Noticeably bloated and senselessly cruel, showing this to a newcomer pretty much requires the disclaimer that "you will die a lot, just try to use all of your bombs before that happens." If this were a slightly neater package; less repetitious segments, and perhaps updated to facilitate a health system rather than one of chugging endless coins in the virtual cabinet, it'd feel less like you're just being strung along for the ride. On the plus side, it's a fucking great ride - an avalanche of spectacle propped up with just about the right amount of feedback to tell you that you're the one controlling it. The final chapter is Thrillhouse incarnate.

Not entirely sure I follow the sentiment of "Yume Nikki, but not incomplete". The last thing I want to think when exploring surreal and intimately personal and vulnerable dreamscapes is ~As A Gamer, I Wish This Were A More Well-Rounded Package~.
2kki is commendable in that its areas are vast and bountiful, but with such little sense of thematic throughline - a clear byproduct if its lengthy development time causing too many disparate ideas to be thrown into the mix. I don't want to rag on a humble free indie project, but I can't pretend this feels like anything but imitation with more bells and whistles. If you like the structure of Yume Nikki, go off, but the vibes aint here.

I miss sending glitter to my homies.....
The world lost a shade of colour when the Switch released with a different type of touchscreen to the 3DS, I guess it's a capacitive one similar to the type phones use? Either way, it disincentivises the use of anything but a finger, or a specialised conductive stylus that the system doesn't even come with. No Art Academy, no Etrian Odyssey, no freaking Swapnote. Not swaggie. The humble social doodler has been hunted down and destroyed. Swapnote Nikki found dead in Miami.

Awe inspiring level design, both to explore and look at, but I can't help but find the core to be a little too rigid for me to really sink my teeth into.
Every time I think I make a discovery, I'm rewarded by a Challenge Complete notification, exp, an achievement or something. It's normal as hell as far as games go, but The World of Assassination feels choreographed to absolute distraction, there's almost something deflating about how all of your devious machinations have been accounted for in advance, and often in the most boring way. Agent 47 is an intrepid explorer going through thoroughly charted ground. A complex system of screenplays that adorn every map, and any time you deviate from the strict and pre-defined script, the AI snaps in half.

There's a lot of fun to be had in replaying levels, finding an impressive amount of secrets, unlocking and levelling up to keep the reptile brain happy, but as far as Hitman goes - I'll keep returning to Contracts and Blood Money.

The game masquerades as some kind of Ninja Gaiden throwback, but if anything its overall quality smacks more of b-tier NES action games like Shatterhand and Vice: Project Doom.
Beyond the faux-retro aesthetic, Shovel Knight had a foundation of fun player movement that helped sell the challenge to just about everyone right out of the gate. Alternatively, Cyber Shadow locks all of its interesting character abilities behind story progress. I spent most of my playtime wishing I had rudimentary abilities that I could tell existed within the game somewhere. By the time I got the parry, my patience was sapped away by the levels' cruel and unwieldy design. Maybe this game gets fun when you unlock all the upgrades - I'm not about to find out.
Cyber Shadow feels allergic to the idea of having much of an identity of its own beyond obnoxious difficulty. I can only recommend you check out Panzer Paladin instead.

Ultimately, a middling Source engine mod that came out at a time when there were a thousand other, better ones of its kind. Hard to beat the aesthetic, a wonderfully gritty sci-fi """cyberpunk??"" setting that if anything still feels fresh. Enjoyed skulking around empty servers and soaking in the unparalleled atmosphere. The maps genuinely feel haunted, detailed and littered with props and history; like teleporting into a forgotten world plagued by untold stories. Whatever sickness that once resided behind these metal walls managed to remove all life therein. I genuinely implore anyone to give this mod a shot just to create a solo server and explore the maps and soak in the vibes.

The game's biggest sin is commissioning Ed Harrison to create one of the best soundtracks ever, and then proceeds to just.... not use it natively? Servers outright had to enable a radio plugin to play the songs that were dormant in the directory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPUp2PiCYBY

Aye, makes sense why I'd never heard of this series before. I love the cast and the artstyle that informs their incredible designs but.... that's about it. Basic point and click adventure game with shallow puzzles and obtuse solutions. I'm normally so weak to games with an element of charm that overrides any complaint I'd have about the core gameplay, but not this time. It's just too dull and frustrating.
Mackenzie is a character I'll stock up rent free in my head until the end of my days, but she can leave the game she's from behind.

I was wondering why I couldn't mine from a mineral deposit in FFXI. It turns out I had to open an item trade with the mining spot and offer my pickaxe.
This game was made by and for psychopaths.

The first day of my subscription was spent trying to log in to the DRM, PlayOnline, something that felt held together by spit and a prayer. Already feeling pressed for time, I started looking into guides, FAQs and walkthroughs to immediately realise that they are filled with conflicting information. What ensued was 29 days of folkloric adventuring, going off years-old rumours and hearsay found among mostly defunct Wikis. A guide would literally say "- Once you meet unknown requirements" and I'd have to crack my knuckles and experiment in any way I could with the absolute wishing well that forms FFXI's design. Unclear signposting, a nightmarish control scheme, and unresponsive NPCs - but what really drags the experience down is the lengthy grind, which not even late-expansion introduced multipliers and buffs seem to alleviate much.

