MoonFaceNick

A Plague Tale: Innocence - This is actually another game I've played before 2020 and needed to add to the list, and both games in this series are phenomenal examples of great AA titles. Plague Tale Innocence does the unthinkable by introducing a combat system that is entirely unique but still very accessible and satisfying, and the puzzles are some of the best in any game.

I've actually beaten this several times before but not since 2020 when I started tracking everything, so I decided to go back and beat it again so I could add it to the rankings. I know a lot of people prefer Diablo 2 or 4 but I have a special place in my heart for this one because this is the game that made me fall in love with loot, I think it's still one of the best loot games out there.

I've been wanting to get to this for a while and now that I've finally beaten it I can say that this is my highest recorded death count of all time - 1721 deaths. But the pain was nothing compared to the pleasure - I love a good brutal 2d platformer, and this delivered on every level. It was fun as hell from beginning to end, and now I can't wait to play the newer ones.

I don't play a ton of racing games because you can't "beat" a lot of them, but this new arcade style racer has a clear start and finish, and the racing is some of the best I've ever played. My only complaint is that the story is kind of boring, and you have to sit through a lot of text between each race, and that made the whole thing drag a bit because I just wanted to get back to the gameplay.

I'm just gonna repeat what I said about Resident Evil Requiem - Capcom is the most consistent developer in the business right now, and all these crazy risks they take somehow just pay off. You would think that having to play a hacking mini-game every time you want to damage an enemy would screw up the pacing, but yet again I just couldn't put this Capcom game down.

Life is Strange 1 and 2 are still the best in the franchise in my opinion, but I think of all the Deck 9 developed games, this is probably the best one. The spinoff titles in this series have a bad habit of ending poorly, but this one is strong from start to finish, and even though Chloe isn't voiced by Ashly Burch the new voice actor does a really solid job.

This is just a quirky little 2d platformer with not a ton going on, you're just an octopus trying to wriggle your way to freedom - a short and unremarkable experience. It didn't rank super high just because the puzzles and platforming lack the imagination you might see in games of the same genre like Inside or Little Nightmares, etc.

I did enjoy this game for about 8 hours but then it started getting really repetitive, which would have been okay if it hadn't been for this one specific boss fight. So now after I've already gotten sick of the gameplay I still have to bang my head against this impenetrable wall that requires a very specific loadout to even get close to beating - it just ruined it for me.

Look, the whole art form angle that this walking sim is going for isn't lost on me, it's just not usually what I play video games for. It's literaly just walking through a house and reading - It's not bad per se, but I'd rather be playing something more traditional that actually scratches that gamer itch, you know?

I've played this multiple times before but not since 2020 when I started doing all this ranking stuff and man, this is just an all-time great. Every single aspect, every single gauge by which you can measure a video game reveals this to be a very wide cut above almost other piece of media that has ever been made, not just games, media. The only critique I can come up with is that the 2022 remaster is a little buggy, a little. That's it. Literally every other tiny detail is simply perfect, like in 50 years I think people are going to be looking at this franchise the way people today look at works like To Kill a Mockingbird - these are history-changing experiences. I ranked Part 2 higher which I realize is a hot take but it's so, so close to me, we're talking paper-thin margins here.

This quirky little indie action roguelite has a lot going on, some of it is fantastic and some of it is just okay. I was immediately hooked by the gameplay loop - go out at night an delve ever deeper into the dungeons, then wake up the next morning to sell whatever supplies you've secured and upgrade your arsenal, it's highly addictive. But everything is also super basic, especially the combat - they do give you a lot of extra tools and options to make things more complex, but most of it feels unnecessary because all you really have to do is just upgrade your gear and then the game is easy. I think at its core Moonlighter is definitely a good game, but the redundancy and the overall simplicity keep it from being a great one.

This take always pisses people off but I just don't think the old Sonic games are that good. The whole point of these games is that it's fun to go fast right? But if you actually try to do that on your first playthrough you're just gonna die a lot by throwing yourself off of cliffs or into spikes or whatever. So I always end up being careful and moving slowly, which throws most of the mechanics that make the game fun right out the window, plus in this specific game there are a bunch of traversal gimmicks that don't seem to work as intended. Sonic just doesn't seem to be built for people who only want to beat a game once.

The way Capcom came at this could have made it an absolute disaster, but somehow they managed to produce yet another masterpiece anyway. They've done two protagonists off and on since the beginning, but two completely different resource management systems, inventory screens, freakin' two entirely different horror sub-genres even, and somehow it still just works. It's not quite perfect - the pacing can be a little jarring, the difficulty is kind of all over the place, there were a couple of minor bugs etc., but on the whole this is just more proof that Capcom is the most consistently successful developer in the business right now. Resident Evil was probably already holistically the best IP of the decade, and Requiem just further solidifies that.

This is the real Little Nightmares 3 from the original developers and good thing too, because Little Nightmares 3 was horrible, but I don't think this is as good as Little Nightmares 1 or 2. A lot of it works perfectly, the art and sound design are impeccable, the gameplay is mostly bug-free save a couple issues with the Coop AI, and at times it was very successful at scaring the hell out of me. My only big issue is the pacing - it's a slow burn that takes a couple hours to really get going, which is kind of an issue when the whole thing is only 4 hours long, so it lacked the urgency of some of those earlier games.

I did enjoy this game just as I've enjoyed all the Halo entries up to this point, but I have to say I think this is the weakest so far. You can tell it's much newer because the graphics are a lot prettier, so why does it still feel gameplay wise like an OG Xbox launch title? In the earlier ones I was much more willing to overlook the lack of weight to the guns, the spongy enemies, the low IQ enemy AI etc., but in 2012 there's just no excuse anymore, plus the story felt like the weakest so far as well.

The Nioh games are, in my opinion, the only soulslikes that are generally just as good as the From Software games - and this one goes even bigger, which is kind **** thing and a bad thing. The combat variety and boss fights are top tier, the colored loot showers are glorious, and this new release is kind of a semi-open world so it is very easy to sink dozens of hours into just running around exploring. But I have to say I think I prefer the more Dark Souls like level design of the first two games, plus here you have two characters to manage with two separate loadouts so the loot can get pretty overwhelming very fast.

This is one of those games that could have been fantastic if not for the biblical flood of game breaking bugs and glitches. Just like the first game it's absolutely hilarious, plus they've made some much needed improvements by making the combat tighter and more varied and adding some great new traversal mechanics like the skateboard. But it's really hard to focus on all the positives when the puzzles don't work correctly, the story won't advance forcing you to reboot, or the game just keeps crashing altogether, like the bugs were endless.

So I just got done replaying Elden Ring and this time I did all the DLC and everything and all the side stuff, and I'm certain now, this is the best video game ever made, like objectively. I've been a fan of the From Software soulslikes for years now and after replaying them all recently my big take away is that they just get better at what they do with every game they make. And that's saying something because even Demon's Souls is a fantastic game, but Elden Ring? Elden Ring is the pinnacle, the very best of everything video games has come to offer us up to this point. Like think about the people that were making the very first video games, those text only dungeon crawlers and stuff like that - those people's wildest dreams for the future probably looked a lot like this game. What really sets it apart more than anything else is the open world - there's just no other open world in any other game ever that holds the same level of mystery to it. I mean once you're out there for the first time and you can walk in any direction and get into something absolutely fascinating at every turn, there just is no other game that has captured that other than maybe Breath of the Wild. But then you add in this brutal learning curve with the combat and the boss fights, and now you're in a situation where you have to earn the spoils from whatever you discover out there, and that's a combination that has yet to be duplicated. When I think about the most important, most influential video games of all time, I think about games like Super Mario Brothers 3, Punch Out, Final Fantasy VII, and other games where you can see their influence everywhere. And to be clear I don't think Elden Ring is in that category yet, but only because not enough time has passed, it'll be there in 10 years, no doubt. But when I think of what the best game ever is, personally I think less about it's level of influence and more about how well it would represent gaming as a whole to an outsider. Like if we were gonna put a video game in a time capsule and shoot it out into space for aliens to find, like we're putting Elden Ring in that thing, right? What else could possibly be a better choice? The only argument I can see against it being the best of all time is that it is pretty difficult if you're not a veteran of the genre, so you could make the point that the very best representation of gaming would be more accessible. But I think there's an equally good counterpoint there - I mean do we really think the best virtual adventure of all time should be something that anyone could do? A lot of the satisfaction of the journey comes from overcoming intense hardship, right? And that's an excellent way to describe some of these boss fights - extremely intense hardship.

