The only form-pushing entry in this series since Dark Souls. At once, the most abrasive and confident work of Fromsoft's career. An anti-accessible experiment huddling in the cloak of the biggest blockbuster gaming has ever seen. In every way, the 2020s' The Lost Levels.

I love the phrase 'What were they thinking!' It sounds like a question, but it isn't. It's the defacto reaction when a game frustrates. I remember saying it plenty of times fighting Malenia in the base game. She's not just overtuned; she flies in the face of what I perceived as the fun part of these games. She's too fast, too tanky, too difficult to dodge. She's an error, a blemish on the piece. What were they thinking!

Rellana, the first mandatory boss of Shadow of the Erdtree can be described in all the same ways. The parallels are so obvious it becomes funny. How can you not laugh at the triple full-stage nuclear bomb? Ridiculous! There are two possible reactions to this.

1. FromSoft are morons. They've learnt no lessons from the wrong and bad design of the base game. What were they thinking!
2. FromSoft is up to something. They've consciously rejected the complaints people levied at the base game and are making it apparent immediately. What were they thinking?

Throughout this DLC, I slowly moved from the former to the latter. Having been deeply frustrated by the ramping difficulty at the start, I came away thinking this may be the most exciting piece of late-career reactionary metatext gaming has ever seen.

I've never ideologically been a Puritan player of these games, but I have functionally. I'd trained myself to see these as nothing more than spruced-up rhythm games or downbeat character action games, whatever floats your boat. It was me and a halberd against the world. I'd reject every additional mechanic the game threw at me. Not out of some sense of ego, I don't look down on other styles, but I believed this was the most fun way to play—the 'pure' experience. Summons, spirits, co-op, consumables, throwables, magic, range weapons, even fucking ashes of war. All off the table. Enough about what they were thinking; what was I thinking? Why did I allow myself to fall into such a repetitive cycle? The simple answer, I was never made not to. Even when the games got hard, I had the patience and rote memorisation skills to overcome any obstacle.

So, I blast through this DLC. I do my famous trick of pressing the roll and attack buttons in perfect synchronicity until the other guy falls over. It's a little more annoying than usual. Then, the final boss. The cinnamon challenge for 'True Souls Gamers (tm).' No spoilers, but they kicked my ass. Again and again and again. I had hit a proper wall. They had an attack (the left, right, double cross slash, for those curious) that was nigh impossible not to take damage from. It's unfair, it's unreasonable, it's impossible! Try and try as I might, I just could not fucking beat it!

I abandon my morals. I hang my head in shame. I humph and say, 'Fine, Miyazaki, you dickhead. I'll make a real build.'

I return to exploration, not just to get stronger, for once, but to find answers. I engage deeper. I started to notice this was the densest and most beautiful world they'd ever made. By a lot. Wow! Finally, here are some locations from the people who brought us Majula. And these bosses! Annoying at times but visual feasts the likes of which I've never seen. Goop Horse! And the level design is excellent! This is the best and most stuff per stuff Souls has ever seen. I'm having a blast! I missed all of this! Have I always missed all of this?

So, what were they thinking? Here's my theory. Miyazaki doesn't hate Git Gud Gamers. I do, but he doesn't. He added a tear that lets you turn this game into fucking Sekiro! Someone has already no hit the final boss! But he wants that to be only one piece of the puzzle. He wants people to deal a billion damage a hit and become immovable walls and re-enact scenes from Attack of the Clones. This team painted a beautiful piece and wanted eyes on every part of it. They're desperately trying to ascend past the repetition of their combat system and boss design. If the only avenue they have are encounters so unfair as to wrangle the melee-only build out of your hands, then so be it. The whole is richer for it. It forced me to engage, to think, even! To get my ass ground into a paste and not just blindly return for more. To go to the drawing board, cobble together the most demented combination I could, and emerge victorious. It's an entirely different kind of joy than I'm used to, but joyful nonetheless.

For a series so marketed on 'difficulty,' this is the first in a decade to challenge me on a level deeper than execution. This is the only thing they've made aside from Sekiro that makes me play it on its terms. Ideologically, it's a ROM hack. It exists not just to be beaten but to converse with the player. It subverts and supplants traditional game design and the expectations of hardcore fans. It demands you find a way to keep up. I loved it after doing so, but I can't be surprised it sounds like muffled gibberish to the die hards blocking their ears. You guys are right. It is the most boring, tedious and difficult attack pattern training room they've made to date. Even if it grabs you by the shoulders and desperately tries to tell you that's not what it is!

