Recent reviews by Buurazu

Unfortunately, I don't think this game is very good, although the description sounded very interesting.

Since your health gets reset to full after every puzzle, it means that there is a ton of leeway for making mistakes. I beat the game without losing once (which meant I had to lose on purpose 10 times for my final achievement), despite purposely rushing things and filling in incorrect squares constantly.

There is certainly some potential in how it does Picross combat. The game is at its peak when there are 3 enemies, and you need to jump between which one you're attacking to keep them from attacking you back. And as attacking is done by filling in a line completely, there is strategy there in purposely leaving a line slightly uncleared, to be able to strike when it's best to. But the game just doesn't really feel at that peak often, since the large health pool and constant free items make you always overpowered.

For treasure levels, once I'd spent 2000 gold for both health upgrades, I would just fill them in without any care at all, since you just lose gold, and the game throws so many free items at you (plus you can only carry 5) that gold is useless at that point. I was just going through the motions to complete the game at this point, not really having fun.

The puzzles get bigger but the difficulty doesn't really go up; the "final boss" puzzle was extremely easy, as it just has way too many squares filled in around the edges. It feels like the developers did not really have any idea what makes a good Picross puzzle.

So, I would say the game utterly fails as a Picross game due to encouraging incorrect play instead of using logic, and it fails as an RPG due to not needing to care about gold or items or health.

In a way, it could be best if the game was a roguelike, with persistent health and feeling a need to scrounge for items and use gold wisely, with a high penalty for death. Although a picross roguelike would be difficult to do right, as replaying a picross puzzle can be miserable.

Try the demo, if you love it, you'll love the full game. It's hugely popular for a reason and I'm glad it blew up the way it did.
One criticism I have is the way you have to get through all the earlier stakes with every deck to reach the stake that matters. Once I beat Gold Stake with one deck, I used a save editor to unlock it for every other deck; I don't have the time to do 100+ runs that are essentially completely pointless (since only Gold Stake completions matter for 100%).
Also I never managed to beat Jokerless, and I haven't gone for all Gold stamps yet... So, reaching 100% completion isn't that good of an experience, especially vanilla, but beating Gold Stake with every deck is a blast.

This was a super fun game to play in co-op mode, although it was a bit short. I wouldn't call it easy, but once we got the hang of it, we got the three wins in a row after getting our first win, but we definitely had to play very carefully and strategically to make that happen. I'm guessing the game is much harder in single player where you don't have a partner to free you if you get caught.

I think the way that the split-screen co-op is done, with a dynamic separation in the screen that tells you what direction your partner is in, is really cool and something I'd love to see in other games.

One thing that is annoying is that progress towards item unlocks doesn't carry over if you get too many points to unlock it, so, if you beat the game before unlocking everything, you have to start dying on purpose to finish your unlocks, rather than just get a high score and unlock multiple things at once.

A fantastic follow-up to Super Puzzle Platformer Deluxe, which I always felt was a very underrated game. I'm glad to see the developer take their ideas to the next level with this game! If I had any criticism, it'd be that perhaps it can be a bit too easy (at least to beat all objectives) because of how you can choose which powerups to bring with you (including multiple copies; I only ever brought 3 different powerups), and choose which one you get each time.

Another fantastic game (possibly the last?!) from Zachtronics.
Two great solitaire variants, neither of which overstay their welcome when it comes to achievements (unlike other games, where there's an achievement for 100 wins).
A picross variant where you construct the walls of a dungeon, adding a delightful flavor and challenge to the puzzle.
The return of HACK*MATCH, a great action puzzle game; a little out of place among the rest of the decidedly non-action games, but a delight for me.
And three awesome traditional Zachlike puzzle games that have just the right amount of levels and progression.
The design, writing, and overall vibe of 20th Century Food Court is my favorite out of any of Zachtronics' games.
ChipWizard challenged the hell out of me, but your space and options are limited enough to solve everything it throws at you, and it felt educational about what goes into actual transistors.
And X’BPGH is a complete trip, very creepy and very fun to finish once you wrap your head around it.

