Recent reviews by Mirin Dajo

Updated pretty frequently, always a decent selection of lobbies to choose from. Customization options are fun to unlock, and you don't have a whole lot of toxicity.


**Updated again, 11/2020, as this game will always earn the Labor of Love award from me. The devs are consistent in their updates, the content is always worth checking out, and they listen to feedback from the fans. Rock on GWYF, may your holidays be filled with gingerbread men.

**Updated, 11/2021. It’s that time of year to award Labor of Love to this funky gem of a mini golf game. The underwater update was new this year, and as always I spent plenty of time playing rounds with strangers and friends. Get the game. It’s cheap, tons of fun, and the cheevos are a decent challenge.

***Hey, look, it's 11/2022! Listen, if you've read all this you can tell I enjoy this game a lot. I've enjoyed it for several years and I'll keep enjoying it. I don't play as many games as I used to, but when the Steam Awards email showed up I knew it was time to renominate my favorite little putt-putt game. Booted up a random round and found a friendly little group to play Bouncy Castle- one of two new official maps added since I last updated this review. The game apparently has cosmetic DLC's now which is A-okay with me as you can still unlock the free ones just fine, and I've been using the same hat and trail on my golf ball since 2019. Also, I don't mind these guys adding some purchase options- the server browser, course designs, and interface have all seen significant improvements over the past year. Buy it!

Very much an interactive story- may lose it's punch depending on luck of the draw and which portions of the game you access before others by chance. Worth sticking through to the end.

Beautiful and strange, haunting and sweet. Mind blowing aesthetics and rewarding for exploration. Best first person walker I've played in years. Devs should be incredibly proud.

Brief but thoroughly entertaining with a surprisingly high attention to detail and nuance. There are deceptively few dialogue choices in the beginning, but the choices you make in the second half of the game make or break your success.

Relaxing, fun to see which items pop up on your mountain. If you have a spare machine lying around with a halfway decent graphics card, keep it running offline 24/7 for a real virtual pet mountain.

Short but beautiful, with a lovingly crafted soundtrack. Refunct is not an extensive game, but it doesn't need to be. There is no tutorial and no instructions necessary- just start exploring, you'll get it. There are some interesting speedruns/challenges that the community has suggested that I may try in the future, but it was worth the price even for a single run-through. This game is one of the few first person exploration/puzzle-ish platformers that has done it right. I would be very interested to see future projects from this dev. Also there are trading cards if you're into that.

I cannot recommend this game enough. Unfortunately, writing too much about it would ruin the experience. If you loved Dear Esther, but always wished for more resolution, more answers, then this game is for you. Atmospheric, beatiful, heartbreaking, and occasionally terrifying, this game is a must-play for those who enjoy thinking and exploring worlds.

I cannot recommend this game enough. It is simply one of the best games released in the last few years. The Stanley Parable puts you in the shoes of an office worker who suddenly finds everyone has disappeared. A narrator begins to set up the plot, and from there everything goes wild. I cannot say too much without ruining the first-time experience you *desperately* deserve for a game like this, so I'll try to stick to the mechanical aspects. The control system is your typical WASD/mouse navigation. Your character, unlike many FPS games, has no jump function (try it anyways and see what happens) because you're walking a linear (HA!) path the entire time.

Your interactivity with the environment is limited. There aren't very many objects you can physically manipulate besides those necessary for progression. The narrator, on the other hand, will have something to say about almost everything. The graphics are pleasing to the eye, and the game is well optimized, running perfectly fine even on integrated laptop graphics cards. The environment has a soft, clean feel to it. Don't come here for realism.

Lot's of fun passive background humor and gags. Take the time to stop and read notes and examine documents and pictures. You'll notice something new every time.

I will say that this game has endless replay and exploration value. No two playthroughs will be the same. Expect dark humor, dry wit, complete lunacy, tranquility, hostility, happiness, and fear. This game will take you from laughing your ass off to a sobering, thought-provoking state. It's a beautiful demonstration of the concepts of free will, causality, fate, and sense of individuality. Just how much are you in control of your life? TSP has some interesting thoughts on the matter.
Buy it. You won't regret it.

And for the love of God, DON'T go to the community page if you haven't bought it yet or if you're just starting. Spoilers everywhere, and spoilers are the exact last thing you could possibly want in this game. You have been warned...

Although it has graduated from a traditional teamplay combat game to DLC machine, TF2 is still a classic. Even if you have no interest in playing but have Gmod, then definitely install and mount this to be able to use it's content. Many workshop items and maps require TF2 content to function properly.

As a side note, this installation is HUGE and only getting bigger, thanks to the plethora of items added to it in the last couple years. If you're looking to save hard drive space, steer clear. New content is endlessly being updated, making the install larger and larger each time.

Ben There, Dan That

A fun, quirky, goofy point and click romp throughout alternate dimensions. First, the gameplay: your controls are the usual point-and-click fare, no surprises. You have an inventory of objects you find along the way that you use to accomplish specific goals- and almost any of these objects can interact with one another, either to make something useful, or to get a remark from Dan about how stupid the combination you just tried is. There's trees and subtrees and subsubtrees of interactive dialogue with characters you meet along the way. You may also interect with literally everything in your environment, too. Basically if you can see it, the developers wrote an action for it.

Style is very cartoony, but fun. Don't be looking for top-end graphics here, it's quite choppy! I personally feel like this just adds to the silly, goofy feel. Character design is pretty standard for Dan and Ben, but some other characters you meet are pretty funky looking.

The game constantly makes one-liners or jokes. It's very tongue-in-cheek, and they break the 4th wall all the time. I promise some of these things will literally have you laughing out loud at least once. Funny dialogue, funny situations, funny level designs... the whole game is one giant cheesy gag and it's fantastic.

The one con Ihave to say against this game is it's length. It was over far too quickly and left me wanting more. Luckily there is...

Time, Gentlemen, Please!

A continuation of the first game with even more exploration, interactivity, and fleshed out story arc. Much longer than BTDT, too. Everything good about the first game is in here too, but better. Some of the puzzles are *really* hard in this game, miles beyond anything in the first. They also added a time element that involves crisscrossing timelines and seeing alternate versions of people and places.

Two thumbs up. Buy it. For an even sweeter deal, get it on sale. You won't regret it.