Thirsty Suitors mixes turn-based combat with a quicktime event-fuelled cooking minigame and a mostly-optional skateboarding system complete with combos and tricks. It’s a strange blend of genres, but it’s all tied together by an excellent story and strong structure.

In each chapter of the game, you set out from your parents’ house with a main quest and possibly some side quests to do. You pick one of the two explorable areas, and skate around them towards your objective. On the way, you can interact with floating objects to fight random battles, participate in optional skate challenges, or just rack up a huge combo and find some health or mana pickups laying around. Skating is like a simplified, more forgiving Tony Hawk game, but gets pretty hard if you pursue a lot of the optional challenges. Once you arrive at a quest, you’ll get some dialogue options, experience the story, and inevitably be pulled into battle.

The combat rests upon its weakness system: You can guess an enemy’s weakness based on their personality, and if they fall for a taunt, they’ll be debuffed, and take extra damage from attacking skills of that type. All 5 types are the same except for the specific debuff they inflict, and the combat isn’t super deep as a result, but it’s elevated by the storytelling woven through the main story fights. You’ll be given dialogue options that can change the fight’s trajectory, as well as hints as to which types they’re weak to. It’s exciting to balance the mechanical aspects of combat with the ever-changing landscape of the fight, and makes the story battles far more interesting than random encounters.

WATCH THE THIRSTY SUITORS VIDEO REVIEW ABOVE

The combat also features action commands, which boil down to a QTE that reduces the damage you take or increases the damage you inflict. They’re a little repetitive, but they keep the combat from feeling automatic, and work to highlight certain late game moments.

More than anything, Thirsty Suitors leans on its story, and the writing is excellent. The game has a deep grasp of intergenerational trauma, family dynamics, Indian-American culture, and dysfunctional coping mechanisms, and turns these into both the game’s emotional core and expressive fantasy visuals. The animation here is very funny, but also depicts the emotional reality of the situation. Jala parkours all over the place, her dad wobbles onto the table, and her mum stiffly makes passive aggressive comments.

A lot of the game is about Jala atoning for her past, and overcoming the ways she has hurt people to protect herself. Your choices impact her personality in three stats, which influences certain parts of the story as well as her combat stats.

The cooking minigames are made up of slightly more involved quicktime events than the regular actions commands, combined with conversations with your parents and a metre management minigame. Again, it’s nothing too deep, but the story is so good and they’re infrequent enough that it stays fresh.

The game’s art is stylish and coherent, and the music, animation, and effects all support this. There’s plenty to do in Thirsty Suitors, as you can skate as different characters, including a cat and dog, and you can also unlock songs and outfits for Jala. The game took me 9 and a half hours, and I did barely any of the skating challenges, but completed all the side quests and cooking recipes I could find.

This is one of the best stories in a game this year. If you like sharp writing, turn-based combat, a little skating, and don’t mind some quick time events, this is easy to recommend.

Thirsty Suitors is available now on PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox Series S and X, Nintendo Switch, and PC, and is also a part of Game Pass

Finn’s moveset is small. You can roll by holding the trigger to gain speed, jump, attack the ground to do a longer jump, and jump immediately after touching the ground to jump higher. Although you’ll unlock new abilities as you collect more eggs, the platforming stays simple and precise, and the bulk of the game is spent using your limited abilities to solve puzzles. 

Distant eggs generally involve hybrid puzzle-solving and platforming. You explore to find a way up, but there’s something stopping you, and you have to solve a minor puzzle to remove the obstacle. In general, these are easy, but satisfying, because they require understanding your platforming abilities to overcome your low jump height, and using the nearby interactable parts of the level. Maybe you need to grow a tree so you have something to jump onto, or maybe you just need to climb up to a different platform and glide over, once you unlock that ability.

WATCH THE CAVERN OF DREAMS VIDEO REVIEW ABOVE

Puzzles, on the other hand, often involve finding things that connect in different areas of the level. For example, a switch for a locked door is found by following a riddle’s clue to another area of the level. A few puzzles are incredibly obscure, but the majority of them are relatively enjoyable, testing your sense of exploration, and occasionally your ability to understand how different parts of the level connect.

There’s no combat in Cavern of Dreams, but this isn’t necessarily in the game’s favour. While many platformers have boring combat, it makes you pay attention in between the jumping challenges. When looking for your next puzzle to solve in Cavern of Dreams, there’s nothing to do but run.

