Just some awesome high-concept sci-fi action. Remedy has quickly become one of my all-time favorite studios. The games they make might not always land flawlessly, but they are constantly putting out stuff that feels fresh and high effort. These guys are always doing something outside the box.

Quantum Break really worked for me. My main, and pretty much only, gripe with it is the TV show aspect. It’s such a weird decision, and as I stated these come with the Remedy territory, that doesn´t really work. It simply is extremely less interesting and compelling when compared to the “game” section of this game. It feels and looks like cheap TV, the things that happen in it have no real impact on the game, and the game itself has no real impact on it, even though the game constantly tries to tell you that it actually does. These 4 episodes add up to about an hour of fleshing out very minor characters that barely show up in the game. It doesn't help that these handful of characters are extremely paper thin, and their respective performances are, as I said before, straight out of a cheap TV show.

These episodes are to be endured rather than enjoyed. I also find it extremely bizarre that the game, at least on PC, streams these episodes from some Microsoft server that will one day be inevitably shut down. There’s no option on steam to download these episodes, and if you play offline, you simply aren’t able to watch them. This adds to the idea that these poorly executed, extra-long, live action cutscenes, are just non-essential filler that could simply not be there at all without impacting the overall player experience.

I do believe that the whole “live action interludes that are affected by in-game decisions” concept could work if more budget and care went into it. And if they were actually developed in a way that complements the gameplay sections instead of as an addon that feels more like an afterthought.
At least the game itself, removed from the “TV show”, is a banger. The story is pure dumb fun sci-fi, with just the right amount of science mumbo jumbo, compelling characters, interesting macguffins and awesome set pieces. I didn’t really care for the “decisions” you can take in between acts, but it ties well into the whole time-travel/multiverse concept that the narrative goes for. Overall, great writing, great performances from a well-known cast, pretty much perfect pacing, I had a blast with it.

Graphically it’s a spectacular game. It looks gorgeous and way ahead of its time, especially the facial animations of the main cast. But it’s the overall visual design that really stands out here. Every location feels like a real space instead of a combat arena, populated with little dumb things everywhere to really sell them as real. The whole visual language they developed for the fractures and “time powers” is simply gorgeous looking and adds a lot of punch to the action. Great architecture and lighting too.

The gameplay is so much fun that it’s kind of a pity that combat encounters feel so short and few and far between. It feels as kinetic and engaging to move around and shoot as it did in Max Payne. Some of the powers available here are clear callbacks to the bullet time shooting present in those games. Everything here pushes you to zoom around the arena, evading baddies and just wrecking them. A blast to play through, I just wished there were more combat opportunities in it.

One other very minor gripe. While it is very much improved here, and there’s a little puzzle aspect to it, Remedy should really cool it with the platforming sections. Not their forte.
Great game brought down a peg because of the terrible “TV show” addon. Honestly, I’d say to skip them altogether when playing if the first couple of minutes don’t grab you, because the game is very much worth seeing through.

Possibly the first ever truly ‘Lynchian’ video game. It’s ‘Mulholland Drive’ the videogame. And I absolutely adore it for that reason.

This might be the most fascinating experience I’ve had with art this whole year. There are few games, even movies, on its level.

I don’t really want to talk about the story here. It’s best to experience it, engage with it fully, really discover it piece by piece. It’s shocking, it’s twisty, it’s scary, it’s moving, it’s a lot more than you think going into it.

Manon Gage, and specially Charlotta Mohlin are on another level. Performances like these are only rarely seen.
The way this is played is fascinating as well. Play with a controller, it’s extremely tactile.

I only wish there was an easier way to pick up the last missing clips after you roll credits, kinda like in ‘Her Story’. It´s not really necessary, I believe that by the point you reach the ending you’ll me more than satisfied, It’s just to make it simpler to complete the movies.

Persona 3 Reload is an absolute success in terms of being a remake. It probably helps that the original game was apparently already excellent, and that two pretty much perfect sequels set the stage for how this series plays in the modern day, but still, it doesn’t demerit the fact that this remake is just a blast to play through and the best way to experience Persona 3 yet.

