In this episode of “buying random older games because nothing is coming out right now”, this is a Metroidvania that I thought looked a bit interesting. It’s made by a studio in Israel, and as far as I can find it’s that company’s first game, which is pretty cool (and the studio itself seems a bit strange, actually being the internal game development company of a school? Huh).

So let’s check it out!

Games need to start coming out again, ASAP. I’ve been looking for stuff to play, and I’m kind of just drawing a blank as far as new stuff to play. So I kinda have to go… experimental.

So anyways I had Bright Memory: Infinite on my Steam wishlist for a while. I saw it was discounted. I knew it was a short game, but I figured it would at least give me something to do for one evening. And yeah that prediction was pretty good considering I not only finished the game but wrote this review in the same evening!

So let’s go and talk about this one… very quickly.

I talked about how short I felt Ghostwire Tokyo was when I reviewed that. I must apologize to Ghostwire Tokyo because THIS game is literally 3 times shorter than Ghostwire. I bought this yesterday evening, played it for around an hour, then today played it part of the afternoon, then in the evening tonight I played… the last level. And that’s it, I’m done, and ready to review it.

So this review is coming really quick after finishing it, which came very quickly after buying it. Let’s just go, this won’t be a long one.

I kinda completely missed the first Blue Reflection game (though I did research it very mildly before writing this review). I’m not entirely sure WHY I missed it, as it’s an RPG made by what seems to be the team behind the Atelier games, or at least a team somewhat related to it (considering how crafting works), and this offers something pretty close to Atelier. You figure I’d have checked this out, but it took me until the sequel to notice it.

I ended up buying it recently while it was on sale at Amazon Canada, and then I waited because early this year was super busy game-wise, and I had plenty of other stuff to play through, so this took a backseat for a while. But finally, game releases calmed down a bunch, and I got to finally play it.

So let’s see if it’s good!

I’ve mentioned a few times recently that I previously gave a very negative review for the last Kirby game, Kirby Star Allies. It was pretty pathetic how bad it was in every gameplay aspect (a game that actively hated the fact that someone was playing it, so it beat bosses for you and solved puzzles for you and had no actual… design). Star Allies is the only bad mainline Kirby, as Kirby was previously a solid series with only good games. So when this was announced, I was definitely liking what I was seeing, but I was a bit wary of it. You know, just in case.

But I still got it at launch after avoiding the demos and every trailer other than the announcement one. So let’s go and see if Kirby is back to his usual quality!

I honestly wasn’t expecting to be reviewing this so quickly, but yeah, I’m done with this game in a mere 14 hours… which is fine, I don’t mind short-ish games, but I was totally expecting it to be longer considering it’s an open-world thing.

I remember when this was announced. I think most people forgot about that because this is the game presented by Ikumi Nakamura at some E3, who made a big impression with her presentation, but said presentation is what got all the attention and people kinda forgot about the game itself. Also, this game is a Shinji Mikami game, in some capacity.

I wasn’t too sure what to expect from this… so let’s see if it’s fun!

*EDIT: I was so focused on writing about why the gameplay isn’t great that I completely forgot to mention that the localization team for this game is awful and fucked up the translation in every way possible by writing lines that literally aren’t even there in the original japanese version. Why is it SO HARD for localizers to just take the japanese text and write it in english? Plus, it’s not just the western localization that’s awful, as the chinese localization is also garbage pushing weird propaganda… This is why I leave japanese voice acting on in games, my minor understanding of the language is a decent bullshit detector*

Sometimes a game comes up that you have basically no expectations for, but they end up being very impressive. Stranger of Paradise is one of these. The first trailer was wacky as fuck, made kinda no sense, wasn’t a good explanation of what the game would be like, and all that people really seemed to get out of it was “CHAOS” and the slew of memes that came from that. Unfortunately for this game, this ended up not being a good thing because that’s all people think of it, and they think it’s bad because of that meme or something. It’s really weird, you mention this is a good game and people think you’re trolling. But it is good.

I actually avoided all gameplay videos and trailers for this game after the announcement because that announcement completely convinced me to buy it, because it was so weird and stupid.

So let’s go and talk about what is one of the best games this year so far! Yeah.

This was announced last year. It is Square Enix’s new HD-2D project after Octopath Traveler, also featuring a weird title.

I did play the first “test” demo for this one, but not the prologue demo which basically, IIRC, gets you through the first 3 chapters. I enjoyed the combat in that first demo, and I’m not sure much changed since (it has been a while), but I was decently hyped for the final product. I very much enjoyed Octopath, so I was pretty interested in seeing more of that.

So let’s go and see if it’s a good one!

It’s the big game everyone’s talking about! So I guess I’ll talk about it too!

My experience with the Souls series is a bit scattered. I rented Demon’s Souls on PS3 (yeah renting was still a bit of a thing back then), found it okay but didn’t fully get what was up with it at the time, didn’t end up getting too far into it during my rental. Played a good portion of Dark Souls 1 but not 2 and 3. Enjoyed it decently. Got Bloodborne at launch, really liked that one a lot. Got Sekiro at launch, it is my favorite of the series. And, finally, got Elden Ring at launch, after not being… particularly hyped for it.

The reviews kinda blow my mind because, while Souls games do review very well, this was getting 10/10 scores all over the place, and no game deserves a 10/10… So I was approaching this game with a lot of skepticism. Games that get this kind of hype (from shitty game journo reviewers) tend to get it very… unwarrantedly? Is that a word? Especially when it’s Souls, which is a series that game journo types tend to complain about for extremely stupid reasons, such as them being “too hard” (and trying to make that into an accessibility issue… which it isn’t, game difficulty is never an accessibility issue and anyone who says otherwise is either stupid or lying).

So let’s go and see if this is the good shit or if the scores are dumb!

I had high hopes for this one, it being a game made by ex-Persona staff. So I got it at launch last week and played it a bunch in-between playing Elden Ring.

I am now 20 hours in and I’m fucking done. That puts me around the halfway mark of the game, and I feel like things are either getting worse, or I just can’t take it anymore. This is very unfortunate, but wow, this game is something else. And not in a good way.

So I am NOT reviewing it since… you know… I can’t (because I didn’t finish it… take note, “professional” reviewers), but at least I’ll give my impressions so far and explain why I’m done with it… This is as much as you’re getting from me review-wise for this one.

Let’s go!