EarthBound is as good as all of the indie RPG designers will tell you, and then some. I think this is going to manage to be one of my favorite games of all time. Honestly, this thing is a work of goddamn art.

The story is charming, and perfectly captures that youthful sense of adventure, still harrowing during its darkest moments, but with a permeating feeling of happiness and silliness through it all. The writing is spectacular even at its most absurd, there are some fantastic mechanical touches that set it apart from other JRPGs of the era, and there are some remarkably modern-feeling touches to a game coming up on its thirty year anniversary.

If I had any complaints, they're a pair of small ones: many overworld enemy sprites don't have well-defined "backs" which makes it hard to land sneak attacks, and the inventory management is a bit clunky. That's pretty much it.

Seriously, EarthBound is amazing, and it's as amazing in 2020 as it was in 1994. This game makes me want to be a kid again.

First game cleared on a next-gen console! Downloaded this onto my Series S after waxing nostalgic for pre-reboot Assassin's Creed games. And you know what? My nostalgia was wrong!

I am happy I played this game, because it helped me perfectly encapsulate everything I hate about AAA video games from the last ten years. An open world littered with meaningless collectables which just require you to go to a spot, press B, and get XP. The same jank-ass controls that have plagued this series since goddamn Altair.

This game almost completely dodges saying or even showing anything interesting about the period, a time rife with classism and industry and colonialism. The one hilarious exception is that the game goes balls to the wall on the issue of child labor, which it depicts by making you sneak into factories, violently murder people in front of children, then just say "hey, you're good now" to all the kids, to get a big banner that says "CHILDREN LIBERATED". Then, when you go back to the factory after it's in your control, the kids are STILL THERE.

The writing is also garbage. Almost 24 hours of playtime later, I still have no idea why the villain is the villain other than "he is a Templar and Templars are bad". He has a scheme in literally the last mission to kill a bunch of English heads of state, which would maybe be compelling if I didn't spend all game assassinating heads of state. The game attempts conflict between the leads and a romance subplot, both of which are terrible. No characters have any personality or motivation for doing what they do, other than "they are a character in a video game and they have to do this for the video game to happen".

God I really wish I didn't hate this game.

Absolutely excellent game feel and sense of humor, feels appropriately frantic, punchy, and violent. Everything about this game, in the classic Devolver house style, feels fast and punchy. The kills feel good, the kicks feel good, everything feels good. There's a character named "Professor Meth".

My main complaint is the three boss fights, which feel extremely inappropriate for this kind of game and somehow make the movement speed feel extremely sluggish. The handling is great for corridor shooting, not for obstacle dodging.

Talkin' 'bout Bugsnax.

I wish I liked the fundamental gameplay of Bugsnax as much as I liked the writing and characters, although, admittedly, I like the writing and characters a whole lot. The gameplay though felt a little plain, like I could have used a bit more mechanical depth or at least puzzle solving to actually catching the Bugsnax. Were this game just the mechanics, I probably wouldn't have stuck with it, but the characters are SO good that I was glued to my TV.

Chandlo is maybe my new favorite video game character

This is fun and nice! The platforming here is pretty decent, and the haptic feedback stuff is great. As far as a tech demo goes, this has way more than it needs to, and the homages to Playstation hardware and games alike are constantly nice. I have a few minor quibbles (controlling a glider with a gyroscope will never be fun, video game developers, and neither will multi-stage boss fights without a checkpoint in the middle), but all in all, it's free, it's pretty fun, and it's nice to see all of my Playstation memories in one place.

So, hearing that this game was on the chopping block, and seeing that it's free with Game Pass, I decided to gaze upon 2019's biggest train wreck for myself, see the carnage.

The thing is, though, parts of this game aren't bad. Parts of this game are honestly really good. Many people have cited the flying as being excellent, but honestly I enjoyed most of the combat. Sticking with a Storm for most of my campaign playthrough, the powers were an absolute treat to use, and my brief foray into Colossus was also quite fun, with that thing feeling weighty and like a tank. The character writing, too, is actually pretty solid. There's a decent cast of characters here that I quite enjoyed talking to, and there are some fun twists with their character arcs along the way that I was really excited to watch unfold.

Aaaaaand the bad parts. Two years on, these servers are still unforgivably unstable. I was dropped from missions, almost always almost-done ones, a dozen times in about as many hours. The load times (or, I suspect more accurately, the server connection times) are abhorrent, massive stumbling blocks that absolutely ruin the flow of play. The loot is all incredibly samey, and I was never excited to find a drop. Literally every mission of the game is the same, just fly to a spot, shoot stuff, maybe do a thing, repeat. And boy, god, the bullet-spongey bosses are negative fun to fight.

But, ugh, dammit, parts of this game feel so solid. There's a good idea buried in here, but a lot of the rot that would need to be yanked out to find it probably entails ripping up a lot of fragile and complex backend server code that couldn't be fixed easily. I think I'm actually pretty bummed that Anthem Next is officially dead: there's a version of Anthem that could have been absolutely phenomenal, and parts of it poke up through the surface regularly enough in the Anthem that does exist to make its faults infuriating.

