GRAPHICS: Pretty charming and a nice style, though the character models can be a bit awkward/plastic-y in appearance and stilted in movement. Everything has a sort of sepia-toned air to it, which fits with the atmosphere of the game.
CHARACTERS: They're all pretty stereotypical. Side characters are one-note, but the main characters were likeable enough to me, though I know a couple of them are a little divisive among players (read: Chloe). My personal favourites were Kate and Nathan; I think they're interesting depictions of two very different responses to mental illness and trauma, one who directs their hatred inward towards themselves and one who directs it outward towards others.
DIALOGUE/WRITING: I generally hate to use the term "cringe-worthy", but the writing in this game is so bad it's sometimes painful. "Ready for the moshpit, shaka brah" and "Go fuck your-selfie" are two immediate examples that come to mind. It's very clearly a script written by grown men trying to emulate how they think teenage girls talk and falling very, very short. It's bearable if you don't take it too seriously.
GAMEPLAY: Pretty Telltale-esque. Walk around, point at and click on objects, some very light puzzles. Dialogue options as per usual, though with the pretty neat twist that you can go through a conversation, rewind time, and use information you gained from that future to unlock new dialogue choices.
MULTIPLAYER: None.

It's a fine game, though definitely overrated IMO. Telltale does everything it does better and with an interface I like better, and the ending pretty much disregards all of your choices even moreso than Telltale games are often criticised for doing. However, it fills a niche, it has a lovely atmosphere and a gorgeous and fitting soundtrack, and the characters fit the setting well. Again, if you don't take things too seriously, this is good for what it is -- and, if you're a teenager, particularly a teenage girl, I think you'll find a lot to like and relate to in parts of it.

Favourite Male Character: Nathan
Favourite Female Character: Kate
First Character I Liked: Kate
Favourite Character Design: Jefferson
Favourite OST: Got Well Soon, Obstacles, Mountains, Spanish Sahara
Favourite Scene: The ending of Episode 1, with everyone watching the snow fall and the first indication something was up with the weather
Least Favourite Character: Jefferson

GRAPHICS: Interesting, colour-poppy, and eye-catching. The 2D character models on 3D backgrounds and how they incorporated that was actually pretty cool. Character models have a lot of fun variety, ranging from pretty average little dudes (Makoto and Toko), to conventionally attractive model-types (Junko and Sayaka), to genuinely unconventional and unique (Sakura, Hifumi, Mondo, Hiro, Celeste... honestly, most of them have some unique visual trait about them). The colour scheme and pink blood gives the whole thing a kind of bubblegum splatterpunk vibe that I'm super into.
CHARACTERS: Great range of personalities, and their different 'Ultimate Talents' lends some more differences between their backgrounds. You have the fashionista model, the jock, the stoic one, the prep, all those cliches - and then they often turn out to be nothing like you'd expect from those cliches. My personal favourites were Byakuya and his smug assholery, Chihiro and his sweet timidity, Sakura and her iron moral code, and Leon and his absolute belief in his own charisma - though I also grew oddly fond of Hifumi after playing through his School Mode route before anyone else's.
DIALOGUE/WRITING: Everyone kind of acknowledges this can get pretty wacky, and, I mean, yeah. There's a talking robot bear who sometimes speaks aloud in emoticons for the hell of it. Don't take it too seriously and you'll probably have a fun time. The plot twists are genuinely great if you go in at least partly blind like I did - I knew Junko would have some greater significance (can't really avoid that with how ever-present she is online) and I kind of got the general gist as to what that significance would be, and I was able to figure out some cases fairly easily, but others caught me genuinely off-guard, and it was super fun to play through them with my fiancee watching me as we both tried to guess what would be revealed.
GAMEPLAY: It's a visual novel, so expect a lot of clicking, a lot of reading, some dialogue options, and not a lot of physical gameplay. I enjoy visual novels, so the gameplay was enjoyable for me.
MULTIPLAYER: None.

