I stopped playing Genshin a few months ago but I think some people are a bit too harsh on the game. The honeymoon period of this game is by far the best of any gacha game out there and I daresay is better than most other open world RPGs with its great visuals, exploration and genuinely interesting elemental combat system. The honeymoon period lasts until about AR 30 as well which is a good 50 hours or so of playtime, that is also completely free as long as you exercise even a modicum of self control and don't buy anything. I'd say Genshin Impact is worth at least trying out for that reason alone.

That said, the post-honeymoon grind is absolutely soul destroying and worse than most other gacha games. At least in other gacha games you can autobattle through the grinding but Genshin wants you to do the same boring domain fights over and over and over again for a miniscule chance of getting a single good artifact drop, which is just the tip of the iceberg of all of the effort that goes into making a good character build. It's just too much for me to care about. Most of the events are mediocre to outright bad as well.

The best thing I can really say about it is that I wish Hu Tao was in a better game.

There's potential for something genuinely good here. The open world has a lot to do, look at and get immersed in. Playable characters are animated extremely well and are often very nice to see in motion. Multiplayer is generally well implemented aside from the occasional puzzle just... disappearing when entering co-op mode - getting carried by higher levelled players illeviates a lot of the slowness of the game and I implore you to play with a higher levelled friend if you ever consider playing this in its entirety. If this was a 50 pound/dollar game with no microtransactions or gacha, I'd probably bump it up to 3 and a half stars, but christ I don't think I've ever played a video game that respects the player's time so little.

I've 100%ed the Monstadt, Liyue and Inazuma regions, and am getting started on Sumeru after several months' hiatus after presumed burnout. At the time, the game's issues were made clear to me, but I rubbed them off as having played too much. Needless to say my thoughts have not changed, and I have a lot to say about the game as a whole.

The combat, while looking flashy and complex on the surface, is monotonous and doesn't change at all in 100+ hours of gameplay, save for exclusive event or dungeon items, gimmicks or mechanics. Its really just: mash left mouse, occasionally hit e, q, or shift coupled with wasd to move, rinse repeat for the whole game. Couple this with basically mandatory, artificial grinding thanks to the world level scaling if you want to progress with the story and power up characters, and you have a slow, boring gameplay loop where, after you've explored everything excluding roadblocks, enemies are still spongy, and you do constant busywork to get dripfed primogems, level up, and ascencion materials to get new, stronger characters and power them up.

The gacha rates are pitifully low, far lower than other gacha centric games, and outside of events and doing everything you can, the currency required to make pulls is scarce. Doing daily commissions nets you 120 primogems, and you need 160 to take a single shot at the slots. That's not enough though, since characters can only be 4 or 5 star rarity, in a pool rife with 3 star weapons. Just getting a character is more reliable when relying on the gacha's "pity" system, where you're guaranteed something of four star rarity for every 10 pulls. Keyword, "something", because there's a good chance you'll just be getting a four star weapon that'll serves merely as upgrade fodder instead. Four star weapons are common enough if you're exploring and collecting materials, too, so its almost always a waste to only get a weapon out of your guaranteed 4 star drop, on top of the 9~ other 3 star weapons you got. 5 star drops are exceedingly rarer,with approx 70 pulls being deemed as reaching pity. Thankfully (at least in event banners, which you should only ever pull on anyway) these are reserved for characters. You have a 50/50 chance to get the 5 star character showcased on the banner or any 5 star character from the perma pool, being guaranteed the banner character for youd next 5 star pull if you get the latter result, which even carries over between banners - a rare example of respect for the player in this game. Naturally, you're incentivised to spend money to get these stronger, rarer, fanservicey banner characters whenever they become available, since their availability is on a timer before they're made unavailable for months again, and there's a good chance you aren't getting a lucky 5 star pull or going from 0 to 70 pity in a month.

The story is, for the most part, pretty by the numbers. There's your lost sibling, an ancient war, gods ruling the land, evil factions that are out to do evil things for the sake of being evil, etc. The inazuma story arc at least stood out, but I was disinterested for most of it, as there's an unreasonable amount of unskippable text, exposition and filler dialogue. That's right; the story is entirely unskippable, and parts of the world in this "open world exploration game" are locked behind it - you can't even mash through dialogue either, since there's a delay to it. I genuinely can't believe this game has been out for two years and it hasn't occurred to the devs that they should add a "skip dialogue" button, but that's the tip of the iceburg regarding poor game design on display here.

