Recent reviews by Soba

The most important PSA first: There is a shark hat. 11/10 for that alone! I was super happy once I found that one.

Little Kitty, Big City is an inredibly charming and wholesome game. I was surprised by how much I liked all the side characters and I wish I could have spent more time with them. As other reviewers have pointed out, the game is unfortunately very short. I got it to 100% in 7.6 hours and just as I was starting to feel at home in this cute little town, the game was over. It's like the game was starting to scratch the itch of playing a cat in a relaxed open-world-ish setting and then stopped abruptly.

For the amount of content the game does have, I'd recommend getting it on sale.

PC port of the 2016 sequel/remake(ish) of the 1999 Playstation 1 "Digimon World" game. The port seems okay, so far. I've been saving frantically every 5 minutes, but the game has yet to crash on me. I will keep on saving a lot, though, especially before tough fights.

You have two partners, so gaining all the digivolution codex entries is faster. Better graphics, UI & QoL - which are all still trash in comparison to other titles released in 2016, but they have their charm and, c'mon, you can explore the digital world!

IN CONTRAST TO THE PS4 VERSION, YOU CAN SPRINT!

Prepare for all the grind and then some more. This is a slow game. On Steam, I just finished chapter 1 after 20 hours and I've played this game on the PS4 before. (There are like 4 chapters total.)
If you're just starting out and don't know what you're doing, you're going to take a LONG while to get anywhere. Don't be afraid to read some guides.
If you have played this game before/know what you're doing, you're gonna take slightly less time.

All in all, this game is amazing for shutting your brain off, enjoying the nice BGM and that sweet, sweet feeling of min-maxing your digimon to eternity and beyond.

And most importantly above all: Angewomon is still tall af <3

7/10

When you see "fun, sexy romp" in an adult romance novel description and you imagine ANY scenario, this game has you covered. Whacky dialogue and situations, lovable and quirky characters. LOTS of outfits to unlock for everyone. You can choose the design of your own character (down to private parts) and you can be as supportive and flirty as you want with everyone in the dialogue options. (You can be an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ too, but I'm judging you for that)
The game lets you choose your comfort level of nudity and I am so here for this.

The gameplay is fun, though it gets a bit grindy after a bit. I haven't found it difficulty so far and I have enjoyed not fretting about every choice I make and not trying to min-max every executive. If you like to see numbers go up and you like a casual, after-hours "I want to relax" sort of approach, this might be for you.

It's a fun, witty, medium-length game (I beat it and completed every character's story in around 12 hours, and I'm a slow player) with dungeon crawler, visual novel and dating sim elements. If any two of these elements sound like your type of genre, I highly recommend checking this game out.

Big trigger warning right away:
This game will make you interact multiple times with a person who will later turn to stalking, threatening and then trying to more-or-less kill you. You have no choice about whether or not you interact with this person, the game makes you do it to advance the plot. Their antics start in 'casual' phrases like "this is why people don't like me" and quickly dissolve to "how dare you reject me, you're a f*cking c*nt like everyone else". What a truly nice guy.
I don't mind the inclusion of such characters, especially because the game judges them HARSHLY for it. But the game also, at its very start, lets me choose whether a friendly parental figure will send me encouraging text messages in between, because that may be upsetting to some people, yet the game did not warn me about the stalker character, at all.
(I went back and checked the game trailer and store description just to see if I missed out on any warnings, but no.)
After starting the game and being pleasantly surprised at the opt-in option for the parental figure, this felt like a punch in the gut.
I have not had stalkers literally trying to kill me IRL, fortunately, but I have met lots of people who raised red flags for me all over the place which made me get the F out, and I saw that reflected in this one character's writing. Kudos to the writing staff, but just please warn me first. Fiction is all about safely exploring (dangerous) concepts and that includes knowing what you're getting into.


The positive:
- the art is GORGEOUS! Not only the in-game avatars for everyone, and the cute outfit options for your character, but especially the animations that play when a weapon first transforms into a human
- the dialogue and characterizations of everyone. The romantic partners are wildly different and all feel authentic, as in: They have their own goals, motivations and developments. Even your bystander cousin and your (if you opt-in) parental figure have distinct personalites I couldn't help but want to see more of
- there's discussions of depression, of discovering yourself, of societal expectations regarding gender expression and it felt very diagetic and "this is this one person's opinion" instead of a lecture on how to do stuff, applicable to All People
- you can freely choose what gender or sexuality you are (but the game is a bit weird on letting you express the latter, see "the negative" below)
- the music is a vibe (I have not much clue about music, but I liked it, it felt very fitting for the setting)

The negative:
- as I've mentioned above: The stalker character. They get displayed prominently for about the first 30 minutes of the game and they made me SO uncomfortable. Afterwards, there's more positive interactions with all the other characters and the game finally starts dropping hints and comments that the stalker's actions are messed up, so I felt more comfortable going forward. And I'm glad I did, because this game has a lot of good scenes where characters with anxiety or depression express their thoughts in ways I had not considered before, and I am glad for getting this experience. But I was really thinking about quitting this game close to the 30-minute mark. Which is a shame, because all the gripes I had, the games addresses eventually.
- the dungeons are kinda boring. Combat isn't hard and after you've figured out how to play every weapon, the game becomes really easy
- you cannot tell the game what your sexuality is beforehand, you can only choose in the moment. Which, I think, is a pretty great idea for factoring in that not everyone is always down for everything, but then the game also jumps ahead and makes conclusions like "You don't want to engage in sex on your nth date with this person? I guess you dislike sex then and I'll make this personwho asks to spend the night specify that they do it on the couch, far away from you."And then you get a tiny sad smiley from that character, sort of disappointed but NOT judging you, that you didn't want to have sex with them on that night (and for the rest of eternity, as the game presumes). Pro-tip: Track the PC's actions across multiple playthroughs, not just the one romance route they're currently playing. Also let us actually say aloud if we hate sex or not etc., please.


