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.

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.

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.

Stare deep enough into the fractal, you'll find yourself staring back. Nothing short of genius - informed by its budgetary limits and creates something truly unique through them. Visuals that go far against horror genre presumptions and instead strives for something calm, meditative, beautiful. The spotless, uncanny opulence of the aging room in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but completely unfathomable in terms of scale and purpose. Possibly my favourite diegetic UI and sound design in games, with the frantic feeling of the encounters being matched completely by their aesthetics going from subtle to sensorially overwhelming. Absolutely beautiful reactive score and weighted feeling lore that is explained through fantastic writing and voice performances.
I don't want to give away the core gimmick of the palace, but suffice to say; Oh My God, play this.

A complicated mess that requires a more complicated assessment than my tiny brain can offer. It is VERY clearly unfinished, you can practically feel the lingering absence of certain mechanics - almost as if the game is riddled with holes from when they were ripped out during the crunch phase. What awful turbulent development did this game go through for it to take 7~8 years to make what is essentially just Rage 2. It's neither a pointed immersive sim or a sprawling interactive open world.

There's stuff to like here, I'm immensely endeared to the sheer level of detail in Night City's design. It's not often an open world lends itself to a sense of verticality with wonderfully designed multi-level roads and walkways that bob and weave haphazardly through the skyline, entirely different styles of colour scheme and architecture when you across districts. Walk from one end of a street to another and be greeted with a new vista. It's genuinely gorgeo. Keanu gives his best performance since Bill & Ted and I'm not even kidding.

I just hate Borderlands DPS-FPS design so much. A litter tray of skill tree perks that make invisible percentile changes and shooting guys just to watch numbers pop out of their heads until they die. It’s never been satisfying, I never win an encounter with a sense of accomplishment, just that I had a gun powerful enough for the task at hand. Why have we done nothing but regress from what FEAR 1 accomplished?

The narrative design is weak overall, each character archetype being funnelled into the same canned timeskip sequence and starting point is about all you need to know you're not freely role playing at all. I love going to undiscovered side gigs with the flavour text "Who knows what you might find?" only for a phone call to completely spell out the entire mission when I enter its proximity. Really keeps any sense of adventure and wonder intact. The only sidequest I didn't complete was the one that I couldn't get working, which it turns out was about a character voiced by Grimes lol. Fuck outta here. What really takes the cake is that every significant-feeling moral choice I've made has absolutely no payoff ingame, and essentially feel like DLC bait. The game aint fucking done.

Is it the best often-delayed and buggily released open world game where you play as a person with a bunch of tricked-out gadgets who is fighting against time to remove a parasitic person in their head who appears as a snarky vision that leans on walls and makes fun of you, but is actually going to end up replacing you and has a bunch of unnecessary driving segments that nobody really likes I've ever played? No, that's Arkham Knight.

Considering the game is riddled with as many craters as the moon, I'm trying to cut some slack and credit the creators for what they ACTUALLY accomplished in spite of soulcrushing crunch. This is the forty-hour sunk cost fallacy sinking in;-

Being worse off financially for taking moral high roads in missions, cops being so ineffective that they pay you to do their work for them (of course the wanted system is shit, they can't chase you if they wanted to). Living ethically is a luxury you don't always have a choice to make. You have to shred your humanity to pieces with body augmentations just to stand a chance. When the game isn't trying to be a visual wonder or a David Jaffe-esque piece of tryhard shit, its systems compound into something a little more meaningful than I think I gave it credit for in the beginning. There's stuff here, it's hard to stomach, but I like that they did it.
Cyberpunk speaks clearly against the way society dehumanises us, it points a condemnatory finger to the corrupt systems that nourish it, and does everything in its power to make you feel chained to your complacency. It tells you again and again that the system doesn't work, it shows the people who idolise it dying senselessly and unceremoniously, it's telling you that we should do better - that the monolith of human achievement in the form of 2077's Night City is a smoke and mirrors act that disguises the same problems plaguing our world today. I'm no genre genius, but if this is "Cyberpunk", then go the fuck off. Some of these questlines struck a nerve, genuinely good pieces of writing, they just didn't need to be in a game that is this fucking bloated.

I hoped playing this with my partner would have been the ideal way to experience a co-op title about two lovers exploring the stars, but Haven constantly found ways to wedge inbetween the intimate experience a plethora of elements that drag the journey down to earth.

Haven not only struggles to deliver the adventure it alludes to, it is a co-op game where the other player is only made to feel like a hindrance. The fact that players control a single given character, yet we both have to agree on each other's dialogue options - that only one player gets to direct the actual journey while the other merely collects starbits Mario Galaxy style - the way you each control a single looming third person camera within the house. It constantly finds new ways to feel impersonal, which betrays the intimate and adult love story of Yu and Kay so much. The moment the journey feels like it's finally abound, the momentum is halted by tutorial prompts, redundant battles, and dialogue that could really have been part of traversal.

Haven masquerades as a fun road trip for two, but it's really just a tour boat with Haven at the helm. There's one passenger seat that the players have take turns to sit on, and you're not entirely convinced Haven even knows where he's taking us. Big respect to these devs for taking such a huge departure from Furi, though.

God, Infogrames really did push the envelope, even when it came to their games based on licenced properties. Maurice Noble's classic Looney Tunes background style lends itself INCREDIBLY well to the low-poly necessities of the Playstation 1. These environments do not miss a beat, nor do the character animations - the jagged messes of the models are animated so excellently that they are as bouncy as they are expressive. Full of life in ways few, more capable, games manage to achieve.
Sheep, Dog 'n' Wolf is almost overwhelmingly inventive, from its visuals to its level design, and invites you to be just as creative in solving them. I'm stunned to see how well this holds up, this game is a uniquely effective powerhouse of joyful cartoonish energy.
Slap that OST on NOW https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZISHX6AfNcw

Dedicated a hundred or so painstaking hours to trying to understand this hulking monolith of MMO Discourse. Nigh impossible to believe a newcomer attuned to the niceties of FFXIV can find any enjoyment in this hamster wheel of hideous, thankless design, and bear asses. Either this is a piece of transgressive art I'm simply too stupid to appreciate, or just a radiant entry in a then budding 3D MMORPG genre with growing pains as noticeable as its ambitions. Thanks for paving the way for other, better games. Maybe in retail WoW they actually remembered to put the story IN the game.