Recent reviews by Blues

I talked to a phone booth in the game that told me to leave a review with feedback, so I'm gonna do that!

This game's totally worth the asking price as-is, really elevates the farm life genre beyond Stardew Valley in pretty much every way (I loved Stardew!), and offers a scintillating post-apocalyptic desert setting that feels really novel.

This game clearly has a lot to say about the way capital and a self-serving government can funnel money to prop up those who are already successful whilst leaving struggling communities to languish. There are tons of quests and side quests where characters ask if you can spot them money because the economy in Sandrock is awful, and public servants will frequently lament the difficulty the town has getting government grants and the belief the residents should 'just move somewhere nicer' without regard for the town's unique culture or the financial hurdles one must jump over to be able to afford moving.

I'm still not done with the game's main story line even 80 hours in, but I'm excited to see how it further develops arguments between characters about the potential perils of technological advancement, because it seems like the game's religious faction is on the verge of lashing out at Sandrock's local government for making use of scientific advancements to try and make the desert environment more habitable.

The game's premise also allows it to offer critique on world politics and modern society from the perspective of characters who are discovering information about us hundreds of years in the future. In the 'My Time at' series' lore, to really simplify it, technology progressed with little oversight or regulation which made it trivially easy to start a world war that decimated most (all?) of the planet's surface and plunged the world into a new dark age, with people living underground until they were able to return to the surface and rebuild on top of the ruins.

I was surprised by the way this game tackles criticisms of the genre as being centered on mindless extractivism; the rationing of water from the local supply is a serious gameplay factory to account for, the logistical challenges of importing water from other towns is discussed frequently, and you're told as soon as you start the game that logging is illegal due to how few trees there are. Plus there's a serious focus on scavenging for scraps and re-purposing those into materials.

This game really surprised me; I had kind of written it off because I thought the art style was a touch off-putting, but the narrative, character writing, and gameplay loops have all charmed and hooked me.

Now, because that phone booth said the developers read reviews of the game for feedback, here's some very specific complaints I'd like addressed:

1. I'm in the summer of year two, partway through the Bronco the Kid quests, and I keep getting building commissions for items I cannot complete because I haven't met Musa yet, which means I haven't gained access to the areas that unlock when he shows up in town. Some of the commissions I've seen posted but can't complete are Industrial Machine Tools, the Advanced Civil Processor, and Chromium Daggers. I have these recipes already because I've been diligent about doing machine research with Qi and buying recipes from the Commerce Guild, but I think the game should check to see whether the player has the ability to get the materials necessary to make something before it pops up as a commission.

2. After you first get the chance to express romantic interest in Elsie, there's a line of dialogue where she declares 'I'm a legal adult' in frustration at the way her parents treat her. I appreciate the effort to make it clear she's not too young to ethically date, but she's very childish, and that line just makes her sound more childish. The mention of legality feels like a reassurance to the player, which doesn't make for good character dialog.

3. At some point, jumping with my camel started causing the game to freeze in the air for a half-second, after which it hits the ground and all four hoof-hitting-ground sounds play one right after the other. I swear the jumping animation used to be way smoother without that hitch and without the weird sound; I don't have performance issues in this game, so it's not lag as far as I can tell.

4. Sometimes machines will get stuck saying they need to have the sand cleaned out of them, and no matter how many different positions or angles I try I cannot see a sand pile to remove with my duster. I found that picking the machine up and putting it back down fixes it temporarily, but I would prefer to just not have that issue, it's annoying having to finesse the position of a civil furnace that sits between two other furnaces.

5. I need storage to be sortable across all boxes instead of the 'sort' option just sorting that individual storage box, as well as the ability to search for an item in storage by name. I would also like for storage to always be accessible when you're gifting a character something. It's frustrating going through my 10? 12? large storage boxes, each with two pages of items to scroll through, especially since item names are only visible by using the left stick and going over every item.

6. Finding relic parts for Qi's side quests is too time consuming. I would prefer the quest-necessary relic pieces be located in chests in the ruins rather than in the dirt; I haven't found the scanner particularly effective at locating the quest pieces, so I've just been hitting every piece of dirt I can find on every floor hoping to uncover a relic piece eventually, which is extremely tedious when I also really need to move on to a new floor for the ores so I have the materials to complete my commissions.

