Glowerworm
Bio
Haven't finished adding all games that I've played. Probably around 600-700. Too much work.
2.5 is a middle-line, average game. Mediocre. I don't often play very far into games that are worse than 2.5, hence why my gaussian curve is cut in half.
I only rate games I've played more than half of (enough to feel like I'm allowed to rate them). I pretty much always finish a game if I get that far though.
Also, I rate games, not mods. So Beatsaber, Skyrim, Minecraft, etc, are rated based on my opinion of the vanilla experience.
Haven't finished adding all games that I've played. Probably around 600-700. Too much work.
2.5 is a middle-line, average game. Mediocre. I don't often play very far into games that are worse than 2.5, hence why my gaussian curve is cut in half.
I only rate games I've played more than half of (enough to feel like I'm allowed to rate them). I pretty much always finish a game if I get that far though.
Also, I rate games, not mods. So Beatsaber, Skyrim, Minecraft, etc, are rated based on my opinion of the vanilla experience.
Badges
Gamer
Played 250+ games
N00b
Played 100+ games
Favorite Games
370
Total Games Played
000
Played in 2024
000
Games Backloggd
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I think most genuine fans of Starbound would agree that the game is pretty mid. But the soundtrack, sound design, and atmosphere are other-worldly. Quite literally the best soundtrack of any game to date.
My second favorite thing to do in Starbound is sit at the main menu and enjoy the theme song for 10 minutes.
My favorite thing to do in Starbound is sit my character in their wooden cabin with an indoor fireplace (don't question the fire hazard, just enjoy the crackling of the wood), and listen as the rain starts, M54 starts, and ten minutes later after you've been emotionally cleansed of all ungodly burdens you've picked up over the last year, M54 finishes, the rain stops, the wind starts flying through the trees, the sun rises, and then finally the birds start chirping and you step outside to begin milking your fluffy space cows.
My second favorite thing to do in Starbound is sit at the main menu and enjoy the theme song for 10 minutes.
My favorite thing to do in Starbound is sit my character in their wooden cabin with an indoor fireplace (don't question the fire hazard, just enjoy the crackling of the wood), and listen as the rain starts, M54 starts, and ten minutes later after you've been emotionally cleansed of all ungodly burdens you've picked up over the last year, M54 finishes, the rain stops, the wind starts flying through the trees, the sun rises, and then finally the birds start chirping and you step outside to begin milking your fluffy space cows.
This review contains spoilers
The most immersive game I've played, and that is including every VR game I've had the pleasure of experiencing. Metro Exodus is a genuine treat. A beautiful product (and honestly, work of art) that I'm really happy exists. It is very unfortunate that for many people, this is a game that sits in their "to play" list for years.
After Doom in 1993, it really feels like the first-person-shooter genre has been defined as fast-paced, reflex-based, sometimes cover-based, and dense. Very few shooters have deigned to try something different and been successful. The only examples I can think of are Fallout 3 and NV, and the Metro series. This game is so far the best slow and methodical FPS combat I've seen in a game. It blends the pragmatic bullet-saving of a survival game with standard first-person "shooting bad guys" and does that blend perfectly, in my opinion. It's usually a bad sign to see survival mechanics mixed with FPS, because it's never done well. Metro, especially Metro Exodus, is the exception.
There are only a few problems with Metro Exodus. For one, the simple moral choice the game gives you (kill people or don't kill anybody) is poorly implemented. Not as bad as Dishonored 1, but not much better. It is astronomically more difficult and less fun to be the pacifist, especially in the third main area of the game.
Additionally, and the biggest flaw of the game, is that it leans heavily on its story but the protagonist Artyom is entirely silent (except he has full voice-acting during loading screens--what were the devs thinking, truly??). This might actually be the worst example of a silent protagonist I've ever seen. Never once has a silent protagonist made me feel more immersed during the main story moments, and I thought the game-dev community figured that out a decade ago, but here we are with Metro Exodus in 2019 still trying to make it a thing.
