Ten Dates follows Misha and her best friend Ryan, who, after you create their dating profile, attend a speed dating event and meet five potential partners each, equaling ten dates. From there, any successful interactions can then lead to a second date and even a third, should the second be a success too! It is up to you, as the player of Misha or Ryan, to navigate these dates and make decisions based on questions, reactions, and topics to either have the perfect date or one you’ll surely want to forget!

One aspect of these games that I love is the sheer number of scenes that must have been shot in a single location. Especially since each decision you make changes the outcome of that scene, whether positive or negative. Publisher, Wales Interactive, has confirmed that over twelve hours of footage have been filmed for this game, with ten successful endings. This unique aspect allows for a lot of replayability, most notably when you want a date to go well and say something that may jeopardize it. Unlike most real-life scenarios, you can always restart and hope for a better outcome next time. If only real dating was like this!

Like similar games, every now and then between conversations, a timed prompt will appear where you can make a choice that will alter the current conversation. Allowing the timer to run out has led to whatever option is highlighted being selected. Sometimes it’s fun to let the timer run out, as the awkward silence or conversation filler before confirming a decision is pretty funny! Especially when opting to interrupt someone’s rambling (sorry, Brandy!).

It’s not only what is said that changes when you make a choice. Your dates’ opinions and feelings about you change with each decision you make. You can check how you’re doing with someone or study what characteristics they’re judging you on by selecting the “-” button at any time during your date. On this screen, you can also check out previous dates, as well as certain criteria to meet or unlock, and how many different scenes you have viewed with that person. A useful tool for anyone who wishes to witness all twelve hours!

An area I do want to highlight and praise is the wide array of characters and people you encounter on your ten dates. I’m pretty confident that most people will come across at least one person they feel compatible with or, at the very least, want to pair up with Misha or Ryan. Some are a little more out there than others; however, that only adds to the charm and reality of dating! You never know what interests, jobs, or words people are going to say at any point. I think it’s also important to highlight that there are same-sex relationship options too, meaning that at some point, you have the chance to decide who Misha and Ryan are attracted to.

One thing that became annoying quickly was all the COVID talk. Wales Interactive’s previous game, “Five Dates,” was an all-digital dating experience during the UK lockdown and the global pandemic. Ten Dates is somewhat of a sequel, where we find restrictions lifted and in-person dating returning, which is great! However, COVID, coronavirus, the pandemic, and lockdown are mentioned a lot throughout the conversations, and after a while it becomes grating. Pro tip: if you do plan on speed dating anytime soon, leave the COVID talk at home.

Another issue I found, especially on a replay with Ryan, was how similar different runs felt, or it at least felt like the game or narrative was pushing it in a certain direction. For example, I knocked it out of the park with both Brandy and Toni—like, my stats were off the charts. But when I went back in from the beginning again, I chose the opposite for every interaction and still ended up with their “handles” (apparently, nobody gives out their phone number anymore). This was frustrating. My only thought was that date number one is meant to go smoothly and be more linear so that the game doesn’t end too quickly, and that dates two and three have more varied paths. 

As I touched on earlier, the first dates for many felt like they leaned toward success, which I had four out of five times. However, once you select who you want a second date with (a maximum of two), it becomes quite hard to get a third! One wrong selection can end a date immediately. I tried to follow the criteria listed on most attempts, and for example, tried to secure a kiss on date two, which backfired horribly. If anything, this adds a layer of realism because what you say matters when things get serious, and I suppose people are more open-minded on their first interaction?

An image I saw way too often…

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In addition to the genre mash-up, HEROish provides two modes of play: a single-player campaign and 1v1 or 2v2 multiplayer. The game throws you into the single-player campaign to begin with, as this acts as a great tool for teaching you how to play and becoming familiar with the heroes on offer. While the story is nothing to write home about, the gameplay itself is a little addictive at first. With varying difficulties to select from, you traverse a map with objectives and challenges as your hero, with the goal of thwarting all enemies in your path. Each objective is fairly linear, with the goal made clear at the start. These are mostly geared toward clearing the enemy out, taking control of a base, or downing a boss. Upon success, you receive some XP for your hero, a new card reward, and some coins. The cards that you earn can be added to your deck to improve them or alter your strategy, and the coins can be used to level those cards up, providing them with more health or more strength.