In a way, I almost admire how every single element of this game feels as tuned as possible to be as transgressively rude and dull as possible. Still, I gave it a shot after two decades-worth of quality of life alterations were added to the title. I can't say it really felt that way as a newcomer, but there were entire systems I found myself relying on, such as the NPC summoning Trust mechanic and repeatable quests that I was assured were late additions.

The thing that kept me strung along really was the story elements; they're so fantastic. Great dialogue and large scale narrative events with meta elements that recontextualise entire swathes of the game in genuinely impressive ways. And almost all of them are things that the guides neglect to mention; you stumble upon genuinely stellar moments while trying to do your bread and butter.

I'll probably never re-subscribe, it was a fascinating month of archaic-yet-ingenious design. On the one hand, thank God I'll never play anything like this again, but on the other, ah man I kinda miss it already. Hell is real, and you can pay £8 a month to experience it.

One of the very many games advertised to me as "having no jumpscares" only for it to have jumpscares. Either my definition of the word is very different from other people's, or I'm easy to own.

Probably the best of these indie horrors with a vague and confused "retro-inspired" aesthetic I've ever played, which doesn't put it very high on my actual quality barometer. It essentially has every single idea you've ever read in an ideas guy greentext horror game thread. I struggle to lend any points for originality (the elevator was cool!!). Still, it's just a lot of nice ideas bundled together into a neat package that is suspiciously just as long as it takes an average Youtube audience to drop off a Let's Play. Hmmmmmmm????? Probably a coincidence.

In the interest of fairness, I believe to know the appeal here. This game's success makes total sense; it's the genre in a shot glass, a Now That's What I Call Horror compilation album with all the bang and none of the fuss. But the devil is in the details. After learning that the developer of this game previously made Spooky's Jumpscare Mansion, it all kinda made sense. "No new ideas under the sun" etc., but horror only works for me when it is introducing ideas that feel in some way fresh, with implications that allow them to stew in my subconscious during/after the runtime or for themes to be navigated in a way that evokes something in me.
Lost In Vivo succeeds at what it tries to do, which is take elements from Silent Hill and SCP Foundation, among many others, and allow the player to fight through the layers of horror hell. Enemies with insane designs screaming towards you as you blast them with your shotgun, defiantly keeping your cool under the setpieces and crushing atmosphere that strings the game together like a roving epic. There's an "Abandon all hope ye who enter" graffiti tag near the start of the game, so I mean yea. I find it all a little too grating, obvious and cheap, but hey.

Marred by my very personal distaste of its handling of the subject matter and exacerbated by my slight gripes with this style of dialogue. I felt emotionally manipulated into fixing my "mistake" on the second attempt.
At the very least, I couldn't find an ill-meaning bone in Missed Messages' body, leaving its brief runtime to feel a little too out of its own depth to competently navigate its story and offer anything besides momentary catharsis. This is the type of thing that'll hit different people in wildly different ways - I can't say it accomplished what it clearly set out to do for me, but it failed in style and with heart.

This review will be mostly partial to the Level 50 (2.X) content that existed before the first Heavensward expansion dropped.

I completed Shadowbringers on release, and went into FFXIV hibernation until the Endwalker trailer got a few friends interested in giving the game a whirl. Eagerly jumped at the opportunity to make a new character on a preferred server, if only to see what impact the long-coming quality of life alterations had on the base game content.

As long as they pick the 'preferred server', newcomers receive a hefty exp bonus that I'd say nearly destroys any need even to do an unimportant sidequest or levelling duty finder. By the time the credits rolled, I already had two classes at level 50, which slaps hard. Considerable alterations were more recently made to the overall length of the 2.X quests - removing something like 18% of main story quests, and heavily abbreviating the ones that remain and adding the ability to use flying mounts in the old zones.

This all sounds really boring and granular, but honestly, it goes a long way into shortening what I'd essentially call the absolute worst content the game has to offer.
In general, it's not until you hit level 50 for your class' toolset will finally feel something close to 'fullness', allowing the player nigh-constant engagement with skill rotations and cooldowns.
It's also not until the post-credits content where the story gets promoted above... boilerplate? Characters become more clearly defined, and the story takes a turn into a fairly convincing political drama. That isn't to say admirable themes of growing into a legend while bringing the world together to heal the wounds caused by the calamity aren't present from the start, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The base game is A Realm Unseasoned, but I find it all worth the effort. Not only is the writing fun in a quaint enough way, but the foundation for great things to come has been made a whole lot more painless to trudge through. I don't envy the FFXIV team's task of adding ever more floors to the monolithic retrofitted nightmareskyscraper that is the game's life structure. The first content you see is the oldest and most naive, and you just have to be patient enough to watch the game grow into something spectacular as you progress through the MSQ. One thing I find particularly impressive is how well the game eases players in with evenly spaced tutorials and tools you have to play to unlock. Far too many live-service games in rotation nowadays do a terrible job at teaching the player anything in a way that isn't intensely overwhelming.