GIPTM: April 2026
- Ryan Zhao
- May 1
- 29 min read
This is a monthly blog post in which I reflect upon and post micro-reviews for every video game I've beaten or otherwise concluded my time with in the month of April 2026. This includes both new and old releases.
Numerical ratings are purely subjective measures of my enjoyment of the game and are conducted on a full 100-point scale in which 50 means that I enjoyed it. Roughly speaking: 0 = hated it; 10 = frustratingly little enjoyment; 20 = seeds of ideas that were not adequately delivered; 30 = some interest; 40 = respectable effort but I didn't quite enjoy it; 50 = faint positivity; 60 = good; 70 = doing something uniquely well; 80 = great; 90 = very special; 100 = legendary.
Key: 🟩 = beaten; ⬛ = not beaten, but I will not be continuing; 🔁 = replay
Easy Delivery Co. ⬛
2025
I'm clearly not prepared for Medium Delivery Co.
Genre: Simulation || Job sim, driving
Played on: PC via Game Pass
Challenging in its tasks, but low-consequence to cushion its difficulty, Easy Delivery Co. is a parcel delivery game set in a snowy mountain region. The environment is hostile -- you start freezing to death as soon as you're exposed to the outside air, the roads are snowed over and often blocked, and the Silent Hill-like fog hangs heavy, making it challenging to see what exists in the far distance. But the hostility of the outdoors leads to a very effective coziness when visiting with other characters indoors, huddled around a fire, or even just driving in your truck.
While there's something inherently satisfying about making these low-stakes deliveries and navigating the sometimes winding and treacherous roads, I found navigation to be a bit inscrutable. The map does not display your current location (something I like in games like Tchia, in which spatial orientation is a fair and fun challenge, with its distinctive landmarks and topographic features). I, personally, had a hard time orienting myself, with the short draw-distances and rather similar-looking, snowy roads. Not to mention the confusingly-similar naming conventions for many of the game's locations.
While I admire the scale and aesthetics of the game, getting hopelessly lost in the mountains quickly became frustrating. It's a "me" problem.
Innovation the game introduces: Interesting use of distinctly Animal Crossing-stylized characters, drawing an interesting parallel with the fetch-quest errands done in that game with a more realistic, labor-intensive "ice road trucking" task.
What I'd like to see from future games: I love that there are physics applied to the parcels held in the back of the truck, and boxes can even go flying out of the truck-bed if corners are taken too quickly. But the boxes are slippery and over-tuned to fly out of the truck, so, even if you lose several parcels along the way, the game counts the delivery as fully complete when you arrive anyways. Maybe a mechanic to encourage careful driving was in place and removed, leaving only the visual. I think there's something interesting about that. Friction of the boxes needs to be better tuned, and ideally, we'd be able to place the boxes ourselves in such a way that we hope will make the packages secure.
Lineage and legacy: Aligns with an ongoing trend of PSX-stylized games, typified by games like Hypnagogia 無限の夢 Boundless Dreams and THRESHOLD.
Score: 41
Hozy 🟩
2026
This man cave is more like a man's grave
Genre: Simulation
Played on: PC
This game sits at the intersection of building / renovation games (such as House Flipper) and sandbox building games (like Townscaper and SUMMERHOUSE). It's objective-driven and follows that satisfying arc from trashheap-to-treasure, but very low-friction (no expenses or energy meters to manage, and cleaning / painting / destruction / construction is tuned to be near-effortless). It's all tuned to be satisfying, in the way that cleaning TikToks, paper towel commercials, or bubblewrap-popping are.
Once the room is cleaned, painted, and re-tiled, you're given a specific set of furniture and decorations with which to populate it. Like Unpacking, the specificity of these objects implies a sense of history. It's the closest I've experienced to the feeling of moving house. I'm given creative liberty to arrange things in the way that I prefer (as opposed to Unpacking's puzzle-like arrangement of right and wrong locations for each item), but it's not a sandbox -- the objects are limited and specific. They're loved and worn. They're chosen and specific to the life from which they came.
It looks quite exceptional as well. Light spills, beautifully, into a room as you clean the windows. Each object is lovingly modeled with an incredible amount of detail (especially considering the distant default view). There are satisfying physics interactions with squishy objects like beanbag chairs. The only issue I take with the visuals is the heavy ghosting / reconstruction artifacts that result from the game's DLSS; an appropriate tradeoff for the performance it gets, but a reminder of the artificiality of the experience in an otherwise grounded and tangible, textured simulation.
Innovation the game introduces: One level, set in a magician's studio, is quite playful with the physics of the simulation in a way I'm not used to seeing in an otherwise straight-faced and realistic sim.
What I'd like to see from future games: It might be fun to revisit the same space with another resident's belongings, letting the shape of the space be the constant while seeing how it adapts to owners of different personality profiles.
