Bobo Robot (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

Another Sokpop game! This one is a tiny Metroidvania where you’re a robot and you have to, well, explore and collect nuts and bolts and fly a little spaceship. Upgrades include a body (you start as just a head!), a gun, the ability to go in water, and so on. It’s all quite cute and has frogs in it. It’s got chunky graphics which remind me a bit of Atari 2600 games aside from a few bits where they have …

Fishy 3D (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

I bought a bundle of cute looking games on Steam from a group called Sokpop. They seem to have hundreds on there, but the “Chill Adventure” bundle looked right up my street. Turns out it was. It’s here if you want it too. After a brief go of some of them, once my daughter graciously allowed me to have my Steam Deck back once she’d played them, I settled on Fishy 3D. You’re a fish who has to grow bigger, …

SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech (Switch): COMPLETED!

As a fan of the SteamWorld games, I’ve no idea why it took me more than three years to get round to buying this, let alone actually playing it. Maybe because it’s an RPG I though I’d need a run up? Anyway, here we are, late to the party. My first impression was “Oh no, what have I bought”. You see, I knew SteamWorld Quest was an RPG but I didn’t know it was a card-based RPG. And I don’t …

Before I Forget (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

Before I Forget is a narrative discovery game about a scientist who is dealing with the onset of Alzheimer’s. You play as her, in her house, as she gets confused, forgets events, and tries to put together fractured memories of her past, her job and her husband. You can probably guess from the premise that it’s not all happy and light, so it isn’t what I’d describe as “fun”, but does fit into the sort of bracket games like A …

Luck Be A Landlord (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

You know what the perfect game for a super-powered handheld console that costs £350 and I had to wait for months for is? A free fruit machine game, obviously. I’d played and completed Luck Be A Landlord a while back on the Mac, but I never really stopped playing it. There are later modes with harder goals that unlock and it’s just a fun thing to play for five minutes every so often. And by five minutes I mean an …

A Castle Full of Cats (Switch): COMPLETED!

A while back I played A Building Full of Cats, to which this is a follow-up. For the most part, it’s more of the same – find hidden cats in a number of cluttered rooms – only here there’s some curse or something which means that the cats are often bat-cats, mummy-cats, vampire-cats, skeleton-cats, or Cthulu-cats. There’s also a plot, items besides cats (like keys) that you need to find to open up other areas, secret rooms, and even a …

We Love Katamari Reroll + Royal Reverie (Switch): COMPLETED!

I’m a bit torn on this game. On the one hand, it’s Katamari so is automatically fantastic and fun and relaxing and nonsensical. But on the other hand, it could have been so much better. A few years ago, the original Katamari Damacy got a Reroll remake on modern consoles, and with it they fixed some of the niggles of the original, like loading times (and mid-level loading), slowdown, and made it all smoother and higher resolution and prettier. Then …

Pikmin 4 (Switch): COMPLETED!

Pikmin is, essentially, Nintendo’s take on the real-time strategy format, only you direct little carrot creatures to fetch and carry and multiply and stuff, rather than build tanks and so on. There are different colours of Pikmin which have different strengths and skills, and there are baddies to fight who all want to eat them. Pikmin 4 doesn’t deviate too much from this, but it is just so much more relaxing than the other games in the series. In the …

Advance Wars 2 Re-Boot Camp (Switch): COMPLETED!

Obviously having completed the first game, I had to set about doing the same for the second. It is, of course, very much more of the same but with some new COs, more involvement of the Black Hole Army right from the start, and a new unit – NeoTanks. Unlike the first game, you don’t play as Orange Star for the majority of the game. You do a few missions as them, then unlock the next area and play as …

Doors: Paradox (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

This game is sort of one of those escape room games. It’s a lot like Rooms, which I played a while back, but each “room” is like a small scene built around a door that you need to get open in order to access the portal behind it. Each one is themed, and features a lot of smaller puzzles leading up to the main one of unlocking the door. There’s the usual things for this sort of game – pattern …

The Revenge of Shinobi (Switch): COMPLETED!

I know this was highly lauded on release, but I’ll be honest – I’ve never been a massive fan of the game. Or the Shinobi/Shadow Dancer series, actually. I don’t hate them or anything, but I certainly wouldn’t hold them up as fantastic examples of the best the 8 and 16 bit consoles had to offer like a lot of people seem to. See also Ninja Gaiden, actually. [Edit: Oh, it seems I like the 3D port of Shinobi III …

Advance Wars 1 Re-Boot Camp (Switch): COMPLETED!

After much publicised delays thanks to An Actual War, Advance Wars 1+2 Re-Boot Camp finally came out. Only it was not long before Tears of the Kingdom so although I got it, Zelda was The Thing as so it was put to one side until that was completed because who can be doing with swapping game cards? Not me. It was with a little trepidation that I went into it. I’d heard horror stories about how terrible the performance of …

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge (PS5): COMPLETED!

A PS5 game? How rare! But yes, this game was on my Switch wishlist for a while waiting for a decent sale, but then it recently appeared on PS++++++ as a free rental so I played it there instead. It felt wrong, somehow, even though it’s on the same TV the Switch version would have been played on. Went through the game with my daughter. I was Mikey, she was Don, and it was great. It’s a proper sequel to …

Kemono Friends Picross (Switch): COMPLETED!

As you might expect, I’m a massive fan of Kemono Friends. Sorry, no, the other thing. Picross. Kemono Friends is something I’d never heard of, but the themed Picross game is by Jupiter who do all the Picross games. so of course I was going to buy it at some point. Apparently, it’s a manga or anime or both, where there’s a zoo but all the animals are anthropomorphic and resemble human girls. Could the premise be any more anime? …