"Maybe there's a reason we pretend. Maybe the lies we tell each other are less horrible than the truths we keep hidden."
PAST TIME

Still think the melodrama is a bit too bombastic in this game as opposed to the relatively internal battles of the first one - but this still efficiently puts a bow on the former's thesis that the truth can sting more than discovering a lie. How it feels to reconcile with lies meant to protect us from the truth, versus lies told in malice - bad people can do good things, and good people can do bad things. This community is synaptically entwined with these characters' psyches - constricted so tightly with strings of shams and mistruths that it all threatens to implode like a mining tunnel accident, further concealing its awful reality. All just to cope with what is.

"You're not real."
"I'm not?"
DON'T TOUCH MY SOUL WITH DIRTY HANDS

Return to ash. Much of this edgy, empty nihilism grates though it's never unfitting for the character - but I feel as though a lot of it is supposed to. You're playing as a 16-year-old who's been through some unspeakably horrible shit, after all - and I think part of the appeal for this particular entry in the series is how often you are made to play as a character who you often do not agree with. You have to do things you don't like, while still having the freedom to make important choices on your own. It has its tone and it's very confident with it, for better and for worse. Maybe a big cloud will come down and swallow us all up one day, are we selfish for thinking we ever had a choice? The tabletop games in this have no right to be so damn fun, and the ending is once again awesome.

In its way the Ratchet: Deadlocked of its series - a steady, effectively uninterrupted stream of tight combat encounters with a de-emphasis on story compared to its predecessors over gadget-fueled gameplay. MAJOR bonus points for altogether ditching the forced grimdark bullshit that plagued the previous Jak games in favor of a more wholesome silliness like the original, without forgetting to set its place in the overarching narrative. Movement is still a little heavy for my liking (as all these games are) but - considering the hardware - Daxter himself controls like a dream, its locations are attractive and memorable, and the top-billed combat is quite appetizing (even the little minigames are a nice diversion!). They somehow made a game about bug-catching super fun. And unlike Deadlocked there's still actual platforming here, too! Considerably less soul-crushingly bad than The Lost Frontier. The Bug Combat bonus mode sucks absolute ass, though.

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So rigorously, fundamentally garbage that it actually spins back into brilliance. I've always found something tantalizingly awful about this series, they're so fucking stupid and hilariously bad that it's a blast every time - I really don't think these get the meme treatment they deserve a la something like Knack does. Literally just an even lazier reskin of the original with bugged trophies, a wide array of laughable visual errors, and another disgusting showcase of the seventh generation's Play-Doh facial animations. Evokes such peaks of human emotion as you go from wanting to die to heights of side-splitting hilarity at its total incompetence that you reach some form of enlightenment. Have such fond memories with this one, objectively a huge disaster - imagine wanting your name attached to this in any way lmfao. "So bad it's good" has never been such a shrewd motherfucker, even better with friends.

Just as endearingly clunky as it was when it initially released, but I'm kind of glad they kept the primitive mechanics intact rather than watering them down and/or replacing them with all-too-basic antiseptic controls like some current remakes/remasters tend to do. It's always a treat to go back and see what we used to expect out of triple-A games from the seventh gen, and both this along with the original still look rock-solid for the time. But mostly this thing just coasts off of charm - particularly the chemistry of Nathan and Sully; and there's always been something particularly special about mowing down foes with AK-47s and Desert Eagles in these games. Rough around the edges, but a very important piece of gaming history.

Better than the base game, actually kind of ripper. Ditches Sheva's boring boringness for a proper Jill Valentine, has King Wesker doing the cool trenchcoated cyborg stuff, takes place in an updated Spencer Mansion, puts a (more) proper emphasis back on classic RE note-reading, but most importantly... the door opening transitions are fucking BACK! The puzzle/cat-and-mouse part in the waterlogged area when you're without your weapons is as good of a section as there are the best Resident Evil games. All of the reskins here are also superior to the original (despite there being a sad lack of enemy variety), but Chris is still a bulging freak of nature though - and it's way too short for what it is - but imo they absolutely understood what they were put on to make here even if it's daisy-chained to the mostly unsatisfactory RE5 engine.

The idea here is really cute - this is clearly made for kids to play with multiple friends/siblings as each one is given avenues on whether to work together as a team unit, or to vie for success as the sole winner (conceptualized smartly during the good-versus-evil loading screen tips). It's rare that you see this sort of freedom to choose between competition or cooperation in a game like this. That being said... FUCK. This is easily one of the most punishingly boring 100%s I've ever gone for - levels padded out with an excess of combat spam and pointless replay requirements. Even if you were just playing this casually, it's still got some of the most broken and mind-numbing fighting since Borderlands - 99 times out of 100 you'll be one-shotted from a full health bar with no indication that you'd even been hit. Some of the worlds are pretty, some are murky in the way that PS3 games can be murky. I'd rather play Skylanders and that's saying something.

"What happened to your face??" - Greg Giraldo, Roast of Flava Flav (2007).

Sadistic, breaking the entire carton of eggs just to even think about making the omelet. I'm with others on the opinion that this should have been an epilogue in the base game - but it being a free update mostly fixes that imo. Chris' redesign is scarier than the monsters in this one! That being said though, good ole' Redfield is my favorite RE character - so seeing his story be continued in a productive (albeit truncated) way here in the franchise's new direction was awesome. I just can't get enough of his quintessential do-gooder mixed with a vial of steroids persona, and his gameplay here feels like a fitting change from Ethan's - with more of a focus on almost RE6-style fleshy military combat, and noticeable changes to the mechanics in a way that makes this feel like its own thing while still retaining what made RE7 so good. "Think we did any good here?" Hell yeah, brother.

