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Puyo Puyo Tetris 2S review: still a great puzzle game, but a disappointing port

by admin August 22, 2025

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While it’s one of, if not the oldest professions, herdsmen aren’t often represented in video game format, and after playing Okomotive’s Herdling, I struggle to understand why. Sure, if you asked me to come up with my dream game tomorrow, I probably wouldn’t start with “herding cattle”, but Herdling takes the idea and expands it into a mystical, uncanny world filled with fantastic beasts and terrifying foes.

Your role is simple: finding, taming, caring for, and guiding a herd of great calico-patterned horned beasts called Calicorns and ushering them to the mountain’s peak. Along the way, you’ll encounter various puzzles, obstacles, and foes.

Review info

Platform reviewed: Nintendo Switch 2
Available on: Nintendo Switch 2, PC, Xbox, and PS5
Release date: August 21, 2025

Puyo Puyo Tetris 2S at Amazon for $29.99

From its painterly art style to its rich, emotive music, the world of Herdling is vivid and expansive, and delightful to explore thanks to a decent variety of mechanics in each level and plenty to discover and explore.

You’ll traverse verdant fields, discover abandoned man-made structures, both modern and mystical, and cross treacherous woods and mountain climes to reach the summit. While it’s not terribly long, offering 4-6 hours of gameplay, Herdling is littered with collectibles and discoverable content, making for a good amount of replayability.

Seen, but not herd

The game opens in a seemingly deserted city, as the protagonist awakens on the streets with a seemingly singular purpose: to find and herd Calicorns. This slightly claustrophobic cityscape acts as your tutorial ground, though there’s little to no instruction.

Things aren’t all as they seem, though; the presence of human life is tangible everywhere in the early stages of the game, whether that’s in trains hurtling past the open fields, lights flickering in buildings, or cars crossing open highways. Still, the manufactured world seems at odds with your new companions, so you dust off the concrete and head out into the open plains on your quest to reach the mountain’s peak, gathering more fluffy friends along the way.

It’s unclear why, bar the Calicorns, you seem to be so alone in this slightly uncanny world; Herdling asks not why, but how you’ll navigate the treacherous path to the summit. And that “how” is largely dictated by your herd.

You’ll find a host of Calicorns along your journey, which you can tame with a good old-fashioned head scratch and name. By standing behind them and facing in the direction you want to travel in and waving your shepherd’s crook, you can steer your Calicorns and command them to stop, go, or slow down.

(Image credit: Okomotive)

You can also activate stampede mode for a speed boost, which is refuelled by guiding your herd over blue flowers and increases the more Calicorns you have tamed. Performance drops are fairly frequent during stampede mode, and as you’d expect, it becomes more challenging to guide your flock at high speeds.

In narrower portions of the map, navigation can be frustrating, especially as you collect more Calicorns, and there were more than a few moments where I feared I’d never safely negotiate the herd out of some slightly jammy corners. On the one hand, that could be by design, but I’m never a fan of chance taking the reins.

You’ll find yourself inventing all kinds of methods to keep your herd compact and controlled, but sometimes even pausing their motion can’t stop the scamps from going on walkabouts. After all, they are wild animals.

Your Calicorns aren’t your wards; they’re your companions, and help you as much as you do them! (Image credit: Okomotive)

Until you find your dream

The game is largely linear, but that doesn’t make your journey easy; you’ll have to decide on the best paths to take, navigate in and out of some tight spots with your growing, occasionally mischievous herd, and care for them to ensure they survive their passage – and yes, that does mean they can die.

Upon taking damage, the Calicorns’ vibrant coat, often dusted with petals from running amidst the flower fields and storing up stampede powers, will become slick with blood, a wound you can only heal by scrambling about the map level in search of berries to feed your friends. There is also an Immortal mode for the faint of heart; thankfully, in my first playthrough, I didn’t need it.

Nobody wants to ruin a perfect run with a herd member’s passing, but it’s doubly heartbreaking when you factor in how personable and cute these creatures are. Each has a unique design, with different horn shapes, sizes, and ages, expressed through their quizzical and expressive wide red eyes.

