Tomb Raider: Legend

The older Tomb Raider games are so much fun! Don't get me wrong... I like the new ones too, especially Rise of the Tomb Raider, but they are so serious and gritty. There's definitely something to be said for just relaxing and having a good time. You kinda know what you're getting with this game as soon as you open it up for the first time with the silly 007-esque sequence just before the main menu. It's got everything the classic Tomb Raider fan could want from swinging across vines to diving from the tops of waterfalls to running for your life from giant boulders like you're Indiana Jones. Oh and let's not forget... actual tombs to explore and lots of them! Everywhere from the jungles of South America and Africa to the peaks of Nepal, Lara definitely gets her explore on in this game. If you want to kick back and relax, you've even got a whole manor to explore right in England with all kinds of treasures to find. My only major annoyance with this game was a bug with the next gen graphics setting that would randomly crash in certain levels. You could get around it by changing the settings, but I do love my pretty graphics. Other than that, it was all smiles all the time. And of course, Lara is <3<3<3.

Legend of Fae

Here's a little gem I found. It's a match-3 game with a heartwarming (but also heartwrenching) story that says you don't have to be physically strong to be a hero. You just have to be determined and have a big heart. Claudia, a young French girl, wakes up one day to find her uncle missing. He's left her a note, a lantern, and a strange book, telling her to go to her parents. Of course, she wants to find her uncle instead and get to the bottom of this mystery. The only problem is she can hardly walk. She has to wear a leg brace due to a crippling illness she had when she was little. Because she has trouble walking, she has to make use of her ingenuity and her friendship with helpful elementals if she's going to survive the attacks from dangerous fae creatures during her journey. I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but in this game, you even have to match-3 just to *walk* and for me, it really hit home how hard Claudia has to work just to keep her legs moving. The levels are pretty short, so you can do one or two at a time or however many you want, though the difficulty does ramp up toward the end of the game. It's just a really sweet game!

To Be or Not To Be

Do you like strong female characters? Do you like to laugh? Do you like Shakespeare and/or literature? ...But not so much that you'll get offended at jokes about it? Then this game is for you! To Be or Not To Be might just be the funniest game I've ever played. I couldn't stop laughing and smiling like a goof pretty much the whole time. Personally, I recommend turning off the narration and just imagining the voices in your head. But then, that's what I do with visual novels too. Sometimes it even screws up my actual reading voice and I freak out... but it's so worth it! There's SO many ways this story can turn out, and pretty much all of them are hilarious. I like to play as Ophelia the best. She has some of the best story arcs, and because she's written as a strong and intelligent character, you get to witness all of the crazy Hamlet shenanigans through that lens. It just really makes the story that much better imo, of course unless you choose to play her like a bimbo to the eternal dismay of the author. :P

Solstice

I love the backgrounds in this game. Honestly, they are so beautiful that sometimes I just stopped to admire how pretty everything was and feel the little flutters in my heart from a majestic aurora borealis or an exotic palace in the background. IMO, Moacube make some of the best choice driven VNs around. Cinders is one of my favorite games of all time. While for me, the story of Solstice doesn't really compare to Cinders at all, you can see how the graphics and animations have improved. Solstice is set in an interesting world with lots of mystery and political intrigue where much is not how it seems. The story is darker than Cinders. In fact, the ending I got was really, really dark... maybe because I'm such a softy. But like I said, the thing that made me smile about this game was the beautifully drawn graphics and the wonderful music. You can really tell that the artists put their heart into it. There's also a guy/guy romance route and a girl/guy route, but no girl/girl routes sadly. Like most moacube vns, the romance is just kind of background to the rest of the story. The characters, at least, were interesting enough to make me want to learn more about them while I admired everything going on in the background.