 Oh my goodness, the eShop, you know it, you love it, sometimes you hate it because it's mostly full of shovel wearing crap, but that's where I come in. I dive and scour through that eShop on a daily basis and I wait, I sit and I watch. When I find 10 games that aren't only good, but are great. You guys know how this works by now, like, subscribe, all that good stuff. I won't keep you waiting, just get into it. Okay, I know you're all very excited to find out what eShop games you're gonna be wasting your money on today, let me make some back real quick. Hey, you know, for the most part, we should all be staying inside as much as possible, right? So yeah, sure, sit on your butt and watch those movies, TV shows and play some games like I've been, but also seriously consider taking this time to better yourself and learn some new skills. Come out of isolation stronger, better, harder, faster, smarter, and better than before by using Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people. Even if you're unsure what it is you want to do next, Skillshare can help you create some small short-term goals and fulfilling those always gives me a motivational sense of accomplishment. There's drawing, writing, and journaling classes, or video production and graphic design, or learn a new language or a new instrument, there's even classes on how to create a successful YouTube channel. Skillshare is less than $10 a month, I use it all the time, so whether you're looking to break some boredom, calm your mind, or just learn something new, the first 1000 of my subscribers to click the link in the description, instantly get a two-month free trial of a premium membership so you can explore your creativity. Thank you Skillshare for sponsoring this video. Yeah, yeah, I know the games, the freaking games. All right, let's go. A mix of Wind Waker and Stardew Valley with some RPG elements tossed into the mix, I was very pleasantly surprised with Summer in Mara. You begin as Koa, a young girl who was found lost at sea and now needs to take care of her own personal island as well as help others across the ocean on various other island towns. On your island, you're able to plant crops and tend to farm life, like chickens and piggies. You gather ingredients and materials to create tasty meals or craft bigger items for your island, and you can hop into your little boat and you can go anywhere in this world, like the main town, where you can buy or sell more seeds, ingredients, and much more. You can also pick up and find more than over 100 quests in this game. Sadly, each and every one amounts to a very basic fetch quest that will have you going from A to B, often having to leave the island, go to another island briefly, then come back to the first island. And annoyingly, you have to complete a lot of these to advance in the main story. There is a lot of fun elements here, but the fetch quests get really old pretty quick. On your island, while you don't have as much freedom to create or plant things wherever you want, like in games like Stardew Valley, it's still fun building up your island, even if you know your island will pretty much look like everyone else's. Summer in Mara doesn't dive deep into any of its many mechanics. What you see here is pretty much what you get. But for $25, I was surprised at how many hours of gameplay I squeezed out of this charming adventure. The jump mechanic is hilarious though. This chick has like spring-loaded calves. I don't know why she jumps like seven feet in the air. Whatever, next. Recently, I did another one of those really dumb, randomly-generated Nintendo Switch game videos, where I roll the dice on the Switch eShop library lane. I have to buy whatever comes up. Usually, it's that crap shovelware. But every now and then, it strikes gold, and that happened when I found a cane, or a carney, or however you pronounce this game. For the criminally low price of $5, I am extremely impressed by everything, everything this game has to offer. The cyberpunk visuals, the fast-paced hack and slash gameplay even down to the great soundtrack. You strike enemies with a single slash of your katana, or a well-timed shot from your gun that charges while attacking. The bad news is that you die if you're struck even once, making the fast-paced gameplay that much more intense. The controls are super tight and responsive. As you slash away at your enemies, you're built up a special bar that can be used for a clean slice through a line of enemies, or you can save up the entire special bar and just go crazy and kill everything on the screen. It's extremely satisfying. I shouldn't hold a sword like this. Luckily, this one's fake. Once you hit 100 brutal murders, you'll hit the boss This is equally intense as the one-hit death rule is still in play, leading to some intense, parry-off action until someone slips up. And that's the game. It's short, sweet and super cool. I really hope they expand on this idea in the future and give us more than just one stage, but as I said, for $5, it's a steal. It's bug. Actually, it's bugfables, but I love that song. It's since the PlayStation 5 event, it's been stuck in my head. I've seen it at least one a day. Bugfables, honestly, probably deserves a much bigger deep dive review from me than just throwing it into this list, but I just don't have time for that right now. And I really want to talk about this game already, so I'm going to do it. It was a massive mistake for me to play this game for the first time, literally a week before Paper Mario Origami King released. Bugfables is everything I have ever wanted Paper Mario to be since a thousand year door. Well, minus the bugs. That wasn't a pun on like little glitches, little but. It actually runs really smooth. I just, I don't like the actual bugs. Don't get me wrong, these characters aren't terrible and I grew to like them for sure, but their designs and personalities, they just don't have that Nintendo charm. The dialogue is a tad stale at times too, but other than that, Bugfables is near perfect for the genre it aims to recapture, a battle system that has weight. You know, like it actually levels up your characters on victories and gives you a reason to actually be in the stupid battles and progress your adventure forward? Imagine that, Nintendo. Imagine that. A world that is