, Mega Man Star Force 2, attempts to expand that foundation through the Tribe system and Zerker combinations. On paper, there is more to engage with. There are more transformation options, and Folder experimentation becomes more viable. In theory, it’s a meaningful step forward, but in practice, the changes feel so minor that I spent much of my playthrough fighting a persistent sense of déjà vu. Encounters remain repetitive, and the structure still relies on moving between spaces, triggering events, and fighting waves of similar enemies. The story pushes toward a more global scale, but like the first game, its major plot points struggle to land.
How will you tip the scales in your favor?
The third entry, Mega Man Star Force 3, is the most refined mechanically. There is a clearer attempt to give players more control over their playstyle, with expanded Folder options, slightly smarter enemy patterns, and more varied transformations that let you experiment with different approaches. Even here, though, the improvements sit atop the same dated structure.
The stakes escalate in familiar fashion. A new threat emerges, shadowy figures maneuver behind the scenes, and Geo once again finds himself bridging the human and Wave Worlds in an effort to prevent catastrophe. The game grasps toward larger ideas about trust, reputation, and the consequences of power, and there is a greater sense of an overarching conspiracy tying events together. Yet despite the heightened scope, the story follows a familiar pattern: investigate an anomaly, enter a corrupted network, defeat a themed boss, repeat.
The pacing in Mega Man Star Force Legacy Collection swings between slow stretches and sudden spikes of activity. Black Ace and Red Joker introduce meaningful tweaks to abilities and builds, but they remain variations within a familiar mold. The core experience still revolves around the same loop established in the first game. It doesn’t help that common enemies are recycled across all three games.
The combat shows flashes of potential. Timing attacks, managing card draws, and adapting to enemy patterns can be engaging at times. Folder building, in particular, hints at a deeper layer of strategy. Transformations add flair, and late-game encounters occasionally push you to think more carefully about your approach. But for every encounter that clicks, countless more pass by without leaving an impression. Instead of building tension, the games often settle into a predictable cadence.
Star Force aims for emotional weight but struggles to sustain it. Themes of isolation, identity, and connection run throughout, yet the writing rarely develops them beyond surface-level gestures. Scenes introduce ideas, then move on before they can register. While the sci-fi setting provides a distinct tone, the execution never creates the momentum needed to carry it.
The presentation does little to help. These were originally DS games, and in that context, the visuals were fine. On modern platforms, though, they just look like a blown-up DS game. The adaptation preserves the structure, but not the comfort of playing on a handheld. Audio fares a bit better, with energetic battle themes and familiar Mega Man motifs. Even so, monotony sets in quickly. Tracks loop constantly, and the soundscape rarely evolves alongside the gameplay. Many tunes also feel distinctly low-fi, as if copied straight from the DS releases, despite the touted rearranged and remixed soundtracks.
There are a few ideas in the Star Force series worth appreciating. The card-based combat framework shows promise. The transformation mechanic adds some identity. The sci-fi premise sets the trilogy apart from other RPGs of its era. But potential alone cannot carry an experience, especially across three full-length games that lean so heavily on uniformity.
At least there’s a music player!
Playing through the Star Force games in 2026, the sense of their era is unmistakable. Objectives feel unfocused; wandering is without purpose. Encounters stack without evolving, and combat rarely feels connected to exploration. Instead of building toward something cohesive, the trilogy circles the same concepts, refining them incrementally without ever introducing anything new.
What ultimately defines this collection is friction. Friction between hardware and design. Friction between ambition and execution. Friction between systems that hint at depth and a structure that never supports it. The more time I spent with Mega Man Star Force Legacy Collection, the more exhausting it became. Not challenging. Not demanding. Exhausting. The constant screen management, the repetitive encounters, the clunky navigation, the slow pacing, the friction layered on top of friction. It all adds up.
Capcom deserves credit for preserving these games in a complete package. All versions are here, faithfully presented. For longtime fans, that preservation alone may justify the collection. But I cannot, in good conscience, recommend it to newcomers. The games are intact, and with them come all of their limitations. Once, it felt like an ambitious handheld experiment; now it plays like a trilogy stuck between ideas. Mega Man Star Force Legacy Collection is an honest time capsule, capturing a series that never found its footing.
Escape from Ever After stars Flynt, a typical storybook boy hero whose arch nemesis is a tyrannical dragon named Tinder. One fine day, Flynt enters Tinder’s castle only to find that Tinder’s been evicted by an otherworldly corporation called Ever After Inc. To add insult to injury, Ever After Inc. turned Tinder’s castle into a cubicle-filled office building staffed by a variety of other storybook characters.
A confused Flynt then meets Mr. Moon, the branch manager whose previous life was in a children’s book. Flynt refuses Mr. Moon’s offer to enter corporate servitude and is thrown in the dungeon. Flynt comes to, only to find that his cellmate is Tinder… albeit rendered physically smaller and weakened by one of Ever After’s impossible-to-remove neutralizing collars. Not willing to take this corporate takeover of their storybook lying down, Flynt and Tinder reluctantly team up to bring down Ever After Inc. from the inside.
Meet Mr. Moon, the smarmy branch manager.
As expected, the task is not as straightforward as it first appears. Flynt’s journey takes him in unexpected directions as he meets a cavalcade of colorful characters along the way. Flynt is a generic hero by design, but Escape from Ever After’s real heart lies in Flynt’s playable companions and its myriad NPCs. My favorite playable character is the Big Bad Wolf, who’s really the Big Bard Wolf. My favorite NPC is Helga, a seafaring Viking adventurer brainwashed by Ever After Inc. into believing that her new life striving to climb the corporate ladder is true freedom. Corporate tyranny is the insidious enemy Flynt, Tinder, and company aim to eradicate.
Escape from Ever After’s premise is nonsensical and absurd, yet charming and amusing due to the clever writing and fun characters. Many aspects of the plot and worldbuilding don’t make logical sense, but so what? Most fairy tales don’t make sense either, yet we enjoy them nonetheless. The same principle applies to Escape from Ever After. Don’t look for logical sensibilities; go along on the 17ish-hour ride from its goofy beginning to its wild endgame.
Jazz-inspired music elevates Escape from Ever After’s atmosphere. I particularly enjoyed the jaunty music that plays in Tinder’s castle/the office building that Flynt and company use as their home base. It evokes the vibe of elevated elevator music combined with the smarmy happiness exuded by “that” kind of manager. The music in the other storybook worlds Flynt explores matches the environments exceedingly well, being simultaneously atmospheric and fun. However, the battle and boss themes are lacking. They are well composed, but not punchy enough to be rousing combat compositions.
The places Flynt and company explore are fairly linear to navigate, so exploration is not too expansive. Save points are plentiful, so I did not miss the lack of an auto-save. Journeying mainly consists of puzzle solving, platforming, and various combinations thereof. In the field, Flynt and his companions each have field skills they use to solve puzzles and access new places. If you dislike “puzzle dungeon” type RPGs, Escape from Ever After is not for you. Not only are there tons of puzzles, but some are quite frustrating (the library puzzle in chapter four is particularly insidious). Even some easier ones take time to solve, putting the brakes on forward momentum.
Timing attacks and blocks is finicky.
Puzzle sequences requiring timing and dexterity were a struggle due to the rather sensitive control inputs. Simply running around felt like sliding on a slushy or icy sidewalk. Loose and floaty jumping made platforming frustrating; I fell into the drink more times than I can count. At least I didn’t lose HP when I fell in. Escape from Ever After’s 2D sprites in 3D (or 2.5D) polygon environments evoke that storybook/diorama look, but when moving Flynt’s sprite toward me, there is no invisible fence to prevent me from falling off an unseen drop.
Along with an input sensitivity adjustment, Escape from Ever After also needs an option to remap controls. I often pressed buttons I did not intend to press. This was especially maddening during puzzles that required precise timing to switch characters, engage their field skills quickly, and platform jump all within limited windows.
Battle employs some of these same precise timed inputs with standard moves, defensive blocks, and minigame-style sequences for special moves. Encounters are turn-based, and only two can fight at once. Knowing when to swap characters to utilize their skills is strategically important. All characters gain full EXP after battle, so there is no penalty for swapping out. In fact, many battles encourage frequent swapping. Unfortunately, button press timing for these actions is incredibly finicky. Missing means either dealing paltry damage or taking excess.
Escape from Ever After offers attack-assist and guard-assist options to automatically do the timed button-press actions. Using these options made the game more playable, but I should not have to switch off a game’s core mechanic to make it more enjoyable. Escape from Ever After also offers three difficulty levels to choose from (easy, normal, and hard). That said, there are some sudden and sharp difficulty spikes throughout that exist even in easy mode with the assists turned on. Some boss battles felt cheap and/or relied heavily on luck to win (chapter two’s second battle with Duxter in the catacombs comes to mind). Other battles, both boss and regular, were battles of attrition due to several nuisance mechanics (e.g., enemies with shields that need to be neutralized in order to deal damage) and some foes being HP sponges.
I’d be angry too if corporate allowed mice to infest my workplace.
Escape from Ever After is a nice-looking game. The cartoony 2D sprites have clean lines and are quite expressive. They fit nicely into the whimsical 2.5D and 3D polygon environments for that storybook/diorama look evocative of the Paper Mario series. Because the playable and non-playable characters all come from various storybooks, Escape from Ever After is filled with a plethora of fun and creatively designed characters. For example, seeing a big ol’ minotaur sharing office space with a dainty little pixie amused me. My only graphical caveat is that while menus are visually stylish, they’re cumbersome to navigate.
My stance on Escape from Ever After is clear. The characters, music, and writing are tons of fun and exude plenty of charm. Unfortunately, the gameplay, especially the mushy controls, sharp difficulty spikes, and maddening puzzles, left me feeling cold. So, despite its potential, Escape from Ever After was a middle-of-the-road Paper Mario-style experience for me.
Ride on, Rangers: Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection, the third entry in the monster-collecting JRPG spin-off series, is here! Can humans and monsters unite to save the world? Bonds of kinship prevail in a fantastical tale revealing how past sins echo through time. Heartwarming and poignant, Monster Hunter Stories 3 builds on an already impressive formula and reaches even greater heights.
The story begins in a kingdom called Azuria with the birth of exceedingly rare twin Skyscale Rathalos (think giant dragons). This birth portends a great calamity, causing the king to make a tragic decision in an attempt to prevent future hardships. Flash forward years later, and much has changed in Azuria. You play as the prince or princess of the kingdom who happens to be the newly minted captain of Azuria’s Rangers: a specialized unit of Monster Riders with a mission to protect the fragile environmental balance between humans, monsters, and nature.
Together with your staunchly loyal Palico attendant Rudy and “Monstie” Ratha, you and the other Rangers face the inexplicable threat of crystallization that is laying waste to monster and human territories alike. Not to mention the increased tensions with the neighboring kingdom of Vermeil, which has been hit even harder by the disaster and is growing ever more desperate. With war on the horizon, can the Rangers, their Monsties, and Eleanor, the second princess of Vermeil, figure out the truth behind the disastrous crystallization and save everyone?
I won’t delve too deeply into the story, as it contains emotional twists and turns. There’s one predictable twist, but it still works narratively. While I’m not as familiar with the mainline Monster Hunter action RPGs, I appreciate Monster Hunter Stories’ focus on humans aiming for harmonious coexistence with monsters. The Monsties aren’t treated as harmless, and Monster Hunters still play a pivotal role in society; however, the monsters are shown with surprising depth and sentience, making their bonds with humans believable.
