Played on PS5 in back compat at 60FPS. I did not actually play this game for 50 hours. The in game clock keeps running when you are paused, which I probably did from somewhere between 15-20 hours. That being said, I played it plenty. I played for many hours a year or so ago, and dropped it. But hearing of how good Forbidden West was encouraged me to pick it up and try to finish it, just mainlining the story quests (something I never do, because I like to take my time in games and see everything).

There is almost nothing redeeming about this game. The combat is its strongest suit but eventually devolves into peppering spongy tank enemies with an endless amount of arrows, or fighting ENTIRELY too large of crowds of robot dinos. You can never just travel across the open world, it is littered with enemies at every corner, and they are ALL hostile. This one redeeming quality has many caveats, both listed here and not.

But the truly offensive parts of this game are its traversal, its polish, and its story. The polish is rough. Most cutscenes have extreme pop-in, glitchy audio, poor facial and character animations, and horribly overwritten and trite dialogue.

It's world isn't just archaic, it was put to shame a few days after it came out by Breath of the Wild. Sure, not every open world game needs to have climbing on anything, but truly here it is an open world game for the sake of nothing but being open world. There is no explanation, verticality is rare and gated by hard to see "yellow" climb markers, and trying to get up anywhere higher than sea level is a glitchy mess. The developers did not INTEND for people to actually go to any vantage point or climb. This is clear by the impossibility of scaling any mountain (of which there are many). You will ALWAYS need to go around mountains. Thank God for the fast travel system because every main story quest completed will give you your next objective ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MAP, WITHOUT EXCEPTION. What is the point of such shiny graphics if your interaction with the world is all about picking up piles of crafting materials, over and over again. MOST OF THIS GAME IS ABOUT PICKING UP FUCKING CRAFTING MATERIALS.

Finally, this might be the worst story ever told in a videogame. Just complete gobbeldygook. I am willing to forgive, and even try to enjoy it's basic premise that sounds like it was written by a 12 year old (robots dinosaurs in the post apocalyptic world inhabited by futuristic natives!) but the "mystery" unraveled by playing is so convoluted, so nonsensical, so poorly explained, so filled with nonsense jargon and ridiculous plot elements with no cohesion or connection or explanation, that by the end I was groaning in pain trying to finish it out. There's GAIA, Hades, Alpha Protocol, The Spire, the corruption (WHAT EVEN WAS THIS??) and a whole bunch of other GARBAGE that had no connection. Does Aloy have to make a stupid comments every time I do something?? Much like attack on titan, you can tell this story was written as they were going along, with deus ex machina after machina being shoved in. Not even to mention its awful pacing. Not even to mention the part near the end where you go to the ruins and it's so hard to navigate after finding the journals that I was lost for 20 minutes on two separate occasions). Just truly without redeeming quality (other than the fact that you can turn off most of the awful HUD, and that you can make it be far less offensively hand holdy).

I like most 1st party Sony games but fuck this. It is everything wrong with contemporary game design and studio priorities. I hope the developers learned their lesson when they got made fun of for being archaic when Elden Ring came out. DO BETTER AND QUIT MAKING ART BY COMMITTEE.

I recognize that there are a lot of problems with this game. Enemy variety, pacing, lots of deus ex nonsense in the story, the way it just sort of ends, forced behind the back camera which hampers the central gameplay, and a completely superfluous crafting and armor system. I barely did any side quests, it feels like they made it impossible to access or move around the world to do them! Tons of modern game bullshit. These are pretty glaring. But as a holistic experience I still walked away having enjoyed myself and being sort of moved by the story and combat. Idk I guess I did like it haha.

Metroid if you take out all of the exploration and mystery. Huge bummer. Undeniably the action and animation is incredible, but what good is that if you never have to think or feel? Metroid isn't a series about shooting the shit out of aliens, it's about about a balance of combat, puzzles, and exploration. Dread just forgot the latter 2. I do commend the dev team on their focus on designing with both completionists and the speedrunning community in mind, I have seen some cool stuff on how they did that and the results.

