Hydroneer - Thoughts

Every so often I run up against a game I can't wrap my brain around. Not in the sense that I fail to understand its mechanics or can't complete it, but that I don't really grasp its widespread appeal. Or maybe I get its theoretical appeal, but find it so severely wanting that I convince myself there must be more to the experience. There are a couple of older titles that I struggle with (Kingdom Hearts, Halo, Red Dead Redemption), but I haven't felt this way about a modern game (sans Mass Attack) for a good while now.

 

That is, until I played Hydroneer—an automation sandbox game that's as fulfilling as eating several sleeves of saltines in a row.

 

Despite the aquatic moniker, Hydroneer is as dry as a game could be. You're plopped down onto an island with a lantern, shovel, and a big patch of land to excavate... and that's all the guidance you get. If you nose around a bit you'll find several stores, a merchant to sell to, and a few quests that seem to point you in the right direction, but they're all red herrings. What you have to do is start sifting through the dirt, because you're going to need a good chunk of money in order to start automating.

 

Interacting with the game at any level will immediately reveal its make-or-break gimmick: no inventory. You're only allowed to pick up and hold one thing at a time, which will either sound like an absolute nightmare or an inviting challenge. I chose to take it as the latter and gradually began filling a bucket with enough ore to buy the rest of the refinement line. This however, was a misstep—smelting ingots and forging jewelry demanded too much manual labor for the scant increase in earnings they provided (25%?!). I had forgotten the #1 rule for any factory game: if you can make it, automate it.

 

So off I went, money in hand (since you don't have pockets) to go purchase some machines. I set up a driller, connected it to a water pipeline for power, and watched as it spat endless chunks of dirt onto the ground. After smacking my forehead in shame I went back to the store to grab a harvester so I could transform those useless brown chunks into ore. A couple of awkwardly dug holes later and I was able to place a bucket below the harvester, and then...

 

... I was done.

 

I don't mean that I was done with the game, but the automation portion was effectively solved. You see, Hydroneer doesn't let you purchase more drillers or harvesters unless you go make your own at a mountain forge all the way across the map, starting at a ludicrous price of 300 units of metal ore—roughly $3700 worth of product. Mind you, the most expensive patch of land in the game is only $7200, and very few items (vehicles) breach the 1k mark. So rather than spending hours selling goods to double my output, I dug down as low as I could go in order to get better quality ore out of my lone driller. Then after doing some exploring and ruminating, I sold all my ore, bought all the plots of land on the island, and then finally called it quits for good.

 

See, a weird thing about Hydroneer that I didn't know going in is that it's a "sandbox" game in the literal sense. You decide how much to industrialize this humble patch o' dirt; there are no objectives, no enemies, no meters to manage, or deadlines to hit. I guess you could try and complete the quests leading up to the king, but considering the second quest requires five thousand units of metal ore, it feels less like a guideline and more like an absurd postgame target. There is more to do in Hydroneer than mining—there's farming, fishing, house building, and even logic circuits of all things—but the only thought I had regarding those was "... why?"

 

I don't mean to be smarmy; I was there for Minecraft's 2011 Alpha, I know how cool it is to just goof around making things in a digital world. But what separates Hydroneer from its kin is its dreaded "no inventory" limitation. That binding makes any creative endeavor an absolute headache to navigate around, like playing an MMORPG at walking speed or a MOBA on a trackpad. I don't want to build a house or cultivate crops in a game where the purported goal is to use automation to bypass your handicap. And when the automation conundrum can be effectively solved in the first few hours (thanks to every mineral type being available in the starting plot), what is there left to do but twiddle your thumbs and make up insufferable goals on your lonesome?

 

Perhaps I'm just the wrong audience for Hydroneer. But then it begs the question: who is the game for? People that only buy one game off Steam a year? Folks unbothered by the sunk-cost fallacy? Satisfactory and Valheim are brilliant alternatives that offer the same kind of "rags to riches" gameplay with stringent (but smart!) limitations. Hell, Minecraft still stands tall in its field, packed with unrivaled potential for stunning architecture and complex logic doohickeys! I feel a tad annoyed to have bought into Hydroneer's hype, its agonizingly-slow pace projected as "part of the charm" rather than the obnoxious time-sink it is. Hydroneer is a game that doesn't fill a niche beyond "something to play while bored", to which the cures are already vast and innumerable.

Picross e Series - Thoughts

I'm not sure there are many people out there that have fully finished Picross e 1-9. Before the 3DS shop closure I purchased them on sale on a whim, having enjoyed Mario's Picross and Picross DS plenty but not really sure I'd get around to playing the series, let alone more than one entry. But it turns out there's a lot of opportunities throughout the day where rather than mindlessly scrolling through your phone you can do a puzzle or two... or a dozen, which seemed to be around my average. Right around the point I got halfway through the series I made it my mission to get through them all, and by the start of December 2025 I was done. Over the course of 3.42 years and 354 sessions I completed 2147 puzzles (22 of which were Micross sets [multiple puzzles]), spending 264 hours total. And what do I think about Picross as a whole?

 

I dunno—it's fun.

