Crow Country is quite the indie darling of a survival horror game. It’s extremely lean, looks incredibly charming, and has a genuinely great story to boot. I was cautiously excited to play this one, a bit afraid of the difficulty a lot of pure survival horror games feature, but was pleasantly surprised that this game is pretty accessible to newbies of the genre, all while never even slightly overstaying its welcome. The first thing that will catch your eye is the visuals, echoing early PSX games like Final Fantasy 7 in both its blocky, almost chibi-like characters as well as the pre-rendered looking backgrounds. They’re not actually pre-rendered, containing a lot of small animated details that you can’t replicate with pre-rendered, but it still captures the energy.

The visuals are striking, creating a small, but detailed run-down amusement park with mystery oozing from every locked room, every strange sighting of these unknown creatures, and the scattered people who are just as confused as you (or are leading you to believe they’re just as confused as you). The world design is arguably the game’s strongest aspect, giving the player multiple areas of the park to explore, characterizing themselves as attractions within Crow Country. There’s a map provided, but each area is so visually distinct that you’ll rarely find yourself lost, moving between the backrooms through the fantasy, horror, and underwater areas, with lots of hidden rooms in between.

The combat is very akin to the first Resident Evil, requiring less actual aiming skill and more so good positioning and managing of your ammunition (which isn’t particularly hard to come by like it is in RE1). Some of the enemies are pretty creepy, the looming skeletons were actually really unsettling. But in general, the actual gameplay isn’t too demanding, provided you watch your step and move cautiously. The story is surprisingly robust, and unveiling the mystery behind the park, what happened to it, and why your character is involved was really quite gripping from beginning to end.

I would highly recommend this game for any fans of survival horror, but especially those who like Silent Hill or the original Resident Evil trilogy. Crow Country is a lean, no frills experience that engrosses the player from start to finish with a gripping mystery, likeable characters, and a unique and engaging visual style. AND you can unlock dumb weapons when you beat the game, another great homage to Resident Evil.

Neon White honestly feels like a game tailor made for people like me. After being recommended it a few times by various friends, attributed to my love for speedrunning and first-person shooters / platformers, I decided to give it a go. For the most part, Neon White was an extremely polished and addictive experience that had me grinding times for hours on end.

Let’s get something out of the way to start off. Yes, the writing is cringe, and it's most likely a purposeful decision. I guess they’re trying to make the story uniquely self-indulgent, complete with an amnesiac protagonist, cartoonishly evil villain who directly says the line “we’re not so different after all”, some extremely sexualized female characters, and the classic stupid but well-meaning best friend. Yes, it's cliche and stupid on purpose, but being aware of how bad something is and winking to the audience doesn’t mean that it's not still stupid and annoying. I understand what they were trying to do, but ultimately the story suffers heavily and I found myself really having to hold back just outright skipping many parts of the story.

Outside of the writing though, Neon White is a fantastic experience. This has been said a hundred times already, but this really is a game built for speedrunning. The card system is quite frankly a genius idea, the card serving as both a weapon and an ability once discarded. Through this system, the game presents super well-flowing levels that mix using your gun for shooting and discarding for abilities flawlessly and makes every level feel so smooth. Once a level is completed, depending on your time, you unlock certain things, like seeing your own ghost, hints at possible shortcuts, and the complete leaderboard of times from players across the globe. Getting ace times (or even red, which requires beating the developer’s time) feels incredible and it pushes you to improve your times over and over.

Though set in heaven, Neon White’s aesthetic leans far more into vaporwave, breakcore, and the like. The level’s architecture has elements of Ancient Greece, and its interpretation of heaven, its monolithic white/beige buildings only broken up with scattered foliage. It’s both utilitarian so as not to confuse players for where to go, but at the same time very stylish. The music is where the breakcore elements really shine, in my opinion. Composed by Machine Girl, the music is so lush and complex while feeling very reminiscent of that PS2 music vibe, similar to games like Super Monkey Ball, Jet Set Radio, or even Ape Escape. Altogether, the visual and audio elements of Neon White create a nostalgic, hypnotic, and free-flowing experience that both looks good and never confuses the player.

