Destructoid

The Ascent itself is kept from greatness from a lot of jank, technical issues, and weird design decisions. All that said, I think once I get my hands on a Steam Deck, I’m absolutely going to treat that as an excuse to go back for more. Hopefully, by then, they’ll have a lot of the technical issues addressed.

A game that challenges but never judges? A narrative that doesn’t put the weight of the world on your shoulders? Something that doesn’t send bosses that hate you for no reason? Then Here Comes Niko! might be a good fit. But look past the bright soundtrack and lovely character art and you might find that there’s no chocolate center.

All in all, I wish I could say that playing Where the Heart Leads was fun — I was really rooting for it, and hoping it would rise to the occasion. But, regardless of how long I held out, playing this game turned out to be a pretty miserable experience, and one I would have given up about an hour in if I didn’t want to finish it for this review.

An exercise in design excellence, Death’s Door recognizes and capitalizes on its strengths to deliver a smart, creative, and thoroughly engaging adventure, painted with wonderful visual strokes and peppered with witty, thoughtful commentary on life, death, and how we spend the hours in-between.

I can’t stop playing Pokemon Unite and chain-queuing games because it’s so fun, but these issues are going to drive some people away and need to be addressed. It’s a shame a few of these problems exist with the monetization skeleton because they’re so easily fixable, and while targeting whales is a classic mobile strategy, I don’t think the general audience for Pokemon is going to stand for it long term.

NEO: The World Ends with You is a sequel worth waiting for. It brings together many of the best concepts from the DS original but in a more approachable and accessible experience. It may lack the lightning-in-a-bottle genius of its predecessor, but the 40+ hours I spent exploring Shibuya showed me this world doesn’t have to be complicated to be worthwhile.

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles as a unified duology really captures everything that draws players into this series in the first place. It’s got big reveals and turnabouts, clever use of examinations and deductions, and a cast littered with memorable, endearing characters. Naruhodo’s journey through the legal system of London is one that’s been a series highlight. It’s nice to finally have these games in the West, as both a great onboarding point for newcomers and a nice treat for Ace Attorney fans. No objections here.

Despite some gripes, the legacy of this trilogy is fully secure. Inti Creates can kind of keep making these types of platformers indefinitely, and I’d keep playing them. But in the case of Blaster Master Zero, at this point, it’s totally OK for them to take a break. So long as we keep getting mainline Gunvolts, Curse of the Moons, and maybe another Mighty Gunvolt Burst.

Cotton Reboot! is a very pretty and highly enjoyable remake of one of the shmup genre’s most pioneering cute ’em ups — as endearing today as it has ever been while featuring surprisingly deep mechanics for score attack fanatics. It’s a shame a threadbare package, a subjectively high price, and distracting visual issues frequently threaten to spoil the party. For dedicated shmup heads, however, Cotton Reboot is an enjoyable blast from the past that comfortably paves the way for the sweet series’ incoming revival.

Akiba’s Trip: Hellbound & Debriefed is a horny game if nothing else. It’s not explicit ecchi, but it knows exactly what it’s doing, and it succeeds in a lot of ways. It’s an interesting satire of the otaku lifestyle, both poking fun at and embracing it.