To be fair, Finn’s roll can be a lot of fun to use. Rolling down a hill, then taking a big jump with the momentum you gained is satisfying on its own. That said, going up slopes is painfully slow, and Finn’s moveset is small, leaving you with little to mess around with other than rolling.

The problem is that the platforming is overly punishing. There’s no health system to speak of, so pits will instantly kill you, and other hazards bounce you unpredictably backwards, often into a pit. When you die, you’re sent to the last door you exited, which can be all the way at the beginning of a level. Because the unlockable buttslam is the only way to gain height, you’re best off halting all momentum and carefully taking each jump. The game has a bunch of narrow platforms above pits where you can lose minutes of progress, and when levels lean into that, it can be more tiresome than fun. The joyful elements of the platforming aren’t encouraged, and instead the game feels more like a cautious puzzle platformer.

Cavern of Dreams is heavily inspired by Nintendo 64 platformers, with a blur filter, low poly models, and simple, charming music. I definitely had fun for the game’s 5 hours, despite the last level being pretty annoying. But I found myself wishing the movement was faster and more frantic, and that just isn’t what this game is. If you prefer your platformers with a focus on the joy of movement, this isn’t for you. But if you like 3D puzzle platformers or classic N64 games like Rocket: Robot on Wheels, this is worth considering, because taken on its own terms, it’s a charming little adventure.

Watch the Review in 3 Minutes for The Lamplighters League, a pulpy turn-based tactics game by Harebrained Schemes.

The Lamplighters League Review Transcript

The Lamplighters League is a turn-based tactics game by Harebrained Schemes in which you fight to stop supernatural forces from ending the world.

Each mission features two modes: real time recon, and turn-based combat. At the beginning of each mission, the enemy forces won’t know you’re there, and you can use takedown abilities to thin out the enemy forces, explore to find resources, and move towards your objectives. You have a limited number of takedowns, and some enemies are completely immune to them, so you’ll inevitably end up in combat. Outside of some fiddly detection mechanics, this works well for the game.

In combat, agents start the turn with 2 action points each, which you can spend on movement or abilities unique to that character Everyone has a basic gun or melee attack, but they also have unique passive and active abilities that grant them interesting playstyles.

After a mission, you choose upgrades and heal your group of mercenaries, then pick a new mission from the world map. Three members of the Banished Court are striving to open a tower that will give them control over reality, and each week, the gauges at the top of the screen increase. If any of the three fills all the way up, it’s game over.

If you fight a battle against one of the groups, you’ll stop their gauge from increasing, so you’ll often be juggling missions that have the resources you need, missions that stop a large increase of a certain group’s gauge, and critical missions that get you closer to your overall goal. The choices here feel meaningful, but not overly complex.

New units from recruitment missions come with entirely new sets of abilities, and they’re exciting to experiment with, especially combined with the upgrade system. Each agent has a skill tree, as well as three equipment slots and three Undrawn Hand card slots that can modify their playstyle, and synergizing these different upgrades can lead to some broken, riotously fun combinations.

After each mission, you’ll be presented with a semi-random selection of cards to equip on the agents who completed it. These effects can be quite strong, like an ability that grants an extra AP, or recovers health while attacking, and the cards can also be upgraded. The randomness adds a nice bit of chance in creating truly powerful units, and encourages you to use units you want to upgrade.

That said, there’s no real reason to use or upgrade more than four agents. You’ll often have so many healing resources that the wounds acquired in battle can be banished immediately, and even wounded agents are quite usable. Skill points are shared between all agents, so you might as well stack them onto the same few, since you can only take three on most missions anyway, with four used for the big ones.

Each character is well written and distinct, and the overall story is fun, though meager. The game as a whole looks fairly good, especially the pulpy character designs, and while the music gets repetitive due to the game’s length, the voice acting and sound effects are well executed.

I finished a rushed playthrough of The Lamplighters League in around 27 hours on normal difficulty. There aren’t many unique features to note, but I enjoyed my time with the game’s solid design. It’s reasonably replayable due to some randomness, but there’s not as much sheer content here as in games like XCOM or Fire Emblem: Three Houses, which may disappoint some.

If you’re not a fan of turn-based tactics games, The Lamplighters League isn’t going to sell you on the genre. But for those who are, this is a far above average, if unremarkable, take on the formula with clever character abilities, and it’s worth a few dozen hours of your time.

The Lamplighters League is out now on Xbox One, Xbox Series S and X, and PC for $49.99, or included with Xbox Game Pass.

