Recent reviews by dances with woolite

This was good. The artwork is fantastic (except for the fonts) and the music is great. Gameplay-wise, it could have used some more polish; the controls feel a bit clunky (but I did come into this right after Silksong!); many things seemed too easy, and a bunch of things seemed fairly useless. I did really appreciate the "what the heck is even going on?" vibe throughout. Once I found the living network it became quite compelling, and I had a great time doing some of the harder challenges that required creative manipulation of the mechanics.

Great little puzzle game in the genre of "find all the corner cases in our code." Elegant exposition, and not too hard nor too long.

Excellent game! It's hard for sure, but not mean. Huge and filled with little charming touches. I would definitely recommend Hollow Knight first, not because it's important for the "story," but because it's also excellent a bit more of a gentle introduction to the mechanics.

Very solid exploration platformer game. If you like "Metroidvania", especially a weird and silly Japanese Metroidvania, you will probably dig this. It's a lot like Rabi-Ribi (by the same people) but seems more refined to me. Some great art and music in here, too (and also some pretty annoying music).

A good cozy adventure game. It's mainly about these puzzles, but they are pretty easy (think Zelda temple stuff). But they were certainly interesting enough; it's mostly about introducing new twists on the central idea, and nothing gets tired. It probably would have benefited from more optional hard puzzles, but I don't think this is what they were really trying to accomplish with the game. The adventure here is fun and the writing and art were charming. I thought the soundtrack was excellent!

I think this title conflates a bunch of Call of Duty titles since they are $70 "DLC" or something. I did not play Call of Duty Black Ops 6 for 200 hours, and I recommend against it. The whole series is very silly, of course, but I have had fun with it in the past. Aside from the fact that this edition is fairly uninspired (which maybe should not be surprising), it has the following serious problems:
- Even after you pay $70 for the game, it is constantly trying to upsell you to buy "battle pass" and other stuff. Like the biggest thing on the launch screen is an ad to buy this, and there are all sorts of pulsing in-game things trying to get you to buy. Would make sense for a "Free-to-Play" title, but not something priced like a AAA game. Come on.
- Cheating is rampant in multiplayer. You can easily tell when people are doing it because of the kill cams, and you can report them, but does it matter? One player can easily wreck the match. I don't quite know what's going on, but there also seems to be some kind of "shadow ban" system where you'll get grouped with all the reported people, and then the problem is even worse. I don't know if it's people abusing the reporting system, or reporting everyone on a team, but it's obvious to me that it's not working well since I'm not cheating and I think this has happened to me. (I'm not even good, so I don't know why someone would think that I'm cheating anyway?) This seems like a solvable problem.
- It runs plenty fast on my machine (4k, 4090) and I'm not getting any crashes, but the graphics are not impressive. There are a lot of graphical problems, like textures and models not loading for quite a while during gameplay, a big airplane model just randomly appearing in the middle of the map and then disappearing, lazy character animations where items just pop in and out of existence, and so on.

Neat bullet-hell shooter with several innovations. I feel pretty good at games like this, but found it very hard! Most of the stages on the second tranche of the game took me many tries. I beat Xulgon ("regular" difficulty) with a similar amount of practice (and subsequent satisfaction!) as late levels in Celeste... yikes!

I thought this was pretty good. It has an interesting tech tree, good music, and both mining and Space Invaders are fun. My favorite part was making my way through the challenges, which make you take different strategies to account for the handicaps (although once you have a good approach and mastery of the tech, it is usually not hard).

Torture

I liked it. Recommended for genre fans, especially those that like repeating hard platforming precision puzzles over and over. A fairly straightforward "Metroidvania" with pretty big map and lots of opportunities for creative traversal. The art and music are "good enough" although this is not a strong point. (I did find the conversations that the main character has, including those voices, pretty charming.) Lots of bosses with a mix of difficulties (probably depending on the order you find them). The platforming challenges are mostly great, and there are a lot of them. I had the most fun with this part, although some of the hardest ones are just kind of annoying, so I didn't do a few of the astral fragments. There are a lot of movement mechanics / upgrades, which for the most part are well done, although the way some of them work I still don't understand (wall jump angle?) after quite a lot of advanced levels.