Recent reviews by little sis jasper ⚢

This review was originally posted to my website[www.sapphic.dog].

Slime Rancher is another game that my current girlfriend, Princess, wanted me to play. My first time seeing this game was my sibling, Kudrea, playing it on our newly purchased Xbox One around the mid-10s. I thought it was a cute little game, but I didn't understand what was going on, and only watched them play it in passing. Fast-forward to 2021, Princess says I need to play the game.

Seeing the main menu for the first time, I could tell why she wanted me to play it. She loves cute things, and seeing the little slimes fall from the sky onto my character and make their cute squishing sounds was delightful. After creating my world and loading in, it indeed had a cute aesthetic, with soft colours.

In-game, you have a survival crafting style interface. You have your standard health and energy bar, item slots at the bottom, and a separate menu for a map. You could also switch into a “crafting” mode, removing your item slots for a crafting menu.

As the name of the game suggests, you ranch slimes. You're tasked with taking over a farm, after the previous owner goes off on their own adventure. To accomplish this, you're given a vacuum that sucks up slimes, items to feed them, and “plorts”, which slimes give you to exchange for currency. As you go through the game and make more money, you can expand your farm to hold more slimes and chickens, upgrade your vacuum, boots, and hover pack, and craft machines that give you exclusive crafting materials.

The basic farm is equipped with your house, a mission board, an economy board where you exchange your plorts, and eight corrals. To start, one of those corrals is given for free, leaving you to purchase the other seven. On each plot, you can purchase a corral for slimes, a coop for chickens, a garden for fruits or vegetables, a silo to hold items, a pond for a water source, or an incinerator to discard items. The main builders also have upgrades that give them more functionality. Some include keeping your slimes happier, holding more items, or automatically completing a task related to the building.

Once you end up filling the farm, you can expand into four other areas. These include The Overgrowth, The Docks, The Grotto, and The Lab. These four unlockable areas have something special about them that help you do specific tasks to advance your farm. The Overgrowth spawns chickens naturally. The Docks give you access to a nice view. The Grotto gives you access to a shortcut into another zone. The Lab gives you access to machines and the lab, which is the most substantial expansion. Each expansion also gives you four or five more corrals to use.

To use the lab, you input materials, which allows you to craft items. You can get new recipes by finding treasure capsules hidden throughout the world. Some of these include toys for your pets, extractors to farm exclusive resources, drones that automate tasks for you, and teleporters that teleport you around the map.

Outside the farm, there are nine different areas to unlock and explore. Each area has more slimes than you can bring back to your farm, and raise. They all have their own unique theme, slimes, and secrets to explore. One of the things you can find around are the Gordo Slimes. You interact with them by feeding them until they explode and provide you with a key. Keys give you access to these new areas.

Putting that all together, what does that look like for the gameplay loop? It's very well put together, allowing progression to feel natural and fun. Every new slime you get gives you progressively more money, but there are mechanics in place that keep earlier slimes worth something. The more plorts you turn in, they decrease in value. This prevents people from corralling one type of slime, as it'll eventually result in no money being made. To supplement this, you can combine two slimes together by feeding a regular slime a plort. It'll then give you both plorts when you feed it. This mechanic alone allows for thousands of different slime combinations, and ways to organize and re-arrange your farm.

Exploring the world after getting a few upgrades makes you feel pretty powerful, too. Occasionally, I would run around in circles instead of doing anything, simply because the movement was so fast, and flowy. Attempting to find all the treasures, and hidden areas gives you a sense of exploration, allowing this massive world to have so much charm. Going out to explore the world, and coming back to min-max my farm provided an exciting gameplay loop.

Overall, I found the game to be one of the best I've played. A topic I didn't touch on because I didn't want to spoiler it was the story. Even if the gameplay wasn't as good as it is, I think the story has a story that people need to hear. The end of the game, and the story, made me cry. Compared to the expectations of games these days, Slime Rancher was a short and sweet experience, well worth your time and bones.

If it weren't for three achievements, you would end up completing this game simply by playing it. These last three achievements are bad by any means, but they aren't a part of the core gameplay experience. They're time trial modes, where you're tasked with making a certain amount of money within a small timeframe. I had to do some research to complete these, as I had no idea how it was possible to accomplish them. They won't take you long to figure out, nor will the entire game take you to complete. I wish the game had more content to complete, so that alone should tell you it's worth a completionist look.

This review was originally posted on my website[www.sapphic.dog].

After the release of Halo Wars, I was glad to see they were branching out and making new genres of game under the Halo franchise. Halo Wars was an RTS, like one of my favourite games, Starcraft, so I had high hopes for Spartan Assault.

