Recent reviews by pmLite

I've been meaning to review this game for a while, but Solar Ash is one of the best "hidden gem" games I've seen. The one thing I should say is that there is definitely NOT $40 worth of content in this game, even if you 100% it, so I would strongly recommend getting it on sale.

That said, Solar Ash is a fantastic game. Completing the missions in each of the different environments almost evokes the same feeling exploring planets in Super Mario Galaxy, which is a special sense of wonder I haven't experienced from a game in years. The movement is really slick, and the fast-paced traversal mechanics feel great to use. The game also has some incredible music—"Praxis", the song that plays before each boss fight, is one of the most cinematic and dramatic themes I've ever heard in a game.

Speaking of, the stellar boss fights are absolutely where this game shines the most. They all involve getting on the boss, Shadow-of-the-Colossus-Style, and quickly skating across the boss to hit different targets before being thrown off. It's absolutely exhilarating, and especially with how tight some of these timings get towards the end of the game, the rush of successfully getting a hit on the boss is a great feeling. It's been a few years since I've played this game, yet Solar Ash remains my gold standard for what a fun and interesting boss fight can be.

Overall, I think Solar Ash is worth playing for everyone, especially if you love 3D platformers or fast-paced movement games, but get it on sale as it's a <10 hour game.

Unlike the Paintress, these devs have created a work of art. This game is a masterpiece.

Sure, the port has issues, and games shouldn’t require third-party software to be playable. But, it takes less than 5 minutes to set up the 4GB patch, and then I forgot all about it for my 70 hours of gameplay. I think the game crashed maybe once? It’s not like it’s a constant struggle to get the game to work.

FFXIII-2 is a great experience if you’re able to play without taking it too seriously. The time travel plot is hilariously convoluted, Serah is a lot more lighthearted than the average FF protagonist (especially Lightning), but the game delivers a pretty fun and fantastic atmosphere overall. The different locations and time periods look great and have a lot of variety between them, and it’s much more open than XIII. It’s really neat being able to explore the same area across 3 or 4 different time periods and see what’s different about it. Combat feels great and honestly does way more justice to the cleverness of the paradigm system than XIII does. The music in this game is also incredible—a lot of the best songs from the trilogy are in this game. There are also more aggressive versions of many songs that seamlessly switch in when enemies appear in the field, which is a really nice touch.

The only major complaint I really have with this game is the huge difficulty spike at the end of the main story. FFXIII-2 is quite short, only taking about 15 hours to reach the final boss of the main story. During this time, there’s almost no need to grind or do side content, as progression scales relatively well, and if you’re decent at the paradigm system, you’ll be fine almost the whole way through. But, this apparently leaves you significantly underprepared for the sequence of 4 bosses at the end of the story. For reasons I don’t understand, those fights against Caius are legitimately some of the most difficult things I’ve ever done in a game. One of the fights only takes 3 minutes to win, but I was stuck replaying it for 5 hours straight to get through it, and once you’ve started the final sequence of bosses, you can’t go back to level up or turn off the game without restarting the boss rush. One of the variants of Caius had an attack that would party wipe unless I switched to SEN/SEN/SEN, and having rewatched footage of my gameplay, there were 34 frames for me to switch paradigms between the attack name showing up and it damaging me. I wasn’t even able to use all 6 of my paradigm slots in this fight because it took too long to menu between them. My playtime went from 15 hours to almost 25 hours just trying to get through this last sequence of bosses, which was absolutely crazy. But, rant aside, the difficulty of this game is quite reasonable for the most part, and even the postgame bosses aren’t extremely difficult to take down (and on that note, there’s pretty a solid depth of things to do in the world postgame considering the brevity of the main story).

Overall, I think this game is worth playing, especially if you were interested in the paradigm system from XIII but didn’t like the linear story or general bleakness of the game. XIII-2 has a lot of charm to its characters, environments, and music, even if it’s on the sillier side narratively, and the technical issues with the port don’t hold it back anywhere near as much as people complain they do.