While I can see the writing being a major turn-off for a lot of players, it would be a disservice to overlook just how much Neon White does with absurd quality. Aside from the story, Neon White is one of the most complete and satisfying indie experiences I’ve seen in a while, and easily sets the standard for first-person platformers for me, and really proves that first-person platformers have so much potential for great gameplay.

Overcooked! is the first couch co-op game my girlfriend and I really fully got into. We’ve enjoyed playing games together in the past, It Takes Two, Stardew Valley, lots of watching me play games, but Overcooked was the first game where both of us had to lock in. We completed the game fully, getting 3 stars on every mission, and it was a tough but super fun experience.

I hate this game in a loving way. I hated every time I would sprint to the serving window just as an order ran out of time, I hated finishing a meal and realizing all the plates were still dirty, I LOATHED that ice level where you had to make a death run for every single ingredient. Despite this, we persisted, got better, communicated as a team, and learned each level to get the 3 stars. In actuality, most of the levels were not super difficult, a good 70% were fairly easy to 3 star and only a few took more than 2 or 3 tries.

The visuals were very charming, perfectly silly enough not to fully rage at. I love how each area evolves in its layout of the kitchen, slowly adding more and more obstacles while simultaneously lowering the quota so as not to make the difficulty spike too bad. If you’re looking for a game that tests your mettle in a cooperative setting, and one that requires strong communication with some hectic randomness, Overcooked is a great shout.

Ikenfell is a game that I really could not bring myself to enjoy. As a big fan of JRPGs and great pixel art, I was excited to see what this game had in store. 9 hours of slowly becoming more and more jaded later, I cannot get behind this game in any light.

First of all, the sprite art is alright. Nothing insanely pretty, it’s obviously an RPGMaker game that takes a lot of inspiration from Earthbound and Undertale. I usually love the visuals in these games but in Ikenfell it was only so-so. The character sprites were peculiar to me, opting for 3 different styles, in exploration, in dialogue, and during combat. The most appealing version is during dialogue, where you can actually see the character’s faces, while during exploration they give a strangely large amount of pixel real estate to the character’s hair, only giving 3 tall pixels worth of a face. It makes the characters look very odd during top-down cutscenes and really disconnects me from the characters (because I cannot see their eyes).

In addition, I found the combat to be an absolute slog. While I did find the idea somewhat interesting, and the lack of MP gave a lot more freedom to what spells you used, EVERY single fight is dragged on horrendously long. Even the most basic enemies take at least 3 or 4 turns from the player, complete with enemies moving AND attacking AND you having to block it. It turns what could be a 30 second encounter to 4 or 5 minutes, which in the long run becomes agonizingly long. Enemies become insane damage sponges and become entirely dependent on the timing of your attacks (which can be done automatically through settings). Also, the vocal tracks during the boss battles, while a novel idea, did not mesh at all with the gameplay, in fact it really took me out of the game.

The story itself felt embarrassingly shallow for how much dialogue there is. I understand in a 10-15 hour game with lots of characters you can’t be expected to get huge development out of each of them, but every character felt so insanely cookie cutter that I couldn’t connect with a single one of them. Each character’s arc just flipped from one end of the other, the mean girl suddenly becomes nice, the shy girl gets brave, it’s just so tiring and I found myself caring less and less about the characters as the game progressed. The actual story of the game is even more unengaging but in the opposite way, plot threads get so quickly muddled and confusing that by the end of the game you’re unsure what is actually happening, somehow the characters talk so much but never about the thing you want to know more about.

I respect the hell out of video-game creators, as they’ve made some of my favorite experiences I’ve ever consumed, and I think this is a great team with a lot of potential to make something truly special. But I don’t think this game respects the time of the consumer, it got to the point where I just started using the auto-victory for every boss near the end because it was becoming such a slog. I do think that if you really don’t mind a standard story and you auto-victory through some of the longer, more tedious bosses you could enjoy this game. But as it stands, Ikenfell, to me, is a dangerous combination of a monotonous battle system paired with fiercely rooted archetypal characters and a confusing story that they never bother to truly explain beyond “it’s magic!!”.

Gato Roboto is a charming little microvania that, although it doesn’t make much of an impact, makes for a decently solid entry point into the genre without too much of a time sink or difficulty spike. It’s short, only 3 or so hours, and is pretty easy to boot, with generous save points and easy-to-find upgrades that boost your health quickly.

