Wow, just wow! Katamari Damacy is a masterpiece of game design and one of the most unique games I have ever come across. Everything in this game is weird and unique, from the intro to the title screen to the gameplay, but at the same time I can only say it is great and successful in doing so.

The game is extremely artsy and creative with beautiful design ideas. For example, the main menu to play the game is a planet on which your character walks and it really looks good and feels like. The sound design is a blast and the soundtrack... it's the greatest soundtrack ever!

The main gameplay is to roll, which is very exhilarating in a way and addicting. While the game only has a few maps compared to its sequel, they're all really big and independent levels will explore them in different manners, something I enjoyed much more than getting a different map every time. The way the game handles this makes you feel like you are progressing: from a small guy that can't do much to passerbies to a big ball crushing that one building you've been roaming around since the beginning of the game, it's something We Love Kamatari just didn't do.

I have no doubt that this is a timeless masterpiece.

Continued by my review of the second game.

I'm genuinely conflicted by this game. On one hand it's a very nice "horror" game. Night Alone is beautiful with an incredibly well done sound design that carries the charm of a lonely walk through a town at night. It has light horror elements that are almost poetic and it really builds an atmosphere around that.

On the other hand, it tries too hard to do horror by throwing some unneeded screamers at you, some of the sounds being way too high and breaking the game's peaceful atmosphere and an absurdly frustrating difficulty at multiple points of the game.

The difficulty is really the biggest flaw of the game in my opinion. One of the things I really loved about the game at first is that it was not hard and felt very different from every horror game I've ever played. You walk around spirits and most of them are almost harmless, the remaining ones are like a puzzle and each of them have an appropriate way of being approached. You're not running, your life is not under a big threat, in many ways it reminded me of a movie like Spirited Away. It's also quite similar to Yume Nikki in the amount of weird and unique things you'll find through your adventure.

But aside from that, not only does the game throw more and more boring chase sequences at you but they're just absurdly difficult and require almost perfect timings (moving as soon as a cutscene is over, managing your stamina...) to survive. The checkpoint system contributes to making this frustrating especially late game. There's even a boss fight which feels completely out of place in a game like this.

I really wish the game had just stuck to the peaceful horror kind instead of trying more. Even the sole fact of walking in such a charming city at night makes it a one of a kind game because I've never seen any game replicate a feeling like this.

I think the game could have also benefited from being more open ended and less linear. Since we're just collecting trinkets through the entire game and there isn't really much of a narrative progression, such a structure would have been perfectly fitting and would have amplified the ingenuity of the design. But it still feels very nice to discover this small city and I really enjoyed that part.

Ultimately, the game doesn't seem to understand what it's good at and tries to appeal to generic concepts instead. Maybe it was riskier, but this game could have been great without being linear, without a "proper story" and without following horror tropes. This also raises a question: do all games that aim to be horror need to be scary? I think this game had a rather cool perspective of that and instead aimed at being spiritual more so than scary: you play a kid as if you were a cartoon's protagonist, there is no stress in regards to resource management (well except the salt, good luck finding salt) and dying isn't punished heavily. It could be an amazing, chill horror themed exploration game, but it's not.

I really wasn't expecting this from a game that I mostly saw as the game equivalent of the trendy colour books for adults, which have never been something I was attracted to. However, contrary to my first impression, I now believe this is a top level mother-like. The character interactions are so memorable and the relationship between some is just incredible, truly a memorable game. Absolutely loved it.

Clever puzzles with a unique colouring mechanic at its core, it's basically a zelda without combat and some other game mechanics taken from "chill games" like Animal crossing (collecting clothes and house decoration). It all mixes well together. The level design is really tight and you just know it's good when the game asks you to find a random area from a picture and you can easily spot where it is, because every single area has its distinct features. It has much a simpler art style than many games but the fact you're taking part in it compensates plenty. And the soundtrack is also excellent.