Favourite Male Character: Byakuya, Chihiro, Leon
Favourite Female Character: Sakura
First Character I Liked: Byakuya
Favourite Character Design: Mukuro-as-Junko (it's the freckles!)
Favourite OST: TBA
Favourite Scene: The ending
Least Favourite Character: Probably Toko

I liked it fine, though I really don't understand the hype around the ending. I played it because everyone around me kept raving about this iconic, shocking, jaw-dropping ending, and then I got there and I was just like... this is it? Surely, something else must happen. Nope, the camera's zooming out. The credits are rolling. That was seriously it. Well, okay.

I found myself looking up explanations of the end not because I was genuinely hooked on theories and possibilities like I enjoy being, but because I assumed I must have missed something massive, because it was so jarring and random and out-of-place that I figured there had to be more to it. Nope, it was just that.

I'd still recommend it, though. Everyone else seems to think it's something special, so I'm inclined to accept I'm one of the odd ones out here. It's short, and a fun experience to actually play through, so why not?

Considering I've always preferred fantasy to sci-fi and real-time combat to turn-based, you'd think I'd be a Genshin person more than a Star Rail person, but now that I've played this going back to Genshin means I'm spending my entire time thinking Man, I wish this was more like Star Rail.

The QoL improvements are genuinely and massively appreciated - off the top of my head, the dailies are so much faster to get through and have actual mini storylines rather than just "Go here and kill 10 hilichurls", you got more Trailblaze Power right off the bat than you ever did Resin (AND this just recently updated to be even more and to give you a reserve amount so you don't have to deplete it daily), you get far more free currency for events and missions (going back to Genshin makes this discrepancy very obvious, I'm usually pulling teeth to get 20 primogems at the end of a longass questline vs. Star Rail where I'm getting 60 jades for every part of one), grinding is so much easier because you can get exactly the material you need from everywhere whenever you want unlike Genshin's "this domain is only open on Wednesdays and you might get some random other item instead" shtick, the pity is much more generous and the Standard banner lets you manually choose a character you want after a certain number of pulls, etc.

On top of that, you can absolutely play this completely free with the characters you get from the beginning. The characters you get for free just from the early storyline are the Trailblazer (Physical damage, later optional Fire support/shield), March (Ice shield), Dan Heng (Wind DPS), Natasha (Physical healer), Asta (Fire buff support), Qingque (Quantum damage), Yukong (Imaginary damage/support), Serval (Electric damage), and Herta (Ice damage). On top of that, so far off the top of my head events have freely given you Sushang (Physical damage) as well as additional instances of Yukong and Qingque.

I've been playing for several months now, and Trailblazer and March are still absolutely mainstays in my team and very rarely leave it. They've carried me through most fights. Asta is also my go-to Fire element despite me having pulled several others by now, and Dan Heng was always in my team until recently too. I still use Yukong pretty regularly. You can absolutely build a core team of purely F2P characters and get through the current storyline just fine.

I personally don't play daily anymore, I don't feel pressured to grind for currencies unless there's a specific upcoming character I want to pull for, and I don't feel a need to grind for levelling/ascension resources unless I have a particular goal in mind for a character which only takes a few days to complete, if that. This helps me avoid burnout so I'd recommend doing the same if you're prone to that.

I'd agree with other people who say the Jarilo VI/Belobog storyline is more engaging than the Xianxhou one so far - when I was playing through Belobog I found myself actively and constantly wanting to play to progress the story, while with Xianxhou I'm enjoying it but I can easily go weeks without feeling the urge to continue - but I still like the writing and the storyline so far.

The characters are varied and pretty engaging, and the game still being relatively new means it hasn't yet fallen into the Genshin trap of a ton of the new characters looking the same as pre-existing ones because they're just recycling the same generic cute girl designs. My personal favourite characters so far are Sampo and his hilarious mischief (and I really hope some of the theories about him are right because that'd be fascinating), Gepard and his sense of duty, Welt and his witty intelligence, Blade and his mental struggle, and Luocha and the mysteries he got goin' on. I actually also really enjoy the main character, Caelus/Stelle - both their design and colour scheme, and their personality. They're not a silent protagonist like Genshin's Aether/Lumine, and I love that - they have some genuinely hilarious dialogue and moments.

