Finished this over the weekend. It's a cute, charming little narrative game with a clever gimmick that doesn't get overused or used to its full potential. In Great God Grove, you play as a character who needs to solve the problems of various gods and denizens in the titular great god grove. You see, a rift has opened in the sky, and it requires all the gods to work together to close it. But they are all angry and disharmonious because the newest god has gone and manipulated them all, turning them against one another and making them cause problems.
So, you get this megaphone that can suck up dialogue, and then you can shoot the dialogue at characters, causing reactions if it makes sense. For example, one character might be telling you all the great things about his girlfriend. You suck up his words, find the girlfriend, who tells you that she wishes her boyfriend would tell her how he feels about her. Then you shoot his words at her ("I love her so much, she's so great"), and she goes "Aww," and they can be emotionally vulnerable with each other (or whatever).
It's a clever little word game, but in practice it ends up being easy and straightforward. There are only so many sentences that can be sucked up, you can only hold five at a time anyway, and there are only so many situations in which it makes sense to use them. I did look up solutions in a walkthrough a few times really early on, but once I got the hang of the game and its logic, I never used one again. It's about identifying what dialogue would make sense being spoken to other characters, finding that dialogue, and then using your megaphone to blast it to the other characters. Levels are small enough that this is not hard.
That's basically it. It's really simple. There are some "optional" interactions, as you can play around and see what sentences will have what effects on what characters, but you'll usually have solutions figured out quickly. It's got charm and it's kind of funny, but I'd say has more of a silly vibe that often makes it cross over into childish territory. As the end approaches though, it begins sharing poignant lessons regarding its themes, and I appreciated it a bit more. One other thing to mention is its treatment of gender, which is really diverse. That stood out to me: masculine women together with feminine men, pronouns that don't match gender performance, gay couples, humans and gods crushing on each other, characters who you totally misgender because they look ambiguous. It was a little confusing at first, but once I realized that the game was playing with gender constructs, I liked that aspect.
Wouldn't really recommend unless you want a one-trick pony silly narrative game. I wouldn't have missed it had I not played, but it was good for a few evenings worth of entertainment.
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Great sci-fi story that touches on real-world topics like protest, the experiences of immigrant families, and intergenerational trauma. It's really creative and artistic, with excellent writing (though the voice acting leaves something to be desired). You play (first) as the new "Watcher" (people are assigned functions: Watcher, Healer, Knower, etc.). Watcher observes things and enters into "communion" with other people, where they share their memories with Watcher. This helps Watcher understand them. As a new Watcher, you don't know a whole lot, so by communing with others, you learn about the history of this odd society, how it came to be, its religious belief, its hierarchy, and the dangers it faces. Too much to attempt to summarize here, and that would ruin the joy of discovering how this society operates.
But, you aren't just communing with others to learn. You are communing with others because people have secrets, notably the "Allmother" (a god-like figure revered in society). The Allmother may not be exactly how she is portrayed, and you end up trying to get to the bottom of who she is and the implications of that for everyone else. Turns out she has a history...A major event occurs halfway through the game that moves the story forward in time and changes who you play as, and makes you question what you had done so far and your goals going forward. Very cool.
That's basically the game! It's purely narrative in 3d environments, so you'll run around talking to people. Goals are clear and direct you from task to task. The story moves along at a good pace. The one thing I didn't like is that navigating "The Orchard" (the main area wherein the game takes place) is difficult. You get a kind of radar showing where other characters are, and you get a map, but they aren't terribly effective, particularly for helping you navigate the weaving hallways and ramps. There is a particular spot, a center of a garden, that I always had trouble finding. I could see the icon on the radar of whatever character I was meeting there, and I could often see them through trees, but it would take me a while to find the correct path!
In sum, I really enjoyed the story here and definitely recommend if you want a creatively presented, unique, and complex narrative. The map really isn't that big a deal, the voice acting is fine, and it can be a bit slow, but the story was so engaging and thought-provoking that I even stayed up one night till 2am playing. I usually start falling asleep around 11, so that's high praise!
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Never played a Ninja Gaiden game before (maybe did when I was a kid), but I knew this was developed by Platinum Games, so I figured it would feel like Bayonetta and their other fast action games that I've played. Indeed, Ninja Gaiden 4 feels like a mix between Bayonetta and Devil May Cry. I don't know what previous Ninja Gaiden games are like!
In this one, you play as a guy whose name I already forgot even though I beat it 2 hours ago. None of the characters have much personality. Anyway, you're a badass ninja and you have to save Tokyo by reviving and then killing a giant dragon. You do this by following a linear path to break four seals, killing the guardian of each seal, and then killing said dragon. Story and missions are extremely straightforward. Oh yeah, and when you're almost at the end of the game, you take control of a different character in the past and retrace the main character's steps backwards. You go through an abbreviated version of every area again and have to kill all the bosses again. Yay, backtracking...
