I really enjoyed this one. Significantly longer than Noblesse Oblige, and while Creme de la Creme remains my favorite from this author's works, this is up there beside it in terms of quality and characters. Engaging story, interesting personalities to romance or befriend, and a mystery that still struggles with pacing but is a lot better blended in terms of genre shift than Creme's. It felt pretty lengthy too, and included an extensive epilogue that lets you catch up on your character and their relationships down the line.

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.

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

Gets old very, very fast - once you've played it for a week or so, you've pretty much exhausted all there is to do and seen all of the unique content. The gameplay is pretty basic and mostly consists of you watching your Miis exist like an ominous god until they deem it time to give you a short, repetitive little minigame.

That said, it's a fun, basic little simulator game that's very random in a very wacky, dreamlike kind of way, and making your friends and family can create some genuinely hilarious scenarios you'll want to tell them about.

I have fun coming back to this once every couple of years, making everyone all over again, playing around with it for a few days, and then abandoning it again, but I can't imagine playing it more in-depth than that. I certainly wouldn't pay more than £10-15 for it.

Also, no gay relationships. That's dumb. If you want to make your gay friends, you have to either deal with the uncomfortable experience of them falling randomly into straight romances or you have to make them a gender they aren't and just pretend real hard.

God, I love this game. I LOVE THIS GAME.

Okay, so the 5 star rating is biased of me. It does have flaws, which everyone else has already covered extensively - the repeating environments and the waves of enemies jumping out of the sky are the two that stuck out to me. We're not going to talk about how terrible everyone's hands look.

But that can't even nudge this out of its place as a firm favourite game of all time. I love the characters. I love the fact that rather than a generic Chosen One world-saving plot, it's centered around this small-scale storyline of one scrappy refugee and their friend group in one shitty little city. I love that the companions feel like an actual tight-knit group rather than co-workers forced together - they feel like they're there because they care about Hawke, even when it's inconvenient for them, not because they have some goal that aligns with yours and so they need to be.

I love the soundtrack, I love the combat (and if you know me you'll know how rare it is for me to say that about games), I love the atmosphere. I love the political machinations of it all, the way your companions have their own stories and motivations that may conflict with and throw off yours, the fact that the game spans ten years so you watch things change and improve and deteriorate and fall apart and be put back together again over time.

I love Hawke! I love that the game actually works the personality-type you lean towards more often into their characterisation, so that the deeper into the game you get, the more your typical approach to situations - diplomacy, humour, aggression - will show in their idle lines and what they do even without your input.

I love the friendship-rivalry system; it's so incredibly interesting, it adds replay value, and it shows you such different sides of each character, both in terms of a platonic connection with them and a romantic relationship.

I love that the story is framed through a narrative of Varric telling the story to Cassandra in the present-day, with her pulling him back at the beginning and end of arcs (and sometimes in the middle of them) to call him out on lies or evasions or comment on your actions, and how utterly Varric slots into the trope of unreliable narrator - not just because he wants to, or because it services the story, but because he's doing all he can to protect the friend he loves.

I love the quests, especially the companion quests. I even happily do the side quests every replay! And that's saying something, because I can't even count how many times I've replayed Dragon Age 2.

I've played it over and over, and I will continue to play it over and over. This game has such a special place in my heart. I don't care about the fact that every cave looks like different angles of the same location - DA2 is almost my perfect experience.

Favourite Male Character: Anders (I know!)
Favourite Female Character: Merrill (I know!!)
First Character I Liked: Fenris
Favourite Character Design: Isabela
Favourite Moment: The Chantry incident
Favourite OST: Love Scene, Fenris Theme, Rogue Heart
Least Favourite Character: Aveline

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

Completed Sacha's route. I usually go for the 100%, but I can't make myself replay this one.

Positives:
- Generally wholesome and pleasant art style, aesthetics, and atmosphere.
- The backgrounds are pretty, particularly the apartment interiors. Was a big fan of the home your protagonist has with the fairy lights and the details like their collection of souvenir mugs.
- The variety in dogs is cool, with four to choose from, each of a different breed, personality, boosted stat, and backstory.

Neutral:
- The main focus is on the dog care rather than the romance for sure, so YMMV on whether that's a good or bad thing. I'm personally playing dating sims for the relationships and characters rather than the 'management sim'-esque aspect this has, so it wasn't the way I'd have preferred.
- The humour reminded me of Dream Daddy. Whether that's a plus or minus is subjective. For me, it was a minus; that kind of relentless, in-your-face goofiness that gets overplayed fast and makes it hard to take the game's attempts at heavier subject matter seriously.