Some even have personality traits that play out as you rest in camp between levels. Needy Calicorns will follow you around camp until they receive affection, while playful ones will try to engage you in a game of fetch. It’s incredibly charming and raises the stakes in the game overall.

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(Image credit: Okomotive)(Image credit: Okomotive)(Image credit: Okomotive)(Image credit: Okomotive)

As the game progresses, the world expands to include more mysticism. Ancient monuments and grand structures become the backdrop for your quest, and the farther you climb, the more enchanting the world becomes; and the farther you feel from the vaguely post-apocalyptic vibes in the earlier game levels as your protagonist becomes increasingly enmeshed with their herd.

There are environmental threats at different levels, including spiky surfaces and even ice calving beneath your Calicorn’s feet (or hooves? You can’t really see them…), but the real fear factor comes from the cryptid-esque giant owls that seem to have a real taste for Calicorn.

These are the primary antagonists in Herdling, but their menace takes various forms. From high-stakes stealth navigation through the birds’ nest to high-speed chases as they snipe at you from the air, these great beasts pose a genuinely terrifying threat to your herd.

(Image credit: Okomotive)

You can really appreciate the calmer moments in the game in contrast to the terror, though. The great, sprawling landscapes are gorgeous, and the soft-touch sound design wonderfully captures the emotion of every moment. Activating stampede mode launches a tremendous Galop-esque burst of sound and color, where more peaceful moments feature little more than the sounds of nature and the sprinkling of keys.

Of course, as Herdling is an indie title, it does lack polish in areas; animations are occasionally a bit awkward, especially as Calicorns descend slopes, and tight or enclosed spaces can be challenging to navigate. That’s especially true as your herd grows, which may well be by design, but if you’re playing using a controller like I did on my Switch 2, you might find yourself in peril (or just fiddling with herd positioning) more often than you’d like, which can impact the pace of the game.

Still, I really enjoyed my time as a Calicorn shepherd. The game hints at themes of homeship, nature, found family, death, and rebirth, giving the player ample perspectives through which to enjoy its wordless narrative. Herdling cleverly implements its key herding mechanic but offers enough ways to play and explore that players of all ages and skillsets can enjoy this minimalist yet profound odyssey to find a new home.

(Image credit: Okomotive)

Should I play Herdling?

Play it if…

Don’t play it if…

Accessibility features

Herdling has a handful of dedicated accessibility settings. You can toggle controller vibration, sprint, auto-run, display HUD, herding direction indicator, Calicorn immortality, and button holds. There are no dialogue lines, but there are various language settings for the menus and tutorial.

How I reviewed Herdling

I played through Herdling twice (10 hours) on Nintendo Switch 2 using both the Pro Controller, Joy-Con 2, and handheld mode.

During my time with the game, I compared my experience with other indie titles, especially those launched on Switch 2, making certain to note any issues with performance or game quality.

First reviewed August 2025

Puyo Puyo Tetris 2S: Price Comparison

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August 22, 2025 0 comments

A cargo ship rests in port having spilled numerous containers into the ocean.

Gaming Gear

SnowRunner dev’s latest vehicle sim lets you channel your inner Frank Sobotka by managing a struggling port

by admin August 17, 2025

I recently finished rewatching all of the Wire, and on reflection I think Season 2 is my favourite of five. This is in large part due to the tragic character of Frank Sobotka, the stevedore and union leader driven into the arms of organised crime as he struggles to keep his workers paid and Baltimore’s ailing trade port afloat.

While it’s unlikely that Docked will be as thematically complex as one of the most critically acclaimed TV shows of all time, it does lump you with a similar challenge as poor ol’ Frank. This latest entry in Saber Interactive’s fleet of vehicle simulators puts you in the role of a longshoreman tasked with rebuilding and expanding a struggling dockyard. In this case, your problems aren’t caused by economic tides, but by a recent hurricane that has battered your port.

Like this year’s Roadcraft, Docked involves a mixture of driving enormous vehicles and higher-level management. The central game loop involves unloading massive cargo ships of their cuboid containers (or “cans” as Frank would call them). To do this, you’ll need to master driving flatbed trucks, heavy-duty lifting tractors, and dock-specific vehicles like massive cranes and straddle carriers.