Lineage and legacy: Destruction and construction fits nicely into the House Flipper trend of home renovation games. Draws environmental storytelling inspiration from Unpacking.
Score: 79
Shadows of Doubt 🟩
2024
Detective Peek-at-You
Genre: Adventure || Detective, immersive sim
Played on: PC
One of the most ambitious indie projects I've ever seen; I've covered this in greater detail on an episode of the Cane and Rinse podcast I hosted. Shadows of Doubt procedurally generates an entire city with hundreds of citizens -- each with a fully furnished and decorated apartment, a daily schedule, an occupation, relationships with other residents, etc -- and, amongst these hundreds of citizens is a murderer. Investigate the crime scene and try to find the perpetrator before he or she strikes again.
The thing I love about the game is that it's an ambivalent detective sim. The only evidence is that which populates naturally as a result of the proc-gen crime. You're not being escorted toward a determined narrative conclusion like in Phoenix Wright; the story is not being optimized for narrative drama like Danganronpa. The game is not interested in leading you down a particular path; it's up to you to investigate using your own methods. Draw your own conclusions. Keep your evidence board organized in whatever way you see fit. Choose what details are and are not important to the strains of the mystery you want to pursue.
Naturally, no, you will not find narratives as emotionally-involving as those in Ace Attorney, but the stories the game generates will be yours. Investigations follow your own logic. Your avatar never knows something that you, the player, do not.
It had been in early access for a couple of years before its 1.0 release, and it felt ambitious, if a bit unwieldy, at the time. But it demonstrated a tremendous amount of promise, and the community's imagination for what the game could become ran wild. With its 1.0 launch in 2024, it still resembled its initial early access launch more than long-time invested players were hoping. It's still a great game and a staggering achievement, but, given years of assuming that significant development was still underway, many early players were disappointed that the game fell short of the vision it (implicitly) set out before itself, leading to a fairly mixed reaction amongst the community.
I recognize that there are ways in which the game can improve in future iterations, but I'm still thrilled with what we have now. The simulation of these virtual communities feels deeper, and interactions within that simulation more intricate, than anything I've seen before. There are ways in which it sets a precedent for urban simulation that I expect Grand Theft Auto VI is going to have a hard time matching (if it even pursues similar goals at all).
Innovation the game introduces: Fully-modeled building interiors are endlessly interesting to explore. I love the ways in which certain types of information are realistically squirreled away, as well. For instance, you can crawl through buildings' vents (John McClane-stlye), but they're weirdly challenging and disorienting to navigate unless you've found the building's blueprints; then it adds the vent structure to your map. One of many ways in which the game pushes you toward All the President's Men-like "doing your homework" rather than blind infiltration.
What I'd like to see from future games: Much of the game's UI, most notably its map, has room for improvement. It would be great if the dialogue system was a bit more robust -- if we could express more complex and nuanced ideas to NPCs and get more detailed responses.
Lineage and legacy: Cane and Rinse colleague Jesse Fuchs noted the closest historical parallel to this game's proc-gen deductive mystery ambition was 1983's Murder on the Ziderneuf. Follows the aesthetic patterns of near-future noir (despite actually being set in the past) like Blade Runner and Tex Murphy. Closest modern kin are Scene Investigators, The Case of the Golden Idol, and The Return of the Obra Dinn. Pairs nicely with the deluge of high-quality deductive mystery games from last year, like The Séance of Blake Manor, Strange Antiquities, and The Roottrees Are Dead.
Score: 91
Pokémon Legends: Z-A 🟩
2025
More like Legends: Z-C minus
Genre: RPG
Played on: Nintendo Switch 2
As a lifelong Pokémon fan, I've kept up with every mainline entry and many of the spinoffs. While the series ebbs and flows in quality, 2022's Pokémon Legends: Arceus represented one of the series' high-points. A novel, ancient setting, new gameplay conventions, a fantastic twist on region-specific monsters... It was a triumph in every sense. Its direct sequel has big shoes to fill. Aaaaand ... Legends: Z-A feels like a pretty unambitious whiff and one of the series' lows.
The Edo-period temporal setting is gone. The historical setting was used as the justification for the unique gameplay mechanics last time (before Pokémon and humans' domestication relationship evolved), so setting this one in present day is doubly-puzzling. Why not continue to set the Legends series in the past? Imagine a sequel set in the Unova region during the days of the American wild west, Red Dead Redemption-style.
Worse still, the entire game takes place in the walls of one city -- a historical stumbling block for fans of Dragon Age (though that game has come to have become better regarded). It lends very little visual variety to the region. Despite Nintendo's vow to the contrary ahead of time, it feels endlessly repetitive to see the same architecture, hear the same music, and struggle through the same genuinely awful platforming side-challenges throughout the game. It feels less like an adventure and more like running errands.