 

 

Trying to write an entry about Picross is like writing about Sudoku: what can you really say? It's a puzzle game where you have to mark pips on a board using numbers on the X and Y axes as your guide, and it's a pretty simple—but effective—mental exercise. All entries in the series start with 5x5 boards but gradually increase to 10x10 and 15x15, and starting from e4 you get super-wide 20x15 puzzles. For novice players you can get highlighted hints on where to start looking for pips to mark, and/or a random row & column pre-marked to serve as a springboard. You can also let the game correct you when you make a mistake at the cost of a time penalty, with your total time being the only kind of "scoring" the game has.

 

Early on I decided to turn all of those assist modes off, only keeping the gray-out indicator for when a row/column's pips have been completed. I tried playing without it for a micross puzzle, but felt there was too much number keeping busywork; you basically have to re-check your work every time you return to work on a row or column. It might be a less "authentic" way to play, but if it meant not having to re-count yet another "1 1 1 1 1" row, I'll gladly take it.

 

While the e series will give you more standard picross puzzles than you can shake a stick at, you'll also get micross puzzles starting in e2 and mega picross starting in e3. Micross has you solving 30+ 10x10 puzzles that come together to form a historical painting, and mega picross features "mega" numbers that extend over two lines. Of the two I vastly prefer mega picross; micross is basically a big time waster, as 50% of its puzzles are easily solved and those that aren't are just your typical 10x10 fare. Mega picross on the other hand is a delectable challenge, requiring a different mindset and new skills to deduce its hardest challenges. At first I didn't care for it compared to your regular nonogram challenge, but slowly I found it to be on par—if not better—due to the extra challenge it adds. The only downside is having to math out mega numbers larger than 12, as it can be very tedious work counting all the possibilities (16, 17, 18—wait, can a pip go there? Wait, what number was I at? 17?)

 

 

 

Ah, but I've saved the best feature to talk about for last: starting in e7, the player can use a second marker on the board! This is a massive improvement to the series, as you no longer have to use Xs while doing theoretical counts, saving you from any potential slip-ups. It's about as fundamental of a feature as being able to list possible numbers within a square in Sudoku, greatly speeding up your deductions thanks to how easy it is to plop pink squares down and then erase them in a single swipe. I've been playing the Twilight Princess Picross tie-in while writing this, and it has made me miss the feature dearly; more than once I've ruined a puzzle due to a rogue X that I forgot to delete while counting.

 

Besides those features, there's nothing that really separates one e title from another. The latter half of the series (from e6 onward) doubles the amount of available puzzles (from 150 to 300), but there's no distinctive or qualitative differences between the entries. Art and music is consistently adequate across the franchise and all games share similar difficulty curves. Namely, that the first 50 puzzles are a breeze but there are always ten or twenty sprinkled throughout that require an advanced level of skill to complete without guessing. Out of the 2000+ puzzles I played, only 43 puzzles took me over 20 minutes, and they weren't centralized to one particular game or era (though e8 was definitively my longest game). Because of this, there isn't really one game in particular that I recommend; I would say to grab e6/7/8 just for the addition of the second marker tool, but in Picross S+ every one of the e games gets that feature, so there's no wrong choice.

 

 

Out of all the simple logic games I've played, I think Picross will always remain my favorite. Part of it is a smidge of Nintendo brainwashing—I was a Nintendo kid until college after all—but another part is that I find it irresistibly charming. The sleek visuals, the pleasant tunes, the delightful sound effect each button emits, and the perfect amount of math involved keep me returning to the series again and again. Plus there's the fun little challenge where after a completion, you try and guess the picture you've made before the game tells you what it is 3 seconds later. Picross will never win any significant accolades from basically anybody, but it remains a treat worth appreciating, like the oft-forgotten after-dinner mint. Quaint and understated, but always entertaining and warmly welcomed.

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Images obtained from:  ign.com, rawg.io,

Eldest Souls - Thoughts

I wish I could dodge sooner after an attack.

That single sentence is what delivers the fatal blow to Eldest Souls, a top-down boss rush that would be worthy of a recommendation if it just felt a bit snappier. I kept the thought from my mind for as long as I could, since the developer usually knows more about how their experience should play than an amateur tourist bumbling through their world. But every action your character performs is insufferably slow: attacking, charging, dodging, and casting are 0.2 seconds slower than the boss's next attack. And while I could tolerate it sometimes, being unable to dodge cancel out of the end of an attack animation wore me down by the end, especially during the game's DLC bosses. I don't think Eldest Souls is a bad game, but it's not my idea of a good time either.

As a general rule, I try my best to sympathize with the intent of a game designer. Rather than jumping to adjectives like "unfair" or "annoying" during a play session, I tell myself to remain inquisitive: what am I getting wrong about this fight? Is there something I'm missing from my repertoire? Is there a mechanic I'm overlooking? Staying open minded has allowed me to greatly enjoy unorthodox control schemes like Castlevania's fixed jump and Resident Evil's clunky tank controls. In both franchises the level design is molded around these restrictions, letting you survive so long as you take into account your own limitations. I get the gripes people have with them—deaths will come from your lack of total control—but I think the challenges they present are more interesting than they are troublesome. They taught me that limitations aren't always a bad thing; toppling a challenge while inhibited can be more gratifying than overcoming it at your best.

