One of the more interesting games I've played a good while.

Worldless is at it's core a turn based rhythm game where you need to master patterns (and how to react to them). When it's good, it's REAL good. Some fights felt downright euphoric once I understood how to tackle them. But god, sometimes it's just such a frustrating combat system to engage with. It's very unforgiving in the sense that it leaves very little room for error. If you fuck up, chances are, the enemy wipes you and you have to start the fight over. Which I'm of two minds of. On one hand, this lends to the hostile nature of the game and makes the highs feel higher. But it also makes the lows feel lower and occasionally felt akin to banging my head against a wall. I do appreciate what it's going for. TLDR; skill issue.

The metroidvania stuff is good. There's are fun platforming puzzle sections sprinkled throughout the map that made it interesting enough to traverse. But overall it's a little unremarkable in that respect.

Graphically, the simply cosmic art style looks great. The animations in combat look especially punchy. I dug it.

So yeah. Worldless is an interesting game. Not really an easy one to recommend but I'm glad I played it.

This game was better than it had any right to be. I adored so much of it from the visuals to the main gameplay loop that from start to finish I was having an exceptional time. The turn based combat was an interesting gimmick to break up long stretches of platforming and the platforming itself was designed well enough to not mandate exploration but heavily reward those who did.

The combat was far deeper than I was expecting, it allowed me to struggle early on without any real punishment that gave a natural sense of progression and feeling of mastery as I became more knowledgeable on the types of fights the game had. I'm a sucker for anything with perfect parries so that being included and not a surface level block/attack system was a welcome addition. The combat really does an incredible job of being lenient enough to not require full mastery but still challenging enough to encourage a deep understanding of what is being asked of you until you hit late game. The four boss fights leading up to the ending were PHENOMENAL (mostly). They were all good but some felt more polished and satisfying than others.

The exploration was another aspect I felt was incorporated well. Your "life" bar being tied to organisms and cards that you had to seek out instead of being tied to your skill tree made all the backtracking feel not like a waste of time and I thought that was something handled adequately. The progression of movement mechanics was done alright enough, the early game can feel kind of slow with only dash b being available but once you get run, shift and shadow grapple after being introduced to shift the game flows a lot more naturally.

My only real gripe with the game was the ending. I later learned there is a secret boss fight that sort of makes up for the whacky ending but even then not really? The game loosely does a job of guiding you towards the conclusion that the story is about the big bang and the creation of the universe and what I believe to be a statement on trying to deny "fate" but I dont necessarily feel that story is told in an all too comprehensible format and this becomes exemplified at the final "boss" which is effectively just an entity speaking an unknown language at you as you waste turns in a pseudo quick time event. The game up until this point was going great and the bosses leading up to this one were handled well so it's a strange ending to me to have the final stretch of the game being effectively just a minimally interactive cutscene.

All in all still a solid game, just one blemished by a lackluster ending.

A game fully designed to speedrun is up my alley. I enjoyed getting through Kamiko faster and faster and that's when the game really clicked for me. I think in my best run, I beat the game in 20 minutes.

Unfortunately, the game itself has a lot of minor annoyances that build up. The way enemies respawn drove me up the wall and i hated not being able to shoot diagonally as the archer.

I wouldn't recommend it unless you really want a short speedrun friendly game.

Hard game to gather my thoughts about.

Ultimately it's pretty mediocre but there's a glimmer of a good game here. Ghostwire Tokyo would be better as one of those hidden gem ps3 games that's 5 hours long and trying to be something different (The Darkness fans unite).

Instead, what it ends up being is a bloated checklist game that wears down its already simple mechanics completely thin. The finger hand powers all have fantastic animations but that's no longer novel after you've done them a thousand times. At first, I thought they were a cool variation on what a first person shooter could be. In practice, all they end up being are your standard pistol, shotgun and grenade launcher. Again, the combat is suprisingly dull for such a creative sounding and looking game.

Most of the game is spent doing checklists, as I mentioned earlier. Ghostwire Tokyo is about exploring a map and sucking souls into a phone or whatever. It's dumb. There's some mindless fun to be had in just going through the map and gathering stuff but it doesn't do it any better than it's contemporaries. Maybe if it had a stellar main storyline, it'd be easy to overlook the bland open world stuff, but it doesn't even have that. The story is immediately forgettable and outside of some great monster designs, it doesn't offer anything special.

God, I didn't expect to be this harsh on Ghostwire until I started writing this. I wanted it to be better and I did have some fun exploring the Tokyo they built. It just could have been so much more. Would not recommend this one to most.

All these cool Nickelodeon characters, but the game feels so bland.

The mechanics are competent and the character models well done. They even did a great job in creating an artstyle that applies to all these characters without feeling too jarring.

All-Star Brawl is just a missing some sort of X factor. I can't even explain it. It's just missing something to make it good and I don't even know what.

A delightful first person puzzler that easily joins the ranks of greats like Talos Principle, Portal and the Witness.

While it's not as difficult as any of those, it does offer a zen like experience where I always felt challenged without being frustrated. It's nice. The concept itself is extremely novel and I can't help but want more now that I'm done.

Bring on the DLC :)