The way in which the game faintly succeeds is in making the Pokémon feel physically present. They roam with you in the overworld, have tasks to perform during your treks across the city, and battles are no longer a distinct, separate task. Even in such cramped corridors, Pokémon are permitted to be large, intrusive, and intimidating, particularly when in Mega Evolved form! And it's great to see how Pokémon have been trained to fit with the demands of urban life, similar to their clever integrations in the Detective Pikachu film. That said, the physical interactions between Pokémon and avatar are pretty minimal. The avatar doesn't ride Pokémon in this game like in games previous, and many functions that were previously mapped to Pokémon cooperation (such as gliding in the air) are now given to the avatar's haunted iPad. It works, but it feels like a missed opportunity to reinforce the theme of human-animal interation in an integrated city.
Many of the game's worst traits seem to have been reverse-engineered compromises from the initial poor decision to set the game all within the city. How do we integrate wild Pokémon? They live in cordioned-off animal sanctuaries ... in which you hunt and capture them. It's like going hunting in a zoo or fishing in a human-stocked lake. It becomes even harder to minimize the ethical problems with Pokémon capture when you're explicitly hunting these monsters while they're in captivity.
Still, it's not wholly unenjoyable. There is a floor for how bad a Pokémon game can reasonably be -- the foundations are solid enough. I don't mind a failed experiment if it means that the team is taking chances and exploring new ideas. But Z-A is disappointing because the vision is so murky. What were they hoping to achieve? What idea was worth exploring here? Especially following such a radical and successful reinvention as Arceus -- how is this the follow up?
Innovation the game introduces: Its big innovation is the real-time battling system. It's a decent translation of the turn-based mechanics, but it makes the puzzling choice to introduce a sub-game into each battle in which the player avatar must also avoid Pokémon attacks, else face an alternative game over mechanic. Diegetically, it makes sense, and it makes the monsters feel more present and dangerous, but it requires perpetually moving in a way that makes for inelegant visual characterization, and since Pokémon attacks (when commanded) are bafflingly oriented around the avatar's present position instead of the Pokémon's, it means that, when issuing a new command, the Pokémon has to walk over to the correct position relative to the avatar before attacking; a waste of time during frantic battles.
What I'd like to see from future games: Let's go back to historical settings for the Legends games. Wild west, knights and castles, nomadic tribes... Anything to give the sub-series a distinct and fresh identity.
Lineage and legacy: Sequel to Pokémon Legends: Arceus set in the city introduced in Pokémon X and Y. Real-time battles seem to be inspired by Final Fantasy mechanics, particularly those perfected in VII Remake.
Score: 39
Berry Bury Berry 🟩
2026
Grapes of wrath
Genre: Simulation, horror || Incremental game
Played on: PC
A first-person, lightly horror-adjacent incremental game with a satisfying loop and toy-like physical interactions with the game world. Taking place in a slightly sinister set of a children's TV show, you must feed the growing hole berries in order to be rewarded with currencies with which you can buy additional means of feeding berries into the hole. It has that compelling quality that incremental games offer, but the pleasure of being in the space (rather than just managing an interface, how incremental games are typically presented) makes a difference.
There are "hidden in plain sight" puzzles littered throughout the space, and they're always a pleasure to figure out. Clever, rewarding. They build to a conclusion that is a bit less than the sum of its parts, but it's fun to figure them out along the way.
The game builds towards a theme of distdain for greed and excess (the implicit theme of many, if not all, incremental games -- see Little Inferno for the most explicit example). While this theme has been explored-to-death in this genre, it's presented well in here; the mechanical metaphor is properly paced and incentivized, so the "monstrousness" of your actions become clear at just about the time you're nearing the end of the game anyways. This game executes its mechanical metaphor well.
Innovation the game introduces: Use of the hole to consume world props is a fun discovery to make, and the game continues to pay that mechanic off with some of the game's cleverest puzzles.
What I'd like to see from future games: The game does have a "ceiling" of rewards that is much lower than most incremental games. You can easily exceed its maximum capacity to which it is prepared to mechanically respond. For the real optimization / patience sickos, it would be fun to see continued growth beyond this point.
Lineage and legacy: Indebted to the lineage of incremental games, such as Cookie Clicker, Universal Paperclips, and Little Inferno. Exists in a continuum of post-Five Nights at Freddy's horror games set in the world of children's entertainment (Poppy Playtime, Garten of Banban, among so many others). Hole-swallowing mechanics seem to be inspired by Donut County, which, itself, descended from Katamari Damacy and ".io" eat-and-grow games.