The UI for this game is basic. I believe it was designed to be a mobile game, but at the very least, it has a console game UI. It reminds me of the simplicity of older PopCap games, having only a few options. This game does have a dedicated achievements menu, and medal tracker, so that was a completionist win right out of the gate.

Spartan Assault is a top-down shooter, where you play as a random Spartan on your quest to beat the Forerunner and Covenant. Before you load into each mission, you can spend some credits that allow you to spawn with some power weapons if you find the level too difficult. You're also shown your three Assault Ops missions, which are mini-objectives you get each level. These provide you with the previously mentioned credits.

You have all the typical Halo toys here. Two weapons, multiple grenades, a melee, and equipment. On the theme of familiarity, each mission will drop you off somewhere, and it's your job to blast through the enemies. All the usual suspects are here, from vehicle missions to defend a target missions. Occasionally, you'll have to fight a boss, but Halo and bosses have never mixed that well. They're never too difficult to not finish on your first try.

Unfortunately, I don't have much to add in terms of the gameplay loop. It's a fairly standard experience, which isn't a bad thing. Spartan Assault is a small, bite-sized game that doesn't need a massive complexity to enjoy.

If you like Halo, this is a great game to add to your backlog. The short length of the game, and bare minimum variety of content, makes it worth your time. It's also a supplemental experience to the Halo lore, if that's something you're into.

There are certain things in this game that the sequel fixed, which make it harder to suggest completing it. If you're the completionist type, it might be hard to recommend you not do this, but still complete Spartan Strike. Some Assault Ops objectives are a massive grind, and they aren't nearly as fun as the next game in the series. Still, while it might take you longer than a weekend, I'm tentatively saying it's worth the completion.

This review was originally written on my website[www.sapphic.dog]

After the release of Halo Wars, I was glad to see they were branching out and making new genres of game under the Halo franchise Halo Wars was an RTS, like one of my favourite games, Starcraft, so I had high hopes for Spartan Strike. With that said, the first game, Spartan Assault, was a rough experience. While I still enjoyed that game, it wasn't the most polished thing in the world. Regardless, I can never get enough Halo! (unless it's Halo 5 or Infinite, then stay away from me)

The UI for this game is basic. I believe it was designed to be a mobile game, but at the very least, it has a console game UI. It reminds me of the simplicity of older PopCap games, having only a few options. This game does have a dedicated achievements menu, and medal tracker, so that was a completionist win right out of the gate.

Spartan Strike is a top-down shooter, where you play as a random Spartan on your quest to beat the Forerunner and Covenant. Before you load into each mission, you can spend some credits that allow you to spawn with some power weapons if you find the level too difficult. You're also shown your three Assault Ops missions, which are mini-objectives you get each level. These provide you with the previously mentioned credits.

You have all the typical Halo toys here. Two weapons, multiple grenades, a melee, and equipment. On the theme of familiarity, each mission will drop you off somewhere, and it's your job to blast through the enemies. All the usual suspects are here, from vehicle missions to defend a target missions. Occasionally, you'll have to fight a boss, but Halo and bosses have never mixed that well. They're never too difficult to not finish on your first try.

Unfortunately, I don't have much to add in terms of the gameplay loop. It's a fairly standard experience, which isn't a bad thing. Spartan Strike is a small, bite-sized game that doesn't need a massive complexity to enjoy.

If you like Halo, this is a great game to add to your backlog. The short length of the game, and bare minimum variety of content, makes it worth your time. It's also a supplemental experience to the Halo lore, if that's something you're into.

You can knock this out on a weekend, and it's a rewarding badge to your collection. The game clearly lays out what you need to do to complete the game. You'll never be confused about what you need to do, or even really look anything up. It's a straightforward, easy completion.