I've been hearing a lot lately that superhero fiction is dead - that it's been run into the ground so many times that nobody cares about it anymore. And I might've even agreed, but then I played this. Dispatch is a choice based branching narrative game that follows a washed up super hero who can't fight crime anymore and now has the job of sending other heroes out to fight crime in his stead. Almost everything about this game is best in class, starting with the brilliant animation style - this thing looks so good that even when nobody is talking I can't keep my jaw in place. And the writing and voice acting is so hilarious that I think this might be the number 1 funniest video game I've ever played, ever. Like if this was just a show I was watching it would be up there with my very favorites. Speaking of voice acting, some of the casting choices are perfect in the most improbable ways - like casting Twitch Streamer MoistCr1TiKaL as a human bat hybrid sounds like a disaster to me, and then he turns out to be one of my favorite characters. Now gameplay-wise, if you've played a Tell Tale game you mostly know what you're in for - tough dialogue choices, tricky QTE segments, etc. but in every episode you also have to work a full shift as a hero dispatcher, and this is one of the best parts of the whole thing. If you've ever played 911 Operator it's very similar, except instead of police fire and medical, you have to choose which heroes to send out to which emergencies based on their strengths and weaknesses, super fun. It actually really surprises me that, as far as I know, nobody else has ever spliced a narrative game with another gameplay genre. I mean it works so well here that it makes the idea seem obvious, but I can't think of any other notable examples. Now there are a couple of minor issues here, and probably the biggest is the UI on console - it's very clear that the dispatching interface was designed for PC. And on my PS5 I never knew which way I had to nudge the analog stick to get to the icons I needed, and when you're literally on the clock and every second counts, yeah that's a bit of a problem. Also, almost every narrative game has this issue, but they try really hard to make you think your choices matter, when it's pretty obvious that no matter what you choose, 90% of the story stays the same. The horror games from Supermassive are the only ones I know of where whole scenes are different later on based on your decisions and a character can literally die immediately if you miss a button press. But this? Games like Life is Strange and the Tell Tale games? They mostly just give you the illusion of agency. My only other problem was that it also kind of felt like the difficulty was on rails. Like regardless of how good I was at managing the calls I would still fail when the story needed me to fail and succeed when the story needed me to succeed, so the stakes often felt artificial and mostly meaningless. But even with all of that in the mix I had a fantastic time playing this, and I highly recommend it to anyone who's a fan of narrative games, or really just anyone who loves comedy.

Have you ever woken up from a really crazy dream you were having and you thought, "I don't know what the hell was going on just now, but that was actually pretty cool"? That's basically what this is. Death Stranding 2 is like the fever dream of video games, except every few minutes you wake up, and you have to clock in and deliver packages to people. Let's hammer out the 2 core elements that really make this game worth playing - the first of which is that absolutely bonkers storytelling I hinted at. I enjoy watching the hours and hours of cutscenes in this game for the same reason that Salvador Dali is my favorite painter - I'm incapable of wrapping my brain around the majority of what I'm seeing, but I'll be damned if it doesn't all look and sound cool as hell. I will say I think Kojima gets away with a lot more than he probably should - some of the writing and directorial choices are so cringe that for any other game creator they would be career enders - I mean we're talking like Troll 2 level cringe at times. The second of those 2 core elements that in my opinion work very well is the actual gameplay - at it's core this is a job simulator, and some people are gonna hate that for understandable reasons, but I happen to love it. There's something deeply, intensely satisfying about plotting the most efficient route possible and then going out there and executing on your plan. Getting lost in the minutia is the point here, but then after every satisfied customer you get to pop some edibles and trip out on some wild hallucination for 10 minutes. Now everything that we've discussed up to this point has also been true of the first game, but there are a couple things at work here that make the 2nd entry go down a little differently. First, instead of going even crazier, it seems like Kojima actually reigns things in a bit by adding more conventional gameplay to the mix - there's a lot more combat, more stealth missions, more raider camps to take down, you know, stuff you've seen before. It actually feels a lot like Metal Gear Solid 5 at times, and while I see the argument that this makes the overall game more generic, I thought mixing in more standard feeling gameplay made the whole trip a little bit more palatable, I liked that. The other difference here is that the first game was entirely unique - it had a novelty that you're just not gonna get in a sequel unless they really make some fundamental revisions to the core formula, and they didn't do that. Kojima's definitely done it before (MGS2 is a perfect example) but for whatever reason he mostly stayed the path with this game, and while that's not a complaint, it does mean that it's really hard to blow people away with something that they've mostly seen before. To sum all that up - I loved it, I loved the little changes they made, and I enjoyed the story immensely even though I couldn't repeat it to you, it's just that it was missing that wow factor that first entry hit me with by being something completely new to the gaming space.

I'm a big fan of what I call the "Limbo-Like" sub-genre, and the Little Nightmares games have done a great job of making terrifying experiences in that vein, but this? This is like the wet fart of the franchise. When I heard Supermassive games would be taking over development of the 3rd entry I was confused, but not in a bad way - I mean almost nobody makes better horror games than the creators of Until Dawn and The Quarry so sure, I guess. Why not? But let's start there - this campaign is almost completely devoid of horror - I mean the art design that the older games made famous is still here to some degree, but all the suspense, the urgency? Nowhere to be found. Before almost immediately something horrifying would be hell bent on snatching you up or eating you or I don't know, and here there are things around but they often don't seem to care much about you - you're just kind of in the way, and that isn't scary. And even those moments are kind of few and far between - there is an astounding number of areas and rooms here that are just empty. Like you're just walking through empty rooms and occasionally solving an easy platforming puzzle or two, and even those are pretty sparse, like it's a lot of just empty rooms. So at best this 3rd game is boring, but at worst? This **** broken. Like fully broken, I can't believe we haven't talked about this yet. So this game is designed for co-op, although they don't have couch co-op, that's a whole other thing - but if you play it solo good luck, cause your AI partner might as well be trying to get you killed. He's constantly picking things up that you need to be holding, not dropping them, not going where you need him to go to progress, ignoring your shouts, and sometimes straight up just standing between you and where you need to go and refusing to move. And if you weren't wrestling with one of those bugs, take your pick from the myriad of other glitches that would literally break the game, force you to reload, or even have to start the whole chapter over, like this is a constant threat. I ran into bug after bug after bug, and every time I looked it up for a solution I wouldn't find my issue, but I would find 10 other game breaking issues that others were complaining about. So this game is a mine field full of problems that you can lose 30, 45 minutes of progress over. I know because it happened to me many times. Long story short, Little Nightmares 3 is boring, empty, uninspired, lazy, broken, and altogether a worthless affair. Like I don't say stuff like this often but I thought it was low effort and honestly crap. So even if you're a big fan of the other games don't go anywhere near this, go play like Bramble the Mountain King, now that's a good game.

Ghost of Tsushima is my 11th favorite video game of all time, so the sequel would have had to completely blow me away to top **** that's exactly what happened. Everything about Ghost of Yotei is better than the original, starting with the protagonist - don't get me wrong, Jin from the original was great but Atsu? Atsu is the ultimate badass. Jennifer English was my pick for voice performance of the year until I played this - Erika Ishii does this captivating job of being both someone who's very real and complicated, but also so cool she's like a walking myth. Just the setup is so good - the Yotei Six slaughters your family when you're little, and now that you're all grown up you have to track them down and put them to the sword one by one? Classic. But as compelling as the main story is, this game does a better job than any I've ever played at drawing you into the side quests and coercing you to explore every inch of the open world. Even in some of the best games like Red Dead 2 a side activity is often nothing more, but here even the most mundane chore invariably turns into an opportunity to learn more about your targets or uncover a new lead that feels critical to your journey. The combat was already pretty much perfect in the first entry but now you've got all these new weapon types to play with, and switching between weapons and combat stances and ranged options is fun as hell. And all the while everything in this world is more beautiful than anything else I've ever seen on my TV - the sprawling, beautiful open world, the colors that change through the seasons as you travel, the way the leaves swirl up around you as you walk down a mountain path or by some babbling brook, it's breathtaking. I do have a handful of complaints but they're all tiny - like the interface for checking your charms didn't have some of the info it felt like it should have on the main screen, little crap like that. Honestly my biggest issue is a really simple one - the photo mode button is right next to the button you use to heal and I don't give two **** about photo mode. So I'd be in the middle of some heated boss battle and accidentally bring up photo mode like 3, 4 times during the fight, and there was no way to turn it off or change the button so I was about ready to rip that input right out of my controller. But that was my biggest problem, so weighing that against the fifty billion huge positives makes it pretty clear - this is the best game I've played this year, and it's not even really close.

Are you a huge fan of Balatro who's looking for the next big game that will scratch that same itch? Are you cool with that next game only being about half as good? Well then have I got a recommendation for you! CloverPit is a horror roguelike slot machine game that challenges you to rack up coin after coin in service of escaping the dank jail cell you find yourself in alongside a single slot machine to keep you company. And just as you cannot escape said jail cell, this title will never be able to escape the Balatro comparison because it's so very clearly inspired by it, even to a legally uncomfortable, plagiaristic degree. Much like Balatro, you're tasked with playing a casino game for money, and the farther you get the more money you have to win to meet the qualifier for the next level. And, also like Balatro, you'll unlock more and more Jokers - sorry, charms - as you play that will increase your profits with all kinds of add-ons, multipliers, and tons of other crazy effects. Now when it's at it's best, CloverPit can be almost as addictive as it's inspiration - I mean seeing how these different perks can synergize together and exponentially increase your winnings is undeniable satisfying. But here's where the issues begin to creep in - First off, even the Balatro version of poker is a lot more interactive than just pulling a lever on the same slot machine over and over and over. So the only real strategy here is around your charms, and to this game's credit, you have to actively manage these by moving them around way more than Balatro's jokers, and doing that was pretty fun. But that's really all you have control over so the luck factor here is way more prevalent, and because of that about two thirds of my runs were botched within 3 minutes because I just didn't get lucky on the machine. So it's very difficult just to get a run going with this formula, and then when you do finally get some momentum suddenly you're a runaway freight train that can't be stopped - there's almost zero middle ground between instantly ruined run and hour long God Mode run. Also I really think calling this game a "horror roguelike" is just blatant misrepresentation because there's absolutely nothing about this game that even really attempts to be scary. The de-rezzed PS1 style graphics do lend themselves to a more ominous overall feel, but that's literally all this game ever even tries to do to scare you - it's simply not a horror game, it's just like, a darker game? I guess? Here's the overall deal - if you liked Balatro, you probably will enjoy CloverPit to some degree like I did because it's so shamelessly similar, but don't expect it to hit any harder than like, Diet Balatro at best.