Negatives:
- Why. Why. Why. Why isn't there a 'skip read text' button? Not only is that a mainstay feature of visual novels for a reason, I'd go as far as to say it's an essential one. The lack of one is the major reason behind why I'm not continuing with the other routes - I am absolutely not sitting here manually clicking through the entire story over again for the minute-long scenes you get with specific characters every so often.
- Dog events happen way too often. Like, within the span of about twenty seconds, I had to continuously stop progressing the story to comfort my cowering dog, then to pull it back from running away, then to pull it back from digging in the ground, then to pick up its poop. Begging you to let me read the damn dialogue.
- Continuing from the above, the randomised factor of when dog events trigger completely messes with the dating sim/emotional story beat aspect of the game. You'll be having your first kiss with your love interest or discussing their childhood trauma and your dog will be farting and taking shits that you have to stop to pick up. Is it funny to mention when you're not actively having it happen to you? Yes. Does it completely ruin it? Yes.
- Typos and spelling mistakes littered throughout the game; not frequently at all, but I noticed a fair few like "and" instead of "a", "through" instead of "throw", etc.
- When you're texting characters on your phone, the text speed of your replies is agonisingly slow and non-adjustable. With the main dialogue speed being adjustable in the settings menu, I don't know why this wasn't also affected by that toggle; no one wants to sit there and watch responses get typed out at less than one word per second for a whole conversation.
- Randomly tone shifts from cute slice-of-life in a utopia-esque town where everything is perfect to you getting violently robbed and knocked unconscious in the street out of nowhere. Huh? Huh???? Pick a vibe.
- The first scene on the bus leads you to think that the game is fully voice-acted, but as soon as the intro's over it shifts into only random noises and catchphrases being said out loud. They're incredibly repetitive and sometimes out-of-place, so I ended up just turning voice acting off.

Another negative point that is exclusive to Sacha's route is the handling of the trans themes. During his route, you meet his roommate who mentions Sacha's transition in front of you, and then the entire game grinds to a halt to force you to have a discussion about it. It was already obvious to me that Sacha was trans and I didn't really feel the need to question him about what his roommate meant by 'transition', because... I knew what he meant. So when given the dialogue options "Transition?" and something unrelated, I went with the unrelated one to progress the conversation, only for it to loop back around and force me to pick "Transition?" anyway. Sacha then acts shocked because "I thought you knew!" (I did), you ask him if his roommate was allowed to disclose that, and then all three of you sit down to have a PSA meeting about how you should never out someone without their consent but that it was okay for the roommate to do it in this instance because he had pre-received permission and Sacha isn't stealth but that in any other circumstance this would be bad and you should learn from this information. Later, you're also forced to confront Sacha's transphobic family and discuss his gender there too.

Throughout all of this, there is no option to say that you/your character is also transgender, despite the fact that you can choose a gender-nonconforming appearance and use they/them pronouns. You just have to stand there asking what a "transition" is like an idiot and have these characters explain surface-level facts about being trans to you.

I understand why it was put there - as a way to educate cis people - but it was clumsy and ground the whole game to a halt, and when you already know these things, it feels incredibly patronising to have to get 'taught' them by this game, especially with the sort of "You should never ever give away anyone's personal information without their permission!" tone it uses like you're a child at an internet safety lecture.

I'm disabled, so I can't really partake in a lot of this game's features. I also happen to live in a super small town, which is a terrible combination for it. All I can get from here is basically the same 5-10 Pokemon appearing, and I can't reach any Pokestops without walking, which is difficult for me to do. They ramped up the prices of remote play, which sucks for disabled people like me, so :')

On the rare occasions I find myself in a city it's pretty fun, but I'll never be able to play it properly or fully enjoy it because it wasn't made for disabled people and their perspective is that accommodating us would go against their aims with it.

Man, this is one of my favourite horror games. I played it on Safe Mode, and the overwhelming consensus seems to be that that's the superior way to play in order to experience the atmosphere and be able to take in the setting and details, so I concur and would recommend other players do the same. This isn't a jumpscare-y game, per se, especially with Safe Mode enabled, but it's horror in the psychological, pervading, keeps-you-up-at-night-having-an-existential-crisis way, which is my favourite flavour of horror. Even when I was at my absolute wimpiest and couldn't make myself watch five minutes of a horror movie, I loved psychological horror - plot twists, bendy narratives, eerie atmospheres, that feeling of something just under the surface being terribly, terribly wrong but not knowing what yet... SOMA has all of it and more.

People rag on Simon for being unintelligent as a protagonist, but I think he's written realistically for someone whose entire arc revolves around the fact that he has brain trauma, as well as the fact that he's very clearly in deep denial about a lot of things right up until the ending of the game.

I also understand why people criticise the ending for adding the post-credits sequence and say it ruins the emotions of the initial ending scene, but I wouldn't change it. The crushing, shocking despair of the first scene, only for that overwhelming relief when you find yourself on the ARK, and the brilliant way they re-incorporated the survey that they'd had you take earlier was great. I ended up with completely different answers to when I'd taken it the first time, and a huge part of that was because of that relief and gratitude I felt in comparison to being down there; I don't think it could've worked so well any other way.

I don't get it. I really don't. It's boring and repetitive gameplay for 95% of it, with absolutely nothing happening and with nothing to even see, I didn't find it spooky at all, and the jumpscare at the end was so anticlimactic and ridiculous that I found it comedic rather than scary.

