Recent reviews by Nerdie

One of the most striking, impactful games I've ever played. My personal ranking list of stories about generational trauma:

5. What Remains of Edith Finch
4. Encanto
3. Umineko
2. Everything Everywhere All At Once

POWER GAP

1. 1000xResist

Do yourself a favor and drop yourself into this multi-layered, beautiful, intricate story. You'll be happy you did.

High school. Freshman year. We sit in the hallway, heads resting against the stone walls. We're talking about Percy Jackson books and the upcoming movie. My friend D insists the actor playing Percy is her cousin. I try to insist that the name of the actor and the name of her cousin doesn't match. She puffs up her cheeks as the lie is proven, loudly boasting that no one *actually* cares and I shouldn't be bringing the mood down. I get so infuriated, I rip my sandwich in half and leave school early.

Being alone for the week afterwards hurt more than anything else.

Sophomore year. Much of my online life involves either the Nostalgia Critic or Ace Attorney Musical forums. Against the warm glow of computer screen, my eyes dart from comment to comment, song to song, screechy comedy review to screechy comedy review. More than anything else, the pupils hover on the sensation of kinship. Of people hanging out at conventions, cracking jokes, sharing stories, entertaining each other. Through these five minute clips, I become certain beyond all shadows of a doubt that every reviewer at Channel Awesome must be best friends with each other. (Whoops).

I go to bed in tears, obsessed with the reality that I'll never be talented enough to be friends with these seemingly superior beings.

Junior Year.

Books and movies club. We all read a book and then we watch a movie. I'm obsessed with having a specific experience, being able to joke around with classmates MST3K style during a film. But no one's joking. It's just me, being the jerk, ruining everyone else's mood. I let silence descend on me, gripping onto the table to try and stabilize my senses. I cared too much about the facts before, now apparently I care too much about being funny. Why am I *wrong?*

Perfect Tides sent me back to these childhood moments, each more unpleasant than the last. To memories I'm not ready to share with anyone, to the ways I could let the loneliness become a shield to protect myself from the brief juices of warmth. Convinced everyone hated me for nearly all four years, shocked to discover how many people thought I was funny and charming in year 4, all the while wondering how I got away with tricking them.

But the real value of Perfect Tides was how it helped me treat that version of me with warmth. Mara is often cruel to her friends and loved ones, but there's such humanity in that cruelty. Her hatred for herself is so high, she can't conceive that her words matter. That people value what she says. That *she* matters.

Perfect Tides is largely a memoir and you can feel the personal touch in every aspect. The animations, the descriptions, the ways Mara can be equal parts unpleasant and endearing. It doesn't concern itself with making Mara likable or perfect. It's in her flaws that she becomes relatable.

The game can probably be navigated fairly quickly, ignoring the world around you and chasing Mara's base wants. But exploring the world provides new choices, new side stories that highlight the world around you. The game doesn't point you in any direction. And it shouldn't! You, and Mara, are making decisions you can't fully understand based on emotions and chemicals you can barely grasp. You're a teen. You have to find your own direction, and it's often the wrong one. But it's your choice to make. And everyone else is making the same ones, even if it seems like they know what they're doing.

This moment of enlightenment will pass. At some point, the anxieties will seep back into my soul, and the creeping dread of who I am and where I belong will return.

And it will pass again.

Here and now, I'm alive and I want to write words in the hopes they can feel what I feel too. And others have felt that way and they'll have words they can share with people too. And maybe, hopefully, we can all treat our past selves with the gentle love and care they deserve.

Perfect Tides is a work of art.

Cozy mystery piece about being a maid and snooping around in a hotel. This is behind a spoiler warning so you can't complain- its a bit of a Gone Home gay drama. You're looking through old letters, uncovering old romances and lost loves, and discovering how characters navigate through society. There's a real risk of the cozy queer drama being... *too* cozy. Characters finding their romantic partners without too much internalized suffering, other characters being shockingly accepting of the gay characters popping up, things like that. I have people tell me I hate happy endings and I really don't think that's true. I mean yes, I do enjoy some bleak endings. But I like mess. I like it when problems are difficult to overcome, so that the successes feel more earned. If the journey didn't have a challenge, its hard to feel enthused about the ending. There's certainly value in the fantasy of a happy ending, but I need a bit more spice for it to hit right for me.