It's so much worse in this game than your middling brown-gray 2010s military shooter, though, because the story is actually pretty good. It's quite pathetic to witness Artyom's wife slowly dying of acute radiation poisoning and Artyom can't even manage to mimic human emotion at the level of a 7-year-old sociopathic midwestern boy. He just sits silently, and I imagine him looking like the wide-eyed cartoon meme.
Still though, this is definitely a game worth experiencing.
After Doom in 1993, it really feels like the first-person-shooter genre has been defined as fast-paced, reflex-based, sometimes cover-based, and dense. Very few shooters have deigned to try something different and been successful. The only examples I can think of are Fallout 3 and NV, and the Metro series. This game is so far the best slow and methodical FPS combat I've seen in a game. It blends the pragmatic bullet-saving of a survival game with standard first-person "shooting bad guys" and does that blend perfectly, in my opinion. It's usually a bad sign to see survival mechanics mixed with FPS, because it's never done well. Metro, especially Metro Exodus, is the exception.
There are only a few problems with Metro Exodus. For one, the simple moral choice the game gives you (kill people or don't kill anybody) is poorly implemented. Not as bad as Dishonored 1, but not much better. It is astronomically more difficult and less fun to be the pacifist, especially in the third main area of the game.
Additionally, and the biggest flaw of the game, is that it leans heavily on its story but the protagonist Artyom is entirely silent (except he has full voice-acting during loading screens--what were the devs thinking, truly??). This might actually be the worst example of a silent protagonist I've ever seen. Never once has a silent protagonist made me feel more immersed during the main story moments, and I thought the game-dev community figured that out a decade ago, but here we are with Metro Exodus in 2019 still trying to make it a thing.
It's so much worse in this game than your middling brown-gray 2010s military shooter, though, because the story is actually pretty good. It's quite pathetic to witness Artyom's wife slowly dying of acute radiation poisoning and Artyom can't even manage to mimic human emotion at the level of a 7-year-old sociopathic midwestern boy. He just sits silently, and I imagine him looking like the wide-eyed cartoon meme.
Still though, this is definitely a game worth experiencing.
Preface: this review is about the base version of Dark Souls II, not Scholar of the First Sin. I am one of those in the small group of people who believe SOTFS is inferior to the original version of the game. You can read the review for the SOTFS-side of things at the bottom of this review.
Dark Souls II provided a sense of adventure that no game ever had for me. To be fair, I never had Nintendo consoles as a kid, so I never played a Zelda game. Dark Souls II didn't try for naturalism, it was comfortable just being an adventure role-playing game. And in being so un-immersive, it paradoxically became much more immersive for me. It felt so much like a sandbox world that I was allowed to venture through without reason or meta, if that makes sense. The levels didn't feel designed for me to beat them, just designed for me to play them however I want. It was so comfortable being a game with little direction for the player, that my actions were my actions. It didn't feel fated by the developers that I take this path and beat this boss by memorizing this moveset. That I save the world in this way from this antagonist. Even Dark Souls 1 couldn't resist making the other paths (graveyard, for example) much harder than the developers' intended path in order to siphon the player into the "correct" path. In Dark Souls II, all the characters live in their own world and to them, you're a stranger. They're not designed to be followed by you, or to follow you. Again, this is different to Dark Souls 1, where it felt like the characters didn't have stories unless you, the player, interacted with them. You're independent from everything in Dark Souls II.
The main theme of the story was and still is very impactful on my life. What does it mean to lose yourself? Lose your identity? Can you prevent it? Should you prevent it? So many characters go through this problem with different solutions. Vendrick fights it with external means. Lucatiel is desperate to keep herself in the same way, she fights it internally. Aldia gives in to it, eventually. Nashandra is immune to it. The Blacksmith just takes comfort in his daily routine for as long as he has left. Dark Souls II feels so lonely, and so comforting. It is The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, except you're the boy and you don't have a dad to guide you through your changing personality. Your character has to come of age on their own while witnessing every parallel character doing the same in drastically different ways and with varied outcomes.