I honestly look forward to seeing where this story is going.

Shoutout to the music, too - the Belobog final boss fight theme is now on repeat in the Astral Express.

Favourite Male Character: Blade, Sampo, Welt, Gepard
Favourite Female Character: March 7th
First Character I Liked: Dan Heng
Favourite Character Design: Tingyun
Favourite OST: Wildfire, Take the Journey
Favourite Scene: Trailblazer running up the statue to confront Cocolia with everyone contributing with individual skills/weapons
Least Favourite Character: Of the playable characters, I find Yanqing pretty bland and Hook grating (though I don't outright dislike either of them)

GRAPHICS: They're fine. It was a low-budget 2014 video game, so it's nothing mind-blowing, but they're not bad at all IMO. I actually really like how the animatronics look; they give off a fitting air of being aged and a little gross, and their texture is good.
CHARACTERS: Seeing as the lore hasn't quite kicked in in this game yet, the characters are pretty much a non-entity aside from the handful of animatronics coming to get you, and they don't really have personalities to speak of. Not much to say here.
GAMEPLAY: I personally find the gameplay of FNAF 1 pretty tedious and repetitive, but that's probably down to the fact that I don't personally find it scary -- I'm more a fan of this series for the lore and connections between games than I am the gameplay loop itself. It's a decent challenge to keep everything out without running out of power if you like that sort of thing.
MULTIPLAYER: None.

I genuinely enjoy this game. People say the community is toxic - maybe I've just been lucky, but I've never had a bad experience in the in-game chat so far. Honestly, people barely even use the chat minus a rare "GG" thrown out afterwards (but it's more likely that people just quietly leave once the game's over); my one interaction that I can remember beyond that was a time all four of us in-game loaded in as Claudette, I typed "squadette", and one of the others said "holy fuck a squadette of claudettes", so that was all I needed. You will probably run into a bunch of campers, which can ruin the fun a bit when it's four games in a row of the killer hooking you and then just standing there until you die so no one can rescue you and you can't play, but in my personal experience it hasn't been toxic in the sense that anyone's saying anything to you.

The gameplay loop is lowkey addicting - repairing generators is an absolute pain in the ass while you're doing it because of how slooooooowly that bar goes up (though Killers say they repair too fast, so what do I know), but then I'll find myself sitting around thinking Man, I wish I was on DBD doing generators right now.

I personally don't find the game scary at all, including back when I was a massive wimp about horror, so I wouldn't recommend it if that's your main draw to it. It's tense in the way any sort of violent hide and seek would be, with you sneaking around and trying to avoid being seen by a killer, and there might be some yelling if you're playing with friends over mic, but I wouldn't call it scary per se.

The variety of characters is fun and keeps things relatively interesting - I have my favourites, as do most people, but I'll find myself playing most of them at least sometimes. They all come with unique personal perks, but you can always re-spec them once they're levelled enough for their perks to be in the general bloodweb and assign them to other characters if you'd prefer.

My only complaints are the rework they did to the wriggle mechanic when you're picked up by a killer (it used to be the same as normal skill checks, which was still challenging to meet the threshold to escape but doable, whereas now it's its own thing that means you're absolutely not going to ever be able to wriggle out of the killer's hold unless a) the hook is all the way across the map and b) you hit every single one of the checks without fail, and often not even then), and the fact that the cosmetics are so expensive. Loading times also tend to be pretty slow, it's not uncommon at all to be waiting 5 minutes for a lobby.

I'd definitely recommend to play it with friends - even just going into a public lobby with one or two friends can turn it from meh into a fun game with a lot of laughs and scares going on. I'll play it every so often by myself, and it's the only way I've played Killer, but all of the fun is in the group play for me.

