I’m just kinda sitting here, staring at my screen and trying to figure out how to introduce Chico’s Rebound. Given that sentence, you can probably tell that it’s not going great, and that I’ve been forced into some sort of meta-narration, because otherwise I am going to sit here until the flesh rots off my bones and the sun burns out.
Chico’s Rebound is a sort of follow up to Chico and the Magic Orchards, a game I wrote about a few years ago. It’s also not really a follow up, because while the characters are the same, the core gameplay really isn’t. Magic Orchards was a sort of light puzzle game with some exploration elements.
Rebound instead takes it’s inspiration from that clasic iPod1 game breakout. If you’ve played Breakout, you know the basic deal. If you haven’t… well. It’s pretty simple. You have a ball, and at the bottom of the screen, you have a paddle of some sort. You bounce the ball off the paddle, and when it hits bricks, they disapears. Get rid of all the bricks to clear the level. Pretty much just PvE pong.
I really hope we all know what Pong is?
Anyway, that’s what Chico is cribbing off of, a souped up version of Breakout with more mechanics. It also has some other mechanics, including overworld exploration, and some puzzles, but the less said about these, the better. They’re not particularly fun, and I found myself struggling a fair bit with them when it felt like I shouldn’t be2.
Instead, the main thing here is the variants of Pong. There are a lot of fun ideas here. One world has fire and water powerups that interact with growing and burning down plants. Another ghost themed level lets the ball swap between corporeal and phantom states, ignoring platforms in the other modes. Another world has a set of mushrooms that swap colors when hit, and can only be destroyed by hitting a matching colored switch.
These are good, and pretty fun. Unfortunately, this is where most of my praise ends, because Chico’s Rebound is doing some really weird stuff with how it controls, and to explain why, we need to talk a bit more about Breakout and how progression in Chico’s Rebound works.
Most of the time in Breakout, any connection of the paddle to the ball launches the ball back up, with the ball reseting only if it’s dropped and goes off the screen. In Chico’s Rebound however, you can regrab the ball by just touching it. Instead, if you want to keep the ball bouncing, it’s necessary to do an input to have Chico do a tailspin. If you fail to do that input, Chico just grabs the ball, and then you can relaunch it.
This would trivialize the game, making it very easy to just clear all the blocks with no risk, except Chico’s Rebound has a scoring system, and to cut to the chase: unlocking more levels ultimately requires beating previous levels at certain score thresholds. Getting higher scores requires high combos, and losing the ball offscreen OR catching the ball both drop the combo.
The end result is that you need to be doing this tailspin input constantly, and if you mess up at all, even if you were in the right part of the screen…. you probably have to restart that specific level.
It doesn’t help that this generally felt a bit inconsistent at times, and I found myself dropping hits I’d thought I’d done an input for, and I found this frustration with the controls overwhelming most of the enjoyment I got out of the games unique level mechanics.
The game also has bosses. I generally liked them, but some almost require you to patiently regrab the ball and wait. Those are a bit less enjoyable.
Chico’s Rebound was $8 and 4 hours long. I don’t really regret it, but I wish I could recommend it more strongly.
Apparently iPods are retro now. If this makes you feel old, you are welcome to join me in this shallow grave I will be digging for myself shortly.↩︎
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with Chico’s Rebound’s overworld, but it’s so disconnected from the games main mechanics. Imagine each time you wanted to play a level of Mario, you had to solve a crossword first. That’s the energy here.↩︎
It’s been a little bit hasn’t it? In the interest of cleaning out my backlog of unfinished work and making it so that I don’t have to look at 18 drafts every time I log into this website, here’s a bunch of stuff I played enough to have opinions on, start write-ups, and then just never finish them.
Order is going to be how good the games are, because one of is these is simply one of the greatest games I’ve ever played, some are the greatest games I played last year, and some were only marginally better than taking the money I spent on them and setting it on fire.
Without any adieu or whatever, let’s begin.
Blue Prince – The greatest puzzle game of the last 10 years.
I started a Blue Prince write-up after “beating” the game, then went back and played another 50 hours, and I have still not beaten the game.
Blue Prince is one of the greatest games in the last 10 years. It is easily the greatest puzzle game I have ever played. If you have not played it, and you like puzzle games at all, go play this. I took notes playing this game, and even with the screenshots, my Blue Prince google doc is 170 pages long. And yet the game never felt overwhelming, or extensively frustrating1.