Nightmare/Night Terror are 100 times harder than Ethan Must Die and I will die on this hill. Anyway, this ain't bad! Nothing special but far better than that Ghost Survivor shit from Resident Evil 2 remake. Bedroom is the MVP - a taut, clever little puzzle-solver that had me genuinely stumped on multiple occasions (RE puzzles are finally back, baby!) though one which probably just should have been a video tape in the main game. Ethan Must Die is insanely fun for what it is, even though I'm almost never into these hyperspecific trial-and-error postgame asset flips - this one clicked with me for whatever reason. Nightmare is CoD Zombies but with only one map you've already seen in the campaign - it's competent and superficially diverting but as you'd imagine drains after a little bit, the weakest of the pack imo. More RE7 is never a bad thing but this is about what you'd expect.

Games I Like That Everybody Else Dislikes

Graphically gorgeous, one of the greatest-looking launch games of all time - but rather vapid gameplaywise. I'd be lying if I said those impressive visuals didn't mostly push it over the "good" edge for me - but every other bizarre, perplexing, and/or stupid choice made here ends up making this feel more novel. There's a strange cozy atmosphere to be found here, and the sense of size-shifting is as rad as advertised. Its sequel improved upon it by nearly every metric, and I certainly won't argue that this is great per se - but it's a shame to see a pretty quirky and warmly familiar series' legacy relegated to unfunny YouTuber memes.

21 > Bedroom > Daughters > Ethan Must Die > Jack's 55th Birthday > Nightmare

About on par with the first volume, though this is marginally better exclusively for the gleefully twisted "21" - which is not only a really fun spin on Blackjack (even when the A.I. blatantly cheats it seems like it only does so to stimulate your problem-solving skills, and how you're able to save your own ass out of a corner via the trump cards) but this continues the RE series' trend of genuinely shocking violence in a way that made even me feel sickened. Vile shit, I'm impressed! As far as memes go, Jack's 55th Birthday is initially amusing but as a score-grabber really uninteresting imo. Daughters is fine, with arguably the most enticing premise out of the two packs but it's out the door as soon as it seems to begin. It's always nice to see more Jack convulsions, but we finally get to see the Baker's horrific, undeserved transformation and it's over in the blink of an eye? It really needed to be the same length (longer, really) as Not A Hero to work at full effect. Plus its different endings seem kind of pointless to me. Anyways, not bad - but hardly anything that will really blow the roof off.

If the base Resident Evil 7 is Angel Heart, then this is Hobo with a Shotgun - guffaw as you eat worms, chuck spears at gators, have bare-knuckle boxing matches with swamp creatures, and 'splode through rows of enemy heads with an electronic Iron Man fist attachment. A totally unpretentious crowd-pleaser of an expansion, think Barry's sections in Resident Evil: Revelations 2 if they were good. Like Not A Hero the combat here has been completely overhauled from the base game, much more methodical this time around - very tight windows of opportunity that don't leave much room for error. Joe Baker as a protagonist is a gift that keeps on giving, I want more of him! While this is all very productively hokey, it still retains the base's bleak themes of civilian minds being betrayed by corporate recklessness - your life will be upended in a curdled attempt to stop other 'more important' lives from being upended, so pure that your body even rots differently. Simultaneously a meat tenderizer to the brain and a twinkle of hope in the fungal cesspool. Biggest flaw is how short it is, and level design leaves something to be desired.

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I've said it once and I'll say it again, there will always be a part of me that's a little nostalgic for the era (let's say 2011-2016) when complete and utter memes/trolls were passed off as full game releases. Stuff like your Octodads, your Turbo Dismounts, Max Gentlemans, bevy of "______ Simulator"s - games that only existed for YouTubers to play and give free advertising to, back when that site wasn't a festering cesspool of creative censorship. Even Triple A game studios were trying to cash in on my generation's willingness to take one joke and drive it into the ground for multiple consecutive years until it became a barren void of forced humor suffocation. As a result, by the time this one rolled around the joke had started getting stale - thankfully though this one really isn't obnoxious at all with its gimmick like some of those others: it's brisk, authentically odd, and low-simmer funny. Saw a lot of staunch hatred for this which I think is ridiculous, it's totally harmless for $0.99.

Even though I think this is only marginally worse than the highly praised Hitman: Blood Money, it's interesting to look back on a time in gaming where so frequently franchises asked themselves: "What makes our games not only work, but really stand apart from the pack?" and then proceed to absolutely fucking break them lmao. Takes almost everything that makes the Hitman series what it is and turns them cheap and un-fun; every so often you'll get a couple levels reminiscent of the IP until you're immediately reminded of its completely nonfunctional disguise system or some of the most heinously butt-ugly cutscenes ever put into a video game (including but not limited to Agent 47's worst design ever, his face looks like a bad bowl of bread pudding). I'll cop to having fun navigating its bizarre collection of levels in fits and starts (being able to knock out like 150 people in a bar for some reason being a highlight) and its voice cast is totally innocent - including Traci Lords and totally unhinged Keith Carradine + Powers Boothe. But so often its mechanics and rules are just godawful, and its equally terrible story betrays everything this series/character is. So it's just too much crap to justify a little dumb fun in the end.