This is my favorite From game to play because you avoid the chores and jank you find in the other games. No scrounging for rocks to upgrade your weapons, much less "cheese", very polished boss fights.

There are times in Dark Souls where it feels stupidly frustrating, Sekiro can be difficult but there are no real "feel bad" moments. There are no oppressive "run-backs", movement is quite free. You are a duelist with a variety of tools at your disposal. You can stick to pure sword combat, you can use prosthetic tools (seamlessly integrated), or even martial arts techniques (I absolutely love these, especially the leaping kicks).

All the areas look and feel great to traverse. While it is not a "perfect" game, and it is much "smaller" than some other From games, it doesn't matter. I'm currently on NG+3, thinking about maybe even platinuming the game, whereas I couldn't bring myself to do that with even Dark Souls.

Dark Souls II is a true sequel to the first game. You cannot play it the same way. You start with one (1) Estus flask. Death is penalized even moreso. Enemies are much harder to parry. And so on.

All that out of the way, DSII is a stunning game. Right off the bat you have the beauty of Things Betwixt, Majula, Heide's, the Fortress of Fallen Giants, then towards late game you have the austerity of Drangleic Castle (with easily the best looking Fromsoft boss, the Looking Glass Knight), the otherwordly Dragon Aerie/Shrine - not to mention the DLC locations!

This is a great game, I do not believe it is "unfair" like some would have you to believe. The infamous Fume Knight took me 1.5 hours. It was a good time.

Still one of the most uncompromised takes on violence in videogames - there's no other statement as clear in them about violence being everywhere, and every pillar of civilization (nations, media, culture,...) being a sublimation of this primordial, animal, thirst for annihilation and carnage. Hotline Miami is not a game about being desensitized to violence - does anyone feel desensitized by playing Hotline Miami? It's a rush. It's a five minute per level climax of violence to the beat of incredible music contrasted later with the mundanity and quiet madness of everyday life. It's about feeling more - feeling the ferality inside all of us, behind all the excuses someone has to make to indulge over it.

As such I consider it the least "hypocritical" statement about violence in videogames, as well as the least coveted. There's no morality in Hotline Miami. Good and Evil are simply meaningless. The world is becoming the endless spring of carnage in this alternate-timeline's Miami, only thanks to society realizing, in the middle of the bacchanal of drugs and music, what it means to be truly alive.