This is a very pretty Metroidvania. You play a small forest spirit, exploring and fighting monsters. Your parental figure dies near the start, which causes you to head off into the world and try to restore the forest to how it used to be.
Stuff about Games I've Completed
This is a platformer for the Mega Drive from the early 90s. I’m pretty sure I got this as a Christmas present the year that it came out in the UK. It’s a hard game though, I never completed it back then. I think maybe I got about halfway.
I’ve been playing around with Pico 8, making small games and experimenting to amuse myself. It’s a lovely little program which they call a “fantasy console”. This means the games for it look quite similar to something like the Game Boy Advance, they are low resolution, with low fidelity sound and are generally quite compact experiences. It’s actually a program which you run on your computer, with a full development environment built in. It includes a code editor, a sprite designer, a map layout tool as well as sound and music creation tools. Each one is very constrained, but in a way that makes it interesting to use. It forces you to not overcomplicate things. You have to focus on the core idea.
I bought the Virtual Boy accessory for the Nintendo Switch so that I could play the games that they have added to the Nintendo Switch Online service. I’ve never played a Virtual Boy before, though I did nearly buy one in 1996. It is the only time I have ever been to the United States, and I saw one in the shopping mall. The machine was such a flop that I think it had already been cancelled by that point, and it ended up never getting released in the UK. I bought a Game Boy Pocket instead, which was a much more sensible purchase. Though I guess a much less interesting one.
This is the game I bought my PlayStation for. I originally bought one with my brother at launch with Ridge Racer, but completed that very quickly and didn’t see much else interesting. We sold that one, and when this game was released I used the money I had from that sale to buy my own. Initially I couldn’t afford a memory card, and so had to start from scratch every time. As such I remember large parts of this game very well thirty years later.
This is a Switch remake of a Game Boy Advance game. I never played the original, but I did intend to. It’s a sequel to the Game Boy Donkey Kong game, which I replayed in September 2024 and have always loved.
This is the game that convinced me to buy a Switch 2. I actually got the console at launch with Mario Kart World but the announcement of this game is what made me want one. It was clear from the original videos that this was made by the team that made Super Mario Odyssey, which was just fantastic.
This is a GameCube game that I played on the Switch 2. I actually bought the official GameCube controller from the Nintendo store to play it, since it’s such an odd controller that mappings can be pretty cumbersome.
I’m not actually sure when I bought this game, but it’s in my Steam library. It was probably in a Humble Bundle. I saw it being mentioned online as an excellent Metroidvania, so I thought I’d give it a go.
I’d seen multiple people online saying that this is one of the best games ever made. I bought it in a sale, and started it multiple times but held off playing it properly. I quickly got the impression that I needed to give it proper attention. It’s not really a game to dip in and out of. I’m glad I did. The game is genuinely fantastic, with excellent writing and a fascinating world. It felt like the game truly responded to each decision I made along the way, with the narrative unfolding in a way that seemed unique to me. I think at some point I’ll need to play this again, and make very different choices to see what happens.
This came as a part of a bundle when I bought my Switch 2 in June. In this version all of the tracks in the game are part of one giant map, and there is a free roam mode where you can drive around and find secrets. It also has a new mode called Grand Tour where you race from one end of the map to another going through six tracks along the way. As you reach the end of each of these sections players below a certain position are out of the race. By the end there are only four people left, and the person in first at the end is the winner. I particularly enjoy this mode online. It is absolutely hectic, especially at the start.
I’d been waiting for this game for 18 years. I love the Metroid series, and the first Prime game is one of my favourites. This game seems to have had a very troubled development, it took eight years and they changed developer halfway through from Bandai Namco to the developer of the original trilogy, Retro.
This is the second Paper Mario game, a sequel to the N64 one. It was originally released on the GameCube, but I played the recent Switch remake. It’s an RPG with a neat graphical style, all of the characters are made out of flat pieces of paper. This actually has numerous gameplay implications. You can turn to the side to fall down grates, you can fold up into a paper aeroplane to get over gaps, you can slip through tiny cracks in walls, and countless other things.
This is a psychological indie horror game that is currently on sale on Steam. I played through it on the Steam Deck in a single sitting. It is quite short and very engaging. The game is first person, and mostly a walking sim style game. You explore the ship, talk to the crewmates, and solve simple puzzles.
This is an early SNES side-view Shmup. My brother had a copy when I was very young and I loved it. It’s very hard though, and so I never got very far back then. There is a large amount of slowdown as the screen fills with enemies and weapons due to the CPU of the machine being pretty underpowered.