Shadow of the Erdtree is Elden Ring at its best, but also takes Elden Ring's flaws, and really exemplifies them.
I honestly loved playing this DLC, which had some of the coolest and absolutely stunning views, and some crazy cinematic bossfights, that were crazy difficult, just like any other souls DLC, but still held to Elden Ring's boss design philosophy. The long combos and delayed attacks are still here, and are seen predominantly through all the main bosses, and while my playthrough and playstyle has no issue with such, it is definitely a flaw due to how unintuitive it can feel at times, and it does not mesh well with many builds which isnt good for a game that promotes build diversity.
The scaling of these fights were interesting, a level 50 is no different than a level 500 here, and the scadutree fragments are rather what makes the difference in scaling for bosses to feel normal. I thought it was excellent in concept, and only okay in execution. There should have been more scadutree fragments on the main path to make main bosses still feel doable, but not crazy in terms of scaling, which would help stay in line with the base game's philosophy of going out and exploring when it gets out of your skill level, and not being more or less forced to search for fragments since the level gap feels like its that crazy.
Outside of all that, I think the boss quality is amazing, and I loved playing each boss (except one) and the final boss had me actually jumping in joy once I beat it. The difficulty is crazy high, and even if I used summons on a boss now and then, it still felt satisfying to fight which is really interesting since if I did that with any base game boss, the satisfaction disappears entirely. These fights will still have you engage enough with the boss no matter what, and I think it's fantastic. There is something to be said about the very small attack windows for many of the bosses, ableit it wasn't a problem for me.

Overall, this DLC is absolutely fantastic, and is just more Elden Ring, and arguably better than the base game. It still has its flaws from base game, but the DLC was so enjoyable, those flaws are negligible to me.

Also, the story is really weird and I don't like it very much, but I never cared about Elden Ring's lore in the first place and so it didn't particularly have an effect on my enjoyment of the DLC. Gotta love George RR Martin and his very odd and creepy (in a bad way) subject matter in this DLC.

Sights & Sounds
- Reventure is a 16-bit evoking pixel art game, but not really the good kind. The environments and characters look a bit like Terraria, but with about 1/5 the visual appeal
- The settings are nicely varied, but there's nothing surprising here. Grassland. Slightly greener grassland with water. Forest. Mountain. Volcano. Caves. Castle. If you've played any side-scrolling 2D action-adventure game with a fantasy setting, you won't see anything new here
- The soundtrack is excellent, featuring all of the 8-channel DSP effects you'd hope for from a pixel art game. You can certainly hear the Zelda influence on the soundtrack (the game was originally called "Lonk's Adventure" before Nintendo's legal department did its thing, after all), but a lot of the tracks sounded like GBA-era Pokemon route tunes
- Despite the quality of the soundtrack, I was sick of hearing most of the songs by the time I finished the game. As you'll see below, repetition and retreading feature prominently in the game's mechanics. You'll hear the music for most environments so often that it eventually becomes grating white noise

Story & Vibes
- You're Tim! The hero of legend! Kinda! And the king wants you to save the Princess from the evil Dark Lord. That plot might seem familiar to you, but that's the point. Reventure is, after all, a parody of 2D adventure games, most notably The Adventure of Link for the NES
- If you've played that game and you're as untalented with a controller as I am, you probably died a lot in that title while trying to figure out what esoteric thing you were supposed to do next. Reventure takes those frustrations and runs with them. It's shtick mostly centers on your protagonist constantly dying and being replaced by various people like his son, his cousin, his friend, and even a cat
- As you can tell by the revolving-door protagonist role and satirical bent, Reventure is a pretty lighthearted and often quite funny game. Nothing is uproariously funny, but a few of the post-death vignettes for some of the deaths did make me chuckle a bit

