I don't like this revisionist history I'm seeing with regards to this project that tries to paint Sonic '06 as something that can be salvaged with "better core gameplay". Sonic 06 was a fundamentally broken game, in every single aspect of its design. It's not something so easily fixed, and after all these years of it being one of the most laughably bad games of all time, one that even the most die-hard fans seemed to have trouble defending, it's very strange seeing people online saying stuff like "it had good ideas!" or "it just needed a bit more development time!" or "It has a lot of potential!". My knee-jerk reaction is to say this is nostalgia talking for a lot of people, wanting to believe this game they felt so disappointed by as a kid could've ended up as a masterpiece, but the reality is that the game never stood a chance. You'd have to go back to the drawing board with Sonic 06 to pull out something decent, not just give it more time in the oven.

No hate to the project's creator, because I think it's a genuine show of love for the series that someone would undergo trying to salvage one of the most infamous games of all time. If I'm judging just his work I'd be praising him, but unfortunately his great work is still being built upon, well, Sonic '06. If the myriad of tweaks is enough to make this game enjoyable for Sonic fans, all the more power to them. But playing this project just crystalized for me how much Sega absolutely failed with Sonic '06. The level design is boring, frequently includes frustrating mechanics and the additional characters outside Sonic, Shadow and Silver still feel tacked on and never as fun as the primary trio, and focusing on half-baked physics puzzles and vehicle combat for the Shadow and Silver campaigns is still completely misguided.

I fully admit the game controls much better now, and would love to see people take this framework and do something new with it. But good core controls doesn't suddenly make Sonic '06 worth playing, it just shows that game development is complicated, and the fixes we propose as fans often aren't enough to save the games we want to love. I wanted to love Sonic '06 when I played it as a young kid, but even then, when my standards for games were so much lower, I still felt that this game was broken beyond repair. Unfortunately after playing P-06, I still feel that way.

Criminally overlooked. This game is a turn-based RPG with a heavy emphasis on survival mechanics in a dark oppressive world. There are some clear inspirations here (one enemy is lifted directly from Demon’s Souls, and an important NPC was no-doubt inspired by Berserk), but the game’s overall aesthetic is wholly unique, visceral, and depraved. The art is equal parts gorgeous and grotesque, and the music, if you can call it music, is oppressive and hair-raising. The whole atmosphere of the game just makes you feel on edge, and stressed about what monstrosity you’ll encounter next.

The dev has a great sense of creating fear and stress through gameplay mechanics as well; attacks from enemies can lead to losing limbs, which makes you unable to hold a two-handed weapon, or a shield. Non-player Party Members will die outright with no way to revive them. Your party can be inflicted with poison, bleeding, tapeworms, and infected wounds, which all require precious resources to treat (and if you can't treat an infected wound, you'll be forced to saw off a limb to stop the infection from killing you outright). You constantly have to scavenge for food to maintain your hunger gauge, and pay attention to your party’s fear gauge, lest they become discouraged and abandon you altogether. All of this is propped up by the coin-toss system, wherein a number of actions in the game require you to pick heads or tails to determine an outcome, such as finding better items while searching chests and bookshelves, or whether you avoid a particularly nasty attack. This system causes you to put more thought into your actions, and play the game a bit more like an adventurer would in real life; being aware of your surroundings and considering the potential risks that your actions carry.

Most importantly, however, the coin toss system is used for saving, which is no doubt going to turn some people away from the game outright. Failing a coin toss while trying to save (done via sleeping in beds) can cause you to be attacked by enemies, or more often than not the game will simply wake you up without saving, and will prevent you from trying again for a bit of time. The game isn't totally heartless, however, and frequently hands out "lucky coins" which can be used to flip a second coin, essentially reducing your chance of failure to 25%, there are also a couple of totally safe save points which won't trigger anything nasty, and there is also a rare, consumable item which lets you save on the spot. What I love about this system is how it forces you to take the rest of the mechanics seriously, something you wouldn’t do if saving was a more available thing. If, for instance, you’ve been a long while without saving, and you lose an arm, or maybe a party member bites the dust, you’ll be much more inclined to press on rather than save-scumming to avoid a bad outcome, which makes your playthrough all the more interesting. Having to deal with a main character losing his arm and becoming less useful, or your favorite party member permanently dying, are memorable experiences that take you by surprise. And when reaching the end of the game, battered, bruised and probably down a man or two, you’ll feel like you’ve accomplished the impossible.