exciting to explore with rewarding RPG mechanics. Each character in your party has different attacks and abilities for different situations, making each one feel like an integral party member in the team. And it leads to a load of strategy and planning your attacks. The graphics leave a little to be desired and feel dated, but in a way, they do feel right at home with that GameCube generation. So for the style of game, they're recreating it works. I just wish it had a teeny tiny bit more polish. If you were left wanting a little or a lot more from the new Paper Mario game, you might just find it here in a Paper Mario game done right, Bugfables. Whoa, I'm dumb. I remember seeing Blood Roots announced in a Nintendo Direct like last year and I thought it looked really cool. And then I immediately forgot all about it and I didn't realize until I was researching for this video that it released way back in February. And that's why I'm glad I make these videos because I love it and I almost missed it. Blood Roots shares a lot of similarities with Akane or Akane, but it's far more fleshed out. Another frantic, fast paced beat-em-up style game that's an absolute blast to play. Each time you load into a level, the enemies and items will be placed in the same location. Then you just start ripping through the levels, wiping out each enemy on one hit. You slip up even once, maybe as you stall for a moment to consider your next move, you're more than likely copper blow to the face and have to restart the level. The incredibly addictive part is that there are so many different ways to kill, destroy or get around a level. So every death is just an excuse to go back to the start and try something new. And by the time you finally complete a level, you more than likely smooth sail, punch, slash, explode and slice through it in a way that if anyone was watching and didn't know you just attempted the level 27 times before you finally got it right, they would probably assume you're some kind of gaming prodigy. It does look really cool when you string it all together super smooth. You can use almost anything around you as a weapon. John Wick on a killing rampage style, chaining kills, going for the top score, and it's just so much fun to play. One of the best games on this list, it's near perfect. But believe me, you can't understand how fun it is until you've tried it for yourself, blood roots. Don't miss it like I did. I love games that force me to think outside the box, and Superliminal is a game that made me do that time and time again. The game plays around with optical illusions and forced perspective. Like when you pick up objects, depending on how you move around the position of them on the screen, it will scale the size as you are viewing them. So for example, how this guy looks really small back here, but if I was to bring him all the way over here, I mean, he's super out of focus and I'm not messing with that right now. But comparatively to the rest of the room, now he looks huge. So in the game, you would effectively make him huge if you dropped him at this point. Does that make sense? Play the game. This mechanic was fun in on itself. I just like messing around and seeing how big I could make the smallest item, taking a tiny piece of cake or cheese, making it massive to use it as a ramp to solve a puzzle. What I love most about this title is that over the course of the entire game, you never run into the same puzzle that needs to be solved the same way twice. It consistently keeps you on your toes, never giving you a chance to catch up or fully understand the game's mechanics. I can't stress it enough. The absolute brilliance of this game is that right as I felt I had the basic understanding of how things behave within the confines of the game's own rules, it flips everything on its head once again and I felt like I was back at square one having to relearn the basics and my perspective on the game and its reality changed, which what's the whole point of the game from the start? It's hard to pick a favorite puzzle, but I was floored at the game's ability to seamlessly create optical illusions right in front of my eyes. In this one part of the game, we have a wall that is clearly just a flat wall. I can't step through it. I can't see through it. My eyes and my brain are telling me that it's just a wall with a painted door shaped rectangle, but as soon as I picked up an item and I placed it through the shape, my brain now accepts that this must be a room on the other side and as such, I am now able to physically step through into what was once nothing. This is just a small example of an action-packed puzzler that I fell in love with. There's no cheap gimmicks or repetitive gameplay, it's well thought out, carefully planned, beautifully executed and left me with chills by the end. Alright, I'ma just throw this one on here because I have some deep-seated nostalgic love for Star Wars Podracer and more people need to play it. So here we go. In HD, Star Wars Racer looks both fantastic and horribly dated at the same time, which I love. The amount of content in this game has always impressed me. It has 23 freaking weirdo alien racers to play as, each with their own Podracer, with individual advantages and disadvantages. There's 25 different tracks to race on, on over 4 circuits and 8 planets. There's also mirror and reverse modes for the tracks, which adds even more replayability. And as you win, you earn credits that you can spend in Watto's store to upgrade your Podracer in different ways, from top speed to cooling and traction. The game is just fast, frantic with fun racing gameplay and visuals that are honestly aged like milk. This is a game purely for us nostalgic seekers and I love it. For a spin-off Star Wars, it really wasn't bad. There are some goodens on this list today and cross-code, which is still loading. Actually, kind of ironic considering the context of the game. But cross-code is just another fantastic one on the list. The depth to this game is incredible and I love the story too. It's set in a fictional MMO of a distant future called Cross Worlds. You play as Leah, a girl who has lost her memory of everything, including how to speak, which you slowly have to relearn words and phrases to talk to the other players and NPCs around the world. But as you progress