Playability & Replayability
- The references to Adventure of Link should clue you in to the gameplay: it's a side-scrolling 2D platformer. You run, jump, and use various map items to help you solve puzzles and advance towards the Princess while cutting up foes who stand in your way (even if the focus on combat here is minimal)
- All the while, you'll be attempting to figure out how to get to the princess without dying. Several enemies, spikes, traps, and other obstacles stand in your path, and most of them instantly kill you. Don't worry though, someone who knows Tim will be able stand in for him as soon as you respawn
- After enough trial and error, you'll eventually figure out the tools and route you need in order to find the princess. But that's just the first part of the challenge; you need to figure out how to get around the Dark Lord and return her to the castle as well. In some ways, the trip back is harder than the journey there
- This difficulty arises out of a major mechanic in Reventure: encumbrance. You can't just run around the map, pick up all the tools, and head towards the castle. That would be too easy. Instead, each successive item you pick up will reduce your jump height, making previously accessible areas unreachable. Even if you do have the grappling hook to sidestep that restriction, you're still not out of the woods. Picking up 5 items will reduce your jump height to a single block, and the 6th item you grab will end your run by crushing you to death. Choose wisely!
- Although the stated goal of the game is to save the princess, the metagame of finding various ways of murdering Tim and his associates is perhaps even more important. Finding 100 ways of making your character die will unlock the path to a hidden 101st ending, accessible after a grueling platforming challenge. I frankly got frustrated and gave up. Part of it requires you to kill enemies and knock their corpses onto platforms so you can jump high enough to progress. This physics-based task, while possible, is incredibly frustrating, and you have to do it in 3 consecutive rooms. Accidentally slash your enemy off the platform? Too bad! You have to off yourself and make the 5-minute runback to try again
- After exploring Reventure's death-based gimmick, I think I'm satisfied with a single playthrough. I don't foresee myself revisiting it to try to get the last achievement either

Overall Impressions & Performance
- While I did enjoy much of the game's humor and did like the respawn and carry weight mechanics, Reventure overstayed its welcome a bit. By the time I saved the princess for the first time, I had only discovered about 40-ish ways of dying. The rest of my time was spent snooping around for secrets and throwing myself at anything that looked potentially dangerous. Some of them are repetitive as well (e.g., dying by falling in the pit in the caves is one death, but doing it while carrying the princess is a separate ending), so it feels like some fat could have been trimmed
- Removing some of the endings would also lessen the need for backtracking, so the monotony could have been mitigated on two fronts. Sometimes, less can be more
- The game ran very well on the Steam Deck, though it's not like it's a graphically intensive game to begin with

Final Verdict
6.5/10. A fun little adventure if you aren't as compulsive about digging into a game's content as I am. It could have done less (and perhaps should have) at its given price point. For $8 though, the juice is worth the squeeze, and it's even sweeter if you nab it on sale--usually around 75% off during Steam sales
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What's better than a cheap game? A free game! Feel free to pick up a free Steam key from my ongoing giveaway
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See where Reventure stacks up against the other 2019 games I've played in the past 5 years

There was a time in my life where I would rate every Metal Gear game a 10/10 on video game sites and pretend to myself that I was being objective. After all, it had to be perfect - it was Metal Gear, one of my favourite series. Reaching the age of maturity (which, it seems, was 25 in my case) and playing through The Phantom Pain a second time forced me to accept something. It isn't perfect. The series isn't perfect. The first Metal Gear has to be played on mute because its 8-bit sounds are aural torture, navigating the Big Shell in Metal Gear Solid 2 can be frustrating at times, Portable Ops is just flat-out shit, and The Phantom Pain is unfinished. This doesn't mean it's not a great game, just like Metal Gear is still a great series.

Hell, it's the greatest unfinished game ever made. It's among the few games that define the eighth console generation. But, on my second playthrough, it also left me feeling empty.

Much has been made of Konami interfering with the genius of Kojima, so much so that anything I try to write feels trite. This game wasn't developed in ideal conditions, and the publisher shoulders a large portion of the blame for that. But I also feel that Kojima made some missteps too, as I'll explain.

Before that, however, we must laud the Phantom Pain where it's deserved. It is an absolute masterclass in sandbox stealth. There are so many ways to carry out missions, limited by your imagination. The simplest way to explain MGS V's gameplay is, "If you can think it, you can do it." If you've got to take out a tank battalion, you can do it explosively with landmines and rocket launchers. Or, you can let them reach their station, wait for a sandstorm and attach Fulton balloons to them - in and out, like the storm itself swept them away.

If you've got a hostage to rescue, you can invade the camp where he's being held and interrogate the guards about where they're holding him; free him, and be on your way. Or you can wait till they're transporting him, lie down with a sniper rifle on the opposing mountaintop, shoot the jeep driver, and then move in for the rescue.

If you're feeling lazy in a seek-and-destroy mission, you can just call in multiple airstrikes and be done with it. There really is a lot you can do in MGS V.

