The Banner Saga trilogy should be seen as one big game in an episodic format, because it tells one continuous story and the gameplay isn't different between the episodes, it just gets new characters with new abilities and items. And it doesn't make sense to play it in any other order than publication order, since your characters, choices and items carry over from each game to the next.

Now what is Banner Saga? It is an epic tale in a Nordic inspired world about hardship, survivors and what you do in order to survive. You play in a world where the sun stopped moving, the gods stopped responding (and were very much present in the past) and now there are stories about long thought defeated demons from the past coming up from underground and invading the known world. Some people fear it's the end of the world.

But for the moment you are still living in this world and need to somehow survive. You are elected to lead your village to a safer place, wherever that may be. And so you start your long journey in a caravan, where you meet a wide variety of people, some helpful, some malignant, but everybody desperate and you need to decide what to do. Do you search for berries in easily observable terrain or hunt in deeper woods where you might be ambushed by aforementioned demons ... or other desperate survivors less scrupulous than you? Because you also need to keep in mind to have enough supplies for your people, which very quickly makes the decision to take even more poor refugees in without any supplies themselves a lot harder than you might think now. In that regard it is similar in atmosphere to Frostpunk. How far are you going in order to survive? Do you leave behind your humanity? Not all of the characters following you will agree to abandon everybody else and so you have an ongoing dynamic during the whole story.

The second big gameplay part of this game series are turnbased tactical fights of your group against others. It has a unique HP situation: your characters have Strength, which is HP and Attack Strength in one as well as armor which reduces the damage from enemy attacks. So you need to find out how to reduce enemy armor in order to kill your enemies before they do the same to you. You're named characters are either small humans or bigger Varls, a giant race with lots of strength behind their hits. You get fame from fights, which acts as currency and XP here.

Playing this game means accepting that you could fail 6 hours in because you don't have any supplies anymore and your people are abandoning you and then restarting. If you are fine with that (or save scumming/cheating, I don't judge) then a very beautifully depicted world, rich with stories and world building awaits you. Each game roughly takes 10 h and while the main locations are pre determined, the story that happens is very much depending on your prior decisions and it's not just Telltales "only optics of important decision making". And without spoilers: I was surprised how many variations of the finale there are, depending on your way to get there.

Oh and I completely forget to mention the music: it's epic in the literal sense of the word. The islandish, I think, lyrics really portrays the 'epic tale told by bards' feeling. It's by Austin Wintory, so of course it's awesome.

If you like taking artistic screenshots in games, then Eastshade is exactly the game for you.

You are an artist who fell into a creativity blockade and to get out again, you visit the island of Eastshade, birth place of your mother, to get new inspiration. The main game consists of you painting pictures by freely choosing the size and orientation of the frame, aligning your view & then taking the picture. These pictures are then used to solve most of the quests in this game. People request that you paint their business for advertisement or somebody wants a picture of their hometown before they leave it. It feels a bit like a pacifistic Elder Scrolls game, because every corner had some quest for you and you want to explore more. I took more than a few pictures just for myself because I liked the composition.

In order to paint you need a canvas and inspiration, which is a resource you get from finding beautiful views, hearing interesting stories or drinking a nice relaxing cup of tea. In this way the game play loop is nicely interwoven with the players desire to explore without making it possible to simply spam the "create picture" button.

The whole game was around 12 h for me and I enjoyed every minute of it. The wholesome atmosphere is a nice contrast to the all to common violence in so many other games. It is the only pacifistic Open World game that comes to my mind. And the music is also really great.

And they even included the possibility of accessing your in game pictures, they are in a special folder on your PC (but only those currently in your possession, if you give one away, it's not in there any more). While this is a wonderful feature, it also contains my only criticism: the resolution of the pictures is sadly really low. So while you can access your pictures in a folder on your PC, it's not high enough quality to use as background or anything similar.

Rime is a very melancholic game by the sadly now defunct Tequila Works. You play a child that is stranded alone on an island but soon gets support by a fox spirit. Together you must solve the puzzles of the island and reach and climb the only landmark of this place, the huge central tower. The puzzles are not overly complicated or hard, but there was enough variety in them to entertain me over the whole play time of roughly 7 hours without feeling bored or it being repetitive. The levels are each unique in setting, theme and atmosphere to each other, highlighting the developers craft. Each level is a big open world, where you need to explore in order to find new ways to progress.

The highest strength of this game is its atmosphere and the music. Both are fantastic and similar to Ico, since you also explore a strange fortress together with a lone companion and wonder together at the vistas.

