Recent reviews by JiF

Beyond excellent restaurant management game and a great entry point to the Touhou "universe" or whatever you call it (it's my first Touhou-related anything but my Touhou friends highly recommended it). Art, graphics and gameplay are all super polished.

You are Mystia, a timid-but-determined bird-girl (I heard she has a lore justification for running a restaurant involving grilled lamprey). You get into the restaurant business to stop a shyster catgirl from breaking your friend's nico-nico-kneecaps over an unpaid debt. It's one of my favorite intro chapters in gaming.

Each day you gather ingredients and drinks with a limited number of time slots to use. Getting the most and best ingredients feels like a skill you'll never fully master. Then, your preparations come to fruition as you serve fine meals to the unique denizens of Gensokyo, learning their tastes and cashing tips to avoid leg-crippling debt. Actually running the restaurant has a perfect balance between frantic and calm. The max-level izakaya attracts dozens of customers, but time stops when you interact with cooking equipment or your notebook.

The secret sauce in this game is how satisfying it is to play for dozens of hours:

- You slowly befriend a fascinating cast of characters: youkai (monster-people), shrine maidens, onis, and more. Each is fun to talk to and unique. Their spell cards are an excellent opportunity to admire the cute-AF pixel art.

- You gain access to new areas, invest into new locations, and discover new ingredients to satisfy ever more exotic tastes. Mastering the ever-increasing layers of complexity is satisfyingly profitable.

- You'll upgrade your cooking skills and equipment.

- Finally, you help Mystia and Kyouko (the friend and extortion victim mentioned above) achieve their dream of holding an epic concert, and, tbh, that's pretty rad for this pair of cinnamon buns.

A true work passion and love worth thrice the price. Buy this game if you're even remotely interested in cooking games, management games, and cute anime girls.

This game is pretty fantastic. You guide of a group of unlucky people who happen to live in the far future equivalent of Detroit. Humanity has developed technological marvels and spread across the stars but that doesn't prevent civilization from completely going off the rails on ****hole planets like the one these poor souls have landed on.


This game was developed at the same time as Prison Architect. Ludeon took notes I think, as the overall UX is very similar. The game-world is grid-based with a simple 2D aesthetic and viewed from top down. You can direct building projects, draft your colonists for combat, and manage their work assignments and schedules using the menus available from a Windows-esque task bar.

While RimWorld is first and foremost a colony management game, great care was put into generating tension during every session. You'll continuously suffer (or benefit) from random events such as:

• Falling spacecraft debris,
  
• Lethal toxic rain,
  
• Rampaging hordes of man-eating turtles,
  
• and more.

The rimworld is a dangerous place but your ragged group of survivors has the potential thrive. Your colonists, aka pawns, have many needs and unique traits which affect their mood, health, and productivity. They have various skills which they use, on your direction, to develop the colony. Hopefully, you can take good care of them and get them to build a colony which provides sustenance, protection, and the tools for progress.

The base game and each DLC provides one end-goal for your colony to achieve, saving them from this dangerous planet forever. Until then, the harsh planet will break down your colonists mentally and physically. Utter ruin can be just around the corner. When your careful planning averts catastrophe, it feels incredible.


There are many aspects which make Rimworld amazing. My first favorite is it's addictive, genre-blending combo of mechanics: colony management, RTS, and roguelike-RPG rolled into one.

Second is the setting: The RimWorld universe, in it's history, hosted the ascension and downfall of advanced, interstellar human civilizations. Their zenith have sometimes been the creation of machine super-intelligences called archotechs, who easily transcend human achievements and create reality-bending artifacts which are basically space magic. These rare and inscrutable artifacts are yours to reclaim if you persevere. For me, developing my colony is immensely satisfying, as we're not just surviving, but also reclaiming humanity's technological glory.


My least favorite aspect of RimWorld are the numerous tiny bugbears I've experienced which I've had to rely on mods to resolve. Little features that I think should just be there. These include a cleaning zone which is separate from the home zone, single-tile shelves, wall-lights, vent-based HVAC systems, and et cetera.

Nonetheless, I still love this game and highly recommend it to anyone who might enjoy a challenging and unpredictable space-themed colony management game.

Edited several sections on 4/4/22 for brevity

This game is wonderful. In the short time I've used it, it's helped me center myself and get my mind straight. When you make a request, it's like writing in a journal that writes back. It can't replace close and nurturing relationships, but it gives me a special feeling all it's own that something greater than myself is cheering me on. And it's nice to write replies to requests, too.

A very fun and challenging ableit short 2D Action-platformer. Almost every aspect of the game is polished to an immaculate shine. The game has meaty combat, lovingly crafted art (I really like the look of the game and the characters even as someone that generally doesn't like cutesy anime girls), a world that is very beautiful and a joy to immerse yourself into, and power-ups and spells to find that give enemy encounters variety and depth. The fantastic A/V design and challenging boss fights could by themselves get you "hooked", but on top of that you gain new abilities at just the right pace to feel like you're really progressing. The character interactions, too, while limited, help give some life to the game world and grativas to your actions. While the game is quite short, it does have a New Game+ mode which is a good excuse to play it twice. The normal price for this game (10 USD) is fair in my opinion, although I just wish it was longer and more fleshed out for the sake of it. It was an adventure that I was sad to finish purely because I felt it had more potential. As it is, though, I would still highly recommend the game to anyone that enjoys action-platformers or good games in general.

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor is a nice little game about the repetitive life of a spaceport janitor who's only role in a humorous and interesting world with heroes and adventure is to clean up trash and vomit.

What sticks out to me about this game is how it combines a pleasant and charming atmosphere and simplistic gameplay with cynical underlying themes and suprising resource management elements that gives the repetitious gameplay some needed complexity.

