Games

Gris is an artistically powerful game not only with the game's art, but also with their music as well. While the game itself has no voice lines or text for the story, this actually makes the game's message more powerful by making it a universal experience since it doesn't have the need for translating besides when teaching the controls.

Gris elegantly depicts the stages of grief, navigating through them, and the players gets abilities that match the stage they're in. This game is especially powerful for those who have gone through troubling times, and can see &hear the depiction of emotions that they've had or are going through.

Undertale

Highly Recommended ✩✩✩✩✩

Undertale is a must play game, and is best played without knowing anything, but if you do know about the game and story it won't diminish your gameplay. The surprise factor of some characters, and the fact that all your choices have consequences have made this game one of the best.

There is intense replay-ability with the possible endings, with some of the fights in some endings feeling absolutely impossible. If the player stays determined, the sheer satisfaction from defeating on of the more difficult enemies is seemingly intoxicating.

Even those who don't think the game is fun, it is generally agreed on that the music in the game are all absolute bangers. So much so to the point where is someone says the music sucks, that people assume they're simply a hater. The game can be very fun, but even if you somehow find yourself not enjoying it, you'll at the very least be vibing to the soundtrack.

It's hard to write about how amazing the game is without spoiling the coolest parts about the game, the best advice would be for you to experience it yourself.

Cult of the Lamb

Highly Recommended ✩✩✩✩✩

The Cult of the Lamb is a very enjoyable game, allowing the player to experience a couple different styles of games within one.

With management style aspects to make sure you cult members don't die or betray you with a variety of factors to keep in mind while you make decisions when choosing the next room when you're dungeon crawling, to even when you are setting up buildings, and exploring the map.

The combat feels very fulfilling with a natural increase of difficulty as you go further in the game, along with allowing you to choose which area you go next if you get enough cult members to skip the next intended area while you are still able to tell which area the game intends for you to take next.

The plot itself, can be very enjoyable as well, and it certainly didn't hurt you get to play as a cute little lamb of which the game even has a little 'baa' button to allow the character to make sheep noises.

Genshin Impact

Grinders Delight ✩✩

With being an open world game, it is fun to explore and find things, the regions further along in the story have more secrets and interesting places to explore- it's clear that as the game has been in development they've gotten better or perhaps more funding for the newer areas so they could do more.

The gacha system for characters feels incredibly unfair, especially for free to play(ftp) players. $100usd getting you about 50 wishes, with pity for getting a 5 star banner character starts at 70 to 80 wishes, it's incredibly difficult to get featured banner 5 stars. FTP players have it rough because it's takes so much grinding to get 160 primo gems to simply get 1 wish, you basically have to grind every day, several banners in advance to save to have enough wishes for a character you want- then of course you still have a 50/50 chance to not get the banner featured character. At the very least if you do lose your pity to a non banner 5 star your guaranteed the next time you pull a 5 star on that banner to get the featured one.

The event quests are fun, however it's poor design how they put very important lore in limited time events- if you miss an event or start the game after you completely miss out on this information. Some events have main quest requirements as well, so even if you want to do it, if you're behind you feel rushed to get through it which makes it hard to enjoy the story.

The characters are pretty & cute, but they could do better with their stories and personalities. It's very clear almost every female character is supposed to be a marketable 'waifu' character. If they explored more into morally grey and not the 'ideal waifu' women then the creators of Genshin would find people really liking the more complex characters.

As the game has gone on in development, long time players, such are finding playing Genshin Impact to be a chore. One of these main factors is the resin system. Capping at 160 resin at a time, and only allowed to have 5 condensed resin at a time simply doesn't feel enough. With bosses taking 40 resin, and other resin interactions taking 20, it simply isn't enough to keep the player entertain for long if they're grinding for relics or anything for their characters. Games having these kinds of limits is normal, but Genshin Impact should either lower resin and condensed resin's costs or increase the maximum resin a person can hold at a time in order to retain player attention time.