Docked Announcement Trailer – YouTube

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More broadly, you’ll need to keep the port’s finances in check by snagging new contracts and ensuring your customers get the cargo they need, as well as maintaining and repairing the dock equipment and investing in its infrastructure. Fulfilling contracts will enable you to buy better machinery, upgrade the dock’s yards and offices, and expand the scale of your port.

It’s intriguing how Saber’s vehicular games are shifting from straight-up driving challenges to being broader, more managerial affairs. I also wonder whether it’s the right direction. RoadCraft proved divisive when it launched back in April, with many players lamenting that its broader scope came at the cost of quality vehicle handling.

Indeed, our own Shaun Prescott was forced to adjust his expectations when he tested RoadCraft earlier this year. “In some ways it’s a physics puzzler wrapped in a lavish simulator outfit,” he wrote back in February. “When I started to think about it like this, I started to enjoy it more.”

Docked may be able to provide both advanced logistics simulation and detailed vehicle handling, of course. But I do think making a proper SnowRunner sequel alongside these more adventurous titles would alleviate much of the complaining. In any case, there’s no release date for Docked yet, but I imagine it’ll float into port sometime next year.

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August 17, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Mario Kart 64’s Unofficial PC Port Is Amazing

by admin June 24, 2025

Mario Kart 64 is now unofficially playable natively on your personal computer courtesy of some of the same people who’ve brought us similar Nintendo 64 PC ports. And so far, Nintendo seems unable or unwilling to legally challenge these reverse-engineered ports.

Nintendo Switch 2 Could Launch With Almost No Reviews

On June 20, as recently spotted by VGC, a group of fan modders and devs known as Harbour Masters released a free PC port of Mario Kart 64. This in’t the N64 game being emulated on a PC, something people have been doing for a long time. Instead, this is a native port of Mario Kart 64 built for modern computers. You’ll need a ROM of the classic N64 kart racer to play this PC version of the game, one which you should, of course, obtain legally via your own backups.

Anyway, once you have that legal copy of a Mario Kart 64 ROM and have set up this new native PC port, you can play this beloved racing game in 4K at 120 FPS with full widescreen support using any controller of your choice.

Not only does this PC port support higher framerates and improved visuals, but you can also change how aggressive the AI racers are and even create custom tracks to share online. It’s truly amazing to see this classic N64 game running so well on a giant widescreen monitor. It’s a thing of beauty to watch in motion.

Are PC ports of N64 games legal, and how do they work?

So, how did Harbour Masters pull this off? Well, similar to their past PC ports of Star Fox and Ocarina of Time, the team has reverse-engineered all of Mario Kart 64‘s original code and recreated it so it can be played on a PC. All you need to do is plug in the game’s ROM, which provides all the copyrighted assets like music and artwork, and the team’s PC version of Mario Kart 64‘s code can run the game. We saw something similar happen in 2020 with Super Mario 64.

You might be wondering if this is legal. Well, I’m not a lawyer, but in theory, these sorts of reverse-engineered ports of old games should be able to avoid Nintendo’s lawyers. Case in point, you can still download all of Harbour Masters’ past N64 PC ports freely and easily from the group’s GitHub page. Considering how litigious Nintendo can be, the fact that these ports remain up is a sign that the company can’t do anything. Technically, they aren’t sharing any copyrighted Nintendo code or assets, so the company shouldn’t be able to sue them into oblivion.

Whatever happens to Harbour Masters and the other modders doing great work out there, I’m happy that people are making these games easily playable on modern hardware with wonderful quality-of-life features. This is a great way to preserve these classic games without needing to rely on emulation or keep old consoles alive for decades.

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June 24, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Don’t Expect PlayStation’s Current PC Port Strategy To Change Anytime Soon

by admin June 13, 2025

Amidst Xbox’s multiplatform publishing strategy, Sony is reiterating its commitment to prioritizing the PlayStation 5. During a recent Sony business meeting and “fireside chat,” PlayStation Studios CEO Hermen Hulst stated the company is taking a “very measured, very deliberate approach” when it comes to deciding if and when a first-party title appears on other platforms like PC.