Monster Hunter Stories 3 is the best in the trilogy at developing party members beyond the protagonist and Rudy. The other Rangers and Eleanor each have their own backstories and motivations. Supporting characters gain depth, and I even wanted more scenes with standouts like Corbin and PK. The game tells a surprisingly epic tale, veering into mature, bittersweet territory.
Gathering monster eggs is an important part of a Ranger’s job.
This leads me into my first “gripe”: the first two MHS games leaned more toward family-friendly, wholesome territory. Monster Hunter Stories 3 attempts to tread that same water while also telling a more grown-up tale of acceptance and coming-of-age. Occasionally, it comes across as not knowing which audience it is trying to cater to. There are some scenes that could be troubling for younger gamers, yet the narrative then pulls back by still retaining “childish/cutesy” elements. For instance, it’s hard to take a scene describing the horrors of war as seriously as was no doubt intended when terms like “Monstie” are used in the same breath.
The cat-like Felynes that populate the world are far too cute, even when in serious narrative roles, given the cat puns they throw around (not that I don’t think they aren’t “purr-fectly” charming and clever myself). Throw in a side quest that involves finding missing Poogies (essentially little piglets), who are often dressed up in colorful attire for some reason, alongside actually racing some of the little guys in mushroom-dotted race tracks, and you’ve got an RPG that seems deceptively kiddy on the surface. But breaking through the egg quartz to find the hidden bounty within reveals a plot with some pretty dark and mature undertones.
In a way, Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection symbolizes the “awkward teen” phase of this spinoff series as it finds its footing alongside its more daring cousin. Still more mature and evolving than its predecessors, yet only taking those forays with tentative, regressive steps at certain points. That isn’t a slight against the plot at all, though! There’s a superb environmental message at its core. I also appreciate how the main character (whom I’ll refer to as “the princess” from here on out since that’s who I picked) is so much more than just a blank slate player insert in this tale, as they have a pivotal role and personality that’s front and center throughout.
Gameplay-wise, Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection replaces the main MH games’ action RPG mechanics with a more traditional turn-based approach. The princess equips three weapon types, each with unique strengths, weaknesses, and skills. You switch weapons to suit your current enemies and choose the most effective element or type. I preferred heavy blades, hammers, and bows, but all weapon types are versatile. After selecting a weapon, combat involves choosing an attack and entering a rock-paper-scissors exchange: technical beats speed; speed overcomes power; power trumps technical. Winning Head-to-Head lets you deal more damage, or the reverse if you lose.
Get ready to fight!
As a Rider or Ranger, you’re never fighting alone. The princess teams up with a Monstie companion, and both share a “heart” meter to monitor and avoid a game over. In battle, you can use up to six monsters, each with unique behaviors, abilities, and elemental properties. Keeping a mixed roster to match foes is vital.
By default, Monsties pick their moves, but you can override this when you need a certain attack type. If you and a party member target the same enemy part with the same attack type and win a Head-to-Head, your kinship gauge increases faster. This lets you ride your Monstie, combining your health and unlocking a powerful Kinship move. Your AI-controlled Ranger companion and their Monstie function identically, and syncing the ride phase enables a more devastating Double Kinship attack.
Combat requires strategy. When first fighting a new enemy, you’re left to initially guess at their penchant for attack types and counter accordingly. After that initial phase, you have to remember which attack types enemies prefer if you want to do the most damage. There are also status effects and a limited number of inventory items to consider, so plan carefully. Many enemy monsters have multiple body parts to target, often with different weapon weaknesses that’ll have you switching out between different ones as needed. Breaking body parts can stagger monsters or weaken their attacks, but it can make the fights drag on.
It doesn’t help that, aside from choosing your own Monsties’ attacks, you have no control over what your Ranger ally and their Monstie do during fights. Every party member and their monsters have different abilities and equipment, but merely serviceable AI. But they might prefer power attacks even when an enemy targets them with a speed one, or they might not heal you or themselves, even when you’re out of your restorative items and desperately need the support. The ability to direct their actions would speed prolonged battles along.
I often relied on the handy Quick Finish option to instantly KO lower-level enemies or attacked and destroyed monsters on the field before a fight even began, but that only works if you’re sufficiently leveled.
Monsties such as Ratha can use fire attacks outside of combat to stun enemies or destroy obstacles and acquire crafting materials.
Outside combat, exploration is central to Monster Hunter Stories 3. Monsties have unique abilities for navigating areas. For example, Royal Ludroths’ Swim lets you cross lakes quickly, while Barroths’ Ground Dive grants access to otherwise unreachable regions. Having a party with varied skills opens up more of the terrain, and you can switch Monsties at any time. Exploring reveals dens with monster eggs to bolster your ranks, or you can use a recently hatched monster in reclaimed areas after defeating a Feral Monster and setting up a campground to increase a specific monster’s population.
Habitat restoration enables you to not only strengthen the monster populations of an area, but also “restore” endangered species. First, you must combat invasive monsters. These souped-up monster battles take more strategy to overcome as they require clue gathering and specific tactics to not so much “defeat” the enemy as to make it retreat, at which point you can retrieve an endangered species egg and hatch it.
Returning the newly hatched monster to the ecosystem then starts populating the grounds with more eggs for that species. Continuing to do so can even cause mutations, resulting in powerful monster variations. The fearsome Tigrex, for example, has two such mutant subspecies you acquire by playing along with habitat restoration.
Homebases are important for the Rangers.
Beyond merely collecting eggs and hatching them, you can also add skills and abilities to your Monsties through the Rite of Channeling. This allows you to transfer specific genes between monsters. There are bonuses to stats should you line genes up a certain way, and the sheer number of abilities you can give a monster is astounding. Genes let monsters access attacks they normally wouldn’t have, like a technical or speed attack skill on a monster mostly known for power, which helps further diversify the roles they take in combat. Narga, my Green Nargacuga variant, became an MVP due to all of the different skills and defensive/resistance bonuses I gave him.
Monster Hunter Stories 3‘s optional side content occasionally opens up, generally of the basic fetch variety, with you having to track down specific monsters or materials. They’re definitely good for resource gathering purposes for crafting or for level grinding, but they aren’t memorable.
The character side stories for the Ranger companions and Eleanor are far more interesting. Not only can you strengthen your comrades’ and their Monsties’ abilities and gear by undertaking them, which in turn improves their combat strength, but you also learn more about their individual backstories and reasons for tagging along with the princess. The side stories further strengthening your companions’ narrative ties and reactions to the main plot. I just wish the rest of the side content were as detailed!
Onwards!
Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection is a gorgeous and vibrantly colorful game. The environments are lively and memorable with a ton to uncover, and I love the expressive characters. The monsters all have interesting designs, though I do wish there were more variety. For all of the different color variations, you do run into monsters that look quite similar to one another, even if their behaviors are different. I also love the different looks the armor getups have, even though some of them have accessories that could prove distracting during cutscenes, like shoulder horns that block another character’s face during dialogue.
The sound effects and voice work for the English language version are nicely done. Monsters sound thoroughly wild and intimidating when necessary, and the voice actors really give it their all in their performances. The soundtrack is also amazing. The vocal ending theme is lovely and fits the narrative theme nicely, and I loved the catchy intensity of the battle and monster themes such as this one. The script localization is pretty well done, with easy-to-read subtitles throughout all cutscenes.
Overall, I appreciate that Monster Hunter Stories 3 is largely a standalone adventure that RPGFans can pick up and play even if their knowledge of the main Monster Hunter series or the previoustwoMHS games is nonexistent (though there are some delightful callbacks for fans). The foundation for Monster Hunter Stories was already solid, and this third game largely builds upon this. Most of my issues with the game are relatively minor and nitpicky in hindsight, especially given how much I enjoyed playing it even after fifty hours.
I think Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection is a great introduction to this spin-off series, especially to those with a fondness for detail and strategy-heavy monster collecting and explorable fantasy adventures. Given how fantastic Monster Hunter Stories 3 is, if the next game in the series can provide an even stronger outing, I’ll be paws-itively impressed!
Even if I wasn’t aware of the background behind Etrange Overlord, I’d still be drawn to its energetic visual style and quirky premise. Knowing that it is the first project from Sōhei Niikawa (legendary creator of the Disgaea series) since he went independent adds an undeniable appeal to the project.
I’m not going to pretend to be a Disgaea expert; indeed, I’ve never touched the property, but I’m well aware of its reputation for bawdy humour and compelling gameplay, featuring explosions of insane numbers to tease the stat fiends among us. You might expect something similar from Etrange Overlord, and if so, you won’t be disappointed.
Etrange Overlord is the story of Etrange Von Rosenburg, a seventeen-year-old noble who suffers an unfortunate fate. After she is accused of plotting against the royal family, she is executed, French Revolution style, getting up close and personal with Madame Guillotine. That bladed maiden usually appears at the end of someone’s tale, but for Etrange, it’s just the beginning.
Waking up in hell, some unpleasant-looking demons confront her, threatening to teach her about what they think is her proper place in the afterlife. Etrange is none too pleased with this and unleashes a torrent of dark magic on the hapless imps, giving them a sound thrashing, whilst immediately establishing herself as a force to be reckoned with in the land of the damned.
Etrange just remembered she left the oven on in the mortal realm.
These unfortunates quickly decide to cut their losses and pledge themselves to the new player in town, becoming Etrange’s first companions in her voyage to find her “happy life,” which she’ll achieve by taking over hell for herself.
And what will you be doing to assist Etrange in her quest for infernal glory? You might be surprised to know that you will not be engaging in the sort of strategic, turn-based combat that features in Niikawa’s better-known franchise. Niikawa is not content to rest on tried-and-tested recipes for success, and instead risks the fires of fan disapproval by adopting a more action-based approach for Etrange Overlord, one so full to the brim with invention that it occasionally threatens to spill over, like a bubbling volcano before its fiery eruption.
In Etrange Overlord, you control up to four characters at a time, chosen from Etrange’s constantly expanding band of “vassals,” which can include our heroine/villainess. When the screen changes to an appropriately themed arena, don’t wait for a menu to pop up, or Etrange Overlord will incinerate you, as battles consist of fast-paced and frenetic button-mashing. You only have to think about three main inputs: your basic attack, a special attack, and an extremely useful dash button. Each character is designed to fit into one of a few combat styles. For instance, Etrange has balanced abilities while others specialise in ranged attacks or brutal close-quarters combat.
Etrange Overlord then throws its central idea into the mix: the “lanes.” These are curving lines that flow throughout stages, transporting various bonuses around in endless, devilishly looping patterns. These provide extensive boons to the fallen souls that collect them, such as the ability to withstand an attack, increase melee damage, boost hit points, or charge your super move.
This forms the meat of the gameplay of Etrange Overlord, but for the rest of the time, you will watch numerous cutscenes detailing Etrange’s dealings with the dear departed and their tormentors. If you are fond of eccentric, over-the-top comedic anime, with exaggerated characters and equally broad jokes, this will click with you. If not, then Etrange Overlord will torment you like a servant of Satan using a cheese grater on your nether regions.
As for me, I swiftly fell in love with Etrange, a morally grey, raven-haired witch who looks like she has just stepped off stage from a high-end opera production. She doesn’t desire to rule over others for its own sake, but instead wants a happy life for herself, principally to fuel her primary obsession, an all-consuming love of sweet treats and desserts. As a recovering sugar-obsessed treat-adorer, this was my own personal hellish trial in Etrange Overlord. Her complete lack of self-awareness, or the fact that everyone views her as an uncontrollable force of monstrous destruction, is also oddly endearing.