This is a short version of my review. To see the full review, check out my website[www.sapphic.dog].I have a history of starting Stardew with someone, then stopping shortly after. Maybe it's just me, but it feels like Stardew is the go-to game for people in a relationship. The health of the relationship depends on how far you end up in the game. I've picked up and dropped Stardew with a few different people. I dismissed it as something I'm never going to get into, and it's not a game for me.When I was a teen, I played Harvest Moon for the first time on DS. Stardew reminded me of Harvest Moon, and was initially the reason I was apprehensive to playing. Harvest Moon is great, but I thought I could only enjoy a game like that once. The UI of Stardew is similar to every other game in the genre. This isn't a problem for me, as it's a tried and true UI, and allows you to move through the game seamlessly. The advanced options also allow you to change some elements, as well as tooltips to provide you with extra information.You're a new farmer in town, and it's up to you to fill the shoes of your grandfather, who left the farm to you. It's silly how cliché this specific scenario is, but it works so well that people keep using it in their games. Everything about the style of this game feels very familiar, yet they managed to compliment it with having compelling backstories for the townsfolk.You're dropped on your farm with nothing but a few seeds and some tools. What you do from there is up to you. The game loosely guides you into the gameplay by giving you quests, and things to explore, but never forces you to do anything. Stardew is far from a linear experience, but there is a clear way to end the game. Making money and building relationships is your primary goal, and there are a handful of different wants to achieve that. Your secondary goal is to build up the town, and attempt to bring the townsfolk closer together.There are a ton of hidden mechanics that you'll pick up along the way. No matter how far you get into the game, something new is always happening, and everything feels fresh. Eventually, you unlock two new areas; one of which has an entire new farm for you, that isn't affected by the season system. You can effectively plant whatever you want whenever you want. The amount of side stories that you get sucked into is wild for the scope of the game. It becomes so much more than farming, chatting, and grinding the mines.Stardew is a beautiful, creative, and compelling game. It deserves the popularity and praise that it gets, as it's easily one of the best video games ever created. What really blows my mind is that it was made by one person, who still loves and updates the game. The experience reminds me of Minecraft, which has an unending amount of content, but you can do whatever you want at your pace. The progression in the game feels natural, and the gameplay loop was crafted to be smooth and satisfying. I can't give this game enough praise, you absolutely need to play it.Speaking as a completionist, you owe it to yourself to not only complete this game, but master it. Once you get to the Walnut Room, you're given a machine you can interact with that tells you how much of the game you've completed. Outside the achievements, there is more you can do in the game to master it. Having that clear outline as to what needs to be done, and what you're missing, makes this game a must master for all completionists.There are some frustrations that you have to be mindful of. There's an achievement to cook every recipe. Be sure to watch the TV every Sunday and Wednesday, as this is the primary way of getting new recipes. If you miss out on this, you'll be stuck sleeping over and over to end the game to get these recipes, as you have nothing else to do. Another tip, be sure to start working on your reputation early. There isn't an achievement to max relationship with everyone, but it's part of the perfection tracker, counting towards mastering the game.

This review was originally posted on my website[www.sapphic.dog]

Insaniquarium was my introduction to PopCap Games. I remember how I stumbled upon their games in 2005. I was in elementary school, looking for free games to play on the school computers. This was before schools started to buy invasive software to block websites and spy on students. Not only did my entire class fall in love with the game, but my teacher did as well. We would all talk about it, put up fish decorations, and write reports on the game.

Even though this was the first PopCap game I played, it's always refreshing to see the familiar PopCap starting screen. Insaniquarium has the usual selection of adventure mode, time trial, high scores, but comes with something special. You're given a virtual tank that allows you to buy fish for a screensaver. I've tried for many years to make it work on Linux, but I can't seem to make it work consistently. I have so many fond memories of the virtual tank, and seeing how much money I could get with the screensaver up.

Starting the adventure mode, the game does a fantastic job introducing you to the mechanics. You start out with a single fish, and feeding it allows it to grow. As it grows, it drops shells, which act as your currency. You can use those shells to buy more fish, upgrades, and the three egg pieces you need to complete the level. The upgrades can be anything from being able to drop more food at once, upgrading the quality of the food, and increasing the damage of your ray gun. The ray gun allows you to defeat the aliens who come throughout the level to eat your fish. Shooting them in the head does double damage, and depending on where you shoot them, they move throughout the tank. Losing all your fish means you failed, and need to restart the level.

After you buy all three egg pieces, you're given a companion to help you in the next level. You can only have three, and eventually four, and they all do something different. My strategy was to buy the fish that give you money at the start to rush the tank-specific fish. Each tank has a special fish that gives you the bulk of your money. I felt the best way to win was to use the money making companions to get them out as fast as possible, as they gave more shells than the starter guppies. After beating each of the four tanks, you're allowed to play a bonus mini-game gives you shells for your virtual tank. Essentially, shells drop from the top of the tank, and they all have different values. Clicking the same shell up to ten times doubled the value each time.

After beating all stages, you have to beat the final boss. Instead of fending off aliens from your guppies and fish, you have to defend all the companions you've gotten throughout your playthrough. I've tried for many years to save them all, but I don't think it's possible. Either way, once you beat the game, you unlock bonus mode. Bonus mode allows you to rack up shells for your virtual tank by playing through the game again, but giving a special stage after every level.

