Thread by @JohanSHolm

2023 games thread: a small review of every game I play and like. Ratings:
[★] Neat and worthwhile, but limited in scope / quality.
[★★] Stronger games falling short somewhat in concept, scope or execution.
[★★★] All-time greats.

Sylvie's Slime Time [★]. Super short but the last level rules, lots of different ways to approach traversing the space.

Creaks [★]. Pretty cute with enough meat to the puzzles and variety in gimmicks to sustain itself.

That Dream Again [★]. Dazzling nostalgia, but has no chill in getting you bouncing and flying around its tight landscape.

Snake Memory [★]. Cool little platforming challenges with catchy music, though I do kind of wish the flags remained.

Luigi Floating on an Egg Over the Sea [★]. Straight-forward autoscroller, but does a lot with its few components.

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island [★]. Charming, downright beautiful in places, decent platforming but a bit awkward with the gimmicks and puzzle bits.

The Cats Bahamas [★]. Fun little dynamics to figure out, often comes down to each boat having a linear path to go forwards and/or backwards to access different points at the right times. Ending goes hard.

[fr0g] clan official server 24/7 zk map [★]. Satisfying movement with wild obstacles, haphazard level design makes for surprisingly few dead ends while really pushing routing.

Dicey Dungeons [★]. Some cool characters and rules to explore, but any serious strategy is limited by its rng, and using dice for singular never stops being annoying.

Sluggish Morss: ɯnʇıuıɟuı p∀ [★]. Expands the previous a lot in dialogue and visuals, a really poetic rumination on time and cosmic purpose.

Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury [★]. The rolling and diving is really fun. Tight levels, slightly gimmicky as a rule with few blunders or stand-outs. Not very replayable since stars are as much secrets as challenges. BF is like a less bad sunshine, boring level design.

Sid Meier's Civilization V [★]. Huge step up in UX, while giving diverse and interesting options to explore and optimise. Spirals out of scale to be messier and less interesting than to start, not helped by awful AI and vague diplomacy.

Gunbird 2 [★]. Slightly slower characters but melee and charged uses for meter is cool, and there's some real fancy bullet patterns and overlays from early on. Rotating coins and gems I'm not as sold on, and no powerups for shooting boss parts is a shame.

Atlantis no Puzzle [★]. Cool mix of mapping out interconnected rooms, exploring item interactions and deducing the path of progress given those.

Riven [★]. Excellent worldbuilding and exploration with some good light puzzling along the way, but both of the major tests aren't entirely sensible in-universe nor flawless in logic, plus some obscure ways to progress that should've had a fallback route.

The Legend of Zelda [★]. Gets the basics right with solid enemy design and a compelling world to explore and navigate. Dungeons are fine generally, get a bit silly towards the end but some high points too (like bats with statues shooting fireballs).

Soft Kitten Experience [★]. Some cool tricks and satisfying rhythm-making in figuring out a routine for levels. Gravity is a bit of a downer, fair for a level as a gimmick and switch-up but beyond that a bit pointless and tedious.

Strikers 1945 [★]. Solid fundamentals, no bells or whistles, swamps you with enemies without being able to just shoot your way out of overlaps. No way I'm using anything but Spit Fire though, and as I descrub at shmups I'm not warming up to how reliant progress is on bombs.

Cocoon [★]. Puzzles don't require much thinking and wait to unlock info that slightly alters the solution for some tedium (especially juggling orbs), but they do work to show off creative interactions of the mechanics in a cool setting and towards the very end it's a bit tricky.

Slay the Spire [★]. Solid fundamentals with card management and structure, even if it takes a bit long to unlock stuff. Bit too limited in build agency and variety (random relic obtainment limits it a lot), but fun to happen upon combos and interactions a while.

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon [★]. Solid movement and economy, if very forgiving levels. Characters can be neat to juggle hp on with attached upsides (money boss is cool), but quickly gets repetitive both in strategy and skips (favoring Gebel), plus discordant instant kills.

@threadreaderapp unroll (you can't do this directly on the site anymore?)