If you’re wondering what’s happening, welcome to Etrange Overlord.
The rest of the playable characters match her idiosyncrasies. The demons that join her initially, Cackie, Chuckie, and Chortie, are each very different in appearance after their initial transformations, with Cackie taking the form of a sophisticated blonde butler, Chuckie adopting the guise of a tattooed, muscle-bound strongman, and Chortie appearing as the sort of neon-clad young girl you might find walking down a geekily fashionable street in Tokyo.
Etrange is also joined by servants from her mortal life, such as the unsubtly named maid “Sweetia,” responsible for keeping Etrange full of cake. The cast is appealing, with some interesting design work, that whilst not always flying to the heights of the best of the genre, still stands well amongst its peers. Etrange Overlord manages to tell some compelling stories for this crew and their antagonists, but it lacks depth. If Etrange Overord’s narrative is the river Styx, like Achilles, you’ll only get your ankle wet.
This trend towards an almost visual novel style is emphasised by the side content, which falls into two categories: side stories that tell little vignettes from the lives of Etrange and her friends and foes, and chef stories that show Etrange delighting in the spicy meals of hell, served to her by the rest of the cast. These episodes are presented in a similar fashion to the skits from the Tales games.
Etrange Overlord‘s side stories are largely essential to the plot, and I would not recommend missing them, even if not all are crucial to developments. The food-focused tales mostly follow the same format: Etrange is reluctantly introduced to a new delicacy before ecstatically rhapsodising over its qualities, like a foodtuber delivering sponsored content. The interludes are enjoyable, although they did occasionally make me drift off mentally, as the “bit” becomes a little wearing over time.
Luckily, the intermittent battles form an otherworldly distraction from these segments. Fun and fast, each has its own objective, whether that be destroying all the enemies on the screen, or delivering items back to a base area: all fairly standard goals familiar to anyone who’s played video games for more than a few minutes. Some objectives, such as holding zones until they are captured, feel like an exercise in patience (it’s a virtue, after all). Bosses provide diversion, as you can only defeat them by figuring out their special weakness in traditional fashion, often using environmental factors to your advantage.
It’s all a bit chaotic, and you’ll find yourself dashing about here and there, as you decide whether to fight your enemy head-on or charge around the lanes, desperately hoping to pick up some worthwhile enhancements. It’s fun, but also imprecise, and I never truly felt that I was in command of a situation, or learning to better use the lanes to my advantage, as the element of random chance is strong.
There are secondary objectives that are revealed after you first conquer a level, adding some replayability and incentive to gather more resources, but I felt little urge to do so for the most part. You can even play them cooperatively with a few friends. I commend the studio for trying something new, but in the end, it didn’t quite send me to the Rapture that some might be hoping for.
Conquering these levels and completing side stories raises Etrange’s Happy Life level. The higher this goes, the more varied the resources she can purchase, and the greater her lane level increases. Lanes are upgradable, so that the bonuses you pick up become more effective in specific ways chosen by you. You can also upgrade weapons for characters. It’s not especially thrilling, but you can choose to engage with it minimally to a certain extent, although doing so can make levels more challenging.
Robots in hell? Why the hell not?
I should also mention the musical element, something that harks back to Niikawa’s early work, Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure. At times, characters in Etrange Overlord break into song, describing current events as if they’re in the West End and time is running short. These little moments are all too brief and infrequently scattered throughout Etrange Overlord.
I would prefer that these were either full-on musical numbers featuring distinctive songwriting or, alternatively, that they kept the operatic nature while leaning into it, with singing much more prevalent. In the end, it feels a little jarring and out of place, even though seeing the spotlight come in to highlight the performers just before they begin warbling is something that always drew a smile from me.
In a way, Etrange Overlord is exactly what many of us hope for from smaller titles. It has flair, it is not some object forced out by cookie-cutter conformism, and most of all, it is experimental, reaching for something larger studios would be afraid to touch. It’s also compact, with play times unlikely to greatly exceed 16 hours, except for the most avid completionists. The end result does not quite achieve celestial perfection, falling some way short of the mark, but as a famous fallen angel once said, “It’s better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”
,Pokémon spin-off games are as broad-ranging and varied as the colorful creatures that populate their digital worlds. From puzzle games to pinball, from roguelike dungeon crawlers to photography simulations, it’s practically a law of nature that if you can picture a game concept, you can probably put Pokémon into it, and it works. Yet, after all these many genre experiments and 30 years of the franchise among the largest media properties on the planet, somehow it took until now to throw Animal Crossing, Minecraft, and Pokémon into a blender.
Taking a kitchen-sink approach to game design can often spell disaster, as various disparate parts muddle together into a bland mess or conflict with one another, especially when each major inspiration has such a well-defined identity. Luckily, Omega Force and GameFreak had the solid foundation of previous Dragon Quest Builders games to build upon. The Pokémon Pokopia team constructed an architectural masterpiece of game design that lifts exactly what it needs from its myriad inspirations, simultaneously nailing an experience that feels unique yet remains true to the core ethos (Gotta Catch ’em All) that’s cemented Pokémon’s popularity and dominance over three decades.
Pokémon Pokopia begins with Ditto, transformation pokémon extraordinaire, waking up in a cave all alone. Unsure of their circumstances, with only an old photo of their human trainer indicating their origins, Ditto adopts a facsimile of their trainer’s appearance and wanders off, quickly stumbling across a Tangrowth suffering from a similar predicament. The Pokémon world experienced an ecological disaster that razed human civilization, disrupted the symbiotic relationship between humans and Pokémon, and led to the disappearance of all human life under mysterious circumstances. A dark premise for a cute life-sim game, to be sure, yet also a wonderful creative opportunity for both our Pokémon protagonists and the player.
This state of nature serves as a blank slate, and responsibility for rebuilding society rests with Ditto and Tangrowth. Our unlikely pair remains hopeful that revitalizing the environment may bring the humans back home. Breadcrumbs in the form of text logs left by humans offer snippets of insight into the central mystery of what happened to the world, yet the bleak subtext is fittingly obscured by the hopeful optimism inherent in creating a utopia for Pokémon. Each major leg of the journey sees Ditto and Tangrowth traveling to a new area reclaimed by nature, gathering up a wide variety of Pokémon inhabitants, and rebuilding a new world atop the ruins left behind by humanity.
Nothing is as satisfying as seeing the smiles on your Pokémon’s faces when the town is finally booming.
How do you even begin to undertake this monumental task? By building habitats for Pokémon, of course! Creating hospitable locations to lure scattered creatures back forms the core gameplay loop here, and it’s endlessly creative in execution. Pokopia posits that through the power of community, it is possible to rebuild what was lost, but better than before. Casting the player as a Ditto proves genius because Ditto’s unique power is one of mimicry; he molds his gooey form into a dopey-faced facsimile of any object or Pokémon he sees and replicates their abilities. Making friends with a wandering Bulbasaur grants Ditto the ability to cultivate tall grasses, and luring a Hitmonchan back to town with a rudimentary training gym allows him to pass on his Rock Smashing fists.
Connection by connection, Ditto’s repertoire of abilities grows, enabling him to cut wood like Scyther, shoot water like Squirtle, surf the waves like Lapras, and eventually even fly like Dragonite. You use these abilities constantly, guided by the Pokedex dropping hints about which habitats attract which species of Pokémon to your location. Things start small, initially just patches of tall grass, fields of flowers, and positioning various odds and ends left behind by humanity. Eventually, as the population of Pokémon expands and their demands for comfort and fulfillment grow more complex, entire housing structures and utilities, such as electricity generation, farming, and resource refinement, become necessary.
Pokopia doles out these concepts piecemeal at a steady pace, ensuring that completion of one task leads effortlessly into the pursuit of another. While no individual system is particularly deep, the way these systems work in concert ensures each one feels impactful. There are only a handful of crops to farm and cooking recipes, yet cooking and eating meals temporarily upgrades Ditto’s abilities and allows you to farm and mine more efficiently, so engaging in these systems is always worthwhile. There are only three power-generative structures you can build, but establishing an electric grid powers homes, decorative elements, and useful structures like shops and vending machines. Herein lies the masterful design philosophy ofPokopia: never overload the player with too many options, but make sure each option serves multiple functions. Many simulation titles get bogged down in complexity, minutiae, and repetition. Pokopia largely avoids those pitfalls through its clever minimalism, giving the player tools just sufficient to exercise their creative muscles, but not so many that they get lost in the weeds.
Crafting is an integral part of rebuilding the world.
The core progression structure is integral to this careful balance of managed simplicity. Pokémon will often make requests of Ditto, things to improve their living space, or new ideas they’ve come up with to address low-stakes communal problems. Fulfilling these requests may prompt a Pokémon to teach Ditto a new ability, remind them of a crafting recipe, or increase their overall happiness. As the happiness of your inhabitants rises, so does the overall quality of your community and the number of Pokecenter PC-based challenges you can complete with their own rewards. Major story events lead you through all the various aspects of establishing and managing a thriving community. Fundamentally, these tasks are a form of tutorialization for what will be possible in the endgame. However, you are granted so much freedom in how to approach them that every lesson feels like a satisfying step forward on your journey of discovery. The real-time clock system can occasionally stymie progress (any large prefabricated structure requires a full real day to complete), but there are always meaningful tasks to accomplish while waiting. I found that after the initial frustration wore off, an occasional construction roadblock simply shifted my focus elsewhere.
The boldest step Pokopia takes compared to its predecessors is the lack of combat. The combat in the Dragon Quest Builders titles was functional, but easily the least robust aspect of the game design. Pokopia replaces violence with the social simulation aspects of Animal Crossing, but without many of the structural limitations that plague the recent entries in that series. Many Animal Crossing fans lament how Nintendo sanded down villager personalities into a handful of inoffensive typecasts, eliminating opportunities for interpersonal conflict. Pokopia, by contrast, has a much wider variety of Pokémon personality types. More alien or mechanical Pokémon like Vibrava or Magneton speak with a robotic diction, brawny Pokémon like Machoke or Gurdurr carry a sense of self-confident exuberance, and mystical Pokémon like Alakazam or Gardevoir convey a haughty, regal air in their sophisticated manner of speech. There is no evolution system here, so each evolutionary stage of a species gets its own chance to shine, and members of an evolutionary line can be as different in personality as they are in physical appearance.
While all Pokémon treat Ditto with respect (he is their leader, after all), the social interactions between Pokémon often exhibit interpersonal conflict. One memorable example I witnessed involved rivals Heracross and Pinsir arguing over who was stronger than Graveler. The heated exchange ended with Pinsir expressing gratitude that I had put their habitats on opposite ends of town, so they could stay out of each other’s sights! Another memorable exchange involved Flygon and Ninetails, who are each too prim and proper to engage in base verbal mudslinging, yet would give each other duplicitous compliments while passive-aggressively muttering under their breath their true feelings. This willingness to introduce low-stakes interpersonal conflict grants Pokopia a level of character authenticity that many cozy games lack. Residents aren’t shy about letting Ditto know when they are unhappy with their living arrangements, and making too many rapid changes to their environment can cause the overall happiness of your community to drop precipitously if you’re not careful. These small-scale social conflicts and consequences help Pokopia avoid the artificiality that pervades Animal Crossing: New Horizons; each resident comes across as a unique individual with preferences and personality, not just palette swaps.
This may look like a pleasant tea party, but unseen social drama bubbles beneath the surface.
