The World is Your Weapon

I hope the developers had as much fun making The World is Your Weapon as I had playing it for the first hour.
It's a simple game, but quite unlike anything I've played before. I started out my adventure facing a group of slimes, with no weapon to fight them with. The game instructed me to find a weapon from the surroundings, and there was a shovel conveniently placed 2 tiles away from me. A bit unorthodox, but a solid weapon against a slime. But I had seen the screenshots - I knew. I skipped the shovel and picked up a nearby pot and smacked a slime with it. A powerful weapon! It killed the slime in a single hit, but sadly also broke. I proceeded to uproot the nearby tree and smack with that instead. Then some flowers, blades of grass, and finally a good whack with the shovel.

What I described is the essence of the game, as it's a bit of a collection game. Pick up something, hit an enemy, learn its strength, repeat. Despite the absurdity of picking up a whole tree, it's the least of this game's weirdness. As I arrived at the village, I went into a house, and picked up someones bed, wardrobe, window, floorboards, and finally, for good measure, exited the house and took the whole thing. Without exaggeration, if you can see it, you can almost certainly pick it up. That includes the road, a lake, even a villager after you've "accidentally" hit them with an AoE attack and got them slightly injured.
You can also upgrade any of your weapons (including the "live" ones), or list them for sale in your shop. Don't worry, it's not slavery, probably. The whole game is absurd and beautiful in its absurdity, and plays into it so well with its aesthetics and narrative.

The problem is that there isn't much depth to it. Once you take picking everything up to its logical extreme and experience the pinnacle of absurdity, you can either attempt the garguantuan task of collecting everything, or just stick to a few hard-hitting weapons which can be maintained and upgraded forever. There isn't much of a difficulty curve, and combat isn't any exciting - you whack, they whack, maybe some special effects happen, repeat until one's dead.
It's fun for an hour, but then you're like "cool", and drop it because you've pretty much experienced everything. So, I don't know. I think it's worth experiencing for a little while, but not playing to completion. I wish they had added some ramp-up to what you can pick up, because the high of picking up increasingly ridiculous objects could have lasted for a little while after each next step of ridiculousness. Meanwhile I picked up a house in the first 20 minutes of the game, and that was about the pinnacle of me being surprised.

Spiritfarer

Am I getting jaded? When was the last time I really enjoyed a new game? I don't know anymore. Even when playing yet another game with an "overwhelmingly positive" review score of 95% and over 27 thousand reviews, I just... find it boring. Sure, I'll reason that I got bored of Spiritfarer because it's a casual story-oriented management game full of tedious busywork, but it's just been so long since I've found something new I've truly enjoyed. Oh well, on with the review.

Spiritfarer is a game about caring for spirits as you see them off into the afterlife. There's a lot of management aspects of building various buildings on your boat for the well-being of the spirits you're accomodating, such as lodgings and food. You will spend a lot of time sailing from place to place, harvesting or gathering the resources there, then using those to build, craft, grow, cook, or otherwise make new things, and then giving those things to the spirits to keep them happy. Many activites run on a timer, meaning you have to juggle them, queuing each up, and then collecting or dealing with them once they're ready. There's also some platforming.

I think a lot of praise goes into the not-strictly-gameplay aspect of Spiritfarer. I didn't get too far with the story, so I don't know what to make of it, but I understand it's trying to tell you some sad tales of the spirits you're ferrying, and it's actually not a very large portion of the game in comparison to all the running about you have to do in the management aspect.
I can say that the game looks very nice and is beautifully animated, even if all the characters being anthropomorphized animals isn't really my cup of tea. The music's nice too. I think the game overall puts a lot more focus on things looking appealing rather than being fun. It'll take the extra time to make you look at the animations, even if it's an activity you've done a hundred times before, or in general make things take just a bit longer than I was comfortable with.

