Dave the Diver is a frenetic arcade of mini-games and quick-time events that provide a compelling gameplay & story experience, while simultaneously being the kind of game you can use to unwind at the end of the day or kill a few hours on a road trip.

What I find intriguing about Dave the Diver is that it’s core gameplay is so uninteresting and repetitive, yet it’s used as a foundation for such a variety of minigames and side quest-like content that can truly captivate you for the entire ~30 hour runtime. Thirty hours, from a game whose central gameplay wouldn’t be fun by itself. Diving down & harpooning fish can get repetitive and monotonous, and the relaxing, slow-paced nature of the activity doesn’t present much opportunity for mechanical challenge or mastery. Instead, Dave the Diver shines in overwhelming you with characters who will either task you to do something fun & different while diving – go find this specific cave, catch this funny looking fish, take a picture of this thing – or reward you with a new between-dive gameplay mechanic for serving them their favourite dish. You will get quests from so many different sources so rapidly and in such quantities that you can’t keep track of them all, let alone complete them in a single dive, which gives you something to go back for the next time, and the next, and the next. While you’re playing through higher production quality missions, there’s also a plethora of collect-athon type content to explore: finding certain colour seashells in ridiculous quantities, catching a large number of a certain fish, collecting materials for weapon upgrades, the list goes on. This really helps Blue Hole come alive as you need to pay attention to every environmental detail, as you may spot something that’ll progress one of these medium-term goals while you’re on your way to a specific area to progress the story. All of these things to do and collect then feed back into the myriad of upgrade options or things you want to buy. There’s a huge variety here too – upgrades for your diving gear, restaurant, weapons, and other facilities you unlock as you progress through the game.

Speaking of detail, the care and attention put into the art in this game is phenomenal. The 2D pixel art is easy on the eyes despite holding a good level of detail, the animated cutscenes are full of personality, and the occasional 3D cooking minigame or water creature gives the game flexibility to use more fluid animations, without creating distracting visual noise from all the aliasing. Keeping the textures of 3D models as pixel art keeps them grounded within the game’s art style so they never feel out of place or jarring. One quick thing to note though is that battery life on a handheld console like the Steam Deck might not be what you would expect of a simple 2D pixel art game, as the ocean you’re diving in is rendered in 3D, requiring more power to do so. The game doesn’t struggle for performance by any means, but you’re not going to get pure-2D game battery life here.

To touch more on the game’s cast, they’re all vibrant people bursting with personality. They all have unique mumbles for their dialogue, but where they really come alive is in the animated cutscenes. You need only to encounter Duff for the first time and ask him to make a weapon to see what I mean. Dave the Diver isn’t afraid to poke at stereotypes and stretch them into absurdity; this isn’t a serious game, and the cutscenes are designed to make you laugh. They do an outstanding job of breathing life into the characters, and even those that don’t get a little cinematic are written with a clear personality and/or accent in mind that keeps everyone feeling unique.

The full version of my review is on my website as it exceeds Steam's character limit: https://alpha-tango-kilo.xyz/gaming#dave-the-diver

Lies of P stands out as the pinnacle of From Software Souls-likes despite made by a completely different studio. The pace of combat, game feel, atmosphere, even the interface all contribute to this unshakeable FromSoft-like feeling to the game, which captured my attention within the first few minutes of play. Even better though, throughout the entire thirty to forty hour run time you can benefit from a continual stream of refinements and improvements that have been built on top of the shoulders of giants. To be absolutely clear though, this isn’t a rip-off game. Lies of P forges its own identity through its unique universe and exudes a level of quality unheard of in clone games.

The full version of my review is on my website as it exceeds Steam's character limit: https://alpha-tango-kilo.xyz/gaming#lies-of-p

I can understand why this game gets such overwhelmingly positive reviews, but to me the atmosphere is lost to the poorly handled puzzle aspects of the game. This is my spoiler-free critique of Inside.

Inside is the story of survival of a young boy against all odds: physical barriers, dogs, people, and other such adversaries in the game. The gameplay against this narrative comes in three flavours, which the game rotates through as you play: escaping adversity, puzzle solving, and spectacle.

Spectacle I have no aversion to – the game nails its art style & atmosphere, and has thoroughly enjoyable eye candy. Sometimes the sections felt a little long to me, but I typically play more action intensive games, so this isn't a huge surprise.

Both escaping adversity and puzzle solving are entirely mechanically devoid – that is to say that the challenge isn't knowing what to do and struggling to do it, it's not knowing what to do, but once you work it out it should be trivial to pull off. There's nothing wrong with this, it just means the game places its difficulty/challenge in finding the solution, which will be important to consider later when I discuss my thoughts on the puzzles.

The character’s animations come across rather out of place in a lot of the escaping adversity sections of the game, where the boy moves at a comfortable jog or light run, despite having a ferocious dog running full pelt behind you with clear intent to kill. This can feel frustrating, because if you don't quite have the solution to the puzzle in time, it feels like you probably could have survived if the protagonist just put a liiiiittle bit more effort in. This bring me onto the main thing I disliked about these escaping adversity sections in general: they require trial & fatal error to overcome. In my opinion, putting a time limit on puzzles with your life is at stake is not fun, and it's the core mechanic of these parts of the game. It damages immersion in my opinion and makes solving the problems feel unrewarding when you consider how many deaths it took you to get there.

To talk more generally about the puzzles – regardless as to whether you’re being hunted down during them – they are not designed to facilitate first time or improvised success. Timing windows are narrow where present, and the game does nothing to help or guide the player. In dedicated puzzle sections where there is no imminent threat of death, performing the necessary experimentation ends up being time consuming and slow, primarily due to the size of the environments and how slow your character moves.

The final nit I'll pick with Inside is the size of the environments. Especially frequent during the spectacle sections, you can end up without a clear indication of where you need to go, and thus simply have to run in one direction until you find a wall, and then turn around. The game's achievements lead me to believe there are more secrets hidden throughout the levels, however more often than not I found myself having explored the ‘wrong’ way intentionally to no reward other than the boring return journey. Maybe I’m just bad at finding secrets, but it felt like the game was actively trying to disincentivise this ‘explore the other way first’ style of play.

To conclude, I did complete the game and enjoy its ending. I didn't feel overly compelled by the story due to its obscurity, and I was more than ready to be done with the puzzles by the time I got to the end – and that's for a short three and a half hour game.