Although the core storyline is important, any good sim game thrives on delivering more to do long after the credits roll. Pokopia doesn’t disappoint here either, with an entire sandbox location (Palette Town) that incorporates all previous biomes into one big playground. This is the main multiplayer playspace; you can invite players to visit any of the five major areas and marvel at your creations, but Palette Town is the only location where friends can also build and harvest resources. Pokémon residents can move between every location, and while only 30 residents can wander around the field at any one time, you can swap them out or summon them at will so long as they have appropriate housing. The town accommodates potentially hundreds of NPCs, plus other players, into a single location, which is where you really feel the subtle impact of the Switch 2 hardware.
Another meaningful innovation is the ability to take a picture of any object out in the world (or in another player’s world) and replicate a copy using the 3D printer in any Pokémon Center. No more waiting days or weeks for a particular item to show up in the shop, or reliance on a kind friend to drop the item for you, which is a godsend and provides additional incentive to visit with friends to marvel at their creations.
Pokopia is a rare example of a game that takes inspiration from as many genre juggernauts as possible, yet ultimately exceeds them all. The building mechanics may not be quite as expansive as Minecraft, and not all of the 1000+ Pokémon creatures feature here (though weekly events are scheduled to add more). Yet, by combining the strongest core elements of city builders, social simulations, and creature-raising RPGs, Pokopia emerges from the rubble as a monumentally addictive achievement in game design that millions of players will enjoy for years to come.
First impressions can prove quite misleading, a sentiment explored many times over in the otome visual novel Temirana: The Lucky Princess and the Tragic Knights. What initially appears to be a more light-hearted romantasy tale contains surprising depth as you delve into its routes, culminating in a VN experience that’s both heartfelt and oddly nostalgic.
The plot centers around the fortune-favoring kingdom of Temirana that, on paper, seems relatively peaceful despite the societal divides that aren’t as easily swept under the rug as its nobility hopes. The kingdom values luck above all else, creating a caste system that notoriously favors only a small section of the populace without much room for potential advancement, not to mention there’s a great calamity set to befall the world that promises to plunge it into chaos after several generations of stability.
Against this backdrop, our protagonist Cecilia has spent her entire young life in isolation and adversity. The third princess of Temirana is a “cursed” number in the royal lineage, looked upon with disdain by most of the noble peerage. To combat this stigma, Cecilia strives to become a “perfect princess” so she never brings shame on her family or others.
The story proper begins with preparations for Cecilia’s coming-of-age ceremony, when the royals of Temirana establish their own personal order of knights. In quick order, Cecilia encounters several potential candidates, but there’s just one tiny problem with her efforts in recruiting them: many aren’t interested in becoming knights one way or the other, and others are technically barred from doing so due to their societal classes. Can Cecilia convince the candidates to join her order, proving that they’re more than qualified for the task while also helping to prepare her kingdom for the potential disaster that looms on the horizon?
The amnesiac Kiya’s route is, surprisingly to me, the most memorable one.
That question is the driving force of Temirana‘s common route, serving as a significant part of the otome’s plot. The other half of the narrative depends on which character route you take afterwards. These character routes include Josephy, the ousted prince from a conquered kingdom; the sickly but earnest and imaginative noble Tobias; the antisocial sweets-lover blacksmith Milan; the caring peasant just looking out for his large family, Adel; and the often-overlooked orphan suffering from chronic memory loss, Kiya.
Once you’re on one of their routes, you’ll uncover an extensive second half of the story that reveals more of the overall lore-building while also making you curious about the other routes at the same time. There’s also a secret hidden route once you see all five potential knights’ stories.
Temirana is a surprisingly meaty game, made all the more so by the fact that the five main characters are all quite likable and have memorable backstories and personalities. The more I played, the more I wanted to keep playing, which is a testament to the game’s overall story and presentation. While my personal favorite route ended up being Kiya’s due to its unexpected heartfeltness, I give the game credit for not having any problematic or unenjoyable routes. I never felt like there were any you had to force yourself to play through, which is rare in an otome.
…I’m intrigued. Tell me more!
Given that Temirana is a visual novel, the overall focus on its story and world-building is certainly its biggest strength. I felt many of the side characters in the plot were memorable and had surprising moments to shine too, while some of the “villain” characters were so stereotypically evil or conniving that their scenes were delightfully hammy. This being an otome, it is important to note that the romance element develops naturally over the course of the narrative, not feeling shoehorned in at unbelievable times.
Temirana plays very much like a traditional VN, with you as Cecilia reading through texts and dialogue until you reach a decision point. These choices are often binary and lead to different outcomes in a given scene or affect a love interest’s affection meter. Even the “ability” of Cecilia to sense danger at times leads to a binary response choice, so there isn’t really any attempt to do anything outside of the standard VN gameplay box, but given that the story and cast are entertaining enough to keep you invested, it really doesn’t require other gimmicks.
You can save anywhere, check the affection meter status for the character routes, skip previously read text should you want to quickly advance through a later playthrough, and you can even unlock extra little audio dramas to listen to in your collectibles menu alongside the standard CG illustration and movie viewing options. There’s a rather detailed story map, too, for keeping track of progress and the like.
The dialogue response choices are the run-of-the-mill binary sort.
Temirana: The Lucky Princess and the Tragic Knights is a good-looking VN with colorful art that brings its fantasy world to life. There’s something of a dated look to some of the unlockable CG illustrations, but I don’t mean that in a bad way! There’s just something about the visuals and UI that’s reminiscent of older otome games. The character art is expressive and nicely detailed, but I just wish there were more of it for tertiary characters who still have a presence in the plot, rather than just having their voices heard.
Speaking of voices, everyone in Temirana‘s cast does a fantastic job getting into their characters and delivering their lines. My only real complaint is that, despite how determined and nuanced Cecilia becomes in the narrative, the game forgoes voice acting for her altogether. The music certainly does the trick in setting the narrative, with the opening theme delightfully catchy. The localization is also top-notch, with only a few typographical errors at times (easy to mentally correct) throughout what ends up being a lengthy script.
I found myself constantly wanting to play Temirana, and getting onto the paths for the routes’ good endings never failed to make me smile or feel giddy. It’s an enjoyable otome VN that actually caught me off guard, given how it initially appears overly cute, but then throws in some surprisingly dark fantasy elements without things becoming terribly bleak.
I love the main cast of characters and many of their allies, with every new scene featuring a particular character making me want to know them just a little more. The fact that the routes themselves skew more towards heartwarming, non-problematic stories is also a nice touch. Temirana: The Lucky Princess and the Tragic Knights is a sentimental romantasy VN I can easily recommend to fans of the genre!
Review by Matt Wardell ·
March 17, 2026 · 12:00 pm
The year is 20XX. The great city of Toronto is beset with three warring gangs: the Demons, the Robots, and, perhaps most fearsome of all, the Vegans. If that’s not bad enough, local legend Scott Pilgrim witnesses his best friends-slash-Sex Bob-omb bandmates kidnapped by the mysterious Metal Scott mere hours before their big gig. Can Scott, his girlfriend Ramona Flowers, and a motley crew of Ramona’s repentant Evil Exes band together and save the day? More importantly, is Scott Pilgrim EXa worthy follow-up on a beloved Canadian franchise?
As a longtime fan of the Scott Pilgrim series (and former Toronto resident), I’m happy to say it’s very worthy. Scott Pilgrim EX is the perfect storm: series creator Bryan Lee O’Malley returns to write the story, set after the events of the original comic and its 2023 sequel animated show, as do chiptune legends Anamanaguchi to compose the soundtrack after their incredible work on Ubisoft’s 2010 beat ‘em up Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game and said sequel show. And there’s no better developer to handle a fresh new Scott Pilgrim beat ’em up than Tribute Games, who’ve proven their chops in the genre with 2022’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge and 2025’s Marvel Cosmic Invasion.
But rather than simply retreading well-worn paths, Scott Pilgrim EX surprises with many of its design choices. You and a potential four friends—online or on your couch—won’t be traveling through a series of linear levels of escalating difficulty. Instead, Toronto is an open world of 2D belt-scrolling screens randomly populated by one of the three gangs, procedurally scaled to your current level. This freedom comes at the cost of level length and depth, as it only takes a handful of screens to reach each end of Toronto, and you’ll eventually be sprinting end to end in a matter of seconds.
Toronto, faithfully rendered right down to the constant construction blocking the streetcars.
The game’s progression, then, comes with a series of twelve quests allowing Scott to rescue each of his bandmates and use their instruments in a very Ocarina of Time fashion to travel through rifts in spacetime. This may require a bit of errand-running back and forth, like carrying keys across the city without dropping them, or bringing bombs to cracks in walls a la The Legend of Zelda to find secret rooms.
The payoff of this open-world structure is that Scott Pilgrim EX’s Toronto is a vibrant, living setting, thoroughly gorgeous to behold. Despite the 20XX label, the colorful visuals pay tribute to games of the 1990s (in keeping with the series’ retro game adoration), particularly Sonic the Hedgehog, Street Fighter, and Mega Man. I could list a dozen other new and old games referenced (and I have, in my notes!) However, I think it’s best if players discover the tribute trove for themselves.
Best of all, the callbacks in Scott Pilgrim EX feel joyful and celebratory of gaming’s yesteryears rather than twee or winking. You can chuck green koopa shells down Queen Street to bowl over a line of vicious Vegans, and Guile-flash-kick Mortal Kombat-esque Demon ninjas and Robots that look fresh out of Dr. Wiley’s factory, and it all somehow gels perfectly. I love the visuals in this game.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t shout out the familiarity that clearly went into Scott Pilgrim EX‘s depiction of Toronto. Casa Loma is reoutfitted as the vampire-housing Casa Vania. The iconic nacho joint Sneaky Dee’s is here presented as Tricky Dee’s, an item shop; the same goes for Honest Ed’s (here: Honest Ex’s), the beloved thrift shop that tragically went under in 2016. High Park, the Distillery District, and Dundas all appear, populated by characters of Scott Pilgrim yore. I realize not everyone will get the same kick out of the visuals as I did, but we Canadians deserve this win.
“Yeah, yeah, references. But how’s the punching?” As expected from Tribute Game’s gameography, the combat is another win. Light, heavy, grab, and special attacks are here, as are equipable assist attacks from plenty of characters who didn’t make the playable cut. What’s more, each of the seven playable characters feels unique. I appreciate that beyond Scott and Ramona, the characters from the last Scott Pilgrim beat ‘em up, now the aforementioned friends in need of rescue, are replaced with a new roster (of past villains!): Roxie the ninja, Matthew Patel the puppeteer, wrestler (and movie star) Lucas Lee, zoner Robot-01, and, surprisingly, series antagonist Gideon Graves, here a rushdown “pressurer.”
There are no unlockable moves; rather, battling and collecting or purchasing items boosts your vitality, willpower (mana), strength, and agility. Stick with one character, and by the end of the Scott Pilgrim EX‘s three-hour or so adventure, you’ll be level 300, maxed out, and flying around the screen with each jump. There are also purchasable accessories and badges to boost your stats and provide other bonuses, though nothing that flips the game on its head. I saw no reason beyond sampling movesets to play as more than one character in my first solo playthrough, as the game was rather challenging in its later quests and I needed all the stats I could pour into one character.
Now you see why they called it Scott PilgrimEX!
The first half of Scott Pilgrim EX, when my vitality was low, was a bit frustrating in my constant need to backtrack to earlier shops to buy corndogs or vegan sodas to heal my character, only to be assaulted by baddies on every street and forced yet again to waste my hard-earned loonies and toonies (that’s 1- and 2-dollar coins for you non-Canadians). The lack of a life system raises the strategic bar going into each boss encounter, but it didn’t jive with the lack of options for replenishing health.
