Inestimate's Game Reviews

Console: Steam, Switch, XB1, PS4, PS5, PSVR2, Quest 2, Quest 3 Developer:  Origame Digital Release Date: May 19th 2020 (Macro DLC released November 7th 2020) Umurangi Generation  is a first-person photography game all about artistic expression, exploration, and masterful environmental storytelling. Developed by solo Māori developer Tali Faulkner in 10 months, Umurangi Generation  is visually reminiscent of the PSX-era of games: low-poly, low-res, and blocky with mostly flat textures, but with tons of visual charm anyway. However, it very much plays like a modern FPS game, and the tutorial even says so. Just replace the guns with camera lenses.

Console:  Switch, XSX, XB1, PS4, PS5, Steam Developer: Pixadome Release Date:  September 1st 2022 Chenso Club is a roguelite platform brawler with cute pixel art, charming characters, and a focus on difficulty. The second release by the now-dormant Pixadome, Chenso Club  makes a good first impression, but struggles to keep the momentum going and ends up stifled by its own design choices. Chenso Club 's key mechanic is its difficulty counter: whenever a world is completed, the difficulty counter goes up by 1 and all enemies grow stronger and tougher. Upon death, as is typical of a roguelite, all powerups and upgrades are lost, and the difficulty counter returns to 1. The game also boasts four difficulty settings to allow the player the customize their experience, but it's quite clear that the target audience is firmly players who enjoy a difficult game, as the game can give you trouble even on Casual. Counting its final world, Chenso Club  has six unique worlds: the ...

Console: Steam, XB1, XSX, PS4, PS5, Switch Developer: Foreign Gnomes Release Date: March 4th 2021 Everhood is a rhythm-based RPG with strong narrative leanings focused around immortality, death, and goofy characters. Created by Chris Nordgren and Jordi Roca, Everhood  takes massive inspirations from multiple indie games, but none are clearer than Undertale  and Yume Nikki. Yet, I think it mostly succeeds at being its own thing. While I would typically avoid drawing comparison with other games so early on in the review, Everhood 's inspirations are so blatant that they are part of the first impression of many players, and some can't go past this impression judging by its comparatively few negative reviews.  Indeed, the wacky cast of characters reeks of Undertale , down to the point of giving each character a "voice" with text noises. Similarly to Undertale  as well, this is a game more based on its narrative than gameplay, despite having unique gameplay. And the narr...