I was originally pretty skeptical when I heard that Konami was gonna be outsourcing the next wave of Silent Hill titles to a bunch of random developers. Then the Silent Hill 2 remake came out and absolutely blew me away, so going into the release of Silent Hill f anything seemed possible. So did they nail it? No. Did they blow it? No? Let's throw some positives out to start with - just the idea of placing a Silent Hill game in 1960s rural Japan is a concept that feels like it couldn't fail. The environments are breathtaking in the most horrific sense possible, and the way they weave traditional Japanese spirituality into the plot, the setting, the enemy design, everything - is very, very expertly done. They did a great job of completely remixing the tried and true Silent Hill formula in a way that feels totally new and fresh, but also still feels distinctly like a Silent Hill type of experience. And the combat while not as satisfying as the Silent Hill 2 remake, still does a fairly decent job of giving a modern spin to that frantic, pipe swinging melee action we've all come to know the franchise for. I mean this game has quick dodges, countering, a parry system, tough boss fights and all that mess, but it still also feels like they just handed a random high school girl a crow bar and told her to start swinging if she wants to live, and if that's not Silent Hill then I don't know what is. So there are aspects, several in fact, that I thought they really did nail, but there are at least as many reasons not to bother picking this thing up at all. Probably the biggest inherent, baked-in issue is the puzzles - I played with the puzzles on hard and the vast majority of them are horrible. Like unsolvable. To be clear I'm not saying they're too hard. A good puzzle that's really hard is the kind that when you give up and Google the answer you think "Oh of course, it all makes sense now! Why didn't I think of that!" I looked up multiple puzzle solutions for this game because I was clueless, only to see the answer online and end up even more confused because the answers don't make any sense whatsoever. They're so bad that I wonder if maybe there was some kind of translation issue or something? Cause I'm not kidding, the solutions are so arbitrary and obtuse they're borderline impossible. Also I'm used to seeing tricky limited inventory space in survival horror games, like I actually like having to manage that. What I don't like is that this is the only game like this on the planet that doesn't have a stash for overflow, so if you're a hoarder like me then get ready to just start discarding valuable stuff left and right because you cannot keep it all.Finally while the premise itself is really interesting, the moment to moment story is abstract enough that I didn't know what was going on most of the time - it looked cool, but I really couldn't grasp what I was seeing most of the time. All in all Silent Hill f is a very mixed bag - lots of really cool stuff happening here, and also lots of BS that I can't believe made it through QA, so play at your own risk even if you're a fan of the franchise.

I usually go into these first time playthroughs totally fresh, but I have to admit while I haven't heard any story spoilers for this game, I have heard from many people that it's one of the very best video games ever made. Do I agree? Mm. yes and no. Let's get the basic stuff out of the way - I played the pixel remaster version of the game and these things are slick as hell. All the awesome technical aspects of the original like visual design and music now look and sound better than ever, plus you get all the added benefits of the updated UI, the faster movement, the easier saving, etc. And now that I've played all 6 pixel remasters of the original games I can say with relative confidence that this is the best one. The esper magic system wasn't quite as addictive to me as the job system from Final Fantasy V, but it's still intensely satisfying to manage and a fun little precursor to the materia system in the following game. And story-wise it's easily the best so far, with a vast array of characters that have much more depth than anyone from the previous 5 entries, but here's where I have to start nit-picking just a little bit. See I haven't played any of these games until just recently, except for Final Fantasy VII. And fans of the franchise have told me tons of times over the years that both games have incredible stories and characters, like in the same breath they'll mention these two games. So in this one even though you don't have the graphical power of that other game, I figured story and writing and character-wise they would be on the same level, but it's not even close to the same. Final Fantasy VII is a masterpiece of story-telling. I mean Sephiroth was one of the first villains of any medium I experienced who seemed like an actual human character with real depth and understandable motivations. But Kefka, who I've always heard was amazing, is just a completely 1-dimensional Saturday Morning Cartoon villain - he's all just cackles and being evil for the sake of it. There's zero depth to him. Now I imagine what happened is that up to this point Squaresoft was making children's games, and it wasn't until the jump to the PS1 era that they decided their audience was starting to grow up and that they should maybe start making games with some more serious, mature themes and writing. So it's not like they did anything wrong with VI. But, as a 42 old man who's jumping into these for the very first time with no knowledge beforehand, I have to say I was a bit let down with how basic the character building is compared to what I've seen from them in the past, especially when it comes to the villain. At the end of the day though, I recognize that I'm not going to rank this game as high as it deserves anyway because this just isn't my genre. I'm not patient enough to live in these RPGs the way they were intended to be lived in, and I just don't have enough imagination to really get immersed in a story that's just 2D portraits and text. So that's on me.

The original Dead Space was one of my very favorite games ever when it was new but I hadn't played through the 2023 remake until just now and no spoilers, but it is not what I was picturing. I remember the original surprisingly well considering I haven't touched it in over 15 years and I thought this was a shot for shot remake with just totally overhauled graphics, kinda like the Demon's Souls remake. But it's a lot more like the Gamecube remake of the original Resident Evil - most of the story beats and even a lot of the rooms are the same but there are several entirely new mechanics, areas, and even missions. The '08 game is very linear, with a tram ride separating out each chapter, but here you have access to the older areas at any time and a bunch of side missions will have you doubling back to those areas constantly. Isaac Clarke is no longer a voiceless, faceless puppet - he's now a fully fleshed out character with lots of dialog that's appropriate for someone with precious engineering expertise, that was a nice **** obviously the graphics are way, way more impressive, and all those awesome textures and lighting effects really highlight the best thing about this game which is just how downright scary it is with all the gross ass body horror and dark corridors with gruesome **** jumping out at you from everywhere. There are also some added quality of life improvements like updated controls and a map, and maybe most importantly the combat has been totally overhauled. This was by far the biggest issue with the original game - the gunplay was pretty good for the time but the extra options like stasis and telekinesis just didn't work very well until Dead Space **** these mechanics are better than ever, and one of the most fun aspects of these enemy encounters is seeing how much you can get through without even firing a shot and instead just launching all of their limbs right back at them.There are a couple of little issues I had - like that new map I mentioned can be kind of a pain to navigate when dealing with multiple floors. The brand new weapon parts you pick up all over the place now are largely focused on the alternate fire systems for each gun. And since the standard fire is so good I never felt compelled to try them, even on hard. So it was easy for me to just ignore an entire aspect of the game that they had clearly done a lot of work on, so I wish that element had been more **** only other reason this won't rank quite as high as something like The Last of Us or The Evil Within or some of the newer Resident Evil remakes is that the gameplay itself does lack variety in some ways. Like here combat is pretty much just "shoot everything in the room immediately", but other survival horror games have like stealth kills or more slowly paced sections where you need to flank enemies or something. And yeah the exploration was less linear but it still felt really simple, whereas in say a Resident Evil game you're juggling all these different key items you can use to solve puzzles or unlock different doors, so long story short it's missing a couple of my favorite aspects of the survival horror genre. Then again, if you had all that stuff in here it wouldn't really feel as much like Dead Space, would it? When it's all said and done they did an awesome job of adding a lot to the experience without really compromising the DNA of the original.