Blue Prince is a masterpiece. It is brilliant, and you should play it. The rabbit hole goes as deep as you want it to.
UFO 50 – 50 incredible games from Derek Yu and other collaborators for a video game console that never existed.
You know what was great last year? UFO 50. I played a bunch of UFO 50, I was going to try to review it, then it turned out that was going to be too hard, so I was going to review a single game from UFO 50. That was Avianos, a dinosaur themed 4x game with action selection mechanics, and I couldn’t even get that done. So yeah. UFO 50. It’s incredible. You will find something you love in it, and that’s ignoring all the other secrets and collectibles, and a billion other things I never even touched.
High Tide – Abstract tile movement game by Marceline Leiman
I don’t know how to write a good review of an abstract ocean themed game about hexagon movement, but I’m not a full time game reviewer. Dan Thurot is, so I’m just going to link to his review, and hopefully that makes up for stealing the images from it.
One thing I do want to quickly note is that it now has a commercial release, instead of having to make some sort of eldritch deal to get one of the very limited night market copies!
Hytale – Minecraft, but not finished, but also designed by people to whom “quality of life” is not just 13 random letters in a row.
What if Minecraft was designed by someone who cared about player experience on all levels of the game, instead of keep in a perpetual state of stasis by suits at Microsoft who are so scared of ever making any adjustments to their 2 billion purchase that Roblox already ate their lunch? You’d probably get Hytale, and if the game goes and manages to actually ship all of its content instead going back to development hell, it is going to be the best one of these crafting games.
It’s a big IF though. Like a HUGE fuckin’ if.
Gundam Card Game – I keep thinking it’s spelled Gundum, but I guess that’s wrong?
It’s fine. Resource structure similar to One Piece, mostly entertaining to play, and nobody’s scalping it quite as hard as some of these other games, so that’s cool.
Donkey Kong Bananza – I keep spelling “Bonanza” correctly, which is wrong.
I was going to put Donkey Kong Bananza here, but then I realized I’d mostly already finished this writeup? And never posted it? I think because I got laid off almost immediately after getting it to 80% complete. Anyway, you can read that write up here.
Highguard – Lessons should be learned here, but they won’t be.
It lived, it died, we hardly cried. The most notable thing about Highguard to me is that it’s not the very bottom of this list, but you can’t even play it if you want to, so who cares?
Age of Darkness: Final Stand – The worst RTS I have ever played.
It is rare that I play a game that fails on every conceivable level, while still somehow making it to release. Age of Darkness is that game. It is so shockingly bad that even just thinking about it again, more then a YEAR after I last played it brings to mind a list of problems burned into my brain. Here it is!
The game’s networking is awful and it disconnects in multiplayer constantly. The game is micro intensive while requiring equally expansive macro. The units are both hard to control and incredibly dull, with no single character matching the personality of zergling, space marine, or zealot. There are no alternate build paths, the campaign difficulty is a brick wall, the game just looks bad, and as a result of all of these it just isn’t fun to play.
There is nothing redeeming, and nothing it does better than its ancestors or contemporaries. It’s not even bad in an interesting way, it’s just awful and I want my $28 back.
I’m not even going to link to it. They don’t deserve it.
Edit 3/27/2026: Quick preface: I think Once Upon a Galaxy is a good game, and you should play it. It’s cool. I don’t intend to change my actual writeup, but uh, rereading this today, I think it comes across a little less enthusiastic about the game and slightly more caustic than I actually feel.
We all remember Storybook Brawl, right? It was a cool card based auto-battler with a fairy tale theme by way of Shrek meets Grim. In 2022 it sold to a scrappy little company called FTX, and in 2023 it was shut down when everyone involved in FTX was being prosecuted for 16 billion dollars in fraud.
As far as I can tell, at least some of the people in Good Luck Games went on to make Once Upon a Galaxy. It’s a cool little card-based auto-battler with a fairy tale theme by way of pop culture references meet Grimm.
Write what you know I guess.
Making a game, getting it popular, selling it to a Crypto company1, then making a new company to make a new game that is pretty much just a better copy of your old game is a bold strategy. It seems to have mostly worked out for Matthew Place and the team at Million Dream Games, presumably because everyone who might be upset about them doing this is currently in prison2.
But I’m not here to recount the one time in the last 20 years that financial criminals were held even remotely responsible for their actions. I’m here to talk about Once Upon a Galaxy.