Annoyingly, bosses and main quests are unrepeatable, meaning you have to start a New Game Plus carrying over your character stats and items if you want to, say, see all seven of Scott Pilgrim EX‘s endings. When partying up with strangers online, I couldn’t see what quest other players were on, meaning I was dropping in and out with oddly balanced levels for the sole purpose of earning more money and levels for my own roster. The crossplay coop experience was chaotic yet very smooth (a huge upgrade from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game’s choppy mess), though the game could better communicate other players’ stats.
Another unfortunate miss was the writing. I love the world and characters Bryan Lee O’Malley has created, though the jokes in Scott Pilgrim EX missed far more often than they hit. This is due in large part to the lack of romance between its key characters and lack of seriousness in the the story’s stakes. Teaming up with the former bad guys felt like Mario playing tennis with Bowser, with all past history scrubbed over so that Scott and co. could be Mickey Mouseified to appeal to new (and younger) players.
There is a win in that: this game would be a blast to play even for kids with little knowledge of ‘90s gaming minutiae. But while the lack of story focus here makes it approachable, Scott Pilgrim EX loses a lot of the magic that makes the series worth approaching.
The sarcastic Julie Powers returns, and with more than one part-time job!
Lastly, the music. I could have spent half the review gushing about Anamanaguchi’ssoundtrack to Scott Pilgrim EX. They were my favourite band in high school (around when the movie and first game dropped), and I was overjoyed to see their return here, and with their largest-scale project ever to boot. 71 tracks across an hour and a half means that rather than delve into longer stage-specific songs, each screen and shop has its own short looping track. Anamanaguchi stretches their traditionally 8-bit chiptune sound in Scott Pilgrim EX, as they’ve been doing in their non-soundtrack discography, to make a mesh of tracks that reminded me of the cohesive chaos of Undertale or Deltarune‘s music.
The soundtrack is not always melodically complex, considering players hear short snippets of each track as they dash back and forth through Toronto’s streets, bars, and inter-dimensional subspace highways. Instead, the music favors immediate, looping catchiness and mood-setting. Combined with the eclectic and retro-amour visuals, Scott Pilgrim EX makes for one of my favourite game aesthetics, and one that reminds me why I love this medium.
Scott Pilgrim EX appeals to me in many ways, mostly in how it lets me reflect on my life in and out of gaming. It’s endlessly entertaining on the eyes and ears, and it has the best belt-scrolling combat this side of Streets of Rage 4. The swings it takes in terms of pushing its genre or reaching towards a new audience don’t always connect, but it’s still a quick, joyful experience I’m happy to continue playing both solo and with loved ones (and you random people online, I guess).
Truth be told, I don’t have a lot of familiarity with Souls-likes. I can list the number of games in the punishing-yet-ultimately-rewarding genre I’ve played on one hand, but I hold great respect for them and those gamers who strive to master them, even while wholeheartedly admitting they aren’t in my wheelhouse.
Still, I was largely curious about Bandai Namco’s Souls-like series Code Vein because of developer Shift‘s involvement, since they created the action RPG series God Eater that I’m rather fond of. Code Vein II is a fun game if you’re the audience for it and can get past some incredibly frustrating boss fights, but it can also be a massive time commitment and probably isn’t going to compare to the greats of the Souls-like genre or the Souls series’ critically acclaimed Elden Ring.
Code Vein II is set in a world already wrecked by calamity, and mankind’s place on top of the food chain has been replaced by the near-immortal Revenants (vampires, for all intents and purposes). Some Revenants try to live peaceably with humans, while others see humanity’s waning population as nothing more than a walking food supply. To keep both species from dying out entirely, a group of powerful Revenants in the past became part of a living seal to stave off destruction, an act akin to applying a Band-Aid to a stab wound. Now, in the narrative’s current timeline, the heroes’ sacrificial seals have begun to destabilize, bringing the world once more close to ruin.
The player takes on the role of a Revenant Hunter: a human who combats Revenants to protect people. After a horrific attack, the Hunter is saved from certain death by a gentle Revenant with time-traveling abilities named Lou, who volunteers part of her heart to keep them alive. Thanks to their newfound heart connection, she can physically bring the Revenant Hunter back in time. In a last-ditch effort to save the world once more, the duo must go back in time to awaken the sacrificed heroes in the present and destroy them before their seals erode away completely. Since Code Vein II is a Souls-like game, doing so is naturally no easy task, taking extreme physical and emotional tolls.
The Revenant Hunter and Lou lie at the “heart” of the story.
To say more on Code Vein II’s story would be to delve into spoiler territory, something I’m remiss to do because its lore and narrative are actually highlights, so I’ll just say I enjoyed the plot immensely, especially how it handled its time travel aspect and how that ultimately leads to acquiring the game’s “good” ending depending on your actions in both the past and present timelines.
The characters are also quite interesting, with the sacrificed heroes being tragic figures you can’t help but feel for and want to help out, even as you know that it’ll conflict with your Revenant Hunter’s overall goals. Supporting characters in the sacrificed heroes’, as well as Lou and the Revenant Hunter’s, orbits are also nuanced and memorable. Even with the difficulty spikes and sometimes incredibly frustrating fights, I found the plot and its characters provided more than enough motivation to keep plowing ahead. I also appreciate that you don’t need to have familiarity with the first Code Vein to enjoy Code Vein II, as its story is largely standalone.
Gameplay-wise, Code Vein II is incredibly challenging and punishing, tempered somewhat by player freedom through customization choices. You have multiple weapons in your arsenal, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. I gravitated towards the one-handed swords and kept a handful of them sufficiently upgraded at all times, but there are also slower-moving powerhouse weapons like two-handed great swords or long-range ones like bayonets. You can also shortcut and equip different abilities and attacks to weapons for a truly versatile array of moves.
You can optimize defense using shields, increase sprinting speed, or parry, depending on the type of defensive gear you want to wield. Tons of strategic variations help you develop a play style that works best for you, with the game encouraging experimentation.
Some boss battles require distinctive strategies to overcome them.
Enemy-dropped Haze counts as your currency, meaning you must choose between leveling up or upgrading gear (provided you have enough crafting materials), further encouraging strategic freedom. Code Vein II also allows you to travel and fight alongside a partner character, who give support or take aggro during fights. They’ll even revive you a set number of times should you fall in battle, though this becomes less helpful the more it occurs, as the health restoration they provide upon revival decreases every time.
Depending on your actions during the main story, you’ll often have choices amongst partner characters, all of whom have different fighting styles of their own. There were three partner characters in particular that I liked to use during fights when given the choice, but only because they balanced out my playstyle. Meeting various Revenants throughout the game awards you with valuable Blood Codes, too, which provide various beneficial stat boosts depending on your playstyle or the abilities of certain enemies.
Of course, the main focus of combat in Code Vein II is its boss fights. While your run-of-the-mill enemy encounters can also prove challenging, it’s the boss fights where you’ll find the most challenge. Boss fights in Souls-likes should be notoriously difficult but also ultimately surmountable, giving you a rush of endorphins once you finally and deservedly triumph. I did find several boss fights in Code Vein II to give me this rush once I found the right rhythm for their specific dance.
Unfortunately, not all of the fights are created equal—some rely on gimmicks to the point where they feel largely unfair and cheap, where I struggled endlessly and only conquered them after I found some previously unviable tactic that I then had to quickly master for that trial alone and with no small measure of luck. I didn’t feel as though I “earned” those victories, so they were both frustrating and hollow. There’s also a lot of repeat boss fights, particularly on the paths to the three endings you can uncover, as they certainly took the “earn your happy ending” sentiment to heart with this game.
Finding as many Towers of Regeneration as you can is quite a boon.
Code Vein II features a large, expansive open world. You can travel on foot or by using a convenient motorcycle, and you can also fast travel between mistle save points once you find them. Mistles are where you level up, change your gear, and replenish healing stock. Save for the small settlements you uncover every so often, the world itself is a largely barren place that feels quite lonely even despite your partner character.
There are some incentives to traveling through the world, mainly to acquire haze and crafting materials or to strengthen and increase the number of heals you can use during fights, but I often fast-traveled to get through it quickly if I wasn’t actively trying to do those things or finish up an ally’s personal quest.
You can also travel to the past at various points on the map, creating pockets of areas that are somewhat different than what you’ll find in the present to travel through. Depending on actions taken in the past areas, you can actually change the terrain or story encounters in the present in pretty interesting ways, illustrated in particular through the evolution of the Sunken City area.
Visually, Code Vein II is good-looking, but it also suffers from severe clipping issues. The character creator for the Revenant Hunter is easily one of the most in-depth I’ve had the pleasure of trying out and I love how unique the character designs are, with Lou in particular sporting a standout design. Sure, you’ll have objects disappear through clothing and the like during cutscenes or someone or something might suddenly pop in and out of view as you’re progressing through the game. The camera could also swivel rather unhelpfully during combat, which isn’t great when you’re struggling to survive a boss fight.
I also had a bizarre glitch late in the game that I was never able to fix, where my second weapon equipment slot became completely unusable and acted as if nothing was equipped to it. Thankfully, my first weapon slot still registered, so I didn’t have to punch my way through the rest of the game, but I had a pretty good panic over that bug when it first happened and became nervous anytime I had to fiddle with equipment afterwards.
Player choice sometimes plays a small role in story scenes, including dialogue choices to “flavor” the Revenant Hunter’s personality somewhat.
Sound-wise, I can’t really complain about the voice direction. I love the game’s English voice acting as everyone does an entertaining job in their roles, though the voice actor for Zenon in particular is a standout. The musical number introduction they do for his character alone is worth playing the game for! The localization is spot-on, too, with nary an error in the script.
Speaking of music, Code Vein II‘s lead composer is the illustrious Go Shiina, a composer I’ve been enamored with ever since my early days of playing God Eater, and the soundtrack is definitely a highlight, full of great atmospheric tracks like the Main Theme as well as memorably haunting boss themes and vocal songs that capture a wide array of emotions depending on the moments when they play.
Code Vein II is a game that’s in equal parts frustrating and entertaining. I spent hours on several challenging boss fights and sometimes, admittedly, wanted to cry from fruitless efforts to beat them, but the compelling narrative and characters kept me invested all the way to the end and even prompted me to take on optional fights to see things through to the fullest.
It’s not perfect by any means, and it certainly isn’t the best Souls-like game out there, but it does show the heart and potential Shift puts into their games and has me hoping once more to hear about their future endeavors. If nothing else, Code Vein II is worth more than a cursory glance if it happens to catch your eye.
Review by Matt Wardell ·
March 10, 2026 · 12:00 pm
Adolescence is a messy, awkward journey filled with emotional peaks and valleys. If you could turn back time, would you take back that awful, if honest, thing you said to your mom? Would you reconnect with that old friend you grew apart from? Would you save that unpopular girl from getting hit by a football, roadside splash, or pool noodle? Life is Strange Remastered packages these teenage, time-traveling woes into an entrancing story that achieves the high stakes you’d want from a great season of a TV drama while touching upon some very raw and real emotions.
First, why write this review now? While the complete Life is Strange Remastered dropped in 2022, the original Life is Strange released its five episodes from January through October 2015, meaning we’ve recently passed the ten-year anniversary of its conclusion. While new Life is Strange titles have continually released since, this March’s Life is Strange: Reunion will finally revisit both of the original game’s protagonists, Max and Chloe. I encourage readers to check out Jerry Williams’ 2015 reviews of Episode 1: Chrysalis, Episode 2: Out of Time, Episode 3: Chaos Theory, Episode 4: Dark Room, and Episode 5: Polarized.
