Prince of Persia, Kumome, and more; The Games I've Been Playing - May 2025

 

  Each month, I want to share some less formal thoughts about the games I've been playing and my impressions of them. These might be game's that got reviewed for the site or not. As an individual person covering a storefront that is shoveling titles onto its store each day, I have time to dip my toes into a lot of it, but I can't always spend the time needed for a review. With recaps like this, I can give some games their due, even if I can't get a full review of them. I can also add additional thoughts to things I did decide to write about or even honor older games I just decided to back to for some reason or another. See below for what I played this past month.  

Scratch Inc. (Free)

This idle game took over my Memorial Day weekend. In Scratch Inc., you scratch off virtual scratch cards to earn points, and—like all good clicker-type games—you can use those points on things that let you earn more points. There’s something oddly satisfying but also deviously compelling about mindlessly scratching and pumping up numbers to jump through this game’s various hoops, and a lot of that ties back to the fact that when you do this the numbers just keep going up.

Click here to read our Scratch Inc. review (coming soon)

Puzzmo (Free)

Every other daily puzzler can take a backseat now that Puzzmo has a mobile app (well, that and Trivia Linked). The app version of Zach Gage’s lovely puzzle platform may not be perfect, but it still has some of the most lovingly-crafted daily puzzles you can find anywhere.

Click here to read our Puzzmo review (coming soon)

Pup Champs (Free)

This cute puzzle game is about guiding young pups on their journey as soccer champs. It’s very cute and has some clever mechanics, but it otherwise feels like an iteration on one of Afterburn’s previous titles, Golf Peaks. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it also depends on who you are, which is to say outside of its charming aesthetics it’s not really clicking for me.

Click here to read our Pup Champs review on Pocket Gamer

Magical Maintenance Mystery (Free)

I started this game at the wrong time. It’s an interesting and mysterious text adventure, but I think I was expecting more of a clicker like the developer’s previous game, Evelyn’s Farm. As a result, I breezed over some of the text and now feel hopelessly lost in it. I should restart and report back, as the Pocket Gamer review linked below paints quite a glowing picture of it.

Click here to read our Magical Maintenance Mystery review on Pocket Gamer

Prince of Persia Lost Crown (Free) - $14.99 Full Game Unlock

After starting it last month, I finally beat Prince of Persia Lost Crown. As I mention in my review, this game is really good at doing all the things that Prince of Persia games did to revitalize the series, and every other change they made to it generally weakens the experience. I’ll also say it was entirely too long. Still fun if you want a good metroidvania to play though!

Click here to read our Prince of Persia Lost Crown review

Kumome (Free)

I really want to like this free turn-based strategy game about trapping opposing players behind obstacles, but there’s a lot of user interface issues that make doing so difficult. Moving between levels takes too many taps and is confusing, powers you unlock expect you to memorize what they do based on hard-to-parse iconography, and certain menu options appear when you can’t actually make use of them and don’t tell you why you can’t use them. It’s a neat concept, but there’s just too much friction getting the way of my enjoyment.

Click here to read more about Kumome on Pocket Gamer

Thronefall - A Little Kingdom (Free) -$12.99 Full Game Unlock

This minimalist tower defense game feels refreshingly open, leaving you to choose what to build where while offering a ton of different modifiers to change how you experience levels each and every time you play them. I like these things, but also am getting the sense that the game might rely a bit too much on “making your own fun” for it to be interesting. There’s a better balance between designed challenge and level customization to be made, but I’ll keep playing to find out if this suspicion is misplaced or not.

Get-A-Grip Chip ($4.99)

This platformer was probably the best game I played all month. It’s a platformer that doesn’t let you jump but instead gives you a magnetic grapple to navigate its levels with. Perhaps because of this constraint, it leads to some really clever level and environment design, all of which stays feeling fresh thanks to the game’s good sense of knowing exactly when to introduce new mechanics and how much to continue combining them before ending in a satisfying place.

Click here to read our Get-A-Grip Chip review (coming soon)