It's alright. Can be fun with friends, but it's not scary at all to me - not in the "I'm too badass for horror huehue" sense, plenty of things can scare the shit out of me and keep me on edge especially with jumpscares and suspense, but this is 100% a 'fun' kind of game rather than a 'spooky' kind of game IMO. It's not uncommon at all for me to find myself just walking around a house looking for signs for 20 minutes straight with nothing much happening aside from maybe discovering a handprint on a door somewhere, and once you get into the groove of the game it gets pretty repetitive and same-y.

The equipment purchasing/loadout menus are pretty buggy and confusing - I thought that might be a me issue, but I see that other people have mentioned that in their reviews as well.

Movement is janky and it's a little disappointing that all of the 'jumpscares'/death animations are the same regardless of ghost type, but I do find the general concept of Phasmophobia pretty cool and I enjoy the basic beats of selecting equipment, figuring out what they all do, calling out evidence discoveries to each other, communicating via radio, etc.

I can't imagine playing this frequently, but it is some casual fun with a group of friends (particularly if they find it scary) every once in a while.

Man, nostalgia makes this so hard to objectively rate for people. I remember telling my friends to "meet me on Club Penguin after school", giving them a specific time and location so we could find each other. I remember spending ages on the pizza minigame, sledding, doing the PSA/EPF missions, the colour-your-adventure books upstairs in the Ski Lodge, ice fishing...

Then again, when I really think about it, there wasn't much... substance there? Every time I tried to go back to it as a teenager or an adult I couldn't find anything fun to do anymore. It was definitely one of those childhood "you had to be there" kind of games.

The Card-Jitsu game still fucks, though. I'd absolutely play that again.

GRAPHICS: Cohesively styled and nice to look at - somewhat typical ATLUS character designs. The colour schemes are pleasing to the eye and I overall enjoyed the aesthetics of the game a lot.
CHARACTERS: The protagonist, Vincent, is a 30-something year old socially awkward deadbeat who's going nowhere in particular in life and has to decide whether he's going to stay that way or start getting his act together. He's an objectively bad person at first, and so he might be hard to like for a lot of players, but I personally found his character development fun to guide along, and the comedy he brings with his constant anxiety and horrified reactions to everything had me endeared. Your potential love interests are Katherine, an ambitious and diligent career woman who wants Vincent to settle down and start taking things more seriously; Catherine, a playful and uncommitted seductress who doesn't believe in love; and Rin, a sweet and mysterious neighbour who doesn't seem to remember much of his past. I enjoyed all three characters and their different dynamics with Vincent (and who he can become as a result of those dynamics), but my personal favourite is probably Rin thanks to what he represents - I believe as a partner he is the biggest catalyst for Vincent to grow as a person and to find genuine happiness. The supporting characters, primarily Vincent's group of friends and Erica, the waitress at the bar they all hang out at, are likeable and funny.
DIALOGUE/VOICE ACTING: I enjoyed all of the voice acting fine. Troy Baker as Vincent is on point and hits all of the comedic beats perfectly, and while my personal enjoyment can vary with the other characters' voices, none of them were bad.
PLOT: A surprisingly mature and nuanced take on relationships for a game like this, Catherine: Full Body deals with infidelity, commitment, sexuality, gender identity, and personal growth. I found it genuinely enjoyable to play through, and your ending can vary pretty wildly depending on your choices and route (if I remember correctly, there are 16 or 17 different possibilities).
GAMEPLAY: The game has two very different gameplay styles. During the day, it's a dating sim/visual novel; Vincent hangs out at the bar with his group of friends, answers texts on his phone and has conversations with his various romantic interests, and has cutscenes with other characters. At night, it turns into a genuinely challenging and fast-paced puzzle game, where you guide Vincent through a series of nightmares he finds himself cursed with where any death in his sleep means a death in reality. I was playing it more for the story and choices than I was for the puzzles, so I ended up utilising the new QoL/accessibility toggles in this edition to breeze past most of them.
MULTIPLAYER: I believe there is a competitive multiplayer mode to the puzzle gameplay, but I've never tried it.