There are a few reasons to create routines for players. One is, the actions that make up the routine are fun. Doing actions in a set routine creates a natural variety of gameplay – you can’t just water plants all day, because you need to look after your animals and build relationships. It also allows games to be longer and satisfy the player with a certain mechanic. If they only shoot one or two bad guys in the entire game, the player might feel they wanted to do more shooting. That all said, the most important reason for repetition is that it provides pacing and structure.

The only reason changes in gameplay are meaningful is because you’ve done the same thing before. When you unlock the horse in Harvest Moon games, it’s exciting to travel so fast precisely because you were previously slow. When you get a new gun in a shooter, it’s interesting because it allows different tactics than the previous gun. You complete your full gameplay loop a certain number of times, and then it shifts, providing structure to the game.

Related: Fae Farm Review in 3 Minutes

Your long term goals in farming games generally remain the same, but the ways you get to those outcomes changes over time. You start with limited stamina and money, forcing you to grow a small group of plants. You unlock better tools that let you water crops faster, and increase your stamina so you can water more plants. You unlock automated systems like sprinklers or friends who’ll do your watering for you, freeing up your stamina for other tasks. By the end of the game, farming is often mostly automated, leaving you to pick up your crops and turn them into something that’ll sell for a high price, and perhaps do some other fun activities with your free time. This evolution keeps the repetition from getting stale, and also reduces as the player begins to tire of it.

Fae Farm doesn’t change all that much after the first eight or so hours. In the first handful of hours, you’ll unlock a double jump, letting you take bigger shortcuts, increase your stamina so you can grow more plants, unlock a spell that lets you harvest a large amount of crops at once, and upgrade your watering can so you can water more than one crop at a time. From then on, all upgrades are incremental. You can get more stamina, water more crops at once, and that’s about it.

To be fair to the game, it does lean into crafting, and you’ll unlock new crafting stations that allow you to turn your crops into more advanced foods that’ll sell for more. But this doesn’t make up for the lack of other changes to the core gameplay loop. The feeling of growth freezes after the early game, and you still have at least 30 hours of farming left for a barebones playthrough of the main story.

Another way to make the daily routine meaningful is to disrupt it. Farming games tend to run on calendars, with events that happen irregularly, birthdays to plan gifts for, and maybe character events that trigger if you enter the right area at the right time. Fae Farm made sure I ignored all of these things.

In Fae Farm, you can’t give characters just any item; they have one particular item they will accept. However, for most of the game, you may not have the ability to acquire that item. There were some character’s favored gifts I never found during my playthrough because they involved hybridizing flowers, which is horribly confusing and difficult. On birthdays, I tended to not bother giving gifts, because I couldn’t acquire them anyway.

The events in Fae Farm always happen on the last day of a month, and they always involve the same thing: a bunch of characters standing around the town hall. There’s a temporary shop you can buy from with special outfit colors and clothes, but they require specific resources you might not have. Unlike other farming games, where events will often have a unique story, minigames, or a competition based on your farming abilities, Fae Farm’s events barely disrupt the gameplay. You just walk in, look at the shop, talk to a few people, then leave.

Character events only really exist in the form of dates. Characters you can romance will send you a letter inviting you on a date at certain relationship thresholds, and then you can talk to them and trigger a cute conversation at a scenic spot. Because you have to seek these out, they don’t interrupt your gameplay routine.

All of this combined to make me not care what day it was. When a birthday came up, I ignored it, and when the last day of the month rolled around, I spent a minute or two walking to the festival, bought from the shop, then went about my usual routine.

This might be forgivable if the main quest shook up the gameplay, but it has the same problem. There are two kinds of main quests. One type requires you to bring specific items to a character, which often require upgrading your tools by mining, then using your tools to get the items. Another type requires you to mine to upgrade your tools so you can get further into the mine and unlock the next quest.

It’s mining all the way down, with the occasional break to catch a bug or grow a plant someone wants.

I wanted to fall in love with Fae Farm. It contains some nice quality of life features, and it has a solidly made progression loop. Despite that, it’s missing the magic of truly transformative upgrades, and fails to vary its gameplay over time. If the game had interesting, deep characters, this might be easier to forgive, but the game has most characters repeating the same handful of phrases, and I didn’t care about them.

I like the fae aesthetic and the magic spells, and giving you wings is a cool hint toward a more fantastical version of the game. But ultimately, the game doesn’t go far enough, leaving its magic feeling barely more powerful than a good sprinkler.