I’m gonna be honest, I feel like I should put an in-depth explanation of the game’s mechanics here, but I’d just be rewriting paragraphs 3 through 5 of my Storybook Brawl write up, so just go read those real quick. We can pretend I put them here.
It’s actually a little tricky to find good images of Once Upon a Galaxy, because the combat screen and shop screen look pretty much the same to anyone who hasn’t played the game. Anyway, please appreciate my 23k Snapping Hydra.
There’s a lot of things in Once Upon a Galaxy that were copied over from Storybook Brawl. The core conceit is pretty much the same: pick a captain3/leader card, build a team of units, have them fight each other, and stay alive the longest to win. But there’s also a lot of fat trimming going on here—places where Once Upon a Galaxy looks at Storybook Brawl and goes “No, I don’t think we need that.”
Most notable is probably board size and reserve. Storybook Brawl had 7 combat slots, and 3 reserve slots. Once Upon a Galaxy has 5 slots. There’s no gold to manage for buying units either. Instead, every shop is just a 4-pick-1 rogue-lite style set of choices.
Of course, there’s also a fair amount of stuff I haven’t seen before, or things that are tweaks from existing mechanics. Treasures existed in Storybook Brawl, but they were limited to a max of 3 per player, requiring you to throw one away when you got your fourth. In Once Upon a Galaxy, they are no longer locked down in that way, opening up a whole bunch of interesting space, such as dragons that care about creating them, and get buffs based on the number, to characters that manipulate the stat buffs they grant.
I could probably write multiple paragraphs about Candy, a cross card type mechanic that influences a global “Sweetness” value, and is used as both a modifier of spells and card abilities. It’s also a good example of how the game creates glue for its archetypes, with various candy cards adding the Candy type to non-candy cards, allowing them to be slotted into an archetype they otherwise might fall out of.
Generally speaking, the game feels fun to play even if a few strategies feel over represented, or good across multiple captains.
This was supposed to be an image of an Animals comp, but then I got this CRAZY Paul Bunyan/Echoing Fae synergy combo off, and I had to see what happened, and then I realized I needed to stop playing if I wanted to actually finish this article.
Probably the biggest mechanic (or the one I will attempt steal at some point) is slot buffs, where buffs can be applied to a slot, and not the characters in the slot, so that you can replace them without losing the picks spent on those buffs. And of course, some characters interact in a cool way with those buffs!
One of the genre’s core mechanics has also been adjusted in a pretty clever way. Most auto-battlers have a mechanic where drafting multiple copies of the same unit powers that unit up, usually three copies. This could put you in a difficult place if you got the first two, but never found a third. Once Upon a Galaxy, banishes this, instead making each copy after the first a promotion, first to silver, then gold. Picking a silver unit gives an extra shop, and picking a gold unit gives a treasure.
There are some things that are just copied, like the Slay4 keyword, which has been renamed to Hunt. I’m okay with that. I think it’s fine to copy your own mechanics.
Then there’s the things they copied that I wish they didn’t.
I have a limited number of complaints about Once Upon a Galaxy. Many of them are small-to-medium sized annoyances, like how some Captains have a single line of voice acting, and others don’t.
The game’s UI is clunky5, and signing in to make an account has been the biggest stumbling block to actually playing. Every time I press the launch button, there’s a 2/3 chance that Steam doesn’t actually launch the app. I’ve gotten a few bugs where the games just kinda… crashes out a bit, and shows me a card named “404 Shop Not Found.”
But none of these quite compare with the monetization.
The monetization is “hmm.” I dunno even know that it’s bad, in a traditional way? I am a sucker for garbage6. Despite the fact that I’ve played 15+ hours of Once Upon a Galaxy in three days, I’m uninspired to buy anything it. Partly because it feels like a bit of a bad deal, with characters/decks running for about five to six bucks each. Partly because it feels a bit pay to win.
It just feels kind of off.
Most of these are small things. The monetization isn’t even egregious. There’s no gacha, and the battlepass is easy to farm, so while there is some FOMO, there’s no limited daily progression. Still, I wish it was a bit better.
I generally like Once Upon a Galaxy. It gives me the play experience that other people get from Balatro, that of just sinking into a small math puzzle of upgrades, builds, strategies and signposts.
I do think there’s a bunch of cool stuff here as well. They’ve trimmed out a bunch of vestigial stuff that auto-battlers traditionally have like gold and level management. There are neat new mechanics.