I've found while teaching friends new to the game that it can be a little hard to pick up and learn at first - there's no tutorial, so unless you want to jump into a public game and learn as you go, I'd advise getting a friend who plays to get into a custom game with you as a killer and teach you the ropes that way instead.

It has great lore if that's something you're interested in - it's not gone into in much detail in-game beyond the TL;DR backstory pages and the tidpits you can glean from item/cosmetic descriptions, but if you dig into it out-of-game it's pretty interesting to learn about.

Also, Nicolas Cage is in the game as himself, which I have to reluctantly admit is quite funny.

Favourite Male Character: The Trickster
Favourite Female Character: Feng Min
First Character I Liked: Feng Min
Favourite Character Design: Repetitively, The Trickster
Favourite OST: TBA
Least Favourite Character: Ash

GRAPHICS: Very dated and outright ugly in places, but it's not enjoyment-affecting at all IMO. I've played games that aged far worse, and everything does its job. If you're on PC, there are plenty of texture and cosmetic mods to modernise things a little.
CHARACTERS: They don't stick with me as much as the DA2 and some of the Inquisition companions do, but they're varied and interesting nonetheless. Your romance options are Zevran, a seductive elven assassin; Leliana, a pious Chantry sister hiding dark secrets; Morrigan, a gothic and asocial swamp witch; and Alistair, a naive and humorous ex-Templar with royal blood. Additionally, you can recruit companions such as Wynne, an elderly healer who seems to be assisted by some mysterious force; Sten, a soldier from a foreign culture who's entirely new to Ferelden; Oghren, a dwarven berserker who's crude with a love of alcohol; and Loghain, a morally questionable but complex antagonist-turned-ally. The Stone Prisoner DLC will also give you Shale, a stone golem with a previously mortal identity.
DIALOGUE/VOICE ACTING: Voice acting is varied but generally good - Alistair's VA is endearingly awkward, Leliana's sounds stilted in places, and Zevran stands out as suitably suave and perpetually amused. The dialogue options you get as the protagonist are typically pretty extensive and easy to roleplay within; my biggest complaint is that I feel romance/flirt dialogues are not at all obvious enough, and very easily confused with platonically kind gestures, which means you more often than not end up 'stealth' romancing a character.
PLOT: Pretty generic, and overrated in my opinion - it's a cliche fantasy plot, there's an evil force threatening the world, you and your band of companions are the only ones who can stop it, and you have to travel around to individual locations in order to recruit factions for your army.
GAMEPLAY: Clunky, and my least favourite part of the game. The combat is aggravating enough that by the time I've been playing for a few hours I'm usually using mods just to skip most of the non-significant battles.
MULTIPLAYER: None.

Overall, this game didn't connect with me as much as it seems to for most; I think nostalgia (and the "older = better" mindset among gaming elitists) is a huge factor in the favouritism for Origins, and I prefer the sequels in most respects. However, the extensive dialogue options and roleplaying opportunities keep me coming back to Origins regardless.

Favourite Male Character: Zevran
Favourite Female Character: Leliana
First Character I Liked: I actually can't remember that far back - possibly Zevran?
Favourite Character Design: Morrigan
Favourite OST: TBA
Favourite Scene: The final battle, aftermath, and epilogue
Least Favourite Character: A part of me always wants to say Alistair for this because I find him absolutely generic and milquetoast and I resent seeing him absolutely everywhere, but I still like the guy. So: Howe and Vaughan.

Even putting aside the fact that I think ROBLOX's controls are horrific and it has the ugliest avatars and general graphics I've ever seen, 1) my friend keeps trying to make me play this with him and when I say no he consistently goes on a 10 minute monologue about how Actually Good it is including screenshots, 2) my 4 year old nephew kept coming to my house to play it with me so now I associate it with running around doing everything a small child wants you to do, and 3) I keep getting push notifications for recommended Tweets on every single one of my Twitter accounts that's just spam bots talking about free Robux and I cannot for the life of me stop it despite blocking every account.

The combination of these factors has ensured I resent this game so much that even if you found me a game mode I was absolutely guaranteed to enjoy, you would have to drag me crying and wailing into trying it.