The seaside town of Arcadia Bay, Washington, is rocked by the disappearance of young Rachel Amber, a bright student at the town’s prestigious Blackwell Academy. Enter 18-year-old Max Caulfield, returning after several years to her native Arcadia Bay to study photography at Blackwell. When Max witnesses her childhood best friend, Chloe Price, gunned down over a botched drug deal on campus, Max discovers her ability to rewind time. With her newfound powers, Max spares Chloe her tragic fate and ignites a weeklong adventure that will uncover the mystery behind the missing Rachel Amber, throw the natural world into disarray, and maybe, just maybe, snag Max a date to the drive-in movies.
Max. Never Maxine.
Narratively, Life is Strange has aged very well in that its heightened American drama would nestle neatly among ultra-popular, small-town paranormal TV series that followed it, such as Stranger Things or Wednesday. In turn, Life is Strange pays clear homage to its many inspirations: various license plates reference Twin Peaks or Donnie Darko, many story beats mirror The Butterfly Effect, and Max Caulfield and her journey with self-expression are a nod to The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield.
Sure, it’s clearly a French dev team indulging in Americanophilia, but this gives the game a certain timelessness (if you’ll excuse the pun). As the opening track from composer Jonathan Morali sings: “I wish I had an American girlfriend…”
Episode 1 of Life is Strange especially feels like a pastiche of Americanisms with its introduction of the cast. Thankfully, many of the paper-thin side characters (students and staff at Blackwell Academy) are fleshed out and become more endearing with later episodes. The real draw, though, is Max and Chloe. Max goes from a self-cringing, selfie-taking outcast to a strong and empathetic young adult. Chloe, who seems inseparable from tragedy, drops her punk, laissez-faire wall brick by brick, as only she shares in the knowledge of Max’s time-rewinding powers. Max’s love for Chloe will quickly become your love for Chloe.
Gameplay is mainly exploring Blackwell and Arcadia Bay as Max and talking with the familiar cast. Dialogue lines are unskippable unless you’ve heard them before. The voice acting is earnest and believable from Max and Chloe, though many side characters feel like they’re intentionally hamming up their archetypes, be they jock, skater, or… squirrel-whispering janitor?
Rewinding time lets you tell characters what they want to hear, or else navigate a conversational puzzle. Many points funnel you into more linear paths and environmental puzzles that can be menial rather than mentally stimulating. Episode 2 may make you wonder, did Max gain time-control powers just so she can collect bottles in a junkyard or pick up boxes without clumsily knocking something over? But mostly, the puzzles are varied enough that their spotty quality never detracts from the intertwining narratives or the great narrative pacing.
This being my second playthrough, the years have cemented a kind of 2010s time capsule quality to Life is Strange. I was born in the same year as the main characters, and though I may cringe at early dialogue like “ubercool” and “amazeballs,” I’m certainly not innocent of a few “cool beans” myself.
“I thought you were my hella awesomesauce friend! Are you cereal?”
The licensed soundtrack, featuring indie acts like Bright Eyes, Local Natives, Alt-J, and Mogwai, might as well be lifted from the iPod of a Canadian teen just tryna be cool. With every movie reference or bad pun in the script, there’s just as much chance for a character to call out another character (or themselves) for trying too hard. This is art and life eating each other’s tails.
I won’t spoil any more of the story because I truly recommend today’s teenagers to give it a try, but I appreciate how Life is Strange tackles heavy issues like sexual assault, cyber-bullying, and drug use so bluntly (pun definitely intended this time). Though that all may seem like standard TV fare, these are topics seldom explored in gaming even today, and rarely this well. Do you, as Max, stand by and watch Chloe’s stepfather hit her for smoking weed in her room, or do you take the fall knowing the consequences will come back to bite you later?
Max’s ability to rewind time means you can see the immediate ramifications of either course, though there’s no telling what comes later. The heavy choices in Life is Strange go from mere hurt feelings in the early episodes to life-or-death decisions by game’s end.
This is as much Chloe’s story as it is Max’s.
Seven years between the PS3 originals and the PS4 Remastered collection seems to have done quite little in terms of visuals and performance, sadly. The newer version does feature facial capture performances for some of the main characters, though the smoothed-out textures now make faces plasticky and environments blotchy. In general, Life is Strange Remastered leans more heavily into its borderline Impressionist art direction, often beautiful at a distance yet uncanny up close.
Episode4’s textures look especially ugly, though the visuals pull back up for the grand finale in Episode 5. I wish the whole package had been given a proper makeover, given the game’s popularity and the years between the original and Remastered releases.
It’s also worth noting that there’s a notorious, nearly game-breaking bug where Max phases through the environment at a narratively sensitive moment in Episode 4 that has still never been addressed, and I only bypassed it with many a Google search and restarted checkpoint. All this to say, if the original Life is Strange is more readily available, it’s not a downgrade.
Life is Strange takes its time setting up a complex pattern of narrative dominoes that fall in increasingly compelling and emotional ways from the end of Episode 3 right up until a gut-wrenching final decision in Episode 5. Its TV-inspired tropes may turn off as many players as it draws in, but it ultimately delivers on its time-warping premise in ways that would make even Ray Bradbury or David Lynch do a double-take. Though the Remastered version doesn’t bring the amazeballs visual improvements this story deserves, this is still an experience I’d readily put in the hands of any teenager, gamer or not.
Any series builds up expectations by virtue of its existence. The Warriors titles, with their plethora of classic games and cross-franchise spin-offs, have numerous precedents: expansive playable casts that span worlds, decades, and even universes; superficial stories to justify said casts; and straightforward gameplay that often feels like mere button mashing. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, the follow-up to Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity and a tie-in to The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, is a solid Warriors title that plays to some of these expectations, but dismisses others in a way that feels surprising, if not exciting.
Like Age of Calamity, Age of Imprisonment can be enjoyed without any prior knowledge of its associated mainline title, Tears of the Kingdom. Those who have experienced Tears of the Kingdom will appreciate the extra depth given to the Six Sages, who are now named and playable. But anyone hoping for an extensive roster of established characters, the norm for Warriors games, might be unpleasantly surprised by Age of Imprisonment. Instead of relying on wacky shenanigans to justify a large cast of fan-favorites, it sticks strictly to a serious story, resulting in noteworthy absences in its character roster.
While some big names are missing from the playable cast, Age of Imprisonment‘s ranks are filled with elevated “generics.” These named side characters are lieutenants or generals of the different Zelda series races—Hylian, Zora, Rito, and Goron—who join King Rauru and Princess Zelda in the war to stop Ganondorf. These characters’ combos aren’t as distinct as the “main” characters’, but they still feel unique enough thanks to them using different weapons.
Not all Rito wield bows, and not all Zora brandish lances. Lago, a Zora, has fast sword strikes that are fun to lash out with. Typhan, a Hylian, has a shield that adds an extra layer of complexity to his moveset. While these sorts of characters don’t make up for the missing key figures, they do help make the setting feel like a true war, where even the “above-average Joe” is participating.
Age of Imprisonment gives some much-needed backstory to the ancient Sages featured in Tears of the Kingdom… at the cost of a typical Warriors-style expansive cast.
Still, it’s with the established characters where Age of Imprisonment’s gameplay truly shines. Each character has their own approach to wiping out the hordes of enemies placed in their way. Even those who use the same weapon feel notably distinct, making it a fun experience to try them all out and find a favorite. Zelda, for instance, can stop and rewind time to call back projectiles and land extra damage, while Calamo the Korok tosses specialized bombs between sword swings to inflict elemental damage.
This underlying gameplay can feel like simple button mashing due to the way combos are performed. No matter the character, all the player has to do is press the Y button a certain number of times, then hit X to complete the combo. But because each combo plays out differently for each character, memorizing what each one does and when to use them helps alleviate the innate simplicity.
There are also extra garnishes that help add depth to battles. Throughout Age of Imprisonment, players unlock special equipment called Zonai Devices, which can be used at will during battle with all sorts of effects. Some shoot fire, ice, or water, which is helpful when squaring off against enemies with elemental weaknesses. Others can reflect projectile attacks or propel the character forward through swarms of enemies.
The water element Zonai Device looks like a fire hydrant and that’s fantastic. No notes.
Players can even imbue combo finishers with Zonai Devices for select characters with ties to the technology, such as Mineru and a construct using Link’s visage and temperament, further deepening the game experience with customization. Choosing which Zonai Devices to link up to attacks can be based on personal preference or the map’s needs, such as imbuing an attack with water to target water-weak enemies. These choices add a welcome level of complexity to an otherwise simple set of systems, even if they only apply to a few characters.
Players maintain their army by gaining experience felling monsters in battle, and by improving everyone’s weapons. This is where Age of Imprisonment becomes overwhelming. Weapons require Zonai Steel to upgrade, and they’re split into categories for each type. Players who want to upgrade a one-handed sword need Zonai Steel specifically for one-handed swords—Zonai Steel for two-handed swords just won’t do.
This gets out of hand quite quickly, because not only is the amount of Zonai Steel that can be held at once fairly low, but there are a lot of characters who use the same weapon type. There will be plenty of times when the player is only able to upgrade one character’s sword because of the limited resources. The road to “100% complete” Age of Imprisonment is long and arduous.
There is a silver lining, though: maxing out every weapon isn’t necessary for a run-of-the-mill playthrough. Other character upgrades, however, feel much more pertinent even if they’re technically not required. Each character starts with a limited moveset, and only after completing side quests will their combo tree expand. Side quests involve delivering the noted materials obtained through battle stages and then reaping the rewards. The rewards come in the form of all sorts of upgrades, from the aforementioned combo expansions to permanent health increases, access to stores, and much more. These are simple to ignore, but offer an absurd amount of things to do for those interested in wringing every last drop of unlockables out of Age of Imprisonment.
On top of keeping track of character upgrades, players must also keep track of Hyrule itself, driving Ganondorf’s army out of Hyrule by clearing specific stages in a Nobunaga’s Ambition-inspired manner. Regaining control of an area opens up extra side quests to attempt and grants access to any of its facilities, such as shops and training grounds. Once an area is liberated, enemies may try to retake it, and players have to dispel the attackers in a set amount of time. This back-and-forth gives Age of Imprisonment an intriguing flow, letting players conquer areas at their discretion while also offering some level of structure through timed defenses.
Age of Imprisonment can sometimes feel easy enough to warrant skipping out on weapon upgrades, but expanding everyone’s movesets is always a priority.
Age of Imprisonment successfully balances player freedom with innate structure. Although trying to keep each character evenly leveled or outfitted with high-level weapons gets overwhelming quickly, there’s a comfortable amount of wiggle room to leave some warriors behind. Many maps allow players to select their characters, so they can focus on leveling up weaker ones or just use their higher-leveled favorites. Certain maps do have required characters who can’t be swapped out due to story involvement, but even when slightly underleveled, the game isn’t too punishing.
There are also bonuses that can make an easy map even easier or help a weaker character stay afloat. There’s the option to eat before each battle, and the ingredients used will offer different benefits. Players wanting to increase character levels quickly can focus on experience bonuses, but if they’re looking for item drops, they can select an increase to that parameter. Anyone worried about battle performance can cook up a meal with a bonus to special attack charge rates or faster unique skill cooldowns, periodic automatic healing, less damage taken from enemies, or even increased damage from Zonai Devices.