Speaking of coming-of-age, I will never in my life forget when I finally took the helmet off my character, 100+ hours into the game, well into New Game +, and for the first time I didn't replace that helmet with another. I will remember this moment because when I exited the equipment menu I was given the surprise that apparently my character had been changed into a woman at the very beginning of my first playthrough and I never noticed. This reveal awakened something in my mind--prior to this I had never questioned my own gender identity--and now suddenly middle-school me was having the realization that "I've secretly been a girl this whole time?" and furthermore, was being confronted with the idea that I really loved having that feeling. Only a game so wholly uninterested in immersing you could provide such a profound message, and only by providing the tools for such an event to occur while simultaneously trusting you fully to use those tools to provide yourself the adventure. It is the ultimate coming-of-age video game in my eye because it was designed to be wholly unpretentious and self-absorbed in its design. Dark Souls II is a gift from the developer to whoever plays it, without any strings attached. The developers' design is there if you want it, but the game gives you a therapeutic amount of space to have your own adventure. Dark Souls II feels like it was designed systematically and in isolation by many different individuals and small teams, and quite last minute was hodge-podged into a sellable whole by the assigned-director-halfway-through-development, Yui Tanimura. And it's a much stronger work of art for it. I bought Dark Souls II because I loved Dark Souls 1, but I guarantee you that if I had never heard of the series and happened across Dark Souls II in a Walmart bargain bin, I would've loved it even more than I do today.
---
For me the adventure peaked with Sinh the Slumbering Dragon, but even after that, the game kept delivering. I used to break out of bounds of games' maps all the time as a kid. It was so interesting to me to know that the developers didn't plan for me to do that and I did it anyway. The Frigid Outskirts gave me genuinely new content (not just more Souls content, but new content. Nothing was the same—the spawning mechanics, the level design, the enemy design, etc) out of bounds of the world. It was me playing in a level that didn't feel "designed for the player to beat it", as all other Souls levels feel in some regard. In Elden Ring, I don't doubt that The Lake of Rot and The Consecrated Snowfields were the children of Tanimura (who was lead directory for DkS2 and co-director for Elden Ring), while the straight, obvious, linear, safe paths through those areas were forced to be there by Miyazaki (the current poster-child of Fromsoft soulslikes) out of fear that the general audience wouldn't appreciate such an area being so unforgiving otherwise.
Dark Souls II feels a lot like Dragons Dogma, in how much experimentation it has and how pre-planned yet untidied everything feels. It was made with passion rather than logic. And I love it for that. I feel that passion coming through the design of the game and in turn share it. It feels intimate like no other game has to this day (for me, at least).
----------
Writing this review inspired me to play through the game yet again, it's been a quite a few years since I've played. And I'm only able to play the SOTFS edition since that's all that's available on my current platform. When I initially played SOTFS about 5 years ago, it was maybe a little too soon after I had played the original, and so my comfort and familiarity with that version was negatively painting my view of the newer version.
Now, with something like 4 years since I last played Dark Souls 2, while I play SOTFS today, I've arrived at the conclusion that SOTFS in a lot of ways "side-proves" the original experience by making it overall more difficult without being "unfair" as I imply in the review. I will say, though, that Heides Tower and especially Iron Keep are absolutely unfair (and more importantly unfun) in their newfound difficulty.
But SOTFS makes some great additions such as the Pursuer pursuing you in the Lost Bastille, and the falconeers populating the camp before Freya's domain.
Also, the constant use of petrified enemies to block paths, which I previously disliked for having paths "arbitrarily" locked, after coming back from many years' hiatus I find they aren't bad at all. It all feels a lot more purposeful than arbitrary and I no longer dislike them. In fact I quite like the petrified statues being used as a special type of lock and key. Again, you have to keep in mind that the Dark Souls 2 devs are unapologetic about having their game constantly feel "video-gamey". If you want to be immersed, then these statues are a blight on the game's quality. But if you are able to enjoy the feeling of playing an adventure game that Dark Souls 2 heavily pushes for, these statues are a positive. I will say though that the statue in the Lost Bastille is genuinely a dumb design decision. The fact that a player might waste their only easily-accessible branch of yore on a statue in the tutorial, and then get to the Lost Bastille and just be arbitrarily hard-locked from continuing is simply a stupid experience.