I just finished my 2nd playthrough of Dark Souls 2 because I haven't played it in 5 years, and if it's been at least that long for you, it is not how you remember it. Every hardcore souls fan knows this is the black sheep of the franchise and some of that's for good reason, but a lot of it is for dumb reasons. People mostly got pissed at the time just because it was so different - the lore, the level design, the way combat worked, the way items worked, it wasn't just more Dark Souls which is what people wanted. Now like most people who are willing to admit it, I never understand the stories in these games so i have to look up some explanation video, but knowing all that stuff now it's about equal quality wise to the 1st **** 2nd game has a much more personal, almost intimate story, and it's a bit more heavy handed but it's not really better or worse, and it still feels like Dark Souls because it's vague as hell but super deep. The combat has a **** more variety - all the different weapons, upgrades, infusions, spells, miracles, pyromancies, hexes, I mean there's like what, 10 times more build variety altogether, at least? Now the boss argument is a little bit tougher to settle but let's be real here out the gate - compared to the later entries like Elden Ring, all the bosses in both games are bad.This is because From Software has gotten better and better at making great boss fights with every game they've released - their best bosses are their newest bosses. But if we're just comparing Dark souls 1 and 2, it's debatable but I would say 2 wins because although there are more bad bosses there are also way more good bosses because there's just a ton of bosses. Like I said I think generally they get better at making boss fights as they go, and the best bosses in 2 like Sir Alonne and the Burnt Ivory King are better than any Dark Souls 1 boss. Now there are some serious problems with Dark Souls 2, starting with the world and level design. Intricate level design is one of my favorite aspects **** soulslike and DS2 is right there, but it's not as good as DS1. Original Dark Souls world and level design is a work of art. Everything is connected in ways that are highly complicated but also beautifully simple, which is why you'll open a shortcut and your mind will be blown when you find yourself right back where you were 10 hours ago. The 2nd one has some of that but it's also got long sections that are just "finish this area, now finish this area, now finish this area" just one after another so it's a lot more linear in parts. And 95% of the art design is brown. Just brown. Everything brown. Nothing stands out, everything is muted, there's no depth to anything, nothing pops, the game is ugly y'all. Ugly. My final verdict is that I do think Dark Souls 1 is a slightly better game, not because it's more important or influential or blah blah blah, that's all true but just objectively on its face, it's a less flawed game. But Dark Souls 2 is still **** incredible, largely because it's so different and unique, and I would take that all day long over some of the best non From Software soulslikes Mortal Shell, Code Vein, Lies of P, those games wish they were as good as Dark Souls 2.

What's that? You don't like turn based combat? Well, you're about to. I didn't think it was possible for a game to have every good thing, but I think this has every good thing, it's almost annoying, like dude, make it all about you. First off the opening hour, the premise of the game, is perhaps the most impressive, most imaginative, most captivating beginning chapter of any game I've ever played. Ever. It hooks you mercilessly. I don't think it ever gets any better than the premise story-wise, but I wouldn't say it disappoints either - it just starts out on such a high that for me it was never able to top that, but overall great story start to finish. And the presentation is absolute god tier - the graphics, the music, the sound design, the art style of this 19th century French style fantasy world, the voice acting, all of it man, god tier. And it's not just pretty, it's flashy - now flashy games are usually a red flag, they're often a lot of style over substance, think Forspoken, think Immortals of Aveum, stuff like that. But when the actual turn based battles get going and you start to get into all the different attacks and skills and combos and parries you find that there's almost as much substance as there is style - almost, there's a lot of style. This is the best example of an active combat system where you're actually playing during the enemy's turn that I've ever seen, like getting good against these bosses felt like fighting dark souls bosses, like the parry system scratches that same itch. So it really does kinda have everything, but that doesn't mean it's perfect - there are a couple little things that aren't flawless, and compared to everything else they actually kinda stick out. Like whoever was in charge of deciding to put platforming challenges in this needs a stern talking to - the platforming was terribly imprecise and should not have been highlighted with challenges of any kind. And the graphics overall were great, but if you paid really close attention to specifically the facial animations, you could tell they weren't quite up to that AAA level, they were stroke-faced a little bit. Lastly, it was fine for me, but if you're hardcore into tough turn based RPGs, this might be a bit of a softball for you, like if you're looking for a real challenge that forces you to maximize everything in your party you should probably play on hard. But these are specks in an ocean of peak gaming - when I try to picture the kind of gamer that wouldn't enjoy this, I get like Candy Crush grandmas, and that's about it. So unless that's you, go play this.

Being a teenager is rough - everything is so confusing and suddenly nothing is as satisfying as it was during those simpler times - and actually that's kind of exactly how I felt playing this so, good job making a teenage simulator I guess? Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is a choice driven narrative adventure about 4 teenage girls who form a tight friendship over the Summer of '95, and if it looks like Life is Strange 3 that's because it basically is. It's from Don't Nod Entertainment who created the two mainline Life is Strange titles which are both incredible by the way, so as a fan I was hoping for more of that, but that's not exactly what we got. Most of the formula is here - a really cool setup for an intriguing mystery, a cast of deep, 3 dimensional, flawed, relatable characters, and a moment to moment script that really does a great job bringing everyone to life. But it does pretty immediately start to deviate from the Life is Strange recipe, and I have to pick my words very carefully here to make sure I don't spoil anything so bear with me. The first deviation I noticed from how Don't Nod has done things previously is that unlike those earlier games that start right out the gate with some crazy event or reveal, this is an incredibly slow burn. The whole first half you're left wondering things like "where is this going? What crazy thing is about to happen that actually sets things in motion. I'm waiting..."Now I was okay with that because I trusted this team to eventually deliver with something spectacular, even if it was just in the last 30 seconds of the game I believed they would make everything worth the wait in the end. But it never happened - there were some reveals and some twists way down the stretch, but they mostly just left me scratching my head and thinking things like "Why would that character say that? She would never say something like that." The ending in particular just didn't make any contextual sense to me so it wasn't satisfying at all - I was just confused and kinda mad, kinda like these angsty teens were the whole time. It almost felt like they were originally planning to do something really cool because the pieces were there, but then at the last minute they were like, "nah, let's just end it." So I walked away from this feeling a bit betrayed - I mean, Don't Nod has crafted some of my favorite stories in gaming, so what the hell happened here? I also have to consider the possibility that I just didn't get it, and if so I'll own that, but it doesn't change the fact that for me, this doesn't even compare to Life is Strange 1 or 2, doesn't even compare.

Being a teenager is rough - everything is so confusing and suddenly nothing is as satisfying as it was during those simpler times - and actually that's kind of exactly how I felt playing this so, good job making a teenage simulator I guess? Lost Records: Bloom & Rage is a choice driven narrative adventure about 4 teenage girls who form a tight friendship over the Summer of '95, and if it looks like Life is Strange 3 that's because it basically is. It's from Don't Nod Entertainment who created the two mainline Life is Strange titles which are both incredible by the way, so as a fan I was hoping for more of that, but that's not exactly what we got. Most of the formula is here - a really cool setup for an intriguing mystery, a cast of deep, 3 dimensional, flawed, relatable characters, and a moment to moment script that really does a great job bringing everyone to life. But it does pretty immediately start to deviate from the Life is Strange recipe, and I have to pick my words very carefully here to make sure I don't spoil anything so bear with me. The first deviation I noticed from how Don't Nod has done things previously is that unlike those earlier games that start right out the gate with some crazy event or reveal, this is an incredibly slow burn. The whole first half you're left wondering things like "where is this going? What crazy thing is about to happen that actually sets things in motion. I'm waiting..."Now I was okay with that because I trusted this team to eventually deliver with something spectacular, even if it was just in the last 30 seconds of the game I believed they would make everything worth the wait in the end. But it never happened - there were some reveals and some twists way down the stretch, but they mostly just left me scratching my head and thinking things like "Why would that character say that? She would never say something like that." The ending in particular just didn't make any contextual sense to me so it wasn't satisfying at all - I was just confused and kinda mad, kinda like these angsty teens were the whole time. It almost felt like they were originally planning to do something really cool because the pieces were there, but then at the last minute they were like, "nah, let's just end it." So I walked away from this feeling a bit betrayed - I mean, Don't Nod has crafted some of my favorite stories in gaming, so what the hell happened here? I also have to consider the possibility that I just didn't get it, and if so I'll own that, but it doesn't change the fact that for me, this doesn't even compare to Life is Strange 1 or 2, doesn't even compare.

I play a lot of video games. A lot. And I could probably count on my fingers the number of games that completely consumed as I played them. This is one of those games and I feel like I barely survived it. Blue Prince is a roguelike puzzle game, so think the procedurally generated rooms of something like Hades combined with the puzzle solving mechanics **** like Return of the Obra Dinn, except better than both of those maybe? Basically you've inherited an impossible mansion that lies on this 9 by 5 grid of 45 rooms, and every day the layout of the rooms is completely different because you're choosing and creating the rooms as you open each door, kind of like in Hades. But unlike Hades, instead of combat there are puzzles to solve and clues to find and items to discover in every corner, and it's intensely satisfying to the point of being so addictive that it kind of became a problem for me, like I wasn't watching my kids. They do such a perfect job of giving you just enough info that you'll always have a running list of things you're working on, but they don't hold your hand so every discovery makes you feel like a genius.I don't even really want to explain what your goal is or how you beat this game because you really should go into it knowing nothing, so just understand that this isn't endless, you have a clear goal to work towards and I love that. Too many roguelikes don't really have an end, they just kind of go on forever, or the true ending is locked behind several playthroughs or whatever, but not this. After completely obsessing over combinations of rooms and yada yada for days, I finally got those sweet sweet credits and it felt like I'd just barely managed to climb Mt. Everest or something. Probably the closest relative to the overall experience is The Outer Wilds - if you played that and got addicted to the slow drip of new info and story they fed to you, that's what this felt like. It won't rank quite as high as the Outer Wilds because that game had me completely re-evaluating my entire life and this isn't as profound as all that, but mechanically it's just as addictive and just as satisfying. I really, I don't want to tell you anymore. If you like puzzle games or roguelikes, go play this now. It's on Game Pass and PS Plus, you might not even have to buy it. Thank me later, and RIP to whatever else you were supposed to do this week.