I think the worst offender, besides the monotony, grind, tedium, story gating and gacha, is the devs' assumed approach to enemy design, because it feels that whenever they made a new enemy or enemy type, they're made to be as obnoxious to the player as possible. From the Fatui and Abyss mages' obscene shield bars, or just stunlocking, a lot of enemies in this game absolutely suck to fight, and killing a single one often drags out for longer than it has any right to - long enough to the point where I often unintentionally drag enemies far enough from their spawn location for the game to decide "nope! this enemy is too far away! teleport him back with full health instead of continuing to fight the player!". Getting unfrozen or out of a bubble is miserable too - you're left for enemies to pile on you since you got stunlocked by near undodgeable attacks while you mash space bar and not left click, for some reason. Its such an uncomfortable button to mash too, and you can't rebind anything in this game.

To end on a somewhat positive note; the music is fantastic. And suits the mood and locales of the world wonderfully. Its a shame that some genuine talent and passion was wasted on what is essentially a glorified slot machine.

This is my introduction to the FromSoftware franchise.
I've wanted to play this series for so long, but I always felt left out due to the difficulty of those games. I've actually tried getting into it 2 times in the Past, but got my ass kicked both times, and gave up out of frustration.
The first time was when I tried the same game over a year ago, and the second time was when I tried Elden Ring at its release. This time, I wanted to give it a serious shot, asked for advices on Discord, Reddit, etc... and I was definitely more prepared to take on this adventure.

I liked how connected all the areas were. I was often surprised to find an elevator or a gate that would lead me directly to a previously explored area. Since you're so focused on trying to survive every enemy encounter, you don't immediatly notice that you eventually always loop back to another region that you've already traversed.
The world has a lot of verticality, which is very enjoyable and offers a lot of surprises during the exploration. I needed to be very observant cause there were a lot of paths & treasures that were viciously well hidden.
The lack of map & teleporters for a good part of the game obliged me to have good spatial awareness and memorization. It was somewhat difficult to remember all the different pathways & shortcuts connecting each location, but it gave a nice feeling of accomplishment when I eventually got used to it and managed to navigate from place to place without much issue. This eventually goes away once you unlock warping tho, but I didn't mind!

The World is full of ominous & otherworldly locations that really left a mark on me. Whether it's exploring Anor Londo for the first time; discovering Ash Lake deep under the earth of Lordran; meeting the Daughter of Chaos in Quelaag Domain; or entering Kiln of the First Flame to defeat Gwyn... The atmosphere surrounding those places is always top-notch, and the lack of music works surprisingly well. I liked the contrast with the epic themes you hear during most Boss fights.

For the first few hours, I only had the Longsword, until I found the Claymore and kept it till the end of my adventure, making sure to upgrade it regularly.
Once I found Havel Armor, I also kept it till the end, but I often switched with a lighter armor such as Gold-Hemmed for many of the Boss fights. Fast rolls are so useful.

I feel like the game doesn't encourage you to try out different weapons/game styles. If you went with a melee build and want to try a pyromancer or mage build midway through the game, you just can't, since you can't reset your caracteristics.
Even simply wanting to change your sword can also be discouraging, because you need to upgrade it all the way to +15 again, which is long & costly.

Beating Bosses was the most rewarding part of the game. My favorites are of course Smough & Ornstein with how challenging they were, and considering what happens after you beat them.
Nito was SO memorable to me. Not necessarily gameplay-wise, but he was by far the most intimidating Boss in the game. His aura, his theme, the fact that you traversed an area that is completely pitch-black to reach him... I was so frightened when the cutscene started!
Chaos Witch Quelaag and Sif are also some of my favorites because of their importance in the lore of Dark Souls.
I also want to point out that I didn't kill Priscilla. I mean, who would even attack her upon seeing her for the first time?
She is so nice with you and just politely asks you to leave her alone. I hope you didn't kill her!