Wow, what an annoying game. Wave Break seems really stylish and creative aesthetically, which it definitely is and its vibes are great. It’s a really cool premise and has great art and music. Unfortunately, once you play for 5 minutes you quickly realize it’s an unpolished, frustrating mess.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever played a game with clunkier control of movement than this—to begin with, more of the gameplay involves 3D platforming than actually boating/skating, and this is ironically easier to do running around on foot (with your character who, putting it generously, has the physics of a Fall Guys character) than with the boat. The boat feels so slippery to move, even on land, and there’s no option to change the control sensitivity. It’s so exasperating trying to go anywhere with the boat when so often you’ll slide just a little bit and end up falling off the ledge you spent 1 of your only 3 minutes in the level platforming to. The level design is also a buggy mess—there are so many places where you can get stuck in a tiny gap and be unable to move out, move in and out of weird geometry edges, or even clip through the floor and fall out of the map.

Further, a lot of the objectives are themselves very buggy. One of the objectives in the first level that requires doing a certain trick out of a window took an hour and a half of me repeatedly doing it before the game finally decided to recognize it. I was actually planning to refund the game (which I have never done before for any game) but this single objective took me so long that I ended up outside of the 2 hour refund window. I also got stuck for nearly an hour retrying the helicopter jump, the very last objective in the last level, because it would never let me grab it properly (and the first time it did was with only a few seconds left on the timer, and it made me restart even though I had finished the objective).

Then, there’s the skating tricks aspect of the game, which almost feels like an entirely separate game (though equally frustrating). I actually spent most of my hours in Wave Break just doing tricks in a corner of the first map, trying to get the 999,999 combo achievement and grinding money. While this was a little bit less obnoxious than the platforming objectives in the levels, it’s still very annoying since the game is really finicky about combos and it kept not triggering the correct tricks or ending the combo the instant I touched the water. There were also some input issues I had where the game would randomly make me jump without me pressing the button, instantly ending my combo.

Another major issue I had is that the game provides basically no information to the player, which is exacerbated by there being very few community guides or even videos of Wave Break online (if you are playing this game and get lost I highly recommend consulting Biglaw’s GDQ run from 2022). Firstly, aside from an extremely basic tutorial, the game provides zero information about the different types of tricks you can do, how they’re scored, and so on. In order to even have a chance at building up a decent combo, I had to more or less mash around while recording my gameplay with a gamepad viewer, then rewatch it frame-by-frame to figure out what button combos triggered what tricks, and even then, after hours of practice, I’m sure there’s a lot I still don’t know. That’s how opaque this game is about skating tricks, the exact thing you need to do to score points. Additionally, there’s one level with a collectible hidden behind a breakable rock wall, yet absolutely nothing in the game indicates that you can damage the environment at all. I spent two entire hours looking for this last collectible thinking my game was bugged before I found a single Steam community discussion where the dev told people to try breaking rocks—that’s the closest to a canon explanation you get.

I’m sure there are more things I’m forgetting, but I hope by now a theme is clear—as much as I love the style of Wave Break, it feels like there was absolutely no polishing or playtesting of the gameplay or player experience, as it’s incredibly confusing, clumsy, and buggy. I can think of very few other games that are as actively frustrating and un-fun as Wave Break was, so I’d really recommend steering clear of this game despite its creative premise and atmosphere.

Inscryption meets Shotgun King with a bit of Obra Dinn mixed in there

very clever game, well worth $3

I can’t even describe how much this game means to me. I wish I could write paragraphs and paragraphs in this review but… I can’t. I’ve tried. I’ve been trying for months since I finished it, but there’s something so special about this game that’s impossible to put into words.

FFXV is beautiful. It’s captivating. It’s emotional. It takes you on a journey you’ll never forget.

Truly the most incredible experience I’ve ever had with a videogame.

I really hoped Tchia would be fun, because it’s such a great game on paper, but some poor gameplay design decisions made this game extremely frustrating and dull to play from nearly the first hour onwards. I want to make very clear that there are a lot of things I really do appreciate about this game—Tchia is beautiful, from a graphical perspective, a musical perspective, and also from a cultural perspective. It’s great to see the success of a small indie team making a game about a place they love and sharing its unique culture with the world. More games like this absolutely should exist.

