Dosa Divas

Dosa Divas is an incredibly charming game in it's visuals and worldbuilding, but falls short in the combat aspect. The characters are fun and unique. I read every piece of dialogue I could and I just loved the depth of the protagonists and villains. The worldbuilding and story is also very enjoyable and has a solid concept to it. If you are mainly looking to follow the story and cook some dosas then this game is a must-buy. The gameplay itself is where it gets dicey. I will say the exploration and cooking were the best parts of it. The cooking is actually quite fun and the game does somewhat reward you for exploring the whole town you are in. However as a turn-based combat enjoyer I was left wanting more. The party gets essentially 3 skills each that are pretty much the same so i was missing some skill diversity. My main problem however is that you fully get your health and mana back after a combat, which removes the need to manage your ressources and just lets you spam your highest damage attack over and over. Basically, I was missing some difficulty, to the point where combat just kinda got boring in the end. The stat increases also weren't super intuitive. I gave Amani spirit stats and Samara physical stats and Samara ended doing a laughable amount of damage compared to Amani who could just nuke everything but maybe I just did that part wrong. TL;DR: Great story and worldbuilding but combat felt a bit lackluster. Buy depending on your priorities.

You know how so many JRPG's try to ape the balance of humor and heavy emotion Mother 3 is acclaimed for? What if I told you this game does that balance well but doesn't feel like just another Mother wannabe (or would it be Undertale wannabe at this stage)? Hell, it doesn't even feel like just another Super Mario RPG/Paper Mario clone; it feels like a game that took the torch from those two games and ran its own path with it. Not to mention how impeccable the game is visually. I love it when smaller studios figure out how to make pared-down graphics look so stylish and pleasing to the eye that the lower poly count or simpler rendering doesn't matter in the slightest. If you like JRPG's and you like playing stuff off the beaten path, I certainly can't think of much from this year I'd recommend over this.

Super fun RPG with combat mechanics in the vein of Paper Mario. The story and characters are the true pull to this game. It's an intimate story of a family of 3 sisters dealing with the responsibility of running a restaurant and a traumatic event that caused the closing of that restaurant... as well as having giant mech robots. It both feels very large scale but small and focused. The music is awesome!