In terms of how you actually play the game, it’s pretty straightforward at first, but as the difficulty rises, the depths of how strategic you can be also increase. As the hero, you control the movement of said hero and also command the cards in your deck. Your own player automatically attacks, and you have a rotating 12-card deck full of other attacks at your disposal that you can spend constantly replenishing mana on to play that card, which will join you in combat. These vary from knights, archers, bombs, wizards, and unique attacks when playing as your hero. Each card has its own cost and serves a different purpose, meaning you have to be sure you are spending your mana correctly. Do you want to save a little time and maybe take some damage, or retreat to use a more powerful attack, or do you want to spam minions to charge forward and chip away at the enemy? The decision is all yours, and both sides have pros and cons depending on the scenario.

The reason the game is called HEROish is that you may not always be the hero of the story. The single-player campaign is split up into three stories, led by three different factions: Imperial, Chaos, and Feral. Each of these factions offers you two “heroes” to select from, for a total of six in the entire game. This felt like an issue at first; however, each hero and faction feels distinct enough that the same tried-and-tested tactics used by one hero may not work for another. For example, the Imperial factions have some devastating attacks that come from your hero themselves that can wipe out large numbers. Whereas with the Chaos heroes, you have a large slew of minions that can be used to simply overwhelm your enemy. It’s fun to test them all out in a campaign that you can cater to your own skill level.

HEROish is a very colorful and pretty game. You can see that its visuals are perfect for both big-screen action and small-screen action, ideal docked or in handheld. The use of color helps to differentiate enemies from allies, which is helpful when a lot is happening at once. The heroes are all well designed, completely unique from one another, and capable of displaying a lot of personality in both combat and the brief cutscenes seen in the single-player campaign.

The campaign can be completed very quickly—in a few hours of solid playtime; however, that doesn’t mean you’re done with HEROish. The multiplayer aspect is where you can now showcase your skills against your friend, family, or someone somewhere in the world! In multiplayer, you’ll begin with a base hero and a pretty simple deck. From here on, you’ll play multiplayer matches and grind your way to better heroes and cards. To build the perfect deck, you will need to earn it, which can be frustrating if you haven’t nailed that balance of card and mana usage because you can get dominated quickly! I had my reservations about multiplayer, expecting it to be just like the single-player stages, except I’d lose more. There’s a lot of fun here. It makes you think differently as you aren’t playing against a mindless AI anymore; however, it becomes pretty repetitive and stale pretty quickly.

The core game and mechanics are great, but with the small pool of heroes and cards at your disposal, having to grind again for cards and heroes you’ve already used extensively in the campaign just feels like you’ve hit the reset button and gained no reward from the hours you have already committed. There is potential here for this to become a much larger game than it currently is, but its variety in heroes and cards and overall game cost have heavily impacted this. I could easily see HEROish becoming a free-to-play multiplayer-only game with a similar system to other MOBAs on the market. I’ll be keeping an eye on this, and if further heroes are added, I’d love to jump back in and give them a go.

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Splatter is a top-down shooter in which you control a “hero” and must blast your way through an endless horde of zombies in the zombiecalypse (yes, I read it as zombiepocalypse first too). In terms of the game’s plot, this is essentially it. There is a story, but it is incredibly thin. So much so that you could boil it down to ‘shoot everything and move forward.’

That’s not to say Splatter isn’t fun. There will be times when you will be literally surrounded and will have to bob, weave, and gun your way through. You have infinite pistol bullets, so you can get very trigger-happy wherever you are. Many of the objects in the environment are also destructible, so zombie bites and splinters are a real possibility. Destroying items will occasionally reward you with money. This can be used to upgrade your weapons at certain stations, making them more powerful as you progress. Each level is broken up by a short story, which is accompanied by gritty graphic novel-style imagery and a very generic ‘lone wolf’ voice saying nothing. You’re then in another area now, spamming the ZR button in every direction. Again.

The main problem with this game is that it lacks strategy. Looking back at Hotline Miami and how it used the top-down camera, you could plan ahead and observe your enemies’ movements, as well as use doors or melee weapons to aid in your attack. There is no real strategy with Splatter other than to run and shoot. With all of your opponents being zombies who will literally run at you, there is only one way out – point and shoot. There are three difficulty levels to help you tailor the gameplay to your skill level. This only makes the same zombies a little more difficult to shoot down.