Talking about Smough & Ornstein, I loved the part in Anor Londo. Defeating them felt so fulfilling. And your reward for defeating them is an encounter with Gwynevere, and the ability to warp between bonfires. The music in the princess chamber sounds so triumphant. This was really a high point in my adventure, probably the best part of the game.

Some areas were a bit tedious, and on the really stressful side. Blight Town comes to mind. No bonfire between the top and the very bottom of the area where the swamp is located, and the blowdart snipers are a pain in the ass. But in retrospect, the area isn't THAT terrible.
By far the worst area was Tomb of the Giants. You can't see shit, you have to switch between your lantern and your shield regularly, and the enemies make you fall off the ledge quite easyly, since like I said, you can't see anything. It simply wasn't fun.

I enjoyed the online features. The messages from other players giving advices along the way (or just being trolls), and the fact that I could regularly see their ghosts fighting or resting at the bonfire. It added a nice touch to the game, and made me feel less lonely. I really felt like we were helping each other and doing this adventure together.

While the music is absent most of the time, there are still a few ones that were really memorable to me: Daughters of Chaos; Great Grey Wolf Sif; Ornstein & Smough; Gwynevere Princess of Sunlight.

Duke's archives & Crystal Caves were my favorite regions. I prefer brighter & more colorful areas, and this place looked amazing. The reflections of light on the tiles in the archives were so nice to look at. Plus the area was easy to go through, including the Boss Seath. So yeah, best part of the game purely in terms of exploration.
New Londo was also one of the best places. I enjoy the atmosphere with the spooky ghosts, and the Abyss realm where you fight the Four Kings was very haunting.

The ending felt really abrupt. When I was fighting Gwyn, I didn't even realise it was the final boss fight, and I was surprised to see the credits roll.
I was disappointed to miss out on the DLC content. Finishing the game automatically started a new NG+ file, and I couldn't go back.
Since I missed on it but didn't want to replay the game, I watched a playthrough of Artorias of the Abyss on YouTube. Maybe I'll play it myself one day, but I had enough of Dark Souls 1 for now!

After I finished the game, I watched several videos of VaatiVidya to learn more about the lore of Dark Souls 1. Despite paying attention while I was playing, there were still many story details & subplots that I didn't understand during my adventure.
Especially to learn more about the fate of some important characters, such as the Witch of Izalith & her 7 daughters, Nito, Gwyn, Siegmeyer, or even Solaire.
DLC aside, I also missed some other content like Gwyndolin Boss fight and Solaire side quest, nor did I try to attack Gwynevere in Anor Londo (I watched what it does on YouTube tho)

The replay value for this game must be great. You can do another playthrough by adding some challenge to your adventure: trying a less conventional build, not upgrading your weapon & armor, taking a different path at the beginning... There would be tons of ways to make your adventure different!

As I said at the beginning, it was really hard to get into this franchise, but I'm glad I finally managed to break this glass ceiling. There are a lot of FromSoftware games, so I'm really excited for the future! My next step is gonna be Dark Souls 2.

----------Playtime & Completion----------

[Started on November 25th & finished on December 11th 2023]
Playtime: 50 hours
I got the "To Link the Fire" ending. I didn't do the DLC unfortunately... The game doesn't tell you how to access it, and I don't want to replay a big chunk of the game in NG+ just to do it. Maybe next time!

Calling something "good with friends" is often the cruelest thing you can ever say about a multiplayer game. Yeah, you can have fun with friends in basically anything, it turns out friends are good, not Phasmophobia. And it's so easy to see that in Lethal Company, especially from the outside looking in - some bullshit lame horror coop horror game to scream at, acting as the new steam flavour of the month game to merely moisturise the slip and slide of socialisation.

Despite the resemblance, Lethal Company is not that. Flavour of the month, maybe, but versus the thousand souless PC games out there of it's breed it's truly closer to something like Dokapon Kingdom and hell, Dark Souls, for the kinds of emotion and socialisation it brings up.