For as long as I've been doing this I've always weighed substance over style. I like a good story, a good art style, a good soundtrack yada yada yada, but if the gameplay mechanics don't satisfy me I'm usually not going to be impressed overall, but this seems to be the exception to the rule. South of Midnight has a story that is going to stick with me for a long time. It plays out like a children's fairy tale, but just beneath that is a raging undercurrent of heavy themes like grief, trauma, child abuse - I mean some of plot here is rough dude. But you wouldn't know it looking at it - the gorgeous stop motion visual style has this air of whimsy to it that really makes all the intense narrative choices all the more unsettling in contrast. And the soundtrack dude, the soundtrack to this game is just a complete album full of deep south backwater country folk jazz (I guess?) with full lyrics and everything and it's just banger after banger, and it really adds a lot to the total package. So in other words, the story and the presentation here is top level god tier stuff, I mean it's perfect - I have rarely been so deeply affected by a video game plot, but the gameplay ain't so hot. It's not bad, it just vanilla - the combat reminded me a little of Kena Bridge of Spirits, except it was way, way easier, like too easy in my opinion. Playing this on normal is more like Story mode for most other games. And the traversal is like one part Spiderman, one part Uncharted, but way more basic and average than both of those - it wasn't an issue, like it worked and it was occasionally fun, it just wasn't remarkable in any way. Now that recipe of an awesome story with middling gameplay usually leads me to think "this is fine, but I could take it or leave it". Not with this - the plot is so impactful and the presentation so beautiful that this won me over regardless. I also wanna add here that I think this game in particular is an excellent example of why representation is important in video games - like they wouldn't have made a game like this in the 90s and this era is better for that. This isn't just a game that happens to have a black female protagonist - the whole thing is steeped in black culture from start to finish. And that's what really gives it this unique awesome flavor that I've never seen in a game before, and I'm just glad it exists.

Are you fan of classics like Half Life, Bioshock, and Portal? Me too! Do you wanna play an extremely basic knockoff of those games that barely runs even on the most modern hardware? Me neither, but I did! Industria is a 2021 first person shooter that honestly looks kinda sick if you're just going off of what you would see in like the trailer. The graphics are stellar, the art design showing all these European buildings overgrown with some horrible robotic corruption is deeply unsettling, and the general atmosphere seems to suggest that you're in for a wild time. But playing it is an entirely different, far bleaker story - it's true that the graphics are good, the art design is cool, and the voice acting and storytelling is pretty decent as well. But those are the only good things about this game, the ONLY good things. Everything else ranges from barely passable like the combat, to a complete disaster like the litany of technical issues. This thing is chock full of game breaking bugs - some were just stupid little immersion breaking things but a lot of them were like "we have to turn the console off" level of bad. My least favorite was the one where you character would just randomly die for no reason - this happened to me a bunch and it was insanely frustrating. And I can't speak to the PC experience but the framerate on console is so unstable that it literally made me sick, like I had to go lie down after playing this. I mean dipping under thirty fps from time to time is one thing but going from 30 to 10 to 15 to 5 over and over and over again over the entire playtime is straight up just unacceptable. I would totally have just given up on it, but I knew the runtime was only 3 hours so I was just barely able to stick to it - let's talk about the runtime by the way. Listen I am all for a shorter game (in general I love that) but 3 hours for a shooter is a bridge too far - it doesn't give you any time for even the most basic world building or gear progression. Even something as old and dated as the original Doom knew this, which is why that game is almost twice as long as this one in a time when 3 hour games were kind of the norm. I'm not saying it needed to be 30 hours long or anything, in fact any longer than 20 for a game like this and I'm raising my eyebrows, but 3 isn't enough. There were a ton of other problems too but I don't want to beat a dead horse, I mean this was made by 6 people who have done a lot more than I ever have in that regard. But my opinion is that if you're gonna do all this and try to charge $20 for it, you don't have to reinvent the wheel, but your game should be playable, and it really isn't. I'm just saying, maybe next time just throw it on Steam for $1.99 and move on to making the next one something that you can ethically charge people for.

Are you a fan of weird more abstract psychological thrillers like Donnie Darko or Jacob's Ladder, and you wanna play a video game that's like that? If so, you'll probably enjoy this a lot more than I did. Karma: The Dark World on its face is a loose adaptation of George Orwell's 1984, and it wears this inspiration on its sleeve, I mean there are literal references to the actual book all over the place in here. But it takes that story and adds a whole bunch of crazy psychedelic horror, like something right out of House of 1000 Corpses or Room 1408, and it is freaking insanity pretty much the whole time. The reason everything is so nuts is that you're basically a member of the Thought Police and you're investigating a crime by invading the minds of those you suspect of wrongdoing. And the visual presentation of all of this is stunning - it is a gorgeous experience where the awesome graphics, the lighting, the shadows, and all the craziness they illustrated here is almost worth the playthrough just to watch. Also I have to say without spoiling anything that the ending is phenomenal - not only does it tie everything together beautifully, but it also finally gives you enough info about what's really going on that you immediately want to play it again so that you can go back to the parts you didn't understand the first time and be like "Ohhh, I get it now." Now If I was still 18 years old back when I was really into horror and super weird stuff and this was a film instead ****, I might put it on like my top ten ever, but there are a couple of issues here. Number one, this is not a film, it's a game, and while you may be one of the people who puts story near the top of your priorities, for me gaming in general is more about the challenge, and there just really isn't one here. Secondly, I'm not 18 anymore, I'm way older than that now, and I no longer have as much patience with stories that don't make a ton of sense right out the gate. Don't get me wrong I love a good story in a video game, but the plots I tend to prefer these days are the ones where you know exactly what is going on the entire time, and that is not what you're gonna get here. But if you do have some patience, and you're in the mood for some weird shenanigans, even in a video game, then this would be one of the first games I would recommend to you because in that light, it's kind of a masterpiece? I mean it is incredibly well done for what it is, it just won't rank super high for me because I'm too much of an old dog gamer to appreciate most of its fancy tricks.

If you know me you know I love soulslikes - it's the only genre that I am always willing to play right launch without even needing to see a trailer - but apparently I'm the only one playing this one. See this came out the exact same day as another soulslike, The First Berserker: Khazan, and this even has a similar anime-inspired art style, but this game didn't get nearly the same level of attention at launch and I don't think anyone really even knows about it. Now I can't speak to Khazan because I haven't gotten to it quite yet, and I will admit that launching on the exact same day as a very similar game that has waaay more buzz is a puzzling choice, but despite all that let it be known that this game is fire. It starts out with more of a fizzle than a bang, with the drab world design and easier than average combat experience thanks to a parry system that is extremely overpowered against the early enemies and bosses. But about 30% into the campaign there is a fairly abrupt difficulty spike and suddenly even the standard enemies had me tiptoeing around them in fear like a teenager trying to sneak out of the house to go party. And that overpowered parry system I mentioned doesn't do you nearly as much good when the later bosses can cut across the entire arena in an instant and slam you to the ground with weapons that take up the entire screen. It reminded me a lot of Stellar Blade in the way that you start out with mostly just basic attacks but by the end you have tons of different awesome abilities to choose from. But unlike Stellar Blade there is a buttload of weapon variety, and tweaking my build over the course of the campaign was one of my favorite parts of the whole game. Look it's not perfect, the boring world design I mentioned earlier doesn't really ever get much better, although the actual level design was really intricate and a lot of fun to explore. And you can tell they really swung hard on the story trying to build some deep lore but it never really landed for me, it was all just "evil robots this" and "post apocalypse that". Probably my biggest complaint is the lack **** difficulty slope - games like Ender Lilies and Stellar Blade really nailed that slow creeping increase in challenge, but here it's all over the place. I'd have two or three bosses that I would just embarrass, but then I'd be stuck on the next one for over an hour, then two of three more clowns, then another brick wall, etc. But all in all, if like most people you opted to play First Berserker: Khazan instead of this and after you finish it you're itching for more, pick this up. It's kind of a tragedy that nobody seems to be talking about it.

I'd already played every Uncharted game except for this one and in my opinion each one just gets better than the last, but that trend comes to a halt with this entry and that's okay. Like most game franchises the goal of every mainline title is to be the best one there's ever been, but I knew before I started this that it was a spinoff staring Chloe Frazer instead of Nathan Drake, and it was originally just gonna be DLC. They did ultimately decide to release it as a standalone expansion, probably because it ended up being a little too long or they just wanted to make a little more money, I don't know. But either way the vibe is very much like the Left Behind DLC From The Last of Us - it's not trying to top the original game, it's designed as a supplementary story that just kind of fills out that universe, and it does a good job in that respect. The actual gameplay is fantastic - it's about as good as Uncharted 4, which makes perfect sense considering it's almost certainly built in exactly the same engine. And I was really impressed with some of the visuals - the walls in a lot of these Indian ruins are covered with all sorts of ornate art and metalwork, and if you squint hard enough it looks a bit like some of those recent Unreal Engine 5 demos I've watched. But you can just tell playing it that the overall scope is nowhere near as ambitious - the story is pretty basic, there's only a few characters, the villain is actually kind of boring, and there aren't nearly as many of those huge epic set pieces and moments that you're used to seeing from this series. I mean you know if you've played Uncharted - you're constantly running from explosions, dangling from the edge of a cliff in a car, climbing a plane in midair and so on. It's a hallmark of the series. And there is a little of that here but it's pretty sparse, and you can just tell that most of that stuff just isn't in the budget for a release like this. And like I said, that's okay - the game still absolutely accomplishes what it sets out to do, which is flesh out some of these more ancillary characters in a satisfying way with a decent story and some pretty kick ass gameplay. I will say I did enjoy it more than the very first Uncharted game - not because the story is better, it definitely isn't, but simply because the gameplay in that original release is pretty rough now. Ultimately I had a great time with it, it just didn't wow me to any degree that's even close to what 2, 3, and especially 4 did.