The more expansive, main story battlegrounds in Age of Imprisonment also have individual camps spread out that offer even more optional bonuses. These bonuses range from battle-relevant, such as instantly filling attack gauges or reviving once after dying, to exploration-focused, including showing the location of treasure chests and hidden Koroks on the mini map.
To earn these temporary buffs, players exchange tickets, which are earned by performing specific tasks during the map. Tickets are kept between maps, so it isn’t a bad idea to hold onto them until a challenging fight or when intent on scouring the map for its Koroks and treasure chests. Both major story maps and the smaller side quest maps can be replayed if its area in Hyrule is under the player’s control, so nothing is missable and grinding for missing mission requirements is always an option.
Age of Imprisonment’s plethora of options helps elevate it as an enjoyable Warriors experience. On the other hand, it suffers from its notable roster absences, especially for Zelda fans, since it’s common to go to Warriors games not for their canon-compliant stories but for the opportunity to throw fan-favorite characters at floods of enemies. Knowing what to expect helps alleviate the disappointment, and the Warriors format works wonders at conveying Tears of the Kingdom’s Imprisoning War. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment’s seriousness and polish help it overcome its shortcomings, making it an overall good time. And like with most Warriors games, a good time is usually good enough.
If imitation is a form of flattery, Esoteric Ebb is to Disco Elysium what Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels was to Pulp Fiction. Simply put, Guy Ritchie’s directorial debut wouldn’t exist in its final form had Tarantino not carved such a strong stylistic claim on the film industry at the time, yet Ritchie managed to run with the inspiration without letting it overrule his own creativity—which is more than you can say about a lot of other movies that tried to do the same. Nevertheless, if you try to replicate a monumental work’s style too eagerly, the best recognition you can hope for rests at the tip of its shadow.
While I’ve seen the term “Disco-like” pop up lately to categorize games that mimic Disco Elysium’s presentation or generally choose the pen over the sword in their design, Esoteric Ebb is the first that I’ve seen openly market itself as such. Even if it hadn’t, it’s clear within minutes that this game is trying the hardest to be the most Disco disco-like. Internal monologue “Chimes” based on your character’s stat distributions? Check. A bunch of ideologically charged dialogue choices with a strong basis in our current political moment? Oh yeah. A psychological mess of a protagonist who bonds with an endearing sidekick? That goblin’s name is Snell, and he’s pretty swell.
At its best, Esoteric Ebb is a revelatory iteration on what made Disco Elysium work, applied to an intriguing Discworld-esque homebrewed DnD setting. At its worst, it overwhelms you with text while retreading its core inspiration’s structure and themes. Though let’s not forget that, as much of an artistic achievement as Disco Elysium was, it was also firmly rooted in the tradition of text-heavy, tabletop-inspired isometric CRPGs. Its spiritual indebtedness to Planescape: Torment in particular shows for anyone familiar with the genre’s history. Esoteric Ebb looks to connect the two classics in an undeniably clever, mostly successful way: taking the presentation format and inventive roleplaying of Disco Elysium and applying it back to the DnD-style adventures that paved the way for it.
Esoteric Ebb’s world is one where DnD 5th edition systems and conventions are playfully rationalized in the context of its events and laws as well as creature roles and relations. The delightfully imaginative worldbuilding thus explains the social customs that keep spells like “Charm Person” and “Speak with Dead” in check. Esoteric Ebb’s writing is most engaging and amusing when it’s dissertating about the metaphysics of the alignment system, has you conversing with a legal assistant who is a literal devil, or showing your Strength and Wisdom stats arguing about the lonely, sacrificial nature of chivalrous manhood versus the plea to just be an empathetic person.
Character creation does an excellent job detailing the kind of roleplaying experience you’re signing up for.
Character creation lets you choose your stat distribution across the standard six DnD stats. You are a cleric named Ragn, who somehow wakes up alive in a morgue after drowning in the river that runs through the city of Norvik. “Cleric” is your job title as a magically endowed official of Norvik’s fading Nationalist government, although you can start to internalize an aspirational character class through conversation. The circumstances of Ragn’s history, death, and apparent resurrection are a mystery, as is an exploded tea shop that he is responsible for investigating.
On top of that, the story also builds towards Norvik’s first-ever election! Politics is in the air, and radical change is (potentially) on the way. Expect your roleplaying experience (including Ragn’s ideological proclivities) to be heavily shaped by your initial stat distribution. This makes the game beg for experimentation with specific proficiencies and deficiencies across multiple playthroughs. I tried out two builds: one focused on Strength/Wisdom and another on Dexterity/Charisma, both of which felt like playing significantly different clerics plagued by their own internal turmoil.
The former build was torn between traditionalist values and revolutionary ideals. The latter was an obnoxious rogue-ish sociopath. Ragn doesn’t have the strongest identity on his own, especially early on, but that allows you to shape him into whatever flavor of adventurer you’re looking for. While he does have a fixed, personal backstory to uncover, the game locks many of these details behind skill checks, so you generally learn about the ones relevant to your build. For a more chaotically entertaining roleplaying experience, I recommend going all-in on a few stats while neglecting the others entirely. Failing checks is often as fun as succeeding on them.
Adding to the character building, completing certain questlines opens the opportunity to take on a Feat after reflecting on what took place. Here, at least two of your stats engage in a debate about what the ideological takeaway behind the quest could be. I saw one such debate revolving around the conflict between idealistic leftist activists and some young men disillusioned with all manner of authority, demonstrating the game’s interest in explicitly mirroring contemporary political issues. After entertaining the multiple perspectives, you must choose one to internalize—with each potential Feat also offering a different gameplay bonus.
All the DnD staples—from goblins to dwarves and elves—occupy an intriguing position in the game world’s geopolitics.
Like Disco, the ideologically infused dialogue successfully balances progressive leanings with doses of satirical irony and sincere empathy alike for different perspectives and the life experiences that shape them. My biggest gripe here is that it can feel overly derivative of Disco’s core narrative and thematic function, which occasionally pulls me out of appreciating the ways that the game successfully differentiates itself.
If Esoteric Ebb’s gameplay only revolved around walking through Norvik and navigating external and internal conversations through dialogue choices, it would be a tad tacky. Fortunately, this is not the case. Many of the game’s quests push you to dungeoneer through the area below Norvik, into an expansive ruin of the setting’s past. Exploring this City Below impressively captures the eventful, dramatic feel of tabletop DnD adventuring.
There are secrets to discover, puzzles to work through, and even combat encounters to conquer. It takes a while for the game to push you deep into these dungeons as stats (and equipment that boosts them) become essential to boost your odds for crucial dice rolls. When I felt confident enough to dive deep, I started appreciating Esoteric Ebb in a new light.
Urth, the god and savior of humans, plays a significant and controversial role in the game world’s lore.
The way the game integrates combat is a highlight, if unfortunately underused. Each encounter is a curated piece of the larger story or worldbuilding. In these moments especially, the narration sucked me into the situation and effectively amped up the dramatic stakes. Choices on how to navigate the encounter are tied to whatever stats fit the situation—which you may or may not have invested in. Spells that you’ve memorized can offer increased survivability or create advantages on offense. Any companions with you also have turns that can shift the tide in combat, though I wish their actions also worked through dice rolls for more mechanical variability.
I enjoyed my time in the City Below so much that I wish more of the game leaned towards this sense of adventure over the dense, extensive discoursing that makes up a significantly larger portion of the overall playtime. I would love a sequel that spreads out the density of the NPC dialogues to provide a more eventful journey through this charming fantasy world. More companion interactivity. More locations to explore. More potential in the spell mechanics. This would help leverage what makes Esoteric Ebb unique and disperse what makes it redundant.
The game features over a million words of text by a single writer—and most of it is enjoyable and pleasantly reactive. That’s an incredible achievement. At the same time, it’s hard not to see the potential here for a more dynamic game and wish some of that Herculean effort went into seeing it through. Across all the quests and exploration I invested myself in, I amassed a huge stash of cool equipment and trinkets that I anticipated an opportunity to make use of, only for it never to come.
They call me Bucket Head. Fear my clerical authority!
Disco Elysium’s gameplay was only as engaging as it was because of the quality of the writing. Esoteric Ebb’s sole writer/designer, Chrisoffer Bodegård, is clearly a captivating GM, but his brand of zany writing started to wear thin on me in the later portions of the game simply due to its sheer quantity. There’s no shame in not living up to the Best Writing that’s Appeared in a Videogame, but placing the same emphasis on reading with several of the same thematic concerns (and without the extra advantage of impeccable voice acting) is a gamble with some negative modifiers.
Despite my nitpicks, the writing supports the overall tone the game goes for quite well, as do the other stylistic elements handled by Bodegård’s collaborators. The distinct art style paints Norvik and the City Below with eye-catching color that could pop out of the pages of a comic book. The game space isn’t huge, yet what’s there is rich in detail. The character models look better than most isometric CRPGs, and the art that appears when you’re chatting with an NPC is always charming and made me want to get to know the diverse cast. What’s more, many small spaces and characters have unique songs as background, which keeps things consistently fresh for your eyes and ears.
I hope this review doesn’t sound overly critical because I am genuinely pleased with most of what Esoteric Ebb achieves. I just think the game could have been significantly improved, had it the confidence to shed its most conspicuous Disco-isms and dance to its own tune. Given everything that happened at ZA/UM and its creative core’s dissolution, we will likely never get a true successor to Disco Elysium. I am at peace with that. But if developers like Bodegård can iterate on its systemic expressiveness with the type of passion and intelligence that Esoteric Ebb manages, its legacy is in good hands.
In Tales of Berseria, the story and the characters do almost all the lifting. It’s a good thing it’s so amazing, because there sure is a lot of weight on its shoulders, especially with this completely superfluous “Remaster.”
It has to overcome some of the most bland dungeons I’ve ever explored. They’re all somewhat gray corridors that have the most basic puzzles this side of, well, I honestly can’t think of many in other RPGs that are more pointless. They’re interminably long most of the time, too. Oh, and you’ll also spend a whole lot of time backtracking through areas for new quests because this is clearly a budget title on many fronts.
That might be okay if the combat was more engaging, but it’s really not, so the burden worsens. It’s a huge step down from Tales of Graces f, with a similar system for creating combos in the free run style introduced in later Tales games. However, it is entirely too reliant on RNG to keep combos going, and if you know what you’re doing, by playing as certain characters, even on Hard, every fight is a complete joke with basically no strategy. Seriously, just play as Velvet, farm for staggers, and keep hitting Break Soul and it’s over before the encounters really even start. For me, that’s pretty fun, and you can play as other characters, but Tales of Berseria‘s combat doesn’t reach the series’ highs.
The additional wrinkles, like using equipment to grab skills and character stat upgrades, or upgrading equipment, might be interesting if the game required any real engagement, But it doesn’t, and every time I spent five minutes in a menu, I regretted it because I remembered I didn’t need to care about my stats. The enemies were my playthings regardless.
Swallow Dance! Swallow Dance!
Let’s be honest: you’ve already looked at the score below, so surely you’re thinking I have to get to something positive soon. Not yet. I like Motoi Sakuraba more than most people I know, but even for him, this is a pretty unmemorable OST, outside of the fabulous “Theme of Velvet.” The game isn’t much to look at either. Even outside of the gross outfit they throw Velvet in, with pretty thin justification, there’s not much to say about the graphics except that they’re fine and they’re anime. To be frank, this looks like a PS3 RPG through and through.