I will warn you that this game is very much a “run of the mill” metroidvania, it takes a lot from NES Metroid without really adding anything of substance. The idea of getting out of your mech for more precise platforming is sort of interesting, but is bogged down by the actual cat controls being weirdly over-reactive to the point where it feels like I’m losing control of my character.

You’ll get very standard upgrades, use rockets and regular guns, the level design itself is almost unnoticeably standard, to the point where my brain was kind of turned off for a lot of it. To be fair though, I’ve played my fair share of Metroidvanias already, and this one definitely emanates more of a “beginner vibe”. I did find the style to be pretty cohesive and pretty to look at, I’m always a sucker for a Gameboy-esque aesthetic and it contributed to the microvania feel.

Overall, there’s really not much I can find wrong with Gato Roboto, and for what it’s worth, it’s a simple, short game that isn’t too difficult and won’t last in your brain for very long. Not that that’s a bad thing, for its price and size it works well with what it has.

WEBFISHING is literally the only game I’ve bought to be released this year, and I do not regret that purchase even slightly. This is one of the biggest signs to me that players, to this day, go crazy for simple games that just allow players to talk and hang out with each other. Webfishing is really not that complex of a game, pretty much all you do is fish and talk, and yet it absolutely sucked me in for days on end.

The visual style is even simpler, taking a lot of inspiration from Animal Crossing in a more cel-shaded low-poly style that is really endearing and comforting. One thing it definitely has over Animal Crossing is the character customization, you can customize your character on the fly, at any time, with a lot more options for facial features. There’s lots of little additions that only an indie dev would add, like typing different emoticons in chat changing your facial expression, or having a specific keybind to bark/meow.

It’s addicting to grind for hours, stockpiling tons of fish and selling them all at once, spending all your money on scratch-offs just to lose, punching people into the water, playing the guitar, it’s really just a social tool with a fun little fishing minigame on top of it, but that’s all it needs to be. The time I spent with it was really something special, and I want more Old-school chat rooms disguised as other games to come back in swarms. Waiter!!! More funny animal chatroom games please!!!

Downwell is one of the most punchy, perfectly condensed games I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing. I bought this game years ago based off of a Dunkey recommendation, and have played it in bursts for years now. Honestly one of the best pick up and play games ever, punishing but fair, and addictive as hell.

The gameplay loop seems simple, but there’s a lot of nuance between the customizable styles and you can really get quite experimental depending on how much you want to risk health. Stacking combos is extremely addicting, which is complimented excellently by the slightly bit-crushed sound design that really evokes that arcade feel. There’s a lot of variety in how you build your character, with lots of unique items to obtain between stages.

Aside from that, the presentation is awesome, I love how it uses its’ vertical screen to convey how quickly and narrowly you’re flying down this endless well. Also, the OST is great, though I would often turn it off and just play my own music, it’s excellent to play while listening to something else. Would definitely recommend picking it up for the price alone.

Interior Worlds is easily one of the most unique and targeted concepts I’ve ever encountered for a game. You’re telling me I get to walk around these creepy environments with no actual jumpscares, just enjoy the atmosphere and take awesome pictures? It definitely sounds like something right up my alley.

And for the most part, it delivers on that promise. You’re given a good handful of maps to explore, all with an atmosphere just chilling enough to unsettle you but still probing you to explore further. However, I will say that a lot of the locations are surprisingly barren of actual interesting things. Many times, you’ll encounter a cool sign, or house, or interesting looking hallway, but as you continue exploring you’ll find that same sign over and over and over again. This not only makes the levels less interesting to explore but more confusing as each landmark is copy pasted a good ten times over atleast.

On top of that, there is a key mechanic that gates you from certain parts of the map until you find its corresponding key. This is mostly fine, and gives the player a set route through the level, but it was often frustrating to realize I had explored a whole area without finding the key I needed. It made the levels less like I was legitimately exploring these locations and more like I was being taken on a tour by the developer. Once again, not necessarily a downside, just frustrated me a bit.