7. The lack of tin scrap makes bronze more difficult to craft than stuff like chromium or manganese steel, and I'm not sure why that's the case given bronze is required for crafting so many different things.

8. There should be an option to turn on alerts for commissions that are going to expire that day. Even if you're tracking your commissions that are due the soonest, you won't see when the commission expires on the main screen.

9. The shop interface should tell you whether clothing/accessories are better or worse than your current gear; I can't really compare my gear when it's all named something like 'Stunt Rider Desert Warrior Visor' or 'Bright Defense Team Boots' since those names don't convey anything about their stats. It's also a struggle to remember my shirt provides, for example, '+136 health + 17 stamina +5% critical hit chance + Negates poison status effects' when I'm in a shop going through a bunch of different shirts all with different stat buffs and effects.

10. Add a setting that lets run be set as the default movement speed, please. Using the 'toggle' doesn't work because there a bunch of annoying circumstances where the game toggles the player back to walking.

11. It's pretty easy to get stuck on obstacles in the sandrunning competition, and I lost a race because I got stuck under a boost pad ramp after hitting it from the side and had to forfeit to get out.

All of that said though, it's a great game, I'm looking forward to getting through the main story so I can go try My Time at Portia after this!

I'm glad to say Mr. Grapefrukt and his collaborators have done it again, combining pool, golf, and roguelite-esque gameplay with charming visuals and music to create an absurdly fun little time sink, much like Holedown, which I've played and replayed to completion on every platform it exists on.

I tried to stay unspoiled on the details of the game mechanics before going into it so I could experience everything totally fresh, and I've been delighted by mixing and matching challenge cards and the different ball types that impact how you play.

The whole thing is charming, and aside from being an obvious extension of Holedown's best design sensibilities, it feels like a fair bit of its ethos took cues from Triband's fresh, novel, and light-hearted takes on sports like golf, baseball, and racing. I really enjoyed What the Golf, and eagerly look forward to the next time Triband makes a game that's on a platform I own, so that inspiration is extremely welcome in Subpar Golf, haha.

It's hard to put a number on all of the work that goes into a video game over time, but I can say confidently that $10 is more than fair for a really fun game that's been in the works for... I think half a decade (give or take). I say skip the sale and get it now; reward the devs for doing a great job if you have the means! 😊

Snake Farm is $3, on sale for $2.69 at launch (nice), so you literally cannot go wrong picking this up. Any earnest human endeavor is worth paying $3 to experience.
That said, the game reminds me a lot of Vampire Survivors, but instead of a billion little enemies there are a handful of more meaningful enemies. The shop menu you enter between rounds offers excellent opportunities to balance risk and reward, allowing you to choose more difficult enemies to spawn that give you greater rewards but are frequently way more difficult to kill. There's also a chance you'll be offered something tougher than your current DPS can handle, but because the enemies you select carry over from each round through to the last one, you can buy a tough snake with high rewards early on and then reap those rewards at the end of your run.
Also? The leaderboards have been wildly competitive in these first few days, it's been super fun seeing my friends' names pop up on the global high score lists by surprise and then doing runs with their weapon of choice over and over to see if I can place on the same leaderboard as them. (I haven't yet, but I'm working on it!) It's nice playing a new game like this way before it's "solved."
Again, to reiterate the point at the top, Snake Farm is way too fun to cost $3, you should get it.

The game's only issues on launch day are entirely technical: there's a glitch corrupting some peoples' save files (not an issue for me personally, though), voice line volume not being the same between characters in some scenes, there's one song where the captions are way faster than the singing, and there's a litany of little graphical glitches here and there that made characters that should've been in focus blurry or made the scaling of their portraits glitch so they oscillated between a little bit bigger than they should've been and the size they were actually supposed to be during a scene near one of the ends of the game.

But all of that means literally nothing to me. This game kicks ass if you're in the mood for a witty, moving, emotionally intelligent romp through an alternate world where gods secretly live among us and almost all of them are lying to you constantly.

I've never played a 'choices matter' game where the choices are this well articulated; there was never a moment where I clicked on a vague option and my character said something I didn't mean. Also, the fact you get to make multiple choices within each song the cast performs which changes the lyrics and how the other singer(s) react means there's a surprising amount of nuance to how you try and deal with everyone. All of the dialog options, alternate scenes, different song lyrics, and different endings makes me want to replay it again soon.

