This is potentially the most immersive video game ever made. The haunting music, well-crafted dungeons, ever-present environmental storytelling, and plethora of missable content in the form of hidden areas, items and enemies make this an absolute gem, sure to fill the player with a sense of wonder and make them feel rewarded for every bit of exploration as they delve into the depths of the Ancient City, provided the player is armed with enough wit and patience to make it through the perilous journey.

I tend to dislike games with ham-fisted stories, which seem to think that they are movies, and can keep the player invested into their story. Some games, like God of War 4 and Silent Hill 2, can pull this off, but most games stumble and embarrass themselves, leading to an experience focused on a stupid, unsatisfying gimmick. With this perspective, it's easy to appreciate a game which lets you discover the story for yourself by observing the environments trodden down by the pressures of civil war and the forces of time, and taking in the sights, taking note of whatever feelings passing across these intricate structures and barren landscapes might bring.

Overall, this is a game which arouses a true sense of adventure within me — genuine intrigue, awe and amazement at what can be achieved with sounds and images within the realm of video games. Sure, the game may not have much literary value, but if you come in with the intent of going on a real adventure into a treacherous land, you might discover an experience that will forever stick with you, making all other exploration games pale in comparison.

The performance is rubbish, where the i5-9600k cannot run this game at "High" settings, since it is optimised horribly. Not that "High" settings don't look bad, but still better than the "Low" settings I had to contend with.

Gameplay-wise , it's actually pretty great — you sneak around guards and cameras, you can stack boxes and use your car to jump fences (which is definitely intended). There is one particular property which offers a fairly fun sneaking experience, which can be completely skipped by jumping over a fence with your car, going inside, looting, up to the second-floor balcony, and back over the fence and out of the area.

The different gadgets you get are pretty fun, if barebones — the window knife and the hacker laptop in particular change up the gameplay in major ways — and there is generally enough variety to keep things fresh across the game's twelve-hour runtime.

Overall, the game sucks on the technical side, with the sound propagation system being very unrealistic and jank all around; and it can be rather simplistic. However, I would say that I enjoyed the game quite a lot for what it was. There's nothing quite like tosding an $8000 3D-printer over a fence onto my car and using janky parkour to jump the fence and escape the property.

The game tells a loose narrative of a totalitarian regime, where a simple office clerk overcomes inner turmoil and reflects upon his life, as he makes his way across his memories to deliver a message to the Queen of Ice.

The game utilises abstract imagery and loose, train-of-thought narration to immerse the player in the thoughts of the clerk, which seem to mostly be concerned with recollections of and reflections upon his past, as well as the world which he is surrounded in. This is, in my opinion, handled quite well, as the synthwave soundtrack and simplistic gameplay make it easy to let your imagination run wild and get lost in the future of 1994.

The aforementioned gameplay consists of the clerk automatically running forward, with the player able to turn the clerk in ninety-degree increments. The clerk gets faster with every turn, and as you run laps around the twisting layouts of the levels, the game can get quite challenging (particularly level 7).

The gameplay serves two main functions: firstly, it subtly showcases the main themes of the game, about how the clerk is running in circles, in his reflections and thought processes. Secondly, the difficulty helps define tension, and let the player know how urgent the task of delivering the message is, and with what difficulty this task is accomplished, without having to put the player through needless exposition. Indeed, the clerk's ever-increasing running speed essentially defines the game, both from a narrative, as well as a gameplay perspective.

The character of the "simplest office clerk" is generally rather loosely defined, with descriptions of his apparent TV addiction and lost love being scattered across the narration. Hence, the main defining thing about the clerk is his ever-increasing speed and urgency, as he tries to win his "inner fight" and deliver the message to the Queen of Ice, which is essentially the focus of his existence.

Overall, this game is much larger than the sum of its parts, and I feel like its presentation and overall composition inspire both awe and creativity. I was not expecting to get so engrossed and so touched by such a short, simple piece, but I am happy to have been so pleasantly surprised. Considering how short and how cheap the game is (as well as the fact that you probably got it in the Bundle for Ukraine on itch.io), I would certainly recommend that everyone gives this game a shot.

The game is repetitive, and there is no reason to sneak around when you can instantly knock people out by slamming doors in their faces, and hack security systems to shoot everyone for you. When they are unconscious, you are free to take their fingerprints, which will let you solve most crimes pretty much immediately.

Due to being an Early Access title, the game can feel rather barebones and repetitive, and with the tactics listed above, it feels as though I have optimised the fun out of the game.

On another note, the side cases just feel unfair — someone with green eyes qnd blood type O+ lives in this 16-storey building, and I have to smash all of their windows? By the time I am done combing through sixteen floors, I shall have stolen thousands of crowns' worth of loot, doing my best Garrett impression. This game honestly feels more fun as a thief simulator than a detective simulator...

The gameplay feels like a real precursor to MGS V (or the home console sibling of Peace Walker, if you prefer). Unfortunately, the stealth action kind of ends before you can get used to it. Most of the gameplay in the game feels as though it was designed to either provide unique setpieces (mainly boss fights), or transport the player between cutscenes.