Unfortunately, however, Tchia suffers from a bit of an identity crisis when it comes to the scope of the world, which leads to major gaps in traversal mechanics. Tchia’s map includes two relatively large islands, Ija Nöj and Madra Nöj, as well as a handful of other small archipelagos and shipwrecks. The game’s main storyline leads you on quests across these islands, and there are tons of different collectibles to be found on the islands and all over the ocean. All of this (in addition to the game’s own marketing) suggests that Tchia is a big open-world game. And yet, Tchia wants to be a small, easygoing, cozy game at the same time, so it purposely avoids traversal mechanics that are necessary to make an open-world game work. For example:

For some reason, you can’t see your own position on the map. If you push the left stick (which I frequently did by accident, due to it being the sprint button in 99% of other games—with no option to rebind it in Tchia), your map will recenter to an unhelpfully large circle saying you are “somewhere near here,” which is frequently half the size of one of the major islands. You have a boat you can travel with, but it’s slow, clunky, and difficult to steer—I almost never used it. There are certain docks you can fast-travel to with the boat, but they are also largely unhelpful given that a) there are very few of them, b) they are not close to major areas/villages on the islands, and c) you have to be at one dock to fast-travel to another one, so the time to get there is often not even worth the benefit of fast-traveling.

What I found to be the most effective means of locomotion was soul-jumping, which allows you to inhabit other objects or animals and move as them. Soul-jumping into birds is useful for traversing land, and dolphins for traversing the ocean. There is a limit to how long you can soul-jump for, but you can max this out early on, at which point it’s not a major concern. When you reach a certain point in the game, you unlock the ability to summon some of these animals, which you can then soul-jump into (assuming the summon actually works, which only happened about half of the time for me). This helps tremendously to explore the open world, but there are still issues with it. Any time you exit a soul-jump in order to interact with a collectible or view a cutscene, the animal will likely leave (birds and dolphins can get away quickly), and you will be stuck waiting on a cooldown before you can summon one again. Even after completing the main story, when the game grants you several “overpowered” abilities, there are still long cooldowns for these summons, making them very impractical for large-scale exploration of Tchia’s world. I do generally enjoy “collect-a-thons,” and I’ve 100%ed some much longer and larger than Tchia, but exploration in this game is downright tedious due to the fact that the only remotely efficient means of getting around disappears every time you exit it and you have to wait to summon it again.

I should also mention that Tchia took 6 minutes to boot up every single time I launched it, and around once per hour I encountered a “UE4 fatal error” that crashed the game while I was in the middle of playing. I haven’t experienced anything anywhere close to this bad playing any other game, so I believe Tchia is rather poorly optimized.

I wish I had more fun playing this game, because there are a lot of things it absolutely nails that I hope to see other games take note of, but sadly the gameplay and traversal in Tchia was painfully tedious for me the entire way through, so I can’t recommend playing it. Devs—you’re on the right track. There’s clearly a ton of love put into this game, which is great, and if you can figure out how to improve your gameplay systems, I have no doubt your future games will be fantastic.

Not terrible, but overall it’s an uninspired metroidvania with clunky gameplay. The visual style, music, and overall environment of the game are nice, but it simply doesn’t feel interesting. Pinball being the main gimmick seems clever at first, but it gets tedious very quickly as you have to repeatedly pass through the same pinball sections many times while backtracking all over the map for fetch quests. On top of this, the pinball levers are so heavily railroaded that it’s actively frustrating trying to get from point A to point B. You’ll often have to go in the opposite direction of where you’re trying to go in order to find some convoluted path there, which is only a problem because of how the paths are connected—having a bit more openness in the level design would be nice. Plus, the game has a fast travel system (beelines), but while you can get OFF at any point, you can only get ON at the ends (with a few exceptions), meaning if you want to make a quick drop off in the middle of the beeline, you’ll have to make your way all the way back to the end on foot. This would’ve been an easy change that could make the gameplay a lot less tedious. Don’t even get me started on using the exploding slugs to launch yourself for certain collectibles—those things are so finicky that a few of them took me over an hour just to get the angle correct once.

Yoku’s Island Express isn’t a *bad* game, but isn’t a particularly interesting one either, and some level design oversights combined with endless backtracking makes it feel quite tedious to play at times.

most unhinged, nonsensical, surreal game i’ve ever played… and i love that

Cloudpunk is a really fascinating experience overall. It has some truly beautiful visuals that make the world of Nivalis feel immersive and fun to explore, and the story is a compelling one that faces the player with genuinely difficult choices. The many side characters that you meet along the way reinforce the strange, dystopian character of Nivalis—it almost feels like something out of “Welcome to Night Vale.” The main story is actually relatively short, as it all takes place in a single night, but flying around Nivalis and getting to feel the city’s magnificent yet uncanny aura is a feeling worth experiencing. So while the gameplay may come up a little short, Cloudpunk makes up for it in vibes. Would definitely recommend.