I can’t recommend this game enough; it evoked a feeling of helplessness and dread that even the scariest horror games can’t get out of me anymore. It’s tough, often bordering on unfair, but if you’re willing to press on, you’ll be left with an experience unlike any other.

I felt something missing from Tears of The Kingdom compared to BOTW. I don't mean this in a bad way, just that something felt different during my playthrough. It may seem obvious to others, but to me it only became clear when I sat down and looked at the actual names of the two games; Breath of the Wild versus Tears of The Kingdom. The phrasing of the two titles cements this initially vague feeling of something missing as an intentional choice for me.

Hyrule is no longer an untamed wilderness with pockets of civilization throughout, instead it's a proper kingdom. You can't go very far without encountering some sign of civilization; an adventurer in the wild, a pile of unused construction materials, or a random shack housing an NPC in the middle of seemingly nowhere. Gone from TOTK are the multiple hours spent seeing little more than nature and the ruins of the calamity. The Hyrule of TOTK feels dense, lively and interesting, but as a result of this direction, the isolated, serene feeling that BOTW imparted is almost gone. It was a feeling I loved in BOTW, one that no other game had ever provided me, the feeling of getting lost in a true wilderness, a feeling that was the basis for the very first Zelda game. BOTW had signs of civilization, but they felt vastly overwhelmed by the untouched wild. When you left a town you truly felt like leaving civilization, it could be hours before you saw another person. TOTK occasionally captures this isolation in The Depths, but given that area's framing as a more sinister, malicious place I don't think it captures that same feeling of being alone in raw nature, devoid of any good or bad intentions, and the feeling that sort of serenity imparts.

I also think that the games new building mechanics, and the Skyview towers which provide an easy method of travel to any untouched location, end up removing the intimate connection with the world that Botw imparts. My relationship with the world feels fundamentally different when I can so easily soar above most of the surface without a second thought, instead of having to hike my way to every location and feeling immense satisfaction in arriving at any new area. The glider of BOTW combined with Sheikah towers already allowed you to cross huge sections of the map without issue, but in TOTK you can pretty easily make a vehicle that traverses the whole map in a fraction of the time. My horses are no longer my trusty thick-and-thin companions, but just domesticated house pets that sit in their Stable while I traverse the map on my Green Goblin Glider. I love these new mechanics to death, I really do, but again, their addition fundamentally changes the way you navigate and interact with this world. Hyrule isn't a sprawling, intimidating wilderness, but an easily navigated kingdom. I felt a little bummed out when I finally amassed all three parts of the climbing gear, my tried-and-true equipment in BOTW, and realized I had vanishingly few opportunities to actually use it in TOTK.

I love TOTK's dense, multi-layered map, and it's excellent new building and fusing mechanics. By all accounts, it's a roaring success of a sequel, one which expands on the good aspects of its predecessor while still leaving room for plenty of surprises. I'm not fully finished with it yet, but I'm leaning towards it being better than BOTW. If Breath of the Wild was about recapturing that feeling imparted by the original Legend of Zelda, then Tears of the Kingdom is the series becoming confident in that change, and moving forward in new directions. I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel a tinge of sadness seeing people say that this game makes Breath of The Wild somehow "invalidated" or no longer worth playing. That isolation remains unique to Breath of the Wild, and I'm glad that Nintendo saw fit to give its sequel an identity of its own, even if it technically takes place in the same world. It's an evolution of its predecessor, no doubt, but evolution inevitably comes with sacrifices, and I'm hopeful that more people will come around to the idea that Tears of The Kingdom is its own experience, and not just a straight upgrade.


Still, nothing in this world could ever recapture the magic of playing Breath of the Wild for the first time. Maybe all these words are just a short way of me saying that I've grown nostalgic for a game from 2017. Maybe it's just the fact that Breath of the Wild was perhaps the last time I felt a child-like sense of wonder from a game before the full weight of adulthood came down on me, the last time I could stay up until 3am five nights in a row just getting absorbed into, well, anything. In that sense, maybe nothing Nintendo could've put out would've been able to fully rekindle that feeling. But that's OK, because Tears of The Kingdom came very close to reigniting that feeling, and it gave me something new and equally valuable as well, in that it showed how that world I cherished so much has changed. Time moves forward whether we want it to or not, and although I can't go back to the same Hyrule I experienced 7 years ago in BOTW, I can move forward with this new one, and see the ways it's changed and stayed the same in that time as we both move toward the future.

