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What an amazing experience - I wish I could go back and play through this again with fresh eyes.

Citizen Sleeper is more of an interactive story than a "true game" in my opinion, but it does that incredibly well. There are some light gameplay elements, mainly revolving around managing your daily pool of dice and prioritizing where to spend your limited resources, but it all feeds back into progressing a number of branching and intertwined storylines.

There were only a few times where I really felt pressured or challenged, and so that contributed to the feeling of being more of an observer as the story plays out before you, but I honestly didn't mind it. Getting to know the inhabitants of the Eye and leaving your mark on their lives was incredibly satisfying. I know that I didn't experience all of the endings and pathways that this game has to offer, but I feel good about the choices that I made and the ending that I did see. I'll probably return at some point to see what I missed, though.

Beyond the gameplay, I absolutely loved the art and sound for this game. The rather simple depiction of the station worked well, giving you a sort of bird's eye view while the hand-drawn portraits of the characters you interact with gave more detail and personality to those individuals. The soundtrack drifted in and out, and provided great vibes as you explore the station and progress through the story.

I highly recommend Citizen Sleeper for sci-fi fans, and really anyone who just enjoys a good story. I'm very much looking forward to the sequel!

Frostpunk is a fantastic game - part city-builder, part resource management, part survival. It blends these different mechanics into a tense and sometimes overwhelming game, where it feels like you can never quite get ahead, and treading water is the best you can hope for.

It took some getting used to, operating under that mindset, and most scenarios took me at least a couple attempts before I was able to finish them successfully. But once I finally got my ducks in a row and had a well-oiled machine running, it was so satisfying.

I also loved the DLC for this game - each scenario put a new spin on things, sometimes adding entirely new mechanics like building trade routes with other settlements or focusing on building the generator itself. These additional challenges were all excellent, forcing me to play differently enough that it didn't feel like rehashing the base New Home scenario over and over.

I highly, highly recommend Frostpunk - it can be a bit tricky to pick up at first, but once you get established, it's one of the most satisfying games I've ever played.

Disco Elysium is more than just a game - it is an incredible experience. The story is great, bouncing from moments of supreme joy to tptal despair, with plenty of beautiful mundanity in between. The cast of characters is diverse and surprising - everyone that you talk to feels like they could be a real person just trying to make it through life. The world is strange and terrifying, yet beautiful. It feels like the past few hundred years of our world, with all of its various cultures and peoples and significant events and ideas, was thrown in a blender, and the result was the world of Disco Elysium.

Each of these components was well-executed in its own right, but combined, they create something even greater than the sum of their parts. This game really made me feel powerful emotions, and consider different worldviews that I'd never really thought through before. I can't say that about many games, and I mean it as very high praise here.

Disco Elysium is an experience that will stay with me for a long, long time. I am so glad that I finally played it, and part of me is now sad that I won't get that fresh experience ever again. However, I know that with the choices I made and the playstyle I leaned towards, there is still plenty of content in this game for me to experience.

For now, though, I feel perfectly satisfied with how things wrapped up. There is a melancholic tone throughout the entire game, with a common theme being that no matter how hard you try, it just might not be enough and things won't work out for the best. Despite that, I'm coming away from this game feeling hopeful and optimistic, something that I can't say about many pieces of media.

What an excellent game! Once again, Suspicious Developments delivers. I fell in love with this team with Gunpoint, and really enjoyed Heat Signature, so I've been anxiously awaiting Tactical Breach Wizards since I first heard about it a couple years ago. It was absolutely worth the wait!

The gameplay is excellent - it's tight, simple to pick up, and scales up nicely as you progress through the game and expand your arsenal of abilities. The difficulty, for me at least, was pretty spot on - challenging, but without being overly difficult. Once you got the hang of things, unlocked your full team, and upgraded your abilities sufficiently, it became more about finishing levels and dispatching enemies in style, which was its own kind of fun.

Beyond the gameplay, I adored the art style and how simple and vibrant it was. The writing was also quite good - telling an interesting story that touched on a number of different ideas, ranging from mental health to personal identity to one's purpose in life. There were a few moments that were honestly pretty touching, and I thought that this was all delivered in a slightly over-the-top, cheesy way without being too much.