Because truly, Lethal Company is a game about having a really shit job. There's no real sugarcoating it. It's a game about being explicitly underpaid for dangerous, tedius work salvaging objects from ugly factories, where the corporation you work under and the true majesty of visiting planets and experiencing it's fauna are so stripped back and corporatised that you don't even notice it. This setting and the gameplay really sets out a very clever vibe for the game, as frankly, it on it's own, is almost deliberately not fun, but it is a wonderful way of building up a camraderie between players and really get into the boots of a worker in a bad job slacking and goofing off a bit. On my first playthrough with friends I found some extraodinary catharsis in one of the gang spending some of our quota on a jukebox playing license free music and just having a jam for a while, and likewise, a good haul which takes some of the pressure off others is appreciated, and the "man in the chair" - the guy left behind at the ship to deal with doors, turrets etc, feels both valued as part of the team, but also themselves lonely, tense, awaiting their friend's safe return.

It is also, as a more obvious point, very funny. Basically every run of this game you'll make something funny will happen. A comrade fumbles a wonky jump to their death based on bad information. You walk just inside the range of your comrade's voice to hear them screaming for help for half a second. You watch as the man in the chair as a giant red dot slowly bears down on your comrade, try to warn them and then see the red dot taking delight in eating them, and there's so much more. It's surprising really as a game with so little going on in gameplay and so limited in variety of stuff that it keeps on bringing up new stupid shit to happen.

Its rarely legitimately scary, even in the rare case you're alone amongst monsters with all your friends dead. The stakes established are just set too low, the animations a bit too goofy for the intensity to ever feel too much. And that kinda folds back in on that "shit job" thematic of the whole thing. Being almost indifferent to the surprising variety of monsters, seeing them as much as obstacles as hell demons that want to eat your face, is ultimately part of the job. Yes, the fourth angel from Evangelion wandering around whilst you slowly crouchwalk across the map to your ship is tense, but almost amusingly tense. Gotta roll with it.

It's a delightful experience, really. If you wanted to you could linger on how cobbled together the whole thing feels right now and how limited the actual gameplay really is, but they do nothing to take away from the truly great times Lethal Company sparks. The closest a game will ever get to being on the last day of your christmas contract with debenhams and just slacking with the other temps, giving people discounts on their items for no good reason and occasionally the weeping angels from doctor who come out with a giant spider and they're in the ONE hallway that leads back to the exit and Ernesto is dead, damn.

One of the few cases of a game dificulty making me hate it for how unfair it feels.

To go into more details, the gameplay of this game feels like it wants you to focus on combos, however, most enemys have super armor and won't flinch with yout attacks. But the same doesn't happen the other way around, a single hit can send you flying, enemys have attack animations with no startup and can spam it, there are rooms with 3 to 4 enemies like that, where as soon as one attack goes of, another follows it up, most times leading to a combo that will get you from 100% to 0%.

"Why don't you just get good?"

The thing is, that argument only really works if you are already invested in a game, there is no reason for me to waist my time and effort trying to get better at a game i didn't like. It doesn't help how obnoxious the narration is all the fucking time, or how repetitive the areas are. I get it is trying to pull a nier automata, but it didn't work for me.

Holy guacamole this game is abysmal from start to finish. Like nothing in this game is enjoyable, the writing and narrators speech is laughably bad, the game itself contradict with gameplay with wanting you to combo enemies but the enemies have the same goal and can spam you into oblivion and the meta narrative aspects are so ham fisted and garbage, its like they took a look at Stanley Parable or Neir and decided to copy spark notes of what they did correctly, so its narrative makes 0 sense. Genuinely got baited with the positive reviews what do people see in this game?

I always had an itch to play this but the price always seemed to steep for me so thanks to user Detchibe for gifting this for me for my birthday. I can now say with full affirmation and disappointment that this is one of the most dulling games I've played in a good long while.

It's almost as if every single component of this game was to be just "good enough," like the developer mission here was to merge half baked percentages of ideas to make a 100% "complete" game. It's a game with "tax writeoff" levels of care and effort.

It's not that Monster Hunter could never work in JRPG format, or that the presentation is too kiddie. It's that MHS2 brings absolutely nothing to the table so it masquerades as kiddie shit to deflect criticism, probably unintentionally but is unfortunately what happens. A half-baked, boring rock-paper-scissors battle system doesn't mean it's an "easy" battle system for children; it means it's half-baked. It's simple in the worst way; it's simply unengaging. Battling the same overworld monsters becomes so repetitive and uninteresting that the "S" rank you'll gain after from peerless play after each battle will mean nothing every time. There's a distinct lack of challenge and real strategy even though the game will always tell you about the "unpredictable" monsters, unpredictable in the sense that they only spam Rock but glow when they're about to use Scissors so watch out!