Everything I love about the Persona series is here, from the jazzy earworm-y tunes to the absolutely mind-boggling interface design, characters to watch grow and evolve, ever-increasing stakes, and a delightful combat experience.

The game overall has an ever-present dissonance with regards to the content and the gameplay experience, which don’t fully mesh. It feels like the content from Persona 3 was just inserted wholesale, warts and all, into the framework of Persona 5. The combat is on that level, the visuals are on that level, the voice acting is on that level, same with quality-of-life updates and several little details that weren’t present, or just worked differently on the original Persona 3, and were improved upon on the sequels. What I refer to as “content” here is the overall story, the pace, the structure, the social links, and the characters, which very much feel from an era before the polish and improvements that Persona 4 and 5 brough upon the original Persona 3 formula.

The overall narrative is very engaging, thematically compelling, and bold, but feels disjointed and the pacing is just all over the place. It has a real slow start, and long stretches of nothing going on. Though it ends up sticking the landing with a beautifully melancholic ending, I can easily see how plenty of people would simply drop the game way before reaching a compelling twist or plot point.

These long stretches of nothing going on in the major narrative are supposed to be filled with activities, social links, events, and combat. In terms of things to do there’s way less here than it the sequels, and once the players stats are maxed out, most of those are basically useless ways to get the game to progress. Events are also lacking, there are less opportunities to do activities with side characters, and so, less opportunities to interact with them and get to know them.

Social Links suffer from this “wholesale insert” approach the most next to the overall story, as Persona 3 clearly was the first time that this time was exploring this concept, and got much better at it in the later games. Characters are very fun and compelling, they each have their own little arcs and evolutions they go through in the company of the protagonist, but each episode is extremely short and minor, and end up having no integration with the main narrative nor any real crossover whatsoever. Once Social Links are completed, these characters may as well be dead, there’s no incentive to interact with them, nor any real opportunity to do so. Sadly, the same thing happens with the romance opportunities, there’s no effect on the narrative, no mention of them outside their respective Social Links, and not even consequences if the player pursues multiple romantic partners like happens on the latter games.

Social Events are a very welcome addition that serve to fix one of the major issues of the original Persona 3, the main side characters having no Social Links at all, and it’s an approach that I would have liked to see applied to the overall game a lot more.

The combat itself is outstanding, and pretty much an exact copy of Persona 5, which I don’t mind at all. Tartarus is the issue. While yes, there are some side objectives to complete, exploring Tartarus gets monotonous and dull pretty damn quick. There could have been way less floors with bigger, more compelling layouts, and more enemies to fight in each of them, maybe even making them a bit more visually distinct could have helped in this regard.

I’m glad I finally played Persona 3, I had a great time with it and remembered why I love the series so damn much. I wish the dev team took a lot more inspiration from Persona 5 and dared to make more profound changes to the original, still, as it stands, it’s a spectacular RPG experience that has little to envy from the newer entries in the series.

I can see why this game is beloved now, it has all the charm and style of the latter Persona’s, with a very 2006 edginess and melancholia that makes it very endearing.

A real delight of a game. I tend to suck ass at action games, even more when I need a minimum of coordination to get the best scores, but I had an absolute blast making my way through this nonetheless. The combat is engaging and deep enough to never get stale, all while allowing the player to engage with as many of the systems as one is comfortable with, so all the possible combinations never get overwhelming to deal with.

Really funny stuff as well, from the dialogue to the overall presentation, I can´t remember the last time I was laughing so consistently while playing a game. The art design is really cool, the game looks really pretty all the time. The music is just perfect, never repetitive, never dull, with some excellent licensed needle drops as a treat every now and then.

A true must play if it looks even remotely interesting, and easily one of the best games of the year. I didn´t really try out the post game levels and the collect-athon approach because that isn´t really my jam, but I’m sure that gamers interested in that type of gameplay will get dozens of hours of top tier entertainment on top of a hilarious, tight, really enjoyable, 10 hour main campaign.

Really solid action-adventure game, brought down by an overall roughness around its edges and lack of compelling innovation in combat, traversal, and storytelling. A slightly derivative amalgamation of what other games in the genre have done better, in a fun Star Wars package.

