amphibious_ReViews

It was a long road to get me excited about a game like Tunic. Because of my growing love for the Ace Attorney games, I was looking for something that would similarly require deductive skills. Because of the video game music compilations I was listening to at work, Outer Wilds was sitting patiently in the back of my mind, even though I knew almost nothing about it. When Outer Wilds came to Switch and I learned that it was all about making discoveries and using clues to solve mysteries, I had to try it. Soon after, it became a serious contender for my favorite game of all time, and I wanted more. In my obsessive consumption of Outer Wilds discussions on YouTube, I noticed that Tunic would often be mentioned in the same breath. Unfortunately, it didn't have an in-game log like Outer Wilds, so if I wanted to play Tunic the right way, I needed to use a real-life notebook. Up until this point, I have actively avoided games that require me to put pen to paper, but Tunic wouldn't disl...

I don't think I've ever been so blind-sided by a game announcement in my life. I've been surprised by the short time between Xenoblade releases on Switch; I've been hyped for Ace Attorney games finally getting an English localization; this, however, is the first time a formative game from my childhood got a surprise sequel nearly 16 years after the fact. Before I bought it two or three more times on other platforms, the original World of Goo  was gifted to me by my aunt via a CD-RW she put together herself. I was a bit too young and inexperienced to recognize the dubious origin of that Sharpie-labeled disc at the time, but I wasn't too young to pop it in our family PC and stack some goo. Thus, my lifelong appreciation of tiny sentient goo balls began, and I'm thrilled that I was finally able to bear witness to their triumphant return! World of Goo 2 was immediately familiar and nostalgic. From the 2D Boy splash screen to the goo world itself being used as a menu...

Since its release, Monument Valley intrigued me. The gorgeous minimalist aesthetic combined with the fascinating Escher-inspired puzzles sat in my periphery for years. However, I guess I was never interested enough to drop any coin on it. I only ended up playing it more than 10 years after its initial release because it was included with my Netflix subscription. While I didn't like it enough to feel compelled to buy it outright now that I let my Netflix subscription lapse, I still had a genuinely good time playing it.   Monument Valley has you directing Princess Ida across little puzzle boxes of physical and gravitational impossibilities to return strange artifacts to their pedestals. You'll be responsible for choosing where Ida should go, as well as manipulating the terrain to discover and create new pathways for her. While most of the puzzles take no more than a few minutes, they frequently introduce new features and obstacles, so they remain engaging.   The eerie impossibil...

The Stanley Parable is an absolute roller coaster of a game. The less you know about it, the more you'll get from it, so reader discretion is advised. While I never played the Half-Life 2 mod that spawned the franchise, I did get the standalone release around a decade ago and absolutely loved it. That was before I was writing reviews, so I don't have any written proof, but my memory is still pretty clear. In fact, I liked it enough that I let my boss play it in the office conference room during a holiday party while we waited for the Jackbox group to coalesce (he's over forty years older than me, but he still got a kick out of it). That appreciation for the game never left me, so when the Ultra Deluxe edition was announced for consoles, I knew it would be in my collection someday. With nearly all of the content from the original (only one section of the game has had a major adjustment), alongside more than 100% more new content, this is easily the definitive Stanley Parable...

For over a decade, I have been a head-over-heels fan of Alex and Lindsay Small-Butera's animated web series, Baman Piderman. The absurdist comedy and eclectic animation drew me in immediately, and I've been a loyal fan ever since. I no longer remember how I learned about Later Alligator, but as soon as I found out that Alex and Lindsay were behind it, I was sold. Like most games I buy, this one lingered in my backlog for years, but I was reminded to play it again after an impromptu Baman Piderman watch party with my family. While Alligator New York City and its inhabitants somehow feel more grounded than anything in Baman Piderman ever did, the same creativity permeates the entire game, and it made me cackle like an overtired witch.   Later Alligator plays like a classic point-and-click adventure game, but it's absolutely stuffed to the brim with mini-games. The silent player character is contracted by Pat, a hat-wearing nervous wreck of a gator, to investigate his family, ...

Most of my gaming in 2025 was with Xenoblade Chronicles X. I picked it up on launch day in March, and didn't finish it until early November. Relative to my usual gaming consumption, I hardly played anything else during that time, devoting most of my attention to this release. I entered the game with the expectations that it was going to be a starkly different experience from the rest of the games in my favorite series, but also that I would still like it just about as much. On both accounts, I was nearly correct.   While some of the standards held by the rest of the series are disregarded here, Xenoblade Chronicles X was not as different from the rest of the games as I had anticipated. Because you control a customized character, the story makes room for you to have some agency, even in cutscenes, so the usual TV-show-like quality of the story is lost. One can (and I have) watch a compilation of all the main story cutscenes from any of the other games and it plays like it was design...

I really saw my eldest daughter's video game literacy grow throughout our time playing this game together. I selected it because I remembered sharing the controls with my younger sister when she was too young to play on her own, and I thought my princess-obsessed daughter might get the same kick out of it. At first, she was interested, but just wanted to watch me play or to point out things on the screen. By the end, she had her hands on the whole controller and was pressing most of the buttons by herself! All I did was provide gentle instruction and hold my big hands over her little ones so I could use the joystick. Disney Princess: Enchanted Journey was clearly designed for a younger audience, so don't take it as criticism when I say that it is simplistic and repetitive. The structure was perfect for helping my daughter feel comfortable. In this game, the worlds of a few Disney Princesses have been invaded by mischievous creatures called Bogs. You take control of a young girl...