The second instalment of A Plague Tale is a visually stunning and terrifyingly graphic game. This rollercoaster of emotions will guide you through some of the most scenic, wonderous and beautiful places, before dragging you through areas and scenarios that make you question the sanity of the level designers.

The stealth in this game has been reworked to give you more creative options for each encounter, but has balanced that with what felt like more adaptive, responsive and more plentiful enemies. A few control and AI hiccups aside, I enjoyed the increased challenge that came with this, but lead to some of these encounters being occasionally tedious.

Amid the sometimes overly childish, and existential dread fuelled writing was a story that, by the end, has you feeling ultimately satisfied.

Archaic and mythic in a way that even Bloodborne couldn't quite muster to this extent in its boldly horrific perfection. Though while that game is superior, it being far more focused and accessible (and frankly more personally appealing) in its approach to the FromSoft formula, there is something deeply boundless and near avant-garde about how epic this feels; an accumulating influence that trickled into subsequent titles in the developer's work. An abstractly fantastical vertical climb and descent from the heavens to hell and back again through a dilapidated and diseased kingdom. While the layered mythology calls for intense analysis, I firmly believe this is a game that asks to be felt and experienced rather than put under scrutiny. There's no shortage of praise that is thrown at this game but despite my past encounters with the franchise, I was consistently humbled and fixed into place by this in more manners than one. It is hard to believe this exists at all and in such existentially despairing and bittersweet form. An evocative representation of the politics of defiance against past generations, the cruel cycles of depression, and interlacing the meaning of existence with twisting power struggles between greedy Gods and petty mortals.. the living and the dead... the tangible and intangible. Through vast ruins built on top of ruins resting atop inter-dimensional tree trunks, a sort of connected system of 'Garden of Eden' clones where all creation was sprouted, the brooding and broken civilizations of Dark Souls unfold to us. These dynamics are sprawling, intimidating, a little silly, and most probably flimsy in how it weaves all them together but undeniably absorbing. After all, the metaphysical essence of these ruinous spaces are tied intrinsically into the nature of life itself as it pertains to the Chosen Undead. We are one with this world for better and worse and we can choose to wield that power with greed and malice or with fairness and embrace of the darkness within the light. Dark Souls understands however that this is not a binary affect but a deeply moralistic play in our own interpretation of what it is to be chosen.

The seminal 21st century horror masterwork. An utterly consuming post-modern translation of Victorian anxieties; the dangers of industrial progress being married to church doctrine as told with both gothic and celestial aesthetics. However it doesn't stop there. That's nothing to say on how the game further goes on to explore the terrifying Eldritch possibilities of unspeakable extraterrestrial beings beyond comprehension lying dormant within labyrinths and our attempts to understand and exploit these cosmic powers. How the result of humanity's endless search for more knowledge is ultimately rendered as capital once it breaches the surface. Just an unimaginably dense work capable of being terrifying, moving, sexy, and amusing in equal measures and completely goes all in on these facets; never shortchanging. My mind spins on the many narrative tangents this game takes you on, its profound sense of empathy for the cursed victims of exploitation, and beyond that it's also just a really fun and addictive gameplay loop with gorgeously designed areas and haunting bosses/enemies that ring in the head long after the television powers off. So stimulating exploring different weapons and builds and seeing what works and what doesn't. Perhaps some of the areas are more annoying than others (Nightmare Frontier, Upper Cathedral Ward, and Yahar'gul can fuck right off) but for something I deeply loved the first time I'm just shocked how much better this feels now. The m-word gets thrown around a lot nowadays but this work of art truly deserves the plaudit of being labelled a masterpiece. A sweeping culmination of everything FromSoftware has been striving to achieve. Everybody else should just stop trying.

𝘥𝘰𝘯'𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 𝘣𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘴 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘧𝘶𝘯?

I’ve taken a considerable amount of time between my experiences with each of the main Silent Hill games. I played the first entry around six-seven years ago when I was still in a mutually toxic relationship and found it excellent yet downright baffling. Containing industrial and metallic horrors beyond immediate comprehension and freaky cults and oddly touching ‘chosen family’ dynamics, it pushed the limits for what I believed a PS1 title could achieve through sheer atmosphere and symbolic prowess alone. After nabbing a decently priced copy of the second game a year post my separation from said relationship (and in the wake of the pandemic), I found myself shattered by its oppressive deconstruction of a guilty conscience and the interconnective nature of trauma- both shared and isolated. How pain binds fractured souls together, and winds them up into botched and abstracted spaces of American normality to fend for themselves on a primal level. It took everything the first entry accomplished and confidently treks into bold territories that challenged the player’s allegiance to their supposed protagonist as well as call attention to their adjacent relationships to side characters- who upon the surface don’t directly contribute much to James’ arc but rather gracefully ebb and flow with the intention of supplementing the themes of the story. These first two games were exhausting to push through, almost sadist in quality and punishing in developer motivation with how they marry deeply complicated and expressionistic narratives with deliberately stunted and claustrophobic gameplay. They are, to me, a primordial testament to what the medium can achieve as singular works of art (as well as propelling the interactive possibilities of horror).

