HBO Presents: Half Life 2 - Episode 1 (FakeFactory Cinematic Mod).

While both games are surely quite good, I'm still unconvinced by The Last of Us. There's REALLY nothing I can add on top of Pansy's wonderful review.
What mostly struck me was how sanded down much of the theming of this really was, the way the second half of the game begs you to find endearment in Abby and her family struck as cartoonish in the already well-trodden realm of player implicating. What I did find assuring was how much I agreed with the game's own assessment of Joel, despite eroding the ambiguity that gave the ending any kick to begin with. Considering how much the game caters itself to low common denoms, I'm glad it didn't take the easy way out and venerate him, making Ellie's Quest 4 Revenge as dicey as it needed to be. I genuinely only wish this wasn't a roving epic where 13 hours of playtime are dedicated to hugging walls, opening shelves and picking up scraps of metal. The developers dying at their desks for this game feels uniquely frustrating to me because of how... unambitious it felt despite dizzyingly high production values?? The whole thing is enemy chokeholds in dense concrete jungles separated w/ scripted segments where someone grapples you from offscreen for going through a door. Very brave, Druckmann.

With great shame, I've always been apathetic to Mario's plight. His journey is a noble one, but I do not see myself in his bings, nor his bings. His wahoos do not reach me. I feel like a cunt rat bastard for giving this Three Succulent Backloggd Stars ⭐⭐⭐ and absconding with the ultimate sayaway that this is "still one of the better Marios" but that's-a my burden, not yours - my paesano in cristo. I pirated and completed the game days ago and earnestly found myself worrying I'd forget I even played it before it released and I could officially log the game on BL.

It's good!!! Honest and true!!! Nice to see what felt like notes of 3D World in here with the little rosary bead structure and rhythm of each level having their own little wonder flower acting as an F5 button, refreshing the level's objective into a unique blink-and-you'll-miss-it sleight of hand trick. It keeps u guessing but only so much. It's still Mario, it's still the charisma of a cereal box free toy, but credit where it's due - the soundtrack is nice and they did a great job in shuffling the artstyle up into representing illustrative 3D. Not losing my nut over this but it's nice to see some sparks of personality rattling around behind mario's shark eyes.

Surprised by how little I hate this. On paper, it's pure gunk of a game, all about being a little seratonin plant that stimulates the brain with the fun chemicals by employing the most base level of visual power escalation. It's not just number go up, it's projectile go so Up you can barely see the field anymore. It's all pretty basic stuff, but that's the appeal - a game stripped down to bare essentials, the character arc of a fully-fledged Metroidvania condensed to maybe 30-minute intervals. A thin Roguelite affair with all the trappings that smacks of a Flash golden-era desktop toy. I'm happy to call this game shite, but it's like yelling at a cheap stress ball and I am well aware of the desperate things we do when we have to listen to a podcast. The veneer of Vampire Survivors is pretty hilarious, uses Castlevania's aesthetic right down to stealing monster designs and items and stuff, alongside this unashamed casino spin where you're pulling gatchas from chests and rolling for good pickups. The music and sound effects sound like a pub fruit machine constantly screaming for attention all the while I'm mowing down the devil's legions in gothic castles.

I see the appeal, I really do, but I'm one of those freaks that watches a movie without tearing my eyes off the screen to blink. Stripping down a game to the point where it is nothing but mechanical gratification isn't my thing, I just need the narrative thrust or linear hand-crafted oven-cooked pomp and care or else a game just loses me and I forget it the moment it exits my peripheral. If I was a kid that had to pretend to do work in IT class in the year of our lord 2022 this would probably be my go-to, but I was definitely better off doing the same with Warning Forever.

Mascot character platformers are one of the most exciting genres in gaming to me. They have the potential to be an intriguing concoction of every visual, aural and story element that normally goes into games, but benefit strongly from their bend towards the main controllable character being the mechanical focus. Characters like Rayman, Ratchet & Clank, Hat Kid, their games are informed by their personalities and rulesets in a way that contextualises the player’s involvement in their worlds. Conceptualised well enough, the degree of exploration and interaction afforded to the characters can elevate these titles to surprising degrees, and give them a unique voice with a sense that they really have something to say.