But man did I struggle to appreciate Eldest Souls's sluggishness. Part of it is that I think the attack animation lacks the appropriate weight: the blade swing is languid and the slash effect doesn't linger long enough, giving you the impression that the attack is over despite there being a dozen or so frames left to it. Watching your character stand in place while you jam on the dodge button doesn't feel good, even if it might make sense balance-wise to force the player to commit to their attack. I never got used to how rigid combat felt either, as even on my replay run I found myself getting caught by enemy attacks I was instinctively trying to dodge out of. Fight by fight, my enjoyment for Eldest Souls was continuously stretched thin, its restrictiveness revealing that even classic-vania fans have their limits.

Of course, another reason your character feels like an octogenarian fresh out of the hospital is because bosses are spry and quick. The first two bosses of the game are a fair and measured challenge, but after that the gloves come off and you get the real Eldest Souls experience: area of effect spam. The battlefield will light up in a tapestry colors as you blow through your stamina trying to get away, all while the boss primes their next attack (or two) before the first is gone from the battlefield. The worst offenders of this are Eos, Warden, Hyem, and the DLC bosses—which is almost half of the entire boss roster. When Eldest Souls is at its best it'll feel like a proper duel with an extra degree of danger (like with Azikel and the final boss) but for the rest of the fights you'll feel like you're trying to dodge strobe lights at a rave—except instead of taking ecstasy you've been gobbling downers. 

To offset the enormous advantage the bosses get, Eldest Souls hands you three distinct skill trees that can be leveled up after each of your victories. Throw in boss souls that can be used to modify your existing abilities, and there's a shocking amount of choice here: you can basically play through the game six different times before having to resort to a similar build. Unfortunately, since progressing your skills is gated by boss victories, you'll have to churn through the first couple fights before your build comes into its own—and by that point you're halfway through the journey. The first four bosses have to be fought in roughly the same order too (with #3 and #4 able to be swapped), further hammering in the early-game sameyness. And while NG+ lets your carry over your unique build, it ratches up the difficulty to such an absurd degree that you may as well start practicing no-hit runs after you beat it.

Beyond the boss fights, there's not much else propping up the world of Eldest Souls. The environmental art is excellent and the sound design captures your attention a shocking number of times, but all else falls by the wayside. The music is okay, enemy design is fairly cartoony, animations are barely adequate, and the story is so astonishingly paper-thin that none of it is worth reading. The lore references kings and characters you'll never meet and that never matter, pulling your attention away from the ostensibly rad, mad gods that plague the land. NPCs are one-note cryptic weirdos copied over from Dark Souls, bosses have zero dialogue, and you never really get a feel for what this kingdom was like as a whole—other than the fact that they were a monarchy that owned slaves, which doesn't really encourage you to save this wretched world.

Lastly, kudos to the developer for offering three DLC boss fights for free, but the player should beware: these are some super-charged challenges. These three nightmares flood the arena with hazards and damage at an alarming rate, easily trapping you in a death combo if you run out of stamina for dashing. Ironically I found the last boss to be the most "fair" as he had a distinct mechanic you had to play around, while the second boss (spider lady) was a serious roadblock for me. Between the slow webbing, the poison, random fountain prompts, and her absurdly-fast movements (seriously, what's with that spin attack?!), the battle encapsulated everything that drove me up a wall about Eldest Souls. These fights are a cool set of bosses on paper, but a frustrating damage-roulette in practice.

Eldest Souls certainly has its meritorious moments, but for me there's like half a dozen other top-down games that get their combat right that I can't help but chide this one when it flounders. There are other criticisms I could lob at the game that I've heard from other players—can't dash through enemies, easy to get stuck in a corner, high boss HP pool—but I feel that they're negligible compared to the lack of dodge canceling. I appreciate the developer adding in a (bafflingly) robust skill tree for such a small game, but that alone can't save it; Eldest Souls is a swing and a—wait ten frames—miss.

Kirby Mass Attack - Thoughts

It's rare for me to feel repulsed by a game. I think as long as I pick up a title willingly, I can usually find something about it that I enjoy—even if it's something as simple as the game's concept. Case in point: a sidescroller Pikmin-like with touch controls? Sure, sign me up! I had a lot of fun with games like Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword and both DS Zelda outings, so it seemed probable that I would enjoy Kirby: Mass Attack. Plus the fan reception towards the game was generally warm (some calling it a forgotten masterpiece) and HAL had yet to steer me wrong...

... until about an hour in, where I realized I was descending into a terrible pit or poor design choices. Kirby: Mass Attack has two only gears: boring and frustrating, leaving the game an unsalvageable mess. It is, as sad as it is to say, one of my least favorite games I've ever had the displeasure of completing.

I understand full-well how audacious the previous sentence sounds. I've played a lot of junk in my day, with only a fraction of it being stuff I've reviewed for this website. But what places Mass Attack near the top of the steaming heap is that I found nearly none of the game fun to play. It suffers from two equally damning, deadly problems: bad controls and bad stage design. I cannot understate what an awfully noxious concoction this produces; it would be one thing if the game wasn't pleasant to play, another if the stages dampened your fun, but both together renders Mass Attack a mood-cratering chore.