The enemies aren't complete idiots as well. They take note of your tactics. If you prefer infiltrating at night, they'll start wearing night vision goggles. If you're a headshot junkie, they'll be issued helmets. As the enemies adapt, you're obliged to too.

Few games are optimized as well as MGS V. This game worked perfectly even on my old craptop, which lacked a GPU. There is no fucking way this game should run so well on seventh-gen consoles and 2010-era computers, but it does. Whoever programmed this, I love you.

Unfortunately, around the time MGS: Peace Walker was being developed, Hideo Kojima's son did something terrible. He told his dad, "This is shit! All the cool kids are playing Monster Hunter now." Kojima took this to heart, and decided that from now on, MGS would also be a mission-based series. This, I feel, is to its detriment. For all the banal jokes about its cutscene length, MGS was originally conceptualized as a relatively short game that adults could play - they didn't have to care about levels, or collectibles, or multiple objectives.

MGS V is the exact opposite of that philosophy. A lot of time is spent deploying and taking off in helicopters, and if there's one thing that you can think but can't do, it's that I wish the fucking helicopter could fly me across the open world from side mission to side mission, rather than having to go back to the level select menu or make the long trips manually. Base management is gratifying, but also tangential to why I play Metal Gear games. You spend a lot of the game on the verge of brokeness, and have to be very selective about the items you develop. You also have to wait for raw materials to process before you can do so - which means you could have all the fuel, metal and GMP needed to build a new platform, but can't because SOMEBODY back at Mother Base is this close to getting fired.

There are things I love and hate about the plot of MGS V. The foremost of the former is that the cutscene direction is award-worthy: this game really consolidated what would become Kojima's signature style in the coming years. Almost all cutscenes are 'filmed' from a single camera in one continuous shot, lending the game its grit. On a second playthrough, it's incredible how in-your-face the plot twists are, yet I didn't spot them the first time. The story is full of the cool and crazy concepts the series made its name for, and this game is second only to MGS3: Snake Eater in how educational it is.

Hideo Kojima has never shied away from wearing his influences on his sleeve, and he sure incorporated some classics into this one: 1984, Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now... There are nods to all of them - some subtle, some not. Watch out for the pig's head and the 'Big Boss is Watching' posters. The music selection is great too.

However, there's no getting around the fact that this is very much an unfinished game. The pacing of the story is completely off, with the beginning and end of Chapter 1 being the most substantial portion - by the last few missions, I was thinking, "Boy, they're really speeding up, aren't they?"

After that, the game's basically over. In Act 2, you're handed a collection of already-completed missions to repeat under specific conditions, with the odd story bit nestled here and there. It's immensely unsatisfying. The cutscenes are great, but half their context has been ripped out. The number of story-heavy cassette tapes also jumps up, which I assume was Kojima trying to finish fleshing out the plot in whatever way he could once development ground to a halt.

There is never a good time to listen to these cassette tapes in this game. If you try to play the game while listening to them, you'll keep having radio chatter or idle conversation play over them, and Lord help you if you try to listen to them during infiltrations - being deaf to the world is a massive disadvantage. As much as people complain about the open world being too empty and big, it still isn't big enough to listen to one of these fucking cassette tapes in peace while driving from outpost to outpost.

As easy as it is to pick on Konami for hobbling the story, I feel some of the blame lies with Kojima himself. I really dislike the /v/-tier opinion that's constantly bleated into the void, that Kojima is a terrible writer and Tomokazu Fukushima was the real hero. But here he fucked up, okay? The second act seems solely dedicated to the demythologization of the series, with massively detailed explanations of how everything that seems magical works. Really, Hideo, it was better when a guy was made out of bees just because it was fucking cool. It didn't have to make sense. And you didn't have to give us such a roundabout explanation for why Quiet has such a skimpy outfit. Just say it's sexy, man. This breaking down of the series' more fantastical elements feels almost like an act of revenge against the playerbase.

'Revenge.' That is the biggest reason I have for believing that The Phantom Pain was only about 40% complete on release. People say Skull Face is a terrible villain, but if you see him as what he was supposed to be - only the villain of Chapter 1, it makes a lot more sense. Revenge is the leitmotif of the first chapter, and having played through every game in the series except for Survive multiple times, I'm certain the plot was supposed to centre upon some three-stages-of-anger theory Kojima read in a psychology book, ending with a more self-actualized Big Boss. What we got does manage to bring the story around full circle to the original Metal Gear, but the journey there clearly isn't what was envisioned. The Metal Gear games generally end on a very poignant note, and to believe that it was supposed to have an epilogue full of repeated missions, scattered bits and pieces and no proper ending feels so hollow. Almost like a...