I've ranted a lot about my perceived inadequecies of this game above, but I want to state: I recommend this game, whole-heartedly. I went into it expecting a whacky, campy, gay dungeon crawler, but then I also found glimpses into depression in ways and especially sensitity I had never expected it to address.
This game made me tear up and reconsider how I have and will handle other people. If that isn't an indication of empathetic quality, I don't know what is.

If you get this game: Go into it expecting it to be cute and then have your world shaken just the tiniest, good bit.

I have only played about 2 hours of the actual game so far, but I've been listening to the song "Marinera" on repeat ever since. The DLC is worth it for that song alone.

When I was a child, my mother used to sing me "Country Roads" as a lullaby. The way she sang it, it carried the feelings of adventure, of longing, of missing home more than actual words ever could.
When the vocals at the end of "Marinera" came up in the game, I pretty much burst into tears and had to think of those lullabies from all those years ago.

I spent less than five minutes with a man whose face I did not see, whose name I did not know and who would not talk to me except in cryptic signs I'm still not sure I completely understand (and that may just be the point). He put his well-being in my hands and what this game accomplished in so little time through a multitude of colored icons is something so many other games cannot make me do in dozens of hours: I cared.

BOY what a fun game! Where it got the platforming right, it did get it damn right and it felt like I was always in motion, always jumping, shifting and having to stay on my toes about where to go and which dimension to use. I loved the animations for the main character, especially the flips and that hand-touching while she runs across walls. EPIC!

Controls:
The controls could have been tighter, because for how fluid and fast-paced the game looks, it doesn't quite play like it. I played it on a PS4 controller and the mid-air movements varied between super rigid or ridiculously oversensitive, so that I'd mess up a jump the first time because the character wouldn't go where I wanted her to and then the second time, she'd go there, to the moon and back and then throw in a pirouette before falling to her death.

Death:
Which brings me to dying. I died a lot, about as often through my own fault as through the game's, but you get put back very close to the point of your demise. The transition happens fast and there's no penalty for dying, so this doesn't strike me as overly negative.

Difficulty:
There was one section where I got a bit frustrated, because the premise seemed like fun (jumping across descending dimension rocks to make it across a gap), but the execution ended up making it the most difficult part of the whole game for me. But maybe that's just me not being a pro gamer. Other than that, the game was easy enough with just enough bite to keep you interested. I was wary of getting the game because another commenter stated that the game required a lot of precision, but I didn't find that to be the case except for a small handful of jumps where you learned how you had to move rather quickly.

Conclusion:
This game is neat. It's very short (got 100% in just under 2 hours), so I definitely wouldn't recommend it for the full price. I got it on sale for about two bucks and that was absolutely worth it! If the controls worked better and there was a workshop support so that the community could post levels, I'd throw my money at the developers like crazy. But given the way it is, it has the nice optics, enjoyable music, a character that resembles Katara from AtlA (yes, that's what sold me, fight me) to recommend it.

6/10 I want more

If I had known how many sharks there were in this game, I would have played it so much sooner.

This game wanted to make me believe it hated sharks, and I believed it and shouted at the screen like the gullible idiot I am. Boy, am I glad to be proven wrong. There are so many sharks in this game.

I rode a thresher shark. I rode a grey reef shark. I rode an oceanic white tip shark. I RODE A WHALE SHARK. We're all friends now and hang out at my club tank every night.

(I guess there are other fish in this game, too. And whales, I think, but I'm not too sure. If you only like those, maybe don't get this game.)


TL;DR
Much shark, so wow. Get game for sharks.

A cute and short little game with an amazing artstyle and even better soundtrack. It's not particularly hard or challenging (apart from one point near the end where I nearly tore my hair out in frustration before eventually consulting a guide), but I don't think it's trying to be.

The animations are fluid and watching the world and your character move around is a lot of fun! I also took way too many screenshots of the scenery, because it's pretty like woah.

I was a little wary going into the game, because another reviewer mentioned the slow animation speed when solving puzzles, but I never found that to be an issue. It comes down to personal taste, probably, but there really aren't that many puzzles where the game makes you sit around until it's done showing your correct solution, so if you're unsure about getting the game because of this - don't be.
Changing seasons was a bit tiring until I realized you can also quick-dial them (right-stick on the Xbox controller I was using), after which it never bothered me again.

There is some backtracking if you want to get all the achievements and didn't look out for them from the start. The puzzles are easy, but a few of them become a little tedious if you pass through an area several times because you forgot something.

There's no map and while I did get lost a couple of times in the beginning, I never felt the need for one.

The controls were tight for the most part of the game and in some areas, I went wild with jumping around while changing seasons to see if there were any hidden paths that could only be accessed by doing crazy fountain height shenanigans. There weren't. There were a handful of times, however, when my character didn't jump as I told it to and I had to redo some puzzles because of that, but I honestly can't say if that was the game or my controller having a mind of its own. Given how the levels are designed, you don't get thrown back a lot if you mess up a jump, though.

Seasons after Fall is probably not a game for everyone. If you want something cute and relaxing that lets you sit back and simply enjoy a nice looking game with wonderful music, great voice acting and season changing gimmicks, you should definitely give this game a try! Given its short runtime, you might want to wait for a sale, though.

8/10 Would find out what the fox says to the seed again

Triple Triad for life.