The main story follows a theme, from the very first location the player find themselves at; they arrive at a nation, the nation needs help, the traveler helps the nation, traveler asks for help finding their twin & gets denied any real help, traveler moves to another nation and repeat. When the traveler arrived in the third nation and was refusing to help it was refreshing, but was incredibly disappointed when they got dragged into helping regardless.

Bassically the game is a grinders heaven, if that's what you like in games.

Hollow Knight

Highly Recommended ✩✩✩✩✩

Hollow Knight is a metroidvania with no set order of events the player has to follow. This allows for great replay-ability as you can play the game differently each time you go through the story, to the point of leaving NPCs to die or to save those who seemed destined to die by the plot. Not only can you chose the order of things to do, but you also straight up skip abilities for an added challenge.

The bosses feel challenging when first starting out, but as you play you get rewarded as you get better at the game. This can be most noticed once a player has completed their first run through and goes for another run, often times being able to kill bosses their first try while on their first run though took them many attempts to beat.

There are optional challenges in the game itself, but for those who want even more of a challenge there is a game mode called Steel Soul. Steel Soul mode means there's no reviving, once the player dies, the run is over. Steel Soul mode only unlocks once the player has completed one of the endings for the game in the normal mode.

Along with having many routes to the game there are many secrets, breakable walls, hidden bosses, and secret routes really make the player feel rewarded for exploring every inch of the map.

Stardew Valley

Recommended ✩✩✩✩

Stardew Valley is a farm management game, where you completely ignore the farm if you want to. There are a variety of things you are able to do in Stardew in order for each person to have a more tailored experience.

While it is encouraged to work on the farm, and to become wealthy through crops & animals, you can also get money in other ways.

Fishing is one of the easiest ways to get money in the early game, and there are even fishing related buildings you can have put on your farm if you want your farmer to be fish focused. You can completely ignore crops and make your money off of fish this way. Most tools require ore being smelted into bars for upgrades, but you buy fishing pool upgrades instead. So you can spend all your time fishing if that's what you wish.

After a few in game days, the mines will open up, which allows the player access to free ores and monster drops. Ores can be purchased from one of the shops, but it's most cost efficient in the early game to get the ores yourself before you have boundless money. Monster drops are required for a few crafting recipes, but you can completely ignore them if you're not going for the crafting everything achievement.

The game isn't all about farming though, you can also, date, marry, and have kids with some NPCs. All NPCs have relationship cutscenes which allow the player to learn more about them, but not all NPCs are dateable- not unless you use mods. The Stardew community has mods for everything you could want and even some cursed ones. If there's an NPC you want to date but can't, there is defiantly a mod for it. If you play multiplayer you can even marry the other person you are playing with!

The game does take a lot of time to get deep into it, but there is so much to explore with the characters, expanding your farm, to even unlocking a whole island in the late game.

Among Us (Multiplayer)

Recommended ✩✩✩✩

Among Us is an online multiplayer game where you can either join public lobbies or play with your friends. Roles are randomly given at the start of a game, most players being crewmates, trying to complete all the tasks before the imposters kill them all, or to vote out all the imposters.

Use your deduction or deceit skills in order to win the win. Imposters try to pretend they're one of the crew by picking off the crewmates, by doing whatever they can to get people to believe they're a crewmate.

Crewmates need to complete all task or vote out all imposters to win the game, but be careful, as you can vote out other crewmates if you don't pay close enough attention to your surroundings or fall for the lies of imposters.

There is also an alternate mode, called hide & seek. Everyone knows who the imposter is, not meetings to vote them out, run away as the imposter with decreased vision but also decreased kill cooldown hunts you down. You can complete tasks to cut down the time you need to survive for, but beware, once the first timer counts down, you enter the final countdown, the timer becomes red, tasks can no longer be completed, and the imposter is much faster along with getting occasional pings to player locations- so you best keep moving. The hide & seek mode also allows for the host to choose who will be imposter so everyone can have a turn, or have it set to randomly pick.

With either game mode, it's a great way to spend time. If you play with friends, it adds an extra element of how well you know your friends, can you tell if they're lying or actually a crewmate?