Ugh, I have a million thoughts about this game. I think it has extremely high highs and extremely low lows. I gotta try to consolidate this so it doesn't become a thesis.

I think the beginning of this game is extremely weak, with bad early-game mechanics combining with some really weak writing, but once Johnny's introduced to the plot and the game picks up some thematic depth to sink your teeth into (I really enjoy this game's core theme of "how much control do we have over our own identities") and the roster of side characters gets added to the mix, the game really sank its hooks into me. The writing around the dozen or so really well-done questlines that form the main trunk of the game is excellent, with fantastic character work that stands with the greats.

But boy, this ride gets rickety the longer you stay on it. The mechanics of the game get more and more tiresome and repetitive the more you play, to the point where I was just straight up ignoring side content for the sake of enjoying the good missions more. This game has a LOT of filler, and it shows.

Then, oh god, the ending. The ending I chose was a narrative mess, paying off no themes, being completely uninteresting on its own merits, and being a complete non-sequitur from anything that came before it. Apparently, CDPR arbitrarily chose one of the endings to be The Good Ending, so my ending was awful for seemingly no reason. An absolutely deflating moment to end the game on.

Also, for what it's worth, played this on PS5 and it was buggy as shit. Hard crash every hour and a half or so, for fifty hours. Completely unplayable at times.

Ugh, this game is almost a diamond in some spots, and completely incompetent in others

Outer Wilds is maybe the best video game I have ever played in my entire life. I think it's genuinely beautiful in almost every regard, and a pinnacle of the medium.

This game feels like when you're a little kid in science class, and your teacher does some incredible demonstration where something catches fire or floats or changes colors or something, and you as a kid are like "Whoa, things work like that?". It's that sense of wonder and curiosity perfectly condensed into a game, where your measure of achievement isn't making numbers get higher or killing bigger things, but just being able to truly understand this world, seeing it as one beautiful, harmonious whole whose elegance becomes clearer and clearer as you understand the rules of the system. It feels like the bit at the end of Contact where they say "They should have sent a poet".

Necrobarista is probably my game of the year.

This is a visual novel in the purest sense of the word: there's very little in the way of interactivity, you're essentially just along for the ride of this story, and as someone who normally looks for interesting mechanics first when looking at a game, that might have been a dealbreaker here, but the writing in Necrobarista is so absolutely sublime that I just can't complain at all. The character work here is phenomenal, I love every character in this story (especially Ned), and I was absolutely in tears by the end. A flawless game, everyone should play it.

The calculating, cold part of my brain loves Florence for what a masterpiece of interaction design it is. The way Florence conveys narrative almost exclusively through interaction is amazing, the subtle way that mechanics are played with and change to mark changes in the story borders on genius. Any game should look to Florence as a master class in how controls are a key vector for meaning in an interactive medium.

But boy, my bleeding heart just loves this game even more. The story it tells is cute, heart-wrenching, joyous, sorrowful, just amazing. Florence almost made me cry. I love this game, no doubt. I'm very happy I played this.

It honestly fucks me up how good Ape Out is.

I love jazz. Like a lot. When I moved recently, vicinity to jazz clubs was, like, one of my top three metrics for choosing where to live. Of course, the Current Unpleasantness fucked that up for me, so something about hearing some dynamic, live(ish), excited, goddamn JAZZ filled me with so much joy.

And the gameplay here is delightful, so simple as to be easily understood, but with a tactility and forcefulness to it that makes it constantly delightful. It never didn't bring a smile to my face to hurl a guy straight into a wall or out of a window.

Ape Out rules. Everyone should play Ape Out.

With my return to the World of Assassination, I took it upon myself to replay the entire trilogy, ICA Training Facility to the Carpathian Mountains, tip to tail. This was my first time going through 3, obviously, but also my first time going through New York and Haven Island. This review will be discussing Hitman 3 as it exists with all previous Hitman content inside of it.

Hitman 3 is one of the greatest video games ever made, bar none. It is, frankly, a sublime package in all regards. A mechanics-heavy sandbox design philosophy created in 1, evolved in 2, and finally perfected in 3 carries this entire series, making this entire game feel to me like a sort of beautiful piece of masterwork clockwork, one which I want to just stare at and fiddle with and see how all of the pieces move.

The new batch of maps in 3 are probably my favorite of the series. It sort of feels like 1 set the groundwork for this sort of game structure and created some solid maps to demonstrate its ideas. 2 expanded those ideas both in scope and complexity (which was good) and by starting to toy with some non-assassination objectives to spice things up, which were a mixed success. 3 perfects this new variety, crafting missions that feel very distinct from each other and all of the other missions in the game, while still offering that freedom and mechanical complexity all the way through (unlike, say, the Sapienza lab, which feels extremely railroady).

Altogether fantastic. I understand why IOI might want to stretch their legs and make new games after this, and I'll support them every step of the way, but I could play another 7 of these games.