The story is fun and surprisingly engaging on a replay, but it feels overly familiar and tropey. Characters are well designed but lack proper development and opportunities to interact with them. Cutscenes are spectacular, they look great and are very well animated, outside of them character animation tends to be rather stiff looking and inorganic.

The story has some great moments, spectacular set pieces, and it’s overall pretty well paced. Doesn’t overstay its welcome and has a few surprises sprinkled about. A great Star Wars adventure that can’t fully shake off a feeling of familiarity and predictability.

Traversal gets more engaging as the game goes along and the player starts unlocking new abilities, but it doesn’t ever come close to being as engaging and polished as what Naughty Dog perfected in Uncharted 4. I’ve never been a big fan of this style of platforming, and while double jumping is fun enough, it still hasn’t won me over.

Combat is where the game struggles the most. When it works properly it’s an extremely engaging attempt at bringing Souls-like combat to a mainstream audience, with the addition of unlockable combos and cool force powers. Sadly, it lacks the polish and exactitude that From Software tends to bring to their games, specially around collisions and character animations. There are plenty of combat encounters that are just annoying to get through in any of the very welcome difficulty levels because of this reason. It feels like with some more time in the oven this could have been fixed, as the bones of the system seem really solid and fun to play.

Easily the best Star Wars game in a long time. A solid foundation that I hope the sequels build upon.

Very much my thing, this felt like the southern gothic lovechild of Kentucky Route Zero and Disco Elysium. I love when games try dare to try weird and out there things without fear of alienating the audience.

A mix of visual novel and point and click gameplay elements, its real hook is its writing and visuals. It boasts some of the most moving and evocative writing I’ve read in a videogame probably since playing Disco Elysium last year. It’s hard to wrap my head around how a team gets to write and actually design such an experience. It’s also comprised of beautifully crafted pixel art. There’s a particular frame that instantly became my new desktop wallpaper. And the music, what a surprise. Just a terrific moody score that goes so hard.

There’s just so much depth and thematic nuance here, enough to think about for a long time after playing. It oozes creativity and artistry, and a certain kind of weird earnestness and sincerity.

Yet another utterly fascinating swing from Remedy. A game not without its faults that nevertheless had me hooked from the very start. In terms of setting and worldbuilding it quickly became one of my all-time favorite pieces of media.
In terms of its narrative, it starts as strong as it can be. Control’s first two to three hours are some of the best work Remedy has ever developed. It’s also a game that struggles with pacing. The overall structure has some extremely high highs and some rather meandering in-betweens. Every great element of this game also has a rather dull attachment weighing the experience down.

The last couple of hours are simply spectacular as well. As I rolled credits on Control, I wished that Remedy had attempted a more focused, slightly more linear, approach to the game’s structure and narrative. Something more akin to their previous output would solve 90% of the issues I have with the game.

The games' second act, though continuing to introduce fascinating spaces to explore and weird documents to read, tends to blend together in memory as an amalgamation of fetch-quests that don’t really add up to much in terms of the main plot thread, character or world building. This feeling is only amplified by the gradual ramp up of side quests that distract from this main story path. Some are pretty stellar and memorable, specially the ones that grant Jesse new powers to fight with or dive head-on into the sheer fun absurdity of the supernatural world that Control presents, but most of them are even more forgettable fetch-quests and an endless barrage of procedurally generated time sensitive combat encounters that pop up in random areas of the map every set amount of minutes, flashing the screen in big bold letters, attempting to entice you into dropping whatever more interesting thing you are doing to go there and kill some repetitive waves of enemies for some truly lackluster rewards.

The game has some slight metroidvania influences in its approach to the world design, in a Jedi: Fallen Order kind of way. As you advance in the story, you’ll start unlocking abilities that will grant access to new sections of areas you’ve already explored, pushing the player into going back to those places in order to find new stuff. There are a couple of issues with this approach in Control. In particular, the Oldest House, the supernatural, ever shifting, setting for the game, is a very weird and labyrinthian place, and a pretty hard one to traverse at that. Exploring every nook and cranny for the first time is really fun but going back to places and trying to remember how to get back to somewhere, even with the use of fast travel points, is a real pain in the ass. This and the enemy waves that spawn pretty much anywhere large enough to be a combat arena every time you go through there, makes simple fetch side-quests even more bothersome than they should be in the first place.

