Recent reviews by Fingers In The Booty Ass Frog

Easily one of the greatest visual novels ever made. It's as close to perfect as anything else I've played. The writing seamlessly shifts between being hilarious, thrilling, heartrending, and back to being hilarious. You will laugh, a lot, and then at some point the game will trick you into really caring about the characters.

Gameplay-wise, there are some cool ideas that were very new in 2008; the gameplay is less unique now but it holds up well. The use of photo and video is still very unique, and it works well. The acting and directing is excellent.

You owe it to yourself to play this.

TL;DR: Innovative and fun gameplay that left me always wanting more. Amazing scene writing, with a good-if-not-too-remarkable story. Instant buy for quirky RPG fans, or anyone who likes Mario & Luigi or WarioWare gameplay.

Love this game to bits. The gameplay is genuinely innovative and incredibly fun. I've seen people say that the game is repetitive or doesn't value their time, and I honestly think that's an insane take. I mean people are entitled to their opinions, but there's not one moment in the game where I felt like my time was being wasted, and I found myself actively getting into random battles that I could have skipped just because the combat was fun and engaging. How many RPGs can you say that about? Outside of combat, the overworld exploration and puzzles are well done. The dungeons aren't the most innovative, but they've got enough meat to be miles ahead of most RPG puzzles without being too onerous.

The story has a strong hook, and I don't really have any complaints about it. It's not the greatest story I've ever seen in an RPG, but it's far from the worst. I would put it on a level similar to Earthbound, not really hitting the same highs as Mother 3 or Undertale, but it's a good vehicle for the game's beat-by-beat writing, which is stellar. Good comedy writing is hard, and games trying to be quirky often fall into a writing style that ends up being a little on the nose. This is not that. The game is just consistently hilarious, unexpected, and weird. One of the funniest RPGs I've ever played, maybe the funniest honestly.

Basically, the game has some things it does really really really really well, and everything else it does competently enough to build a foundation for the really great stuff.

GOTY 2023

An insta-buy if you're a fan of 2D top-down sprite-based bunny-themed meta-mechanical puzzle games, which is now its own genre I guess.

Really great soundtrack, cute buns, scratches the same "cute and deceptively hard" itch as Baba. Gets to the meta stuff much faster, with more focus on meta-puzzles and less on regular mechanics compared to Baba.

Perfect game tbh

This game is made of pure happiness.

Somehow this is the best Riichi Mahjong implementation available. Responsive controls, easy-to-read UI, great teaching tools, CPUs to play with less than 4 people, available on Steam and mobile. And cheap, too! I have like six people I play with and none of us are furries, it's just the only way to play this game online that doesn't feel like pulling teeth.

To give a brief summary of the other options:
- Tenhou is a horrible flash app that feels like it hasn't been updated since 2000. There is allegedly an English version, but it doesn't work very well and it's only translated in the very loosest sense. It's free, but there are no CPUs, so you can't play with fewer than four people. God save you if you try to learn the game this way.
- Mahjong Soul is an anime gacha game. It's free, and probably the best other option, but you can't play with CPUs, and the UI is kind of a mess. The gacha elements are also really egregious, so if you're in it for the anime I hope you like catgirls. This also isn't a great way to teach your friends, because the timer is mandatory and there aren't any good teaching tools ingame.
- Final Fantasy XIV is free, and it has Mahjong in it. You have to play about 20 hours of an MMO to unlock it, and you can only play with four people (no CPUs). Also, the tiles are very tiny on screen, and they use a weird tileset, which makes them kind of hard to read. There are no teaching materials in game, but FFXIV is popular, so there are some community resources for learning specifically ingame.
- Tabletopia has Riichi for free, but no CPUs and no teaching tools. I've heard it's glitchy, but I haven't tried it myself.
- Pretty much anything else costs more money than Kemono Mahjong. Some of them are on par; I like Clubhouse Games but that costs literally ten times as much money. I haven't seen anything else good on Steam though. It seems like most of what Steam has for Riichi is either anime porn or softcore anime porn, and the latter camp tends to have incorrectly implemented mechanics.

So yeah, in summary: furry game good, anime game bad, my entire life up to this point has been a lie

I see no reason to play this when there are like eight Layton games. The puzzles are all super famous (how fast can you solve the Tower of Hanoi? Or Four Queens?) or they're rote busywork. The rare puzzle that isn't is usually clunky and indecipherable. Worse, the puzzles are all that's here. The story is barely present, and when it is present, barely felt; a real bread sandwich of a narrative. The sprites 90% stock RPG Maker assets, and 10% unhappy little accidents that look like they were rushed out in MS Paint. What else even is there? I guess the non-sprite assets look nice. That's kind of it though.

Also, the translation feels a bit rushed in places. Hardly unplayable, but I expected better from FBF. :(

I've long thought that the metanarrative PC game story was a concept that only worked the first time you see it. I was wrong. The truth is just that I've only played two games that do it convincingly. OneShot is one of those games. OneShot also gets a lot more mileage out of it than, say, Undertale (which is the other game that does it well imo). OneShot is well worth playing, and I think it proves that metanarrative mechanics have a lot of yet-untapped potential.

Pawnbarian is an addictive, tough-but-fair blend of roguelike and puzzle game. If you like chess, roguelikes, or puzzles, you really owe it to yourself to check this game out. It's also notable for having a shogi-based character, which almost certainly makes it the only shogi-based roguelike (a genre which frankly needs many more entries).

Don't be daunted if you're rubbish at chess (or shogi for that matter), by the way; once you know how the pieces move, you're pretty much good to go.