Recent reviews by cat

absolutely phenomenal little incremental game that's beatable in ~2 hours! the graphics are super sleek and fun, and there's a really great sense of progress throughout the whole game. i cannot recommend it enough

yes your grace is an intriguing game that ropes you into its world quickly, but ultimately feels a little bit...lackluster? i think that's mostly something to do with it being marketed as a choices matter game when in reality the story is quite linear, with the biggest changes being ones told to you post-credits or on a title card between scenes. and that sucks!

at the same time, though, i think that's an interesting narrative choice to make for a game about managing a kingdom where every return is a negative: everything that goes wrong is inevitable, you only get to choose *how* wrong it all goes

it's neat seeing all the little B-plots connect and mingle with each other. the archive feature is a really nice way to track every choice and every branch you've placed yourself on, too! but there's just...so many and at some point they all start blending together. to illustrate what i mean: i was interested in what my people wanted at first, but as the game progressed i started to ignore the weight of my choices and just picked what would give me the most resources for later. i want to care about the lives i'm ruining/saving! but they're so inconsiquential in terms of the larger game

but still, it was a powerful story, one that took pivots i was absolutely not expecting a cute little pixel game to take (it gets...really dark actually) and it was a blast sitting along for the ride. despite it being one i don't see myself going back to anytime soon, i think it's worth the ride if you grab it on a sale!

cute game, i adore the art direction! unfortunately it doesn't really know what it wants to be. it's painfully grindy, and if you choose to go the more idle route, it takes forever to wait for your cats to level up enough to make money to do...literally anything else. and once you get a decent start, the difficulty skyrockets rapidly and you're back to square one again. there's none of that feel-good progression that idlers tend to have.

that said, this game updates regularly, so these could be issues remedied later, but for now this game isn't really worth it.

i think i need to preface this review by saying i loved the answer in FES. i think it was the perfect way to conclude the story of persona 3; what better way to end a game about death and moving on than showing the party you spent that whole game with moving on from the player? the worldbuilding concepts also, admittedly, make my brain do somersaults (i think there's something SO cool about the wild card being an inheritable thing. can we talk about this more guys. ALSO EREBUS IS SO ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ COOL? AND SO IS THE GREAT SEAL CAN WE TALK MORE ABOUT THAT ???). i think it shows *just* enough of these new honestly universe-shattering concepts for it to give the answers you need about why P3's ending was Like That, but so little that it's still tantalizing to think and theorize about, and that's amazing!

i love how episode aigis takes what was once a story about the horror of death and makes it more about the tragedy of finally, *finally* having a moment of peace and having no choice but to process everything that happened to you. it's about them coming to terms with the fact that they're really and truly never going to see makoto or any of the characters lost ever again. it's about how, no matter the show you put on for others, you cannot run from your feelings forever. writing this out, it's such a perfect precursor to persona 4 too... and i love how episode aigis' adaptation took those ideas and ran even further with connecting the two!

i even love the gameplay! i really enjoyed the reworked tartarus in p3re, so having a story that hinges on progressing through that rather than the progression of time was a fun twist on the gameplay loop! i loved being able to really experiment with persona builds and party builds (mitsuru diamond dust + metis' regular attacks are insane, btw) and i'm ecstatic to mess around in the last monad door they hand you

all that said, i really, *really* wish it wasn't $35. even if the main story is 20 hours and that nets you around $1.75/hour, i cannot in good faith say a recycled version of the main game is worth that, even if the story and gameplay sandbox it offers are a blast! i reccommend episode aigis, if and only if it's on sale

open casket wedding

prefacing this review by saying i am contractually obligated to like this game, as i bought one of the official hoodies & needed to justify that purchase by actually playing through the source. anyways! calico is an adorable, short and simple game! it's pretty buggy and the controls can get a bit janky (but, to be fair, the game says you should play with a controller and i did not) but it leans fully into the goofiness and the glitchiness and just feels so *charming*!

the characters are cute, i love the designs! i really, really wish they expanded on some of the individual character quests some more. i feel like so much went into planning out the relationships each of them have to one another & their interests and whatnot. not to mention, there's a really impressive scheduling system to mix up what characters get up to on any given day? but, at the same time, i don't mind being able to fill in the blanks considering just how much thought went into each NPC!

my biggest complaints would probably be the dialogue (it reeks a bit of 2020 but that's not something that ruins the experience for me) and a color palette that can be a bit grating after a while. i'd very highly recommend playing this game on stream with some good friends and no research beforehand to experience how wildly goofy the mechanics can be

i got this game on a whim, i saw someone on reddit say it scratched the same itch as tomodachi life. i've been going through a bunch of games under that "user-generated rng lifesim" genre for a personal project. and honestly, this was probably one of my favorite impulse purchases. this game isn't for everyone i'd say (very few are), but if you miss that old school mobile game feeling, or something to waste a few hours on, i'd absolutely recommend it!

i played kairosoft's games growing up and am so delighted to see their formula hasn't changed at all, and has only improved! it has the same reach #1 goal as... pretty much all of their other simulator games, but with so much more to do to reach it, like setting townies up to get married, or finishing tasks for buildings so you can force all your residents to ride cows to work, or organizing your districts and decorating your city. basically, it's just a super simple gameplay loop with so many different ways to use it.

my only complaint is that the menu design isn't... great. some submenus are pretty unintuitive, and the arial font is a bit souldraining, but both those things are very likely due to it being translated by a small team from japanese to english. so they're not at all dealbreakers. wow who would have thought i'd have an essay in me about this silly little game?

my friend & i's den got invaded by bears and the only survivor of our 5 pups was the one who wandered off like 2 hexes over, i think he knew something. 10/10

hrgrnng vamp isn't for vampire, it's because he's bisexual

FREE MY MAN WOOLY