To address the elephant in the room, I'm sure there's nothing I can say about the transphobia criticisms about this game that hasn't been said already. However, personally it all comes down to: I can look past it. For an ATLUS game in 2011, having a major and likeable trans woman character like Erica is progressive in itself, and while I completely stand by the fact that people's criticism of how her character is treated by other characters is valid, I do believe they genuinely improved with Full Body and showed growth in how they treat LGBT+ characters with the inclusion of Rin, the fact that sexuality and gender is directly addressed on Rin's route with Erica weighing in on it, and the toning-down of some of the more off-colour moments to do with Erica's gender from the original.

I do think the 'alien reveal' was pretty silly and tonally off from the rest of the game. As some others have said in their own reviews, I would find Rin as an angel much more consistent and easy to digest, and a nice rounding-out of the love interest roster with Rin as an angelic figure, Catherine as a demonic figure, and Katherine as a grounded regular human. Frankly, I tend to just pretend that part of the ending didn't happen.

Favourite Male Character: Rin
Favourite Female Character: Erica
First Character I Liked: Vincent
Favourite Character Design: Katherine
Favourite OST: Result, Revelation
Least Favourite Character: None

What a weird-ass game. Absolutely riddled with bugs and glitches (I really thought people were exaggerating about that... nuh uh), makes decisions that retroactively fuck with the timeline and events of previous games, they completely dropped the 'animatronics are possessed by murdered children' concept and seemingly went the route of 'animatronics are actual sentient beings' weirdness, and it's just not scary. I mean, FNAF isn't generally scary aside from in the literal jumpscares sense, but this one felt very sanitised and for-kids in a way the others didn't.

The whole Vanessa/Vanny thing was so bizarre and badly explained, especially the whole "Gasp! Vanny... like Vanessa! And Bunny! But gasp! Now there's two of them in this ending!" shebang. The fact that the endings were just a slideshow of half-drawn images was so ridiculously funny to me, like they didn't even bother to finish the climax of the damn game and just left their imageboards from the planning stage in. Did anyone keep a straight face when that popped up for the first time?

As for positives, let's see. I think the general idea had potential - I actually really dug the intro at the beginning with the concert and the sabotage/hack interrupting it. The colours and settings of the game were pretty great - not sure I like them in FNAF, but I like them (the bright lights, the funplex, the minigames, the vibrant face paint) in general.

I'll also admit that Moon section had me tense.

Someone else's review said "Words are sometimes not enough to describe something" and frankly I concur.

This game was rough. I like to push my limits a little with visual novels sometimes, so I saw everyone talking about how fucked up this one gets and figured I'd give it a shot. I got all the endings, and one of them was so genuinely depressing and bleak that I immediately rushed through every other outcome so I could palate cleanse my brain and forget about that one. It's been a few years since I played it, and so normally I'd replay it again to refresh my memory before reviewing, but I can't bring myself to get through this one again - it's definitely a 'play it once and then put it down forever' kind of experience.

There were some scenes I had to physically look away from and just mash skip until it was over (I'm thinking specifically of one moment where one of them has to hammer a nail through the other one's hand), and I was so incredibly not a fan of the enema scene, but at least there's a handy 'no visuals please' button for that one.

I found the psychological elements of this one really interesting, the question of whether physical trauma vs. psychological trauma is worse and which one you'd choose to go through if given the option (though I do think it would have been more engaging to get to make those decisions yourself). You can get some pretty varied endings, and I found it interesting to see how earlier scenes and the dynamic between the two main characters changes subtly depending on the 'route' you're on.

I don't think I can put a star rating on this one. I kind of like it, I kind of hate it, I still think about it often, I never want to play it again.

I remember seeing a video showing this game off years ago over on Tumblr, and I was blown away by how creative and mind-trippy it all seemed. I completely forgot the name of it, but I always remembered the video, so a few years later I went hunting for what the game title was to play it for myself and found Superliminal.

This was a genuinely super neat concept. I dig games like this, and it didn't overstay its welcome to the point that the puzzles and core mechanics lost their novelty for me.

Might replay it on stream or something when it's been long enough that I've forgotten the solutions. This is the kind of game where seeing people's reactions to it all would be fun.

I have a lot of good memories of this one, mostly through playing with my fiancee before we were ever dating. Fun and slightly cringey fact - I first told her I thought I was going to marry her someday while we were playing this together.