Speaking of the cutscenes, they are very long and very boring. There are multiple 50-minute non-gameplay sections throughout, and the infamous ending is over 70 minutes long. The game absolutely does not justify the absurd amount of cinematics present, and it really makes you feel like you spend most of the game watching a boring movie instead of playing the game.

The story kind of sucks, and undoes a lot of what I liked about MGS 2. It is very overt about its intentions of delivering 'moar metal gears!!' to players due to popular demand, but this kind of lampshading and metanarrative does not make the actual plot any more tolerable. The constant 'male gaze'-esque sexualised portrayal of most female characters really got on my nerves, too. I did not enjoy sitting through these cutscenes, and ended up doing chess puzzles on my phone with them running in the background a lot of the time.

Overall, the game can definitely bw enjoyable, with some string gameplay and story moments (I quite liked the soundtrack, too), but calling it a 'mixed bag' does not even begin to describe it. The gameplay arguably peaks about 2/5ths through the game, and never recovers, as act 3 onwards is just not the same game anymore. Especially considering the pain of emulating this through RPCS3, I would honestly say that this game is only really worth playing for die-hard MGS fans. I'm still giving it 3.5 stars because I liked some parts of it quite a bit, but the overwhelming majority of players would, in my opinion, be much better off simply playing MGS V or Peace Walker for the gameplay, and the first three mainline titles for the story.

Thinking about it, I think I liked the story of Peace Walker more than that of this game, too...

The game is free to a fault, where obstacles act less like obstacles and more like suggestions on what you might not want to do for most of the game — you can pretty much trivialise every level by possessing an enemy, and running through with invisibility when needed.

The gameplay and world-building are top-notch im-sim stuff, but I found that the pacing of the game dragged around halfway through, and it only really got better when I further upgraded my character to completely trivialise the actual challenges, so the game became more about exploring the station at my own pace than actively struggling to make it through.

Overall, this game feels more like an exploration sandbox than most other immersive simulators, making me disengage at times, but it really has no major flaws in my mind, and I would recommend it to anyone who would find this intriguing based on its Steam page.

I ended up doing three runs in one sitting, reaching the end of the time limit twice. The combat loop gets really repetitive, really quickly, and the characters don't really seem to have strong arcs like they did in The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa — things just sort of happen in response to the player's actions, where the world and characters feel kind of static and as though they lack agency compared to the world-shaping power of the player. In simpler terms, it feels like a combat/monopoly simulator with consequences, and less like a coherent story with characters — case in point, on one of my runs, I did not focus on attacking specific factions and basically no story ended up occuring, despite Seiji spending every day fighting and capturing districts.

Overall, this has Yeo's usual stylistics, good pixel art, and expanded and improved combat system, etc... but it doesn't really leave an impact on me like their first work.

Having Gotten Over It eight times on mobile, and five times on PC, I can confidently say that this game is a work of art. It unashamedly takes skill-based gameplay and mixes it with frustrating level design and pleasant commentary, motivating you to keep going despite every setback. If you are not afraid of facing a real challenge, having to hone your skills through repeated attempts to reach the summit, and feeling closer to the creator as well as to yourself, I cannot recommend this game enough to you. You will fall, and you will learn to hike. Don't worry if you get teary-eyed at the end, the tears are fully justified.

Despite how simulated the world is, your ways of interacting with it are quite narrow — you cannot even ask random strangers about the weather... I don't really know what I was hoping for, but this game doesn't really seem to have many compelling roleplaying mechanics, and the actual click-and-wait gameplay is both bothersome and boring (micromanaging troops can be interesting enough, but is also frustrating due to all the usual issues you encounter when managing a group in games).

At the end of the day, most of the game seems to be spent running to and fro, or reacting to the world in fairly uninvolved and predictable ways. Maybe I just don't get it.

This game has the best graphics, some of the best gameplay, and some of the best atmosphere in video games. It's a perfect mix of compelling gameplay and even more compelling setting and story. The music, while mostly not my cup of tea, is well-crafted and helps convey the uniqueness of the different areas and encounters in the game, making the whole experience that much more memorable.

I went into Hollow Knight thinking it was going to be another crappy Soulsborne copycat, except in two dimensions, much like Salt and Sanctuary (that game had such unenjoyable gameplay and uninteresting setting that I never bothered to finish it... maybe I'll go back to it one day). What I got instead was a very successful metroidvania which only took the best elements of Dark Souls, splicing them in with its own gameplay and style. I haven't played any metroidvania-platformer games, but I can say that the gameplay in this one was wholly enjoyable even without the context of existing games.

The story and setting, much like Dark Souls, don't really call for describing them in words — suffice to say I would recommend you to experience the game first-hand.

Overall, Hollow Knight is a masterfully crafter experience from start to finish, with a few frustrating moments helping spice up what could have otherwise been a pretty monotonous experience. Unlike Dark Souls, the game never really drops in quality, and there's lots of game to be had for any player seeking to experience it (as someone who has achieved 112% completion, I'm not even going to try the fifth panethon). I can't recommend this game enough, really — there are no real negatives I can see to it. It's a masterpiece.