It'll make another billion dollars, and they're already making the next one that will be exactly the same, and the incredible potential will yet again consume its own fetid tail. The circlejerk of life.
This could have been a wonderful RPG, set in the show's array of utterly fantastic locations, quests and side-quests sending you on various journeys, with pretty much the same combat mechanic. It could have been something that celebrated Adventure Time, made use of the amazing resources it had to hand. But instead this is an insipid, limp waste of it all, and a proper shame.
It is, it has to be said, okay. Quite good. Not that bad. Horrid words to give a nice game, but true all the same.
It remains a joy. It's calming, pleasurable, cute and tricky. It's Spelunky for people who don't like restarting all the time. But it's also its own distinct notion, with its focus on progression over difficulty. SteamWorld Dig is a really lovely, very fun time. What a great thing for a game to be.
I reached the point of only sighing or shouting in frustration, despite sitting in front of a gorgeous-looking game with a ton of potential.
It's a dreamy, gentle, melancholic game, created with tangible passion. It's utterly beautiful, and while not nearly challenging enough, it's entertaining to play.
On its own, out of nowhere, I'd likely be pleasantly surprised by a not-terrible game-of-the-movie, especially one aimed at kids. But in context, I can't believe you've played every single TT Lego game, and would far more strongly recommend you go fill in one of the gaps.
For where it falls short, it far more often had me crouched in a shadow, heart racing, waiting for the perfect moment to dart past a guard's routine. It may be the fourth best Thief game, but it's a damned fine game in its own rights.
It is at once the South Park game we've been waiting for since the series started 17 years ago, and a cluster of stupid mistakes and bad balancing that we'd hoped Obsidian had put behind them.
The game is clearly enormously detailed, a real passion piece, and one I fought and fought to enjoy. It didn't work out for me. I suspect it may for others.
Moebius is an utter disaster of a game. An entirely unlikeable or vacuous cast, a contempt for women like I've never seen, and indeed almost equal contempt for men, gibberish puzzles, ghastly animation, flawed conceits, the stupidest plot idea I can remember, and the whole thing scored with lift music. It's as if the moustache puzzle from Gabriel Knight 3 got an agent, and a starring role as an entire game.
It's beautiful, no doubt. The pixel art is wonderful, and the soundtrack is splendid. Looking at just the screenshots, I'd be reaching for my wallet. But the core game is just so tedious. By the fifth chapter, you're literally wandering through near-identical scenes of desert, and at this point I'm honestly wondering if maybe this is the point?
The key is, I do enjoy playing it. I'm still far from finished, but have played for an awfully long time. For a tenner, that's a lot of game. It's somewhat obnoxious, but special for just getting on with being a game.
But instead it's the rusting chassis of an ARPG, after it's been stripped down for parts and left, abandoned in a disused yard, where it really ought to be forgotten.
It's unquestionably smart, almost intolerably cute, and splendidly novel. I'm not quite convinced the balancing is right, and think the levels become too cluttered, too quickly. But it remains completely lovely to play despite it.
It's such a colossal shame, but I am certain not one that should put you off playing Mind. The puzzles are genuinely great, and it's just so unrelentingly eye-warmingly beautiful, that it wins out. As visual, explorable art, it's masterful. As a puzzle game, it's rewarding and taxing. As a narrative, it's a car driving into a lake. But in this case, two out of three is really rather good.
Chapter 2 is a big step up from the already decent Chapter 1, and delivers lots of rewarding answers on the plot, while introducing enough to make the final chapter worth waiting for, however long that wait might be.
It's enormously clever, and very often inspired in how it delivers this cleverness. But for me it was simply too fast, too busy stumbling over itself to do the next even more difficult thing, that it forgot to ensure I'd fathomed the previous.
There's no story worth hearing, there's no immediate hook that makes this different from anything else, and nothing special about the combat or the questing to make me care.
It is, however, probably the most aesthetically beautiful game I've seen, and I can genuinely recommend it on that basis alone. The rest of the game, it's sombre tale, is well worth hearing, and some of the puzzles are really splendid. But every time you walk out of a door and see the vista spread before you, it's an effort not to gasp.