Aside from that, it's just an oddly satisfying game. Admittedly, I spend most of my time on Raft catching fish and then cooking everything I catch and acting like it's the height of fun, but I maintain that it's useful so I'm allowed. The storyline was surprisingly interesting to slowly uncover, and the general gameplay is pretty engaging - it's always fun to find new islands, and you can make some seriously impressive-looking rafts with the building mechanics. Me and my fiancee ended up with a super cozy floating home with a fireplace - not sure how good of an idea that is when your entire living space is made of wood, but at least we're surrounded by water.

This is really tricky to rate, because everything is brought down by the inherent predatory nature of EA's microtransactions and pricing tactics.

The base game itself is hollow, soulless, and corporate. Basic content that was always available in earlier games is now parceled out in sectioned DLC and 'kits' that cost extortionate amounts of money and will only give you a piece of each previously-complete category of content - for instance, Sims 3 gave you Pets (which included cats, dogs, horses, foxes, small animals like hamsters, all of the furniture and items for pets, etc). In comparison, Sims 4 gives you Cats & Dogs, then a separate DLC for Horses, THEN a separate Stuff Pack for My First Pets Stuff for furniture and items. They sell a DLC for their fucking DLC.

If you download a ton of custom content, creating Sims is as fun as ever. The graphics are a step up, and it makes it (unfortunately) difficult to return to older Sims games after getting accustomed to this one, but everything else is a huge step back.

Once you've created your Sim, it's pretty much just empty repetition. You have to make your own fun via legacy challenges, mods, etcetera.

So: my rating is not for what the game can be with your own additions and downloaded custom content, because then it's what you make of it. I am rating it as it is vanilla, which is, frankly, barely anything at all.

Pirate it. Genuinely. At this point, pirating EA games is almost less ethically questionable than funding them and allowing their practices to be worth continuing. If they don't get their shit together, I can absolutely see the Sims franchise being run into the ground, which would be a sincere shame.

Usual disclaimer that my experience with Jackbox is entirely dipping in and out of games at random with my friend groups, so my reviews are based only on the games I've experienced until I potentially update with the ones I haven't gotten to try yet.

I really enjoyed Trivia Murder Party - I didn't expect to, as I find the more personal games more enjoyable than the plain objective trivia ones and I didn't think I had a lot of general knowledge, but through pure blind instinct I've never lost a game of this, so I must be doing alright. The little minigames between each round are surprisingly fun and nicely varied.

Push the Button is one of my favourite Jackbox games of all time; Among Us-esque, but with much more to do and a pretty broad range of minigames. It can get heated, which is saying a lot because I'm very chill and not competitive at all, so if you're someone who gets fired up over games this may set a burning rage aflame within you, and the timer can make things stressful - I find that with a certain number of players the timer just doesn't feel like it's long enough to have any fair chance at deducing the imposters' identities through all the games because there are just too many people to thoroughly test, particularly when hacking and thus the uncertainty of any task failure comes into play. I enjoyed most of the minigames enough to actively look forward to being selected for testing. Overall, pretty creative and gameplay-heavy (as long as you're not being neglected in being chosen for games).

Not a fan of Joke Boat, personally. This game got complete crickets from all of us, and, not to suck the dick of everyone in my friend group including myself, I don't think it's because we're not funny people - every other game we've tried consistently gets us crying with laughter. The prompts on this one are just so, so bad, and I did not see a single good opportunity for a clever joke throughout this entire thing.

This is actually really fun to play with my friend groups. It could do with some ironing out the parts that occasionally act up or are unfair - e.g. there's a "don't move" challenge that you'll fail instantly if you happened to already be moving before the instruction appeared, which you most likely will be because you're probably not just standing still between challenges, and I'd say at least once a game there's some instance of one of us getting told we've failed or passed one despite blatantly not doing so. That aside, especially for a free game it has good variety to keep your interest and make sure it doesn't stagnate, and rounds are fast-paced so you're almost always moving and doing something. Games are also a good length - it's pretty addictive, so we'll almost always say "one more round", get to the end, and then end up playing more and more because, well, the next one is starting anyway and that one was short, so we might as well, and now the next one is starting, rinse and repeat.

Some gameplay elements can take some getting used to - I and a few friends found the strafe-jumping to be a pain in the ass to control at first - but it's pretty simple once you get accustomed.

Not sure what it would be like playing with strangers, but half the fun for me comes from the voice chat and jokes with friends while playing so I'd guess there's less enjoyment playing that way.