Score: 75
LocoRoco 🟩
2006
Jelly roll
Genre: Platformer || 2D platformer
Played on: PS4, PS5
Such a joyful game; a smile-a-minute type of experience. But one that I took many years to finish. It's been installed on my PS4 (and now PS5) since ~2015, and I'd play a level or two here and there, but I was never compelled to make it all the way through to the end. It comes down to how similar each of the levels are. Very few have distinct level gimmicks that set them apart from the rest. As such, the experience of gameplay feels like a long, straight road; no twists and turns to add texture to the experience.
That said, it's a very charming game and enjoyable in its moment-to-moment control. It's good at what it sets out to do. It just feels more like a demonstration of the concept than its full realization.
The characters are all very charming -- there are some wonderful child performances, and I love the dramatic song of the blue LocoRoco. The design of some of the enemies feels a bit unfortunate, with the most common type resembling a blackface caricature and even sporting dreads.
Because of the vector-based visuals (it's not sprites; it's mostly math!), the game upscales very cleanly when emulated. I played the proper remaster, but having seen videos of the emulated versions (and having played Midnight Carnival, which is just a PSP emulation running natively on PS4/PS5), the differences are minor (mostly cleaning up a few sprite-based UI elements). Its graphical techniques give it a real timelessness.
It's a game of indirect control -- you tilt the world, you don't directly control the characters (like Super Monkey Ball). The LocoRocos have a bit of individual agency, as well -- left to their own devices, they'll hop around and explore, sometimes getting themselves into trouble or moving away from where you'd like them to stand. But it gives the game a feeling of cooperation between separate beings, and -- especially for a platformer -- very unusually resists embodied play. You are not the LocoRoco -- you are guiding the LocoRoco.
Innovation the game introduces: We are now quite familiar with games that adopt a minimalist, colorful, modernist aesthetic like this, but this was not the case at the time of LocoRoco's release. Video game graphics were still in an "arms race" in which greater density of details was seen as greater sophistication. Minimalism and abstract, iconographic simplicity was seen as "cheap" -- retro or confined to the free, hobbyist-made Flash games of emerging online communities. Reclaiming a "retro" aesthetic and modernizing it with clean vectorization and cutting-edge jelly physics was a radical departure from what was seen as graphical "progress", and it opened up the door to a wider diversity of styles that we still benefit from today!
What I'd like to see from future games: My biggest complaint coming out of this game was its lack of gameplay variety. I'm happy to report that the sequel addressed this!
Lineage and legacy: Follows a design branch of passive / indirect control platformers, like Lemmings, following the logic of The Incredible Machine. Went on to inspire games like PBJ - The Musical. Patapon feels directly indebted to this game's graphical presentation and its place in the PSP library.
Score: 71
she danced in the wind like a holographic dream before the world died 🟩
2026
The rose that grew from concrete
Genre: Adventure || Exploration adventure
Played on: PC
This is one of Nathalie Lawhead's spatial poems, and, like her other work, it is a mixture of written verse and semi-abstract imagery set in a 3D, explorable space. You play as the seed of a dandelion, drifting in the wind, flying through a devastated landscape; a forest of corpses, frozen in space like the victims of Vesuvius, growing twisted and wretched like gnarled trees.
It has the feeling of post-apocalypse, with the usual visual signifiers of an extinction event, but something else is growing in its place. Not just the typical "nature reclaiming abandoned spaces", but it is as if humanity's digital signature has continued to metastasize. All that is left is the virtual structures we created, but instead of being a monument to humanity's greatest collective achievement, the digital is only a reminder of our worst attributes. We built a great temple and filled it with all of our hate and scorn.
Throughout the game, you encounter messages and correspondences, distinguishable from the poetry by their colloquial tone. The first messages are obliquely accusatory, and they elevate in hostility and specificity to the point at which they start to sound like a raving mob demanding the blood of a witch. At first, it reads like audio logs (to use the video game convention) providing backstory as to how the fiction's setting ended up the way it had. Soon, it becomes clear that these are real messages expressing real hate; embarrassing and shameful hate, targeted at the game's author.
Nathalie created this work expressing the pain, humiliation, and undue persecution she experienced after she, herself, was violated -- first by an industry colleague and subsequently by the online community and their structures of hate who sought to delegitimize her account to protect the reputation of her attacker. Hell is other people.
The game culminates with a visage of a crucified figure; a satisfied bloodlust. A skeleton hangs amidst a deluge of genuinely upsetting messages. It represents a defeat, though perhaps not of the author herself but of the image of the person the hateful commenters had grown to imagine her to be. Crucially, the hanging body is a long-dead skeleton; it is alien from the agential player position. Instead, the player, controlling a seed -- the foundation of new life, concludes the game by literally rising above it all; flying upwards to leave the metastasized structures of hate behind. The game exits; it points outside of itself, indicating that greater possibilities lie outside of the virtual space in which death felt inescapable.