This is pretty much where Psychonauts comes in. The first game came about in the full swing of the mascot platformer craze of the 00’s - and with the help of Double Fine’s history in sharp character writing and adventure exploration, concocted a game where the themes are both broad and accessible: Psychics exist and can explore people’s mental planes to empathise with visualisations of their own unique psychological issues.

Part of my adoration for the first Psychonauts comes from its strong visual direction, with off-beat and illustrative takes on individual character’s mindscapes. Psychonauts goes above and beyond with its core concepts by allowing its cast to express themselves through clever writing and impressionistic environmental caricature. Likely inspired by Rankin Bass stop motion movies and the artwork of Tim Burton, who’s styling has roots in ideas of eccentrism, depression and nonconformity - as well as have a level of cheeky humour that complements its attempts to depict darker themes. It sets the perfect stage for what Psychonauts is setting out to do; to let its cast express themselves in unique and personal ways of which the player is tasked with physically navigating, a visual metaphor for the therapist and the client. All these abstractions never go too far into sheer chaos because they’re balanced wonderfully and grounded with stereotypical visual metaphors that help keep things grounded, like “censors”, “emotional baggage”.


Psychonauts 2 is great, I’m amazed that it not only delivered on its promise of being a follow-up to the original title, it also exceeded it in almost every aspect. My main complaints are that I simply didn’t find it anywhere near as laugh-out-loud funny, and that the climax is a little contrived to the point it simply wasn’t satisfying. One of the strengths of the original was the level of interaction you had with the world in the form of use-items and environmental objects, and character count… something Psychonauts 2 seems to have made an effort on trimming down. I think a lot of my disappointment in the humour of this game stems from how little there is to reveal, by comparison? Still, it’s a fun story to see unfold - I’m hugely fond of how there is a throughline across the levels in the form of a kind of shared trauma within the cast.

This is simply one of the best looking games I’ve ever seen from a technical standpoint. Uses, and masters every trick in the Unreal Engine book while also inventing new ones. Unbelievable work with gravity tricks, false scale, shaders and portals. Every area is simply stunning. I can’t believe how good it looks. Oh my god. Platforming feels wonderful and mercifully there’s an easy mode for the less-than-stellar combat.

This review feels bad to me so I'll just end it here.

My contrarian ass is always on the lookout for another miscarriage of Gamer Justice, failed assessments of misunderstood secret gems of olde - it's my role as tastemaker ambassador in chief to purify the well and let the world drink full with a hidden mineral spring of mastapieces. Vexx looks like if Hugo the Troll listened to Lacuna Coil, why did I think this would be any good. The best compliment I can give this game is that it's "fascinatingly ugly", another misguided 00's attempt to cross Soul Reaver with Banjo Kazooie. Just dispassionately flopping onto the collectathon genre with a sauceless platter of 14 worlds and 100 orbs and 6 skulls and 81 hearts, it's kinda funny it's kinda sad.

"The world once shaped by the great will has come to an end.
It was a foregone conclusion. All is preordained.

If in spite of this you still have the will to fight, now is your chance to prove it."

This is a particularly difficult game for me to write about because I want to greedily compare and contrast every ballhair with the first title’s, just so I can diagnose exactly where my issues with it lie - why a game that is functionally so similar in DNA to one of my all-timers doesn’t hit the mark. Personally speakin, the long & short of it is that Dragon’s Dogma 2 is something of a sidegrade to the original title that distances itself too much from what I found spectacular about it to begin with.

Possibly my favourite element of Dragon’s Dogma 2 is one that could be felt from the moment you first gain control of your character. There’s a palpable heft to character locomotion, complimented by the multilayered textuality of the land itself & the threats of wrong turns into the unknown or slipping off a slick cliffside to your untimely demise - it leans wonderfully far into the concept of traversal being a battle unto itself. As was the case with DD1, being tasked to travel from safety to a marker deep into the fog of war is never a simple request. Goblins, ogres, harpies, and whoever else decides to grace you with their presence are waiting in the bushes to act as regular speedbumps to be carefully considered and planned for accordingly.