Repetition has a place in games. It can effectively highlight progression, allow the player to gain mastery over a system, or allow the game to create a break a routine for the player. Repetition can also be overdone, with not enough variety to break it apart, and when that happens, the game suffers, like it does in Fae Farm.

Watch the Review in 3 Minutes for Moonstone Island, a deep, entertaining, and cozy creature-collecting life-sim by Studio Supersoft.

Moonstone Island Review Transcript

Moonstone Island is a creature-collecting life-sim by Studio Supersoft in which you spend a year training as an alchemist by farming, crafting, and battling spirits against one another.

Each day works more or less like a farming game. You get out of bed, leave your house, and water your crops each morning, followed by whatever other tasks you find important. There’s a lot of typical farming stuff, like a calendar with seasons and seasonal crops, dating and relationships, and upgrades for your house and greenhouse.

But Moonstone Island is also a creature-collecting game, wherein you can use certain crops to tame spirits who will then fight for you in card-based battles. Each spirit has its own deck and stats that can be added to on level up, and each of the spirit types has a different pool of cards available. The card-based combat allows for some truly silly card combos, which are great fun to pull off, and also emphasize the unique traits of each type, like healing, multi-hits, or energy generation. Importantly, the spirit’s visual designs are overall fairly good.

The spirit combat is paired with exploration; Moonstone Island’s world is split into 100 floating islands placed randomly when your game begins, and you must fly between islands in order to find resources, expand your stamina bar, and solve the mystery of dark-type spirits. One of the most valuable resources, Moonstones, are only obtainable in large quantities by leaving the main island, as there’s one per island per season, plus they’re obtainable in chests you’ll find in dungeons or mines.

The exploration and farming could have been disparate, but the game ties them together in clever ways. If you want a variety of useful plants, you’ll have to find them by exploring so you can grow them at home. While exploring, you might as well tame some new spirits, pick up charms to upgrade them, and complete dungeons. This will result in you getting more moonstones, crafting recipes, stamina, and money. If you want to feed the newly-acquired spirits that live in your barn, you’ll need to grow crops, which are easier to grow with upgraded tools from mining. If you like, you can even set up your farm on one of the outlying islands, set up multiple houses and farms, or just carry a house around in your backpack, unloading and repacking it every night.

Each part of the game is fun on its own, and since they’re all tied together, you don’t often feel like you’re wasting time by focusing on any one part, or get stuck playing a single aspect of the game for hours. It feels like one of the freshest farming games in years because it integrates exploration into the game so smoothly.

There’s a main questline as well as a few sidequests, but the game has plenty of content even if you just explore, fight, and farm, which makes them feel like a fun extra. It also helps that the writing here is really good, especially in the dates. Each character can be romanced by talking to them regularly, as well as going on dates with them twice a week. The dates are written as little mini romance arcs, and they’re quite cute. There’s a solid variety of romance options, and I liked quite a few characters.

Sadly, I experienced quite a few softlock bugs during combat, meaning I lost progress several times. The only holographic spirit I ever found was lost due to a softlock. That said, I don’t have a tonne of criticisms of the game. I wish there was more to the romances, but that’s just because I like the characters and want more.

Moonstone Island is an innovative and enjoyable farming and creature collecting game I had no trouble playing for hours, always wanting to do just one more thing. If it looks good to you, you’ll probably enjoy it.

Moonstone Island is out now on PC for $19.99, and is coming soon to Nintendo Switch.

Minutes later, the protagonist’s severed arm is replaced with a magical arm that transforms into a sword. Even though he now has a functioning arm, he’s just experienced a lot of pain and shock, and that would stay with a person. But of course, he’s the protagonist, and he has no opinion on having his arm cut off. It quickly becomes a joke that when he fails to transform his magical arm into something, it turns into a weird tentacle. None of the other characters seem worried about how he feels about losing the arm. In fact, they think it’s cool that he can fight, since he’s the only one with a proper weapon. As soon as the problem is superficially fixed, it’s swept under the rug and becomes a joke.

Related: Eternights Review in 3 Minutes

To be fair, this is a self-insert protagonist. He doesn’t speak unless the player selects a dialogue option, so the developers probably made him bland on purpose. But this is roughly how the game deals with all its traumatic events.

Eternights goes to some dark places. It puts teenagers in situations that would traumatize anyone, and lead to a prolonged and messy period of recovery. But the game ultimately fails to deliver on the traumatic consequences of the events in its story, and it’s worse for it.

