There's a story told of a man visiting the Louvre, looking at the Mona Lisa, and saying, "What's the big deal? it's just some lady."

A security guard overhearing him says, "Sir, you don't judge the Mona Lisa--the Mona Lisa judges you."

It's not you, Tekken 8; it's me.

I can't tell if this is the worst game in the remake trilogy or if I've just forgotten how basic the prior two were.

If memory serves, Tomb Raider (2013) as a "gritty reboot" for the series humanizing Lara Croft and giving context to her development as the titular grave robber/action badass mostly works! Rise of the Tomb Raider was Uncharted 2 with some minor open world stuff which mostly works! Which leaves Shadow of the Tomb Raider as... Uncharted 1 but with... less charm? It feels like a strange step backwards for the series that seemingly had some renewed momentum in the 2010s.

The game is gorgeous. The 15ish-hour adventure features some staggering environmental scale and especially impressive use of lighting to highlight beautiful overlooks of the Amazon. The production value of this game is the main sell. Unfortunately that admittedly impressive veneer is thin and frail. The beautiful world feels far from realized.

There are effectively four characters: Lara, her extremely patient sidekick Jonah, a proxy for the indigenous people that I wished was more interesting, and a very generic villain who kind of makes Lara look like a villain by comparison. None of the characters develop in a meaningful sense. Lara and Jonah are the only two who have anything close to a personality in the first place. It's a bummer because the game's opening section presents this tension of Lara getting in too deep--losing herself to her mission of hunting insert evil group. She's pushing so hard that she's hurting herself and those fighting to love and care for her. Neat! Make your invincible protagonist painfully aware of the toll of being an action-adventure murder machine. There's opportunity for growth here.

That doesn't go anywhere. lol There's a moment in the late game that seemingly implies that Lara was right all along, she's the only one capable of enacting meaningful change in this world, and the civilians around her need to deal with that fact or get out of the way.

I don't hate this game but it's really disappointing because it comes from a fun franchise, has a ton of polish, and stands as one of the latest steps in this style of blockbuster adventure game. It manages to feel like the most dull take on the genre at this scale in some time.

I'm open to critique here. If you liked this game, tell me what I'm missing!

A well-deserved booster shot for this IP but probably not enough to make it a household name again.

They made a new Ori game in 2024 and I'm totally here for it. The Lost Crown is a welcome return to Prince of Persia by way of a return to its sidescrolling platformer roots that manages to learn most of the right lessons from other more recent games in the genre. The mechanical comparison to Ori and the Will of the Wisps is immediate and constant and there's some definite Metroid Dread DNA here by way of its relatively clean transitions between 2D and 3D. The game sounds great, sports a strong art style, and strikes a great balance between being short and direct on its critical path yet surprisingly challenging once you dig a bit deeper.

Movement is the highlight of the game. Genre mainstays like a double jump and grappling hook are coupled with more unique fair like a positional rewind mechanic and a dimensional shift that all seamlessly combine for some truly satisfying platforming and puzzlesolving. Banging my head against tough platforming challenges was the highlight of the game for me.

Big props for the depth of accessibility/difficulty options for the game. While I didn't tweak them too much in my playthrough, The Lost Crown allows you to choose from 4 different default difficulty settings along with a custom option to edit individual aspects of the difficulty. Being able to edit specific pieces of the difficulty here is huge. No one should have to tap A to break out of ice. It should be illegal.

My main complaint here is the combat. It's far from bad but it never totally clicked for me. Specifically, parrying never quite felt right and basic attacks felt weak for most of my playtime. I felt underpowered for most of the game until the... second to last sword upgrade? At which point the swords were extremely strong. Some strange scaling there.

Overall, a good game that released at the right time in what will be a busy year for games. I wish I liked the game more but as it stands this may be a one-off for the franchise rather than a blueprint to be used in the future.

I enjoyed so many pieces of Solar Ash.

The movement feels great, it has an interesting premise, and everything about it looks beautiful. Hell, I spent almost half the game not realizing there was a boost button (no idea how I missed that in the tutorial) and it was still really fun just idly skating around, finding caches, and playing "Connect-the-Dots of the Colossus" every hour or so. But beyond that admittedly impressive surface lies a game that's disappointingly hollow.

There are brief excellent moments when you arrive at new locations or when you reach scenic overlooks and the camera pulls back to let you savor a gorgeous unworldly vista. Apart from those moments, however, Solar Ash does little to stand out of the crowd. It's never bad but it rarely excels either. My save file is just short of 6 hours playtime and that feels about how long I would want this game to be, given how shallow your interactions with the world are. The game does very little to iterate on its initial traversal or combat, so I'm sure the last couples hours of this game could feel like a slog for some.