I thought the little samplings of horror, seeing figures dart across rooms and under crevices, was a nice touch. I honestly wish they went further with it, throwing props across rooms and closing doors behind the player. I thought the lighting was great on most maps, I loved the heavy fog, and the graphical style itself is a great midpoint between the source engine’s fidelity and the haziness of 6th generation consoles, creating an enticing, mystical vibe.

Overall, I found Interior Worlds to be an enjoyable experience, though slightly marred by a lesser scope than I anticipated. I wish it took that atmosphere towards more explorative levels and creepier ambience, but nevertheless it was still fun to capture unsettling forms in pictures in a wonderfully creepy atmosphere. Plus, I can always appreciate a super unique concept like this.

Kao the Kangaroo 2 is a very inoffensive game, and honestly, it’s one of the most neutral, nonstick platformers I’ve ever seen. The sequel to a Dreamcast game, released on all 6th generation platformers, makes some logical steps in the right direction but doesn’t do anything to really wow the player.

Aside from the obvious graphical upgrades from the generation console gap, this is very much a run of the mill platformer. You have your grassy first levels, then you move on to world 2, a snow world, then a bunch of underwater sections, and then a jungle before the singular interesting idea, infiltrating the hunter’s ship to free all of the animals. There are occasional cool ideas here and there, but I don’t think I can point out a single one that I haven’t already seen in a Spyro, Crash, or Mario game beforehand.

While the level design and music were mostly of no impact, what did stand out to me was the combat and enemy hit detection, which was consistently lackluster and frustrating. Your hitbox is absolutely massive, you’ll get hit by projectiles you’re completely jumping over and take hit after hit while facing enemies because they’re just balls of damage. While you can in most cases just ground pound over and over again until they die, it made progressing through areas littered with enemies really annoying, and usually the best course of action was to just run past them.

While Kao the Kangaroo Round 2 isn’t outwardly bad, it does so little with its short length and cookie cutter levels that by the time you’re done, you’ll hardly have even thought about the game at all. If you’re a massive fan of Crash and Spyro you might find this enjoyable, but in that situation you might as well just replay the games Kao is so heavily inspired by. Though to be fair, it is only $2, so I really can't be that harsh on it.

Call of Juarez: Gunslinger is a straightforward but very well executed on-rails shooter that doesn’t waste a second of its runtime. I always have an appreciation for games that know precisely what they are and don’t waste any time getting to it. Call of Juarez launches right into the good stuff, telling the story of acclaimed bounty hunter Silas Greaves as he encounters and tussles with legends of the Wild West.

The visuals are a mix of realistic with stylized elements, some cell-shading here and there, but for the most part, its’ stylization comes from how it uses the unreliable narrator to play with your expectations. Doors will open, bridges will form, and enemies will be placed precisely to create the perfect action set piece, both for the satisfaction of the player and to fit Silas’ over exaggerated nature. The audio department is similarly polished, featuring an excellent voice cast, notably Silas himself, whose actor perfectly conveys that braggadocious nature, embellishing his stories to pure fantasy. The music is great too, littered with plucky guitars, banjos, and out of tune pianos, the constant gunfire feels like an instrument of its own.

As the story progressed, the events became more and more insane, defying reality, as Silas weaves in more and more legendary outlaws like Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy, and the Sundance Kid, his audience becomes more and more untrusting of Silas’ words. He begins only slipping up occasionally, explaining away histories’ “inconsistencies”, but as time goes on, he stretches further and further, and he starts becoming more unstable. I love this kind of protagonist, where you’re not sure whether he’s telling the truth from the very beginning.

The gunplay is fun, if very simple, with lots of great point modifiers for headshots, longshots, catching people while they’re running. You’re encouraged to chain kills together, use dynamite, switch up your weapons, while there aren’t a LOT of elements, it keeps it easy to understand and makes it fun for the player. I will note that I found the duels to be clunkier than expected, maybe I just misunderstood them but I found it oddly tedious to line up and actually win the duel, even dishonorably. Aside from the duels though, the gameplay is smooth sailing.

Overall, Call of Juarez is a standout Western game that wastes none of your time. Its’ unreliable narrator makes for a unique story that makes a great use of its’ characters with banter back and forth. If you wanted to play Red Dead Redemption 2 but your computer is terrible and also you’re a father of 4 with no free time, Call of Juarez is a great alternative. But actually, it’s a fantastic game on its own.