Recent reviews by avie!!

this isnt meant to be clown react bait but i sure feel like im going to get a bunch for saying all this.

put simply, this is extremely not my thing, frankly. i only liked 8 out of the 50 games because the vast majority of them to me felt either too obtuse, too difficult, or just straight werent fun or engaging to play. if youre someone like me who doesnt exactly have the highest of attention spans for games especially when it comes to 8 bit retro games you're likely going to bounce just as hard as i have off this.

the description says "we carefully chose what elements to modernize" but frankly i don't think they tried hard enough, the vast majority of these just feel like good ideas for games that are not fleshed out past the initial concept and were needlessly shoved into the limitation of "fake nes game" which ends up making them play like sh*t half the time because two buttons is nowhere near enough for what they're trying to do. if it werent so tied up in trying to be nes adjacent then this would probably be an enjoyable exploration of weird ideas for games.

nowt wrong with the presentation though. that bit is pretty firmly knocked out the park.

even outside of the brick wall of clunk you have to scale after playing kiwami 2 this game is just full of bafflingly awful design decisions and a really resoundingly meh storyline that forgets major plot beats or stops bothering to care about them when theyre no longer convenient. a gigantic amount of the important plot information is divulged during a sequence that takes about 20 minutes to go through where youre sat down on a sofa talking with the minister of defense in the diet building and nothing else happens. it is so so hard to care about any of the characters in this one either. just a complete and total misfire in general imo.

Hands down one of the best sudoku games you can buy on Steam to this day, purely for its excellent controller support and wealth of puzzles available. No other game on here matches up to this because of that.

bonus note: after playing through the game, you wanna go grab the farcette mod and go through it again. especially if you were in on this for the memes of it being a third animation magic zelda cdi game.

does Arzette accomplish everything it sets out to achieve? no, not really.
does it make a bloody good effort regardless of that? is it still charming, sincere, and cute? absolutely.

I could list of a bunch of picks i have with the game but frankly for the money and for the short enjoyable romp that it is, i wont. even with the small hiccups i had with figuring out where i had to go, i ultimately have to conclude that i had just a lovely time playing it. really interested to see where the devs will be taking this series going forward from here. can only get bigger and better, i have to imagine.

the difficulty is honestly pretty high rn even on the easy mode but its a solid enough little game if you like suika adj stuff and/or cute animal boys and/or big pernices. worth grabbing if it's all three.

important pre review side note: advertised as "multiplayer co-op" but this game has a singleplayer mode, and is entirely what this review is based off. tl;dr - it's good!!

what is flock? flock is...a big warm comfy bed, with fluffy pillows, and a weighted blanket, all cozy on a cold winters night. flock is a world to flop into when nothing else feels right. flock is a game where you drift around a beautiful and serene world and giggle at all the funny little creatures floating about making various chirruping noises.

it may not hold my attention for long every play session. but thats okay. just an hour of flock a day, and i feel at peace with everything. i love this game so f*cking much thank you for blessing us with such wonderful delightful experiences hollow ponds and richard hogg. yall are two of my favourite indie devs ever, and this is by far your best work yet. also bonus shoutout to dan pugsley and eli rainsberry for the amazing sound design and soundtrack for this game, both of which are phenomenal!!

this year has been great for indie games but the comedy focused side was desperately lacking. thank goodness thank goodness youre here is here.

and dont fret, there's a subtitle option for people who dont speak like they do oop north. though; the whole subtitling situation in the game is very clumsy and poorly timed even on the english options currently. hopefully theyll patch that soon. also, ive heard the translation situation isn't great either; visual gags arent translated or anything, its just subtitles (and frankly given this games writing style and references, i have to genuinely wonder how one even begins to localize this game at all...) but apart from that, its great fun and absolutely worth picking up.

listen man what two consenting adults do in their own time is not something i'm gonna judge upon,

jokes aside its giving some proper conflicting feelings regarding the intentional lack of choice of actions and being made to watch someone who has already well and truly made up his mind with no real ability to help suggest better options so yeah writing wise its there. its an interesting one, giving you little snippets of information that build up to a bigger picture, but leaving just enough details out to keep you wondering about why things ended up the way they did. i feel sorry for the guy, honestly. short n sweet, the price matches that value. the title and promo is baity as all get out but when youre a lil indie studio producing cool weird sh*t you kinda gotta do what you can. do check out other strange scaffold stuff, cos they're doing some hella interesting work.

though do note gameplay wise youre gonna be clicking a lot with that broken up by moving around the place and then clicking more, p much, so just be aware that whilst the title is haha funny it is entirely a story centered experience with minimal gameplay. if that doesnt bother you then by all means hop in. theres no autoclicker detection or anything like that if you prefer to take that route but do keep in mind dialogue will be interrupted upon reaching certain numbers, so dont set it too fast if you use it.

also frankly if you think this is unsettling, disturbing or weird you need to get out more and explore kinks instead of being a scared vanilla b*tch (/hj)

the controls are janky and awkward, the background is unusually low detail despite everything else, the UI iconography is impossibly vague despite the devs wishing for it to be a "language free game anyone can understand", a huge amount of the tools are locked out and have to be paid for with ingame money earned from making the gems and theres not much else to be doing other than making the gems and naming them once youre done

...yet, despite all of those complaints, i can't deny it's not a very pleasant and compelling game. it's very satisfying to finally figure out the right way to do certain cuts and see your rank and skill in making the gems rise over time. getting my first SS rank was extremely gratifying, and its nothing more than a vague statistic attached to your finished piece. definitely not going to be for everyone with how samey it is and both literally and metaphorically grindy it is, but hey, that's how it goes some times. the devs are also clearly taking on feedback and putting out patches to make it even better, so its all smiles over here from me!

As a longtime fan of Hexcells I really wanted to like this but far too many puzzles don't give you nearly enough information to go off to the point that it actively feels like guessing. Some of the common logic paths it uses aren't consistent and also don't really make that much sense to begin with either. I honestly can't recommend bothering with this over the trio of Hexcells games or similar games like Tametsi, Polimines or Patterna.