I was going to hold off on reviewing this until I'd finished the available content, but with my gaming laptop in repair I don't see myself getting to that anytime soon, so I'll just throw this out now with the caveat that I haven't played for longer than a handful of hours so far.

First impressions are: it's better than I expected, particularly considering I'm not really into survival/crafting-type games at all (with a few exceptions - Minecraft and Raft, though they feel as though they barely count, and Subnautica and The Forest kept my interest with their stories). It's not something I see myself devotedly playing or becoming a big fan of, but it's fun to play with a good group of friends, the graphics are clean, it has some good potential, and it kept me engaged for as long as I was on it.

The gameplay is still pretty rough, but that's probably a given with an Early Access title like this. I experienced a lot of bugs and glitches and just general awkward movement.

Re: the elephant in the room, I think to say there's no copying here would be to be in complete denial, especially considering how shameless a BOTW copy their last game was. A fair few designs in here are blatant rip-offs, some going as far as to have the Pokemon assets one-to-one copied but just flipped around or combined with others', so I'll be curious to see how that lawsuit pans out. I don't expect the game will be entirely taken down, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if they have to rework some designs and elements.

That said, there are also some nice unique (as far as I know) designs here. I'm cautious to give Palworld too much credit because I've seen claims the artist has stolen from Fakemon/fanart as well, so those 'unique' designs could be down to someone else, but I don't know enough about that to say for sure.

Gameplay-wise, it's not really much like Pokemon at all - I see a lot of comparisons to ARK, but I've never played that, so it mostly just reminded me of Rust. I leave the base-building up to my friends and pretty much just spend my time collecting Pals and exploring, and that works for me.

I'll keep up with it and I'm interested to see where the development goes, though I can also completely understand why this game is getting the criticism it is. I've also heard their other game had some incredibly bad practices and financial ethics, so I'm retaining some caution.

I hope updates add more of a storyline, and ideally I'd like to see more maps. It's the same world regardless of server, which I get, but it means once you've explored in one you don't have much left to see. Having more of a plot with relevant NPCs/locations etc. scattered around it might make it feel more interesting.

GRAPHICS: Definitely aged even by Telltale standards, but they're absolutely not what's important here. I'd also say they're not bad by any means.
CHARACTERS: The best part of the experience. You will, most likely, grow emotionally connected to these people in a way you may not expect. Lee is iconic as a protagonist and one of the most beloved leading men in gaming for a reason, Clementine is adorable and from what I can tell a good emotional anchor for most players, Kenny is lauded by gamers (even if I find him overrated myself), and the various side and minor characters are well-written and serve a purpose. I could write you an embarrassingly long essay in defense of Ben even years after I last played.
GAMEPLAY: Typical Telltale fare - QTE sequences, timed dialogue choices, moral decisions, walking around, some scattered environmental puzzles. If you don't like Telltale's usual style of gameplay, it does nothing different here, but I do, so I enjoyed it.
MULTIPLAYER: None.

It's really, really hard to express how much this game means to me. Not only my first Telltale game (to this day one of my favourite studios), when it released in 2012 this was my first choice-based/interactive fiction type game ever, and it catapulted me headfirst into possibly my absolute most-played genre ever. There is a reason people still talk about this game and its characters over a decade later, there is a reason people uploaded videos of themselves sobbing at the ending, there is a reason this won so many GOTY awards. If you're going to play one Telltale game, make it this one. Even if you don't like gameplay-light experiences like this, try it. I don't think there's a single person I wouldn't recommend this to with my entire soul. I've lost count of the number of times I've played this - on Xbox 360, on Xbox One, on PS4, on computer - but it's absolutely in the double digits.

As an aside, the horror of Episode 2 impacted me so deeply as a child that aspects of it formed and affected my fears to this day. "See where he is now" is a phrase that haunts my damn mind. If you know, you know.

(Sidenote I include with all Telltale reviews: Telltale's games often get a bad rap for having your choices not influence the story, but to me this misses the point of what they do. Variant endings are a nice bonus in games, and I enjoy them when they do pop up in Telltale's stories, but for the most part your choices aren't here to change where you go. They're there to change how you get there, who you are when you get there, and often who you get there with. They influence and change your relationships with the characters around you. The joy of replaying these games is to experience the different dialogue, the different reactions to you, the different routes you can take on the way, the different bonds you can evolve with people - not to have a wildly different ending. I think this aspect is overhated and sadly misunderstood by a lot of players, so if huge, game-changing differences are what you're looking for, I'd temper your expectations.)

