Click to 13. Just do it. Click. To. 13.

Ballsy move on the devs' part to introduce a brand new protagonist in this one.
Kate tracks down Emily, a freelance photographer, and takes her to the House of 1000 Doors to break the news: she's the last of the Lancasters left unaware of their true identity, at least until now. The residents of the House get only enough time to introduce themselves and explain her task before evil finds its way into their hearts and turns them against her. Equipped with the Hand of Light, as well as a couple of other helpful powers, Emily has to defeat the evil and save the House.
The HOG scenes in this one were sparse, with most of them having you point out key items that hide a piece of a puzzle needed to open a chest or something similar instead of collecting a bunch of random items. More times is spent on minigames, some of which I've not encountered in any other game. Most of them weren't all that easy, either.
Compared to Serpent Flame, Evil Inside is of even higher quality from a graphical standpoint, though I'm not impressed by the updated voice acting or the partial (?) redesigns. (Amanda in particular looks nothing like herself from the three previous games.)
The bonus chapter fills you in on what Kate has been up to while Emily was busy saving the others.
This was a really solid HOG. I'm a bit sad this is the end of this series. It's ridiculous, sure, but what HOG isn't? If they could find ways to keep this train running, I'd probably keep on playing more.

In this re-skinned porn parody of Sousou no Frieren, we follow Kota, a travelling mage who decides to visit her old friend, the drunkard priest Weisser. She learns he stopped drinking when he took in a little girl named Stern. Now that Kota is here, he'd like her to teach Stern some magic. However, he knows Stern is much too weak to harness the full extent of her power, so he asks Kota to give her a specific set of food and drink. And so, Kota sets out on a quest to get said items from other characters, with sexual innuendo abound.
I didn't want to say "No" to the prompt regarding its Verified Deck status, but it did freeze on me a few times. I didn't even get to save by that point, so I had to replay the beginning over and over. The menu was weird, I couldn't even bring it up a lot of the time, so I started saving every time I could. I also didn't think to check the key mapping, so no looking through the inventory for flavor text for me. The music was nice and basic, although there's only so much one could take of the same song for about an hour. Some memes were referenced, but I didn't find it cringe.
After finishing the game, you get a message from the devs suggesting the Patreon build, so not only is this game re-skinned, it's also censored. I'm not really interested in the original, considering I don't know anything about Frieren, but there are guides available on how to replace the files of the Steam build to match the original version.

A certain nuclear family just won the lottery and decided to move from the city to the countryside. Now you have to help them build their farm from the ground up. …this immediately made the game sound better than it actually is.
In reality, all your help consists of is harvesting their produce in time to fill all the scheduled delivery trucks. You can harvest produce by selecting grids of at least 2x2 plots, as long as all corners contain the same kind of produce. The plots change shape and size between levels.
I like me a good old casual game, but there's good reason for this one not making the history books. It's painfully repetitive and there aren't enough upgrades to justify playing until the very end. The soundtrack seems to be comprised of no more than three or four tracks, so each and every level plays one and the same vaguely farmer-esque ditty. This made struggling against time provide an odd sense of relief, as the track would finally change. The art style of the cutscenes is awful and because screen resolutions have advanced since 2008, it all looks blurry.
I thought the gameplay was new and interesting (they could have, after all, just made another generic match-3 game and called it a day), but it was all so same-y I'm just glad I don't have to play any more of it. I would've liked to see more updates, more chances to look for oil (that's something that just gets added in the middle of the story, you get to look for oil between levels just 'cause), maybe even fluctuating prices for produce types, so you'd have to check between levels and account for that (as it stands, whenever you get a new type of seed, the market value goes up for all produce across the board.) Honestly, good on the person who gave the code for this away for doing so.

Since childhood, you've been haunted by a handsome, blonde man. You don't know his real name, but you've named him "Geist." Now that you're in college, you're more than used to his presence. One might even say you're fed up with it. Could the chance encounter at a comp sci tutoring session be the start of something new?
You don't need to read too far to figure out that Geist is a personification of MC's social anxiety. The things he says are extremely harsh, enough that the dev has provided a trigger warning, but it makes sense in context. Depending on your choices, you can either bond with Kalei, the cute guy you meet at the comp sci tutoring session and block Geist's presence out of your life or, through avoiding contact with Kalei, become a shut-in while embracing Geist's presence. It's hard to like Geist, obviously, but Kalei is an extremely fun character. Hell, I'd love some kind of follow-up to his and MC's story after his ending, if that ever made sense to make. Him and MC can bond over shared interests, and his selfless interest in MC really warmed my heart.
MINDMINDMIND is also fantastic from a technical standpoint: it's got a minimalistic UI, a floating textbox (featuring a variety of fonts to choose from, including OpenDyslexic), character sprites animated with 2DLive and full voice acting for Geist and Kalei. I was positively surprised to learn it was made in Godot, as I still haven't played many VNs running the engine and if such great work can be done with it, I'm definitely interested in checking out more. I'll also be keeping an eye out for the dev's other works.

