Recent reviews by Gunnar

A nice and short incremental game with good vibes. I got all achievements in under 5 hours, and played for a bit longer just to absolutely max out the game.

The visuals are cute, with a few different themes to choose from. Sound design and music are good. Narrative is borderline non-existent, but that's OK. Progression feels good.

If you're an incremental gamer, I'd highly recommend you pick this up, as cheap as it is.

OneShot is a pretty simple game on the surface. It's a top-down narrative-focused puzzle game where you guide a child through a dark world that's falling apart at the seams.

However, this simple description neglects to mention the mind-blowing details of the game's puzzles. I won't explain any of it here to avoid spoilers, but this game does some truly unique things that I have never seen a game do -- and it does it masterfully.

Nor does that description say anything about how engaging the narrative is, or how deeply you will connect with the protagonist. You will feel strong emotions when you observe the interactions Niko has with other characters, and even more so when you interact with Niko. Personally, this game made me cry on more than one occasion, and I felt myself tearing up on several more.

I could talk about how amazing this game is for several pages more, but I fear that this game is so utterly unique that if I were to give many more details, it could easily spoil aspects of the puzzles or the story.


If you are on Windows or Mac, please play this (the original 2016 Steam release) version first. World Machine Edition is a sort of "definitive" edition that adds a bunch of cool extras and quality-of-life features, as well as makes the game console- and Linux-friendly, but to accomplish that, it makes some sacrifices to the immersiveness of the narrative.

This reworked version of the game, World Machine Edition, is an excellent extension of what the original game had, with new supplemental and quality-of-life features, as well as console & Linux compatibility.
HOWEVER, if you're going in blind (as you should), and playing on a Windows PC or Mac, then I STRONGLY recommend playing the original 2016 Steam release of OneShot instead/first.
If you're a Steam deck or other Linux player, then this version is your only option, unfortunately. It's still the same fantastic story, but certain aspects may not hit quite as hard.

Innovative and satisfying movement paired with an incredibly hype soundtrack, a nice art style, and great character designs.

This is, in my opinion, the best game in the Assassin's Creed franchise, managing to be very good from every angle -- gameplay, narrative, and visuals.

As someone who hasn't enjoyed an AC game since Syndicate, the gameplay in this one just clicked for me in a way that all the games from the past decade haven't. The stealth is good, if a bit too easy. Assassinations are well-balanced, requiring a little building into for the strongest foes, but still instant kills on most enemies. The combat is great, and the RPG elements felt much less frustratingly out of place. Yasuke is not your typical AC protagonist, but he's something new and interesting, and his gameplay feels mostly great, actually.

The protagonists are amazing and most of the supporting cast are also great. The quests and story are good, and while there is a lot of it, it doesn't feel like it trades quality for quantity. I highly recommend playing on canon mode to get the best experience. Canon mode also (from what I've heard) gets rid of worst dialog options in the game, those being the romance-related ones.

The world is absolutely gorgeous, and I also can't help but stare at Yasuke's face. At 4K max quality settings, this is the first game that I feel genuinely approaches photorealism. It's the first photorealistic-style game where I can say that every frame looks like a piece of art. This game basically single-handedly turned me from a raytracing skeptic into a raytracing believer. The dynamic weather and seasons are awesome systems that make the world come alive in a way that no other game has managed. All this comes at a hefty cost, though. I will say, however, that this is the first game in many years to make me give up a steady 60 fps just to crank the eye-candy up.

There are a few technical issues with the game, but I am hoping that those will get patched soon. Primarily, the music, voice lines, and some ambient sounds will stop playing for up to a minute at a time, then all play at once. This also seems to be connected to a level-of-detail switching issue, where I am sometimes able to get all the way through a town on horseback before the high-quality textures and models load in (at the same time as the sounds resume). Additionally, cutscenes are capped to 31 FPS, have really bad clothing physics that spazzes out all over the place, and sometimes have extremely bright spotlights on characters at weird angles.

My specs for reference:
Ryzen 7 7800X3D
RTX 4090
NVME SSD in the slot that connects directly to the CPU without going through the chipset
96GB 6000 MT/s CL30 RAM

I hate that the game has microtransactions and time-limited challenges for currency. If I pay $70 for a game, I expect to be able to play the game at my pace and unlock all the content, given that I have the necessary skill. I will never pay extra for any of these things out of principle.

My play-through was close to 100%, but I didn't bother with most of the busy-work completionist quests. It ended up taking me about 80 hours of actual playtime to complete.

The music was really good.

I'm no Ubisoft fan, but I'm very happy to see this game succeed. Hoping for a game to fail just makes no sense to me. Anti-woke chuds take another incredibly common L. You love to see it.

A beautiful point-and-click adventure, hidden object puzzle game. Just like their previous game, Behind the Frame: The Finest Scenery, it tells a melancholic tale of self-discovery. Also like the aforementioned game, it is quite short, taking less than 2 hours to complete. My only wish is that there was just a bit more.

A charming little point-and-click/hidden-object puzzle game. Took me about an hour and a half for my first play-through, then went back to get the achievements I missed.

One of the greatest games ever made

A great metroidvania with lots of secrets, puzzles, collectibles, and combat and platforming challenges. The boss fights are pretty good, though there aren't that many. Most of the puzzles are quite good as well. The movement feels really fluid and the controls are good. I basically 100%'d the base game in just under 30 hours, except for some of the extra challenges that were just insanely difficult. The first 15ish hours felt like I was playing Hollow Knight again for the first time, which was really nice.

I'm not usually a visual novel player, but I figured I'd give this one a chance because of its 97% positive ratings, and wow, I'm glad I did.

I really liked the format of this game, with the way you're encouraged to explore all possible branches of the story, and that (almost) all of them are required to get the real ending. The narrator was another really great part of the game, that really helped sell the story and the meta-story. The concept of choices as pickups/unlocks that must be found before they can be made is also a pretty cool system.