An annoying companion and a "power of friendship" plot aren't child-friendly ideas to tell a story, they're stale bread JRPG story tropes that dominate a story with nothing of substance to tell. I played about 7 hours of this 50+ hour game and I took it upon myself to see how the rest of the story goes through synopsis reading and cutscene watching and it has absolutely nothing more to show. It's a low stakes morality story that never once feels like it gets its feet on the ground. Everything is not just horribly cliché, but horribly anime cliché, like a stab wound but the already boring anime art style is like a little bit of lemon juice on the tip of the blade to make it hurt just a little bit more. If I can be real I found better "Stories" in the past 4 mainline entries of the series where it served as nothing but a standard backdrop of context to the gameplay.

I see too many reviews writing this off like "but it's for kids so," and I ask why so many people leave it at that. Since when has children's media been barred from such criticism? Especially since so many other JRPGs for children exist like Ni no Kuni, early Tales of, Yo-Kai Watch, Paper Mario, hell even Pokémon. Maybe I was saved of having to spend $60 on this but are we all just trying to justify a purchase here? So many middling reviews but I've never seen so many excuses. A game doesn't have to be "kiddie shit" to be boring and vice versa. MHS2 was obviously a spinoff made with skimpish resources as it shows with the repetitive overworld design and over-reuse of assets, but was never intended to be made with enough love and care to make something fulfilling out of. There's no heart, there's no soul, it feels like a product of a JRPG lab. If you want your kids to get into Monster Hunter just make your youngest play Freedom Unite and watch his ass get kicked by Nargacuga instead of trying to play Rock Paper Scissors with it.

I wish I'd gotten to play this during its heyday. As a huge fan of the original Ragnarok Online there's been few games quite like it, but this one really feels like a spiritual sequel that I would have adored.

The art style captures that beautiful Korean cartoon style in 3D, the music is done by SoundTeMP who worked on the RO soundtrack, and the gameplay is a mix of classic MMO class skills and light/heavy melee attacks which give it an action RPG vibe.

The bones of a really solid game are in here, but sadly everything is so intensely geared towards getting you to max level, playing with the existing player base, and getting you into the shop that it's almost impossible to play the base game without constantly shunning the advancement rewards.

Even ignoring all that stuff the game is very, very easy and it's such a shame. The world is beautifully realised, the dungeons look great, the monsters and characters look great, the story is fine, the content is heavily PvE and grindy which I'm fine with because the gameplay feels good, and there's a huge variety of subclasses to explore.

The PapayaPlay version launched recently and while less aggressively monetised it still whisks you through the levels with constant XP bonuses, more tolerable, but no less eager for you to be at end game spending money. The game is definitely there under everything but the developers just do not want you playing the bulk of its content.

A serviceable twin-stick shooter both improved and let down by its musical focus.
+ remarkable diversity in music genres (even if most individual songs are rather generic and some unsuitable for a rhythm game)
+ clean art style featuring short but well-animated cutscenes
+ very slick UI that looks modern and is generally efficient to use
+ satisfying combat hit effects
+ straightforward co-op feature
+ functional song import (which isn't impressive however, considering it only takes BPM)
- mediocre equipment system for player customization
- simplistic campaign structure with 10 themed locations of 10 stages each and no real climax
- boring story told by embarrassingly written dialogue between shallow characters
- monotonous rhythm gameplay unaffected by difficulty settings
- too many copy-pasted environments with low enemy variety

The combination of rhythm game and twin-stick shooter is a great idea, and the game plays well and looks great. The OST is amazing, with songs ranging from R&B, over Classical, to EMD and Rock, so there is something for everyone here.

However, it is unacceptable that - in certain songs - the metronome is wrong. It's a rhythm game, that's the one thing that you need to get right!

