The premise of the game is in the title, and it seemed contrived, but Overwhelmingly Positive always catches my eye so I decided to give it a chance. I regret nothing. This was really good. Of the four main routes, two of them go deep into the relevant lore regarding the curse, so you might miss it if you pick the "wrong" route, but the NPCs will helpfully nudge you toward those and the early choices seem designed to funnel a first-time player into one. My only real criticism was that one of the bad endings (I won't say which) is almost impossible to get without a guide, which I found a bit odd.

Meh. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't great. The very first scene of the intro was apparently one of the last scenes written for the game, and it shows. The quality of the writing never quite lives up to the initial impressions. Several antagonist characters are set up and done relatively well at first, if a little cliche, but their story threads are abruptly dropped before they can cause any real problems for the protagonists, because the protagonists couldn't realistically do anything against them in their social class. The ending is convenient, predictable, and comes rather abruptly. The character designs and general tone of the romantic scenes were clearly designed with a male audience in mind (that's not a value judgment, it simply is the case and it's worth mentioning). Some aspects I did enjoy were the unabashedly flawed protagonist, the banter between the female leads, and its unexpected but tasteful portrayal of religion, of all things. It's not a major feature of the story, but when it was there it was relevant and well done. All told, it held my attention until the end, and left me hopeful for better from ebi-hime's later works.

Ah, another old classic 3D mascot platformer collectathon that I couldn't resist playing again. Why is this so? Honestly, I couldn't tell you. Perhaps it's because the game is unabashedly enthusiastic to be exactly what it is. Ty is very pleased with itself. The game doesn't seem to care if the audience it was made for has already grown up and might think that the "90s cool" protagonist is actually kind of a dork. The characters are absurd parodies of themselves. The voice actor for your designated tutorial NPC laughs at their own lines after reading them with disregard for the subtitles, and the "bloopers" are left in the audio. During the credits, the antagonist is so ready to be done with the game that he tells the player to "go read a book or something." Honestly though? I forgot about all that stuff a long time ago. I played it again because I remember enjoying it despite not remembering why. It's just a vibe. I've never played the sequels, so it'll be interesting to find out if they kept that vibe or followed the Jak and Daxter example and turned edgy. The Steam version adds a hardcore mode, which feels kinda unnecessary. If you're even a little bit careful, you won't die in this mode. There are no instant deaths that I know of, and there's no situation you can't escape by simply exiting the level. It doesn't change the game in any way that I know of other than replacing the extra lives with full health items, which makes the game easier, and forbidding you from saving. That might've been nice to know in advance.

It's Gex, so I wasn't exactly expecting N. Sane/Reignited Trilogy levels of effort, but this was truly the bare minimum. Easy Steam achievements are an excuse for fans to re-play the games and finally beat Gex 1/Planet X if they haven't done so before, but there's nothing here to justify a $30 price tag or excite/expand the base enough for a sequel to be worth it. "I'm thinkin' I'm back?" I'd like that, but I sincerely doubt it.

This game has always been free, so I was convinced to try it back when it was still pretty new as my first visual novel. When it came to Steam I knew I'd have to play it again, and I was not disappointed. It still hits me the same way it did when I first played it over 10 years ago. If you're going to play the Steam version though, save often, because it can crash sometimes.

A cute game with some rather serious pacing issues, if you ask me. After each main story arc, you'll unlock some new scenes, and about half of them will be the same scenes from other characters' perspectives, which is fine—but you'll be required to play through those before moving on to the next part of the main story, leading to a lot of redundant dialogue immediately being required reading, and you'll have a basic idea of what happened in the other scenes because another NPC already talked about it and spoiled it for you. There were also 78 extra post-game scenes, most of which was more of the same, and didn't unlock in a chronologically coherent fashion either. It's not the kind of game that you'd want to binge-play on the weekend. Like any manga with a lot of filler, it's probably best enjoyed as a drip-feed.

No actual games played in the last two weeks, just some free idle achievements.

A cute premise with great presentation. Hard to say if 10 bucks is too much for the content when the game's menu system does everything it can to respect your time. A single playthrough can take less than a minute if you're a fast reader and skip ahead to the next branch of the story.

RetroAchievements complete. The first 9 levels of NLNMAS have to be done in sets of 3 each. That's a lot of cutscenes you're forced to re-watch if you die near the end. The last 3 levels are done individually but are notoriously difficult on account of RNG and lots of forced damage. More annoying than hard.

Played this game before it had achievements; happy to have an excuse to play it again. Now, it's completed… Mega Sad.

I liked it so much, in fact, that I went back to the original to finish the RetroAchievements. I am now a master at losing Senet.

Pikmin was also mastered on RetroAchievements. After the Distant Spring challenge mode, I might just be crazy enough to try the 'no blues' run.