Maybe I'm making a big deal over nothing but I feel like having your "seemingly normal program that becomes more creepy as you play" immediately begin with spooky ambient noise blaring in the background kinda just serves to remind me how manufactured the whole thing is.

For me, having the game be silent aside from the sounds of the computer and the map application itself would've created a better sense of stumbling into something you shouldn't have in an otherwise normal program, rather than trying to unsettle me with spooky noise from the get-go. If you want to make a game about a seemingly normal thing becoming unsettling, I think non-diegetic sound like that can really pull you out of the moment. Still really love the concept though!

Nintendo has outdone themselves by making an aiming system worse than the one they made over twenty years ago with Pikmin 1. Please make all of my decisions for me, Nintendo. I was stupid for ever wanting any semblance of control over the cursor, please play the game for me, and do so very poorly!

Lacking fluidity in many of its systems; constant interruptions combined with constant cursor jumping combined with constant radio chatter make this one of the most annoying games Nintendo has put out in a while.

I'm still really enjoying it, but WOW do I hate being treated like a toddler at every opportunity. Just let me CHOOSE to turn off some messages or the auto target.


I am fully convinced that every single person that touts this game as one of the greatest of all time or an underrated SNES gem is playing an elaborate trick on me, it has to be nostalgia, right? I've been trying to fully play through this game for more than a decade now, and every single time I bounce off it once I remember how bad the whole thing feels.

The visuals might be quaint and charming and the music might be some of the best of the era, but after being stunlocked to death for the fifth time in an hour, or getting softlocked because the AI companion got stuck in a way that made it impossible for me to correct or free them, or after said companions getting insta-killed by an enemy leaves me without the magic I need to spam in order to even stand a chance with this godforsaken combat system, I have to wonder if it's worth suffering through such a fundamentally broken game just to experience some nice music, decent visuals and a mediocre story told through a translation that leaves me not even sure what's going on half the time.

In my case, it is not worth it, not even slightly. I'm glad some people can look past the flaws and enjoy the positive aspects, but for me, this game is one of the most janky, unwieldy experiences I've ever had. I'll probably get gaslit into trying it again a couple months from now.

I consider it to be a genuine feat that a game clocking in at less than an hour can feel so monotonous and overdrawn.

The visuals are really incredible. But slowly trudging through these overly-large, confusing levels towards the end was a genuine test of my patience. It doesn't help that the creepypasta-tier writing seemed to acknowledge this, saying phrases like "HURRY UP" and "ANYONE ELSE WOULD'VE BEEN DONE BY NOW" as I struggle to find the sixth whatever-the-fuck in an overly large map. Not exactly charming to write in stuff like this when your core gameplay is this miserably slow.

Maybe this would've worked better as a short Youtube video about a haunted game someone discovered. Cliche though it would've been, at least the visuals could shine without being bogged down by slow. uneventful gameplay.

If one were to come up with a "golden rule" for making video games, I think the most commonly applicable mantra would be this:

Games should feel good to play, and they should be fair.

Hard to disagree with on the surface, and it's a rule that, in 99% of games, wouldn't steer you wrong. But assigning "rules" to art is tenuous at best. Filmmakers, musicians, writers, artists of all kind have long since learned the lesson that breaking conventions and established rules can be valuable in evoking certain emotions. Filmmakers have broken basic rules of shot composition to create a feeling of unease or intentional confusion, dissonance can have its value in music, and one may argue that traditional art may not have moved much past realism if not for artists pushing the boundaries of the medium to better present the intended emotion of a piece. Not every piece of art should be enjoyable to experience at all times, because life itself isn't always enjoyable to experience.

Rain World is a game which understands the value that can be created in not being enjoyable. Rain World is unfair, not because the developers didn't balance the game correctly, but because they understood that as soon as they started making concessions for the player, the ecosystem they created would cease to feel believable, and the world would become the same as nearly every other game; a space made for the player, in service of an enjoyable experience. If enemies arbitrarily ceased attacking you as you changed screens or adhered to specific patrols and behaviors they would no longer feel like inhabitants of this world, but instead merely obstacles meant to be overcome.

To be totally fair to Rain World’s detractors, there are two stances one could take in opposition to this unfairness that I see as valid concerns:

1. Players with any sort of accessibility concerns may be completely incapable of completing Rain World due to its indifferent approach to fairness - I sympathize heavily with anyone who simply cannot complete Rain World due to conditions out of their control. The game added the Monk character which goes a decent way towards making the experience easier for players, but this "easy mode" character doesn't fundamentally change the way the world works, it just makes those moments of unfairness less frequent.