So yeah. Go play it before it turns out Million Dreams Games hasn’t figured out how to monetize the genre yet, and they have to sell themselves to an AI company, then remake this game a third time.
Also, if two of you use my pyramid schemereferral link here7, I can get 500 more gems total.
Or maybe not? Sure, Sam is still in prison, but some of these people only got 2 years. They say crime doesn’t pay, but apparently it does if you’re white collar enough about it. ↩︎
Captains grant some sort of permanent build around passive or trigger-able ability.↩︎
Slay/Hunt is a trigger-able keyword that occurs whenever the unit attacks and kills another unit. The important bit here is “Attacks.” If a unit with slay is attacked, and kills the other unit on the defense, that doesn’t trigger the keyword. Using slay effectively means either gambling that your unit will get the first attack, or buffing it high enough to be able to take a hit, and smash back.↩︎
One friend who I showed this game to immediately stopped playing after 10 minutes because of how aggravating he found the on-boarding and UI. Knowing it was his sort of game, I persuaded him to give it one more shot.
He proceeded to play for literally 12 hours in a row. I went to bed, woke back up, and he was still playing. The game is that good, and the UI is that bad. ↩︎
I spent $50 on an arcade version of Minecraft Dungeons yesterday, because it spat out collectible trading cards. The bright side to being an unemployed miser is that I now have a lot more free time to spend the money I spent the last 10 years shoving into a pile.↩︎
This is the only referral link in the article. All the other links are normal ones, and will just link to the Steam page. Figured I’d just put that disclosure out there. ↩︎
I’ve never really played sports games, but I’ve played a fair amount of golf games. This is because golf is not a sport. It’s an activity, like lawn darts or bowling. Golf in the real world is reserved exclusively for rich assholes: the sort of people who will ban Michael Jordan from their country club because he’s wearing the wrong pants, a real thing that actually happened.
Part of the problem, I think, is that golf is often a deeply unsatisfying activity. Every time I’ve ever picked up a club, there’s a little voice inside me screaming that it would be far more satisfying to give someone a good smack across the ankles with it than it would to hit some dinky little ball into a hole. This voice only grows louder with each missed putt as my score careens higher and higher, further and further out of actual contention.
The difference, though, is that Super Battle Golf is the first game to recognize that tension, and then design key systems around it.
The core system of Super Battle Golf is a fairly simple golf game. You have a club, you have a ball, and there is a hole. You need to get the ball into the hole to win. There is only a single type of club, and you can adjust the angle of your shot, and control the power by holding and releasing. Standard stuff, the chips in a metaphorical golf nachos. But the toppings are where everything gets interesting.
The first difference you might notice is that after hitting a ball, unlike many golf games, you do not follow the ball, or teleport to its resting spot to take another shot. Instead, you must walk there on your own, golf club in hand. Additionally, while there bonus are points for finishing under par, the majority of the scoring rewards being the FIRST person to reach the hole.
One way to be the first person to finish is, after taking your first swing, to turn and give the next closest golfer a swift thwack across the ankles, knocking them down, and setting you up for a second swing that can send them flying and ragdolling.
Alternately, if you time your first shot perfectly, you’ll get a boost of speed to start, often giving you the edge to rush forward and be the first to claim one of the game’s Mario Kart style item boxes. Players can hold up to 3 items, and unused items will be carried over to the next hole. Items generally fall into two categories: travel or combat, with my personal favorite, the elephant gun sitting neatly in both.
The secret sauce, the thing that really makes Super Battle Golf work, though, has to do with the boost system, and a special type of hit called a homing shot. First, the boost system.
When you hit another player in Super Battle Golf with an item box weapon, golf club, ball, or running them over in a golf cart, you get a temporary boost of movement speed. This speed is the key to pulling ahead of other players, because while everyone can be reasonably good at the golf part of the game, it’s more important to reach your ball as quickly as possible for the next stroke.
Critically, if you are losing, choosing to grief or attack other players around and in front of you isn’t kingmaking. Instead, it’s the mechanic by which you gain ground.
The same is true of homing shots. Without going into too much detail, you can hit shots so that they will track a player in front of you like a heat seeking missile. If it connects, it will knock that player down, giving you the aforementioned speed boost, while forcing them to wait out the knockdown.
This is what really differentiates Super Battle Golf from every other lite multiplayer golf game. It rewards and encourages combat, as opposed to just making it possible. And while it’s not the deepest combat ever, there is a fair amount of strategic decision making, politicking, and routing.