You could say this was doomed from the start because I don't really do point and click games, but I make an exception when it comes to horror because I've enjoyed games like Loretta and Stories Untold. Well it turns out this is not a horror game, there's nothing scary about it at all. There's some mildly disturbing imagery from time to time but at no point did my pulse quicken, unless I was getting mad at something. This is one of those experiences where even telling you what it's about would be kind of a spoiler, because you don't even really begin to understand what's happening until you're more than halfway through, and even then it's exhaustingly abstract. It kinda feels like a David Lynch film like Mulholland Drive - it's not really a cohesive story on its face, it's just a stream of consciousness collection of disturbing avant garde art pieces. Now depending on who you are that might sound pretty good, I mean Mulholland Drive is one of my favorite films ever, but this was torture for me. But here's the thing, I didn't have to play through Mulholland Drive. All you have to do with a film like that is sit back and enjoy the ride, you don't need to understand it. But having to actually navigate these rooms and conversations that require specific actions and responses to be able to move on in a world where literally every single word is nonsense to me, was not a good time. I was so disinterested with what I was seeing that pretty early on I stopped even choosing the dialogue options and objects that made the most sense because none of them made sense. Instead I would just start from the top, click every option and click on every single clickable object from left to right top to bottom until the game let me move forward. Now all that sounds bad right? But here's the kicker: I wouldn't actually call this a bad game - bad games are broken, they don't play as designed, they miss their intended mark. This game is not broken - it's not buggy, it works as intended, and it seems to accomplish what it sets out to do, I just think I don't get it. Like if someone came up to me and told me they hated Mulholland Drive, I' would think, "oh well, they just didn't get it. Bummer for them, their loss". Right? I think that I'm that person here. But, I will say, the target audience for an experience like this is probably extremely specific. Like people who don't mind being thoroughly confused fumbling around for 5 hours straight with no expectation for any real payoff at the end. Look, I don't want to s**t on indie games. This game was made by 4 people, passionate people who put out a product that seems to be exactly what they dreamt of, how could I s**t on that? But I didn't get it and it didn't satisfy me in any way whatsoever, quite the opposite in fact.

Lemme just set the stage for you - in 1996 the original Resident Evil was released and it was scary, then Silent Hill came along and it was way scarier and way crazier, and then Dead Space came out and topped everyone again. The Evil Within settled that arms race by being so crazy when it came out and so over the top that everyone else was like, "okay that's too crazy, we can't top that, can we all just reign it in a little bit?" and the entire genre started to kind of tone it down after that - that happened because of this game. It's so balls to the wall insane that it borders on whimsical, like they're trying to make you laugh, but the magic of it is that no matter how much it feels that way, it never it loses its horrifying edge - I mean it's still one of the scariest games I've ever played. If you sat down right now to play this it would take you all of 15 minutes to see what I mean - right out the gate there's just blood and guts everywhere. A chainsaw wielding maniac chasing you down over here, a teleporting throat slashing burn victim over there, a theme park style slide into a pool of human viscera and that is the baseline, like that is the least crazy this game ever is. And the gameplay at the time was top of the line - you had all the best elements of your classic survival horror titles like tricky resource management and slow methodical room by room exploration, coupled with more modern Last Of Us style combat with stealth takedowns and some more tactical gameplay sections within these larger maps. So when I beat it for the first time I was like "this is maybe the best game I've ever played?" but playing it again in 2025 when I've beaten almost 600 games since then, my perspective has evolved a bit. The gameplay is over a decade old now, so stuff like the stealth mechanics and the gunplay that I loved at release, now feels finicky and floaty and it does bug me a bit. And the frame rate, which is something I was never even conscious of back then is frequently dipping under 30 and it bugs the hell outta me now. I also burn through games way quicker these days, so the first time I beat this I loved that the really beefy campaign keeps going long after it feels like it should end, but now I feel like it kinda overstays its welcome a little. I mean look, the game's over a decade old at this point, and while I don't think any horror title has ever been able to top the insanity level, there are lots of games now that I think just play better, and even a few that I think are scarier. But it is still the best thing I've played this year.

I'm gonna try to be delicate here because I don't want every JRPG fan on the internet all over my balls, but I found most of this game to be a bad time. Let's start with the positives, that won't take long. The story is phenomenal, phenomenal. Almost every character has real depth to them and there are a LOT of characters. They are expertly written and fully believable in almost motivation they express. And the collectathon-esque gameplay loop of going out into the world and looking for all of them and having to figure out how to get each of them to join you, that is fun, or it would be, but here's where things get unsavory. The party management system, especially early in the game, is way more trouble than it's worth - you have to go to like 4 different places and spend 30 minutes just to get your team the way you want it. And even when you do they're always resetting your party to just you, taking people out, restricting who can join you often for no apparent reason. It ended up not mattering much in the end though because the combat is so brain dead easy that I only died twice - once on a rock paper scissors style luck duel and the other time against the final boss on a fluke. By the way the boss battles are bad, like more than half of them are just some bug you found in a sewer that has zero plot implications, and you really can just auto battle through the whole thing. Speaking of auto battle, they did make this elaborate war strategy mini game with all these rules and complexities that seems super fun. Problem is, every single one of those battles except for maybe one is rigged from the start for you to win or lose, so have fun stressing about it for half an hour just for it to abruptly end because somebody gives up. That stuff is just the tip of the iceberg but I'm running out of time so let me end with this - I learned something about myself playing this game, and I did not like what I learned. My guess is that the people who really love this game, which is a lot of people apparently, adore the story so much that they can just overlook all of these annoyances. Plus it doesn't hurt that a lot of people played this when it was new and back then most games were at least a little bit clunky in that way. And like I said I agree that the story is excellent, but I don't think I have the imagination to really appreciate a story that's just still portraits and text, so the annoyances are more like full on fun killers to me. I think maybe a reason I prefer newer games and different genres usually is that a lot of those do most of that heavy lifting for me - you can hear the characters emoting, you can see them interacting. Now that is a me problem and ultimately just a preference thing so we can disagree on whether the game is good overall. But can you really disagree about what I said about the stupid easy combat? The UI with way too many steps? The mostly meaningless boss fights? The rigged mini games? I would challenge any fan of this game to tell me one thing that's really great about it that isn't the story, or just the fact that there's a bunch of characters to find.

I knew this was from Capcom, and I had seen the box art a few times, but that was all I knew about this PS2 Classic before I booted it up. Turns out it's very much what you would expect from Capcom in 2001. It's definitely got some Resident Evil 2 and 3 DNA with the tank controls, fixed camera, puzzles and map, but it's actually a lot closer to something like the original Devil May Cry, which also had all of that but was also an action game like this is. Just like the old DMC games you have a few different weapons that you can upgrade with orbs that drop from killing enemies, and then you have to drop everything for a minute so you can solve some puzzle, and then it's back to the killing. And the action is okay - it's a lot more basic than something like Devil May Cry because you don't really have any combos or new unlockable moves, you're just mashing square the whole time. It's also way easier and way shorter than those other Capcom titles which for some people might be an issue, but for me the difficulty that comes with the fixed camera and awkward controls is enough. You pair those issues with actual combat difficulty like in the original Devil May Cry for instance, and that is a recipe for some serious frustration, so I welcomed the general lack of challenge and short campaign time. The game is probably at its best when you've just killed some boss and now you get to watch the bonkers story play out through one of the nostalgic pre rendered cutscenes that have aged beautifully. I still love the way these old PS2 cutscenes look, partly because I remember how jaw dropping they were around the turn of the century when they were new. At the end of the day I wasn't blown away by anything here but I do enjoy the look and feel of some of these PS2 era classics, and this is about as PS2 as it gets. The whole reason I picked this up is because there's a new one coming in 2026 so my plan is to play through them all and I'd say this was a fairly good start, I'm excited to see where the franchise goes from here.