I had a ton of fun reaching 100% completion, and there's even more that one can go for beyond 100%, like optimizing solutions, or the endless mode in Dungeons and Diagrams, and of course just playing solitaire, or even building and painting a few little gundam models if you're into that.

I really enjoyed this game at first, fighting my way to barely reaching the 30 minute time limit on the first couple stages. But once you learn more about the game, and especially learn the weapon evolutions, it's too easy to get extremely overpowered every time, to the point of being able to just idle in place.Going for the achievements turned into a total grind, where I spent as much time NOT playing the game as possible to complete them. Almost none of them are difficult, as the game almost never makes you play on Hyper or Inverse mode for any of them, where you'd actually have to put thought into what you're doing.If you're not focused on achievements and doing self-imposed challenges, this could definitely be a very fun game for you, but if you're an achievement hunter like me, it starts really fun and interesting but quickly turns into just setting up and idling with 10+ characters.

An absolutely fantastic, perhaps the best, entry in the Ace Attorney series. I am so so glad that it got an official localization, and as far as I can tell they did an insanely good job. Most of the game takes place in 1900s Britain, and the variety of characters and their way of talking feels very realistic. I'm curious how these various types of English accents got handled in the original Japanese.

The setting as a whole is very compelling, and I love how rooted in reality and history it is. For instance, due to a "window tax" in the 1800s in Britain, the housing for some characters has bricked-up or boarded-up windows, and that fact can play a role in the case itself. An actual treaty between Britain and Japan allows a visiting student to get away from being persecuted in Japanese court. And you meet a famous Japanese author who was studying in Britain and had a miserable time (even more miserable in the game!)

All in all, I really enjoyed the story, setting, and characters, and feel like I also learned quite a bit about Japan and Britain's history together in the process! I wonder if Ace Attorney Investigations 2 will ever get a duology release like this?

Tinykin is a 3D platformer with a gorgeous visual style, extremely fun and fluid controls, and is very comfy. It seems like it'd be similar to Pikmin, but there's no combat or time management or risk of losing your guys, so it's much more about exploration, and the little guys just help with that. You start each level with no Tinykin, and as you find more in the level, that opens up more paths and objectives to do.
The levels are larger than life, and in particular, if you're a big fan of Chibi-Robo like I am, you will definitely love playing this game. The characters you meet in each level and the objectives you have to do for them are pretty entertaining. There's also optional challenge races that are a ton of fun to go for Platinum Medals in. The movement has a ton of depth, and I bet this will be a fun game for speedrunners to optimize.

Death Wish is an incredible remix of the game's base stages, making almost every original level WAY harder in a variety of creative ways. It is multiple times harder than the base game if you go for all of the extra objectives on Hard Mode, so if you're up to the challenge, this DLC can easily double or triple your playtime. One of the missions is a Boss Rush, and it's funny to see just how easy the original bosses were compared to their Death Wish counterparts.
And with Easy Mode giving you regen health and disabling extra objectives, none of it is particularly that difficult. It's up to you if you want to truly complete it or are content with Easy Mode.
I finally went back to clean up my last few Hard Modes, mostly on the bosses, and the feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction upon dealing that final hit on a one-hit or low-hit challenge is remarkable. I'm so glad to finally have 114/114 with no Easy Mode, and I thank Jonas and Gears for Breakfast for the challenge and generally great design.

Oh, but the Seal levels being focused on stacking a bunch of stuff and being hard to control maybe wasn't fantastic.

It's a cheap little lewd puzzle game, but I think its level design is pretty weak. Most of the levels felt too easy, and it's over before it gets into anything too good.

And although the animations are quite nice, the lack of any way to skip the animations makes replaying the few hard stages a huge chore.

I also don't like the enemies that create paths on defeat, since there's no clue about what paths they will make beforehand, causing a bit of trial and error.