Sony has been porting many of its marquee titles to PC for years. Some of its more recent live-service titles, like Helldivers 2 and the short-lived Concord, released day-and-date on console and PC, while tentpole single-player games like God of War: Ragnarok or Ghost of Tsushima typically release on PS5 first and arrive at least a year later on PC.

When asked about the industry’s move towards multiplatform titles and how Sony is looking to protect the “value” of the PS5 console, Hulst indicated that Sony isn’t looking to change its current strategy.

“It’s important to realize that we’re really thoughtful about bringing our franchises off console to reach new audiences and that we’re taking a very measured, very deliberate approach in doing that,” Hulst said. “Particularly on the single-player side, our tentpole titles, they’re such a point of differentiation for the PlayStation console.”

He went on to say that Sony’s first-party titles are meant to be a showcase for the PS5 hardware, and that the company wants players to “get the best experience” from these titles playing on PS5.

“We’re very thoughtful about how and if and how we bring these titles to other platforms,” Hulst said.

It’s an approach that appears to be working, even as Microsoft doubles down on its multiplatform game strategy of releasing Xbox titles on PS5 with positive results. When asked about Microsoft’s strategy and whether or not it’s a good thing, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Hideaki Nishino said he believed competition in the industry is good and creates innovation, but that Sony is “confident and committed to our current strategy.”

In addition to discussing how its approaching platform exclusivity, Sony reiterated its commitment to live-service titles, with Hulst stating he doesn’t believe Bungie’s upcoming shooter Marathon will suffer the same fate as Concord.

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June 13, 2025 0 comments

Tachy, with her face lit by fire in the background

Product Reviews

Stellar Blade is doing better numbers than almost every other PlayStation port on Steam, and it’s probably not just because of the nude mods

by admin June 13, 2025

It’s great that so many PlayStation games have come to PC in the last few years, letting me stack a heap of extra big-budget videogame junk food on my pile of shame. Welcome to the backlog, Horizon Zero Dawn. These games haven’t always set the Steam top sellers list on fire, however, sometimes thanks to a marketing budget you’d have to squint to see. How many people even knew Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 came out on PC at the end of January? No wonder it only managed a peak player count of 28,189.

Meanwhile, the newly released Stellar Blade is currently number one on the global top sellers list and hit a peak of 183,380 concurrent players. As far as PS5 ports go, that puts it behind only Helldivers 2, which made it to 458,709 players at release. In the number three spot? Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut, with 77,154 concurrents.

For the sake of completeness, here’s a bunch of other PlayStation games Stellar Blade is doing better than on Steam: God of War (73,529), Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered (66,436), and The Last of Us Part 1 (36,496). In the case of the last one especially, Stellar Blade has the advantage of being a much better port. You’ll still want a controller because it’s that kind of game, but testing out the demo I found it ran smoothly and looked great, with no slowdown even when things were exploding all around me.

If you don’t know much about it, Stellar Blade is the kind of third-person hack-and-slash where perfectly timed parries and dodges are essential, with explorable open sections between the on-rails bits, and a plot that’s like every sci-fi anime you’ve ever seen thrown in a blender until it’s reduced to the purest Trope Juice. It’s basically Nier Automata for dummies, with even more fanservice.

While Stellar Blade comes with an impressive list of PC-specific features, like ultrawide resolutions, DLSS 4 and FSR 3 support, unlocked framerates and so on, there’s another reason the PC version might appeal that won’t get listed on the Steam page: mods. Stellar Blade’s protagonist Eve already boobs her way breastily through the game, but modders have wasted no time adding nudity, a variety of saucy outfits, pornographic backgrounds for the menu screen, and more. Nexus Mods already has dozens of adult mods and the game’s brand new.

(Image credit: PlayStation Publishing)

There’s certainly overlap in the Venn diagram of “horny weebs” and “people who want a sequel to Nier Automata already”, but Stellar Blade does seem to have hit big with both groups of players. There are plenty of user reviews praising its optimization, combat, and exploration, as well as ones that are shamelessly thirsty. I quote: “The camera angles? Designed by the devil himself. Someone on that dev team was NOT okay.”