If I have any complaints, or reservations, it might be the map pool, and the always online voice chat. There are 27 holes, which doesn’t quite feel like enough. On the flip side, I find the always online voice chat incredibly funny, but that’s quite possibly because I have a deeply broken sense of humor.
Some “highlights” of the voice chat include: 1. The entire lobby grouping up to repeatedly pummel someone screaming a racial slur in a Russian accent. 2. Hearing “get Kirked” moments before being shot by someone with a dueling pistol. 3. A discussion about how shooting up schools is a real “white person” activity.
If you don’t find early XBox Live level (read: fucking cesspool) of interaction and voice chat funny, you will not have a good time online, and should probably stick to playing with your friends, or immediately mute everyone when you join a public lobby.
On the other hand, I find something deeply satisfying in using a rocket launcher on someone calling me a series of both inaccurate and offensive racial slurs.
Your personal mileage may vary.
Super Battle Golf is $7. It’s pretty great, but given that public lobbies are cesspools, I highly suggest getting it if you have 4-5 more friends you can play with. The game is best about 5-8 players, and while I wish there were more maps, the ones that do exist justify the price.
Q-Up is a lot of different things. It’s a incremental game. It’s a competitive coin-flipping eSport. It’s a weird satire of live service games and tech startups. Oh, and it has a really cool grid based node engine building system, and slightly less interesting, but still compelling item system. Finally, it’s a game that I feel weirdly conflicted about.
Before I go any further, I want to note that I do recommend Q-Up. It’s a weird one, but if you like incremental games/engine building experiences, and enjoy strangeness, you’ll probably have a good time. And if you’re on the fence because of that “incremental game” element, Q-Up generally respects the player’s time. It took me about 6.5 hours to reach the “end” of the game, and I suspect it would have been closer to the expected 8-10 hours if I hadn’t played a lot of the demo to get familiar with mechanics beforehand.
If you’re the sort of person who really loves incremental games… well, there are some absolutely busted end-game builds, and semi-competitive ladders, and the folks on the game’s discord seem to be having a good time.
A lot of what I’m going to be talking about here, I already covered in my writeup on Q-Up’s demo. If you want a spoiler free discussion of the game, I suggest you go read that instead.
Q-Side
The premise of Q-Up is simple: it’s the hottest new competitive game on the market. Games are 4v4, and after queuing up, and getting placed in a match, you’ll either be put on Q-Side or Up-Side. A coin will be flipped. If it lands on Q, Q-Side team gets a point. If it lands on Up, Upside team gets a point. First team to 3 points wins.
But just because you can’t influence the outcome doesn’t mean you can’t change the results. After all, it’s not about winning or losing. It’s about getting as much stuff as possible.
Oh The Stuff You Can Get
Q-Up has four main resources: Q, experience, gold, and gems. Lets start with Q.
After each flip in match, you’ll gain or lose Q. Winning the flip starts you out with a positive amount of Q, losing with a negative amount. Q determines your rank, with higher ranks giving more Q, and lower ranks give less.
This amount, however, will be adjusted by your character’s skills and items, which is as good a place as any to talk about experience and gold.
Experience points are… experience points. You get enough of them, you level up. When you level up, you unlock skills and skill points to use on the skill grid.
This is the engine building part of Q-Up. The skill grid is a set of interconnected trigger-able nodes. Nodes can trigger when you win, lose, or always. They can do a variety of things, including triggering other nodes. Nodes also have activation stock: a maximum number of times that they can be triggered during a given flip.
It will start out reasonable, and it will rapidly turn into something that is very much not that.
It’s a very fun and unique system, with each of the game’s eight characters having their own nodes and builds. Some want high numbers of combos, others generate Q by spending gold, or clone items.
Which brings us to gold and items. There’s a shop, you buy items in it. Then you equip those items.
They’re mechanically impactful, and very functional, but there’s nothing here that makes it different from any other item shop.
Which means it’s time to talk about gems! You get gems by ranking up, and recycling unwanted items. They’re used to unlock meta-progression-y style stuff, like the ability to stop shop items from rotating out, and extra item slots, and other things.
And this is the core loop of Q-Up. Play a match, get resources. Spend those resources to improve your build. Rinse, repeat. Often, in the middle to late portions of the game, that’ll involve reworking your build to generate a specific resource you might want, such as gems or experience points, or tweaking to maximize getting as much Q as possible.