That's why while going for Multiplatinum, where you have to beat all stages on the highest difficulty doing all actions perfectly on-beat and whithout taking damage, I had to lower the music volume and have the metronome very loud, so that I could hear when it would go off-sync.
On Playstation, we didn't get the balance patch that released on steam, so doing Multiplatinum requires you to play with a specific character and kill everything with her special weapon, as regular weapons don't deal enough damage and stages can't be completed in time. That's a shame.

I'm contrarian. If something's popular I'm not eager to like it just to fit in. In fact, admittedly I'll probably try a little harder to hang on to the parts I dislike about it in any future discussions about said piece of media.

So when I finally tried what is probably the most unanimously beloved not-Nintendo owned JRPG I expected to be whelmed, doll out the "Yeah it's good but--" lines in any future discussion and die on those hills. But no, I loved it. The charming writing and cast, the well paced action scenes the well designed overworld map and area maps in general. The game was cool, it was fun. I couldn't put it down. I fell for its allure hook, line, and sinker.

I didn't finish that play through due to hardware failure, so fastforward to 5 years later and I'm even more jaded of a person. And I'm gonna try Chrono Trigger again, and while I enjoyed it last time, and I'm sure I'll enjoy it this time, I'll obviously see the cracks in the walls of this game this time.

And yeah, I did. The game can fall into some of-it-time JRPG trappings, espcially towards the end where I found myself mashing the A button more than I ever had. This game's got flaws but...who gives a shit? Everything that I experienced through my last playthrough still holds up. The cast is just as charming, the story just as well told. Music still hits. It's still one of the most cohesively put together games you could experience on any console, and if you're a fan of the JRPG genre, it is an absolute must play.

Chrono Trigger is truly the result of when amazing talents all share the same vision on a project, and if it can even make a noted hater like myself turn into a fanboy who is already planning his next playthrough in the future, I cannot recommend it enough.

I will not mention Disco Elysium in this post.

Citizen Sleeper is a narrative-adventure game much heavier in the way of narrative than adventure. From the outset, you're given a handful of six-sided dice per day and told that you're allowed to spend them however you want in order to find your place onboard this ringworld station. Your start is going to be appropriately alien and confused, with you getting lost, and making mistakes, and taking hits to your very limited resources. As time marches on and more of the station opens itself up to you, you'll be given the opportunity to spend your dice on an ever-growing list of activities under the threat of time pressure. You can only do so much, the game warns, and your time is the most valuable resource of all.

This isn't true. You can do everything in one playthrough without any real challenge.

In fact, there's so much to do that your struggle is mostly going to be figuring out how to spend your off-days, when all of the NPCs who can progress the story wind up gating you behind a timer of arbitrary length before you can speak with them again. To be frank, I can barely remember most of their names. They all fit a bit too neatly into their archetypes — Good Dad with Cute Daughter, Hackerman, Gold-Hearted Gang Member — and you can kind of see where all of these people are going to end up hours before they actually get there. The story as a whole is too obvious for its own good.

This is a world where that which is moral is that which is correct. It’s a curious little foible I’ve noticed in a lot of these smaller-scale games with gestures towards socialist thought; pragmatism is dedicated exclusively towards villains, and idealism is dedicated exclusively towards the (virtuous) player character and their (morally unobjectionable) allies. You get a bounty hunter set upon you in the early stages of the game, and his entire deal is that he’s willing to not turn you in so long as you keep paying his bar tab. I was ready to dig in, pay up, and take the hits at the cost of buying my own freedom. However, you only need to pay once, because he gets so shitfaced after the first time you pay him off that he drops his gun the next time you see him.

You can give it back to him.

You can give the guy who has a price on your head his own gun back, and you suffer literally zero penalty for this because the bartender stole his bullets while neither of you were looking. He then gets kicked out and completely ceases to be a problem. In terms of pragmatism, giving a bounty hunter who’s coming after you a gun is a miraculously fucking stupid idea. But if you look at it idealistically, you’re refusing to point the gun at him because you’re not going to do violence unto violence, or something. The same thing happens again with the Killer AI; killing it results in your friend NeoVEND dying with it, while binding it eternally in a hellish loop from which it can never escape is the more difficult and thus more “moral” option, so NeoVEND gets to live.

