Recent reviews by Latte

Touhou Luna Nights is a short, but really awesome Metroidvania that leans heavily into the Castlevania vibe and references. If you remember the heyday of Castlevania on the Gameboy Advance and Nintendo DS, this fits right in - it's got a lot of the usual Castlevania stages, but like each of those games it has a unique hook. In this case, the hook is time control, both slowing it down and stopping it. It makes extensive use of this mechanic both for combat and some really interesting time puzzles.

One thing to note is that the big difference between Touhou Luna Nights and Castlevania is the Touhou tone to the game. Instead of an apocalyptic battle of good and evil, the story of Touhou Luna NIghts is really about a bunch of super powered friends having friendly challenges and rivalries in a Castlevania castle. It's surprisingly slice of life for a game where you're stopping time and throwing daggers at big monsters. Personally, I loved it.

Cozy game of the year. Chill atmosphere, fun characters, and a great gameplay loop. The way you get to know your customers and their needs kind of reminds me of Recettear, but instead of dungeon diving outside of shop hours you're socializing with the locals and doing favors for them.

And it really helps that every character I've come across is some unique and different flavor of adorable.

The game is only about 20 minutes long, but they were 20 *great* minutes.

I'm 17 hours into this game and I'm loving it. It's chill, it's comfy, and it's basically fantasy slice of life. If you like JRPGs and Stardew Valley, then you will enjoy this game and its fun, silly characters and cute enemies.

Fair warning that, like Stardew Valley and Harvest Moon, it does have a time management and deadline system for completing the quarterly main tasks. I'm on Assignment 6 and starting to breeze through them just because I've kept myself well-stocked from exploring. I've finished the last few tasks in the first ten days of a quarterly deadline and I think you can, too.

It's also a really basic port. 1080p quality and ultrawide only through stretching (which doesn't look too bad, I'm playing that way). Also, for some reason I'm having trouble upping the graphics with Nvidia Control Panel, so the edges of clothing and such are pretty aliased. Otherwise, the cute graphics and fun design make up for how basic it is from a technical standpoint, which is common for good low-end JRPGs like early Neptunia games or my personal favorite, Recettear.

I just want to give fair warning that the first two hours of the game is just tutorial menus and tutorial dialogue with about five minutes of super easy "press space to jump, press shift to run" tutorial gameplay early on. I'm interested in this game, but I'm refunding it because I feel like I can't even see how it plays or whether it's any good within the refund window.

If you're really into SAO or watched some videos online and are positive this is the game for you, then go for it. If you're on the fence, then you're not gonna get a good feel before your purchase is final.

It's cool that the game has a lot of side quests, but you feel like an idiot after watching mysteries build for hours and then the game abruptly ends, answering exactly zero questions.

Games that ran out of time and money and don't have a real ending, like Metal Gear Solid V or Knights of the Old Republic II, have way more satisfying endings than this game. This game just stops at an arbitrary point and you're supposed to wait for their next $60 game for any sort of payoff.

I loved Dragonfall. Really, really loved it. And you can pretty much say that I agree 90% with most of the positive reviews of this game. However, I'm not finishing this game for a big reason.

The whole weird stuff keeps happening issue. In Dragonfall, the game occasionally buckled under the strain of the designers' wishes. Too many enemies and the occasional complicated environment led to long loading times, awkward enemy behavior, and the enemies taking very long turns "thinking". This game takes the same engine and goes crazy-go-nuts. Two or three times as many enemies, large maps, vendors on combat maps, complicated mechanics, and teams of helpful NPCs make the game go really weird.

I've had the game repeatedly take a long time "thinking" about turns for enemies I had not aggroed, so the long turns just resulted in them taking no action. I've had friendly NPCs block exit doors and I had to trick them into fighting enemies so I could get past them. I've had both enemies and friendly NPCs take weird turns where they just kind of wander around the map. It seems like whenever enemies summon a spirit, it inevitably starts wrecking them and they don't fight back against it (yay!). I've had really weird item management when vendors are present on combat/mission maps.

Overall, it's like someone decided to take their stock Toyota Camry to the race track; the game just doesn't do what the designers wished it would. The weird stuff makes a game that kind of isn't as good as the last game really lose whatever luster it still had.

Cash shop prices changed 2 1/2 hours before Early Access launch, at 11:30PM EST. We'll see them when the game launches.

That's not suspicious.

Tried it with a GTX 770 and 16GB of RAM in January. All NVidia Fun Stuff turned off, settings at absolute lowest to start with. Stuttered on the opening cutscene and stuttered whenever I glided as Batman with zero enemies on the screen. Refunded. This is either the most demanding game in my Steam library by two or three times over or something is wrong.