The first point—the controls—seem solid on first blush. You can tap the screen to make Kirby walk, double tap to make him run, and a quick scratch will fling him at your enemies. All of this works like you think it should, but the more Kirbys you add to the equation, the messier the game becomes. The pink puffballs tend to spread out rather than bunch up, and since the camera needs to keep all ten in frame if possible, you don't have a lot of screen real estate to work with. Worse yet is neither does the gang of Kirbys: prompting them to move produces definitive "winners" and "laggers", with some Kirbys reaching your stylus first and others taking a second or two to catch up. Therefore the camera doesn't have much room to look ahead at what you could possibly be running headfirst into, and if there's one Kirby missing it won't even move until he's reunited with the rest of the pack.

Plus there's a nastier consequence to holding your stylus down to usher the Kirbys along—Kirbys that reach your stylus will be sucked into a Canvas Curse-esque blob that can be ferried to wherever you draw. The problem with this is that it absolutely kills the game's momentum, as the Canvas Curse blob is not only slow but worse at wrangling the camera than your screen taps are. Most of the time you will activate this effect without wanting to use it, giving the game a very stuttery ebb and flow as you tap away to dispel the blob, and then hold on the right side of the scren to keep the train moving. So whenever you're not having a tug-of-war with the camera, you'll be watching the Kirbys at the caboose struggling (and failing) to make a jump to keep up, while those at the head attach themselves to your stylus like a newborn desperate to suckle. Though annoying only a couple hours in, you better brace yourself, because this vexing struggle is going to go on for at least ten.

Kirby games are usually not lengthy affairs. Most of the titles can be wrapped up in under three hours, with only the bigger, more prestige titles reaching the (still comfortable) seven hour mark. Mass Attack is about 1.5 hours of content spread into a vacant 12 hour container, thanks to its laborious and glacial level design. Stages in this game just do not know when the hell to end, stretching on for over fifteen minutes at a time—and that's if you don't have to replay the stage! So much of this game is designed to slow you down: mid-stage cutscenes, painfully long autoscrollers, durable minibosses, stretches of flat land, and endless patience-testing mechanics like darkness, sandstorms, rolling logs, simon says switches, block destroying, block pushing—it never ends! Hell, once you have all ten Kirbys out on the field, consuming more fruit will pause the game momentarily to add to your worthless score, which also unnecessarily interrupts your run command. Mass Attack willingly sabotages itself, resulting in the stupidest thing possible: death by innumerable speedbumps.

God help you should you aim to 100% the game, because you will receive no mercy from the designers. Completionist goals are split into three categories: grabbing all the medals on a stage, beating a level without a single death, and completing hidden bonus objectives. On my run I only had the stomach to attempt the first category, and even that was a pain in the ass to complete. Mass Attack commits the cardinal sin of storing its medals down exclusively branching paths, forcing you to replay a level to grab them all. It's not one or two stages either: 1-1, 1-9, 2-1, 2-2, 2-4, 3-5, 3-8, 3-10, 4-1, 4-2, 4-4, 4-6, & 4-11 all require multiple visits. And this isn't even counting all the stages in which you only have one chance to grab a quickly appearing medal, or if you miss one by accident, or if you just take the wrong goddamn door!

The content within the levels themselves range from dull to decent, although you're likely to notice a weird trend: Mass Attack is at its best when you're not playing, well, Mass Attack. The first four levels of World 3, 6-2's tank stage, and the surprisingly robust minigames you unlock are the closest I've had to "fun" in the game, with the key feature linking them being they have nothing to do with the 10 Kirby touch screen gimmick (I think 3-11 is probably the best regular level, but even then its leaning tower gimmick could easily be used in another one of the puffball's platformer outings). Meanwhile the game's more traditional stages were constantly hair-pulling: 1-5 has you walking around 90% of the time, 1-8 is rotten with time-wasters, 2-5's miniboss is a joyless slog, 3-7's valves take twice as long as they should to rotate, and 4-10's ship ride is like 5 whole minutes of mindless flicking. The worst offense of all is found at the end of 4-11: after a gruelingly long stage you're offered an invulnerability power-up that's often used to get medals in impossible-to-reach places. But if you take the power-up and run through the last leg of the stage, you'll destroy a key you need to unlock a chest that contains the last medal you're hunting for. I've never seen a Nintendo game bait you with a power-up that will then lock you out of getting a collectible. It's just rude and spiteful; one more blemish to add onto this ugly, bloated wretch of a game.

In a vain attempt to pity you, Mass Attack includes mid-level warps that can take you straight to the goal, provided you've completed the stage before. But these are often placed in the most puzzling areas. Ideally you'd use them if you missed an early medal but didn't want to replay the entire stage, but I often found the warps were placed before you could even grab the first medal. That, and the most easily missed medals (those you have only one chance to get) often show up at the end of a stage, rendering the warps useless. I suppose you could use them if you needed to restock your Kirbys, but you'll rarely be finishing a stage with any Kirbys missing, as even a full wipe will bring you back to your initial Kirby count. It's a complete design oversight—look at the mid-level warp in 3-1/3-2/3-3/3-4 and tell me this game is well designed with a straight face.

