Still formulating my thoughts on this, but for a game that directly cites FEAR as an inspiration and has seemingly put sooooo much effort into "versimilitude" and emergent mechanics, playing it is pretty fucking boring.

Here's the problem, and why I love FEAR while games like this do nothing for me: FEAR is actually pretty straightforward, the enemies are dumb and easy to kill, and the environments often eerily absent of detail. It lives large in people's memory because of what it ~evokes~, not what it explicitly shows. It's constantly trying to surprise you with new room layouts and situations. As a result it's both sparse and memorable, two great qualities for a game to have.

Meanwhile, in this game you can press "Use" twice to open a can of soda and then drink it. Many objects can be picked up and thrown around but this does nothing interesting. The encounter spaces are full of all this detail, like turning off lights and closing windows and such, that plays pretend at a cool and theatrical sort of combat style, but which ultimately amounts to nothing because rooms are basically just boxes attached to other boxes without interesting vertical elements, unique layouts, etc. Enemies are bullet sponges even with headshots. And one of my biggest aggrieved nitpicks in games: it binds an important core function to Caps Lock.

Really disappointed, the promo stuff for this game actually caught my interest so to see how badly designed the levels are deeply frustrates me.

at some point you gotta stop saying vaguely evocative shit and making me rorschach test it into something of value

and actually show me something of value

barring a few sleights of hand in the presentation, this is almost entirely a waste of time. and if you're interested in said sleights of hand, you would probably be better off making ur way through satoshi kon's actual oeuvre. or anything by yuasa. the only thing this gains out of being a videogame is... weirdly long chunks of time getting lost in a huge archvis greybox doing random fetch quests with minimally helpful markers and no map?

Seeing Liz review this here made me remember I once played this! I wrote a really long essay on it that I don't really agree with (please don't dig it up.. or do...)

Perhaps the epitome of the 'teach the player without using words' late 00s/10s philosophy of game design - a not-bad rule of thumb that could (generously) be interpreted as 'maintain some level of clarity/consistency/ design in a way that people can figure out more complex things themselves' that was ultimately twisted into pure idiocy about NEVER USING WORDS that forgets that COMPLETELY NOT USING WORDS ONLY WORKS IF THE GAMEPLAY REALLY FITS OR YOU CAN ASSUME A PLAYER HAS LEGACY KNOWLEDGE FROM PAST GAMES. Sure it's not a bad idea to try and convey puzzle mechanics to players through the experience of using them, but then 10 years of video essays later and everyone thinks it means to make an overwrought first level that 'teaches you how to double jump without using words'. NO!!! THE PRINCIPLE MAKES SENSE IF IT'S SOME PUZZLE GAME LIKE THE WITNESS WHERE THE PUZZLE RULES MAKE INTUITIVE SENSE BUT WOULD BE CLUNKY TO STATE OUTRIGHT!!!!

But... The Witness!! Why do I like it? Why, it has a deep philosophy about the humanity of mankind... NOT!!! I like this game because the puzzles are fun to solve, they interact with the environment, and they sort of acknowledge that a fun part of puzzle solving is failing, walking away and coming back. It incorporates walking way and coming back into the environment and layout! The island is pretty and fun to walk around! The Witness level design "Bangs". I like the tactile feeling and sound design of looking at the panels and drawing the solutions. I could draw those puzzle lines for days.

Look. If I'm being honest I don't really like pure puzzle games that much. I make my little progress across the level select, inevitably get stuck and then forget about the game. My life is a Brain Teaser, I don't want to just Solve Brain Teasers. I don't want to solve middling puzzles in service of revealing some arbitrary conspiracy mystery: I just want to do some fun good puzzles and see some stuff, and this game has that. Playing this was a "Good Time".

Anyways it's time for "Analgesic Lore": did you know a super early version of Even the Ocean - honorary recipient of a 3.6 average Backloggd score rating - was supposed to be a 2D game about exploring islands with PUZZLES...? Well it was, and it never got anywhere because I just don't like puzzles that much, maybe. Then again I made Sephonie's Linking Puzzle system (ironically that game was on an island), which weren't really 'puzzles', but...

More exploration puzzlers set in 3D. Please! Do it for me!

Extremely good game as long as you're willing to let go of your expectations and enjoy the game on its own merits.

I'm really impressed how dense the game feels: each area seems to have its own gimmick that is never doubled up on, pretty much every weapon category & build idea feel viable, you're constantly getting killed by a completely new kind of trap or encounter idea. Combat is very deliberate (aka 'the animations are slow', but there is a lot of snap-decisionmaking involved in each fight, so I found the pace perfect) and the game encourages swapping between multiple weapons depending on the fight, which I really enjoyed.

The game puts a lot of trust in the player, and if you can meet that trust, it's a very rewarding experience throughout the entire thing.

initially i buried the lede, but i'm angry enough that i won't: this is a story david cage would write wrapped in a game good enough that he would hate every second of it.

lorelei and the laser eyes is a flawless dollhouse construction of beautiful puzzleboxes. the art and design is excellent and when it pulls a gimmick it pulls it excellently. it pushes, dramatically, towards one-upping the mechanical center of outer wilds' climax (with several more moving parts, each with a highlights mathmania's worth of fun little tricks to solve).

the problem is that the game also wants to one up the emotional climax of outer wilds, and it doesn't know what the fuck a human being is. the best it can offer you is a mannequin, with a mannequin of that same mannequin off to the side, in the corner, winking solemnly. it is a sad joke, an attempt at a gut punch so limp that it made me the angriest i've been at a video game all year. it is rare that i am this impressed by a video game i feel for a moment i might actually hate.

the worst part is that i know these motherfuckers can do the work. there is good writing in many inches of the margins here, and, besides, they've made one bonafide goddamn video game narrative masterpiece (device 6, a much better game than this overall) so it's all the more disappointing.

at least the end credits song is basically another sayonara wild hearts track.

probably the most angry i've been at a video game in years. hell, even twelve minutes was funny to think about.

On an engine that doesn't have a famously-bad character controller and a penchant for inexplicable crashes, this would be a flawless game. Instead it's just extremely good. Wonderful and reactive story, a well-realized world, builds upon the mythos with care and insight, and just plain fun! Ugly as piss but you do the best with what you got.

Give Josh Sawyer infinite money and a talented team please. The man deserves to not have every triumphantly good RPG he directs be ruined by corporate meddling.