Breakneck pacing through linear design cleverly made to feel open, combined with the themes of lost agency and the powers one serves betraying them, which juxtaposes excellently by finally facing off with the pinnacle of power Samus used to be - now a horrific weapon to be feared and avoided. I love how naked it all makes you feel, Samus has her powers literally surgically removed from her body, your superiors withhold upgrades from you and lord complete command of your exploration, the new Fusion Suit follows a very bare, muscular system aesthetic, and that's the point.
Your adversary is the SA-X, a fully suited and booted walking sun, it practically glides through the station like a hot knife through butter - but despite inferior firepower and four layers of Federation protocol to sieve through, you've got the one thing it lacks. Wits.

If I could change one thing, it'd be for the opening act to be far less verbose and slow. If I could change a second thing, it'd be to make power bombs actually useful against bosses.

Hammered the entire Bit.Trip series in release order (sans the Runner sequels) the night before Christmas, I have no idea what brought me to thinking this made any sense. My scores for each of the games may not be positively glowing - I just didn't find them all too enjoyable - but you can colour me VERY surprised by how much of a journey the series takes you on.
I had no idea at all that there is a canon to these games, essentially outlining Commander Video's conception, life, death and ascension. There's something a little corny about that on paper, that's the "emotional 2009-2011 indie game story" shorthand, but it's wonderfully obfuscated here by being told almost entirely through wordless gameplay.
Despite the Pong-like bookends at the start and end of the series, each entry plays very differently, but are always a little abrasively difficult. VOID was my favourite, it was a great Katamari-like arcadey concept where you have to be very cognisant of your greed and impulse control.

I've still yet to be convinced by VR. If I wanted to slap physics objects around rudimentary rooms, I'd just play Garry's Mod - which doesn't even require you to wear a radioactive death box on your head that melts the brain and churns the stomach.
Boneworks, however, acts as a showcase for the future potential of VR, a fully immersive museum designed around its myriad gimmicks. Your character is fully rigged with an IK collision solver, lending you a sense of physicality as you climb ladders, run into walls, smash open crates with hammers. It's technically very impressive, but I never found it any fun, in fact it just made me feel violently sick. How the hell do I articulate why something clearly very innovative and forward-thinking just isn't working for me?

The closest comparison I can think of for Boneworks is when you switch to the first person camera while driving a car in a game. Yeah, it's more immersive, but,,, why the fuck would I ever do that. The less is more approach; omniscient camera, invisible player character, and floating disembodies hands is a nicety that eliminates the laborious "realistic, immersive" elements and allows me to focus on the game. If you focus too hard on the game part of Boneworks, it's just some toys strewn around barren environments. We've been talking about the "potential of vr" for fucking years, do something good already.

Silent Bomber ran so Spec Ops: The Line could walk.
Incredible high-octane arcady action where your only method of attack is to plant and detonate bombs. One of those late-PS1 games that realises so much more than you'd expect the console to be capable of graphically - the levels and bosses are detailed, varied, and smartly designed around the controls. The game finishes before you know it at around two hours, making this one of the most cut and dry cases of Just Fucking Play This On That Emulator I Know You Have Right Now.

Solves my biggest problem with Slay the Spire - rather than facing off with only two or three enemies at a time, you are hurriedly retaining ground control of the three floors of your train from a series of escalating enemy waves. It's less elegant, by oh my god it's not stopped being exciting.
Lacks Slay the Spire's years of content and quality of life updates, but the foundation of Monster Train is so strong I'm excited to see where the journey takes it. Wonderfully designed around scrounging whatever bizarre and broken-feeling combos you can find on the road, with a tough but fair difficulty curve that encourages you to do so.

Left my ass cooked and crooked. Easy to let complaints of the rigidity of RPGmaker ATB combat and exploration fall to the wayside when the game's narrative doesn't miss a beat. OFF has a lot of unique ideas, and it tells them confidently with fantastic dialogue, surreal environments and an all around sense of style. For a game that paddles in the abstract so obscenely, the conclusion still manages to expertly close the book and leave the player with exactly what they need. Thanks for the stone in the gut.

Replayed for the first time since launch to see what the famous Updates were about. They must be good, people never stopped bringing them up every time Hello Games added a new type of fern.

All these years and the game is still an exercise in prefab asset tourism - once the novelty wears thin and the artifice sets in, you come to realise that all of the tension comes in the form of anticipating what colour the trees are going to be on the planet you're leisurely approaching. No Man's Sky does about as poor a job of conveying information to the player as Destiny 2. This thing is now a hulking behemoth of retrofitted mechanics that gracelessly clash together, and poorly explain themselves with a haphazard collage of tutorials and tooltips leaving the first thirty minutes of this game with the UI looking like fucking a ransom note. Way to make space travel feel like homework.

Without a shadow of a doubt the best game Crytek has made. An extremely well designed inversion of the Battle Royale formula that mixes PvP and PvE elements with some smart AI and excellent attention to detail in the sound design. The gunplay feels weighty and the enemies are sp00ky. My score is representative of the Solo experience as a chronic antisocial - boring as fuck in spite of things. Get a friend and play this and you'll have a good time. Otherwise you're being lulled into braindeath by rolling brown environments before getting one-tapped by a brain surgeon's shotgun.