It’s a lot of fun at first to keep shooting and navigating from room to room, level to level with a variety of guns at your disposal. But that’s all there is to it. After a few levels, you’ve seen pretty much everything that Splatter has to offer.

“Watch as colors shift and the level shakes to the beat of the music,” says the promotional description for Splatter. I’m perplexed because the music was nowhere near as prominent as this description implies, and there was no shaking at all. It may be present, but the only sounds you will hear unless you change the settings are gunshots, explosions, and zombie groans.

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If you’ve played games like Dead by Daylight or Friday the 13th: The Game, you essentially know what you’re in for with THE BREAKERS. This is an asymmetrical survival game that follows the same formula, except you’re in the anime world of Dragon Ball. For those unfamiliar with this style, you find yourself in a 7v1 survival match, where one big, bad villain (known as the Raider) has a single objective: to take everyone out. The seven are tasked with either escaping through a time machine or using ‘transpheres’ to power themselves up and defeat the Raider. As a player, you can be either the villain or the survivor by setting your preference before jumping in. It took me many attempts to become a villain, but once there, I realized how unbalanced THE BREAKERS truly is.

There are a handful of ways in which the seven survivors can win, and pretty easily, too. The most common way is to run around the map and look for ‘Power Keys’. These ‘Power Keys’ can be used to power up your way out of the map and are hidden in supply boxes dotted around the map. There are also a number of ways to keep the Raider at bay. You have various weapons that can be used to shoot at the Raider in order to protect yourself, and you can use vehicles to zoom around the map quicker and use this to hide quicker. 

On top of the items you can find within a match, you have abilities at your disposal that you can equip. Using ‘Transpheres’, you can temporarily acquire the abilities of a super warrior—these being the heroes from the Dragon Ball franchise. When activated, you will inherit the warrior’s iconic outfit and find yourself in a brief one-on-one fight with the Raider, being able to use the special move of that hero.

When playing as the Raider, you must hunt the remaining players down before they escape or defeat you. Getting the chance to be a character like Cell, Majin Buu, or Freiza is awesome, but you’ll find out quickly how hard it really is to win as the Raider. You start in a base form and ‘level up’ as certain criteria are met. Each Raider has different requirements to level up, making for a unique experience each time you play as someone new. However, as mentioned before, it’s really stacked against you, and in all of the matches I played, the Raider didn’t win once. 

Similar to games like Dead by Daylight, an internet connection is required to play the main mode. Whilst the matchmaking states that it should take no longer than one minute, I found myself waiting far longer than that each time. Given that there is no crossplay means that you are limited to matchmaking with other Switch players only—so take the advised matchmaking time with a pinch of salt. These long wait times, plus the even longer menu management and process to get into a game, make for a poor experience before a match has even begun.

The issues did not stop there, unfortunately. Graphically, THE BREAKERS is unimpressive. Aside from the disappointing visuals—which are on par with the PS2 Dragon Ball video games—there is a lot of clipping, with trees and buildings popping in and out of vision and focus, and many cut scenes will freeze or just skip altogether. This really did take a lot of fun out of the gameplay and overall player experience.

On top of the graphical issues, there are a bunch of minor things that make THE BREAKERS counterintuitive. The menu screen, for example, takes inspiration from previous Dragon Ball games like FighterZ, where instead of a simple, easy-to-use menu, you have a small town where random robots, shops, and billboards are your menu options. This, coupled with the stuttering visuals, makes finding what you’re looking for the first time a real pain.

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SipderHeck is an ultra-fast-paced brawler where you fight it out as a spider, against spiders, in physics-based environments. You web (and sword) swing around avoiding attacks from enemies as well as preventing yourself from falling out of bounds and to your instant death. 

SpiderHeck can be played as a PvP or PvE, which allows for consistent fun against a friend, random opponent on the internet, or the computer. All are just as fun and chaotic as each other. When playing alone against the computer, you become enemy number one and are tasked to take on wave upon wave of kitted-out spiders with knives, lightsabers, and sometimes rocket launchers! It’s wild. 

