Recent reviews by Garlyle Wilds

I had hopes for this one, as even if it isn't quite there, it felt like it had a vision of a Battle Network spinoff. ...But, I think it has kind of missed the 'point' of an idle game. The amount of mechanically impactful goals feels like it dries out quickly, and the autobattling nature limits how exciting trying to strategize your arsenal can be. Any semblance of greater story or worldbuilding to discover (which could've been a cool alternative), is so brief as to be weightless and basically relies on familiarity with what it's aping.

To boot, there's just a ton of playability stuff that feels off, in ways that were off months ago in demos and leave me wondering how they stayed a problem. The desktop companion style design is a neat idea, but suffers from a ton of things (like the scaling either meaning things are too small, too big for a constant overlay, or stretched in ugly ways). Navigating menus is an active pain, often giving way too little information (eg missions not informing you where they're taking place), and having your attacks come from little wandering monsters is a cute idea until you need to actually manage them to try out new abilities, nevermind the incredibly messy chip encyclopedia and an inventory with only manual sorting that quickly becomes a nightmare. Display settings have to be reconfigured each time I start it up. There's bugs with terrain display desynchronizing in navigation, or the chip load system half breaking, all just the sort of thing that make me wonder how they made it past the months and months thsi game has spent in development.

I want to love it. I'll keep an eye on it and keep giving it a chance, and maybe someday this will become a thumbs up. Idle games don't really demand much to keep up with, after all. But man, for all the love I can tell was put into parts of this project (like the music and art), and for how long I followed it, a lot of it just leaves me thuroughly like "oh, that's it?"

It's fine. The hook of being basically a custom Dragon Quest 1 randomizer, with its own progressing complexity throughout its larger story, is neat. ...That said it's still built in the style of the original NES DQ1, which is not going to be to everyone's tastes. You probably know if you're interested just based on concept alone.

Feels very close to what I would've expected of a third Katamari game on the PS2, and I mean that in a complimentary way. It's a lot of familiarly Katamari structures but in fresh environments (always a plus), renewals of many of the more iconic unique levels of the past games, and a dash of brand new gimmicks and surprises that I wish they'd done a bit more with. Most importantly, I didn't walk away feeling like "wow, I had played this already" the way I did for... basically every game after WLK, lol.

At first, you might rush your dream date, then be surprised when that tale's over and their story's gone in just a few visits. If you're here for a traditional 20 hour story with your guy or gal of choice, this isn't it.

...But then you keep going anyway. And you start to find this game isn't a story about finding the One True Love, it's about just getting out there and meeting people, and all the strangeness and vulneurability and baggage that can come with that. It's about the fact maybe you don't click with everyone, about the fact maybe sometimes you grow to hate each other, and that's fine, the story doesn't end there. It's about the way that it's okay to love and let go, that One True Love isn't the only winning condition.

It's colorful, earnest, and unashamed, and I love it.

Fantastic title with its own unique twists on the cooking genre, taking a lot of visible inspiration from Fire Emblem. The resulting game is a unique mixture of strategy, puzzling, RPG, and relationship building, all within the backdrop of a super cozy tale about succeeding the family restaurant on a small Hawaiian island. I hope this game doesn't get lost in the depths of Steam, it's a real gem.

The Warriors combat formula and massive roster of playable characters turns out to make for a fairly engaging horde-survival type of gameplay, especially with effort put into the boss fights and all. What's really surprising though is that the usually shallow Warriors games instead have a multi-faceted depth in the officer system that serves as your main upgrade selection. The only real issue is that, with just one set of largely static challenges to run through, the breadth of challenges to match against that depth of customization is limited, but who knows, with the updates, maybe more will be added in time.

The free play mode is very good; it's a solid, if fairly typical, rhythm game, with a broad genre selection from hard rock to light memes. The core of this game is very, very good.

The surrounding aspects are where it falters. The tutorials (especially for Danmaku mode) just dump a ton of pages of info on you. The keys for UI navigation feel often arbitrary. And most notably the story mode suffers for multiple reasons: Repetition of tracks across multiple stages (despite the wide track list), unclear progression, and the RPG aspect in the Mitama cards... which can and do effect your score, resulting in "I got All Brilliant and the game still gave me a C rank" nonsense that doesn't feel right for a rhythm game at all. And Danmaku mode is cute but, without difficulty settings, feels like it's tuned only for players who've never touched a shmup before.

Again, none of these issues tarnish a great core rhythm gameplay and its free play mode. It's just all the stuff outside of that which is lacking, but that's not so important to a rhythm game to say this is bad.

Though definitely on the 'too easy' side because of how stupid OP Rage Mode and Items are, it's still mindless good fun.

A pretty good escape room puzzle with a fun concept. It's not reliant on jumpscares much, to its credit. However, its conclusion(s) leave much to be desired, and anyone with colour blindness may want to avoid it due to the many puzzles reliant on colours. The rest is good though.

Though there's some small corners that could be cleaned up, I had a blast with this one. It just feels super smooth once you get the hang of it and it has a great energy to it.