Even Mass Attack's aesthetics underwhelmed by the end of my journey. Occasionally the backgrounds can look pretty nice (like at the start of Worlds 3 and 4), but the game is far from the looker that Super Star Ultra and Squeak Squad are. Levels are fairly barren by design since all 10 Kirbys need space to stick together, and I was never really impressed or tickled by the enemy design. Likewise, the soundtrack underperforms for a Kirby title; sure the first stage is mildly catchy and jaunty, but the rest of the OST is filled with depressingly lackluster tracks that initially sound good but don't really go anywhere interesting—they're all bark and no bite. The best thing I can say about Sakai's compositions is that they're wonderfully varied and not starved for quantity, but they lack the texture and splendor of Ishikawa's pieces. Just compare a boss track from this game to the common one in Return to Dreamland; ignoring the difference in soundfonts, Dreamland's is much more compelling—and it's not even my favorite boss track from the game!

Returning to what I claimed at the top of my review—that Mass Attack is one of my least favorite games I've ever finished—I think what really cements this opinion for me is a simple truth: you barely even play Mass Attack. There are plenty of notoriously worse games that are deserving of far harsher criticism, but almost every one I can think of has at least some element of play to it. There are buttons to press, mechanics to learn, and strategies to devise on your terrible journey that can lead to some form of mastery (unless it's full-motion garbage like Plumbers Don't Wear Ties). Mass Attack requires only lazy inputs from the player, where your mind wanders with your stylus in one hand and your chin atop your palm in the other. Even other games with low gameplay input like Vampire Survivors and Dragon Quest  have at least some modicum of interesting minute-to-minute decisions you have to make, which can impact your survival in the long term. In Mass Attack, the most interesting problem you face is what angle to throw your Kirbys at—and it's really only one enemy (the cactus fellow) that takes advantage of this.

It summons an interesting dichotomy: I recently went trophy-hunting in Ketsui and you know what? That's an amazing video game. In a few seconds you'll be mowing down enemies, optimizing score, and needing to balance the route in your head with the bullets on the field. It's admittedly unfair to compare a Kirby offshoot to one of the best shoot-em-ups ever made, but the point I'm trying to make is that Ketsui is an input extreme, giving you full control at all times with interesting decisions to be made nearly every second. Going to Mass Attack soon afterwards felt like hitting the other end of the spectrum, where all you do is hold your stylus on the right side of the screen... and slowly watch Kirbys clonk an enemy to death. There's very little risk management, even fewer heart-pounding scenarios, and no pathing quandaries that need solving. Every other Kirby game at least gives you some substance you can sink your teeth into and play riskily if you so choose. Mass Attack consists of only 10% of that excitement at best—the other 90% is the most boring, repetitive game on Earth. Why else do you think almost nobody speedruns it?

I have no sympathy for Kirby Mass Attack; it's a tedious, dull, asinine game. What I think I struggle with the most when looking back on it is trying to understand why some fans love it so. I get being drawn in by the concept—I was too. I understand having a soft spot for it because you may have played it in your childhood. But calling it underrated? Phenomenal? The best game in the franchise? It's a circle I can't square, outrageous doublespeak I'm too shrewd to accept. I get that tastes are subjective and all that, but a masterpiece? This game? No.

You'd have to lobotomize me before I touch it again.

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Images obtained from:  ign.com, blogger.com, ebay.com, amazon.com

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice - Thoughts

[contains minor spoilers—no case specifics, just general themes]

Something is rotten in the ancient state of Khurai'in—and if that statement doesn't spark an interest you, then Spirit of Justice likely won't either. The sixth mainline title in the Ace Attorney series sees a radical shift in setting, dropping Phoenix Wright & co. into a fanatical nation on the cusp of a revolution. It's a bold change to make, but arguably a necessary one, as the class and caste of old was growing stale. Note that this doesn't radicalize the structure of Ace Attorney in any way—everything you know and love is still here—but it brings to the table more unpredictability and intrigue, two key components to any good mystery story. I don't think Spirit of Justice gets to lay claim to being the best in the series, but it does its best to compete with the better titles, and in some ways, even transcends them.

Dual Destinies—the previous entry—tried to shake up the formula with the threat of corruption undergirding the judicial process, but it was a laughable dilemma that bore no weight on the story. Spirit of Justice counters this feeble punch with a hard right hook called the DC Act: a Khurainese law that ensures defense lawyers receive the same punishment as their clients should they fail. From the moment the game starts it keeps the pressure high for Phoenix Wright, who has to put his literal neck on the line to defend the innocent bystanders caught up in vile machinations greater than them. At times it can feel a little ridiculous how stacked the odds are (especially in the last case, where the governing body itself seeks your demise), but the stakes help to propel the story forward, frequently reminding you that the nation of Khurai'in is irredeemably broken.

Along with the vibrant new setting, Spirit of Justice also introduces the player to Insights: half-minute recollections (ie videos) of a victim's last moments, peppered with stray details from their five senses. It works similar to Athena's Mood Matrix in the previous game, where you're looking for a contradiction between the prosecution's argument and how the magical retelling unfolds. For a fictitious example, if the suspect is presumed to be a man, then spotting the word "perfume" in the victim's Insight could be the saving grace your case desperately needs. Although Insights were not used often, I found them to be an excellent addition that both enhanced and evolved the player's understanding of a case; they're perhaps the best mechanic the Ace Attorney series has ever produced (sorry jury system, but Insights allow for some clever twists!)