The highest praise I can give it is this, though: I haven't been able to focus on a game for more than an hour or two at a time for weeks, but I sat and played Stray Gods for seven hours straight until I beat my first playthrough and I don't regret it at all, even though I'm typing this review at 3 a.m. already half-asleep!

If the premise of the game, the visual novel genre, or musicals appeal to you, I think you'll enjoy it, because it delivers extremely well in all of those areas.

I never played the original Myst, so instead of talking about how it compares to the original, let me start by saying that the game is pretty good, but I have two points where it needs improvement.

The interactivity zones on certain things in the environment are wildly inconsistent, with most having fairly lenient tolerances but others requiring precise mouse clicking to make work. I was determined to play this game without using a guide, but I got stuck trying to figure out how to access the library tower (which is key to progression!) because when I moused over the handles under the paintings in the library the smart cursor either never flashed to indicate they were interactive or flashed so briefly because of how thin the handles are that I didn't realize they did anything. The handle has a huge 'U' shaped interactivity zone, with lots of of room for error on the right and left sides of the handle, but little to no margin for error if you're trying to click it dead center. It's unfortunate I felt compelled to look up a video walk through just to find out I'd failed to click a handle precisely enough. That's not a test of my puzzle solving ability, that's just the game being finicky.

I also take issue with a change made during the Selenitic Age area. The radio box you tune to find the correct frequency for each button no longer displays a numeric indication of what frequency you're on the way it did in older versions of Myst. Instead, that information is replaced with a spectrogram showing the sound waves being played, which is genuinely no help whatsoever. The frequency display was a great way to indicate to the player that they're making progress scrubbing through the full range of radio frequencies available to them. In this modern version of Myst, I ended up thinking I was missing some aspect of the puzzle because it seemed to me like I was just looping through the same frequencies over and over again with nothing but static playing. I wasn't, I was actually still navigating through different frequencies, there was just no obvious visual feedback to make that obvious. (The art in the background on the frequency dial still changes based on where you're at in the range of frequencies, but there are big parts that are just clouds and sky. That's what caused me to incorrectly figure I had gone through all the frequencies without finding the sound I needed.)

This isn't a complaint, but do be aware this remake gets rid of the FMV elements of the original game in favor of 3D animated characters. I think they're fine, but if you have nostalgia for the original Myst, you might be bothered by it -- a couple of my friends totally were.

As for strong points, even if your hearing is just fine, I highly recommend using the gameplay subtitles feature under 'Display' options in the settings menu once you get to the audio puzzles towards the end, Unless you're just particularly good with identifying piano notes and then picking them out on an unlabeled slider. That added accessibility is a huge plus, and a lot of sound-based puzzles in games don't offer alternative visual cues.

All in all, this is a nice remake of Myst, so long as you're not too nostalgic for the visual style of the original game. It's still a short, fun, (generally) straightforward, immersive 3D puzzling experience, with a bit of interesting narrative work to boot.

This game is great, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention my dislikes:

1. I ran into a hard lock in a battle against the Samurai Soul in the ancient castle. Gau got stuck casting Reraise every turn (I don't know how) and after the rest of the party was finally dead he re-raised himself. After coming back to life, he got stuck doing his spellcasting animation, as if he was going to cast Reraise again. He was poisoned, but the poison didn't damage him anymore, and the Samurai Soul wouldn't act, either. I had to exit the game and redo a few minutes' worth of progress, then start the battle over again.

2. The Jidoor/Zozo writing is really weird. You go to Jidoor and townsfolk are talking about how they ran all the poor people out of town because they're liars and crooks and thieves. It's textbook classism, so I figured the game was setting that up in order to knock it down. You find out Jidoor's poor established their own town, so you go to Zozo, and not only does everyone there actually lie to you, almost every single NPC in the town is part of a quest where finding the solution is centered around knowing all of the people in Zozo are liars. It's pretty absurd, lmao.

3. Whenever Gau learns a new move, the left side of the 'G' in his name is cut off in the text box on the victory screen. Not a big deal, but one of those things you see for the first time and then just can't stop looking at every time it happens.

4. The whole entire Veldt mechanic where Gau has to run around and leap on enemies in the Veldt to learn their moves is a nightmare. I have 80 hours in this game and somewhere between 10 and 20 were absolutely just running around the Veldt trying to get encounters with newly found enemies so he could get new moves. The worst part is that it's actually pretty worth it, because Gau with good moves is really strong.