What shines most with SpiderHeck is the ability to dive into a fight, and it rarely lasts a ridiculous amount of time. The gameplay itself is rapid, and you can customize the number of rounds there are, or the points total to reach, with the default being ‘first to ten points.’ For those that do want to be ‘SpiderHecking’ for hours on end, there are also endless horde modes offline. 

I highly doubt anyone will enter SpiderHeck and immediately be seamlessly swinging around and gunning and slicing opponents like a spider-sassin, as the control scheme can be a little finicky at first. However, the opening tutorial is great and whoever is lucky enough to play through it (my fiancée), gets an edge on their opponent. I did, after going four points down, eventually learn how to pick weapons up and then use them, in which the match ended six – ten in my favor! It’s incredibly satisfying picking the controls up naturally and then stringing (get it?) together some mean combos such as swinging fully around a floating boulder to then snipe a spider on the other side of the stage!  

What’s more, once you’ve nailed the ultra-smooth gameplay, the visuals are then taken to a whole new level. The minimalistic (well, black) background allows for the spiders, weapons, and platforms to stand out and really shine. The sharp, neon colors that shoot out of the guns and lightsabers are stunning, and even more so when two sabers clash—it’s a real Luke Skywalker v Darth Vader situation, but like, with spiders. Another thing that always gets me hyped is when the visuals of the game are perfectly suited for handheld gaming on the OLED Switch, and this is most certainly one of them. Those colors just pop in handheld, and given the game’s simplistic design and approach, it’s perfect for some handheld goodness. As you can also customize your spiders with hats and specific colors, you can build your very own vibey aesthetic to battle it out with others. 

One area that’s fun, but gets old very quickly, is the main menu. Don’t get me wrong, it’s unique and actually a terrific way to learn the controls or practice a little. However, making the main menu a stage where you must swing and jump your way around to the options, customization menu, and the different battle modes can become a little aggravating when you wish to simply just dive in. 

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As you begin Idol Manager, you are offered two modes: Story mode and Free Play – it is recommended at first to play through story mode as the tutorial is essential if you haven’t played Idol Manager before. This is mostly due to the menus and the control scheme (something we’ll touch on later!). Free play is essentially story mode, but without any help or prompts on what to do next. This mode is more for when you’ve done a lengthy story campaign and just want to dive in and build a crazy successful idol group. 

Once you’re past the very heavy tutorial, the world of idol management is your oyster… and what a busy, busy world it can be. As you are starting from scratch, you first need to: hold some auditions and hire some idols, build an office for yourself, hire staff members, build rooms for them to work in, send your idols out on performances and visits to build some cash and fame, and once all of this is done, you can begin training and preparing for your first single. These lists of tasks are only scratching the surface of micro-tasks you need to do to succeed and take your idols onto a world tour. 

Auditioning for idols isn’t as exciting as it seems. You can choose to hold local, regional, or national auditions, each costing more the wider your search. You are then randomly handed five potential idols of varying ages, skill sets (that can be trained), and personalities. Each has one special trait that can make them easier or harder to manage. You then hire the ones you want and ditch the ones you don’t. There is no real limit to the number of idols you can hire. However, the more you have, the more you spend on salaries, and the much harder your day to day can become. 

Starting out as an idol manager is not easy. You have a fairly sensible starting budget, but if you aren’t careful with your finances, you will see that bankruptcy fast approaches. Almost every decision you make costs money, so you must be incredibly shrewd to begin with otherwise you’ll be in for a world of debt. Whilst you can make money by sending your idols out on the job, this will deplete their physical and mental stamina. Knocking either of these too low will result in depression or injury. Which means you must strike the right balance between using your idols, managing finances, all whilst increasing the popularity of your idol group. 

At first, Idol Manager appears to have quite deep mechanics. Especially when you can build relationships, trust with each idol, and customize your single releases down to genre, type of dance, promotion, topic of lyrics and even the single title. However, these mechanics very quickly rise to the surface and show Idol Manager’s shallowness and repetitive nature. Sure, it’s fun to hire new idols and produce wild single names and see them crack the top five charts, but the actions you take are almost identical to the actions you took on your last single. Once you overcome the tough financial start and begin seeing a profit, the game becomes a breeze, and the aforementioned challenge disappears. Funnily enough, it becomes harder to fail than succeed. 