Combat is the other aspect of the game I’m quite conflicted about. The gameplay experience is amazing, powers and abilities are really fun to play around with. Remedy really nailed the superhero shooter style. My main issue is with the combat encounters. They are simply not engaging nor fun enough to sustain how many of them you can be involved in. It’s near constant, there’s pretty much just one approach that works consistently and enemy variety isn’t enough to keep them fresh for long. Quantum Break had very few opportunities for combat, Control might have too many for what It’s offering to the player. Midway through the game I was quite over these encounters, even though the gameplay experience itself never stopped being fun.

There’s also a whole upgrades system with stat modifiers for weapons and powers that should have been cut altogether. These XP points and mods are not engaging as exploration rewards, builds don´t feel different from each other when playing, the interface itself is a pain to interact with, it just doesn’t work, and it wasn’t necessary to include here. You cannot engage with this at all and still have the same experience as everyone else playing, because I’m sure most people even forget that the system exists at all.

I have my complaints about the game, and I’m rather passionate about them, but that’s because I love the overall experience so damn much. It works so well for me. This blend of weird sci fi and horror, played straight but with some sense of humor, is very much specifically my thing. I absolutely adore all of the world building, finding these documents, letters and videos. Just the look of the game and its spaces was enough to win me over instantly. The presentation is amazing, the way it uses cutscenes and video like no other game does, the wonderful music and sound design, I could go on for a long time praising every little detail I loved. Remedy, as always, created something even more ambitious and fascinating, and I hope they keep doing just that with their next games for a long while. Just maybe keep it tighter next time, trim the fat a bit.

Great DLCs too, AWE is a must play for any self-respecting Alan Wake fan.

A really solid action horror game, though a very confused one at that. Alan Wake doesn´t really know what it wants to be. As a horror game it mostly succeeds. Its atmosphere, tension, and writing are its best parts. As an action game it’s a mess.
I like the mechanic of having to light up enemies to break down their defenses before being able to shoot them. It adds an engaging layer to resource management and forces the player to pay more attention in combat scenarios. Sadly, there’s a particular focus on dodging incoming attacks that isn’t really supported by the way the player character moves and reacts. Incoming attacks tend to come from offscreen, and there’s no way to know if something is coming in order to properly dodge it. The physics engine seems to be tuned to favor ‘realistic’ and mostly clunky movement, so controlling Alan isn’t nearly as precise as it should be to support this approach to combat. And Remedy still doesn't know how to do engaging platforming.

Another issue with Alan’s controls comes with his slow walking and running speed. During plenty of sections this isn’t an issue at all, but there’s plenty of very open areas that could have interesting rewards for exploring them further if only it wasn’t such a slow pain in the ass to do so. It’s clear that these areas were built for a different style of exploration, and that feeling only adds to the overall sense of confused identity that this game carries throughout. Most of these open areas have nothing in them, not even the quite crappy collectibles that are occasionally spread around. A couple of hours in I just decided to follow the minimap at all times. A minimap that wouldn’t be there if not for these really confusing and annoying to traverse through open areas.

I love the story being told here, and the way it’s being told. It’s a fascinating mix of Lynch and King, with fun characters, moody sequences, and a killer soundtrack. It plays with structure in a way more games should try, but the pacing is completely off for plenty of its ‘episodes’. The combat sequences are mostly to blame for this. Cool set pieces overall, but its unwieldly nature, poor difficulty balancing, and repetitive encounters make these a slog to get through pretty damn fast for a game so hard-headedly focused on action. I can only imagine what this game could have been if not for a clearly very messy production and confused objectives.

The Remastered version looks very pretty on PC. It does have some constant bugs related to lighting though, which get to be very annoying at times. It doesn't make the game unplayable, but it's annoying and doesn't do the experience any favors. The two DLCs aren't anything to write home about, just more of the same in a smaller package. Still, enjoyable for what they are and what they add to the overall narrative.