Innovation the game introduces: I have played hundreds of indie games on the artsy-fartsy side of the road; it's what I'm passionate about. But each of Nathalie's games present me with some kind of visual aesthetic idea that I had never seen before. The opening shot of this game, blurry at first but slowly coming into focus as a skull inside of a tight nook is masterful. The cohesion of the image is a slow burn, and upon the morbid realization of what we're looking at, we find that we're trapped in a narrow space with it. It is also the first point in the game in which we discover that this is a nightmare not of humanity but of the digital memory humanity has left behind; the glitch-grunge in this scene (and throughout) is mesmerizing and uncanny.
What I'd like to see from future games: If I have one complaint about the game, it's that I don't feel that the controls are wholly cooperative yet. Floating through the air, you can propel and elevate yourself with the space bar, but it has a strictly limited range. At the end of this range, your forward momentum stops dead and you begin descending directly downwards. It feels very artificial and not evocative of the listless inertia of a seed floating in the breeze. You can extend the range of your flight by pressing the space bar again, and continue indefinitely by finding the proper rhythm of space bar depressing, but this kind of rhythmic tapping doesn't have a kinetic link to the type of avatar (floating seed) that we are intended to embody. It feels like an unjustified player motion.
Lineage and legacy: Inspiration taken from Flower.
Score: 93
Anthology of the Killer 🟩
2024
"Gee, I guess instead of Dark Souls we should have 'gotten good' at murdering women"
Genre: Horror || Exploration adventure
Played on: PC
True to its title, Anthology of the Killer is a collection of nine games, published between 2020 and 2024. They are bitterly-comedic yet surprisingly bleak horror adventures, navigated like walking simulators (exploration adventures). Notably, though, the games’ dialogue and progression flags (the points in the level that trigger the next bit of storytelling) are visible, like collectables, making the act of exploring the space more like reading a graphic novel and choosing, explicitly, when to turn the page to get to the next bit of story.
Each of Anthology’s stories stars BB, a young woman struggling with hilariously mundane life problems in a city constantly under attack by an immortal serial killer. Violent slasher movie deaths are a nightly occurrence and have become a commonplace part of life; they’re factored into apartment leases and insurace terms. The ubiquity of violent death seems to have shaped the social psychology of the community: their lingo, their senses of humor, their arts. As such, everyone in the city says horrifying, gruesome things that would have no place in polite conversation in a normal, healthy society, but you get the sense that the morbid humor of these citizens is the way that they cope with the ever-presence of death; a fear so persistent that they have become numb to that feeling and simply laugh or grumble their way through it — similar to how we, in modern-day America, have to suppress our horror at the atrocities committed against us and ostensibly in our names on a daily basis.
I’ve talked about this film concept before — a Friday the 13th sequel set two hundred years in the future in which the immortal Jason Voorhees has spent every hour of every day murdering nearly everyone on Earth; the remaining civilizations are nomadic tribes trying to maintain some semblance of social order and reciprocity while trying to stay one step ahead of Jason. This game felt like a successful exploration of similar concepts.
The game is consistently funny, in writing, scenario, and animation. Its humor always skews just over the line of shockingness. I was constantly asking, “is this okay to laugh at, or has it gone just a step too far?”. The wickedness and morbidness of the humor is counterbalanced by the game’s episodic structure. It takes a monster-of-the-week format, with each bundled game having a unique setting and narrative hook, like Goosebumps stories, but pitched a bit older. You have the assurance that, however the episode resolves, the next will start from a fairly even status quo; the series’ consistent protagonist isn’t going to die (or at least stay dead); but, on the other hand, a clean reset means that Gillmurphy can push the destruction of the secondary cast and desecration of locations to any end, as there is no need for the continuity of space or supporting players to carry over.
Innovation the game introduces: The bonus content included with this compiled package is great. The level select hub is framed like the opening of an exhibit, and there is a generous additional exhibit showcasing the sprites, wallpapers, and even shader effects that constitute the game.
What I'd like to see from future games: Minor quibble, but the way the game handles window sizing is odd. The window can be resized freely (and must, as it opens quite small by default), but it's important to maintain the window's aspect ratio, else dialogue boxes will be forced off-screen. It takes a bit of adjusting every time the game is opened to get the ratios correct at a proper size.
Lineage and legacy: Original explorations built in RPG Maker, following trend of RPG Maker horror games. Games within this anthology originally published independently over the course of many years.
Score: 87
Chicken Hill 🟩
2025
Why did the chicken become the road?
Genre: Puzzle || Hidden object
Played on: PC
This game is a twist on hidden object games involving tracking down not specific objects but a race of chickens that can possess objects. Every object they possess gains its silly facial expression. So, essentially, you're looking through dense and elaborate scenes for occurrences of these cartoon faces.
The game is very short, and the entirety of its text is in Chinese, so it's hard for me to determine exactly what's going on with the game's story -- populated with over-the-top characters and elevated sequences -- but it's a silly good time.