What you will play this for is the combat, which is very fast and brutal. I haven't played anything this gory in a long time. The learning curve is steep. You can button mash your way through like the first hour, and then you will start getting your ass kicked. Instead of learning the deep combat system, which ends up with four weapons, two stances, various special abilities, a shuriken, and like 50 moves (including what you can do in the air and jumping up and down from things in the environment), I set the game to easy mode after a couple hours and button mashed my way through. My rationale? I am on a Game Pass timer and still have to go back to Hollow Knight: Silksong, and maybe Blue Prince. I am least interested in Ninja Gaiden and would prefer to spend my time attempting to beat Silksong.
Button-mashing your way through the game on easy ("hero") mode is still satisfying. The game mostly plays for you, auto-blocking all enemy attacks, but that let me pay attention to the environments and the enemies. Ninja Gaiden 4 is a visual treat! Somehow my computer ran it just fine on my TV. The environments are detailed, especially the neon-lit underground Tokyo part. Enemy animations are meticulously done, and bosses are huge, fast, and scary. There is also souls-like difficulty here on the bosses. They all have two phases, lots of different attacks, and are just plain cool. Granted, I was playing on easy, so I never lost enough to get frustrated at them!
And that's Ninja Gaiden 4. Played on easy, ended up just trying to speed my way through, it was pretty to look at with some good metal soundtrack, but it felt pretty much like 10 other games I've played before. I wouldn't bother playing it unless you really love these types of combo-combat action games.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Jan 3rd, 2026 at 02:47:29.
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I LOVED Blue Prince...until I didn't. Fasten your seatbelt because you're on the complain train. Wait, trains don't have seatbelts...do they?
Blue Prince has a great concept. I went in blind and quickly realized that I was not playing a regular puzzle game. I was playing a roguelite puzzle game with (mostly hidden) deckbuilding elements. Cool.
So let that be a spoiler warning of sorts. If you want to be completely surprised by how it works, then don't read this.
In Blue Prince, the first goal that you have is to reach "room 46" in a mansion. The mansion is laid out in a 9x5 grid of rooms (that's 45 rooms; the 46th is a mystery!). The gimmick is that the rooms reset every day. You have x number of steps you can take in a day before you have to "call it a day," resetting the mansion and starting from the beginning.
Imagine you are an architect. You begin your day in the entryway, which has doors facing west, north, and east (and south to outside). You choose a door and "draft" a room. What that means is that you are presented with three rooms from your deck (you can never see your deck, so you don't know exactly what's in there; I assume one copy of most rooms to start, though later on you get slightly more info about what is in your deck and are able to manipulate it a little bit). You can choose one of those three rooms to build. Rooms:
- have different configurations. Some are dead ends, some have 2 doors, or even 4.
- cost different resources. Some rooms cost gems, some require keys to open, some are electronically locked, etc.
- are of different types. Some are bedrooms, hallways, green rooms, red rooms, shops, etc.
- have different effects. For example, bedrooms tend to give you steps (e.g., +10 steps for drafting this room; +2 steps every time you enter; +5 steps every time you draft a bedroom), hallways tend to have lots of doors, red rooms tend to have even more doors but often come with negative effects (e.g., for the rest of the day one of your draft choices will be hidden [dangerous!]; lose 1 gold every time you enter; lose 1/2 of your steps).
- may have items (e.g., gold, gems, keys, or utility items like shovels [dig up dirt], a magnifying glass [scrutinize papers and pictures], or a metal detector [makes noise near metal and makes finding coins and keys more likely).
Those are the basics, then. You build the mansion each day as you walk through it, attempting to strategically map your way to the antechamber, a room opposite the entryway on the far side of the mansion, through whose locked doors room 46 may sit. I say "may" because I never actually got through the antechamber. I got inside it once, but there is another locked door to get out of it that I never figured out how to open. Your main hazards are running out of keys, gems, and steps, such that you will be confounded by a locked door (no key, womp womp), unable to draft what you need (some rooms cost gems and you might be forced to draft a dead end, for example, womp womp), or you tire out and have to call it a day. These were problems for me early on, but I ended up rarely running out of these resources. More often, later on, I would paint myself into a corner, come up against electronically locked doors when I didn't have a keycard or hadn't shut off the power, or, most commonly, I would just not get any useful combination of rooms/items and couldn't solve whatever puzzles I needed to solve, or just couldn't make it into the antechamber.