Eternights wants to juggle two tones; lighthearted teen dramedy, and dark apocalypse story. This is a weird blend, but it’s not bad on its face. Relentlessly dark stories can get boring, and comedy and lighthearted drama can be a good emotional contrast. That said, you can risk undercutting your narrative’s integrity if the two halves become too separate. The comedic moments should highlight the sadness, rather than undercut it.

The central premise of Eternights is that the majority of the population have turned into monsters, and the rest are barely sane and slowly changing. The only people who are still sane are a handful of teenagers on a train trying to save the world.

Three of the game’s characters spend months isolated in a bunker. On its own, that’s traumatic. But once they escape, things only get worse. There’s an early scene in which Yuna, a pop star, unknowingly gets tens of thousands of her fans killed by essentially clicking a phishing email link that claims clicking it will help people. When she realizes, she’s horrified, and decides that trying to help only makes things worse, and she should stop.

Three scenes later, she’s finished her short recovery arc. The game shows her doubt, then her getting inspired and overcoming her fear of trying to help. While she’s sad about what happened, it mostly leaves the story. It’s an abbreviated version of a typical character arc, but it doesn’t really work for something so big and awful.

Min, another teenage girl, abandons her friends and hides when they’re attacked by monsters. She has survivor’s guilt, and it’s made even worse by the fact she has magical powers, and might have actually been able to save them. Of course, a few scenes later, she’s mostly over it.

Grief and trauma recovery aren’t linear or logical. A person who seems to be recovering one day can look non-functional the next. It’s okay for Eternights to want to simplify things. Most stories prefer to make sense, even if the real world doesn’t. But a story like this one is begging for a depiction of the cyclical nature of trauma, the way that you grieve over and over again at seemingly small provocations, or flip out over nothing because it reminded you of your trauma.

Instead, Eternights wants to be like Persona, a series where most of the characters’ traumas are smaller, and the game resets to a comedic tone once it’s done with the serious parts. Even Persona struggles under this paradigm. Jokes that trivialize Ann’s trauma around being sexualized come to mind. But Eternights could have walked this line more deftly, given its smaller cast and more focused and dark story.

Related: Eternights Is a Promising Blend of Action, Dating, and Anime Style

Both games use their confidant system to give one on one time with characters and their traumas. All Eternights really needed to do was let the characters show their emotions strongly, rather than blunting them with comedy or emotional distance. These are extremely recent events for these characters, and they should lead to outbursts and difficult conversations and awkwardness.

Instead, Eternights doubles down on comedy. This isn’t a fundamentally bad choice. It lends the game a comfortable hangout vibe, where you choose a confidant to spend time with, watch a funny scene play out with maybe a side helping of calmly discussing their trauma, and then go back to the train and pick again.

There’s a comfortable feeling to playing this game, where something shocking might happen in the main story, but once you’re back on the train picking optional content, you know nothing really bad or challenging will happen. This gives the player time to emotionally rest between big scenes, which seems like a purposeful choice to moderate the tone. Sure, there are monsters, mass deaths, and trauma, but you’re also going to get a safe helping of comedy.

This comedic tone is assisted by the scavenging, which is often given comedic context. Sometimes characters will ask for serious things like pads or batteries, and other times you’ll be risking your life for a limited edition bear mug.

Quite a few of the characters have regrets from before the apocalypse that they need to deal with, and these feel more authentic given the amount of distance these characters have had from those events. When Yuna ruminates about a friend she didn’t stand up for, that hits me as something she really would care about after the apocalypse. Her biggest regret from her life before re-emerging now that the world is ending. It’s just that the game doesn’t give equal emotional weight or time to things that happened recently and would likely be just as prominent in her mind.

In many ways, fiction has to feel safe for us to want to engage with it. There’s often intentional distance from things like violence in video games, because the game is designed to be enjoyable and not disturbing. But Eternights’ story goes too far in this direction and undercuts the power of its emotional arcs.

When I think about the story of Eternights, it’ll be about the silly jokes, the teen drama, and the time the main character created a parachute in the shape of a bra. I saw flashes of emotional depth in this game that rang true, but weren’t followed through on, and so they’ll fade away with the memory of this game until I remember the bulk of the experience: jokes about tentacle porn. There are so many.

Games don’t need to spend much time on their story. We have titles like Journey and Super Metroid, where the story is told mostly through gameplay, and we have games like Tetris, where the gameplay is abstracted to the point the story is mostly absent. Spending time on a story is a choice, and if you’re going to do it, you should have a damned good reason to do so.

