Recent reviews by Philo

Short, relaxed platformer with fun and light-hearted art and sound design. Minimal dialogue and narrative, but the characters are in the world are fun enough to give locations depth. The game isn't really difficult, but exploration and platforming (as well as the aforementioned art and sound design) are engaging. 4-5 hours should be enough to 100% the game without too much struggle or back-tracking.

I cooka da food

Thicc goat-bunny-cat girl jumps 10,000 times in order to master the art of jumping. 10/10

Truly a masterpiece. Never nutted so hard. GG gamers.

Wildfrost is a fun, cute, and easy to understand (somewhat difficult to 100%) deck builder with a solid amount of replayability, strategy and difficulty options involved. (Meta-commentary on difficulty will come at the end of the review) The TL;DR review is that the game is fun, unique, and can be played casually while also offering a good deal of strategic challenge and new possibilities at the high end. Wildfrost receives a strong recommendation, especially during future sales.

Art and Design:
There's not much to say about the art style and graphics that isn't grasped from the store page. It's simple, charming, and lends itself well to the gameplay. You'll know if it suits your tastes based on the footage. One fun thing to note is that each playthrough, you must choose from three heroes with random names, abilities, and designs.

Music:
The music in Wildfrost is fun and lively without becoming too bombastic or monotonous while playing. The soundtrack may become repetitive through several playthroughs or long sessions, but helps foster the game's fun and charming atmosphere as you play through and try to beat the game for the first time. Generally, after I beat the main campaign for the first time, I've idled the game while listening to audio books or podcasts, and it's perfectly suitable for that as well.

Gameplay:
The gameplay loop manages to be easy to understand and experiment in while also allowing the player freedom to use preferred cards, abilities and strategies. As the difficulty increases, and with later game mechanics, the player is tested on their ability to understand and counter enemies and their own strategies. While Wildfrost might not have as much replayabiltiy as a game like Slay The Spire, there are plenty of ways to approach the game, and craft current and future runs with careful decisions and planning. There are always opportunities to ask yourself if a strategy or combo could work, and to challenge yourself to make it work.

Onto the discussion about the game's difficulty, there was a large percentage of players on release that felt as if the game was unfair in its difficulty. While those feelings may be subjective, I would like to claim that Wildfrost overall is quite middling in difficulty for a game in its genre. Players who are new to roguelikes or deck building games might struggle to understand concepts that older players would think as obvious. However, there are no mechanics or strategies in Wildfrost so esoteric as to be unrealistic for the average player to uncover if they gave it a shot. The game can be beaten by anyone willing to get through their first few runs and learn the general mechanics and most consistent strategies. There is optional content that can be quite challenging and potentially require some amount of luck, but this content is completely optional and does not take away from the normal gameplay loop the average player will return to.

It's like killing people, but ultra, and you're a robot.

Final Fantasy PR is a good remake of a classic game that'll be enjoyable to replay after many years for older fans. I personally began the series with FF7 as a nineties kid and only played backwards to FF5, making this a fun new experience. That being said, here's why it's perfectly fine to skip this game and pretend like it doesn't exist;

• The story — There is no story. There is, but barely, and it sucks. Spoilers: Four heroes carrying four crystal shards appear. These crystals shards correspond to the four crystals that control the elements. Why do these heroes have the shards, when did they get them, and why? Go ♥♥♥♥ yourself. Anyway, the four crystals (the big ones) have been drained of their power and/or stolen by fiends. You go to the only location you can, get an item that unlocks the next location, someone speaks two lines of dialogue to you, and you go kill something. Repeat. Surprise, you're at the end of the game, and it turns out the events of the game are part of a 2,000 year time-loop caused by an evil guy named Garlic, somehow, and for some reason. How does any of this work? ♥♥♥♥ you. So you kill him, the time loop ends, and none of it ever happened, so the world is safe. Yay.
  
• The gameplay — The gameplay is classic turn based Final Fantasy gameplay. Except worse than later titles, as the job system hasn't been refined, mage jobs get no equipment or rows, and the magic system sucks, meaning that mages suck ass early game outside of healing or needing to use one of your limited use AOEs at specific moments, where they're possibly overpowered as ♥♥♥♥. This system gets a lot better towards the mid to end game where your options are less limited and have more use cases, and ethers are accessible.
  The entire game is also extremely easy as long as you're not under-leveled. I had a character die twice throughout my playthrough, because some enemies can use an instant death move, and you can't i-frame through terminal cancer. The gameplay is further dragged down by the monotony brought on by a lack of any plot and a constant loop of walking/sailing around way too ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ much for the pay off.
  