So I’ve talked about the mechanics. I’ve talked about the theme. Which leaves the narrative.
Narrative
From here on out we’re talking spoilers. If you want to play Q-Up, this is a good time to leave.
Q-Up trades in a lot of different fields/themes. Fortunately for me, I think I recognize most of them, as they’re related to my job and interests.
This narrative starts out as one poking fun at what I’d generally group as “Live Service Games”, perhaps more specifically the “single match” live service game. League of Legends, Dota 2, Valorant, CS:GO, that sort of thing. This is where the game stays mechanically, but narratively, it’s going to become Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride real fast.
The writing is very good. I wish there was more of it.
I can’t think of a better way to dissect the narrative and the struggles I had with it, without laying the full structure, so here we go.
After you start playing Q-Up, at some point you’ll either get a 3-0 loss, or 0-3 win. This introduces you to Alice and Bob. Alice is the head of a quantum computing company and Bob is the head of the company running Q-Up. Alice and Bob are at least somewhat fighting over the company Bob is running.
This opens the second part of narrative, which is mostly about conflict between Alice and Bob. Notably, it’s also not told in any straightforward way, and most of the information you get given is filtered through the lens of “You just joined this project, and everyone is using terms you don’t understand, and acronyms no one’s explained” sort of energy.
Fortunately, I work in a tech company. I have LIVED this exact experience. Multiple times. So again, I was pretty in my element for this bit.
This is the sort of thing I think you can only write if you actually have worked at one of these tech companies.
Anyway, this culminates with Alice attempting a hostile takeover, and Bob using you, the player, to stop it by proving that Q-Up is a game of skill, and not a game of gambling. You enter the Q-Up championships, and attempt to win your way to novice rank.
Then things get odd.
I have a hard time summarizing what exactly happens next, because I’m pretty sure this is where the game starts playing around in the space of Information Theory. I don’t know anything about Information Theory.
Anyway, after you get banned from Q-Up by Alice, a sentient artificial intelligence intervenes in order to get you unbanned, and also to use you to free itself. At the same time, the server room for running Q-Up seems to start to collapse, because… again. I think something Information Theory related.
This leads to the finale of the game, where a pair of cosmic intelligences attempt to restart the universe.
It’s this last tenth or so of the game where Q-Up completely lost me. Not because it was bad, but more so because I was just incredibly confused. The sentient AI part is mostly fine, and foreshadowed pretty hard, but it’s also not really paid off to the extent I would like. The same is true of the cosmic intelligences. To me, they just come out of absolutely nowhere, but I suspect that the writers may be trading in themes or ideas that I’m simply not familiar with.
It left an unpleasant taste in my mouth, because the rest of the game is actually fairly interesting. I was much more invested in Alice and Bob of all things than I was in any of the “wacky hijinks” at the end. And in the last moments of the game, that story got pushed to the wayside for cosmic strangeness.
It also doesn’t help that this last section of the game feels very short and sudden. Things are escalating, escalating, getting exciting… and then it’s all over.
Putting on the introspective critic hat for a moment
Given that Q-Up is already trading in a bunch of specific themes in its aesthetic and narrative, I think that what is actually happening here is that I am just out of the loop for the joke. This last portion of the game probably isn’t “random wacky hijinks,” but is instead Who’s On First for quantum computing or information theory, or perhaps some third thing I’m completely unaware of.
Maximum insider baseball that I am no longer an insider for.
But it was incredibly jarring, because I had been an insider for the rest of it, and the result was that a narrative I cared about, that I was curious and excited about, suddenly felt like it pulled a Fish Guys.
It just left me feeling really weird about a game that I had, until that point, really enjoyed.
Hat is off, back to final thoughts
I like 90% of Q-Up. I like its mechanics, I love the theming and UI, and I love most of the story.
It’s the suddenness with which the story ends that really bummed me out more than the weirdness, if I’m being honest. Everything felt like it wrapped up too quickly. Q-Up is not a very long game narrative. The majority of the game takes place across 70 or so emails, and the finale across another 30. And that’s probably overcounting a bit.
Q-Up was $9. I think I got my money’s worth. But I wish I felt different about the ending.
I wish I could call the game a masterpiece, instead of just very good.
P.S. This is not my finest write-up. If it feels stitched together, that’s because, well, it is. I wrote 3-4 different versions of this, and none of them were exactly what I wanted. So instead, you get this mess. Sorry about that.