Speaking of twists, Spirit of Justice comes packing a decent number of them, even if (as is typical with the series) you may have to suspend your logic for a second. Nearly every case has a one or two twists that will be hard to see coming, with the third and fifth in particular having some especially brilliant, memorable, and dark outcomes. Sadly, the fifth case spins its wheels for a bit too long after its greatest rug pull, as its remaining mysteries make little sense or outright fail to convince the player ("that" character's reveal is one of the most nonsensical things I've seen in a series known for its serendipitous buffoonery). Thankfully, nothing here dips as low as the Phantom arc in Dual Destinies; from start to finish, I was constantly wondering, hypothesizing, and awaiting the many mysteries Spirit of Justice laid out for me.

And of course, no Ace Attorney game would be complete without a gaggle of curious characters and quirky music to accompany them. While the witness lineup doesn't quite hit the highs of the original trilogy, there are a decent number of memorable faces like Rayfa, Datz, Uendo, Soren, and my man Dhurke (arguably the best character in the whole game). Sahdmadhi as a prosecutor is... alright overal: he fulfills the "insufferable heel" trope pretty well without ever feeling cartoonishly evil or petty. I think his biggest problem is that he takes a backseat during his own character arc, allowing a larger character looming over him to take his stead (but hey, it fits in a way). The music is a bit less catchy this time around and more surprisingly moody, albeit still equal parts fantastic; the cream of the crop being the cross examination theme for being simultaneously unsettling and sinister.

Sadly, as with all the non-Shu Takumi titles, Spirit of Justice doesn't know how to handle its characters in a meaningful way. Trucy gets an emotional moment in the second case and then is promptly forgotten about for the rest of the game, the third case features some vile betrayals that no one shows any kind of guilt over, and Apollo gets yet another "never mentioned before but it's super important" backstory. But the worst for me was Maya: ignoring the fact that she's still a 17-year-old mentally with all the same old animations, she does very little in the main game besides being relegated to a damsel in distress. It's only in the DLC case that she gets to shine as an assistant once again, and even there her colorful commentary isn't nearly as bright as it once was. After being gone for so long, Maya's presence here is frankly a disgrace.

Likewise, I think the way Spirit of Justice ties up its tyrannical government plotline is deeply unfulfilling. The tumult of revolution can be felt in the background early on, but the game never takes it seriously as a potential outcome, treating it as beholden to—rather than in charge of—Khurai'in's destiny. Instead, it's our heroic cast of foreigners and their elaborate deductions that carve a path towards tyranny's end, with the final "aha!" being so farfetched that it could only work on a die-hard constitutionalist. For a narrative that was surprisingly grim and tragic up to this point, Spirit of Justice handles regime change with unwarranted, blinding optimism.

Now obviously I'm viewing this 2016 game through a more cynical 2025 lens (gee, it's that easy to topple an authoritarian government built on brainless zeal, huh?) but it's hard to restrain myself when Capcom deliberately chose this bold of a setting. And look—I get that this is the series where multiple villains have confessed to their crime when cornered with facts and logic; expecting a Pentiment-style portrayal of the common man's plight was never going to happen. But I refuse to believe Spirit of Justice couldn't have resolved its central conflict in a more thematically cohesive and valiant manner—I mean come on, Dhurke and Datz are right there! They could have done something more meaningful!

For fans of Ace Attorney, Spirit of Justice won't be a revolution; it plays its story straight and safely, doing little with most of its characters and even less with the established cast. But for someone looking for some lengthy cases with plenty of evidence to pore over, Spirit of Justice is a wedding-size buffet of intrigue, surprises, and subterfuge. The game takes over 50 hours to finish (DLC included) and is bound to stump you at least a handful of times, which I greatly appreciated after the relaxed ride of Dual Destinies. Even though I hope for the eventual Ace Attorney 7 to shake-up to the now-stable formula, Spirit of Justice has proven that for however long Capcom wants to crank out games of this quality, I will continue playing with glee, gripes notwithstanding.

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Images obtained from: Ace-Attorney.com

Witcheye - Thoughts

When Peter Malamud Smith sat down to make Witcheye, a lone question must've plagued his mind: if Treasure made one more game for the Sega Genesis, what would it look like? I'm honestly surprised that more developers haven't asked themselves this question (where are all the fan-made successors to Alien Soldier, Dynamite Headdy, and Gunstar Heroes anyway?) Perhaps it's a tall order given Treasure's inimitable brand, since—despite producing almost exclusively sidescrollers—they rarely made the same thing twice. All of their games are filled to the brim with personality, passion, and an untouchable eccentricity, so following in their footsteps is no small feat. Yet even with that knowledge, Smith barreled ahead, creating one of the coolest (only?) bite-sized bounce-a-thons I've ever played.

The first thing you'll notice about Witcheye is that it's bursting with tremendous creativity. Smith's artstyle effortlessly pops, every screenshot a warm-colored painting even if the palette consists mostly of deep blues and cloudy grays. Backgrounds are exquisite, intermingling seamlessly with the foreground tiles while remaining clearly differentiated, ensuring you're never confused where you can and can't go. The soundtrack is frenetic and surprisingly varied, pushing you onward with the help of a sonorous, upbeat bass that you can't help but nod your head to. I think no matter your opinion on the game overall, it's impossible to deny that Smith is extraordinarily talented.