2. Related to my previous point, video games are the only medium which are largely active experiences. You may find an aspect of a film upsetting in some form, but you can take solace in the fact that so long as you don't shut it off or walk out of the theatre you will see the ending to the movie, you don't need any sort of active input to see the credits roll. This isn't a promise kept for video games because many of them require some direct input from the player to reach the ending, so therefore some consideration should be made to allowing the player to reach the ending of a game. I don't think that buying a game somehow entitles you to experience it in full without trying, but I also understand the idea that at the very least, the obstacles presented to the player should be ones they can overcome with their own skill, rather than left to the whims of an unfair system.

As a side note, Rain World may not seem to be very fair, but at the very least it has two concessions made in the players favor; that you can respawn at all flies in the face of the idea behind making a believable ecosystem but I think we can all agree that it’s a necessary concession, and that you can see when enemies are coming through pipes in advance to avoid getting killed by something you had zero chance of seeing.

Yet barring those small concessions, Rain World is indifferent to your plights, and because of this, it approaches a level of realism that beats out the almost lifelike graphics and shallow survival systems of triple A games. Navigating this world is truly treacherous and yet, because of this, it creates some of the most satisfying moments I’ve experienced in a game, none of which are scripted. Escaping the jaws of a salamander through a well-placed spear to its face, out-swimming a massive sea monster, befriending a group of scavengers and helping them fight off a dangerous vulture are all satisfying and memorable because you know that the game didn’t lean in your favor in the slightest, you accomplished these things by yourself using your knowledge, survival skills and wit.

It also helps immensely that the music is appropriately foreboding and suits the drop-dead GORGEOUS art of the game. Seriously, Rain World is probably the best looking 2D game I’ve ever played, all the realism in its mechanics would have been utterly wasted if the art hadn’t been up to snuff but thankfully, it compliments the gameplay perfectly. I also want to give a small shoutout to the ending sequence which, without spoilers, left me in a state of complete awe and was the perfect capstone to the experience.

I can completely understand why many find this game frustrating, but to me it’s proof that this medium has so much room to grow and expand. Gaming is a very new form of art, so seeing indie games like Rain World be willing to push the boundaries of the medium gives me hope that maybe the art form isn’t as doomed to homogenization as I thought. As usual, the indies continue to push art forward, while the big companies are content with stagnation.

This one appeals to my personal tastes way more than Toree honestly. Just a chill as hell collectathon with great movement in a wonderfully chunky N64 style.

Also can I say that I adore Siactro's approach to weird visuals? Their games don't try overly hard to be creepy or disturbing moments and instead just presents strange things without fanfare. It really helps evoke that feeling of coming across something in a childhood game that inexplicably creeps you out but you're too young to understand why. I wish more developers were willing to be this delightfully strange.

Aesthetically a treat, but the game surrounding it is frustrating.

The weapon feels bad to use and the fact that you lose your projectile unless you're at full health is obnoxious. First person melee almost always feels awful and in a game like this where you're encouraged to strafehop and build up speed it feels awful having to stop to fight enemies at close range, especially since your melee range is pitiful and almost guarantees you'll get hit in the process of trying to melee most enemies. When you actually DO have full health you basically can't afford to be looking forward since you constantly have enemies right behind you that you need to shoot, so you end up running into terrain and taking damage, or you face forward and end up taking damage from an enemy you can't see.

If you manage to live long enough to get to a safe area you can upgrade your character and regain health but the portal to the safe area spawns at random. I had one run where two portals were right next to each other, and another run where I was running around for 5+ minutes with ZERO portal spawns. It seems the game's areas are procedurally generated, which I don't think added to the game at all since the variance is so little for each area.

The other areas were great visually and I liked the new creature designs I encountered, but since most of my runs ended after 5-10 minutes in the first area I lost desire to see the rest of the game.

Was gunning for 100% completion but it left Gamepass so I'll leave it as-is for now, only missing 2-3 endings I think.

Incredible aesthetic, 10/10 dynamic soundtrack and an interesting gameplay loop that feels fun to learn the intricacies for. The narrative does something I've never seen in a game before in that you're encouraged not to pay attention to it if you want to play optimally. Rather than dismiss this as a flaw, I see it as intentional choice, showing the complete lack of ethics and morals inherent to this free market. Sure, you COULD take the time to make sure the customers you're helping have good intentions, but then that makes you a bad businessman, and you won't make it very far into the game with that attitude, you need to be amoral to succeed in this game's world.