I expected to have more of a personal involvement with the idols and staff than what is presented in Idol Manager. For example, once your staff is hired, there is little to no further interaction than just telling them what to do. As for the idols, you can take them out for coffee and chat with them, flirt with them (at your own risk) and ask them questions about their dreams and goals. These result in one or two lines of dialogue and then a boost or decrease in stats. After you select a chat option, that is it. There is no option to reply or ask further questions. It’s a one-and-done scenario, and whilst the idols are, more often than not, cute and all given a sometimes-unique personality trait, there is nothing more than just that to them.

Idol Manager is not a new game, as it was originally released on PC. The Nintendo Switch version is a direct port of the PC version, meaning that the controls are optimized for a mouse and keyboard. This means that the controls on the Nintendo Switch are beyond poor. Thankfully, there are some button combinations to make life a little easier, like holding ZL and using the left stick to scroll. This doesn’t excuse the fact that you must use the left stick to move a cursor across the screen to select every option – with some options requiring a clunky click and drag. I would have happily taken a touch screen option in handheld to massively improve the player experience. Sadly, this is not something they opted to include.

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From the title menu alone and opening level, I had flashbacks to Shadow Corridor (another Asian horror video game I reviewed here at PN). From the deafeningly quiet hallways to the equally deafening sounds of cicadas, the eeriness really does put you on the edge of your seat. Like Shadow Corridor, you play as a wholly defenseless human up against some very dangerous ghosts and apparitions. 

You play Ai, a lonely Japanese schoolgirl who has found herself in a very unfortunate game with Tsun, the spirit of a deceased boy. The game is simple: you must find a bucket of water and a doll. The doll is hidden somewhere, and you’re tasked to find said doll and dunk it in the bucket of water. However, you cannot let anyone – or anything – see you doing this. If you lose, you’re stuck playing with Tsun forever. 

Sounds simple enough, however there are a few layers of complexity. Firstly, the locations you find yourself in, whether this be an abandoned school or hospital, are chock full of turns and doors, and rooms that lead to nowhere. Essentially, you’re in a labyrinth of sorts. Once the doll is found, you must navigate back through to where you came from, so a good sense of direction helps massively. Unfortunately, each level design  looks eerily similar to one another, and some areas are carbon copies of others. I was lost trying to find the doll, let alone bringing it back to the bucket of water! 

The sometimes-puzzling layout is only half the battle with Yuoni. Alongside the never-ending dusk are ghosts haunting the level. These ghosts vary from glitchy shadows to large, skulking slender-like objects, and they all act differently. Some will have an excellent sense of hearing, so you’ll need to hold your breath and crawl by them, whereas others will have incredible vision, so you’ll have to tactically hide and let them pass or find other ways around. This means that you’ll have to be on your toes (sometimes literally!) and adapt your style of play based on which ghosts you encounter. Of course, if you are caught, you’re dead. You can try to hide or run, but some will spring on you in an instant, sending you back to square one. 

Yuoni has all the pieces to create a great horror puzzle, but everything, when put into action, doesn’t work as smoothly as it sounds. The repeated visuals become dull very quickly, and the repeated handful of ghosts become very predictable once you have sussed out a way around. I stumbled upon this feeling as early as the third to fourth level, and whilst the levels became more complex, they only delayed the inevitable – me dunking a doll’s head in water.

That said, there are three levels of difficulty: normal, hard and, exclusive to the Nintendo Switch, deathless. The latter mode is essentially a walking simulator. Ghosts will not come for you at all, even if you stamp in their face and run rings around them. Keep in mind though, the jump scares scattered throughout are still present, with many of them being highly effective. 

My biggest issue with Yuoni is the visuals. I found myself having to fine-tune the brightness and contrast on numerous occasions. Even in the dusk-lit sun, some areas were incredibly hard to see and determine whether it was a wall or a dark corridor. Even after finding what I felt to be the best settings, everything was very muddy and unclear. This does add to the creepiness a tad, but it also heavily affects the gameplay. Far too many times were doors and other important visuals unidentifiable. It wasn’t until I was pressed against them that I knew what they were! And that was mainly because the on-screen prompt appeared to open it!

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In case it wasn’t glaringly obvious, Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? is a Nintendo Switch quiz game based on the American quiz show of the same name. After conducting some research on the television show, you’ll be unsurprised to find out that Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? the video game follows the exact format as the show that it shares its name.  