Where DD2 slips at this for me is in how little it reciprocates for what it demands. This is a sequel that has ballooned itself in scale to a dizzying near 5x the original map’s size, but hasn’t developed the enemy roster nor the environmental design acumen to make use of it. Take for instance that DD2 has fifty caves strewn around its tectonic world map, and I don’t think a single one is as impressive as one that could be found in DD1. Where the caves/dungeons in DD1 were concerned, there would be special objectives relevant to the overall story, a person you were going there on behalf of who represented a town or group, they would unlock shortcuts for faster world traversal and upon repeat visits you’d notice the location’s role in the world change for the denizens. They would be densely designed so that every corner was worth being scanned to the best of your ability for pickups, shortcuts, levers, climbing points - lending to the almost DnD-esque adventure core followed passionately by the game’s design. Hell, the locales would generally sound and look different too, built to purpose so as to become plausible enough to justify their utility in the world and lend credence to exploring them.

Compared to that, DD2 has shockingly little of this. Its myriad nondescript caves wallhugging the world could scarcely be five prefab rooms tied into a loop to house a few potions, or some equipment you could find at a store. No unique gimmicks or trials, only populated by a handful of gobbos and maybe a midboss as a treat. I feel that Dragonsbreath Tower was supposed to act as something of a callback to Bluemoon Tower from DD1 - it being a perilous journey across a handful of biomes towards a crumbling hanging dungeon that houses a flying peril, but it’s so bereft of pomp and confidence. A truly memetic core routine that made me think less of adventures and more of waypoints and upgrade materials. I want to use a Neuralyzer to remove BotW shrines from the face of the earth. And god why is none of the new music good.

DD2 implies at a big story, but to me it felt like nothing came together. I had no idea who anyone was supposed to be beyond Brant, Sven and Wilhelmina. DD1’s progression from Wyrmhunt -> Investigate the Cult -> Kill Grigori -> Deal with the Everfall -> Confront the Seneschal was great, and throughout all of that you kept up with characters like the King and got to see his downfall. The writing and delivery of the cult leader and Grigori himself far surpasses anything in DD2, despite having very similar subjects. Outpaced by DD1 in setpieces and pop-offs and thematics. There's barely any antagonistic people in the game and once you get to Battahl it feels as though the game trails off like it’s got dementia.

It's a completely different kind of design that, sure, encourages player freedom - but communicates it in this really loose way that I just don't care about. I spent much of my playthrough having no idea what I was doing besides wiping off the blank smudges of world map. What expounds this problem is that quest discoverability is astonishingly low here, oftentimes made worse by restricting itself to AI astrology, time of day, relationship levels (??). The duke could stand to commission a farcking quest board imo!!! I won’t kid myself and say that the quests in DD1 were even a bronze standard, but they worked and communicated exactly what they needed to do while also leaving open ends available for interpretation. But in DD2, they’re just awful, I absolutely hated the experience of trying to clear up Vermund’s quests before pushing Main Story progression and at this point I wish I cared as little as the game does. What need is there for almost all of them to have a “return to me in a few days” component in a game with such limited fast travel, do you want me to throw you into the brine? Frankly the game is never as interesting as when you're doing Sphinx riddles.

Combat’s good enough, I do enjoy how the interplay of systems would present the player with all sorts of unique situations, but even these can and do begin to feel samey when a very slim enemy pool on shuffle. What makes these emergent conflicts even less impressive to me is how I can't help but feel as though the ogres, trolls and chimeras in particular have had their difficulties neutered. The hardest time I had with the chimera was during a sidequest where you had to get the poison-lover to be doused in chimeric snake venom. They're barely a threat otherwise, and can either be chain stunlocked with well-placed shots or slashes, or get too lost in their own attack animations to really hit anyone. Comparing these enemies to DD1 where climbing was far more effective at dealing damage encouraged the player to get real up close to them and it felt like their AI knew how to deal with that. Like when I fought the Medusa it felt like they didn't have any idea where the party even was. I think if the hardest encounters the game has to offer is Too Many Goblins we have a problem. (Dullahan is very cool though)