Solar Ash is good not great which is a bummer coming from Heart Machine. Announcing your studio with an exceptional, challenging, and down-right eerie isometric action-adventure only to make a pretty good 3D platformer is a letdown, and it leaves me hoping that Hyper Light Breaker is a return to form rather than a continuation of the trend.

One hell of a nostalgia trip. This game was everything to me when the original came out in the early 00s and it instilled a love of ARPGs that's lasted ever since.

There's a laundry list of issues I could compile here (wonky camera, arbitrary paths to take in each world, the fuckin vine swinging) and all those issues are only accented on proud mode. But what really impresses me is how well the core movement and basic combat still feel decades after initial release. I'm thankful that many mainstream ARPGs have moved past KH1 in terms of structure but many more could learn from the concept of just making something that feels good at a fundamental level.

What a ride. A game that really demands engagement.

Usually when I hear about an indie darling I expect an interesting idea with some light iteration that either ends quickly or overstays its welcome. Chants of Sennaar absolutely could have been that. What starts as "match symbols to words using context clues" is fun and eases you in well enough, but the game quickly becomes so much more over time.

Developer Rundisc deftly avoids the awful design of simply compounding on difficulty and instead truly expands on the game's ideas. What if there were more languages? How do they compare? How are they different? What does that say about each fictional culture? It's hard to highlight how impressive each language is and the toolkit they give you without spoilers but suffice to say I was thoroughly impressed and hooked with each new symbol verified.

A substantial treat for puzzle lovers and people who like words.

Celeste 64 is a pleasant surprise.

To have been made in around a week makes the small foray into 3D platforming extremely impressive and it also makes the clunky camera and movement a bit more forgivable. The game manages to briefly consider similar ideas as the original while offering something new and fun for the series by way of Super Mario 64 and Sunshine.

Give me a full-sized and more polished one of these please. I'm stoked to see this beaten with a sub-5 minute time at SGDQ this year.

The cherry on top of an exceptional remake.

This could have just been a short asset flip and I would have been satisfied. Instead, we got a tonally varied reintroduction to a beloved character that further fleshed out a world that already feels largely realized. Yes, it's short, but it plays as a sort of beta for what we can expect out of Rebirth. With the rebuilt Fort Condor mini-game, synchronization attacks, and the revealed kit of one of the newly added characters, Intermission serves as a perfect way to gear up for the full release of Rebirth.

Final thoughts: the ending had no right to go that hard or that sad and Scarlet is a certified babe.

The beginning of the end for Infinite. I'm a little disappointed because it never really felt like it "got started" thanks to all the launch issues, poor progression hooks, etc. When you consider that the game took a whole year to make playtime feel worthwhile, putting Infinite on the backburner in 2024 feels a little sad.

Maybe Halo 7 will be cool from the start!

Editors Note: He also said this about Halo 4, 5, and Infinite before their launches

This game apparently started development as DLC for the already much-too-large Assassin's Creed Valhalla. While I appreciate that it didn't add to that Golden Corral buffet of a game, it seems like Mirage never grew past those briefly considered constraints as a simplified piece of something more substantial.

Sold as a return to form for the franchise, this mercifully priced entry was said to be focused less on expansive open worlds or convoluted meta-narrative and more on a character-based stealth action story (the kind that made this franchise "great!"). Unfortunately, that tight pitch never saw reality. Sure, there's never an "out-of-animus" moment to kill the frame story's momentum, but Basim's origin of joining the Order of Assassins and rooting out Baghdad's corruption is impressively dull and uninteresting. You effectively murder your way across the city with little reason to question what you're doing or why your character would even want to. Basim looks cool, Baghdad is a great setting--hell they got Shohreh Aghdashloo to voice the mentor--but none of it really goes anywhere outside of a brief sliver of overarching connective tissue tacked on to the end of the game.

None of this would bother me in the slightest if the game was fun to play. To be clear, it's not terrible. If you like earlier entries in the series, this one will feel mostly functional and intuitive. That said, none of the existing problems with this system have been remotely improved upon. If anything, the dense and varied cityscape you explore in the game highlights how clunky and sluggish the traversal system now feels. Even the very purposefully designed stealth sections feel like momentary distractions that you slog through until an extremely simple rock-paper-scissors style combat breaks out. Mirage seems to exist only to showcase simple and outdated systems that never motivate playing the game for anything more than to roll credits and move on.

When you make a paired down version of your AAAA game to focus on the important bits, I shouldn't be pining for games in the franchise that came out over a decade ago.