The key difference between the video game and the television show is that you can opt to take on the quiz show solo or against up to seven other friends/family via couch co-op. Oh, and the hosts are different. You’ll have a super annoying rotation of two hosts, Teddy and Claudia. Thankfully there is a skip option most of the time they are yammering on. 

Across the two modes, there are over 6800 questions and a variety of topics based on school subjects, ranging from measurements and mathematics to life sciences and vocabulary. Getting a question wrong in the solo mode, Exam, will end your run, highlighting that you are not smarter than a 5th grader. However, the co-op mode instead allows you to run through all questions, and not only will you see if you are smarter than a 5th grader but smarter than your friends and family, too. If you are ever stumped, you can always cheat. With the cheat option, you have three choices to make. They are ‘ask the class’, where you ask the group of students their thoughts on what they believe the answer to be. ‘Copy’ is where you copy your current student’s answer in Exam mode, or one of your opponents in co-op mode. The final choice is to pick a new question, where in Exam mode, there will be a new question altogether, and in co-op, only you will receive a new question. 

As you play through Are You Smarter than a 5th Grade? you receive points based on your correct questions; these points are used to unlock new things for you to make your time with the game more interesting and diverse. These unlockables range from new students to help you in the main game and special outfits for each student based on their specialist subject. You can also unlock cosmetics for your own desk and, most importantly, new subjects to test you. These are nice touches and add a desire to dive back in again, especially when you receive a new subject to try out. 

The personalisation of your own desk is also quite cool. You can edit the border of your desk, a bobblehead, the material of your desk, and create your title. These titles are built out with two pre-made lists of words. Some combinations you can make include ‘Sports Goth’, ‘Botanical Mother’, and ‘Free-Range Egg’! What’s more is that no matter what combination of words you choose, you will hear both Teddy and Claudia audibly say this as you play through the game. In fact, all dialogue is voice acted, including every student having their own voice and quirks. Whilst there are subtitles, some subjects like Spelling need this audio as you don’t want the subtitles giving the answer away!

Given that every part of Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? is voice acted, there is a lot of chatter in between questions. If you want the full game show experience, lay your controller down and enjoy the show. If you’re here for the trivia alone, you are able to skip almost all areas of dialogue – which is very, very handy. Without this, each playthrough would have been excruciatingly long. Especially as each new game opens with Teddy running through the rules and how to play every single time. There are also backdrop changes depending on the subject you choose, which at first are charming, do become tiresome, and these cannot be skipped. 

Aside from the slower pacing, Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? is a fun time with people. I found the single-player mode a little boring, and I was spamming the skip button each time. However, when playing with friends and family, it’s a great time! Being able to outsmart your fiancée or discovering that they aren’t 100% how many weeks there are in a year is pretty hilarious! 

It is important to note that Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? is wholly based on the American television show, meaning that the subjects and questions are those that American 5th graders should know. I found myself a little stuck when the Social Science subject came up. Being British, I had no clue that Supreme Court Justices are appointed for life! But I do now. 

Unfortunately, during my time with Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? was not as smooth as I had hoped. Yes, I have proven that I am in fact smarter than a 5th grader many times. However, a handful of attempts were interrupted by the software crashing and force closing the game on my Nintendo Switch. This happened at least once, each time during my sessions with the video game. At the time of writing, I am still experiencing this and have reached out to THQ Nordic via multiple platforms with no response yet. I hope there is a patch coming shortly after release, as these crashes hugely impacted my experience. 

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2D golf games usually follow the same formula and tend to be relaxing and therapeutic. Cursed to Golf adds to this formula but removes the relaxing and therapeutic parts. Instead of worrying about getting stuck in sand dunes, you must watch out for TNT blocks, fans that will suck your golf ball away, and many other hazards to make your life (or death) harder.

Another aspect of Cursed to Golf that differs from other golf games is its roguelike-ness. In Cursed to Golf, should you fail to complete a course within the allotted number of strokes, you are sent right back to hole one to start all over again. On top of this, the courses themselves are not identical each time. The locations of hazards and special statues (which grant you additional strokes) will be different every time you jump in or start again. Still, I bet you’re thinking, “18 holes? That isn’t too difficult”. Well, that’s where you are wrong.