Which I why I adored how difficult it is to get the golden ending. Figuring out which evidence Sophie needs to throw away to protect the wider cast from the cops is a genuine challenge. The police are ready and eager to throw some schmuck in prison, especially if they're a minority. Any scrap of evidence you've missed could lock you into Paul, Anne, or Marcela being unjustly arrested. As of the current Steam Achievement rankings, only 8% of players have successfully shifted the blame from anyone we care about. According to the stats, 64% of players completed the game. That gulf is fascinating to me. The next stat of successfully protecting anyone is around 16%, which at least indicates that most players didn't throw away anything. But still, the balance between discovering all the clues and remembering to dispose of everything later is a genuinely engaging mechanic, at least for me. It just hammers home how truly oppressive this institutions are and how survival is so profoundly difficult in a way that felt well-realized and well-crafted. The game is a short enough 2-3 hours that seeking out the variation feels feasible and rewarding.

Just an absolutely fascinating, surreal game. About 3-4 hours long if just following the plot, but the length can be easily doubled chasing down bizarre loose threads during each story segment. The game has an Earthbound energy to it, and not just because its "quirky rpg." Much of Earthbound's quirkiness emerges from how it puts its audience into the perspective of childhood. To Ness and crew, the adult world operates on strange rules, often cruel without any warning. Felvidek felt like it was placing me into the sort of mindscape of some theoretical ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Catholics. The world is intensely aggressive, devastation hits random people for reasons we can't really grasp, and demonic threats are apparently real things we should be worrying about. But its also incredibly silly. There's a naked man in the river, there's cultist guards who really want you to know they aren't afraid of you but aren't coming out to fight you, there's horny priests who circle back to being almost reasonable moral authorities just by the fact that violence and in-fighting get in the way of being horny. Its an absolutely fascinating game, with hand-painted backgrounds, 3D cutscenes, and a translation that delights in its "thees" and "thines" and "-eths" and providing almost no context for the history of the era.

The mechanics are fairly straight-forward rpg fights. There's no exp gain to be had. In fact, diving into too many fights risks leaving you unprepared or low on healing items. You can restore your health in any church, ala Dragon Quest and the small map of the game means its often easiest (if time-consuming) to just leave dungeons and race back to one of the churches to refresh yourself. But it also means that every battle is a challenge and not using the full scope of your skillset means you can get killed in any of the game's plot or non-plot based encounters. Advancing your characters relies more on the tools you pick up and purchase to upgrade your team. Figuring out what tools work best for Pavol and Matej is tough but... fulfilling! I can often fall into being fairly disinterested in upgrading anyone who isn't my main fighter, but Felvidek pretty definitely forces you to be smarter and thoughtful about the power your guys have. I very much need to be able to cast heal twice in a fight, actually! Once isn't enough!

Its just a fascinating little piece. I need more short, interesting rpgs compared to the beefy 40 hour monstrosities that leave me feeling guilty about time I could have spent elsewhere. More than anything though, I think I want to direct people to experts like Felipe Pepe, who frequently posts about non-American rpgs and crpgs that often never make it to English audiences. Its just really refreshing and enlightening to have someone so firmly affirm that this idea of playing all the "important" games is impossible. There's so many hidden works of wonder found in other countries and languages. We're lucky to get access to this one and I hope to be lucky enough to see more.

I love the sense of history Golden Idol presents, it fits really well with my own sensibilities. There's all kinds of scheming and plotting and manipulation, but beneath all that is Stupid Impulse. No one is as invincible as they think and no master plan can ultimately outwit the power of someone really stupid being in the right place at the wrong time. The wheel turns.