As a modern urban city sandbox this is still pretty much unmatched. The city just makes sense as a space, it´s interactive, it´s populated, it really feels alive and most importantly it is fun to traverse and explore. There´s a crazy number of activities to partake in, you are sure to find something interesting there, and the famous GTA mayhem is as fun as ever. The shooting is ok, standard third person cover action, nothing special there. The driving is simply excellent, you are going to be driving a lot in this game, and it manages to always be engaging.

I’m not as fond of the story sadly. The main trio is very well realized and compliment each other wonderfully. All the systems introduced to make playing with three characters at once while also making them feel like individual characters work flawlessly. It´s just the narrative and its structure that doesn´t quite feel as polished as the other elements of the game. The plot is technically moving along, but it doesn’t feel like it goes anywhere or that there is any reason behind the things that are happening. It lacks some major end goal or evolution in its characters and story that leaves it feeling aimless and similar to doing a set of chores. I can’t help but compare it to Red Dead Redemption 2, which I believe is a way better game in pretty much every sense, where there always was something to look ahead for, plenty of unexpected surprises, and honestly, the strength of the writing and characters held up any sequences that might feel a bit lackluster in comparison. Here it seems like they are hiding behind the irreverent tone and jokey satire to not really develop much of anything, and the comedy and satire are not nearly as solid as they should be to carry the momentum all by themselves. It starts strong, but it just becomes more of the same as it goes along, never really surprising the player nor justifying itself. I also played a bunch of the side missions and while they have some interesting moments, they don’t really amount to much sadly.

I´m not even remotely interested in trying out the Online component.

Amazing city sandbox, not so great story, you probably have already played this, so you know it already.

Instantly became one of my favorite games of all time. Easily the best release of 2023, and clearly the best gaming experience I’ve had in a while. A balanced mix of everything I love out of RPG storytelling and immersive sim, sandbox-y mechanics. It feels like a game specially made for me.

It also helps that I love fantasy and have been playing plenty of DnD for a while now. It makes terrific use of the Faerûn setting, and it’s wonderful to toy around with what are mostly one-to-one translations of the 5e mechanics as a player instead of a DM.

It’s an outstanding experience from start to finish. The writing and performances by the voice cast are impeccable, combat and exploration allow for an enormous amount of player freedom, the world is reactive and alive in a way that feels truly rewarding to explore every single nook and cranny.

There are some technical polish issues towards the end of the game, some that have been fixed already and some others that will be fixed in the coming weeks. I mostly no-lifed this playthrough since release, it took me longer than it took me to finish all three Mass Effect games in the Legendary Edition, and encountered 0 game breaking bugs, just a couple minor ones and some performance dips later on.

It’s a game I already want to return to roll a new character and have several ideas on how to approach it in several different ways in order to experience new stories, and I’m sure I won’t be the only one. I’ll wait a bit for now, until they update some stuff, so as to not burn out early. But I wholeheartedly encourage anyone even remotely interested in it to try it out, and there’s no time like the present.

It's good enough for what it's trying to be. Nothing really game changing here, just more Half-Life, which is cool. Really short and kinda uncompelling in the narrative department, while still managing to feel rather repetitive and dull at parts. Alyx is still great, and here you get to spend a bit more time with her through the story, and there are some cutscenes that offer some real spectacle and scale. I just don´t see how this adds anything of consequence to the Half-Life series as a whole. It´s not the next step, it´s a bit more of the same.

The music score goes insanely hard though.

Truly a perfect game. It has easily risen among my favorite games of all time, and clearly among the best RPGs I´ve ever played, and probably will ever have the opportunity to play. It may sound hyperbolic, but I have rarely encountered such a profound piece of interactive art. This will stick with me for a long time, and I´m already looking forward to revisiting this one for years to come, to explore and toy with the different options and outcomes of the game, or to simply appreciate this world for a while longer.

An extremely bizarre, weird, smart, hilarious, original, political, sincere experience. The quality of writing here is pretty much unmatched in the medium. The art style is gorgeous, the voice acting is outstanding, and the score will be played on loop by myself for years to come. What else can you ask for?