through the game's... game, a deep mystery surrounding Cross Worlds begins to unravel as you come to understand why a mute player is stuck inside this game in the first place. There are two main gameplay elements here, the real-time action combat and the Zelda-esque puzzle-filled dungeons that will reward you with a great variety of weapons, upgrades and abilities. The combat is extremely varied, with massive branching skill trees that feature many different abilities and bonuses. To start, you have a disc that you can throw in rapid fire. You can also charge it up to bounce the shot-off walls, which is also heavily used in the puzzle solving. There's your basic slash attack as well, and as you progress, you will unlock the ability to shift between elements, like being able to power up your attacks with fire. This also unlocks new skill trees for those modes and those come with their own devastating special abilities. Initially, I found the game to be really difficult, and it doesn't help that, both in the game and the story, you'd start as a level one scrub. But the moment I realized that every battle is always about utilizing the enemy's weaknesses, the game became a lot easier. Just wailing on an enemy's face will always take 10 times longer and often result in death. But if you switch up your tactic and target their weak point to break their guard, you can deal massive damage. That's a lot of damage. The game is so large in scope, about 65 hours in fact, if you complete every side quest possible, that I don't have enough time to talk about everything I love. You know, like the 30 different epic boss battles, the music, the art style, the characters, more of the story I couldn't even talk about, the fact that, you know what, just go play it. It's really good. The story of Bloodstain Curse of the Moon and now it's incredible sequel, Curse of the Moon 2, is an interesting one, that I'll probably get wrong, but bear with me here. So Bloodstain Ritual of the Night, a Castlevania spiritual successor game that I believe I reviewed in the past, was kick-started and one of the stretch goals on the campaign was that they would create a shorter, retro-styled Castlevania inspired game. Of course, the goal was hit and Curse of the Moon ended up being just as fun as the main game that was being funded. Cut to two years later and that stretch goal game even got a sequel and I love it. Also apparently like 60% of its sales were on the Switch, so that's cool. I always wanted to play Old School Castlevanias, but the difficulty always got the better of me. Curse of the Moon isn't that much easier, but the option of switching between characters on the fly for various situations, not only helps me gain the advantage, but it's also really fun. The sprite work is gorgeous, the level designs are flawless, and the soundtrack is just as cool as ever. If you loved the first game or any retro Castlevania, I can guarantee you'll love this one. Oh, I'm having a great time. What a fun time I'm having making this video. So if you don't mind me, I'm just gonna go ahead and carry on. It's a name that carry on is the next game. You all know me. I don't get down with horror games because I'm a, I'm just a big old baby trapped inside a man child's meat sack. But apparently carry on is referred to as a reverse horror game. So I'm much more down with that. In carry on, you control a tentacled monster whose objective is to stalk and kill humans in its path. Oh, I can do that. First up, I gotta say, even though I am this disgusting looking monstrosity, it still freaks me out watching my legs spray onto surfaces as I propel my grotesque body forward. The gameplay is very much Metroidvania res. You will explore areas finding upgrades, solving puzzles, and unlocking doors. Now, while many humans are easy to grab for a quick munch crunch, there are many stronger ones you'll have to outsmart using stealth, quick thinking, and the abilities you've acquired along the way, which leads to some interesting strategies. Also, the more humans you gobble up, the bigger your bright red stringy body mass becomes. So that's gross. The game is published by Devolver Digital, and that sentence in itself is quickly becoming its own seal of quality approval. So keep it up, guys. Good work again. Okay, this list of reviews has already gotten very wordy. In fact, I'm already on the fifth page of this script. Luckily, I don't have too much to say about Crysis on the Switch. Other than, how the heck does it play and run so great on this? This! This game used to blow up PCs. I honestly can't imagine them doing any better a job porting a game like this to the console. It's arguably the best FPS we have to play portably. Ever. That said, I've never been a huge fan of the original Crysis game. But I'm just so impressed blasting through this game in handheld mode that I don't care, and I'm having a ton of fun. Bearing in mind that Crysis Remastered still hasn't launched on the other current gen consoles for some reason, that technically makes this Switch port the best looking console version of the game to date. I mean, they added gyro controls too, and considering my Switch hasn't blown up yet, I'd say the visuals are downright incredible, while, you know, still looking a little dated. It is like a 15 year old game. But mostly, it just plays smooth as butter, and I'm just so gosh dang impressed with this little guy. I don't know. Good job, buddy. You continue to impress us. I have no clue what you did without a world, but everyone makes mistakes. Thank you guys so much for allowing me to do this. Every time I make another one of these, I'm like, how have I played 230 games? But it's because of you, I get to play these really fucking so much. I get to download and play all these games, have a great time, then make a video, have a great time making the video, then you guys get to have a great time watching it, and it's all because of you supporting me. That's awesome. Thank you. Keep doing it, please. Like, subscribe, all that stuff. I'll see you in the next one. Thank you. Bye. Also, every time I wear this shirt, people ask me where I got it from, and I just, I'm going to clear it up right now. PixelEmpire.com forward slash beat em up, something like that. You can find all my merch there. Oh, this shirt. Oh no, I don't remember.