Recent reviews by 82

It's like raiding in Final Fantasy XIV without all the hours of preamble like leveling, gearing, grinding, and all that jazz only to get screamed at by your Free Company leader when you mess up and get the whole party wiped.
Now the only person screaming at you when you wipe is yourself :(

Bnuuy 🐇

I'm doing my part!
EDIT: I WAS doing my part. Sony has decided that I can no longer do my part because I am forced to connect to an account on their service in order to be able to play.
EDIT EDIT: It's been fixed, but once bitten, twice shy. I highly suggest not buying anything ingame because I'm absolutely sure Sony is going to come in again at some point and just ruin everything again. Like, it's Sony; it's an inevitability. Beyond that, it's a great game. When (not if) Sony ♥♥♥♥♥ it up again, I'm not going to bother anymore.
I will not change it to recommended until the 177 countries locked out of playing the game can play once again. Anything less than reversing that is just words on Social Media.
EDIT EDIT EDIT: What did I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ tell you. Sony has added three more countries to the restricted list of locations that cannot play the game, bringing the total to 180, even though they claim that the account linking would no longer be mandatory, implying that they might go through with it after all. WE DIVE TOGETHER OR NOT AT ALL.

I ain't spoiling nuttin'. It's worth going through at least once.

You are a robot tasked with the unsung task of maintaining and repairing a deep space spacecraft, complete with cargo of the highest priority: Humans, frozen in cryo. The ship falls apart around you, and your replicator meant to produce the spare parts to repair it is just as reliable as the other systems you rely on; marching forever towards entropy as everything else does within the universe.
But the ship is not the main focus of this game. Of course it is what you interact with, keeping it running and getting it to your destination (if there ever truly is one) with all of your human cargo alive is your top priority while you carefully manage a few select resources over the course of several cycles. No, the main focus is you, the custodian, a robot that also marches endlessly towards entropy.
If you think your parts or your body are the only things that can break down, think again. You have unfortunately also been given the capability to feel, and to reason, and the terrible results placing both of those in a facsimile of humanity that does not possess the mental fortitude to withstand the constant rigors of its solitary life. Part of the true horror is seeing your custodian as another person, mistaking it for a human character, simply because of how human they act, only for an event to trigger and to find out that one of the options you can select as a response is literally ripping out your eyes, because you didn't need them anyway. As human as your custodian may act, they can suffer far more than one, and the scarce resources indicate that they must.

Endless Dark, at the time of this writing, is in early access, but what's here is very compelling already. There are no jumpscares, there are no enemies to run and hide from. There is you, ten humans in cryo, you, a ship falling apart at the seams, you, the endless abyss surrounding you, and you. Only you. Only you. I highly recommend it.

If you're looking for a point and click adventure with several puzzles to solve and challenges to overcome, with mysteries to unveil and all that,

this is not that game.

There's several minigames, animated beautifully in a fictional world of alligators as you help one specific paranoid alligator named Pat figure out what his family is going to do to him later that evening. You supposedly have a limited time to meet all of his family (Read: Talk to every NPC you see, often several tiems), but even once the ending happens you can start the day over with all of your previous progress, so you can properly see everything you didn't before and retry minigames you might have failed. Given this, it's easy to 100% the game and see everything there is to see. You shouldn't have any problems.

The animations are gorgeous, there's a couple puns that might actually get you (There is an alleyway with a neon girls girls girls sign, and it turns out to be a women's advocacy meeting. Politics aside, it was a hilarious joke.) and you'll probably feel something in your blackened hard heart. Probably. Maybe.
Again, though, don't come in expecting a full on video game. It's definitely more of a walking simulator, but it's a nice one.

It's a cute short game that won't take you any more than five or six hours, but you can certainly beat it sooner than that. You run around a facility, recruiting enough animals to the point that you have a massive conga line that trails behind you. By the end of the game, your party will consist of 90ish-100 animals that trails clear off the screen.
The puzzles aren't that difficult, but there's a couple headscratchers and the imperfect localization doesn't necessarily help (especially when it comes to the dreaded animals that want cooked food. It took me an uncomfortable amount of time to realize that when a recipe called for something to be "baked," you needed to select "Grill" on the cooking menu).
Some of the music tracks can get a little annoying after you've gone through the same couple areas more than a few times, but they're generally inoffensive and you'll be more focused on remembering where to take what animal/item to which animal/obstacle to add the animal to the party/remove the obstacle. There's a lot of running around, and seeing all of your hundred animal friends trail behind you never gets old.

Again, it's short, cute, and it's a nice time. You won't regret checking it out, especially at this price point.

Also, for your sanity, write down every recipe as you come across it. There isn't a written guide and there isn't any forum threads that have done it for you.

Disgusting. This is NOT the way to play Persona 3, Atlus literally took the PSP release, upscaled a few of the backdrops and character portraits with some strange AI that barely knew what it was doing and made it look like it came from a Playstation 1, did absolutely no sound work so everything sounds so noticeably compressed you'd be forgiven for thinking you were playing it on a Nintendo DS, and then topped it off by charging you $20 for it (at the time of this writing).