Tactical Breach Wizards was a joy to play, and a game that I look forward to revisiting in the future! I highly, highly recommend picking it up.

Cyberpunk 2077 has been one of my favorite games of all time. It certainly has its issues here and there, but I have never felt so drawn into a world. CDPR outdid themselves crafting a detailed, living, breathing world in Night City, and as I slowly ticked off the boxes and crossed things off the to-do list, I felt a growing sense of sadness as I knew that my time in that world was coming to an end - at least for this playthrough.

A couple small issues that I had with the game - progression stopped mattering at a certain point, as by doing all of the side jobs you quickly accumulate more than enough XP and money to make yourself functionally invulnerable. I wish there had been better scaling there. The choices that I made throughout the game seemed to have minimal impact on the ending that I got - with the choices that I made in the last few hours of the game seeming to almost entirely determine the ending. I was hoping for more impact on how I played my V in the determination of my ending.

But even with those issues, I absolutely loved this game. Despite the lack of impact that my choices and playstyle had on the ending that I ended up with, I felt that it was a satisfying and bittersweet conclusion to my V's story. Given the breadth and depth of this game, it'll probably be some time before I revisit it again, but I very much look forward to doing so at some point in the future.

Fallout definitely shows it age from time to time, but despite that, there's a really great game here. I had a few bugs and a few more crashes during my playthrough, but overall I had a lot of fun immersing myself into this smaller-than-what-I'm-used-to opening to the Fallout series. There's a lot of freedom in how you approach situations, and there are some serious consequences to the choices that you make. What impressed me more than anything was just how dynamic and immersive this world felt, given how old the game is. I definitely enjoyed my time with it, and I'm looking forward to moving through the rest of the series over time!

Elden Ring, to put it simply, is one of the best games that I've played in recent memory. It is a perfect blend of the tactical, timing-based combat of the Soulslike genre and rich and rewarding exploration of a massive open world.

At times that open world can certainly be overwhelming. I found that the game really shone in its more linear sections - the large and more traditional dungeons that served as funnels for the game's main story events and characters. The tighter level design in these dungeons just felt so much more satisfying to move and progress through. That being said, the larger world was still incredibly rewarding to explore - with some sort of upgrade or resource around practically every corner.

I played Elden Ring pretty thoroughly - I kept guides and Googling to a minimum for my first playthrough, but I still felt like I saw quite a bit of what the game had to offer. Towards the end of the game, but not during the "endgame", this made the game feel like it was dragging a bit, as there is just simply so much to do and explore. You never know if this mini-dungeon or that world boss will be the one to give you the exact upgrade that you've been looking for - so they can be hard to pass up. However, that is one fairly minor complaint in an otherwise stellar game.

The art style and visuals, the music and sound design, the typical fragmented and disjointed storytelling typical of a FromSoft game - they are all at their peak in Elden Ring, in my opinion. This is one of the most gorgeous and immersive games I've played, and the sheer variety in landscapes and environments is mind-boggling.

With a 100+ hour playthrough for my first time through the game, I probably will put Elden Ring on the shelf for a bit. But I know that someday I'll be returning to try out new builds, unlock new endings, and uncover new secrets in the Lands Between.

This is definitely the best game in the We Were Here series so far! As with the previous games, it's been so much fun to see how Total Mayhem has improved their skills and honed their craft over the course of the series. We Were Here Forever definitely was the most robust gaming experience, with an aesthetically pleasing, cartoony graphical style, pleasant music, and a decent story. The puzzles, the focus of the game, were across the board fun without being overly challenging or feeling cheap. Overall, my wife and I had a great time playing this game, and it's a bit bittersweet that we're done and only have one more entry in the series.

Each game in the We Were Here series is better than the last! It's been great fun seeing Total Mayhem improve over the course of their series. We Were Here Together definitely felt the most polished and had some great, cohesive puzzles. There were still a few with somewhat strange or obtuse solutions, but overall the game was a great experience and lots of fun. On to the next one!

Overall quality-wise, We Were Here Too was a step up from the original. However, I felt like the puzzle quality was a slight step down. It felt like most of the puzzles in Too boiled down to communicating very specific things on a very tight timeline, and often left one player with very little to do. It was still a fun game, and was a great length for what it was, but I think I preferred the original as a whole.