Anyways, Backloggd word salad aside, it has been nearly four years and I have finally gotten to the trilogy capper. I have since healed from my own personal traumas from the relationship that haunted my experiences with the previous two games (but still write the inflated wordy nonsense on here for the four people that actually read my reviews). That word, “healed”, succinctly captures what it felt like to play through Silent Hill III. It is an encompassing coming of age narrative about origin and birthright and interrogates the identity that we are born with versus the one we ultimately choose for ourselves. The game also wraps itself back into the thematic backbone of the first game in a clever way, weaving in ideas of evangelic persecution that removes women’s agency from their bodies and intertwining that with emotional struggles of familial belonging. Team Silent fills the game with the adequate amount of angst, grief, and sass that any teenage girl confronts as they are exposed to the chronic realities of impending adulthood. And yes, it is also very scary; utilizing some fairly cursed sound work and utterly hideous (and frequently phallic) creature designs in addition to incorporating another deliciously brooding soundtrack by Akira Yamaoka. Everything in this game carries the instinct to exercise hostility and discomfort towards Heather. Who didn’t feel that way about the world as an insecure adolescent? At the very least the sense that nothing is quite “okay” permeates much of the game’s wildly structured first half leading up to the story’s venture to the titular town in the second. The player navigates through malls, subway stations, construction sites, office buildings, and apartment complexes with the overall goal of getting home and then from there we are thrust into the familiar spaces we’ve walked before as other characters.

Despite its messy development, this is as much an effectively bittersweet culmination of the franchise’s mythology as it a deliriously unique exploration of its own themes. While I wasn’t as taken with the characterizations here as I was with the previous entry (Douglas didn’t do much for me, sorry), that remains somewhat the only sour note to an otherwise masterful game that I imagine will smooth over with time. Just writing this I look back on my nights playing this fondly and already with slight tinges of nostalgia. Every dream-like moment is so committed to utmost immersion for the player, inducing unease within the most mundane of everyday locations- at least before they are transformed into otherworldly distortions of malice incarnate. This dynamic allows for pulpy levity that toggles self-reflexive tone shifting; registering discordant humor, occasional dramatic poignancy, but mostly unhinged beats of urban surrealism. The game’s iconic visual and thematic aesthetic teamed with Heather’s infectious presence providing a much-needed cushion for the player to fall back on for reprieve against the most ungodly of manifestations, this is truly as well-rounded as horror games can be. Now if someone out there wants to lend me Silent Hill IV..

SotN takes and blends both of the aesthetic elements of Castlevania and Dracula X to create an absolutely lovely atmosphere. The music was absolutely incredible start to end and pending time in the castle was an absolute delight beginning to end, I loved uncovering all of the secrets that the game had to offer. I love that the secrets also culminated into a wonderful twist that really tied the whole experience together for me. There were some things that really stuck out to me, however, that preventing me from loving it more than I do. My biggest complaint is the difficulty. Compared to earlier Castlevania games, I felt as though I never really had to apply myself or plan out my strategy in each room. Instead, I found myself running at things and avoiding damage when it was convenient. I think it's something that is inevitable when the game is so open-ended, but I would have loved to see some enemy designs that complimented Alucard's moveset better. Unfortunately, a lot of the bosses followed the same trend. I ended up beating the vast majority of the bosses on my first try, which led to most of them bleeding together for me, despite having incredible designs visually. Although the bosses are undertuned, I think the problem is more fundamental than that. A lot of the bosses have annoying attacks that are difficult and finnicky to reliably dodge. This led to me trying to just out damage the boss rather than actually engaging with it. I think SotN still holds up rather well, but I think there are definitely some games that improve and iterate upon the foundation that this game laid.

O maior inimigo da repetição, simplesmente.

Esse jogo consegue se sair bem em tudo, sério. Os mapas são lindos e bem diferentes uns dos outros, os inimigos (tanto normais quanto os chefes) são únicos, as habilidades são tantas e bastante criativas, a lista continua...

Pra minha 1a experiência com Kirby, me surpreendi de verdade, nem sei se achei algum defeito enquanto jogava. É impossível não se divertir com esse jogo.