Honestly this shit STINKS, the SkillUp review summarized it better than I ever could. I was excited for this and I was very much am enthused that Dinga Bakaba directed this. Love seeing more representation in games... but then all you gave these character is le epic bacon joss whedon dialogue??? I can't believe the dev team played this and let it release and even more astounding is the praise it got on release from critics. Proof that quick review turnarounds impact game scores, if you get time to think about the game design you see and experience just how poorly put together it is. P.S... goes down historically for an all time bad menu system. and absolutely goes down in history for worst enemy AI of all time, bar none

A short and sweet adventure. Not among the best Metroidvanias ever but I enjoyed my time with it. It's not even really a metroidvania as I NEVER backtracked to a previous level, and only needed an upgrade a few times to move forward, and only then it was a traversal upgrade. It's more of an adventure game that seeks to mimic the spirit of SotN and I think it succeeds in that regard. If you have never seen the anime (which I have not), the story is nearly incomprehensible. Environments can get very repetitive and the lack of landmarks is disorienting (great map system though). I like the twin spirits system but it is either too easy or too hard to maintain level 3 bar and the system feels underused, it is ONLY used for combat and even then the elemental weakness system was not apparent until I read about it after I beat the game. At a certain point you become powerful enough and solve the game. There is no point in the shop, you get weapons steadily that are better than anything you find in it. Despite all my gripes and imperfections in design I walk away with positive feelings and being very charmed, not to mention the game is so pleasing to look at and live in. The game really is more than the sum of its parts! I do recommend it for anyone looking to scratch an itch, and most important to remember is this is an indie game made by a small group of talented people (and a Japanese indie game at that, so rare) so their achievement is large and commendable~!

Despite having some of the same fatigue inducing open world aspects as its other, far more tedious and bloated peers, Ghost of Tsushima stands as an example that the "genre" (read: structure) of story based open world games does not have intrinsically awful. First and foremost, Tsushima is about its core gameplay loop first. The combat IS the point of the game, and if it weren't so well done the entire thing would collapse, since that is what you principally do 80% of the time. Like really, other than finding little baubles and light, guided platforming, you will just be killing mongols for the majority of this game. Story, kill mongols, story. Almost all of the sidequests outside of the epic tales are just killing mongols in camps, in squads, etc. But GoT also does some things differently, mercifully. None of the typical tedium is here. Instead of constantly opening your map to look where you're going, or maybe worse, looking at a compass, the wind guides you. Instead of a 15 second animation to pick something up, it's automatic, including when riding your horse. Instead of not being able to travel where you want to go, your house basically teleports behind you when you call it, and it cannot die. These few elegant solutions to typical open world problems reduce almost all of the (bad) friction that games like Horizon, Red Dead, and Assassins Creed refuse to do anything about. They're so ingrained one would think they're inherent to do the genre. Furthermore, the gampleay of Tsushima is actually integrated into its story. Instead of a hackneyed stealth system, you are told to use stealth because the mongols are vicious and do not care about the honor system samurai use as warriors. You have to debase yourself to free yourself from your enemy, and this core theme is taken to its logical extreme all the way to the end of the game. It's really well done. Because of this, GoT elevates itself to the top of that sort of open world adventure game, something Horizon refuses to do. And because of this, it's the best one. Not the best open world game. Those would go to games where the exploration are the POINT of the game (BOTW and Elden Ring), but very few developers do that because it's hard to do, and because this is easier and will sell a ton. That being said, I had a really good time other than some repetitiveness of just constantly being in combat and nothing else, but when I realized I should just ignore a bunch of the side quests since I was already so leveled up (thankfully combat was still challenging) and go see the story, I enjoyed it much much more, though that didn't happen until about 45 hours in. Really good game. I hope the sequel can learn and make discovery and adventure the point, while still maintaining an engaging story.

What's so strange about this game is how much less I was enjoying it as I got further into it. Maybe I played it "incorrectly", but I like to explore a lot and play my games at a leisurely pace. That's how I play all Metroid games and Metroidvanias in general. However in Hollow Knight, at a certain point after 20 hours or so, I was completely stuck, and one issue with this game is that its map is enormous, but gives you no direction or hint on where to go. This might have just have been my experience, but that means I bumped into an awful period where-in I had uncovered a huge portion of the map, but not gotten important upgrades so as to move past black gates or those long hallways. Ok, well after searching for hours on end on how to get past these barriers, I ended up just using a guide, and the solutions ranged from "you just didn't explore this small part of an area you've been to" to "extremely esoteric solution to this area you wouldn't have figured out alone." I also didn't enjoy the story presentation. This is NOT like Dark Souls' story. Dark Souls is shrouded in mystery, but its usage is not as important. In this game, story is often very important, but it goes out of its way to obscure everything, and make the lore incredibly obtuse. Don't even try to understand, I'm not sure if they made the game first or the story first but they definitely jerry-rigged the other portion afterward to fit the first. Still, the good outweighed the bad and I kept playing, this was just my way to air out my issues with this game that got universal acclaim.