Man, Okami is one of the best games of that generation. Unfortunate that you don't vibe with it.
I love the character design and appreciate its soundtrack. So the disappointment that I don't really like the gameplay is shared.
Somehow my writer's block has even bleed into my desire to write reviews for games. So with that said, here's a brief overview of what I've been playing. (Or at least, what I tried to play.)
I never thought I'd ever get into survival crafting games. But both VRising and Palworld have proven to be enjoyable time wasters. The former had a ton of variety in combat, traversal and base customization. And its challenging bosses were both a highlight and lowlight of how chaotic and cheap a lot of the challenge was. But it also had shit like waiting 24 hours of real time for servants to bring you back a pithy amount of resources. So by the end of Act 2, I was getting a little tired of how unnecessarily padded its grind was.
And thus far, Palworld is pretty entertaining too. But it doesn't seem very multiplayer friendly right now. Since it has a lot more general bugginess in multiplayer servers, and resources (like item chests) can be easily stolen. So I may very well play this one on my own.
Otherwise, I'm very happy to be enjoying my time with Northern Journey. Because I was worried that my troubles with Frogmonster being too difficult to control and play were my own. But no, as it turns out, a quick save does wonders and is vastly superior to a checkpoint save system. Also, this games' atmosphere is pretty stunning for a solo developer. (And it's also better at providing freights than Little Nightmares 2. Which controls terribly and had several bugs that forced me to restart levels in order to progress.)
And the Plucky Squire is a worse than mediocre game. Whose highlight is a singular bullet hell endgame boss that Akimbot did a 100x better. I seriously would've been pissed if I spent $30 on this. (The combat is barebones simple & the AI is barely there and easily exploitable. The puzzles are far too simple and done better in other games. The bosses are a few terrible mini-games that almost seemed encouraged to be skipped. And the sheer amount of awful forced instant-fail stealth sections in this game felt like a quarter of the game’s runtime. Plus, the amount of bugs, crashes & times I had to repeat entire sections over again were past double digits.)
Cassette Beasts (and it's awful start) made me want to go back and play Nexomon Extinction again. Ghostland Yard was a barebones simple platformer that has an optional feature to make the game feel less bad to play. And it had me glitch through the terrain in a "trial-and-error" chase through the level boss. (My least favorite gimmick that never dies.) Anomaly Collapse is another roguelike that does not have enough variety to justify repeating its gameplay loop all over again. And Cleo: A Pirate's Tale was a wasted dollar.
But with my vacation coming up, I'll likely be playing less vidya games this week. So I'll have to return to finish what I started. Least I'll have some things to look forward to.