Pummel Party (Multiplayer)

Highly Recommended ✩✩✩✩✩

Pummel Party is the perfect game to play with your close friends. Every played Mario party but wanted more violence? This is the game for you, a board game map where you're doing your best to get to the treasure before others, use your items the game gives you such as sniper guns or eggplant bombs to get rid of the competition and ensure your victory. If you know you're about to be attacked, you best hope you have a cactus item, by using it you get 1 attack immunity- but be careful, if you try using another item whether or not you actually do while wearing a cactus, you'll lose you shield!

It's not just navigating the board you have to worry about, in-between each movement round are minigames, the winner gets to go first next round, along with the higher you ranked the better item you get that you can potentially use against others.

You can play this game with a few or many friends, as their are small and big maps for both types of groups!

Attack on Titan 2

Highly Recommended ✩✩✩✩✩

The game's plot follows self insert character for the player during the beginning story of the anime. While most games who do this for show related game, the self insert feels forced and seems to contradict the original show, the AOT 2 game does it in a very fluent way as to make it feel like your character could have very well been in the anime all along. The plot following the self insert character feels very natural, and you truly feel like you belong while playing the game.

The controls are a bit tricky to learn at first, and skipping through the tutorials will leave you very confused- so even if you don't normally read them, movement is very important to know for the game. Once you know the controls though, the game itself is incredibly fun, being able to go on expeditions and seeing your custom character on screen and in cutscenes is very rewarding.

There is lots of replay-ability with side missions, hard mode, and game mode where you control the main characters as well. Along with the aspect of being able to see your friendship level with characters, the game pulls you in to keeping you around for more.

The ending of the game feels complete, giving a sense of satisfaction when reaching the end of the main story line. While it does leave questions for how there would be a follow up game since it is seemingly so concrete of an ending. Even with the finished ending, the player still wants more just because of how fun it is to play the game itself.

Beat Saber (Requires VR)

Recommended ✩✩✩

Beat Saber is a VR rhythm game. While the game itself is fun, the base game has a limited number of songs to choose from with additional songs locked behind DLC packages. Mods can help fix this problem, but the game itself constantly tries to update in order to block those mods to force people to simply buy their DLC packs. So while the game itself is fun, and a great way for exercise, it can be quite frustrating to not have many options when you have to buy the game in the first place, and most of the songs being locked behind another set of paywalls.

Celeste

Recommended ✩✩✩✩

Celeste is a precision platformer that is great for those who like a challenge. It's important for those who go to play this game to be okay with not succeeding the first time, as the games difficultly level gets fairly high pretty quickly, but then again there is a reason for the 'difficult' tag being on the game in the steam store.

The story is very heart warming, and even if you don't want to play this challenging game yourself then it is at the very least recommended to watch the gameplay as the story has a very important message.

Minecraft

Highly Recommended ✩✩✩✩✩

Minecraft is a sandbox game, which is great for a variety of different players. There is a good reason as to why Minecraft is one of the most popular games in the word. Along with all the updates Minecraft has had and is having over the years, the game has only gotten better and better.

Survival mode is the standard game mode of the game. The player explores an endless world, finding all kinds of different blocks and materials, the only thing that would stop you is yourself from venturing out in the world, along with the nether and end realms adding even more to the game.

Hardcore mode is like survival mode, except if you die you're dead. A terrifying challenge for those who dare to take it, work on your world for a month to years, and one mistake could cause you to lose it all- don't worry though! you can still enjoy all your hard work in spectator mode. This is a nice challenge for those who want more stakes when they play games.

Creative mode gives you access to all the blocks in the game, no fear of being harmed by enemies, a way to focus on simply building and creating for those who don't want to go out and gather the resources themselves.

I started out as a solely creative player, but as I've played the game over time I found going out and gathering the resources give me a different sense of pride in the builds I do. I still love creative, it's just survival and creative have different spots in my heart.

The only thing that limits you in this game is your imagination.