Maybe something just isn't clicking with me? Everyone seems to rave about this game and it's like watching everyone hype up a stale end slice of bread. You can eat it without issues, but... why would you want to?

1.5 stars because there's nothing mechanically wrong with it, but I don't understand this one. Check it out if you think it'll be your thing by all means, it's short (though not short enough for me) and cheap.

GRAPHICS: Genuinely gorgeous. The world, the creature designs, Alice (the hair physics!), the fact that her appearance and outfit changes depending on the chapter you're in to better match the area around you (a mermaid-esque dress for the Deluded Depths, a dark steampunk look for the Hatter's Domain, a soft floral outfit for the Mysterious East), it's all beautiful - even if that beauty is sometimes a very twisted brand of it. The additional outfits are wonderful, too - I personally love the Late But Lucky, Cheshire, and Hattress dresses (she has cogs for pupils!). The Vale of Tears is beautiful, especially in the moments before the game begins to pull out the darker stuff, and the Cardbridge genuinely took my breath away.
CHARACTERS: The game mostly focuses on Alice (who is great by herself - I've read a fair number of essays on how important her character and how her mental health/story was handled were), but there are some fascinating and well-conceptualised supporting characters too. The Cheshire Cat has always been a favourite, as has his appearance, the Carpenter is always fun to get to again on replays, and the Queen of Hearts is beautifully designed. The main antagonist is appropriately sinister and ominous.
DIALOGUE/VOICE ACTING: I thought the voice acting was pretty good, and everyone's approaches to their lines fit well with the tone of the game. Alice's voice is sharp and she hits the emotional beats pretty well, and the Cheshire Cat and Bumby are stand-outs.
PLOT: It's dark and potentially upsetting for younger players, but I got into this game at 11-12 and loved it, so your mileage may vary. It weaves between twisted and dreamlike while in Wonderland to depressingly realistic while in London or when confronting Alice's mental state.
GAMEPLAY: Platformers aren't usually my thing, but I really enjoyed the platforming in this game. The different worlds keep everything varied and interesting, and there are always different things to keep you on your toes - you're platforming over dominoes in Vale of Tears, giant cogs and steam jets in Hatter's Domain, paper fans in the Mysterious East, floating playing cards in the Cardbridge, etc. The combat is fun enough, with a variety of different and interesting weapons to unlock along the way, and I found myself having to be pretty strategic about when to dodge and when to attack and when to back off, so it wasn't just mindless slashing.
MULTIPLAYER: None.

Favourite Male Character: The Cheshire Cat ...does he count as male?
Favourite Female Character: Alice
First Character I Liked: Alice
Favourite Character Design: The Cheshire Cat
Favourite Moment: Either floating down into Wonderland for the first time, the first time entering Cardbridge, or the train station scene at the end
Favourite OST: Vale of Tears, Jack Splatter, Radcliffe's Fate
Least Favourite Character: Bumby

My favourite Telltale game behind The Wolf Among Us, and probably objectively better than it. Also absolutely concur with everyone who says this is the best Borderlands game, because by far and away it is.

I have my issues with Episode 5, but they're entirely personal and subjective ones. This game is genuinely funny, full of personality and with a plot that kept me engaged and invested in its characters and outcomes. Rhys is one of my favourite protagonists of all time, and I genuinely love how different he can be as a person depending on your choices (although, and this is one of my aforementioned issues with Ep5, he does end up railroaded into A Good Guy Accepted Into Found Family in the end no matter what because it's clearly the path they Wanted you to go down with him, which sucks, but it is what it is). Generally in Telltale games you have a protagonist who's a set kind of person and you can only lean them a little in other directions (for instance, Lee from The Walking Dead could be angry with people but he was always fundamentally a decent guy who cared about protecting Clementine), whereas here, with Bigby from TWAU as the only other instance that comes to mind, Rhys can genuinely be a sweet, well-meaning dork or an ambitious, backstabbing asshole.

I wholeheartedly encourage people to try the Trust Jack path - I genuinely think that it's more interesting, engaging, and funny than the Trust Fiona/hostile to Jack alternative, and opens up more interesting choices.

I played this before I ever played the main-line Borderlands games, and didn't go into it with a lot of knowledge about series lore. I think it did pretty well keeping things clear and giving me the necessary context, and I didn't struggle to follow along at all, so you can definitely get into this without playing the FPS games first if they're not your kind of thing. The only thing you'll really miss out on are full appreciation of some character cameos and in-jokes.

Ultimately, this is Telltale at their absolute peak, and it's genuinely sad that more people haven't played this and given it a chance.

Favourite Male Character: Rhys
Favourite Female Character: Yvette
First Character I Liked: Handsome Jack
Favourite Character Design: Present day Rhys (the black and gold outfit! The hair! The gold eyes!)
Favourite Soundtrack: To the Top
Least Favourite Character: None