It's available on GoG, Steam, XBox One & PS4 but the price of 35 € really hurt the game in my opinion. <15-20 € is a fairer price range for the amount of content.

My relationship with P&C adventures is... strained. I often like the stories they tell, but their moon logic is too often too strong for my poor brain & patience, so I start using a walk through. With this game it was the same, but it was better than many other offenders, as i only used it a few times, so I consider it one of the better designed P&C games.

You play as the android Horatio Nullbuilt (voiced by non other than Logan Cunningham, the voice actor from Supergiant Games, voicing all those old gruff ones like Dad Hades or the narrator in Bastion), the last name is one of the great points of world building in this game. It describes by which other robot this unit was built. Some ancient robots are even called humanbuilt, after the semi mythical creator beings that apparently lived once in the ancient past on this planet. But Horatio doesn't know his creator, hence Nullbuilt. He lives with his own creation and side kick Crispin Horatiobuilt in the airship UNNIIC and they try to repair it. Somerobot steals their power core though and so they take on the journey of retrieving it or finding a new one. This ultimately leads them to a city of robots, which shortly does away with silly questions like "oh no, does this robot have a soul?"and instead asks you the important questions like determining the parental naming rights between bickering robot creators.

While that last one is one of the few moments that lie more on the humorous side, the story of Primordia is in general on the serious side and in my opinion in the tradition of Isaac Asimov's AI: it has a premise about how the robots work and tells a story around that. The melancholic atmosphere of this game is one part I especially enjoyed.

If you like a well told story about a society of robots more on the serious side, give it a try! It's available on GoG, Steam and apparently also on iOS & Switch.

The first Psychonauts is a true Tim Schafer game: unconventional and a bit absurd, but funny and entertaining nonetheless. And make no mistake, this game is old, as is obvious by the graphics and certain game designs. And while the art style is unique, is grotesqueness is also not for everybody, sure. But I first played it a few years ago and so can say: even without nostalgia googles, it is a fun collectathon in today's age, if you can forgive some old school jank.

You play as Raz, a kid with psychic abilities that sneaks into a training camp for psychic secret agents, the titular Psychonauts. He wants to be one as well, but his family of circus artists forbid it. Psychonauts can enter the minds of other people and can access memories or help with psychical problems in this way. And the mind levels of all the different characters are the highlight of the game. Every single mindscape is unique for each character with different objectives and mechanics. You have one mind stuck in a 70s disco party, where you mostly have to use a bouncing ball to float around. One from a small guy with Napoleon complex, where everything is set up like a wargame or another from a failed actress where you have to literally set the stage and tell her life story and thereby help her come to term with it.

If you like unconventional designs, collectathons and can forgive some old school control and game design issues & somehow haven't played this game yet, I highly recommend it! The creativity in its characters and their mind levels is pretty unique. The sequel Psychonauts 2 is also a great game and modernise the formula without losing it's charm. Between those two games is also a plot relevant VR game "Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin". It is a fun little VR game, but if you can't play it, just watch a let's play or read a story summary, it's not a long game and only the setup for the beginning of the second main game.

It's available on GoG & Steam.

The first Evoland was mostly just a one-joke game that was funny for half an hour. Not so it's successor, Evoland 2. That one is a full game in it's own right telling an overarching story and integrating it's greatest selling point, the constant change of gameplay mechanics, into that story.

You mostly play in an Action Adventure way similar to Zelda, but there are different time eras, which all have a different graphical style: the past with it's 8 bit and the present with 16 bit pixel art, as well as the future which has 3D graphics. You jump back and forth between the times to follow the plot and find out why you can do that in the first place. At certain points of the mostly linear game story you have scenes with special game play mechanics. From fighting game or Bejeweled to Prof.Layton puzzles, there is a lot of variety. And while no mechanic is really deep, it's only there for at max. 30 minutes, so nothing overstays it's welcome in my eyes.

The story is nothing overly philosophical, but it worked for me to endear the characters (well, except the MC, because its literally a blank state, maybe as reference to those older games, maybe because they didn't knew what to do with him) to me and move the game forward. Sadly it did get tangled up a bit in it's own time shenanigans story, but nearly every story with time travel does, so I'm not holding it against them.

While it is not a must play, I felt well entertained during my play through and was fascinated about the world they created.

While a lot of people praise Chrono Trigger (and right they are! Play it! It's an often recommended game for a reason), its sequel Chrono Cross doesn't get as much love. There are valid reasons for that in my opinion, but I want to argue that CC is still a strong and good game, but it needs to be looked at separated from its ancestor. They didn't call it Crono Trigger 2, in order to separate it more from the first game, but people still expected a sequel to the characters they loved in the first game. And they didn't get that. Spoiler for CC now:

While the game is obviously set in a different world than CT, there still is a connection to the first game.