All in all, though, I'd say it's fighting with Final Fantasy 5 for my favorite old school Final Fantasy game. Some people have complaints about how the Pixel Remaster looks compared to the original, and that's totally fair if you're someone who's used to the original, but never being particularly invested in the SNES version means the remaster's aesthetic didn't bother me, even if I do think the original game looked nicer.

Keita Takahashi is known as an auteur in the video games industry because of his sense of humor, unique style of storytelling, and the whimsical atmosphere he brings to the projects he works on. If you love Katamari Damacy, the gameplay is nothing like that, but you can't play this game without thinking, "Yeah, this is a Keita Takahashi game," because it has a charm to it that's distinct from most other games.

I'm not a fan of the toilet-related humor and mechanics, the controls are a little wonky, and Wattam leaves little room for problem solving with quest titles or hints telling you almost exactly what to do.
Grievances aired, though, the game is short enough the main story can be completed in one sitting: I took just under three hours to roll the credits and reach the post-game. If you're going into this expecting what it is, which is a cute, fun, story about loneliness, making friends, and forgiveness, with fairly novel mechanics and design, then you're not going to be disappointed. If you go into this wanting a '3D sandbox game' that suggests in its description that it has some fun and interesting physics interactions you can mess around with... it's not *bad,* but I don't think the sandbox element is what this game excels at, personally. Or maybe I'm just not the type of person who finds experimenting with stuff like that fun.

All in all, it's a good time! I do think it's worth the original price despite its short main story play time -- there's still a few more hours' worth of stuff I could do in the post-game if I wanted to get more out of it -- but I think it's especially worth it if you're considering it during a sale.

(Also, side note: this game's probably pretty good for kids, which is something I think they hint at in the description with mention of playing with siblings or parents. Easy gameplay, simple story and dialog, nothing scary or violent. One of my friends said it was 'like a baby sensory video' when I streamed my playthrough, which I think is reductive, but I do agree that it seems to be aimed at a younger demographic than Katamari Damacy and has pretty engaging audio and visual design.)

This game's crazy good and wildly fun in a way most multiplayer golf games absolutely aren't.

If you have "Golf with your Friends" in your regular friend game rotation but are getting tired of it, try swapping in Golf Gang. It was a no-brainer purchase at the $3 spring sale price, but with 144 holes spread out between 8 courses and a ton of fun modifiers that make for even more unique experiences, you won't be disappointed at full price. (It's also a pretty relaxing, meditative experience in single player; I'm pretty amazed by the way Golf Gang can facilitate experiences ranging from serene to rowdy.)

I know I don't have a ton of playtime on Steam yet, but I'm leaving a review anyway because I've finished and re-finished this game multiple times on mobile and Switch.
This is (subjectively!) the best shoot balls at things game I've ever played, the peak of simplicity and style. Everything from the spacey soundtrack to the way balls start to turn the game's signature shade of reddish purple as they speed up and burn out makes it just sort of delightful to play.
That said, this was originally a *mobile* puzzle game lovingly handcrafted by an experienced indie developer and a couple of collaborators. As such, the game will typically be completed in a handful of hours at most. That's a shame, because like I said, this is the best shoot balls at things game I've ever played. I would love to have more new and exciting locations in which to shoot balls at things beyond what the game has already.
Despite my desire for more levels, though, it's fairly priced. I'm glad to support the developer in anticipation of whatever he might release next! And I think if you have the right expectations for how long Holedown is going into it, you're more than likely to enjoy it.

I've been extremely pessimistic about Sonic games for years and years and years and I think this is the game that has finally convinced me that the series isn't doomed to mediocrity forever.
Sonic Frontiers is just an all-around good time.
There's a little bit of the classic 3D Sonic game fussiness with like 'oh you didn't lock onto this grind rail' or 'oh you're not in range of this spring you need to homing attack onto' but that's a few minutes of play time in a game you can easily put tens of hours into.
As stated already, I'm not a huge Sonic fan, but I think the way this game blends 2D and 3D-style Sonic gameplay with new combat mechanics, open area traversal, and a genuinely decent story (among other fun additions) makes it worth playing if you have literally any affection for Sonic the Hedgehog.