Those latter problems are what kill this game for me. I really, really, really want to keep loving it, but unfortunately it gets really tedious because, however much strategy you employ, you need a lot of luck on your side. I stopped on day 21 and had played about 16 hours. It was day 14ish, and around 11-12 hours, that I started to get the "uh oh" feeling that I wasn't going to finish, chin resting in my hand as yet another day was ended through no fault of my own. I stopped seeing much new (though ironically on my last "just one more day" run, I saw a bunch of new rooms, solved two new puzzles, discovered a big new puzzle, and felt slightly compelled to continue). Here's the thing. You will figure out what you need to do, but you will be unable to do it unless you are able to find the correct items and draft the correct rooms, often in a correct order (and avoid all the pitfalls I mentioned above, like running out of keys). For example, I know that to get into the antechamber, I need to find one of several rooms with levers that open doors to the antechamber. One lever is found after solving a puzzle in the secret garden, a room that I drafted one time by dumb luck. It requires that you use the secret garden key, which I have also seen exactly one time in 21 days, in a specific area of the mansion to draft the room. This means, by the way, not only that you have to find the secret garden key (again, I am 1 for 21 with that), but that you have to find it before drafting rooms in the specific spots in which you CAN draft the secret garden and/or that you haven’t already blocked off those spaces. Another lever is behind a locked door in the great hall (a room with 7 locked doors). I have double the success rate of this, having found that lever 2 times in 21 days. Again, you first need to get lucky and draft the great hall (I saw it maybe 4 or 5 times), but then, because the great hall has 7 locked doors, you then also need to have tons of keys or the lockpick kit (which lets you sometimes pick locks in normal doors). So, there are three times that I found levers to open a way into the antechamber. The very first time I opened an antechamber door, I made it in, but not the other two, because even if you do open the antechamber door, you need to draft rooms leading to that side of the antechamber in such a way that you can actually get inside. It very well may be that you get to the space next to the antechamber door that you have opened, and then your three options to draft don’t include a room with a door on the correct side. Day over and an hour of your life gone.
Here are some other examples of not getting what you need or things taking a long time:
- I found the chess puzzle after 20 days. I assume that solving this requires finding a bunch of chess pieces scattered throughout the mansion, which will take who knows how long. On my last two days, I found three unique chess pieces. I have no idea how long finding the rest will take. I will basically have to draft every single room until I find all the pieces, and they could be hidden in super rare rooms! I said I found like 4 new rooms in my last (21st) run. These are rooms I'd never seen before. If you need those rooms for something, good luck!
- Apparently there is an item, a wrench, that is super useful. Never seen it. Not in the toolshed, not in any item closets, not in a shop, not for trade, never. I am sure there are other items I also never saw.
- One very useful item is the shovel, which lets you dig up things when you see dirt mounds (common in green rooms and underground areas). If you draft a particular room outside in the west wing, it increases the number of dirt mounds found throughout the estate that day. I was never able to draft that room and get the shovel in the same run.
- Another shovel one…if you draft a laboratory, you can set up “experiments”, which are cause-and-effect actions like “every time you eat an apple, gain 5 additional steps” or whatever. You are given three causes and three effects to mix and match. One of the causes is “dig up junk” and one of the effects is “permanently increase your allowance (starting gold) by 1.” Permanently increasing your allowance is awesome. Anyway, I found “dig up junk” twice and of course never got a shovel. One of those times I had more dirt piles too! And I found “permanently increase your allowance” twice and was never able to do the cause that resulted in the benefit. You just have to get lucky.
- There is a room, the boiler room, from which you can send steam power to other rooms. Some rooms have piping for steam, but most don’t. There are like 5 rooms that are affected by the boiler room, that can be powered. The catch is, you have to actually draft them in such a way that you pipe the steam physically through them. I NEVER was able to pipe steam anywhere. I would route the steam, draft rooms from the boiler room, and get a bunch of bedrooms or something that don’t need power or don’t even have piping to chance drafting something useful after that. Solving the various boiler room power puzzles would require getting multiple specific drafts in a row. That is crazy.
- And so on and so forth x 100.
It’s not just the randomness that is bothering me, but the over-reliance on it. Yes, there is some strategizing. For example, you can boost your chances of getting a shovel by drafting a room that lets you request items that will appear the next day, gunning for rooms with items like closets, or building a commissary and hoping there is one for sale. And there are permanent upgrades for meta-progression that are helpful. For example, I was up to starting each day with 2 gems, 11 coins, and 20 extra steps. You can also permanently upgrade some rooms, manipulating water in the pump room persists, etc. But you just cannot get around drafting the “wrong” rooms, not getting items you need when you need them, etc. If you aren’t getting what you need, there isn’t really anything you can do. I mean, it’s not engaging. Like, you just draft rooms until you decide to call it a day. It’s slow, and it gets repetitive. The meta puzzles are cool as hell, but the per-day puzzles are a slog, figuring out the box riddles or (and this is actually a puzzle) solving increasingly complicated arithmetic problems on the dartboard. If I have demonstrated that I can solve arithmetic puzzles 10 times, can you please not make me do it anymore?!
In most roguelites, there is combat that keeps you engaged, even if you fail a run. I’m not faulting Blue Prince for no combat, but it is missing something to keep you engaged for run after run after run when you are not finding anything new or advancing any of the puzzles. Too slow, too repetitive, too reliant on luck. I still like it…it’s something different…but I’m not going to finish it. It could take me just a few more hours to get lucky and for things to click, or I could see this taking 40 hours, and I have no idea which it will be!
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