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.

Writing any sort of conflict for which the crux is a single piece of information that the main character knows but doesn't just say to the character with whom they have conflict should be five years' jailtime.

Other than the pretty lackluster villain roster (save a brief cameo appearance by... sort of a classic Spider-Man villain), this was pretty enjoyable! If this was a 20-30 hour mega-open world, I would probably have gotten very tired of it very fast, but it clocks in short-and-sweet, meaning other than screaming at a character in the end, I enjoyed this tip to tail.

This was, if you'll believe it or not, my first time playing Journey, a game heralded as nothing short of a masterpiece since it came out eight years ago. My not playing it for so long was partially inertia, partially the shame of having to admit I missed it, and partially fear that there would be no one playing this game in 2020 save me, forcing me to both miss the game's valuable cooperative elements, and to mourn the loss of such an incredible game.

But, no mourning today, I found Journey on PS4 to be alive and well, and joined a small troupe of companions during my journey up the mountain. I can't possible have much to say this late in the game that hasn't been said a hundred fold, but this game still does meaningful cooperation and multiplayer so simply and perfectly that it still stands tall as a masterpiece of the craft this far along later, and I hope travelers continue to go up the mountain for years to come, to keep this thing alive and perfectly beautiful.

This game fuckin' rules, oh my god, another thing I should have played years ago. As a sucker for ensemble villain casts, where every villain has their own, like, thing going on, a game about fighting your way to the top of an assassin leaderboard is absolutely my jam.

I must echo the common complaint here, that the open world sucks and is pointless and sucks away too much time, but they already fixed that in the sequel, a decade ago, so how mad can I really be. My biggest stumbling block here was a lack of tutorialization. The game just straight up doesn't tell you about some mechanics (notably a sort of split-second dodge I unlocked somewhere around the halfway mark, I guess), and, in what I assume is a new issue to the port, no controls scheme really bites you in the ass when you switch from Docked to Undocked and the whole control scheme changes without it telling you how.

I really love this game. The premise is good dumb fun, the combat at its peaks is extremely exciting and fast-paced, and I am a sucker for any game that structures itself around a series of cool, unique boss battles.

The nice thing about being this late to a franchise is, hey, there's also No More Heroes 2 for me to play, and hopefully 3 just around the corner.

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".

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

Rolled credits on Hades after a triumphant 10th clear, but I think this will remain the game I go back to whenever I have a little bit of free time left on my hands to enjoy.

Honestly, with the well-deserved praise this game is getting all around right now, especially with regards to Game of the Year deliberations, there's not much I can add to the conversation other than to add my voice to the chorus (heh) saying that this game is incredible.

The way it doles out narrative, the way conversations with characters react to your play, the way storylines ebb in and out of each other, the tight, snappy gameplay, the fantastic upgrades which let you play in so many wonderful, different ways, the way all of the systems slowly unfold like a lotus as you play, the fun of setting your own challenge with the Pact, it's all just so perfect.