There’s a long, long questline of exposing corruption on the station in the interest of getting your tracker disabled, and it seemed like the closest thing to a core path that the game was offering. There’s a timer constantly ticking down to warn of hunters being set upon you, with the final and most dangerous one taking something like 24 cycles to complete; an in-game “day” is counted as one cycle, so this is an absurd amount of time. I managed to get the tracker disabled with about 16 cycles to spare. And just like that, my body was no longer considered the property of my owners. They wouldn’t come looking for me, anymore. I was free. I could live out the rest of my days onboard this station in my little apartment that I made, hanging out with my stray cat and moving crates all day to buy fungus bowls and stabilizer shots while helping out at the greenhouse commune.

I was satisfied with that, but the game told me that I wasn’t. If I wanted to see credits, I was going to have to either figure out a way to leave the station right now, figure out a way to leave the station eventually, or destroy my body to live in the cloud. The credits rolled for every time I insisted on sticking around — three times in total, four with the DLC — and it wasn't hard to get the feeling that I was overstaying my welcome.

Uh. Why?

No, seriously, why? The Eye is a decent place with good people who I just sunk tons of time and resources into helping. Why leave? Why even think about leaving? Where am I gonna go? A different station, somewhere else, to do it all over again from scratch? Why should I forsake my body and go full computer when we’ve made the point time and again that Sleepers aren’t just programs, and are in fact the sum of their parts, tangible or otherwise? I know that the game needs to end, because a story can’t go on forever, but why like this?

I suppose this was a common complaint, because the DLC addresses the problem by tossing in what you could charitably call an actual endgame scenario, and what you could less charitably call rocks fall, everyone dies. I'm not sure how many people here have ever read a fanfiction as it's being published — don't be shy, I know it's a lot of you — and the conceit of the expansion has that same essence of someone on AO3 writing their responses to reader comments directly into the story. There's no impetus to ever actually want to leave the Eye? Add one in ex post facto! There are far worse things you can do with your narrative, but there's something about saving your actual ending for extra content that betrays some development struggles.

Speaking of, Fellow Traveller needed to get Gareth an editor. I know it's the absolute peak of being a Melvin to complain about a game having typos, but there are a lot of them in here. Like, grammar and spelling mistakes which are consistently wrong. Count the number of times that quotation marks close without punctuation at the end. Characters will use homonyms rather than the words they're actually shooting for to amusing effect, as seen in the phrase "make hole". It's sloppy. I get that writing this many words is hard, and it's just as hard to leaf back through it all to make changes, but I've seen way more people complaining about this than I haven't. Very few people care about spelling mistakes as much as I do, so imagine how rough it must be for them to notice.

But I did still like Citizen Sleeper, and maybe that's why I'm being harsh on it. There is something here that I think could have been outstanding, but it's a little half-baked. The DLC doesn't seem to have helped it much, if at all; when you're loaded to the gills with chits and meds and scrap, the game devolves into just slotting dice into the square hole until text appears. It drags. Ironically enough, for something that's "tabletop-inspired", this would probably work a bit better with a human GM and players at a table, rather than between one person and a computer that has no sense of whether or not its wasting your time. At least your game master has to keep to a human schedule and will thus hurry you along to the juicy bits.

The Sleeper is no Harry DuBois, but at least they're not Kay from fucking Norco.

Sad to say Citizen Sleeper is a pretty neat little experiment that I only wished I could’ve loved more than I should. I really vibe with the visual look, music, it's more hands on approach to cyberpunk themes and concepts, and the Disco Elysium approach to the gameplay lacking conventional combat in favor of story exploration and dice roll mechanics. The game is also fairly non-linear, allowing you to basically pick and choose whatever quest lines or stories to follow in the Erlin’s Eye and pretty much make up your own personal main story to progress through. But once you’ve cracked down on how the cycle progression and dice rolls work in the game it just starts to feel very dragged out because you’re basically clicking and waiting for the real interesting stuff to happen occasionally. Everything in between those parts to do with waiting and resource management just doesn’t feel engaging because there really isn’t too much to it gameplay-wise and story-wise nothing is really going on yet. This didn’t tarnish the experience dramatically because of how short the game is, and if you’re willing to get pass that easy enough this should click with you more, but I would’ve liked to see this concept a bit more fleshed out to live up to its full potential.