SOTFS is still worse than the original version since it has the general issue that the difficulty curve is insane. Pacing has been thrown out the window. The game starts astronomically difficult, which if you're new to DS2 means you won't be given room to learn the mechanics, and then after Lost Bastille SOTFS just completely drops in difficulty (except for Iron Keep and Shrine of Amana which were made ridiculously difficult by way of enemy spam). The original DS2 version is easy up until you get all 4 main boss souls, at which point the game's difficulty increases linearly with the castle, shrine, and crypt, and then tapers off with dragon aerie and the return to the castle. This follows in line with the rest of the Souls games' pacing. DS1 gets difficult at Anor Londo, DS3 at Irithyll, Sekiro at Ashina Castle on fire, Elden Ring at Leyndell (well, really just at the Mountaintops). DS2 followed this established and, in my opinion, good pattern until SOTFS came along.
I think SOTFS works as a remix for established fans of DS2 (who are already familiar with the mechanics of the game and fighting groups), whereas it is definitely a worse experience and game if you're going through DS2 for the first time.
Dark Souls II provided a sense of adventure that no game ever had for me. To be fair, I never had Nintendo consoles as a kid, so I never played a Zelda game. Dark Souls II didn't try for naturalism, it was comfortable just being an adventure role-playing game. And in being so un-immersive, it paradoxically became much more immersive for me. It felt so much like a sandbox world that I was allowed to venture through without reason or meta, if that makes sense. The levels didn't feel designed for me to beat them, just designed for me to play them however I want. It was so comfortable being a game with little direction for the player, that my actions were my actions. It didn't feel fated by the developers that I take this path and beat this boss by memorizing this moveset. That I save the world in this way from this antagonist. Even Dark Souls 1 couldn't resist making the other paths (graveyard, for example) much harder than the developers' intended path in order to siphon the player into the "correct" path. In Dark Souls II, all the characters live in their own world and to them, you're a stranger. They're not designed to be followed by you, or to follow you. Again, this is different to Dark Souls 1, where it felt like the characters didn't have stories unless you, the player, interacted with them. You're independent from everything in Dark Souls II.
The main theme of the story was and still is very impactful on my life. What does it mean to lose yourself? Lose your identity? Can you prevent it? Should you prevent it? So many characters go through this problem with different solutions. Vendrick fights it with external means. Lucatiel is desperate to keep herself in the same way, she fights it internally. Aldia gives in to it, eventually. Nashandra is immune to it. The Blacksmith just takes comfort in his daily routine for as long as he has left. Dark Souls II feels so lonely, and so comforting. It is The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, except you're the boy and you don't have a dad to guide you through your changing personality. Your character has to come of age on their own while witnessing every parallel character doing the same in drastically different ways and with varied outcomes.
Speaking of coming-of-age, I will never in my life forget when I finally took the helmet off my character, 100+ hours into the game, well into New Game +, and for the first time I didn't replace that helmet with another. I will remember this moment because when I exited the equipment menu I was given the surprise that apparently my character had been changed into a woman at the very beginning of my first playthrough and I never noticed. This reveal awakened something in my mind--prior to this I had never questioned my own gender identity--and now suddenly middle-school me was having the realization that "I've secretly been a girl this whole time?" and furthermore, was being confronted with the idea that I really loved having that feeling. Only a game so wholly uninterested in immersing you could provide such a profound message, and only by providing the tools for such an event to occur while simultaneously trusting you fully to use those tools to provide yourself the adventure. It is the ultimate coming-of-age video game in my eye because it was designed to be wholly unpretentious and self-absorbed in its design. Dark Souls II is a gift from the developer to whoever plays it, without any strings attached. The developers' design is there if you want it, but the game gives you a therapeutic amount of space to have your own adventure. Dark Souls II feels like it was designed systematically and in isolation by many different individuals and small teams, and quite last minute was hodge-podged into a sellable whole by the assigned-director-halfway-through-development, Yui Tanimura. And it's a much stronger work of art for it. I bought Dark Souls II because I loved Dark Souls 1, but I guarantee you that if I had never heard of the series and happened across Dark Souls II in a Walmart bargain bin, I would've loved it even more than I do today.