Gunbrella chooses to spend a lot of time on a tired story. It’s a revenge narrative where a mournful husband chases down his wife’s killer and rescues his stolen baby. It’s a story told so often it has its own set of tropes, and to be honest, I’m sick of them. If you’re going to tell a story like this one, you should try doing something different, or your story will feel dated as soon as it’s released.

Since at least 2010, people have talked about the “daddening” or “dadification” of games. While this was mostly in regard to daughter companion characters, dead wives and kidnapped children are a highly related trope. Heavy Rain features a kidnapped child, and you’re a dad. Fallout 4 features a dead spouse and a kidnapped child, and you can choose to be a dad. God of War, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, Dante’s Inferno, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. All dads with dead wives seeking revenge.

Some of these stories handle it well, and some don’t, but that isn’t really the point. The point is, if you’re going to tell this story now, you should probably do something interesting with it.

The gameplay of Gunbrella doesn’t inherently imply a story about grief or revenge. It’s a game where you do sick jumps with a gun that’s also an umbrella, and shotgun cultists and wild animals until they explode into blood. They could have told any story that justified you killing some people, and in fact, the game provides an alternate explanation for most of the people you’re killing; they’re destroying the planet.

Related: Gunbrella Review in 3 Minutes

Gunbrella’s narrative doesn’t spend much time explaining why you should care about your dead wife. She shows up in exactly two scenes. One where she’s a dead body, and a flashback to the moments before her death, when she asks her husband to go pick some mushrooms. She barely speaks.

But Gunbrella does show you the effects of manmade climate change and fossil fuels on its world. A large corporation mines Crude, a crystalline substance that can power almost anything. Of course, mining it frees a plague of vengeful spirits that were previously resting inside the Crude. For each piece mined, another spirit terrorizes the land. But the corporation has found a way to both protect themselves from the spirits, and deal with the diminishing supply of Crude: human sacrifice.

This is not subtle stuff. They are melting people down into fossil fuels in order to power their society, and protecting themselves with violence while they cause the apocalypse. The game spends a bunch of time on how the cultists are trying to end the world through human sacrifice, then compares them to the corporation that’s sacrificing people because they need more fossil fuels.

When you find your wife’s killer, you discover his reason for killing her was just greed. He needed your daughter because agreeing to sacrifice her in the future got him into the safe, clean society they run. The dead wife and kidnapped child are there to add a personal reason to go on this journey, but it really could have been anything.

One way to justify this kind of narrative is to make the wife or child interesting characters. As discussed above, the wife gets almost no development, but the same turns out to be true of your child. While she’s stolen as an infant, she does become old enough to speak… and speaks about four lines of dialogue in the entire game.

The wife and child aren’t really characters. They’re macguffins, things that are only there so other characters have something to fight over. Gunbrella lacks a deep dead wife, and it lacks an interesting take on the trope. But the rest of its story is actually pretty good?

Like, the climate change stuff is heavy handed, but it’s also quite believably written. The people aren’t cartoonishly evil, they completely believe that they’re doing the right thing, that a non-human sacrifice solution is just around the corner. The cultists are outlandish, but the people fighting against them are likeable, with often funny dialogue. I still remember Marle’s name because she was brash, showed up more than once, and helped me sneak into a facility. I genuinely don’t know if the wife even has a name.

Gunbrella isn’t uniformly poorly written. The dead wife just creates a black hole of writing that distorts everything around it because the writers failed to make it interesting.

The opening of Fallout 4 is almost exactly like Gunbrella’s, and although it’s still cheap pathos, it at least tries something different. When you finally emerge from cryostasis and find your kidnapped son, you’re decades too late. He’s a 60 year-old man whose values have been shaped by the life he lived without you. This doesn’t help with your murdered wife or husband’s characterization, but it’s at least an interesting concept to shake up the trope, something Gunbrella lacks.

I once picked up a game called Dragon Blade: Wrath of Fire from the bargain bin for about five dollars, and the first thing that happens is your fiancée is murdered. I laughed at how transparently it had killed a barely relevant woman to give its male lead pathos, and this was in 2007.

Gunbrella’s dead wife trope feels like it came from the bargain bin. Its gameplay and other writing don’t, and it’s a shame for the game to drag itself down this way. And the worst part of all is, he didn’t even keep the mushrooms. Your wife died for those mushrooms, man.

Watch the Review in 3 Minutes for Gunbrella, a 2D action platformer by Doinksoft in which you fight enemies with an umbrella that is also a gun.