Inquisition is a very strange creature where I could rant for virtually hours about all of the facets of this game I genuinely dislike with a passion, and yet when it comes to it, I still enjoyed it. There's so much to be annoyed by:

- Typical empty open-world RPG that gives me awful Ubisoft vibes and where "our map is so big and expansive!" really just means you'll be walking for 20 minutes through hills.
- Filler quests upon filler quests. I do not want objectives like "Collect 20 deer hides" in my Dragon Age games, particularly not as almost every single side quest.
- Say what you will about DA2, but it had genuinely original, creative ideas, and Inquisition throws them all out of the window. No more inventive, subversive plot; we're back to the generic Chosen One fantasy storyline. No more complex and nuanced politics and grey morality; we're back to clear-cut good guys and bad guys.
- The companions are good, some of them I even got genuinely attached to, but unlike DA2 I can never quite forget they're just characters on rails. DA2's companions felt like complicated people, people with emotions and conflict, a real core friend group that sticks around through the plot because they care about each other and that's what you do for your friends. Inquisition's companions, by comparison, feel like co-workers who are just there to pull the plot along. The fact that you can just skip recruiting multiple companions, or tell them to leave at any time, and have the story not feel different at all is very telling.
- I don't care about Solas, and the game hinges on you caring about Solas. In fact, it hinges on you caring about Solas so much that the entire sequel looks to also be hinged on you caring about Solas. This is not a good sign for me continuing to enjoy the series.
- They sold you the real ending of the game as paid DLC. Come on.
- Your race/background/class changes absolutely nothing about the game except for what essentially boils down to flavour text. I can think of a very scant handful of dialogue options you get, mostly in one conversation where Josephine asks you about your history and where what you tell her affects absolutely nothing ever again, and there's the one Winter Ball quest where being a Qunari, elf, or mage docks you a very small number of points at the beginning (which you can effortlessly make up for regardless). Comparing this to Origins, which was constantly reacting to and acknowledging your character, is disappointing.
- It's nigh impossible to roleplay in this game. You could be an evil bastard in Origins and DA2. In Inquisition, your dialogue options boil down to "Good Guy", "Good Guy who jokes around", and "Good Guy who's blunt". You have absolutely no room to play around with any other motivations or personalities.
- There's so much grinding. So much. Plenty of people have compared this to MMO gameplay, and I concur; you have to put off the story quests all the time to run around doing your "Collect 20 deer hides", "Close 50 rifts", "Kill 10 darkspawn" type beats to gather enough Power points to progress with the next actually interesting thing. If it wasn't for the fact that I can mod that out on replays, I likely wouldn't have been able to force myself to get through the game more than once.
- The war table. Not the quests themselves, mind; a lot of the quests on there should have been full-fledged cutscenes with dialogue vs. text on a screen, and were clearly just relegated there due to a lack of effort, but they weren't unenjoyable to do. However, why are there arbitrary time limits in my single-player RPG? Why do I have to wait 12 real-life hours to progress with this war table mission in my single-player RPG?
- I could never put my finger on my issue with the English VA's voice for the female Inquisitor, but someone else compared her to a text-to-speech program in their review, and that's exactly it. She sounds flat and artificial.
- The animations are... questionable. The Inquisitor's "sad" and "scared" expressions just look like they're sucking on a lemon.
- Combat feels clunky and clumsy. It's not as tactical as Origins, not as fast-paced and sharp as DA2, just... you firing arrow after arrow at someone, or very slowly swinging around a giant sword until something dies.
- Mounts are useless. They clearly know their open world is a pain to trudge through, hence their inclusion, and yet all they accomplish is ensuring you never hear party banter (because for some reason your party just vanishes if you're using a mount and doesn't speak at all), and they don't even function properly. A dev straight-up confirmed on Twitter that galloping on a mount doesn't even make it go faster, they just added speed lines and a blur effect to the screen to make it seem like it did.
- Speaking of party banter, bugs, such as banter simply not triggering, have still never been fixed ten years after release.