---
For me the adventure peaked with Sinh the Slumbering Dragon, but even after that, the game kept delivering. I used to break out of bounds of games' maps all the time as a kid. It was so interesting to me to know that the developers didn't plan for me to do that and I did it anyway. The Frigid Outskirts gave me genuinely new content (not just more Souls content, but new content. Nothing was the same—the spawning mechanics, the level design, the enemy design, etc) out of bounds of the world. It was me playing in a level that didn't feel "designed for the player to beat it", as all other Souls levels feel in some regard. In Elden Ring, I don't doubt that The Lake of Rot and The Consecrated Snowfields were the children of Tanimura (who was lead directory for DkS2 and co-director for Elden Ring), while the straight, obvious, linear, safe paths through those areas were forced to be there by Miyazaki (the current poster-child of Fromsoft soulslikes) out of fear that the general audience wouldn't appreciate such an area being so unforgiving otherwise.
Dark Souls II feels a lot like Dragons Dogma, in how much experimentation it has and how pre-planned yet untidied everything feels. It was made with passion rather than logic. And I love it for that. I feel that passion coming through the design of the game and in turn share it. It feels intimate like no other game has to this day (for me, at least).
----------
Writing this review inspired me to play through the game yet again, it's been a quite a few years since I've played. And I'm only able to play the SOTFS edition since that's all that's available on my current platform. When I initially played SOTFS about 5 years ago, it was maybe a little too soon after I had played the original, and so my comfort and familiarity with that version was negatively painting my view of the newer version.
Now, with something like 4 years since I last played Dark Souls 2, while I play SOTFS today, I've arrived at the conclusion that SOTFS in a lot of ways "side-proves" the original experience by making it overall more difficult without being "unfair" as I imply in the review. I will say, though, that Heides Tower and especially Iron Keep are absolutely unfair (and more importantly unfun) in their newfound difficulty.
But SOTFS makes some great additions such as the Pursuer pursuing you in the Lost Bastille, and the falconeers populating the camp before Freya's domain.
Also, the constant use of petrified enemies to block paths, which I previously disliked for having paths "arbitrarily" locked, after coming back from many years' hiatus I find they aren't bad at all. It all feels a lot more purposeful than arbitrary and I no longer dislike them. In fact I quite like the petrified statues being used as a special type of lock and key. Again, you have to keep in mind that the Dark Souls 2 devs are unapologetic about having their game constantly feel "video-gamey". If you want to be immersed, then these statues are a blight on the game's quality. But if you are able to enjoy the feeling of playing an adventure game that Dark Souls 2 heavily pushes for, these statues are a positive. I will say though that the statue in the Lost Bastille is genuinely a dumb design decision. The fact that a player might waste their only easily-accessible branch of yore on a statue in the tutorial, and then get to the Lost Bastille and just be arbitrarily hard-locked from continuing is simply a stupid experience.
SOTFS is still worse than the original version since it has the general issue that the difficulty curve is insane. Pacing has been thrown out the window. The game starts astronomically difficult, which if you're new to DS2 means you won't be given room to learn the mechanics, and then after Lost Bastille SOTFS just completely drops in difficulty (except for Iron Keep and Shrine of Amana which were made ridiculously difficult by way of enemy spam). The original DS2 version is easy up until you get all 4 main boss souls, at which point the game's difficulty increases linearly with the castle, shrine, and crypt, and then tapers off with dragon aerie and the return to the castle. This follows in line with the rest of the Souls games' pacing. DS1 gets difficult at Anor Londo, DS3 at Irithyll, Sekiro at Ashina Castle on fire, Elden Ring at Leyndell (well, really just at the Mountaintops). DS2 followed this established and, in my opinion, good pattern until SOTFS came along.
I think SOTFS works as a remix for established fans of DS2 (who are already familiar with the mechanics of the game and fighting groups), whereas it is definitely a worse experience and game if you're going through DS2 for the first time.