In both the user reviews and comments on Nexus Mods, there are an unusually high number of messages in Chinese, which provides the final piece in the “why is this fairly mid action game so popular” puzzle. Good thing Stellar Blade’s developers pushed back against region-locking.

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June 13, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Switch 2 back-compat fixes Batman: Arkham Knight – Switch 1’s worst triple-A port

by admin June 5, 2025

With Nintendo Switch 2 arriving with us just a day before release, there’s little time for Digital Foundry to put together any kind of comprehensive coverage – but there are a number of system features I was curious to test out, none more important than backwards compatibility. Would Switch 2 improve performance running Switch 1 games? The first game I tested was Batman: Arkham Knight, described by DF’s Oliver Mackenzie as “the worst performing software I have reviewed to date at Digital Foundry”. 18 months on he says it still is – but the good news is that Switch 2 fixes all of its performance issues, at times doubling performance. Put simply, Switch 1 games do run better on Switch 2.

Batman: Arkham Knight is a game with a long and storied history for Digital Foundry, not least because of its highly compromised PC version, which was so bad it was pulled from sale before returning in an improved but still poor shape. The Switch version though – I played it for the first time today on original hardware and it remains the same “unmitigated disaster” we reported on back in December 2023. We’ve talked a lot about “impossible ports” for the Switch and we’ve seen games like Doom Eternal arrive on the console in compromised form, but still delivering a good experience overall. Batman: Arkham Knight on Switch is anything but.

For the purposes of our testing though, this actually makes for an interesting challenge for Switch 2 backwards compatibility as the evidence suggests that Arkham Knight pushes all system components beyond tolerable limits. Graphically, the game is rich and detailed, pushing a lot of detail in its characters and open world. Meanwhile, the fact that it is an open world means that the CPU is pushed hard streaming in and decompressing data. And finally, gigantic stutters found in the Switch port suggest that storage is also stressed.

The end result is astonishingly poor. There are graphical compromises that Switch 2 can never fix – dramatically poorer textures and no anti-aliasing whatsoever – but what’s truly remarkable is just how bad performance is. Based on measurements of capture taken today, Switch’s stuttering problems extend to 180ms frame-times hitting the user in rapid succession, often depressing performance under 20fps but feeling a lot worse. Driving sections in particular are borderline unplayable. The 30fps frame-rate cap is almost advisory in nature.

Going into our Switch 2 testing, we’d received no real indication from Nintendo on whether back-compat would actually be any faster than running the game on original hardware. Wii titles didn’t run any better on Wii U, for example. However, Switch 2 is different. It’s not using full hardware backwards compatibility as such – it’s effectively using a translation layer to run the original game code on the new system. In this scenario, it would probably be a lot harder to limit games to original performance levels as opposed to just letting the new system run those titles with whatever system resources the Switch 2 can throw at them.

The end result is that – remarkably – Batman: Arkham Knight is as fixed as it can be on Switch 2 without going back to the game and optimising it. While the game still possesses ugly pared back textures and hideous aliasing problems, it runs as flawlessly as it’s possible with the original code. Extra CPU and GPU power in combination with the faster storage are effectively brute-forcing the game to be everything it can possibly be, given the design constraints placed on the original code. Is it perfect? Well, in Batmobile driving, while frame-rate is fixed, animation error hoves into view, so despite a locked 30fps, something still doesn’t look right. Meanwhile, my colleague Oliver Mackenzie had the game crash on Switch 2 simply by pausing it.

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Extra horsepower is clearly there, however and this sets the scene for a more detailed Digital Foundry investigation into backwards compatibility on the Switch 2 system, but based on initial testing, I feel there’s grounds for profound optimism here. Take The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, for example. It’s another port that truly pushed Switch hard. We’d argue that in many ways it’s as good as you could possibly get for the older hardware – but developer Saber Interactive used every trick in the book to get the game running, and there are problems.

Settlements like Novigrad push CPU hard even on PC and more powerful consoles and it’s clearly struggling on Switch. Meanwhile, image quality struggles as the game leans heavily into dynamic resolution scaling. Looking very quickly at the game running on Switch 2 and Novigrad is running at 30 frames per second locked.