I find it interesting that Inquisition was generally beloved upon release vs. Mass Effect: Andromeda being widely panned, because honestly I'd put them near enough in the same category when it comes to how they feel to play and the general quality.

AND YET.

After all that, I still like Inquisition. A disappointing Dragon Age game is still a good game. I've replayed it several times and enjoyed it, the soundtrack is beautiful, it has some of my favourite characters in fiction (Cole, Dorian, Josephine, and though I'm not quite as invested in him I found Blackwall's story arc genuinely fascinating and refreshing), and I cared about where everyone ended up and what ending I got.

Like I said, a strange creature.

Seriously, though, Bioware, start putting some damn effort into your hair selections in character creation. It's not difficult to add long hair. It's not. Every other company is managing it.

Not gonna give this one a proper long review because a) it's been too long since I played it so it's not fresh enough in my mind and b) I technically never finished it, but I did enjoy this one. The oppressive and mechanical atmosphere of London was amazing, I enjoyed the characters (very fond of Jacob's rogueish humour and I was genuinely interested in his little sub-plot with Maxwell Roth), and the gameplay was as fun as Assassin's Creed usually is; I could happily spend an hour just parkouring around the city as always. Also loved the concept of your base being in a moving train.

Said gameplay was more engaging than the main plot for me, which is probably why I never completed it - I'm more of a story-driven gamer than a gameplay-oriented one. Maybe I'll get back to it someday, but I'm not planning on it.

Favourite Male Character: Jacob
Favourite Female Character: Evie
First Character I Liked: Jacob
Favourite Character Design: Henry
Favourite OST: Bloodlines, Too Dreadful a Practice for This Open Air, Jokes Jokes Jokes, Family
Favourite Scene: The burning of the theater
Least Favourite Character: N/A

The sequel is definitely better than this one, but it's an alright lead-up to it. I'm not much of a fan of the graphics change Telltale went with here - the models look kind of plastic-y and Lego-like to me, oddly shiny and artificial in comparison to their natural cell-shading in games like The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us - but I get used to it after a while of playing every time.

Love that you can play Batman as a bit of an immoral asshole, love that you can lean into the Bruce as an elitist playboy thing. Troy Baker is, as per usual, pretty good in his role as the protagonist.

I wasn't sure how to feel about the treatment of the Joker when I first played this, and I think if it had been this game alone it would've felt hamfisted and out of place, but it's a build up to his bigger role in the second game where he turned out to be a fantastic character with a fantastic dynamic with Bruce, so with that in mind it's more than forgivable.

The major issue I have with this game is just that... I don't want to fuck Catwoman. And the game really, really wants me to fuck Catwoman. A lot of Telltale games have this kind of canon romance that you're nudged towards with varying degrees of force - Lee and Carley in The Walking Dead, Bigby and Snow in The Wolf Among Us, Rhys and Sasha in Tales from the Borderlands - but this is up there with the worst ones in terms of making me feel like I was required to put active, constant effort into not tripping and falling into a relationship with the character they wanted me to.

Still, fun enough game overall. Play it for the sequel, if nothing else.

(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: Alfred
Favourite Female Character: Vicki
First Character I Liked: Oswald
Favourite Character Design: Oswald
Favourite Moment: Being injected with the serum and the subsequent villain reveal
Least Favourite Character: Not gonna lie boys Harvey bored the shit outta me after a while

I can't play VR for long at a time due to the fact that my headset doesn't sit right over my glasses, but once I finally get around to going back to contacts we'll be good. As a result of that, though, Beat Saber is currently the only VR game I have, and honestly it does a pretty good job of making it feel satisfying all by itself.

The vanilla game and tracks are probably a 2/5, so definitely don't pick it up if that's all you're going to have access to, but with custom songs and mods this is a fun game and a genuinely engaging workout in one. The satisfying burn in your arms when you've been playing this for a while is great.

Just try not to hit your furniture and/or roommates while you do it.