Insaniquarium will always have a special place in my heart. I wish we saw more of the game, but after what EA did to PopCap and Plants vs. Zombies, I'm happy for the game to remain as is. This game is easy to understand and fun to play. I'll always come back and beat this game every couple years or so, and I encourage you to do the same, at least once.

Absolutely. It's short, it's sweet, and the completion goal is very obvious. Completing the game feels like what you're supposed to do. I found that beating it alone left me unsatisfied, and it has so much more to offer. Add this to your backlog, and complete it.

This review was originally posted on my website[www.sapphic.dog]

Zuma is another game that I never got to as a child. We had this game, but it was more of a game that my grandma enjoyed. I was always scared to open Zuma Deluxe and Zuma's Revenge, because I didn't want to ruin her save file.

You're met with the signature PopCap loading screen, profile creator, and basic UI. It's always comforting every time you load up one of their games. Short and sweet, you have your adventure mode, time trial mode, and challenge mode. It has an obvious Aztec theme that's either going over my head, or is lightly offensive, or both.

As with other PopCap games, the premise is basic, but I feel this one was more well done. You start in a usually static position, and given two coloured balls. You can shoot or switch between the two balls. The goal is to shoot one of the coloured balls at a set of two or more of the same coloured balls going down a set path. The objective is to stop the entire chain of balls from getting to the end by making these combos. Again, simple premise, but things can get hectic.

The game will mix things up from time to time. In some maps, you're allowed to jump between a couple of points. In other maps, you can move your frog around a fixed path. They'll also put points and other power ups outside the map, and you need to craft a window of balls to get to them.

Every so often, there's a boss you need to fight. It mixes in the elements from the game, and some other mechanics. The result is you playing the original element to initiate the next element, thus damaging the boss. They're fun, and engaging. Some are decently hard, too. Towards the end of the game, things can get brutally difficult. Things move so fast, and there are so many colours that you have to think seemingly as fast as you do in an RTS.

Overall, I had a fun time beating this game. With a lot of PopCap games, it's random how well you're going to do, but there's also some skill involved. I'm excited to complete this game at some point.

This review was originally posted on my website[www.sapphic.dog]

Growing up with PopCap games, it was hard to not be aware they all existed. Bewjeweled was never a game that I was excited to play, but it happened to be on the family computer because my grandparents liked it. My grandpa probably still plays to this day. The only reason I have an affinity for this game is because of PopCap, which was one of my favourite game developers as a child. Even after they were bought out by EA, I played their mobile version of the game until it became overloaded with microtransactions.

If you've played any PopCap game, you'll be used to the screen you're met with. When you launch the game, you have the iconic loading screen, some character asking you your name, and a handful of menus to jump into the game. In classic PopCap fashion, there's the adventure mode, challenge mode, time trial mode, and high scores. Jumping into the game, it's a match three game based on gems, naturally.

You get a real sense that nothing you do matters, and everything is random. It makes it feel like this is a game that you're going to beat not by skill, but overtime through brute force. I can tell that there might be some skill involved, but I'm not quite sure how to achieve that yet.

After beating the game, I can say that it was all random, with some minor inklings of skill. If you look at the screen long enough, you can find combos to get a higher score, or complete the level faster, but it's slim. The real skill comes into play when you start doing the challenges, but even those feel random.

I don't have much to say. When I was a kid, it was worth the price. Even now that it's heavily discounted, it's worth the price. However, it's nothing compelling. It was a neat little look back at how computer games used to be.

It's easy enough to complete if you can put up with the random elements. The random isn't fun like a game like Peggle is, the randomness makes winning feel unearned, and losing feel unfair. Completing this game was quick, but felt like a waste of time. I did it mostly because I have this desire to complete everything I touch, but you can leave this one at beaten.

This review was originally posted to my website[www.sapphic.dog]

Felicity and my girlfriend, Princess, have wanted me to play this game for a year now. I've put it off in favour of other games, but I was able to get to it recently upon completing a large project. I was told there was lesbians, which had me excited to see what the game had to offer, since there's a lack of real lesbian experiences in video games.

You play as the world travelling older sister to a family of seemingly important people. Your mom works for the government to protect the local forests, your dad is an author, and you travel the world. This leaves your younger sister in a weird spot, as she's growing up as a punk in a high-standard family.

The game is a walking simulator, and you're tasked with figuring out what happened to your sister after you come back to an empty house upon finishing your travels. The tone is set early on, and doesn't change at any point. Walking around an empty house while it's storming outside makes you feel like you're playing a horror game.

The walking speed is set to be slow, so you'll really be taking your time to explore everything. As you go through, you learn about the family more, and the house you recently moved into.