20 YEARS OF GAMING PART 10: HALFWAY POINT

Is Red Dead Redemption 2 a perfect game? Absolutely not. It's a 10/10 in the same way the Breath of the Wild duology are. If rating games was just about "things it does good vs things it does bad" then this game, nor those, would be anywhere CLOSE to a 10/10. And just to satiate that curiosity, I'll quickly run by the issues I do have with it so it doesn't look like I have Rockstar's 100 Work Week Bad Security Dick in my mouth.

Several systems are either super easy to take advantage of or not taken far enough in a way that ruins the immersion that the game otherwise dedicates a whole bunch of time to like the Wanted mechanic, NPC behaviors, weather and temperature, and more. There's a shit ton of trailing missions and some of the shooting galleries can get pretty repetitive. And Chapter V just generally kinda blows.

Now, all of that on its own would drag this game down to a 9 or even an 8/10. But what this game also has is some of the best visuals in any game, an incredibly engrossing open world with a ton of different ways to interact and have fun in it, some incredible music, excellent linear mission design, and one of the best stories in any video game. Arthur Morgan in particular is maybe the best protagonist in any video game ever and the story of him and his gang trying to make it in a dying world that's quickly outliving them is incredibly compelling. It's next level on a video, game, and narrative level so even if there are a good amount of issues I have with it when I really dissect it, the experience I had playing the game was so incredible and so engrossing, that I would feel dirty (at least right now) rating it at that 8 score I was considering. Anyway, onto the second half of this marathon!

I joyfully smirk the whole way through, tapping my foot and bobbing my head to the cool ass beats. There’s genuine inspiration for me in its experimental nature and pitch perfect childhood silliness. Add to the mix that the songs are unironically good and you’ve won me over. Infinitely better than the first game by virtue of it actually being playable. Incremental positive changes add up, like seeing your input of the buttons on screen for better time judgement or having more time to react in general.
I wonder when the moment was that devs figured out that rhythm games work better vertically, rather than horizontally. One of the 2 major benefits is that you don’t go cross-eyed trying to follow both the prompts at the top and the image in the centre. The other is that you remove the awkwardness of having to carry on a musical sentence (if I can call it that) on the next line, completely breaking the flow of the rhythm. That might be the only ‘’flaw’’ I see with PaRapper 2 design wise. I could’ve also gone without the unnecessary and unskippable training sessions before each level but it’s not a big deal.


‘’BIG’’ and ‘’ALWAYS LOVE’’ are my jams.

Stellar Blade was an extremely fun game, but the story is pretty straight forward. (No Spoilers)

The combat was incredible, action like Nier with a bit of soulslike when it came to bosses having attack patterns with timed parries. Even had segments that made the combat just turn into somewhat of a horror game. The animations were crisp. Everything felt like it hit with force it was so satisfying.

The soundtrack was beautiful, every fight scene had a banger of a song play in the background and just roaming around the song fit the atmosphere. One particular song that played during a boss fight near the end was amazing.

The graphics were absolutely stunning. The character detail, particularly EVE, was insane. She looked so lifelike you'd think it was a movie. The cosmetics to make EVE stand out in many ways provided many options, made me want to replay the game just to see her in different outfits in the cutscenes.

Like I said at the beginning, the story was pretty straight forward but they told it quite well. However, I did wish they explored the word they built more. Normally, I don't mind getting collectibles to discover more lore but I felt like I needed to go out of my way to learn more doing so. What did shine however, was the side quest line of a duo that I loved so much. At the end of the day, it was still a solid story. Replaying the game to get the platinum trophy really makes you focus on the cutscenes even more knowing the end.

My biggest issue with the game is some stuff out of combat. It could be a bit rough. Some segments slow down to a crawling pace, especially a few parts near the end. Sometimes the movement wasn't quite responsive, EVE would not listen to the inputs and would do whatever she'd like, normally falling to her death, which got frustrating. Some of the puzzles, although pretty easy, ended up being tedious.

Overall, the game is great. They had some minor issues that I think could be easily resolved with some patches. I definitely recommend this game to anyone who enjoys action games.