Rise captures that same sort spirit and expands on it with one of my other all time favorite themes: the ♥♥♥♥ rolls downhill. Numerous mysteries don't even involve the main players of the ongoing story, just showing fragments of how the wider narrative hurts normal people. Truly abhorrent criminal negligence occurs in this game that made me ready to pace around the room in a fury. And beyond that, it just makes for a more intimate story. Quiet little micro-tragedies and interpersonal dramas that make the world feel alive and meaningful. It makes sense that the series would go this direction with the shift to the modern day. Case of the Golden Idol built entire alternate histories with weird political parties and movements, letting itself chase whatever horrible historical development it wanted to. Rise, being set in the modern day and building a Franchise, can't exactly stretch too outside the norms or build undefeatable stakes. They have to hold back on potentially culture changing consequences, because the world needs to be intact for more Content down the line. But I actually think its to the game's benefit. It means it can focus more on individual character stories in a way it couldn't before. When the stakes are lowered to a less monumental scale, it has to find new ways to build drama. I think it makes for a better game. I ended Case of the Golden Idol with really only one character's adventure keeping with me a week later. In Rise, there's a dozen incidental character plotlines that will stick with me for a long time to come.

Certainly, there's an argument that it might be a less tight experience. There's a lot of hanging threads that are designed for upcoming DLC chapters to really keep the money train going. But Golden Idol really avoids my complaints about that sort of thing by just building really compelling adventures. Solving the mysteries is still electrifying, piecing together the clues and codes feels much more intuitive than it did in Case, and it just Feels Good To Solve Crimes. Banger time. Banger game.

A game about surviving in a desert kingdom, delivered with confidence and self-assurance.

I like this game a lot more than Nairi: Tower of Shirin. The scope of the franchise is clear now: each game centers on a different aspect of the setting of Shirin. The first game focused on the poor district, the second game presented the middle district, and the third game will focus on the rich district. There is so much clarity of purpose seeping through the game's framework, a certainty of its setting and story, delivered with such a precise pace and tone. Its kind of incredible to behold. Rising Tide so dramatically expands its world, offering a greater variety of nuance and internal discourse to its setting that really makes it feel more like a real city. I kind of adored it!

The puzzle dungeons are genuine challenges that forced me to make heavy uses of maps and notes in order to reach their conclusion. But the way all the pieces click together into a greater whole is downright electric once the entire picture slots together.

Its tough for me not to feel anxious about the world of indie development. The different costs and barriers to turning a profit. How difficult it is to survive to keep making the things you're passionate about. I don't like to sit in the mentality of art as profit versus art as art, but I couldn't help but fuss about the future of Home Bear Studio and Nairi. So I was reluctant to write a Steam review for a while because of how inevitable it might be that the review would become just about that. Which is why I was kind of surprised and heartened to get a message from Home Bear Studio on social media responding to that anxiety and encouraging me to keep some faith. They didn't have to try and assuage my fears, I'm sure they've got all kinds of bigger priorities. But the passion and care this team have for their game and this world... its something I think is worth rooting for.

Buy this game. Its cute, its fun, and the people making it care a lot about it. That's worth the price of admission.

20 minute puzzle adventure. Full of surreal and disorienting effects, requiring you to rethink your sense of reality and what internal rules shape the space. Really satisfying and the exact right length it should be. I'm extremely glad the final puzzle was the final puzzle, because I might have exploded if I had to be at that specific level of disorientation for longer than a few minutes.

A strange little soap opera mystery, sharing a lot of DNA with Her Story and similar interrogation focused drama games. Contains some odd plot contrivances, but putting together all the information and grasping the weird nuances of what's going until you've filled out the puzzle pieces into a perfect pattern... that's gaming, baby.

An all-timer! Surreal puzzle adventure about being trapped in the arctic and forced to accept all the worst aspects of yourself. Absolutely banger game, absolutely beyond compare. The subplot with the harp girl and the beeswax she wanted destroyed me with just the feeling of "you can't fix this and its weird for you to think you can try." Hit hard.

Utterly fascinating, charming game. Very buggy and there are three points in the game you have to search around in the dark to click on the next character route to pick. But I find it so completely charming, all my issues kind of melt away. Not always perfect, but you can feel that the artist worked hard and cared deeply about what they were crafting. What a delight.