Deeper still Witcheye's creativity runs, like the roots of a mighty oak. Taking cues from both Treasure and classic Rare, every level is crafted around a distinct theme or gimmick, unafraid of introducing a unique enemy you'll never see again. Likewise, there's a smorgasbord of minibosses that range from nifty to tricky on the first go-around, but let you blow through them when properly trained. In fact, one of the coolest things about Witcheye is its brisk pace, with each level taking roughly thirty seconds to complete—though expect to spend several minutes when looking for the game's deviously hidden collectibles. There aren't any auto-scrolling stages, backtracking mazes, or patience-testing boss battles either (maybe sans the Colossus); Witcheye keeps you on a constant treadmill moving forwards, its eye fixed firmly on its next delightful surprise.

But what impressed me the most about Witcheye is that goes above and beyond for its NG+ difficulty. While it's worth buying the game for a single playthrough, the post-game's "hard mode" is where the gameplay really starts to shine, as it looks at every stage and manually tweaks them in just the right way. Don't expect the typical attack reduction or damage inflation; every enemy comes at you with a new trick up their sleeve, varying from a slight spring in their step to an evil new projectile to catch you off-guard. Likewise the stages themselves are occasionally altered, changing where certain collectibles are or tossing a new hazard your way (like the never-ending lightning storm of 4-7—lovely mechanic!) Witcheye's guiding hand may start in a gentle, grandmotherly manner—but play long enough and a werewolf's gnarled paw take shape, its endgame talons more than capable of ripping you to pieces.

(Plus, if you still yearn for more of a beating, you can try your hand at the boss rushes or NG++ 1-hit-kill mode!)

I think the only thing about the game that fits the "love it or hate it" bill is its curious controls. Screenshots may suggest Witcheye is a platformer, but it honestly has more in common with pinball than Mario. You play as a whirling eye set to bounce around the stage like a perpetually ricocheting billiard ball, able to change direction with a flick of the left stick and hover in place with a tap of the A button. Though simple, most of your struggles will come from accidentally veering in the wrong direction, as there's no indicator for where you're going or what direction your stick is pointing in. This leads to a lot of situations where you intend to move orthogonally but are instead sent at a slight angle, prompting more skewed course corrections and inevitably spiralling into a bunch of unintended damage.

Though unfortunate, mistakes will gradually diminish over time as you adapt to the controls. There is a noticeable chasm between how you play as an greenhorn vs a seasoned eye-bouncer, with 1-tile wide gaps transforming from your worst enemy to a shrug-inducing speedbump. You'll come to embrace unintended tilts like an awkward in-law, capable of pulling a friendly U-turn out of the worst trajectories. I mean, if someone can get used to the brain-wrinkling control scheme of Alien Soldier, then Witcheye will be child's play in comparison. Even when the game's latter stages start to turn up the heat, Witcheye stays light and breezy thanks to its snappy size—any death you suffer is a thirty second setback at worst.

Witcheye may lack the replayable depth of a Treasure title, but it's a worthy student of the Genesis gems in just about every other way. It's well-paced, punchy, relentlessly pretty, and frequently brilliant, displaying a ton of variety for such a relatively simple game. And that's to say nothing of its superb level design, measured difficulty curve, and host of challenging extra modes for the hardcore. For the astonishingly low price it's set at (it goes for $2 on sale!), Witcheye is an essential purchase that devotes every second of its playtime to pure, unfettered fun.

(... although the cutscenes do tend to linger for a little too long)

Red Ronin - Thoughts

It takes a lot of guts to look at sliding block puzzles and think, "You know, if only there was a way to fit some Hotline Miami in here!" Despite reeking of a drunken 2AM epiphany, Red Ronin seeks to do exactly that, marrying ponderous ice physics with violent, frenetic action. And while this blood-soaked Sokoban appears to be a smash hit in its first chapter, Red Ronin's ugly bits will eventually unfurl as its concepts vie for attention. The puzzle side of the game will argue for more complex and methodical setups, while the violence demands more reflex-based traps and harder boss fights. Red Ronin likes to believe these two concepts can work out their differences, but their incessant tug-of-war-ing will come at the cost of the player's patience—and sanity.

At the very least, Red Ronin shows that its premise has legs. Enemies are restricted to moving a square at a time but the protagonist can zoom across the arena until she collides with an obstacle, slicing up any opponents in her path. While you'll feel like a murderous bolt of lightning in the first chapter, each subsequent chapter introduces its own unique speed bump: patrolling bots that kill upon contact, enemies with 2 hp, lasers that sweep across the arena, and plenty more. As mechanics are added the odds will be increasingly stacked against you, forcing you to lean heavily on the game's two collectible resources: time-stop and mid-direction change.