I waited a bit before I played it. Maybe they'd patch it, or at least bring it to feature parity with Persona 4 Golden and add manual skill inheritance, the plethora of difficulty options (why are compendium prices still tied to your difficulty?), or at the very least add the FMV cutscenes from FES, if only for the male protagonist. They clearly weren't interested in giving us the full experience on the PS2 with FES plus the few improvements that P3P DID give us (Marin Karin should give anyone wartime flashbacks), but what we got wasn't even the bare minimum.

If you want to experience P3P in some manner of remastered, emulate it. There's mods for the PSP game that actually upscales the backdrops properly or outright replaces them, adds in the PS2 models, includes the FMV cutscenes, gives you the PS2 UI or increases the resolution of the P3P one, gives you uncompressed sounds and music, add manual skill inheritance, the whole works. You, a singular person, in the span of an hour, maybe an afternoon if you're technologically challenged, can give yourself a far better P3P experience on PC than Atlus could in thirteen years. Some of these mods exist for the PC version here, but almost all of them are incomplete and most offer no downloads with a promise that "We'll get it out eventually I guess."
Persona 3 FES? Same deal. You might not have the FEMC route, but you can mod in all of the above, along with direct party control, the quick travel feature from Persona 4, balance patch(es), widescreen FMVs and a proper widescreen format, among several other fixes. You no longer have to choose between the gameplay improvements of P3P or FES's presentation. The efforts of fans, working tirelessly with (probably) no expectation of award or pay, already gave you a proper remaster of both FES and P3P. For free. So long as you back up your legal copies of your games.

Atlus offers us basically nothing except the opportunity to give them cash for next to no effort whatsoever other than "Hey we ported Persona 3 to PC like you peasants wanted!" Which I foolishly did. Don't make the same mistake as I did. Or if you did, don't go beyond 2 hours.

Before you go any further, the majority of what I'm going to say applies if you have any intention of dueling other people. If you just want to play Master Duel for the single player content (and there IS single player content), it's good enough to install it for that and just play that. You might get something out of the lore. The gameplay is snappy, looks great, everything you might want out of a Yu-Gi-Oh dueling simulator. Do NOT confuse the single player experience for the multiplayer one.

I wish I could play this game on release again. When just about everyone on the internet picked it up for a month or two and played the decks they actually wanted to play.

This is not that game anymore. If you didn't play this game on release, you've missed the golden age. If you try to play now, either fully commit to making the flavor meta deck of the week, every week, every time new cards are released, or don't play at all. This is not the game where you can challenge your buddies that also happen to play yugioh and have a fun time, this is the game where you "play" a game of yugioh which involves you sitting and watching your opponent play solitaire for a couple minutes, and once your turn comes around it is a miracle if you can play a single one of your cards without your opponent having a handtrap or an effect on field that outright says you can't play the game.

I'm getting ahead of myself, though. I'm not the person that takes Kaiba's blue eyes deck into a tournament at ye olde comic shop and expecting a good time. I used to breathe the same poisonous cancer that pervades this game today; carefully waiting to drop Ash Blossom or Nibiru at specific choke points during my opponent's plays to completely disrupt their plays, ending a turn on I:P Masquerena and a few other links to make a nigh invincible Avramax or Underworld Goddess of the Closed World to just eat the big wall that my opponent spent their whole turn making. I saw the game rise and fall throughout the years, and happily played it when they introduced synchros, back when Black Rose Dragon was considered good enough as a board wipe and summoning Shooting Quasar Dragon, or hell, two or three of them was a dream, and to see it in action was truly a blessing for everyone involved (I will forever miss you, Yugioh4realmen). Xyz came and went, I remember going through so many decks and cards like Geargia karakuri, or sitting on Evilswarm Ophion on turn 1 when it came out while the guy across from me just started playing dustons of all things, and I think I speak for everyone when we collectively groaned when Atlantean Mermails became a thing and then didn't stop being a thing for what felt like an eternity (I jest, I liked the deck too). E-drags also wrecked all of our collective behinds (Or not, if you were among the few with the disposable income to afford a deck that costed nearly four digits), Pendulums happened, D/D/D reigned supreme, blah blah blah you don't need to keep listening to me reminisce, you get the picture.

I used to live and breathe this game. I was on board playing against meta decks, dismantling them with rogue decks or playing something meta adjacent. I am not unfamiliar with the game at all. So why did I stop?
At some point, the juice just isn't worth the squeeze anymore. You could say I just got tired of it, and you might be right. Maybe I didn't want to run on Konami's meta treadmill anymore. Or my old and busted that I liked to play can't keep up with the new hotness, no matter how hard I tried. Rogue decks as a concept no longer exists unless the deck in question was released in the last couple months and Konami has deigned to give you support. Or you've been spared the banlist hammer.
You can say I grew out of it, and you're probably right. Even now I yearn for the games I played back then.