Arkham Knight and The Witcher 3 are our go-to titles for testing Switch 2 backwards compatibility performance enhancements – and initial impressions are positive. What isn’t quite so positive is that on the handheld screen, you’re still getting the handheld versions of Switch 1 games designed for a native 720p screen – meaning that every game will be upscaled to 1080p in what looks like a very basic technique that doesn’t look great. We’re probably asking for too much here but the option to force original Switch games to run in their docked modes would clearly improve matters on games that aren’t reliant on handheld-specific features, like the touchscreen support in Mario Maker, for example, and could potentially address the scaling problem.

We’ll be reporting back with more Switch 2 backwards compatibility testing soon.

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June 5, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Switch 2 Is Shaping Up To Be A Much Better Port Machine

by admin May 29, 2025

I hope all of you are ready for a lot of PS4, PS5, and Xbox ports arriving on Switch 2 over the next few months, because that seems to be our future. For folks who primarily play on Switch and soon Switch 2, it will be a chance to play a lot of great games that were too much for the OG console to handle, or which arrived via less-than-stellar ports. For everyone else, well, that new Donkey Kong game looks cool…

Nintendo Switch 2 Could Launch With Almost No Reviews

The $450 Nintendo Switch 2 is nearly here, though some people already have their hands on the console ahead of its June 5 launch. Its launch lineup isn’t horrible, but it’s nothing too impressive either. It mainly features a handful of new, exclusive games, like Mario Kart World, and some upgraded versions of OG Switch games. But the majority of the Switch 2’s launch lineup is ports like Cyberpunk 2077. And that’s because, unlike the old Switch, Nintendo’s new machine is actually going to be able to run these games without compromising visuals and features.

Looking at the launch lineup for June 5, of the 25 or so games arriving on day one, about 10 of them are ports of old games that didn’t arrive on the original Switch. Stuff like the previously mentioned Cyberpunk 2077, Street Fighter 6, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, and Split Fiction. Then there are some Switch 2 ports that are replacing or upgrading older Switch ports, including Civilization 7, Fortnite, Hogwarts Legacy, and Hitman: World of Assassination, which was only available as a cloud-powered streaming game on the old machine. There are also ports that are coming after launch, like Star Wars Outlaws in September.

It’s not surprising that a big chunk of games announced for Switch 2 so far are ports of older titles. The original Switch got plenty of ports during its run, but most AAA games were chopped up and squished onto the aging hardware, resulting in some really ugly conversions.

Sure, some of these games, like Doom (2016), ran mostly fine and looked okay on Nintendo’s hybrid console, but there was always this feeling when playing these ports that the Switch hardware was being pushed to its limits. And then, when the PS5 and Xbox Series X arrived on the scene in 2020, games started targeting the more powerful hardware, and Switch ports became harder to pull off. As a result, we got some truly gnarly versions of great-looking games. Remember Mortal Kombat 1 on Switch? Yikes.

In the last few years, fewer and fewer big games have been making the leap to Switch, primarily because the hardware is so old and outdated that they would be impossible to pull it off, or you’d have to compromise the visuals and performance so much that it wouldn’t be worth it.

So the Switch 2 is a big deal for a lot of publishers who have been unable to bring some of their recent games to Nintendo’s audience, which is often cited as a group of people hungry for new content. And for players, it means they’ll receive some fantastic-looking ports.

As recently pointed out by Digital Foundry, Cyberpunk 2077 on Switch 2 looks as good (and sometimes better) than the open-world game running on an Xbox Series S or PS4. That’s thanks in large part to DLSS, but also the guts of the Switch 2 are just significantly better than those of the Switch. There is more power inside this new console, and that’s going to be good news for devs, publishers, and players.

All of this does mean that the Switch 2 will likely end up being something of a port machine as publishers race to get their big games running on the new console. That might be annoying for people who buy Nintendo consoles for exclusives and unique experiences, but with Mario Kart World, Metroid Prime 4, and Donkey Kong Bananza on the way, we can feel pretty confident that we’ll get plenty of those games, too. They’ll just be the outliers among a ton of nice-looking PS5 and Xbox ports.

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May 29, 2025 0 comments