Getting mere glimpses of the harm you're causing as you frantically buy and sell body parts only to end the game ushering in a variety of apocalyptic events due to the unregulated market and your desire to chase a profit is a type of gameplay/narrative cohesion I've never seen before. Highly recommended.

Remember when the pre-order bonus for this game was a costume for Casca in her bathing "outfit" (i.e. wet shirt with no pants)? Not that Berserk was the type of series for this shit to begin with, but really? You chose CASCA of all characters, wearing the outfit she wears during one of the most tender and vulnerable moments in the series, to sell your pre-orders? .

That disgustingly tone-deaf bit of fanservice didn't exactly inspire confidence in this game, so I wasn't particularly hurt when I played it and found it to be the most bland musou imaginable.

Can we try a Berserk game just one more time?

Same feelings I have as Ship of Harkinian, just a fantastic show of love for such a wonderful and revolutionary game.

Gold standard for source ports, tons of options, Render96 fucking rules. No reason to go back to any other version after this.

This review contains spoilers

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey

Some of the best gameplay/narrative cohesion I've seen in a game. Lobotomy Corporation is a game all about managing a series of ever increasing worst case scenarios that culminates in an absolutely brutal final stretch that left me hobbling towards the finish line with only a third of the employees I'd spent so many hours training.

Unfairness and brutality are a core facet of this game. The only way to understand many of the horrible monstrosities you're tasked with managing is by throwing your employees at them and letting their deaths help you to formulate your strategy. Abnormalities have conditions that are generally easy to manage in isolation, but where the game gets truly sadistic is in managing multiple abnormalities with overlapping and often contradicting rules. One requiring a number of sacrifices per meltdown while another will wreak havoc after enough employees have died. One abnormality may require you to never have your camera on it while it's being worked on, whereas another may require you to keep your camera on it the whole time. Juggling all these different challenges will truly put a test to your ability to micromanage, and just when you think you've got it all under control, you'll remember you haven't checked Express Train to Hell in a couple minutes and a ghost train will rip through your facility and kill half your team.

The olive branch extended to you is the rewind feature, allowing you to rewind back to a previous day or even the beginning of the game while retaining your abnormality information and equipment, as well as your mission progress (that last one I was ignorant to until about 35 days into my first cycle, having failed to complete a single core suppression). I had to do two full resets before reaching the true ending, and while losing my employees was a harsh blow, the gains were too big to ignore. Cleverly, the game even ties this rewind mechanic directly to the story, recontextualizing what I initially thought to be a fail state into an expected aspect of my journey.

The best aspect, however, was the core suppressions; which put to the test nearly every skill you learn in your playthrough in interesting ways while often providing some great insight into your colorful cast of coworkers. My favorite of all has to be Hokma's suppression, the mechanics behind it and how they relate to his personal mindset and feelings was a particular highlight for me. When I tried to speed up time during this event and was met with a message telling me that we "mustn't let time pass recklessly", it hit me way harder than expected.

And can we talk about the music? The core suppression music is always a perfect representation of its boss' mindset, but the standout tracks were the trumpet/warning themes. Trumpet 1 is accompanied by a tense track that wordlessly tells the player "Hey, some shit is starting to go down". When things start to really go bad the Trumpet 2 theme kicks in, a fast paced, energetic song backed by a whining alarm telling you that your situation is spiraling out of control. Finally, when you inevitably fail to control the situation, the third trumpet theme plays; a somber track with sorrowful vocals effectively communicating that your situation is almost certainly incapable of being salvaged. The first time I had this series of tracks play in full for me might just be my favorite moment of the game, perfectly lined up with my own initial panic, determination, and despair as I went to restart a particularly disastrous day.

Overall this game features an incredible cohesion between all of its aspects, nearly every gameplay element justified in it's story and fitting well with the plot and themes. I jumped right into Library of Ruina upon finishing Lob Corp and while I am loving it's turned based card system, I can't shake the feeling that it's numerous systems won't achieve that same wonderful harmony this game has.

One of my new favorites for sure, just make sure you download those stacking healthbars and super speed mods to save yourself some headaches. Even making liberal use of the super speed mod, my true ending playthrough clocked me in at around 140 hours, a number I imagine would be a lot higher if I stuck with the vanilla game's max speed. There's a fair bit of jank to this game, and all my major flaws were easily fixed by mods that I didn't feel impacted the cut-throat difficulty.