I’m not miffed no matter how miffed I sound. When do people like me ever get sequels to games they love? I’ll tell u dear reader it’s Never. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is full of wonder & delight and I think anyone less fatigued by SCALE and SANDBOX than me has a home in it. I feel a little left behind, having spent 12 years wasting away in the waiting room rotating in my head the concepts DD1 confidently wields, and its further potential as a foundation for a sequel. A game that was absolutely 'for me', course correcting into sick-of-this-already airspace. I’ll be excited to see whatever news, expansions or the like the future holds for DD2. Right now, though? I think DD1 has a stronger jawline.

Hard to completely despise this despicable game because it's been polished to an absolute mirror shine through a lifetime of quality over quantity updates. Sadly, these updates were hyper-focused towards catering to the Elite Gamer demographic and far less towards the people who play games to have fun, and you're lying if you think there's no difference between the two. I went into this game at release hoping it would shape up to fit the hole in my heart left by Team Fortress 2, but Overwatch's walled garden content approach means the sheer user-created variety will never ever coalesce.
I'm not saying I'd love this game if it lets people make surf maps or play on servers with insane plugins - but I'd PROBABLY love it, if it even as much as let me set my spray to an animated gif of Konata Izumi.

My wildest hopes and dreams for Overwatch 2 begin and end at hoping they hired a writer this time. Overwatch trailers are seriously written like when you just press the middle suggested word on your phone keyboard. "We are heroes and we must protect this world because it is just the right thing to do and heroes must come together to do what is right and". I literally need to stop myself before I start talking about how good the TF2 comics were.

I have this propensity to never play games a second time, even the ones I love. It serves me well more often than not, because I greatly value backlog exploration and sheer variety over mechanical or scholarly mastery of any specific title. Where it bites me in the wahooey, however, is in largely skill-oriented titles like character action games, ones that demand keen attentiveness and willingness to retain and juggle knowledge of systems macro and micro. For as much as I love these games for their absolutely unbridled pomp and the hot-blooded verve that courses thru em - I know I’m not going to get the most out of them, I just don’t have that kind of attention. Bayonetta 1 is astoundingly good, but it’s a game I essentially Bronze Trophied my way through, and only watched .webms of people going sicko online for. I only knew what dodge offset WAS when I hit the last level, when it was too late for me 😔.
Bayorigins: Wily Beast and Weakest Creature is just a nice little scrimblo that forces a more steady pace with its longer runtime and focus on action adventure & metroidvania-lite elements. There is a more sensical focus on the storytelling here than in the mainline entries, exemplified through its presentation style of a children’s picturebook narrated by a granny. It’s all just nice, the visual direction is utterly astounding, and is the most blown away I’ve been by sheer artistry in a videogame in a very long time, the shader programmers were spinning in their chairs like the tasmanian devil on this one. With the combat being a touch more of a tertiary focus on the title than the rest, it allows itself time to slowly blossom through the course of the runtime with a steadily increasing amount of abilities, roadblocks and enemy gimmicks - and while there are no post-battle ranking screens to have Stone trophies nip at my heels, it felt immensely satisfying to sense myself mastering it under a more forgiving piecemeal delivery. It’s actually a little impressive how intuitive this control scheme becomes after an awkward starting period; forcing the player to control two separate characters by splitting the controller inputs down the middle. With its smart application within certain story beats, I became more than sold on the way this plays, kinda love it. For all these reasons, it's my favourite Bayonetta game. This is the warmest I’ve felt for a Platinum title since Wonderful 101, and while it doesn’t reach the same heights, it’s a miraculously good little spinoff to patch over my confidence in the studio that Bayo3 had dented.