Your mother works for the forest preservation branch of the government, and she does it well. The father, on the other hand, isn't doing too well as an author. A publishing company took a risk with his first and second book, and it didn't play out, so they aren't moving forward with him. The house was apparently owned by someone who took their life, or there was some sort of accident? I couldn't quite follow what happened on my first play through of the game, so I'm not sure what happened with the house. You learn all this by walking around, finding notes, audio tapes, and secret rooms throughout.

The atmosphere of the game made it challenging for me to get into. I don't do well with horror and jump scares, so having the tone of the game feel a pseudo-horror game kept me on edge. In general, I feel like the story wasn't for me, despite being a lesbian. It was a cute and happy ending, but the “fish out of water” story doesn't feel earned. Maybe it was more compelling in 2013, but playing it in 2023, it doesn't do much apart from make me sad overall. She “gets the girl”, but has to run away from home to do it. I need more than that. The default for queer people is to run away from home because it's the only way they can get what they can reach happiness.

The achievements to completing the game are short and sweet. Listening to the developer tracks in the game made me lighten up towards this game. They told the story they wanted to tell, and I can accept that. The game doesn't need to be for me, and it's still an important story to tell. The developer tracks were the most fun part to me, and I'm happy I was able to sit down and hear their insight on the game design.

This review was originally posted to my website[www.sapphic.dog]

My girlfriend, Princess, wanted to watch me play this game. I've put off playing Portal forever, for no real reason. The only reason I'm doing it now, is that I have the very obvious inspiration to do it. Other than the memes, my only engagement with Portal was in Killing Floor, but that was a Portal 2 reference.

It's certainly a puzzle game. I don't have much to say about it other than that. It's exactly what I thought a game named "Portal" would be.

Even though I've never played Portal 2, from what I know about it, this seems more like a beta version of that game. It feels like this is the demo of a game you'd get before purchasing the actual game. You can tell there's some charm there, but it doesn't hit that much.

It feels like a tutorial for another game. All the puzzles feel like they're all extremely easy, and none of them took much thought to complete. The advanced modes should have been what the default game was; those were actually fun and challenging. Most of the difficulty comes in the challenges, which I'll talk about in the completion section.

The achievements in this game are a mess. Sometimes, they simply don't work. I tried to get a few of them multiple times, and it wouldn't register. You'll get them all eventually if you want them, but achievements not registering are the bane of any completionist. The other achievements in the challenge mode are categorically not fun. I haven't talked to anyone at this point who's enjoyed doing them. The speedrun challenges are okay until they expect you to utilize glitches to complete them. There's no way you'd know about these glitches unless you go out of the game to look them up, either.

This review was originally posted on my website[www.sapphic.dog].

My girlfriend, Gwen, urged me to play this game after she showed me an older game made by the same developer. I didn't understand why until I got into it, apart from it was made by the same person. This review will contain major spoilers, so if you have any interest in this game, or Frog Fractions, I suggest checking out any other review on the site.

It's a very bore bones city-building game, based around fairies. You need to keep them happy by building them homes & feeding them. In turn, they'll collect wood, and set up new buildings for you to cast spells, and mine with explosives. I thought the game was going to be over pretty quick as I got the world boarder, but I was very wrong.

In the game, there are four seasons. During winter, you can't do much with the fairies, as food and tress don't grow. The leaves you with the ability to mine, searching for treasure, and crystals. I stumbled upon a door. After clicking that door, my god. I never saw the fairies again. It took me into an entirely different game. It was a text-style RPG. I don't mean a text-only input RPG, the graphics were all Unicode symbols. You have to run around and solve puzzles, like a 2D Zelda game. Slightly disappointed, I learned that I wouldn't get to play the game I thought I was playing anymore.

The “TXT GAME” as it's called was a bit frustrating to me to play alone. I enlisted the help of my girlfriend to play it with me, and we solved the puzzles together. Much like how we got here in the first place, it was heavily based around trolls as well as puzzle solving. Throughout the game, you were thrust into other mini-games, which was a neat idea. Each mini-game had its own art style. It grew on me over time, but through the entire experience, I was a little salty that I was tricked.

A lot of the movement puzzles with the sword got under my skin, and made me increasingly irritated. This is probably more of a personal thing, but I didn't enjoy the puzzles all that much. They irritated me while I was doing them, and I felt relived when I was done with them. I'm not sure whether I was happy that I'd finished them, or whether I was happy that it was finally over. The best part of the game is the ending. The final two parts of the game were enjoyable, and made the entire experience worth it.

There isn't a real reason not to complete it. Playing through the entire game will net you completion, as there are no achievements or special things to unlock. No reasons to play through the game again. Short, sweet, easy completionist marker.