That is the biggest problem in my opinion. By including this link to the original game they hindered CC of being its own thing and instead alienated fans of the first game and non players alike.

But Chrono Cross has its own strengths, which still create a good game in my opinion. First and foremost I would praise the world itself, set in a tropical archipelago, which was great to explore in combination with a wonderful soundtrack. The atmosphere is often nicely serene, but there is also humor and drama there during the story. I don't know many other RPG games building a tropical world to explore. The story has some interesting twists in it and the parallel world setup means some interesting interactions between them. And while 42 playable characters is a bit overkill, I was surprised how well their language modification works to give nearly every character a characteristic speech tic.

So it should not be seen as a direct sequel, but rather as a story in an universe adjacent to the original one. To keep those stories separated makes both stronger in my mind.

This one got a little longer since there are so many things to talk about. TL;DR at the end

Valkyrie Profile's world and story is nordic mythology inspired. Meaning it takes some characters and concepts from it but gives everything it's own spin and also adds its own characters, like the main heroine for example. You are playing as the valkyrie Lenneth tasked by Odin with finding worthy souls to train them and bring to Valhalla as Einherjar in order to fight the giants in the coming battle of Ragnarök. Since Odin has clairvoyant powers, he knows when Ragnarök is coming, meaning you play under a certain time limit. The game is made up of a set amount of chapters, which themself have a set amount of periods depending on the difficulty. One period means you can visit one location on the map or rest & heal. The available locations change between the chapters and could either be a dungeon for monster slaying, a city to buy things/progress the story or the recruitment of a worthy soul. The worthy souls are the characters you can use in the battles and each one is unique. If you know your nordic mythology, you know that you have to be dead to become an Einherjar. Meaning you will see each and every single character you can recruit first die and the circumstances that brought them to their death in a 2D pixelart style cutscene (or some 3D animated cutscenes if you play the remaster Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth). And if you don't like cutscenes, this game is definitely not for you: the YouTube "all cutscenes" video for Valkyrie Profile 1 is longer than 5 hours! The stories range from bittersweet to downright depressing, as is fitting to the nordic myths. They even managed to connect some of the stories, so you will meet some characters again, sometimes because you will recruit them this time. The main story is about who Lenneth is and what her part in preventing Ragnarök means for herself and for the world.

As can be expected from so many cutscenes, the story is front and center for this game. But Valkyrie Profile doesn't need to hide its gameplay. They also included a lot of interesting and, as far as I know, for its time unique features. While fighting, your team is always made up of Lenneth and up to 3 other Einherjars making a diamond shaped formation. The position of each fighter corresponds to the same positioned button on the right side of the controller. When you press a button, the corresponding character will start its attack animation. Each hit fills a combo meter and when it reaches full capacity, you can start a special move, again with a button press for the character you want to attack. Now it is your job as a player to learn the characters moves, when to activate the next attack sequence and in which order to start the special attacks. It is a great feeling when you finally manage to fire all 4 special attacks for the first time and do massive amounts of damage. Only downside is, that you always want to use this attack sequence after finding it, since every other one would be suboptimal play.

To shake this up, Valkyrie Profile doesn't let you keep your characters forever. As I said in the beginning: your mission is to train Einherjar for Ragnarök. So after training and giving equipping good items, you need to let them go and send them on to Valhalla to fight in the Aesirs war. While you can just send anyone or even noone, your rewards from Odin change depending on the fighters strength and attributes you send him. Odin often has requests, for example a mage or a person with the cunning trait, which stirs things up for you as you need to decide: do I fulfill Odins request and send my best fighther with the ruthless trait to get a better reward from Odin or do I send this untrained & useless mage but risk making the Aesiers side in the war too weak? After each chapter you gain information on how the gods do in their battle against the giants. Depending on Odins favour you can also gain strong items, so sending strong warriors with strong items themselves to increase their worth is also a viable tactic.

Due to this mechanic you are forced to always change your team composition and seek out new worthy souls, in order to stay strong enough but also gain Odins favour. The forced change in characters is something I first experienced in Pyre. There it also worked to make you experience the many different stories of the characters and then letting them go. Only while writing this review did it occur to me, that Valkyrie Profile already established this mechanic nearly two decades earlier, to the same great effect.