Somehow this game manages to be worse than the previous one despite showing evolution. Unfortunately, it evolved in all but the right ways. See my review of the first game for more details.

Everything that made the charm of the first game is essentially thrown away, I'll just list some comparisons:

The minimalistic story is replaced with a much more involved narrative. Unfortunately it only serves to show how poor the writing is, whereas it didn't matter in the previous game because the story is relatively unimportant. The abundance of mini-cutscenes is also quite frustrating, the game taking control away from you for usually no good reason. Every so often you have to watch your character agitating the lamp in multiple directions as if surprised by a sound or something, instead of experiencing it yourself. It's the same for multiple scares, which don't work because the game takes control away from you at that point. Not only does it break immersion but it's simply frustrating because of how often this happens are and they really break the flow.

I must admit however that the story has a good surprise toward the end, but that's about it.

Where the previous game could have benefited from being more open ended, this one is even more linear than before. Almost every single location is locked in a precise way by those giant monsters or barricades that magically disappear when it's convenient for the plot, requiring you to take the path the game wants. The directions are also clearer but in a way that only emphasizes the linearity. The annoying dog appears every 10 meters to tell you where to go and it is extremely immersion breaking.

The chases are replaced by mostly awful boss battles that require you to die multiple times and go through the same ordeal to solve them. The biggest problem with them is that they're extremely tedious to redo and require a lot of waiting every single time. This is a very intentional design in many segment of the game where it's obvious that the developers intended for the player to die and it's just infuriating, especially when you consider that they did not put checkpoints and require you to backtrack in many cases. Oftentimes, the boss is just a matter of evading attacks for a few minutes before you can do anything that matters and this is where you die if you do not have the solution, forcing you to restart a sequence of waiting for minutes before trying again.

The biggest change by far : the environmental sound design is much tamer and ordinary. What made the first game stand out was how powerful the environment was, the strong sound of cicadas or the wind in the rice fields. This created a truly unique and captivating atmosphere. This time around, the town is mostly silent and you'll only hear your footsteps. What's worse, the monsters are much more aggressive and most of them have very annoying and violent sounds that completely shatter any peacefulness. Even the dog seems completely out of the loop, why put such an annoying sounding pomeranian? A much lower pitched dog would have done the job better, like in the first game.

Adding onto that, the monsters themselves are rather boring. In the first game, you explore a town where most monsters can easily be avoided and are almost harmless. This helped to create this mystical atmosphere which is not just horror. In this game, you walk through a desolate town where at every corner there's a white ghost looking to chase you for 100 meters while spamming the same annoying scream and death traps are also much more common. There are also less ways to interact with enemies such as throwing rocks so that the ghosts would not pursue you any more. Therefore the appeal of exploration is reduced and there are more chases through areas instead.

All of this just shows that the developers did not grasp what made the first game so interesting and instead invested into much cheaper directions, making a game which keeps the flaws but doesn't have any of the pros of the previous one. I would not recommend to play this game at all and it's pretty terrible in my opinion. The first game is also much shorter, it doesn't help that this one is double the length when it has nothing to show.

I just can't stand this game and its dullness when I've done similar jobs in real life. Hell it was way more interesting in real life, I'm not stuck with the same generic and very limited information so I can actually learn stuff going through someone's files.

So I sure don't work for the soviet governement but I absolutely can't relate to this game one bit. We also made tough calls from time to time but I can't relate it to this game.

I really can't get into this type of gameplay.

I wanted to 100% this game but encountered two problems: 1) some of my progression achievements were not accounted for 2) the game crashed during a sidequest and all sidequests became inaccessible.

Overall a nice game if I exclude this problem. Nice enough that I wanted to 100% it.

The game is pretty simple and bare bone outside of combat, it's the main appeal of the game. The combat is nice and in my opinion offers quite a bit of variety with a lot of moves to be unlocked. I was never quite bored and experimented a lot of different things throughout the game.