Favourite Male Character: Ben, Mark
Favourite Female Character: Most of my favourites are from later games, but by process of elimination probably Lily
First Character I Liked: Lee
Favourite Character Design: Lee
Favourite OST: TBA
Favourite Scene: Bitten Lee's final unflinching walk through the city in Episode 5 with all the walkers surrounding him
Least Favourite Character: The Stranger

Some of this review might be contextualised by the fact that this is my first Pokemon game (unless you count a brief foray into DS spin-off Blue Rescue Team when I was too young to really comprehend what I was doing) - as a result, I might not always know which complaints or compliments are SWSH-specific or apply to the series in general. On top of that, I ended up shelving this game once I hit the Dark gym because it just wasn't keeping my attention much anymore and I was getting distracted by other games, so all of my thoughts are based on the game up to that point.

I probably did like this more than most, likely as a result of it being my first, but even I grew tired of the extreme hand-holding at the beginning. Now, I personally don't like being dropped in a game with no indication of what to do - I'm autistic, so I like clear instructions - but this was pretty stifling. You'd get a dialogue telling you to go to X place down Y road, walk ten steps down said road, get interrupted by another dialogue telling you X place is up ahead, walk another ten steps, get interrupted by another dialogue telling you you've reached X place and how exciting that is, etc.

I enjoyed the Wild Area, though it quickly lost its novelty to me as it still contains the same general kinds of Pokemon and after you've caught those it's very rare to find a new kind you don't already have there.

The characters weren't very gripping; the most interesting ones to me were probably Bede, Nessa, and Kabu, but even then the latter two mostly stood out to me for their designs rather than their actual characterisation or actions.

There were some genuinely beautiful locations, such as Ballonlea, and I don't fully understand the criticism of graphics, but again that might be down to this being my only experience with Pokemon thus far.

I liked the Dynamax/Gigantamax thing well enough, mostly for the sake of playing around with different Pokemon and seeing what they looked like with it, but as a gimmick in itself it's just okay.

The game did motivate me to get more into Pokemon and go back to some of the older games, and I did discover a genuine love for catching and collecting Pokemon and filling out my Dex (which makes the Dex cut a little disappointing even for me as a newcomer), so I'll be doing that sometime for sure.

Maybe I'll get back to this someday, though it's not a super appealing thought as of right now. I'd restart and begin fresh, but the concept of trudging through all the hand-holding at the beginning again is putting me off.

Before anything else - play this with the Unofficial Patch (Plus). I'd go so far as to say it's a necessity. Additionally, the consensus is to avoid playing Clan Malkavian or Clan Nosferatu for your first playthrough. These two clans offer completely different experiences; Malkavians have visions of the future and are considered to be insane, which is reflected in their dialogue, and you're often given hints/story spoilers throughout your own options along the game because your character is seeing/sensing things that haven't happened yet. Nosferatu vampires are forced to basically stealth the whole game as they can't be seen by humans without violating the Masquerade, which means you won't be getting most dialogue and you'll be confined to the sewers for most of your run.

Now that that's out of the way...

Fuck, I love this game. The graphics have aged terribly (the opening cutscene made me giggle when I first saw it because the movement of someone pouncing on another character was so bad), the combat is clunky, and it's undeniably a game from 2004 - but hell if I care. I can't even put into words how special this game is. It's brimming with character, with this thick, deep Gothic atmosphere, and it's one of the most immersive, path-varying RPGs I've ever experienced.

VTM:B genuinely could have been made for me.

My only slight complaint is that I wish there was a character creator, but you're playing most of it in first-person anyway, so I could ignore the preset appearances for each Clan. The fact that every Clan offers such a different experience offers so much replayability, I love the political intrigue and machinations of it all, the soundtrack is gorgeous, the quests are genuinely interesting, the characters are all fascinating, just... ugh. God. I love it, man.

Favourite Male Character: Lacroix
Favourite Female Character: Jeanette
First Character I Liked: Lacroix
Favourite Character Design: Pisha
Favourite Scene: Escaping the explosion and walking away from the house on fire with the music swelling around you
Favourite OST: All That Could Ever Be
Least Favourite Character: None