Pretty much the same experience as Horizon 4 - if you liked that, you've got more waypoints to hold RT to & from. I sadly get nothing out of this, and its desperate cloying attempts to wrangle a drop of dopamine from me all fail too. People give rpgs a bad rep for the whole "number go up" thing, but this could not feel more like time wasted while being hypnotised by a laserlightshow of exp bars and increasing integers that progress towards nothing. Far too many player retention systems draped over a racing game that is overly saccharine in tone and too scared to thrill. The challenges just aren't interesting and the cars don't even feel that good, what am I missing here? This is what all the dialogue sounds like https://i.imgur.com/i1TOMt2.png
Sick beyond belief of open worlds where I have no idea whether the tasks are procedurally or community generated. A barren expanse of a world map dotted with prefab roads and obstacles that the course designer has to fruitlessly negotiate with for any texture. Maybe I'm just down on this franchise for whatever weird or petty reason, it just gives me the same joy as being toured around a Toyota dealership. Psychotic UI, too; why do we want our system navigation to look like a moodboard. Perfectly competent, very pretty, but I don't have 122gb to spare for a game that is only adequate lol.

I've been pushing for Cotton to be the mascot of Backloggd for the best part of a year now and the intro of this game featuring her bio that states "Age: Unknown. Mental age: 5" is validation for that. Accept her as the symbol for what you are - a hungry little scamp and rascal.

Anyway, this is great. Played the recently released fan translation and was blown away by how fun this shmup is from front to back. A core universal grabbing and throwing mechanic on top of a general focus on physics-based nonsense makes Cotton 2 so much more tactile and openly comedic than most other Shmups I've ever played. Particularly adore the cutscenes inbetween misisons using squash and stretch principles applied to comic book panels, it's all shockingly unique and easy to love.

I’m overwhelmingly glad that I stuck with this game through to the end, because I very nearly didn’t. True to what other people have said - Eastward is glacial; largely disinterested with stringing the player along with explosive story beats, overarching goals and villains. While the game shares many similarities to Zelda: Minish Cap and Mother 3 in its aesthetics, dungeon schema and quirky ensemble cast, it feels closer in spirit to Moon: Remix RPG. Eastward is primarily a story of a journey, a potpourri of emotions and vignettes, and it expects you to inhabit the communities of the microworlds you visit on your trip. I wish I had known this going in, and I’d like to start my review by stating as such as a primer for anyone reading because when I clocked what Eastward’s intentions were and met it halfway, I finally found myself sinking in.

Eastward is an adventure RPG revolving around the story of John, a stoic, taciturn miner and his mysterious wide-eyed adoptive daughter named Sam - each born into an isolated town deep beneath the surface. The narrative is ostensibly a one-way ticket on a train powered by Sam’s positive energy and curiosity as she yearns to see the sun for the first time with a thoroughly convincing and endearing childlike wonderment. Upon reaching the surface, I was right there with her.

The world is presented through the dichotomy of John and Sam’s polar opposite personalities. Sam is contagiously cheerful and childishly chatty, but she often fails to perceive the more adult dramas and contradictions. Despite John being ghoulishly silent throughout the game, he exhibits warmth and intelligence at points that the player can fill in themselves. This is particularly noticeable in moments like when Sam and John encounter incubators for artificial human beings hidden deep within ruins for the first time. For Sam, those seem almost like hyper-technological playgrounds, while for John, and consequently also for the player, their mysterious and threatening nature is very evident. It’s all surprisingly effective as far as Game Dad character interactions go.

Eastward is a post-apocalyptic setting fraught with danger, but dotted along the tracks are pockets of humanity small and large, towns and cities with cultures cultivated over time in isolation. Each is inhabited by characters that are of course quirky, but surprisingly fleshed out and genuinely memorable. It’s been a very long time since a game world has felt so alive and well-told down to its minute details, helped in no small part to the stellar pixel work in the meticulously realised characters and environments. Some of the best pixel art I have ever seen. Honestly, it left me genuinely inspired - to take in every inch of the world, but also to create for myself.

I often found myself thinking back to the steps on the path I had already walked, about the characters I could no longer return to, and wondering what they were doing while I was not there to watch. Personally speaking, I can ask nothing more of a game. Eastward acted as a beacon of positive vibrations and inspiration to me. As someone who has never grown out of pinning himself to a train window and imagining the lives of the people in the towns I zoom by, the experience of this game was incisive to something I hold dear. Favourite game of 2021 by far.