Yes, that comment even applies to Tales of Berseria Remastered, which is a generous term; therein lies the rub. “Port” is more like it. Sure, there are some nice additions in this version, like increased running speed and the ability to have unlimited fast travel a bit earlier. I guess I’m happy to have access to the Grade Shop to include some boosts that are normally reserved for NG+ runs, but in this game, what does it matter? It’s already so easy. And I suppose if you squint really hard, the game looks slightly better in this version.
But, other than a few minor additions and adjustments, Tales of Berseria Remastered is absolutely, 100% the same game I saw in a bargain bin for the PS4 for five bucks about six months ago that runs just fine on my PS5 (I even ran it alongside Remastered to confirm there’s little visual difference). I’m not one to complain about remasters, or even ports, but why does this even need to exist when other games I want to play in the series (looking at you, Tales of the Abyss) aren’t readily available on modern consoles? The answer, as always, is money. I get that, but even I have limits, and this “Remaster” pushed them multiple times during this second playthrough.
Ultimately, though, I landed on one simple thing: this game still rules, and it’s entirely because of the excellent story, characters, and voice acting. In fact, I might venture to say that this is close to the “platonic ideal” of a JRPG story for me. Sure, it doesn’t go anywhere amazing thematically, but the characters are fabulous, and most importantly, it’s not afraid to look some really dark things in the face and genuinely earn some of the late story beats typical of the genre. I cheered, I cried, and at least in terms of my experience, Tales of Berseria is working on a different narrative level than the rest of the series.
I promise, at least for Velvet, this is a much better outfit than the original.
I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for a good revenge story, too, and this game both indulges in the natural pleasures of those stories but also looks at some of the consequences, too. The cast is amazing, and the delightfully weird witch Magilou almost takes the cake, but it’s really Velvet, that broken, enraged, tender woman who moves us through to the end. The voice acting helps a whole lot, too. I’m not sure anyone can shout a name with rage quite as well as Cristina Valenzuela.
Look, I know this is a pretty short review. If you want a more thorough one, go check out Alana Hagues’ lovely take on Tales of Berseria when it came out…less than a decade ago. It’s the same game, and I don’t disagree with anything she said there, so that’s why I gave it the same score. And that’s the problem. Did I still enjoy my time with Tales of Berseria Remastered? Oh yes. In spite of all its flaws, I was still moved to tears and goosebumps multiple times. I don’t even mind all the backtracking because I got to spend more time with the amazing cast. Put simply, the narrative and the characters still carry the load.
But I don’t know who the audience is supposed to be here. If you don’t own Tales of Berseria yet, it’s available in a very similar form on the PS4 and PC. I guess if you really want to play it on the go, you can grab it for the Switch, which is new, but it’s visually inferior to even the original PS4 version.
I guess I can hope that whatever money they make here goes toward finally bringing Tales of the Abyss my way. Assuming you have access to the original in any other format, I’d recommend you not spend yours on it, though.
Review by Audra Bowling ·
February 25, 2026 · 12:00 pm
Setting sail into new waters is the conceit behind the tenth Ys game and something it does with gusto, according to our own Sean Cabot’s excellent review. Now, however, a “definitive” edition has reached our shores in the form of Ys X: Proud Nordics. While a worthy purchase for those curious and those who’ve yet to try the vanilla version, does Ys X: Proud Nordics justify a double-dip for returning players? The waters are murky in that regard.
Set sometime after the events of the second Ys game, Ys X: Proud Nordics sees redheaded swordsman Adol Christin once more embarking into the great unknown, accompanied by his erstwhile partner Dogi the Wall Crusher and the researcher Doctor Flair. It isn’t long after arriving in the waters of Obelia Gulf that the boat they’re riding on is besieged by the Norman forces of the seafaring Balta Seaforce. That encounter leads to the trio’s momentary stranding in the port town of Carnac, where Adol not only encounters a mystical talking seashell but also becomes literally chained to the Norman Pirate Princess Karja.
When Carnac is attacked by an undying, monstrous army and the townspeople are kidnapped, Adol and Karja embark on an epic quest amidst tumultuous waters to protect the entire gulf from being swept into chaos. The truths they uncover about the region’s history hit closer to home than they could imagine, especially for the determined Karja.
Karja and Adol embark on a memorable journey as Shield Brethren.
That’s pretty much the gist of Ys X: Nordics’ plot, and it’s carried over word-for-word to the Proud Nordics version. Adol and Karja rescue their allies and, in the process, obtain the necessary upgrade materials to strengthen their boat, the Sandras. Their crew sails the waters of Obelia Gulf, reclaiming occupied territory as they traverse through a combination of both naval and land battles. If one has played the game’s original version, there’s very little different here beyond some minor quality of life improvements to make combat flow better and boat travel easier.
It is the addition of the EX quest line involving the large and mysterious Oland Island that truly differentiates Proud Nordics. This island is a large region that allows you to test acquired mana abilities, fighting tough enemies as you travel the dungeons throughout to uncover the mysteries behind why the Normans were forced to leave their ancestral homeland in the ancient past. Adol and Karja meet up with Karja’s cousin Canute and his exasperated Shield Sister Astrid, with Canute coercing the two into taking part in a contest to see who can uncover more of the island’s mysteries. Of course, he has an ulterior motive, culminating in a challenging and multi-tiered final fight.
The EX quests open up about halfway through the game’s ten chapters, and I’d hardly call them “seamless” additions, given their length and how they often divert from the main plot line. This is especially apparent with the last EX quest that activates right before the main storyline’s final boss fight, causing you to hop over to Oland to run through a maze-like dungeon and fight the final boss of the EX quests before jumping back over to proceed with the game’s actual final boss and see the ending.
You get to put your mana abilities to the test with the EX quests, which can be fun and rewarding, but beyond some light lore and world-building, there isn’t too much actual story added into the mix. Canute and Astrid are interesting characters, but the game waits until the end of the EX quests to really delve into them, so they aren’t as memorable as they could have been.
Astrid and Canute are the two new characters introduced in the EX questline.
Beyond having new dungeons to explore and bosses to fight on Oland, you can also participate in mana board racing and train up Adol and Karja through coliseum fights. A new mana ability, the Mana Hold, lets you telekinetically lift blocks or yank projectiles out of the air and hurl them in a different direction. To be honest, Mana Hold isn’t my favorite of the abilities Adol and Karja unlock, as Mana String and Mana Board will forever hold those spots, and Hold’s aiming could use some fine-tuning. Still, it’s another interesting way to tackle puzzles and exploration advancement.
Exploring the waters of Obelia Gulf leads to a slew of new discoveries, and I enjoyed uncovering islands to explore, freeing townsfolk to recruit to the ship, finding lost pikkards, and just sailing in general. The Sandras essentially becomes a floating town in and of itself as you go, and I liked getting the chance to raise affinity with its residents and uncover their personal quests, as that often meant I had the opportunity to once again set out and explore to my heart’s content.
The naval battles themselves weren’t terrible either, being less tedious than, say, those in Suikoden IV. As long as the ship is upgraded and retrofitted, they are manageable. The slow boat travel can get tedious, so I often relied on the helpful fast travel option to quickly return to places I’d uncovered once it was available.
The action RPG gameplay after reaching land and traversing dungeons is where Ys X truly shines, with Adol and Karja using mana abilities to quickly get to areas that’d otherwise prove inaccessible. The combo-based combat is both fast and fluid, relying on attacks you program into button shortcuts. You can control either character directly or have them work in tandem, with their joint attacks often having more oomph. It was fun seamlessly switching between the two different styles of play.
While I preferred Adol’s speedier approach to fighting, I found that Karja’s heftier axe and ice attacks were a boon at times. Ys combat is polished to a tee here, though boss battles often proved to be lessons in endurance rather than skill towards the game’s final portion. While I enjoyed the different combat styles of the various party members in other Ys titles, I think the streamlined combat here is a strong selling point, as it really gives the sense of Adol and Karja working as a team.
The Mana Hold ability is an interesting, albeit not flawless, new addition to Adol and Karja’s arsenal.
From a character stance, Karja is Ys X‘s driving force. Her personal journey of growth and development shapes the narrative, whereas Adol’s wide-eyed enthusiasm for adventuring helps place the player directly in the story. I liked most of the other characters too, and the Sandras’ crew all had their moments to shine, though Rafe, Ashley, and Ezer were probably the standouts given their stories and questlines.
I don’t think the Sandras crew might have as much staying power in my mind as, say, the party members from Ys IX: Monstrum Nox or Ys: Memories of Celceta, since they don’t often leave the ship or travel dungeons with you, but they’re well-written nonetheless. I do feel a bit bad for Dogi, though! He’s Adol’s most steadfast companion, and I adore him, given his narrative throughout the series, but even he tends to take a bit of a narrative backseat here. Sadly, that seems to be the lovable guy’s lot in many of the recent Ys titles.
From a story stance, I do think Ys is in an interesting place right now. At the moment, Falcom has two big-name series, with Ys on the action RPG side and The Legend of Heroes: Trails on the other. I adore both series for different reasons: Trails is a sprawling sci-fi/fantasy epic, while Ys is a more self-contained tale of discovery and adventure. Ys is like comfort food to me, and the series has a whole lot of heart and polished gameplay mechanics that make it fun to play.
Even I can tell they’re now trying to expand the narrative more, given Trails‘ success, and I’ve mixed feelings about it. On one hand, it’s certainly an interesting approach, and we get some great characters like Karja through it. On the other hand, Ys is more about the thrill of adventure and overcoming challenge, meant to be enjoyed at any point in the series’ timeline without feeling beholden to what came before.
There are some interesting teasers going on in this game about possible future story points, including a secret hint you can uncover in the epilogue, but I know that the Ys series leaning more towards being like its cousin Trails has had mixed reception, so Ys is certainly at an interesting crossroads right now. I do wish that Ys got as much development budget as Trails does, though, as some of the visuals, like acquired loot graphics, look less visually appealing and almost “gacha”-esque.
Mana board racing will always be a highlight of the game for me.
Speaking of visuals, Ys X: Proud Nordics is a good-looking game in many respects. There’s a lovely vibrancy to the graphics. I do think the terrains and enemy designs can have some degree of “sameness” to them, but character models and art are expressive and detailed.
The areas you travel on foot are cleverly designed to help you think and figure out how to best progress without being too frustrating. There were some pop-ups in the final dungeon areas, but I do know a Day One Patch is planned to fix many of those hiccups. The script localization is also really well done, with nary an error to be found; impressive given that this is a meaty script for Ys.
Of course, one can’t really talk about Ys without delving into its music. The soundtrack for Ys X definitely doesn’t disappoint, with several tracks designed to capture the sense of wonderment the game wants to convey and to get the blood roiling during frenetic combat. Ys X: Proud Nordics even has additional music tracks, which only add to that sentiment, such as “Mighty Blizzard.”
The English voice acting is also relatively decent, with special kudos going to Karja’s actor, Cherami Leigh, in particular for some incredible deliveries. Adol and Dogi’s actors also do a fantastic job reprising their respective roles. Ys X does suffer from sporadic/partial voice acting at times, which is an interesting choice to be sure, as there are oftentimes long stretches of no voice work at all.
Ys X: Proud Nordics is an odd duck: though it’s most certainly the definitive edition of the tenth Ys game, it’s a tall order to get someone to pay full price for a game that could’ve easily been a cheaper DLC expansion, especially if they’ve already played Ys X: Nordics. I greatly enjoyed this game myself and was thoroughly entertained by this new installment of Adol the Red’s adventures, but I’m in the position of not having had a chance to try the original beforehand. I think any newcomers to Ys X should certainly add Proud Nordics to their collection, but those who’ve already crossed these waters might want to wait for a price reduction before doing so again.
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