• The music — I can't help you with one. It's fine, from what I heard. I played most of the game with the sound off while watching podcasts or yelling racial slurs at people on Discord. This will improve your experience with the game.

Hopefully the tongue-in-cheek nature of this review is apparent and gives you some sort of insight as to whether or not you want to pick this game up. If you do, I recommend waiting for a sale. I wanted to go back and beat the older Final Fantasy games that I never got to experience because I'm a piece of ♥♥♥♥ that was born in '97, and I'm glad that I did. It's still a decent overall experience, and it's good to go back and see where it all began. At the same time, the game has negative plot, no dialogue, is not relevant to later titles in any way, and gets boring faster than reading twitter replies, so just know whether or not you're a die-hard JPRG dude or dudette before you buy.

Signalis is a hauntingly beautiful game. It demands your attention and forces you to ask questions. It makes you enjoy every minute of determined frustration while you try to uncover more and more information. The best review I can give this game is that you should play it without reading any reviews or summaries of it beforehand. It's best to save questions til the end in this case. I will, however, summarize my feelings on the most important aspects of the game.

Gameplay:
Gameplay is solid, with an inventory system and perspective similar to early Resident Evil games, but with much more fluidity and control. Combat is tense and fun, and offers many branching paths of decision making and strategy. Level design is simple but effective, and lends itself well to the atmosphere of the game. The inventory system is one of the game's strongest points, but also the only real gripe I can find with it. It will force you to make smart decisions with your items and ammunition, and prioritize different items, but can also lead to some backtracking in order to stock up on missed items, or lead you to having very little ammunition for your entire collection of weapons, making equipping yourself awkward if you haven't been careful. Overall, this doesn't hinder gameplay or become a time waste to any significant degree over the run time of the game. The puzzles are one of the most important parts of the game, tying in with the story and atmosphere of the game well. Some of them really make you think and put effort into exploration, forcing you into combat and to pay attention to your surroundings. All of this combined makes the gameplay feel well thought out and rewarding.

Music and Visuals:
The music and visuals of this game are absolutely stunning, and speak for themselves. Both are gorgeous, and are used perfectly at each beat in the story. If you don't care about the deeper story or full completion of the game, the landscape and powerful soundtrack will keep you wanting to know and see more. There's no better way to picture the emotion this game offers than to experience yourself, and thus I'm combining the music and visuals into one category and giving them a 10/10.

Inmost is a short and sweet game presented as a glimpse into how people take action in tough places. Great sound design and visuals carry the game all the way through, and the story gives you just enough to bite on for you to want to know what happens next. A great game to be played while relaxed in one or two sessions to take everything in. Recommended for those who want a solid game with a good story to unravel with it. More detailed thoughts on specific aspects of the game below.

Sound Design;
Sound design and music are the game's strongest components. Music is used appropriately and is both beautiful and impactful, complimenting and boosting the visuals accordingly.

Map Design & Puzzles;
The world that is fleshed out through the game serves its purpose well and adds to the mystery and intrigue of the story well. Finding and exploring new areas, and gaining information and a better view of the world is the strong-suit of the core gameplay. Puzzles and tasks very from acceptable to smart and rewarding. There is nothing that requires a supercomputer to figure out, but there's nothing dull and overly long weighing the game down either. Puzzles and tasks don't overstay their welcome and reward the player enough to stay engaging and feel accomplished upon making progress.

Story;
The story of Inmost is well crafted but somewhat understated. The underlying themes, dialogue, and message are nothing new or ground-breaking for any medium, and that's not a bad thing. The attachment formed with the protagonists, the pacing of critical information being revealed, the mystery of the real meaning behind it all, and the strong character moments sell themselves to the player well. That being said — The game does make the player ask "But what does it actually mean/have to do with everything?" and players who are not fond of that method of slow storytelling may not be as invested. However, the game gives you enough to piece together everything you need to know, and the tense segments of the game keep you wanting to play and see more.

Girls, pog