Gunbrella Review Transcript

Gunbrella is a 2D action platformer by Doinksoft in which you fight enemies with an umbrella that is also a gun.

The eponymous gunbrella is the centre of the game’s fast-paced combat and platforming. You can dash in any direction using your gunbrella, hold it upwards to fall slowly, or open it at the last moment to reflect projectiles. If you bump into an enemy while dashing, you’ll stun them, and you can shoot immediately after dashing. While you can only dash upwards once per airtime, you can refresh your dash by clinging to a wall, or dash downwards to touch the ground again.

This lends the game the potential to be frantic, with you dashing upwards over walls, shooting enemies, then dashing towards the next. But the game rarely demands this of you, at least on normal difficulty. If you want to play slowly and move from one enemy to the next, you certainly can, and the majority of the platforming is fairly easy. But it’s so fun to dash up and down, shotgunning enemies and sliding around the game’s world that I found myself doing it anyway.

Technically, the game provides you with limited ammo for non-shotgun bullet types like an assault rifle or flamethrower, but I found the game easier if I just used the shotgun for everything. There’s little encouragement to use your ammo outside of boss fights, and even then it’s often easier to stick to the shotgun since you have to scroll through every weapon type to choose the one you want, and it can be distracting while you’re dodging the game’s lethal attacks.

Other than a couple of standouts, the bosses are aesthetically and strategically quite similar. That said, they’re satisfying to run circles around, and since the game’s quite short, they don’t get overplayed.

The game’s animation is fluid and its pixel art is sharp. It’s fun to look at and super responsive, and also conveys emotions when it needs to. Some of the jazz-inspired music is really catchy, and the sound effects are pleasantly crunchy.

I completed Gunbrella in roughly 5 hours, and completed all side quests except for two. For a fast-paced action game, the story takes up a surprising amount of its runtime, and it doesn’t entirely stick the landing. While the middle of the game features likeable characters and pretty good dialogue, the game begins with your wife being killed and your child being kidnapped, an overdone trope at best, and the ending is bad. Without spoiling too much, we never find out how any characters feel about the ending, and that sucks because I was generally on board with the story.

There are some binary narrative choices, and while they’re not exactly deep, they work well at keeping you involved. There are a few sidequests you can choose to ignore or complete, and a few hidden chests and alternate paths, but outside of that, the game’s a linear run towards the ending. You do return to some areas later on to find new stuff, but it’s not a metroidvania deal. Your gunbrella abilities never evolve, but stay fun for the whole 5 hours, with health and damage upgrades giving a feeling of progression.

If you’re not a huge fan of action platformers, there’s not a lot here for you, and if you like long games, this isn’t one. But if you’re a fan of the genre, the combat and movement feel great, and it’s briskly paced with few missteps, making it a fun way to spend an afternoon or two.

Gunbrella releases September 13 on PC and Nintendo Switch for $14.99.

Watch the Review in 3 Minutes for Eternights, Studio Sai’s 3D brawler with Persona-esque time management elements.

Eternights Review Transcript

Eternights is a 3D Brawler with time management elements by Studio Sai, in which you fight to save humanity from an evil god who has turned everyone but your small group of teenagers into monsters.

Each time your train arrives in an area, you’re given a set number of days within which you must complete the dungeon. Each day you can spend time with a confidant to increase your bond level with them, or go outside to progress through the linear dungeons.

Bonding sessions play out like a simple visual novel, albeit with 3D models, camera angles, and voice acting in most scenes. You watch a very anime-inspired conversation, and choose from a few dialogue options. If you choose right, you’ll increase your relationship points and personality stats, but regardless, you’ll increase your confidant rank, and unlock new skills to spend your skill points on.

Dungeon crawling, on the other hand, is a well-tuned 3D brawler with RPG elements. You enter an area, which then closes off your exits and spawns enemies. You have a basic attack combo alongside heavy strikes. If you dodge or parry at just the right time, you’ll be invincible for a moment, and gain a massive amount of charge on your elemental fist, a powerful attack that can break the guards of otherwise undamageable enemies. You can activate your confidant’s abilities, which pause time and do damage to enemies or heal you, or use your sword abilities to extend your combos. Once you beat all the enemies, you can explore before finding the next arena.

Most of these mechanics are slowly unveiled by unlocking skills, meaning the game has a satisfying ramp up from a spammy battle system with sharp dodges to a moderately complex brawler where chaining your abilities rewards you with more damage and survivability. 