These abilities are integral to Red Ronin as a puzzle game, as a good chunk of the challenge comes from where and when you'll use them. At first these power-ups seem like a cool way to allow for some player expression in battle, letting you take shortcuts to the end of a fight with smart ability use. That, and any leftover power-ups can be taken into the next battle, which can give you a leg up on a tricky opening. But as the game goes on your freedom to use these power-ups diminishes, until you're forcibly chaining them together in a conga line atop a tight rope. The game is absolutely better with the power-ups than without them, but the level of restriction Red Ronin prefers is that of a straight-jacket, offering little room for personal flair, style, or even mistakes. Puzzles often have one solution, and dallying outside that golden zone will undoubtedly result in a swift and decisive death.

Despite the game's numerous issues (which I'll get to shortly), what miffed me most of all was the lack of a rewind function. A good portion of the game's eccentricities may boil down to personal preference, but how do you miss adding a way to undo actions in your turn-based puzzle game? This is an issue that only gets exasperated as the game gets harder, seeing as deaths send you back to the start of a battle, instantly undoing an upwards of twenty or thirty inputs. And since there's little flexibility in how you move through a level, you'll often be memorizing the exact inputs required to get you to the spot you previously died at—and then you better pray you can figure it out from there. Stage inputs will be burned into your retinas as you run through the first half over and over and over again, with small mistakes weeding their way into your actions due to sheer fatigue. The lack of a rewind function may start as an understandable omission, but it won't take long before you'll see it for what it truly is: inexcusable.

While no rewind is a slow-killing poison for Red Ronin, a more immediate and pressing problem the game has is that it isn't strictly turn-based. Laser traps and bosses break out of this constraint, operating independently of your turns and actions. This means that as you're sitting there trying to work out your next best move, a boss can put you in his crosshairs and blast you all the way back to the start of the fight. However this rule-breaking is also strangely infrequent (barring Stage 6), meaning you never really get to train the reactions required to play Red Ronin like a coked-up samurai. It's an uncomfortable pivot; for 90% of the game you'll be allowed to play as slow and methodically as you want, but the last 10% thrusts you into a Guitar Hero duel, where missing a single note incurs a reset. Naturally, it's here where you'll rack up most of your deaths, as you'll be backed into dead ends constantly via bad judgment, sloppy execution, or (most likely) a sad combination of the two. For the slower players out there, the bosses are likely where Red Ronin shall bury them.

Strangely, however, reactive players don't get a much better treatment since the game lacks (noticeable) input buffering. Hitting a direction mid-slide doesn't queue that movement up when the slide ends, which makes the protagonist feel sluggish and unresponsive, as if she's taking a leisurely breath between actions. This can lead to a lot of stupid deaths where you're thoughtlessly inputting a correct sequence of actions (up-left-up-right-down) but if you don't wait for each animation to finish an input gets dropped somewhere (up-left-right-DEAD). Worse yet is that activating your abilities can freeze the real-time bosses but only when they're between their actions, meaning occasionally you'll miss your window to pause the boss fight due to a lingering animation. And then the boss will throw bombs at your feet, then the game will pause (but not the bomb timer), then you'll be frantically trying to unpause the game, and then finally blow up mid-slide to safety.

Even if the issues I mentioned so far weren't present, I still wouldn't call Red Ronin perfect. Not only are its puzzles too exacting for a game trying to be stylish and smooth, but critical information is easily muddled by the amount of enemies on screen. Foes lack a visual "danger zone" that lets you see their striking range, hiding the fact that they both move and attack adjacent squares. Although you'll learn this lesson very early on (the hard way), I think it would still be helpful to see their striking range with the press of a button. As more enemies are added into the fray it can be hard to parse which of them will move in what direction too—like, if there was an enemy to your bottom left and one to your bottom right, figuring out which of the two will move into the bottom middle spot first could be integral to your survival. This only gets worse as big guys and far-reaching foes are thrown into the mix, muddying things until there's not much else you can do besides blindly search for the correct path. Ultimately, as fights grow more chaotic and frustrating, you'll come to rely on trial and error to find the way out, which isn't nearly as satisfying as outsmarting your opponents.

Lastly—and I'm hesitant to even mention this—but the story is surprisingly not good. A "cyberpunk revenge story" doesn't need much besides a good aesthetic and cool tunes to listen to, but I was surprised by just how unfulfilling Red Ronin felt. Its main character is a selfish, thoughtless, bitter human being, bosses are weirdly flippant when staring down their would-be murderer, and any pathos the game shows in its dossiers is gone as soon as characters open their mouths. On top of this, the game opens with a cliche, in media res hook of falling off a building—and that scene is nowhere in the game! The whole thing ends on a cliffhanger! For most other video games I usually handwave away the story when it's not that strong, but here I was left flabbergasted by just how hard Red Ronin missed the mark. And it was such an easy mark to hit too!

I don't regret playing Red Ronin but I can't help but feel overwhelmed by its disappointments. I think part of it is that I find the concept really fascinating; most of the time action games get infused with puzzle elements, and not often the reverse. Throw in the fact that Sokoban puzzle games are a dime a dozen, and Red Ronin manages to shine all the brighter: it's nakedly violent, constantly creative (new mechanics every level!), and isn't afraid to give the ol' noggin a workout. But its strengths are diminished by too many asterisks, its two-faced nature splitting the experience in half instead of coming together. If you decide to try it, enjoy the first level—because it's all downhill from there.