Recent reviews by Draaloff

A fun free game that plays around with the desktop. There's a fair few pop culture / gaming references thrown in too.
When you're not on the desktop, you're usually platforming. This gameplay can be pretty clunky, but it's passable enough if you're not achievement hunting.
There's a story, and it's a good mix of funny and emotional.
Not much more I can say without spoiling it other than it's worth a go as it's free.

Played with the 07th mod. This one focuses on Satoko and is extra emotional.

It can be a pain to select the pieces you want, as they float around and overlap each-other. Additionally, you can't save an incomplete puzzle to continue later.

Flash puzzles come and go on the whims of the developer. This is a major issue as you need to complete 10 of them for an achievement.

I played with the 07th Mod and had already seen the anime.
Part 2 is as good as part 1, this time focusing on Mion. It jumps around a bit between slice-of-life and horror like the first, while exploring new angles of the mystery.
There's also a different opening video and song to chapter 1; a lovely bonus.

Get it if you enjoyed the first game. Parts of the story will spoil the first game if you play it after this one; there's an anti-spoiler feature, but it misses a lot. The game generally expects you to have played the original, as characters and info from the first game don't get much of an introduction.

The game has a lot of issues, but I'll start with the good points:
I didn't experience any crashes or significant bugs.
There's new quality of life additions that are very helpful for both general gameplay and completionism.
Best girl Aibo is back with the rest of the previous game's main cast. I like the new characters too.
I really like some of the music tracks.

And now the issues. The original shares a lot of these:
The puzzles are very hit and miss, with a few requiring you to know trivia from outside the game. You'll also want a pen and paper for some. Don't be ashamed to use a walkthrough if you get stuck.
Somnium time limits can be unreasonable on the 'Standard' difficulty. I recommend playing on 'Easy' for this reason, as you can still get every achievement.
The first game's story is significantly more intense and emotional.
There's a big twist late in the game that can be hard to process. It's a clever idea, but poorly handled.
More ridiculous fight scenes that are impossible to take seriously.
The translation localisation is sometimes inaccurate or plain wrong, but nothing that will affect your understanding of the characters or story.
There's a song and dance that get reused too many times.
There are some forced political lines that break immersion and could have been more subtle.

I generally enjoyed it just like the first one, despite its flaws.

I was excited after playing Automata and had high hopes that were quickly crushed.
The game has some nice visuals, music, voice acting (I only used the Japanese dub) and story sections, but there are way too many issues for me to recommend it:

You have to replay the second half of the game at least 3 times with no gameplay variation and part of the first half twice. I put the game on hold for many months because of this and the below point.
The third playthrough of the second half adds almost no new content and could have been in the second run with no conflicts.
Additionally, combat is very repetitive with no variation (including difficulty) in each playthrough.

The world is pretty small and makes you revisit every area numerous times. This is not due to hardware limitations of the original, as there's plenty of older games with significantly larger 3D worlds. For example: Nier released in 2010 on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, while Ōkami released in 2006 on the Playstation 2 and Wii.

Lots of permanent missables. This includes sidequests, documents, words (equip-able stat boosts) and even tutorials (which are random enemy drops, weirdly).

Most sidequests are just boring, time-consuming fetch quests without a worthwhile reward. You only need to do 50% for an achievement, so don't bother unless you need to for weapons.
You need to get every weapon to unlock endings C, D and E, despite there being no plot reason.

Unexplained plot points (like why magic exists and the purpose of grimoires).
The new content in this remake is cool, but adds lots of unanswered questions.

A gardening minigame that uses real world time. If you don't play for several days, you'll have an empty garden as your plants die, drop seeds, then the seeds vanish.
Cross-breeding garden plants is also not explained and uses harsh RNG.

A fishing minigame that doesn't explain everything, like which bait to use and locations. It also has annoying RNG. It's the one thing it does better than automata though, as fishing in that is worse.

Grinding materials to upgrade every weapon (which unlocks parts of stories) is insanely time consuming and also relies on RNG.
I recommend cheating this part after doing the first playthrough with NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139 GAMEDATA Editor instead of grinding for days. This will also help you speed through your next two playthroughs.

I have spent more time troubleshooting than playing, with mixed results.
Both audio and parts of the map frequently glitch out or fail to load entirely.