I would die for Kim Kitsuragi.

A real diamond in the rough. If you are even slightly interested in this game just do yourself a favor and play it. It´s not a perfect game, on the contrary, it´s a rather flawed one, but it´s an experience greater than the sum of its parts. A beautiful story told rather oddly, the pacing is off and is rather disjointed by nature of its release and its structure. The movie is pretty good and should have been bundled with the game somehow, the short anime series can be found on Youtube and is a great introduction to the best aspect of this game and what has hooked me so. The main cast. I would just die for these boys.
What this game does so well is put you in the shoes of a group of friends, trying to have some fun along the way in a path filled of adversities, and it manages to build such a complete picture of these characters as fully formed people as I have rarely seen achieved in other games. It´s the sense of having embarked on a journey, having seen them grow and evolve together, what makes this game such a memorable experience.

The open world element and its design, just most level design in general, and combat as well, is rather simplistic, and it will depend on how much you enjoy each of these aspects how much you´ll want to engage with the side content, and later end game. The world is quite beautiful but rather empty and traversing it is quite a pain after a while. Dungeons look great and each have a distinct and epic style but are rather linear and end up feeling too similar after having completed a couple. Combat is an interesting aspect, it´s extremely simple, constantly looking to reach epic heights, but it mostly ends up feeling janky, unpolished and uninteresting. There´s nothing epic about pressing one button and the enemies being damage sponges. Side content can become dull very quick once you notice that side-quests are just checking things off lists and doing chores for non-characters. The “epicness” though comes from the visuals and the music. It still looks gorgeous in every level, the art design is wonderful, and the sense of scale it manages to convey is outstanding. The musical score is just on another level altogether.

The DLC “episodes” are must plays. I wish they had found the way to better integrate them into the main game in this “Royal” or “Windows” editions. Other than that, they serve as condensed and streamlined scenarios that showcase the best things the main game has to offer all while further developing these wonderful characters and their stories.

I nearly cried at the end. Highest praise I can give.

I can’t really say if it’s a better or a worse game than the original Max Payne. What I can say is that it’s a much more ambitious game. Remedy really put absolutely everything they had into the making of this game, and it always shows.

I think the story lacks a certain charm that comes with simplicity by trying to be a more convoluted, non-linear narrative, but the ambiance is still there, untouched. This one might be even grittier and more hopeless than the first game. Violence no longer has the murky justification of vengeance behind it, it’s just violence for violence’s sake. Max is still stylish and cool as hell to play ass, and Mona shines in her own way. Villains no longer have the personal involvement with Max’s goal of revenge as they did in the first game, so they feel a bit more anonymous here. Killing them isn’t personal anymore, they are just kind of in the way. The relationship with Mona is what drives the story forward, the rest of the plot is slightly unmemorable. Though dialogue is still as perfectly overwritten as ever.

The graphical upgrade seems to be where most of the money went. A truly impressive jump for a two-year gap between games. Really detailed and populated levels, a new physics system, and a surprising preference for in game cutscenes over the constant graphic novel panels from the first game, though I did end up missing them for a bit.

Platforming still isn’t good, but it works better here thanks to those upgrades mentioned before. And the shooting experience, while slightly different than in Max Payne 1, is still as delightful and engaging as ever. There’s a lesser reliance on dodging and jumping when enabling Bullet Time, which makes for an overall easier gameplay experience and took a bit of time to get used to. This kind of detail is what I mean when I say I can’t really pick which one is a better game, or which one I enjoyed the most, there are some subtle differences that make one approach gameplay in slightly different ways, while maintaining the same pretty much perfect core.

A real grimy delight that I beat in a day!

These are still some of my favorite games of all time, and this is the best way to play them right now. It’s not much more than a new coat of paint, they are pretty much the same games underneath, but they look nicer and feel more cohesive as a trilogy.

There’s the jankiness that comes with age, the rather dated design elements and the combat never was much more than serviceable. The characters, writing and worldbuilding are where this series’ strength lie. We do not often get original epic space operas that are as detailed, fascinating and actually great as this one. It’s a true pleasure to come back to this universe every now and then.