Edit: I misremembered, you need to play on normal or hard to get the best ending

One aspect that was not good when it came out and isn't good today: You need to play on the Hard difficulty to get the best ending. And I seriously doubt that many people got that ending without a guide. You need to reach specific thresholds and do certain actions in the right chapters, making it everything but clear how to reach that ending.

And last but not least: the music is one of the best of the Midi era. The simple but satisfying melodies evoke a lot of emotions in me, even now years later. They effectively use the music to convey the emotion of the situation.

What fascinates me about this game is that they managed to make the game mechanic fit to the story so well. You need to train the warriors but then let them go, because Odin needs Warriors.

If you like JRPG even a little, I highly recommend to try this game via emulation or playing the remaster on PS4/5, because it really is a great game with a great (albeit deprimistic) atmosphere.

TL;DR: great music & atmosphere, nice interplay of story and gameplay for ludonarrative harmony, sadly need guide to reach best ending

I highly recommend this game to all those who want to have a more wholesome game and bemoan that so often we can just solve things by violence. In fact, that is one of the main ethical points of the protagonist: he doesn't want to use violence. The problem is just, the world is ending and a hero is needed. And what is a hero who doesn't wield a sword and uses that sword? Well, play this game and find out if the protagonist can stay true to their convication or not.

The protagonist is a bard or in fact The Bard, no other name given. Every problem the bard encounters is solved by what the bard can do best: singing. This is represented by you selecting the note for his singing via a radial menu, using either mouse or gamepad stick. The developers managed that this simple mechanic didn't feel annoying to me over the roughly 10 hours playtime. Instead they reused/recontextualized it in different ways multiple times, so that it doesn't felt overused. In general this is an easy game without really difficult parts besides some rythm parts. But even then you don't need to hit the right note by ear, it is shown which note to hit like in other rythm games.

It is sometimes a silly game, but silly in a wholesome way. Where I often couldn't stop smiling due to the siliness. Like who has ever heard of singing coffee pirates? Or the fact that there is a dedicated dance button, which you can press nearly at all time, making some cutscenes a bit less serious. It feels similar in a way to Night in the Woods regarding the atmosphere and talks between the main characters.

This game is not however for people who want to have action sequences, a realistic graphic or can't stand some silliness in their games.

One of the games that cemented Tim Schafers reputation for creating fantastic games. This is a classic Point & Click adventure from 1998, so keep a spoilerfree guide open if you aren`t up for trying each item combination.

In a little longer than 10 hours Grim Fandango tells the story of Manny Calavera. He is a guide for the dead working in the department of death... selling them packages how to reach their after life depending on how good they were on the other side. Sadly Manny isn't doing so well, he only gets the loser souls who aren`t worth anything. But this is only the beginning, you will puzzle your way all around the afterlife, through cities and forests and oceans. And you will learn that Manny is a suave and cunning businessman who manages to turn nearly every situation to his advantage.

The underworld is astethically styled after the aztecs and wonderfully brought to life by the story. The dead built their own unique society with the same vices already present in the living world. the atmosphere is a little grim noir themed, but still with humor in it. While the polygon count on the characters may be low, the world itself is beautifully pre-rendered.

This game probably is not that unknown, considering it sold more than 1 million copies, but I still recommend it because it fantastically showcases the power of the human mind for anthropomorphism. The game is only made up out of rectangles. So graphicwise, a potato could run it.

The charm comes from the narrator and the characters (meaning the colorful rectangles you can control) he brings to life. The game is a platformer where each character has a special skill (can jump high or be a trampoline to others, etc) and you need to find the right combination of combining their abilities to reach the goal of each level.

The story isn't anything great, but with the narrator it feels much more emotional and at the end you don't see a small red rectangle, you see Thomas, who is not alone anymore, because he found some friends.

The game is a 2D side scroller where you can create clones of yourself which mimic your movement and you can also swap into those clones to solve puzzles with switches and pressure plates to find out what happened on a derelectic space station stranded on a planet. Fitting to the central mechanic is also a bit philosophy about what is the mind etc. involved, but not as explicit as in Soma.

The puzzles are not so convoluted that you don't understand what you need to do, but also not so easy that it's just busywork. The art style is a bit different, because they modelled everything in clay and then digitized it, leading to a pretty unique style. Together with the sparse lightning it creates a wonderful eery atmosphere in the space station. The story plays into this atmosphere, but it is not the main focus of the game. Still, I found a certain philosophical concept they introduced fascinating, because I never thought about it.

So all in all it is a fun little game of around 5h with a little bit of philosophical concepts if you want to think about it or just some neat puzzles and atmosphere if you don't.