This game and really this whole franchise has flown under a lot of people's radars but lemme just tell ya, metroidvania fans need to be playing these games. The first one, Ender Lilies, is a masterpiece and this one does most of the same stuff right but they do make a few tweaks to the formula that made me feel juuuust a little bit differently about this new one. Let's go over what's still perfect starting with the god tier art style - the monochromatic design may look a little too much like Hollow Knight at first glance, but if you look closer you'll see the more anime aesthetic shine through and it is breathtaking. And it doesn't just look great, it sounds great too - all of the music is enchanting, and every other sound you hear from the weather to the clash of weaponry is just beautifully done. The combat is just as tight, precise, and varied as the first game, and there's so much customization available with your loadouts that there's probably dozens of ways to build your character. But here's where things start to slip just a little bit for me, and why I ultimately think the first game is a little bit better. They made some solid changes to your skills that make them simpler without losing much variety which was smart, but they failed to balance the effectiveness of those skills as well as they did in the first game. I know this because about halfway through I started to build my perks and abilities in a way that was just totally broken, and I just walked over the rest of the game. In the first title the bosses got gradually tougher and tougher at a slightly higher rate than I was getting stronger, so that made for a very satisfying uphill slope on the difficulty. That was probably my favorite aspect of the whole game. Here I crested a hill around the halfway point and just never struggled again because my skills and stat bonuses were stacked in a way that made me waaay too strong, and I'm not out here like min-maxing or anything. It would have been easy to fix too - make this perk give you an extra 10% attack power instead of 25%, or put some rules in place to stop me from equipping all the most powerful abilities at the same time, just little things like that. Now while that's a pretty big problem, it was really my only problem and the game as a whole is still incredible, I just didn't love it quite as much as the original. But if you're a metrodivania fan and these games aren't on your backlog, put them there - they deserve to be at the top of that list.

I went into this knowing nothing about it except for the box art which to be fair looks very different from Far Cry 3 (which I played for the first time about 8 months ago), but I didn't expect it to be this different. It's a completely different style of game, with this insane over the top 80's sci-fi action and art design - think Running Man, Escape from New York, Robocop, that kinda thing, and it's my favorite aspect of the game. The writers do not waste any opportunity to poke fun at that genre through the use of one liners, musical interludes, and on screen gags. It got old a couple of times but mostly it's pure gold. There are a few things about it that still feel like Far Cry, like the UI, the vehicles, and the combat, but here's where I have to voice a few complaints. Far Cry 3 is a great game overall but the combat isn't that strong - the gunplay is floaty and less than satisfying, the stealth takedowns are finicky, and most of the big set piece fights are underwhelming at best. In Blood Dragon the more tightly focused structure means that the combat is almost all there is outside of the story, so suddenly the spotlight is on all the worst mechanics of the game. And the exploration which is the best part of the base game's moment to moment action is pretty pointless here because the map is so small and there's not that much to do. In other words what they've done is taken Far Cry 3 and accentuated the lows while mostly eliminating the highs, and the only thing that really saves it to me is the added art style and humor which is again, excellent. I think Blood Dragon would have been a lot better if they had done away with the open world stuff altogether and just made a linear experience with a focus on better, tighter combat mechanics. But I still enjoyed it, and it was such a left field 180 turn from what they've done in the past that now I'm really interested to see what the later games are gonna be like since I'm playing them in order.

There are things about this PS2 classic that I love - the problem is that they are almost completely drowned out by the things that I hate. I really do appreciate that this feels like a lovable indie game form a time before indie games were really even a thing. You get a sense that the plot has very deep lore, even though what they actually explicitly tell you is very vague, kind of like what soulslikes made popular but almost a decade earlier. And the art and sound design gives you a daunting sense of scale by surrounding this small boy with giant structures, you really do feel insignificant when even your loudest cries are dampened by the sound of the wind whistling through these ancient looking buildings. The puzzle design is hard enough to be a real challenge for someone like me who isn't awesome at puzzles, but mostly in a way that was satisfying once I finally came to the solutions. In other words, the game is full of great ideas. The problem is the moment to moment execution which I found to be **** torture most of the time. Let's start with the girl you're dragging around. The entire experience is basically an escort mission, and it's somehow even worse than that sounds - this girl is so useless she makes Ashley Graham look like Robocop. And when you're fighting to keep these shadow dudes from dragging her away, you're just pushing square until it's over. You only have one attack and it doesn't appear that you can die, so have fun just pushing square until everything is dead. The puzzles are very good on paper, but all of the traversal mechanics like jumping, climbing, ledge grabbing etc. are horribly imprecise and very often lead to you inadvertantly hurling yourself off a ledge. Or, right when you make a tricky jump from one surface to another, the **** coked out camera will lurch in multiple different directions so now up on your analog stick is suddenly not up, it's left, and again, you fall to your death. And almost every time that kind of thing happens you lose 10 - 15 minutes of progress because the manual checkpoint system is stingy with the save points. I realize some of this is simply a product of the PS2 era but I don't know if I accept that as an excuse anymore. I just got done playing the original Ratchet and Clank last month which is only a year newer than this and all that stuff is great - the camera, the controls, the traversal, everything. So I know it could be done well. All in all I am glad I finally played this because I want to see how team Ico grows when I play The Last Guardian and eventually their new game that comes out in the future, but if you offered me $100 to play through this again I would flatly refuse.

This is one of those games that reminds you of a dozen other games because they've incorporated elements from several different successful franchises, but none of it is executed as well as what inspired it. The main gimmick here is that you have to defeat these giant bosses all over the world by climbing on them and attacking specific weak points, but the climbing mechanics are so finicky that you're always grabbing the wrong surface or hitting the wrong body part or even just slipping off for no reason. Almost all of the quests consist of either taking down these giants or just fetching items - go to this biome and pick up 4 pieces of lore, go this other biome and kill this enemy type until they drop 4 of this resourse, etc. - it gets old pretty fast. And the combat against the normal size enemies is a bit of a snooze too - you have some magic skills that you can unlock and improve, but if you're just trying to do the most damage possible you're better off just swinging your sword for the same three hit combo over and over. Probably the one thing that pissed me off the most is that the game does a thing that I hate where they have a lot of side quests available, but most of them actually have to be completed to satisfy the objectives of the main quests. In other words it looks at first glance like there's a lot to do here, but in reality the 16-ish hour campaign covers most of it, including one quest where they force you to fight several bosses you've already killed several times. Look, I love it when certain games give you the option to go back and re-fight bosses you've already beaten for fun or for extra rewards, but requiring you to fight the same bosses over and over just to progress the story is in my mind one of the laziest and most boring possible ways you can artificially inflate the campaign time, especially considering how repetitive and janky the combat is. Don't get me wrong, there are some things that work here, like the story is actually pretty good - the characters are well-voiced, well-written, nuanced, and believable, and the places the plot will take you are really interesting, like this could make a good short novel maybe. And while the moment to moment art style is just kind of generic, Diet Breath of the Wild, there are occasionally these gorgeous hand drawn cutscenes that had a tendency to come out of nowhere and really impress me. But at the end of the day, if you're asking me if playing this is worth the time investment I would say the answer is a resounding "No", even if you already pay for Game Pass.

Like many other franchises I'm playing through this series in order of release and generally I think they keeping getting progressively better, but I think this one takes a tiiiiny little step backwards. The foundation that makes Mega Man great is all still here - that gorgeous and clearly distinct mega Man art style, super clean movement and platforming, and tough but fair boss fights that have a ton of variety. But here's where I think it starts to stagnate a little bit for me. In Mega Man 5 I was ultra impressed with how inventive and creative the 8 initial bosses are - they really outdid themselves in that game with the likes of Gravity man and a few of the other fights. In Mega Man 6 the bosses are still a lot of fun if a little unfortunate ethnically in a couple places (but you know, different time, I get it) but more to the point they just weren't super inventive this time around. Most of the bosses had very similar movesets where they would jump around, then shoot, jump around, then shoot, etc. and this is common in the earlier games but the 5th entry really stepped things up and I was hoping that trend would continue, but it really didn't. Similarly, the group of bosses at the end were also in that "good but not great" category - they were fine, just not really very memorable to me. But I still really enjoyed playing through this as per usual and I'm looking forward to seeing how the franchise progresses from here, especially since this is the last NES game in the series and the next one is Mega Man X.

I keep a close eye on new video game releases so there aren't many that completely fly under my radar, but I didn't even know this existed until it won the Games for Impact Game Award. So of course then I had to try it, and after playing it all the way through it I can certainly attest to its overall quality, but I'm a little confused as to why it was nominated for that particular category. Let's start with some clear wins - The watercolor inspired art direction is some of the best I've ever seen - this is a visual spectacle that is operating at the highest level of art throughout its runtime. That's what it really should've been nominated for - I mean this is right up there with this year's visual heavy hitters like Astro Bot, Animal Well, Black Myth Wukong, and Hellblade 2. And I wouldn't have been surprised to see it nominated for best narrative either - there are some thematic question marks that we'll get into in a minute, but the upfront story is as poignant as it is heartwrenching. That being said I will admit I am one of those people who will immediately buy into any media 5 times more if you put a lovable dog in it, and this one has antlers so I'm pretty much putty in their hands. I also love that as you're adorable companion matures and moves from a liability to an asset, you gain access to more and more powerful abilities that really showcase how special this relationship is. The actual gameplay is simple but very clean - the attacks, dashes and dodges all work exactly as they should, and some of the boss fights are deceptively tricky even though their movesets are mostly simple and clearly telegraphed. I'd probably have more fun if there were more moving pieces like maybe some RPG elements or more unlockable attacks or something, but I can respect that the devs are clearly going for the utmost simplicity here, and that matches up with the overall experience better anyway. In fact, I don't really have any specific complaints - the game seems to set out to do exactly what it intends to and for what it is it's largely flawless, but I am still confused about that Games for Impact nomination. The Game Awards themselves describe the category as an award for "a thought-provoking game with a pro-social meaning or message", but without spoiling anything, what is the message here? At first I thought it might be an environmental thing like a climate change warning because you spend most of the game trying to free all of these biomes and wild animals from this creeping corruption that could be pollution or something similar. But that theme is pretty pervasive already with tons of games, and it doesn't seem like enough on its own to merit a nomination. My best guess is that the "pro-social" message here is that of the hardships of parenting or caring for others who need you? I mean the whole time you're either being rescued by your friend or vice-versa. But that still doesn't seem like quite enough when you compare it to something like Tales of Kenzera: Zau, which is what I thought would win. That game wasn't as well-made overall as this one, but the cultural representation as well as the clear themes of grief and the importance of letting go hit so hard in that -to be honest I can't believe it lost. But if my biggest complaint is that some other game did one thing better that's not much of a complaint, is it? And while this won't rank super high on my personal rankings because it's very simple, I have to concede that some of the simplest things in life are also the most beautiful, and this is no exception.