Innovation the game introduces: Following the standard hidden object puzzles, the game culminates in a timed challenge that plays more like a shooting gallery. Under a tight time limit. It's a nice bridge between puzzle and action gameplay and a fitting conclusion and twist based on the game's previous challenges.
What I'd like to see from future games: A localization patch would be nice, though, for such a simple game, the inscrutability of its text descriptions adds to its odd mysteriousness.
Lineage and legacy: Hidden object game following current trends in the genre.
Score: 69
LocoRoco 2 🟩
2008
I'm loco for roco
Genre: Platformer || 2D platformer
Played on: PS5
The first LocoRoco nailed the series’ identity, creating an appealing and joyous world but perhaps letting it down slightly by coming up with too few things to do in that world. LocoRoco 2 expands on the modes of interaction and gets the most from the musical formula. Each level has new ideas, creating a much more propulsive, engrossing progression experience.
The game feel of LocoRoco is based on textures; the soft-body physics of its protagonists and the ways in which their amorphous jelly bodies interact with different surfaces, shapes, angles, tunnels. There is a toy-like appeal to squishing and stretching these creatures; breaking them apart and putting them back together.
Following on from that, the best new mechanics in LocoRoco 2 are based on similar principles. The LocoRoco may roll into a hard shell and roll its uneven surface through obstacles. The LocoRoco earn the ability to venture underwater, but instead of swimming, it has the feeling that the creatures are playing with their density to sink or rise by the force of their changing buoyancy.
There are stages that are specifically modeled after pinball tables, a playful nod back to one of the unnamed influences on the series’ gameplay. That, itself, would make way for Yoku's Island Express years later.
My biggest complaint about this game is that it leans, to a greater degree, into a focus on combat, which has always been a weak point of the series. Enemies are more frequent, and, while it can be satisfying to aim and time the perfect jump to sock them right in the face, more often it reminds us of the inconsistency of the mechanics that support the combat systems. For example, when falling at a high speed, enemies can be bonked from above, knocking them out; but the exact speed that enables this attack is unclear. Falling any slower than that speed will result in the enemy catching and taking a nibble from the LocoRoco instead, so when you’re falling and see an enemy below, you have a choice to make — to avoid it or target it — requiring information that is poorly communicated.
Innovation the game introduces: The new mechanic that felt like the most awkward fit is the rhythm minigame that takes place when the LocoRocos sing at specific points to unlock secrets mid-level. The screen is lined with musical notes, with a cursor that passes through them. The notes are timed to beats in the music, and hitting the beats on-time issues greater bonuses at the end of the activity. Playing percussive support for the chorus (successfully-timed presses play the sounds of tambourine hits), it supports the framing that we are not directly controlling and playing as the LocoRoco, but it raises the question of just whom are we within this world? If a force of the planet itself, which is how the narrative frames it, the percussive backup feels like an odd element.
The game also introduces a new type of collectable hidden in each level: musical notes. They are picked up by performing fun, mundane interactions with the toy-like environment. It further incentivizes physical, playful exploration of the space and rewards players by “leveling up” the stage in ways that make collecting the game’s other limited collectables easier. It’s a generous system for those intent on 100%ing the game by rewarding repeat playthroughs of courses.
What I'd like to see from future games: Some of the most interesting sections of the game hinge around the LocoRoco being chewed up by a squirrel-like animal and spit out in a different shape that affects their movement capabilities and jumping angles, just by nature of their new shapes (for example, square or long, thin rectangle). It might be interesting to build a future game around this, allowing players to mold and squish their LocoRoco into different shapes in order to get through particular types of obstacles. It’s nice to be able to feel the difference in the control of a protagonist you helped shape (as recently demonstrated in Kiln), and using amorphous shape as a level design challenge is an interesting conceit (as demonstrated in Mushroom 11).
Lineage and legacy: Sequel to LocoRoco. Minigames follow arcade archetypes and would even feel at home in the at-the-time emerging mobile game marketplace.
Score: 76
DYNASTY WARRIORS: ORIGINS 🟩
2025
Army of one
Genre: Brawler || Musou
Played on: Xbox Series X (game received for free)
Despite rinsing the original Hyrule Warriors on every system onto which it was released, I had never truly given full attention to a game in the mainline Dynasty Warriors series before. Following the poor response to 9, Origins made some significant changes to the series' formula in an effort to serve as an ideal entry point for those who, like myself, are new to the series.
Dynasty Warriors exemplifies abundance in all things; an outsized effect of each swing of the sword on the battlefield, an excess of playable characters, an enormity of optional content with which to engage. Rather than elevating, Origins smartly scales back in particular avenues in an effort to refocus on fundamentals.