Aesthetically, the spaceport that you clean is enjoyable to explore: the map has a number of nooks and crannies and all sorts of personality to it, the flavor text for the items you collect (or scrap) are pretty funny sometimes and the characters you will find might be a bit quirky or, equally likely, they'll be jerks that will try to put you in your place. The port has a weekly celebration with jovial songs ringing through the streets, and as you walk around strange alien creatures make all sorts of squeeks, moans and beeps. Overall the soundtrack and sound design is fitting and adds to the atmosphere significantly. These happy elements are then contrasted by the player character being at the lowest place in this world's society and being "doomed" to an endless and menial life of labor by a cursed floating skull.

Mechanically, the game actually has more depth than I first realized. There's no way to lose, but to keep yourself from being at the very, very bottom of society you need to do your job, make money to keep yourself fed and buy quest items, and sleep. At first I thought that trading with merchants the real way to make money and that your incinerator backpack lost charge for each item you disposed of with it and I simply needed to learn what items are worth a lot, but then I realized that the charge drains with time rather than use and most of what you find is, in fact, garbage that isn't worth anything to anyone (suprisingly and appropriately realistic). The real depth of the gameplay comes from the fact that there are a variety of ways to live your frugal life even more frugal-ly. You can learn where the trash hotspots are on the map, learn which foods you might find are safe to eat (getting food poisoning slows down your cleaning significantly) or learn what items are actually worth keeping and where to sell them. It pays off to be careful to not incinerate high value items but still do your job quickly and efficiently since it's a bit of a race to do as much cleaning as you can before your incinerator loses charge. Exploiting Lotto-shrines and luck bonuses can also reward you with better loot, free food, and the occasional gendershift pill (or whatever it is) to get rid of the annoying visual filters that you get from not getting your fix.

What I don't like about the game is the fact that it really could afford to have more quests and more in-depth character interaction with NPCs. Expanding these things could really benefit the game but I'm satisified with it nonetheless. Also, I really wish certain things were explained like why your incinerator runs out of charge and the layout of the map and why you're collecting containers for that one guy. In fact, it kinda bothers me that the game cheats in order to make the map harder to navigate: the map is actually an endless loop, like a mobius strip, where you can go through the same 3 districts in sequence 9 times in a row without ever stopping. It's an awkward way of making the map feel bigger than it really is, since realizing that the game world is essentially broken is key to navigating it with any sort of competence.

Ultimately, I'd say it's a fun game with good ideas, nice gameplay, interesting art which is well-crafted around it's core concept, but it has some room for improvement.

Editted to remove my very opinionated interpretation of the gender shift mechanic that I don't think has a real purpose in the review, and also because I have a terrible vocabulary sometimes.

I'm not going to mince words: The stealth gameplay is quite simply sh*t, and the survival mechanics and map design (a key element of every stealth game) do nothing to make up for that fact.


You know all those tense moments in other stealth games of sneaking up on a mook oh-so cautiously, praying he doesn't turn around, to take him out, then methodically do the same to every one else in the area so you can explore unimpeded and progress? That simply doesn't happen in this game. There are very very few tactics for you to use against the robot and this means the gameplay is incredibly boring since actually interacting with the main obstacle of the game is counterproductive to the game's objective. Perhap it's unfair to expect this game to have gameplay more similar to a stealth-action game since this could be more a part of the survival horror genre than the stealth genre, but it was not able to immerse me or terrify me with it's minimalistic presentation. The robots don't seem scary, just overpowered. Now about the survival aspects of the game: they are incredibly simplistic, the game enviroments are sparse and dull from a mechanical perspective, and there are few interesting tools with which to fight or avoid the robots. Some other reviews say the game simply needs "more content", but that does not address the fact that the problems with it are mostly on the design level, in my opinion. The game does not need more stuff to throw at you, it needs a more interesting way of putting all that stuff together to make your encounters with the robots more nuanced and exciting or make exploring the map more interesting. It is a bland and wholly un-interactive experience.

A fun, minimalistic puzzle-platformer involving rolling around as a cube (the irony is not lost on me) and a FANTASTIC SOUNDTRACK! THE MUSIC IS SO GOOD!!!

I stopped playing the Overwatch beta to play this game, and then logged 40 hours in less than 4 days. It's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ good.

It's a 3rd person stealth game for people that really like stealth games. The presentation of the game, as a whole, is pretty mediocre and it doesn't have the best level design or mechanical depth. The different abilities your character can use are fairly interesting but proper usage of them only makes the game somewhat easier. It's notable (at least for someone like me that hasn't played a massive variety stealth games, just a few of the good ones) for having a Assassin's Creed style movement system and being fairly challenging almost any way you play it. As always, doing ghost runs of the missions is harder than killing off guards, but, unlike some other stealth games, engaging in open combat will get you killed. Overall, it's fun if you truly enjoy the methodical slow-paced infiltration that you would expect from a run-of-the-mill stealth game but nothing about it is particularly remarkable or exceptional.

Given that the Hotline Miami and Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number are very similar overall, I'll put down my critiques as list of comparisons categorized by the pro's and con's:

Pro's:
+More missions and more crazy moments.
+Soundtrack is just as good or maybe even a bit better.
+More gameplay variety via different characters.
+More fleshed out story.

Con's:
-Simpler score system that's not as much fun to use.
-Annoying level design that makes the game more frustrating than challenging.
-It just feels like an overly drawn-out experience.
-Story is less interesting for me because it's less enigmatic.

In my opinion, the cons outweigh the pros and the original is the better game but Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number is still good if you have the patience for it.