Even if Rockstar's design philosophy has worn out its welcome long ago, I would be lying if I said Red Dead Redemption 2 didn't tick all of my boxes while playing it. Maybe it's just the nostalgia goggles refusing to come off, seeing that I played RDR way back in 2010 when I was 13 years old and absolutely adored it (my first Platinum trophy ever). But even with all of its rigid mechanics and fragile pretentions of free-form play, RDR 2 consistently delivers an involving narrative experience that had me on the edge of my seat all the way through -- which is especially impressive, seeing that I had the ending spoiled for me a couple of years ago. The journey there, even with its array of hiccups, is one of the most emotionally satisfying I've found in my life, with some of the best characters probably ever written. Slow but always meditative, gleefully chaotic (sometimes too much so), and a perfectly captured portrait of the american landscape as a dialectical dream/real. This is a game I'll cherish for the rest of my life, but I do hope I never have to play anything like it ever again. RDR2 should be the last hurrah for this kind of open world experience. There's nothing else you can do here. Time to break the wheel.

Interesting concept that feels bogged down by some iffy design and pretty shoddy writing. Its ideas and themes are sometimes so poorly implemented they feel as if they exist purely for shock value. And yet, and yet!... I also felt a certain kind of obsession with it. To say that would be to sell it shortly, actually -- I REALLY fucking wanted to see how the narrative progressed, just because I wanted to know just how bonkers it could get. On that department, Twelve Minutes didn't disappoint. Shame I can't say the same about the rest of it.

It's absolutely incredible how drastically a game's mechanical philosophy changes just by slightly readjusting the speed and intensity of a combat system. In Dark Souls you felt like a thing to burned, gnashed, stabbed and pounded until made ash, and thus the combat reflected this by incentivizing the player to tackle it in a ponderous and surgical manner. Bloodborne doesn't just ask you, but demands that you partake in violence in a much more bestial manner, where you have to throw yourself at your enemies, again and again and again, because blood is not just a consequence or need of your journey, but a blissful pleasure in of itself. Even when hunted, you're always the Hunter.

What a game, what a setting, what a feast for the eyes and ears. I do have to give it another go before pitting it against the other Soulsborne games (and Sekiro, of course), but it's just as masterful as I anticipated it being.

EDIT: currently tied with DS1 as my favorite of the series.