Gone is the enormous roster of playable fighters plucked from Chinese history; the game features a single, blank-slate protagonist (whom I named Wanker, a choice that kept paying dividends in dialogue exchanges throughout the game). This single warrior can equip and level several types of weapons, essentially folding the play-styles of multiple characters into one avatar with a single progression path.
While I did not tire of my character (there's too little in his characterization to arouse much of an opinion one way or the other), it does raise questions about the storytelling conceit and mission of the series. Being loosely based on the history and mythology surrounding the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese civilization, hinging the outcomes of multiple wars on the lone contributions of one original, ahistorical character feels historically incurious. Obviously, the entire series is built on an over-the-top, reductionist aesthetic of individual spectacle -- no single warrior is slicing through dozens of combatants with each swing of the sword. But the hyper-competence and mythic martial presence of each figure reflects the degree to which their influence looms large in the myth-making surrounding the period. Strategic, political, and cultural victories made by these figures are focused and represented as larger-than-life combat presence using the active mechanics of the games' combat. Because there is no grand myth-making associated with the mysterious drifter named Wanker, this layer of mechanical metaphor feels stranded and unfulfilled.
Innovation the game introduces: The Warriors games have always been a mixture of character action and strategy, as you not only have to manage your own armed contribution to the conflict but manage the flow of the battle at-large. This game simplifies the strategic considerations, perhaps too much. You have to be conscious of which allies need your support at any given time elsewhere on the battlefield, but performance of large-scale tactics has been scaled back.
What I'd like to see from future games: With the success of adaptation of other IPs into the Warriors formula (Zelda, Dragon Quest, One Piece...), I feel like the musou genre would be a perfect outlet for a Kingdom Hearts spinoff. Hearts' lavish, over-the-top animations and variety of weapons and enemies could be beautifully exhibited in this style of game, and the main series has even aspired to the spectacle of such large scale battles as far back as Kingdom Hearts II.
Lineage and legacy: The series evolved from Koei's turn-based strategy series, Romance of the Three Kingdoms (based on Luo Guanzhong's novel of the same name). Dynasty Warriors spun-off first as a fighting game (memorialized in this game's dueling mechanic) before pioneering the action / strategy hybrid gameplay for which it is now known. Romance continues alongside Warriors, with the most recent entry being released in 2020.
Score: 80
Quilts and Cats of Calico ⬛
2016
Knitten
Genre: Puzzle, strategy || Tile matching
Played on: PC
A board-game-style competitive puzzle / strategy game built around a quilting aesthetic core, Quilts and Cats of Calico feels more like tabletop play than video game play, as it front-loads its rules in a breakneck tutorial. In the opening minutes of gameplay, the pace of the tutorial and the density of rules and lingo it drops without much was unexpected, but it quickly becomes very manageable. It echoes the experience of reading the instruction booklet of a board game rather than being experientially led through the learning process as one might expect in a video game.
The game is simpler than it initially appears. Fill the "board" (quilt) with hexagonal tiles, each with a pattern and color, in order to satisfy the requirements of "goal" tiles (which award points) or to build patterns, generally, that contribute additions and multipliers to the total score, most often against competing NPC agents. It is satisfying and elegant.
Innovation the game introduces: The game uses its aesthetic theme to put the players in the proper mindset, invoking its board game inspirations with a stronger sense of tactility than the game actually requires. The quilt board is soft and reactive, and cats wander in from off-screen and lounge around on the board. These cats can even get in the way of the readability of the board, but they make for a very charming nuisance. There is a button that can be pressed that immediately clears the board of feline intrusion, but playing around them feels very true to the experience of playing board games in non-ideal environments. Lovely little design touch.
What I'd like to see from future games: Something about the stylization of characters in the dialogue segments did not fit with the way that the rest of the game was stylized. The game has a striking look, and 5% more cohesion between its elements could elevate it.
Lineage and legacy: Proudly exhibits boardgame roots, replicating the physicality of how a game like this would play in a real, physical setting. Hexagonal pieces reminiscent of games like Hex and Hexago.
Score: 71
PRAGMATA
2026
Dad Space
Genre: Shooter || Third-person shooter
Played on: Xbox Series X (game received for free)
Capcom continues its miracle run of high-quality games with a brand new, original IP that borrows liberally from great games of the past that have otherwise disappeared from public attention; the likes of Binary Domain and Vanquish. What we get is a brilliant balance between gameplay that feels pioneering but familiar. All tuned with expert grace to be one of the standout games of the year.
I am always interested when games present dual-protagonists like this, framing a single avatar-unit's abilities as a combination between two distinct characters (Banjo-Kazooie, Jak and Daxter, Ratchet & Clank, Donkey Kong Bananza). The experience of playing the game is one of controlling a single avatar entity, but the attribution of particular mechanical verbs to one character or the other reinforces differing identities.