"But that's regular yugioh old man. Tell me about Master Duel"

Exact same problems. You might be able to eke out a few games where you don't get flattened, rolled up, and tossed aside in a dominating performance in the low ranks. These are merely the same poor souls as you, in your same position. They were sold a dream and expect to take Kaiba's deck in a tournament and have a fun time. Go anywhere near an upwards trajectory in rank and you cannot escape the madness that awaits you. There's no respite. There's no fun to be had. The restrictions and staples that you used half the deck to run back in yesteryear used to allow for some self expression in deck design and gave you mechanics with your cards that fueled your interactions with your opponent and their cards? That does not exist at all anymore. You play Konami's intended deck design, you play the same mitigation and disruption as everyone else, you cannibalize three fourths of your deck to play the eight to ten cards you think might perform this week, or you don't play at all.

By the way, this isn't even a good way to play your fun pet decks against your friends. Suppose you want to build Arcana Force; absolutely terrible deck, don't even entertain it in any competitive or semi competitive setting, but it's great for a couple laughs, or maybe you want to try the unorthodox World Lock. Well, Arcana Force XXI - The World is an Ultra Rare, and you want at least one of those. A big bulky monster that needs two tributes is an Ultra Rare, a rarity that, on the tin, should be as valuable as Mekk-Knight Crusadia Avramax. You and I both know it's not, nowhere close. Light Barrier, their field spell, which half the time negates itself because of coin flips, is a super rare, and only works for Arcana Force cards. That's worth the same as Twin Twisters, right? Right? Of course not.

For these decks that Konami has left behind in the dust, and has no intent of picking back up, you would expect them to at least make the majority of them no rarer than Rare, with Super Rare reserved for the one card among them that makes the deck work. So even if you aren't trying to climb ladders, you could at least still use Master Duel as one of the nicer simulators (which will go unnamed in this review, you know exactly what I'm talking about) and make a buncha pet decks to play with your friends whom also probably have an assortment of pet decks. But even here, even here, your decks from yesteryear have Konami with an outstretched hand demanding you pay up, either directly through boosters or indirectly through crafting (do NOT tell me crafting solves this, as a free player, you get at most three decks starting out with the crafting system. Maybe four if you really stretch your resources. Either that, or you get one "good" deck that won't last beyond a month of power creep). You can make the argument that Konami will eventually get around to these decks and make support to warrant this, but please actually sound like you mean it when you do make the argument. Take lswarm for example. Lswarm hasn't been supported since Extreme Force with a Link card in 2018. Before that? 2013, in Lords of Tachyon, also with just one card, smack dab in the middle of the Dragon Rulers format as pack filler. Before that? When they were introduced in Hidden Arsenal. Arcana Force earlier? Introduced in 2008 in Light of Destruction. One card since then for Duel Links, and a newer one very recently that does absolutely nothing for the deck other than a field spell search.

If you truly want to play Yugioh, especially in its modern state, Master Duel is indeed the way to do it. Albeit missing several cards that are, uh, available elsewhere. Don't worry, they'll get patched in. They always get patched in. Be prepared to breathe madness in a way only HP Lovecraft could truly express in his works.

You won't have any problems with Master Duel itself. The simulator works as you'd expect with almost no problems. If only the game it was based around wasn't as utterly ruined as it is.

Beach Island Deluxe is a Single player game that shouldn't take you any more than five to ten minutes to beat and no more than twenty minutes to 100%. It is heavily reminiscent of ye olde N64 games of yore like Banjo Kazooie, Super Mario 64, Rayman 2, etc. It's a good time, and I enjoyed it.

The game is a collect-a-thon where you are tasked with collecting any number of stars between 7 and 20, and you have to perform a series of tasks or platforming challenges to attain them. There's also a speedrunning option where you are timed, and a couple easter eggs if you know where to look. It's not exactly a massive world, the experience is short and sweet, and doesn't overstay its welcome. Plus, I dig the stylized pixelated graphics and low poly counts, it gives this solo developed game a certain charm that I wish was more common.

I have a few misgivings, mostly with the controls being a little scuffed. Some examples are holding down dash while you're standing on a few certain inclines makes you slide down faster (even if you aren't moving), holding and releasing dash while in the middle of a jump mid-air changes the laws of physics and makes you fall or move faster/slower, having two mid-air jumps if you run off a ledge without jumping prior, your drop shadow appearing on top of objects like rainbow stars when you're platforming and can disorient you, and a couple other small things here and there. Some of the physics can be mildly frustrating until you get used to it, especially for a certain platforming challenge (you'll know what I mean if you find it, I ain't spoiling it).

All in all, it's a good experience from a student solo developer from DigiPen. Oh, and it's free.

I'm going to be real with you. The first hour or two you play this, you're going to wonder why the hell people like this game so much.

And then you're going to get a couple unlocks, you're going to try a couple builds, maybe grab Garlic and obsess with getting it until you realize that it actually isn't the greatest weapon, unlock a couple characters, get a couple stages, unlock hyper mode, evolve some weapons, get constantly rotating lasers, grab the Yellow Sign, become literal (red) death itself, grab the Arcana cards to change up the gameplay, get the rest of the characters, fill out the collection, get a million coins or so (don't cheat it in with save editing or whatever, trust me), and fully fill out the unlocks.

And then you'll realize that It's in early access. It's not even done yet. Good thing it costs, what, $3?