Supposedly made for insomniacs, (Neg)Entropic Wandering is the story of you, an insomniac, as you try (and fail) to fall asleep, then decide to go on a walk. Your walk takes you on an abstract adventure, which then returns you to your bed, now able to fall asleep peacefully.
Considering the graphics are all pixelated images, it was depressing to learn that they were AI generated. Come on, dev…! That's what royalty-free images are for!
Since this is being marketed as a story "for insomniacs", you'd think it'd be something more than just a depiction of an insomniac's bedtime, but alas. Also, once more, I did not get to explore all the choices as I normally would, because this was made in goddamn Unity.

The no longer available prologue for Nova Lands, Nova Lands: Emilia's Mission is perhaps as barebones as it gets. There's little to unlock and craft, and even with all the automation available the game takes over 2 hours to complete. In a better demo, the time I spent bumbling around waiting for ingots to get made could have gone towards exploring or research, but not here. By the time everything was automated, I've unlocked all there was to unlock.
The most obvious improvements even this preview could have used in my opinion are the removal of the oxygen mechanic (it's the only thing preventing you from just getting up and leaving the game running while you wait for it to complete itself, and it's more annoying than challenging), some sort of counter for the ingots (in-game or an achievement tracker) and mapping the pause button to something else than the Tab key (I was hoping I could let the game run while I'd read the discussions, but nope), and that's not even mentioning the things you can't do anything with in this demo, like animal poop, bones or gold nuggets. If it wasn't for the guide someone made, I may not have known how to complete this game, either.
Between the forums and the negative reviews, there's been disappointment in how barebones Emilia's Mission is, especially considering that there was an earlier demo which supposedly showcased much more content than this one. Puzzling, to be sure. I think the only reason I own this is because I learned it would be getting removed soon and it seemed mildly interesting, but I'm not too into survival crafting games, so for once I will say I am not interested in checking out the full game.

Talk to Strangers is an odd little game about working as a salesperson for a company called Sunny Morning, which specializes in… well, I have no idea what they sell, because you don't get to learn that. What you are supposed to focus on is endearing yourself to different kinds of strangers in order to successfully facilitate as many sales as possible. You also have to keep track of your rage and depression meters, 'cause if they fill up… well, the depression one isn't that bad, but blowing out the rage meter is an instant game over.
As you progress through the game, you may gather tips regarding particular households; when the residents are or aren't in, how to approach at a given time of day or what the residents may be preoccupied with. I'd say these are only mildly helpful, considering it feels as if the devs have established a rule that each and every house needs to have four tips pertaining to it. A few of the tips don't even unlock during any conversation with the resident of a particular house, but only after a specific set of choices at one particular time of day at another, completely unrelated house, which I found annoying.
The game definitely loses its charm the moment you learn that progression is dependent on your ability to memorize the few choice sequences that allow you to make the sale happen. Then again, it does have 36 (!) different endings and after you unlock one, it'll mark the choices that lead to it in red to stop you from picking them again. Most of them are joke endings, and therefore not "good", but I enjoy this exact kind of humor. With as little as is established about the player character, they can say any random thing and it automatically becomes true.
That being said, to get the true ending, you need to know how to get everyone to buy the most items they possibly can, and perhaps because a single playthrough lasts about 30-40 minutes, there isn't a manual save option. This becomes annoying when you know exactly what to do and have to go through all the motions, but can't go out of the recommended order outlined in a guide, because half the map isn't even unlocked on the first day for reasons I haven't managed to figure out.
All in all, I think unlocking the whole map at once, more helpful tips and possibly more leeway with some of the conversations could improve this game. I've already unlocked all achievements, but I've still not seen the last two endings, which would require me to go through the whole game again twice. I liked it enough to want to do it, but not enough to do it right away.

As the title would suggest, this is a typing game centered around the original 1926 Winnie-the-Pooh book. You can type as fast as possible to try and place high in the rankings if you want. I mostly focused on the fact that I was able to read the book for the first time while playing. I've only ever seen the movies, but I was pleased to see that all the stories match my memory of them. Tigger's absence surprised me, I never knew he first appeared in the sequel.
If anyone cared to make more games like this for other classics, like Alice in Wonderland, I would absolutely eat it up. It's just gotta be someone who can make sure the text will not be as full of errors as it is in this game. That, and the fact that the options for auto-capitalization and auto-punctuation are turned on by default just makes everything more confusing. I felt like it made me a lot slower than I'd normally be. Other than that, I managed to rank high pretty consistently despite never learning the proper typing technique. And oh, yeah, if there ever is a next game, it'd probably be good to do away with the AI art.

I've had vol. 2 on my list for a while now (apparently I got it in a trade of some kind), and while browsing aimlessly through my list, I looked at it again, then got to watching someone's gameplay, then checked Steam and saw that the Classic YDKJ bundle is on sale… and now I own all of them.
I finished my first 21 question game with -$6.000 and my first 7 question game with $2.250. Considering this is an American trivia game from 1995, I reckon I did okay. Will be playing the other ones over the next few months.