While this may be an improper comparison, considering I've never played Stardew Valley, I imagine it to be kind of like what this game is. It's not difficult, you can't really fail. It allows you to sink dozens of hours into it, throwing a lot of busywork at you, and tries to keep things fresh by introducing something new every now and then, even if it's just a new item or location instead of a brand new mechanic. Clearly there is a large audience for this, and I can by no means say that I think Spiritfarer is not well made, but regardless of the length or how much there is to do, I just do not enjoy these kinds of repetitive tasks, running back-and-forth, and waiting on various timers to complete. So, if you know you like these kinds of manual farming / gathering / management games with a tinge of story, I'd have to guess Spiritfarer might suit you, but I can't give it a personal recommendation.

Breakneck

On a roll with old games. Breakneck was the third least recent game I had added to my Wishlist. It was also the 9th worst rated. Went about as well as you'd expect.

Breakneck is a racing game, where you're endlessly driving at high speeds through a world with various obstacles in it. You can turn left, you can turn right, there's some powerups, driving near walls gives you boost energy to accelerate faster, bumping into a wall slows you down, while crashing into a wall ends the run. The run also ends if you've been going too slow for too long.

It's a very basic game, but that's not the problem. The problem is that I've played this before. It was called Race the Sun, and it's almost the exact same, except, despite the simpler graphics, Race the Sun is more visually appealing, and has more content and polish overall. Now, I enjoyed Race the Sun for a while when I played it almost 10 years ago, but it got boring somewhat fast. Sure, there's elgenace in simplicity, and mastering some simple task can feel really rewarding, but I'm no speedrunner - doing the same thing over and over generally exhausts itself for me.

So, I don't really have much to say about Breakneck. If the idea of a kind of endless runner racing game seems appealing to you, and you're not against something slightly older, go try Race the Sun instead. Stay away from Breakneck - it's similar enough to basically be a ripoff, and I don't like that.

Transistor

Oh wow, I didn't even realize I had games this old still to play. I played Bastion less than a year after it came out and kind of enjoyed it, so I've been meaning to play Supergiant's other games since then. Being me, I wanted to play them in order, so I'd been putting off good ones like Hades until I finished the previous ones. Well, 9 years after release, I finally got around to Transistor.

Much like I liked Bastion on release, perhaps I would have also liked Transistor on release, but games have gotten better in the past decade. Transistor's atmosphere is great, much like it's predecessor's. The mostly silent protagonist, a narrator with lots of voice lines for both important events and things as trivial as admiring bits of scenery or kicking a ball around, the slow and beautiful soundtrack, a futuristic city to traverse... It all sets the mood so well, and it's excellently put together. As much as I love the atmosphere, I have to mostly judge Transistor for its gameplay.
As you traverse the city, fights occasionally occur, limiting you to an arena with a variety of enemies, as well as some obstructing terrain. You're given an arsenal of abilities, which can each be slotted either as an active, a modifier to another active, or a passive, allowing for extensive customization to your playstyle. You can use these active abilities either in real-time, each having a cast time, or switch to a planning mode, allowing you to plan out the next several seconds of movement and abilities and then execute them while the enemies are almost frozen in time, at the cost of then being locked out of all abilities for a comparable amount of time. Of course, you will maximize your potential by combining these two - acting in real-time when possible, and freezing time to escape complicated situations.
I believe therein lies the biggest fault of Transistor, as I won't tire of repeating that mixing different types of gameplay rarely works out well. Personally more of a fan of turn-based combat, I found it especially frustrating, having to wait for my abilities to come back online whenever I did plan things out. Switching between the two gameplay modes was also not a smooth experience, as I have trouble rapidly adapting between fast and slow modes of thinking, and maybe that's common. And finally, the planning mode shows a prediction of what will happen when you execute your turn, but it's just... wrong. It fails to properly consider the environment, and fails to understand that things do not stand perfectly still during the time freeze of the execution step, causing many abilities to miss.

Overall, Transistor has a very appealing atmosphere and quite unique gameplay. Sadly, I believe the action and turn-based modes of combat mix together quite poorly, and there are some fundamental flaws in using the planning mode at all. If you're willing to overlook the not-so-great gameplay, it could still be an enjoyable experience, but I only managed to get about 50-75% through the game. I would have to lean towards not recommending it, at least not in the current year.