If you run out of SP that your healer can use, it becomes essentially impossible to continue since there are no healing items, and you’ll have to use a checkpoint to return home and try again another day. Parts of the game feel like a battle of attrition, especially in the sections where your healer isn’t around and there’s no way to restore health at all.

The writing is good overall, though it certainly has some rough edges. Anyone who dislikes anime due to its over the top characters won’t enjoy Eternights, and the game also suffers from tonal whiplash. There are some pretty grim scenes, implying mass death, showing a character’s limb being cut off, dealing with intense grief, and more, and then the game goes back to being a wacky anime comedy with some weirdly sexual references.

The balance of gameplay and story works almost as well here as in Persona games, despite your limited options of 5 confidants. In the evenings, you can train or scavenge with a confidant, which both involve minigames, and both give skill points for your confidants and other benefits, but outside of that, it’s just fighting and hanging out.

The romance in this game is essentially the same as friendship – just keep going and you’ll get there. In the end, you’ll need to pick one character whose ending you want, but there doesn’t seem to be any punishment for dating as many people as you can manage with your limited days.

The character art is generally great, with charming animations and beautiful 2D splash art during important scenes. The sound effects and music are uniformly good, but not great, and the voice acting is solid.

Eternights is basically a 10 hour Persona game where the combat system is replaced with a 3D Brawler and there’s a more horror bent to the game. If that sounds good to you, I can recommend Eternights.

Eternights Releases September 12 on PC, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 for $29.99.

Watch the Review in 3 Minutes for Fae Farm, a new cozy farming adventure game from Phoenix Labs.

Watch the Review in 3 Minutes for Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, a stealth strategy game set during an alternate history of the Golden Age of Piracy.

Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical is a visual novel where most of the important choices take place during song. Here’s our Stray Gods review.

You play as Grace, an adrift twenty-something who becomes a Muse after one dies in her arms. When the other Greek gods suspect you of murder, you’re given a week to prove your innocence using your power to influence people through song.

You go to a location via the map, talk to some people and make some choices, then get into a musical number in which your choices affect both the music and the outcome. As in most musicals, the songs tend to contain the most emotional and conflicted moments of the story, and as such give you the biggest choices to make.

The choose your own adventure musical numbers are a complicated balancing act between the art, composition, voice acting, singing, and writing, and I’m glad to say the game nails it. While poorly written musicals can become overly superficial, the writing has a tenderness to it. Laura Bailey, who plays Grace, heads up a cast that both sings and voice acts so well that the characters feel real, and the music is well performed and composed. The animated comic-style art really worked for me, and while it’s not as full of movement as most musicals, the use of blocking, color and facial expressions keep the visuals impactful.

The musical scenes focus on character conflict – you want something from someone, and must convince them, for example – and the game balances strong consequences for your decisions and a sense of playfulness. You aren’t likely to screw up a song because you make one bad decision, and you basically can’t die, meaning you can feel your way through the choices. The songs aren’t overly long, and your decisions often do impact the outcome of the story, so they continue to feel special throughout the game’s runtime.

A large part of your enjoyment of the game will depend on your buy-in to the musical aspect. This is a choice and consequence game in the vein of Life is Strange, but instead of puzzles to solve and areas to walk around, the musical numbers with choices are the big set pieces here. I come at this as a musician who generally likes musicals, and to me the songs felt well integrated into the story. I was never wishing a song would be over so the story could continue; the songs are the story as much as the dialogue.

This does mean that Stray Gods functions on a more emotional level than most choice-based games. You’re encouraged to feel what the characters feel through the music, and to put yourself in Grace’s shoes, but if you don’t connect to the music emotionally, it could fall flat for you.

The game does sometimes hit up against the limits of song-based branching dialogue. At one point a character accused me of not asking them before doing something, but that wasn’t a choice I made, it was because the song was ending and I had to pick one of two options. People really do get caught up in the moment and make emotional decisions, but I was also railroaded into a decision too soon.

Overall the game takes a somber, but playful tone, which sounds weird but totally works. Issues like torture, war, loss, and suicide are addressed emotionally and thoughtfully, and the characters also get to make jokes.

The question with Stray Gods was always whether it would pull off its musical roleplaying premise, and it does so. The game’s only 6 or so hours long, but that time is awesome. There’s no other game like this one, and if you’re willing to give yourself over to the music, give it a try.

Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical releases August 10 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC.

Check out the rest of our 3 Minute Reviews here.