It's cute, it's charming, it's challenging without being overly frustrating, it's wonderfully designed, Celeste is genuinely one of the best platformers of all time. Restricting it to just 2D would undermine how amazing it truly is. For how few controls it has, it does a lot with them; you really only have a jump, dash and climbing maneuver, yet the developers add so many new ideas in that keep the individual chapters fresh, culminating in The Summit which is straight up one of the best levels in anything. The music is mostly relaxing but knows when to get you pumped up for a difficult section, the sprite-work is gorgeous, and I could spend so, so long talking to Theo and the Granny - I've come to absolutely adore the "voice-acting". The side-content is ingrained into the main levels so well, and obtaining the strawberries isn't some ridiculous challenge, it's mostly just being smart - which I am not - with your moves. The bossfights (especially Chapter 3 [actually all of Chapter 3 sucks, fuck you Oshiro]) kind of suck for the most part, but some of my favourite moments also occurred during one later on, and it gives the game a large sense of identity so I'm conflicted about them. Other than that well... I love the story, I love the music, I love Madeline (and Badeline) - I fucking love this game.

For 2004 this game is absolutely spectacular and super ambitious and gorgeous, even 20 years later I was amazed at how beautiful some of the environments were, and the physics and interactivity is obviously incredible - without Half Life 2, it is pretty clear that most modern games would cease to exist. But unfortunately, this isn't the unrivaled masterpiece that I was expecting, in fact it's mostly a downgrade from the original. While some chapters are jaw-dropping even now like Ravenholm and the interior of the Citadel, a huge chunk of this game is driving around on gimmicky vehicles, or engaging in some of the most uninvolving, brain-dead combat ever put to the screen. While the original Half Life paced itself perfectly at upgrading your arsenal and introducing new enemies, HL2 stagnates nearly every step of the way. Instead of introducing new Combine enemies, it's mostly just the same guys but with increased health, which is incredibly lazy but also frustrating as it renders most of your weapons completely obsolete. While the gravity gun is obviously the coolest shit ever (second to only the Portal gun), the rest of the guns are just generic or never really needed to be used past their specific usage point in the game. What Half Life 2 does do better in, is probably the tension and dread that surrounds your movement. The introduction of the new headcrab/zombie variants in Ravenholm is perfectly executed, similar to how the antlions emerge from the ground in the chapter 'Sandtraps' and how you subsequently command them in 'Nova Prospekt' which is genius... but then you don't get to use them anymore past this point, which is also the case with the poison zombies - arguably the most terrifying enemy. The whole game feels really experimental and disjointed in it's treatment of weaponry and enemy usage, rather than being fully cohesive like the original. I still do think that Half Life 2 is a good game, and I'm annoyed that I didn't play it earlier so I could understand just how big of a deal it was, but I feel like people's love for it is chalked up more to nostalgia and it's influence on the industry, rather than assessing the overall experience.

Valve just gets game design. They fully understand how to get a player to keep pushing through their game - by cutting up chapters into short segments, they take you through different environments in quick succession, slowly building upon your arsenal while introducing new enemies or story tidbits. For the most part, this game is paced perfectly, it is almost always clear where to go (which is a pretty big deal for a game in the late 90’s), the gunplay is so satisfying yet challenging, there’s no real handicap to your weapons, and it makes certain encounters that much more tense. The storytelling is super impressive (especially the ending for me), I found that the story was quite deceptive, which other people don’t really point out, but I am pretty stupid. Some events are kind of ridiculous like the assassins, but for the most part the game does do well at replicating how an event like this would unfold in the real world - I love the whole idea to do with the marines, it kind of shocked me the first time. While there are moments of unrelenting tedium or just straight up boring chapters like “On a Rail” or the infamous “Xen”, the bigger problem for me was the steep difficulty spikes that randomly occured, which are not only frustrating, but fatal to the game’s overall pacing at times - say if you accidentally run out of ammo at a specific point you might have to restart that section from an old save - something which, as I pointed out, is crucial to what makes Valve games so good (and fun). But even with that, Half Life is still a brilliant experience, and a game that I feel everyone needs to play, to gain an understanding of how Valve continues to evolve with each new game they make.