I've been slowly playing through this franchise over the last few years and I'm a big fan of every single one so far, but there are definitely some I like more than others and I'd say this one's right in the middle for me. Gears 1 is a masterpiece of action horror - 2, 3, and Judgment while still very good were mostly more of the same but without the horror, and then I thought the 4th entry was awesome because it brought a little of that horror back and updated the gameplay. Just continuing to do what made that one great would've been acceptable to me, but now Gears 5 steps in with several more sweeping changes, some of which land perfectly and some I could've done without. Having a cute little robot sidekick that you can order around to complete puzzles and assist during combat may sound gimmicky, but it actually adds a lot of interesting complexity to what has traditionally been extremely straightforward gameplay - that was risky but it paid off. And with the exception of the original game I think this story is probably the most interesting, the most emotionally satisfying, and probably the weirdest which is saying something. Also can we just take a moment to appreciate the talent of Laura Bailey? I always knew she was good but it seemed like every little throw away line she had in this she was just pouring her heart into it, it was awesome to hear. To wrap up the win column here, this is a very little thing but it fascinated me - the transitions from gameplay to pre-rendered cutscene and vice versa were probably the best I've ever come across. Most games are happy to just give you a black screen for a moment or maybe cut away to a different character or backdrop during those transitions, but you can tell that whoever was in charge of this detail did their damndest to make it look seamless, and I thought it really added to the immersion. Now all that stuff was great but I do think there were a few flies in the ointment here, starting with the tacked on open world segments in what has always been a linear franchise. When these are done right they are the freaking best, like in The Evil Within 2 or The Tomb Raider Reboots or the new God of War games, but here they felt almost totally unnecessary. If you're gonna go that route, those sections either need to be required or you need to give me a really good reason to stray from the beaten path, like some awesome gear or a max health upgrade or something. But I did a couple of optional things in those sections and all I got was some weapons which are a dime a dozen anyway, or maybe some components for the aforementioned robot companion. I initially loved that you had upgrade points you could spend to add a mild RPG element to the mix, but in practice those upgrades didn't actually turn out to be very impactful, so I eventually just starting skiffing right past them. Last but definitely not least, remember how I said I loved that they brought a little bit of the horror element back in the 4th game? Well I guess they decided that wasn't working because it's pretty much gone here. There are moments that you could consider somewhat tense, but that atmospheric tone that had your heart racing as you peaked around corners and into the dark is gone, and it's back to just balls to the wall action now. But balls to the wall action is still a lot fun, and while I don't think it's quite as good as Gears 4 or the original of course, I did enjoy it slightly more than 2, 3, and Judgment.

I am a devoted fan of the original Indiana Jones trilogy, so I was nervous when I heard they were making a new video game adaptation, but it turns out that unlike the more recent movies, they mostly nailed it. MachineGames has done a fantastic job of curating an experience that feels like it's ripped straight out of some lost Indiana Jones screenplay from the 80s, and Troy Baker does an aaaalmost perfect rendition of the voice, although there are a few moments in there when you can tell he's not the real deal. The subject matter is perfect - it gets pretty bonkers like Indiana Jones tends to be, but never ventures into territory that would be out of character for the franchise. The actual gameplay seems like it's been ripped out of the past as well, and sometimes that can be enjoyable, but it's also often clunky and annoying like a lot of older style games can be. The stealth sections are fun and probably when the game is at its best but the AI is incredibly stupid, and it's definitely one of those games where if you're seen you can just run around in circles and then hide and everyone will just forget you ever existed. If you do decide to stand your ground and fight there are a few ways to do so and all of them are super clumsy - most combat instantly devolves into throwing wild punches all over the place until somebody passes out. But there is something undeniably endearing about a very straightforward adventure game with a near total of absence of more modern tropes like gear, levelling, skill trees, and almost every other RPG element you're used to seeing in everything these days. There are a few conventional aspects like a very basic upgrade system and some side quests, but the emphasis is always on the adventure itself and never leans into things like RNG or loadouts or min-maxing your character. This strict focus on the narrative gives the whole package a charming PS2 vibe - it's just one of those video game ass video games, as I've heard these things described, and it brings a breath of fresh air to the industry by not trying to be everything to everyone. Now that being said I like a lot of that RNG stuff, and any game that just has a great story and little else is gonna struggle to keep me plugged in, and I was definitely ready to move on by the time it was finished. But while this won't end up being one of my top 100 games or anything, I'm really happy to see that something with such a retro playstyle can succeed in 2024, and if they ever make a sequel I'll be there on day one.

I went into this knowing nothing about it other than the art style and that was enough to get me interested, but there's a lot more here to love aaaand a couple of little things that weren't so lovable. Let's start with the grainy black and white elephant in the room - I've never actually sat down and watched a Kurosawa film, but from what little I have seen it sure looks like they nailed the visual presentation. I don't usually go in for those optional retro filters that add CRT scan lines, sepia tones etc., but the old school film grain that comes by default makes the otherwise unremarkable graphics pop like I never would have imagined. The story gets a lot crazier than what I was expecting, but it still delivers a classic tale of love and revenge straight out of some Shakespearean tragedy, and a few of the more emotional moments hit like a truck. The actual gameplay isn't nearly as perfect as the presentation but it's still a mostly satisfying experience - think of it as a simpler, 2-dimensional version of Ghost of Tsushima. Between the light and heavy attacks, the various ranged options and the parry system, the slower combat almost has a soulslike feel to it, although in general I wouldn't place this in that category at all. Most of the problems come along with that 2d aspect - you're stuck on a line the whole time while your enemies can adjust their depth, so I would occasionally lunge forward with my sword only to find that my intended target isn't actually directly in front of me. And since you can't circle your attackers it was very common to get immediately surrounded and have no quick way to recover - even something as simple as turning your ass around was overly complicated. Lastly, even at over 2 years old, there are still a few bugs present that really spoil the fun, like sometimes the enemies would just stop attacking and wouldn't start again until I completely restarted the game. So yeah, there were unfortunately a few bumps in the road on my way to Yomi, but the Trek itself is still solid enough to make it an easy recommendation if you're in the mood for a modestly sized, challenging action game with an excellent story and outstanding visuals.

I'm playing through these games now so that I can be all caught up before the new Mafia game releases next year, and I loved the Definitive Edition of Mafia 1, but this 2nd installment didn't quite make it to love status. The first Mafia game really impressed me because contrary to my expectations it didn't just try to be another GTA clone, but it brings something different and very valuable to the table instead. Mafia 1 is a much more cinematic narrative experience than GTA with less over the top action but a lot more nuance with the world they've built and the characters that live in it. So I came away from that game really impressed and expecting the same from the sequel, but there ended up being a few reasons that didn't exactly happen. First and probably most importantly, the story in the sequel takes forever to really get moving, I'm talking like halfway through before it even starts to get good. The original did a great job of getting me invested in the plot right out the gate by making every mission meaningful and weaving in important character interactions throughout via the excellent cutscenes. But with only 2 or maybe 3 exceptions, the first half of the Mafia 2 missons are just "go here, drop this off, go there, kill this guy, mission complete" etc. etc. with almost no significant story movement. It did eventually take off and the last 40% of the game's story is about as good as the first one, but that initial 60% not being up to snuff heavily affected my final view of the game as a whole. Now the rest of my issues are a direct result of the fact that unlike Mafia 1 Definitive Edition, Mafia 2 is not a ground up remake, but rather a simple remaster that just touches up the visuals and audio. I don't really care about the graphics but the gunplay is straight out of 2010 and it is rough - the auto-aim is always either way too good or completely MIA, and it feels like Vito's downed an entire bottle of hooch any time you manually aim your piece at anything. And the driving is already less fun than something like GTA, so do we really need things like traffic laws and speeding tickets to bog the action down even further? In the remake of the original that stuff was all turned off by default and you had to opt in if you wanted to bother with it but here it's unavoidable and irritating. Finally the outdated checkpoint system can be brutal - I found myself having to meander through entire buildings and mow down 20, 30 people before the game finally saves, and it is alarmingly easy to die in a split second if you make a wrong turn or the shoddy cover system craps its pants. Even with all of these distractions the game overall is decent and absolutely worth playing for the story, but I do hope that when I play Mafia 3 sometime in early 2025 I have a much smoother ride in store for me.