These courses are not your usual left-to-right courses where you avoid inclines and hazards. Instead, what you have before you are Metroidvania-like courses that are complex and daunting. The usual first hit with a driver to get your ball as far as possible won’t work here; you’ll need to scout ahead each and every time and strategically figure out the best course of action. Whilst this deepens the gameplay, it severely harms the pacing of the game. When things go wrong, it can really putt (get it?) you off starting from the beginning again. 

To add an extra layer of strategy to Cursed to Golf, you have a set number of consumable cards at your disposal to aid you during each perilous course. These cards can help in several ways during your journey through purgatory. Some of the most useful cards you can use include a time-stop mechanic that can suddenly stop your ball dead in its tracks, a ‘mulligan’ that allows you to retake your last shot, and a special card that will explode all TNT in view to openpaths. A favorite of mine is a special card that splits your golf ball into three after you hit it, allowing you to pick which of the three you want to be your landing ball. You also have three different clubs to switch between (driver, iron and wedge) to specify your shot arc and distance.

There’s no hiding that Cursed to Golf is an incredibly difficult video game, and frustratingly so. One incorrect stroke or faux pas and you can find yourself in an awful position that may see you back at hole one (if you even made it past that hole!). What’s more, you’ll come across special cursed holes where you will be given a handicap on top of what is an already hard course. Some handicaps include being unable to utilize the trophies that award you more strokes, limiting you to hit the ball in one direction, or even flipping the course upside down to make your controls feel very strange.

It is likely that you will be unable to make your way through Cursed to Golf first time round with no deaths, and Thunderful Games anticipated this by including a fast forward button that can be used at any time. This allows you to breeze through your hits or any text that you may deem unimportant and comes in handy between strokes. Even though the animation of your character chasing his golf ball is cool, you only need to see it once or twice.

A highlight of Cursed to Golf is its art design and music. Both are perfectly suited to each other and full of ghoulish fun. Each course is relatively unique, and the soundtrack compliments the visuals. Alongside this are the very cool-looking characters you encounter through purgatory, ranging from a Scotsman to a ghoulish, sad skeleton.

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The story opens with Nuki, a young man who loves looking up at the stars (and his starfish!) and a particular fairy tale called ‘The Milky Way Prince’. He comes across as incredibly lonely and seems like he needs something new and fulfilling in his life. We meet Nuki on the evening of what should be a meteor shower when something strange happens, and he witnesses a star crashing down from the night sky. Enter Sune. Nuki seems to instantly fall for this mysterious person, who he affectionately nicknames ‘Milky Way Prince’. What at first seems like a cutesy tale of two young men, turns into a pretty sour, controlling and – as the warning stated – abusive relationship through the actions of Sune. 

The controlling behavior isn’t only displayed through dialogue. Like most, if not all, visual novels, you are provided with dialogue choices, and those choices impact the narrative. Early on in your relationship with Sune, some of these ‘choices’ fade away after a very short period of time, leaving you with only one choice – usually one that benefits Sune. This is a pretty cool mechanic to demonstrate the controlling nature and power that someone can have on your decision-making – something I imagine some can relate to. 

Milky Way Prince – The Vampire Star is a visual delight and wholly unique in its aesthetic. It is incredibly minimalistic in its design, using a small handful of backdrops coupled with this moody, red style. Both Nuki and Sune are these monochromatic 2D designs that stand out from the aforementioned backgrounds. This creates a gorgeous and simple, yet melancholic design, perfectly matching the theme of the video game.

Whilst the visuals are great, they begin to wear off a little due to the lack of movement in longer periods of one conversation. Alongside this, the overall pacing is very slow and harms the impact that some areas of the story should have. Speaking of the story, the subject matter addressed is serious and compelling to a degree, however, the execution on many occasions is pretty underwhelming and doesn’t hit in the way I imagine developer Santa Ragione intended. 

When you aren’t reading through the slow-moving text or selecting items in your apartment to comment on, you, err, have sex. This mechanic is different from the rest of the game where you are provided a wheel of senses that you can select from, and you are then described what you and Sune are up to via that sense. This section initially wasn’t clear to me at all. I didn’t realize that they were doing it, as the visuals describing the senses are very abstract, and it wasn’t until I read the text that follows that it clicked what I was choosing. Overall, this portion of the game was poorly presented. 

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