The game is fairly easy but it's also why you can afford to experiment so much and the moves are cool, so I had a lot of fun. I also like the fact that every mission has a hard alternative and the ranking system adds some more meat to the game.

Outside combat, there's not much to see. The characters are nice but the story is forgettable and sometimes sounds like gibberish machine translation. The game has some Persona-like events which are disappointingly short and void of any depth. The events are like five long and that's it. For example, one of them was just a conversation akin to "Hey you got a guitar? You'll play music for me sometimes? Yeah ok".

All the collectibles are pretty stupid, requiring you to spam the same action over and over until you get it : eating multiple times at restaurants, spending 10 minutes watching the gacha action to get all the loot... It feels like they were designed for you to come back every once in a while and max them out just like you would in Yakuza for example, but there's no reason to hang out in the city and getting the food buff that way would be genuinely painful. Besides, nothing stops you from spamming and the prices are cheap.

And speaking of spam, one of the achievements require you to constantly water a tree throughout almost the entire game. It seriously takes a long time.

I hope the second game would be less buggy and have improve the quality of content outside combat. Considering the length of these games though, I'm not buying it anytime soon because it's too expensive.

This game is an amazing recreation of the atmosphere of the first movie, in a certain manner, but other than that it doesn't have much to offer unfortunately. It's a fun visit for maybe the first hour, then the environments just repeat themselves.

The gameplay part is horrendous. Stealth games like Thief, Dishonored or Sekiro are fun because they offer interesting and rewarding mechanics while a game like this only has you crawling slowly or hiding in a shelf to avoid enemies while waiting for them to move away. It's just tedious, especially considering the long stretches of stealth you need to do and the save system with no checkpoint, forcing you to restart entire sections if you die. Even Outlast understands this is not very fun, hence why you only have to hide or slow down a few times and why it has regular checkpoints.

Yes, the alien has advanced AI, but did we really need it and does it do anything in this context? Rather than the enemy AI, what can I as a player do other than hide in a cabinet, crawl slowly behind NPCs who follow boring patterns and use a few weapons from to time to time, in an endlessly repetitive loop.

Aside from the stealth, all you do is gather things for a very basic and generic craft system as well as opening doors, repairing things... perhaps the most generic game objectives possible. You arrive somewhere new, you need to repair a door, some machines, that's it, that's the game.

Perhaps these mechanics could have worked if the game was more sandbox and open. Go in any direction you want, find some audio log or something like Outer Wilds while avoiding environmental danger. And cut the length of the game: it would have been a fine 5 hours long game, it's a stretchy and boring 20 hours adventure.

The DLC is such a good extension of the base game that it's hard for me to distinguish it from the base game. However it does one thing that deserves great praise: it GREATLY extends the base roster of weapons, with some of the most fun weapons in the game.

The bosses are more interesting than the base game and also much tougher. The areas are great just like the rest of Bloodborne but one part suffers from having the worst trashmob ever: that shark thing. The underground cave with the two sharks is awful.

Through a compilation of short videos of an interrogation room, this game manages to present a very compelling and fascinating story. Right from the get-go, it manages to captivate you with a single word, murder, and you'll have to understand what it means and you'll WANT to know why it's there.

It's amazing how this game manages to hook you so easily into doing this investigation work. The nature of the game also makes it that every player will take their own path and make reach a different answer. At the end of the game, I was honestly far from being fixated on an answer and I must admit to having watched all the footage in the proper order, in the game's folder, before I could really understand what's going on.

I think this game truly creates a morbid, fascinating atmosphere that really makes you feel the dread of your average household incident. It's a "slice of life" of real life horror.

The main area in this DLC is beautiful and nice to explore. I really enjoyed the snow area.

I did not enjoy the idea of backtracking the whole thing after "unlocking" those sealed ice things, though, and it felt like a cheap way of padding content.

This DLC also has the worst area of the entire souls series: frozen outskirts.