Playing with a controller is awful and setting up keyboard is a nightmare:
Left handed? Non-standard keyboard? Don't like the default binds?
Too bad! You can't play because keys like F and Q are unchangeable without editing game files.
This requires closing the game, going into the files and editing them every time you want to change any of the forced keys.
And guess what? The game plays with no issues if you rebind any of them.

The opening section of the game is rough. I had trouble learning some of the basics due to insufficient explanations. There's also an awful lot of things you're expected to learn and remember.
The first combat section is pretty unforgiving unless you're stealthy, but that method is poorly communicated.

I hate Male V's voice line delivery, which is always excessively aggressive and confrontational. Thankfully Female V is not like that. You can't change voice pitch though, nor can you change V's personality beyond picking the Male or Female voice.

A short but sweet shoot-em-up in the world of DanMachi. It's also free.

~ Updated after playing 135 hours ~
Captaincy is out. Cool cosmetic stuff,
but has insane grinds for all of the trinkets (like being on fire for 100 hours and catching thousands of fish) and some of the pirate/boat levels (like sleeping, sitting and playing shanties for an hour per level).
Hopefully these are significantly reduced as they will not be gained through regular gameplay, with many being near-impossible.
The new levels have since been balanced, with most requirements being lowered. However high level trophies will still be very grindy. For example: the infamous hour on fire has been reduced to 5 minutes per level, while fish caught has been reduced from 25 to 10. Therefore you still need 100 fish for the first trophy and 1000 for the last. All 'gold earned as an emissary' levels are an exception, instead being raised from 30,000 to 100,000.

The game can be fun, but has a lot holding it back. An Xbox account is also required to play.
Don't play it solo. It's not designed for solo players and is really tedious. Some events are also near impossible.

You can team up with random players, but expect plenty of griefers and incompetents. If you get any decent players they will likely have to leave before you're finished, then soon be replaced with someone worse.

With at least one friend it's actually pretty fun, however you're always at the mercy of other players who may steal your loot. You'll always be on a server with up to 5 ships and 16 players. Any other crews can kill you, destroy your ship and steal your loot whenever they want. This can really sting and is guaranteed to happen sooner or later.

Sailing is slow and boring, regardless of crew size. Occasionally it becomes exciting for a while when you run into a surprise enemy event that may sink you.
There was also a separate gamemode called 'Arena' until a few months ago that focused purely on PvP. The Arena players are now in Adventure mode with everyone else, sinking them.

The game has a lot of bugs that have been around a long time. Don't expect them to ever be fixed.
Visuals and audio are great, although I had to use the 'cursed' graphics preset because occasional GPU spikes were freezing my PC. Thankfully you can rejoin a session if the game crashes.
Unfortunately the menu graphics like to lower their resolution (like distant objects do) for no reason; this can be fixed by changing any graphics setting back and forth, but shouldn't be a problem in the first place.
If you use Windows 10 LTSC, you can't invite Xbox players to your session; but they can invite you.

The only rewards are cosmetics like clothing, ship parts, weapons, handheld items (compass, bucket, telescope, etc) and titles to go by your gamertag. Everyone is equal and only limited by experience. You can also use your money to buy some useful items such as ammo boxes and storage crates, but they are just pickups and not permanent upgrades.

Season passes exist. You can reach 100 levels during each season, which unlock currency, cosmetics and titles. If you buy the pass, you get extra items.
Unfortunately there's elitism here, with Pirate Legends (a status unlocked by reaching level 50 with 3 companies) getting some extra cosmetics. Reaching PL in a later season will not unlock them.
Season pass items are unobtainable once the season finishes.

One of the 6 companies (excluding the Pirate Legend exclusive one) does not have an emissary flag (it's a multiplier that increases as you get company related treasure.)
This company is Hunter's Call. It's exceptionally boring to level up and considered one of the biggest grinds in the game. You just do a dull fishing minigame, cook meat and fish, then sell it for a low payout that you could have got doing anything else in a fraction of the time.

You cannot freely customise your character and have to use a random character generator until you get one you're happy with. This includes gender, face type, beard, body type, haircut, hair colour, eye colour, blind eyes, scars and default tattoos. You can't filter anything, not even gender.
You can buy tattoos, hair dye and change your haircut and beard, but nothing else. You can buy an appearance changing potion, but it just dumps you back into the generator.