Like last year's Donkey Kong Bananza, PRAGMATA pairs the big, lumbering "doer" with the small and nimble "preparer". Dividing their realms of effect between the physical and the "ephemeral" (though the latter can affect the physical) is a smart way of making their skill sets complimentary rather than reduntant or competative with one another, from a play perspective.
Movement and platforming is a bit inelegant, and Hugh's movement speed is always a bit lower than you'd want it to be for game spaces of this size, but the combat feels great and complimented heavily by the split focus between puzzle and action tasks and the frantic mood that can create.
The progression systems (with regard to avatar and weapon enhancements) provide an empowering sense of perpetual progress, but they feel like they could be more interesting. Weapons and hacking commands are upgraded with a currency obtained through combat and found in-world (requiring limited collectables to progress further once certain milestone levels are reached). The currency is not lost on death (like it is in Dark Souls); it is strictly cumulative. It's a nice assurance that you're always making some progress toward a goal even when struggling with a section, but it doesn't result in making significant choices during play. Compare it to Vanquish's weapon-leveling system, which levels up firearms when picking up ammo that exceeds their maximum capacity, such that powering up a favorite weapon requires holding it but not using it, a short-term sacrifice (and a push towards using weapons other than your primary favorite) in pursuit of a long-term goal.
Innovation the game introduces: I always respect games that bake a permission structure for taking design shortcuts into the premise (genuinely; this is not a backhanded compliment). The game's setting is a lunar base created with heavy use of (frequently-malfunctioning) 3D printers. As such, any inelegance in object cloning, positioning, intersection, etc. is a result of the rote function and impersonal malfunction of the 3D printing tech. The uncanniness of particular elements is a part of selling the setting.
What I'd like to see from future games: The layering of hacking (puzzle) and action gameplay was well-executed, but the hacking felt very contextual. It would be exciting to see that layer of gameplay more deeply integrated. Games like Watch_Dogs 2 and Gunpoint make hacking puzzles a much more expressive, open-ended toolset within the sandbox. For future PRAGMATA games, it would be great for hacking and combat to be more co-effective options for dealing with combat and exploration.
Additionally, taking a cue from one of Watch_Dogs' smartest design decisions -- Watch_Dogs' hacking is cued by persistent visual prompts on-screen; white lines that extend from the avatar to the nearest hackable object in the game world. This ensures that the player always knows what object will be "acted upon" (hackted upon?) when initiating a hack. PRAGMATA features no such visual indicator until the left trigger is depressed; you don't know for sure which object the game will "choose" to hack until the hacking begins, and the game sometimes chooses incorrectly in high-intensity moments.
Lineage and legacy: Feels of a lineage of design with Vanquish, Binary Domain, Resident Evil 4, Dead Space... Follows the recent trend of "dad games" (The Last of Us, God of War [2018]), with a particular kinship with Donkey Kong Bananza, for replicating the "young girl rides on the shoulders of the big smashy guy" dynamic.
Score: 91
Hidden Cats in Barcelona
2026
Casa Catlló
Genre: Puzzle || Hidden object
Played on: PC
Of the modern hidden object games, the Hidden Cats series is my favorite. The games open with magnificent city-scale puzzles with moving pieces and a Where's Waldo level of detail, based on real cities. The map slowly colors itself in as cats and select humans are found. Once all of the cats in a particular building are found, that building is colored in, narrowing the search to unexplored areas as fewer and fewer cats remain. The game then opens into a series of smaller puzzles which are not traditionally progressively colored in the same way; manageable for smaller spaces but unnecessarily challenging once the spaces become larger.
This game improves upon the formula by applying a progressive coloring mechanic to all stages. It does make the latter stages significantly easier, but it also gives enough time to appreciate the fully-colored version of each scene, something that was not appreciable until stages were completed, previously, and thus, there was no more reason to focus in on the scene's details.
Innovation the game introduces: One of my favorite elements of these games is the colorization of characters. Since every stage starts of as black-and-white line drawings, only colored in as objects are found, the color choices made for its human characters seem deliberately incongruent with expectations. Characters with particular ethnic signifiers (hair style, facial construction, etc.) will always be colorized with skin and hair color you do not expect. To the point at which I must assume it is an in-joke amongst the artists.
What I'd like to see from future games: Progressive coloring is such a step forward. It would be fun to see a similar mechanic applied to the emerging market of 3D hidden object games. Perhaps it exhibits an Unfinished Swan feeling.
Lineage and legacy: Hidden object puzzles originated in print publications such as magazines and books. They were adapted to the digital medium in the 1990s with games like Mother Goose: Hidden Pictures and I Spy. They became a dominant genre in the "casual" game space in the mid-'00s. Hidden Cats as a series originated in 2022, amidst other games in which cats are hidden amidst various locations. A competing series, Cats Hidden, has been threatened by lawsuit by this game's publisher, now retitled Travellin Cats.
Score: 76
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