The game is atmospherically heavy, by which I mean two things: the entire narrative is very dependent on its atmosphere and it drowns you in its very weighty melancholy. As you play an AI, the visuals of the game are perfectly and inhumanly fit: you are not a human, you do not see like a human. Therefore, the world you (or rather, the person you guide) explore forever stays alien to you, you only get to know anything through meticulous descriptions that really allow your imagination to work. The soundtrack is very melancholic and I think it fits the themes of the game perfectly.

This is a very narrative focused game which makes you imagine an extensive in-game marine universe with rich environmental descriptions of the flora and fauna. The story itself is mainly told through occasional monologues and a few diary pages, which I found very depressing by the end of the game.

On the gameplay part though, the game is a bit lackluster. I think the ergonomy could seriously be improved. Having to constantly shift through the scan mode and travel mode is a pain and the worst is that you can't read descriptions, which are essential to enjoying the game, while in travel mode: this means that everytime you're in a dangerous situation where you need to move fast you have to stay still and waste your oxygen and outside of that is it also annoying because of the amount of time you spend watching your character moving without being able to do much. Fusing the scan and travel screens and having hovering text boxes would have been much better. The controls are also somewhat lackluster, I think it would have been better to simply click on things to travel rather than move the directional thing. I tried both keyboard and mouse and a gamepad, ultimately settling on the keyboard and mouse because I couldn't figure out how to use the shuttle menu with the gamepad.

The map being limited to such a small screen is also relatively annoying, in my opinion, as it really becomes a bother when revisiting areas. I don't think it would remove annoying to the unknown nature of your environment if the whole screen was used, they could simply use a fog of war instead. If these points were improved, the game would really be a great experience. Nonetheless, I still highly appreciated it.

The game's concept is alright but I just can't highly rate a game that relies so much on the cheap difficulty tricks you find in very old plateformers, such as placing a block right above the character so that your jump will end up killing you because you got blocked and forcing you to do near pixel perfect jumps.

Because of these things, the game gradually becomes tedious to play. Its concept doesn't do much either at some point, it's just a repetition of the same thing over eight layers and only one of them has special gimmicks. I was mainly interested in the game because of its scare factor and the description as "sadlet", but there's nothing "sad" in this game (there isn't a story at all) and the horror is just on the surface. Even the music is pretty tedious and repetitive.

The game looks great and has decent atmospheric sounds, ruined by constant cries from your character getting hit or the enemies. Seriously, the yelling is reason enough to not play this game.

If you can go past that and the frustration of constantly dying at the beginning, it's an alright enough plateformer. Note that it is NOT a metroidvania at all. Also, even though you get a lot of gear, I found myself playing the same setup from beginning to end because of a combination that allowed me to increase the attack of my Gladius and heal by attacking. The healing system is terrible and does not encourage experimentation much.

This game also feels highly fetished and that's somewhat disturbing, in my opinion.

I like the concept of this game: it's like Minecraft but with that one aspect of Terraria where you make houses to recruit NPCs and they can do things with you. There's also more emphasis on farming and sort of creating a village, and RPG elements.

However, what ruined my enjoyment is... this isn't actually a sandbox. It's a super linear game, everything you do feels so linear that every single bit of progression feels cheap and unrewarding. I get a new weapon? Yeah well it was part of the story. I'm in a new area, I have multiple objectives: I can only accomplish them in order because that's how the story wants me to do it. There isn't much point to exploring because areas are locked into the main quest and aside from a few collectibles, it makes it pointless to go anywhere but where the story wants you to.

While the story is very funny and the writing isn't bad, the game being this linear just made me not want to keep playing. And it's so excruciatingly slow! And you don't get to choose your own pace either, because of how linear it is. Want to play more and do new things? You must sit through the story now and read for the next ten minutes before you can procede to do something.

Just imagine if Minecraft had a main story quest where you have to do things in order. It asks you to cut a tree, then make your first tools, then mine, then build your first house, then farm; every area would be explored in the order the game wants you to; you only discover new things by progressing the story. It would remove all the magic about the game! Sometimes the game will even go as far as telling you exactly what a building should look like and you have to follow a blueprint, can you imagine that in Minecraft instead of making your own wonderful structures? Well, it certainly didn't sit well with me.

Will I ever have the courage to finish such a long game? No, probably not. I have replayed the game multiple game and really, I can't get close to the ending because it's so long. It doesn't mean I don't like the game though, I enjoyed it a great deal and it's also why I eventually replayed it.

Persona 5 is a game bursting with personality. The user interface is an absolute blast and overall, the visuals of the game really have a good direction. Starting from the beginning, the vibe of walking into the town really made me feel like I'm the new kid in a big city and it's the first time I've felt such a marvel at a video game. Taking the subway felt magical.

The gameplay is like a mix of dating sim and dungeon crawling. The slice of life part of the game is pretty cool but I find the stories to be a little too shallow. All the events are unfortunately short and don't really develop into any type of story arc, which makes me feel like this format is ultimately very limited. Every character only has one story which is basically spread through the multiple events and it feels very short. When you reach the end, you're just left desiring for more. Ultimately, the game is the story of the player growing and meeting people.

The dungeon crawling, I was not much of a fan and it's the part that tired me the most. It just doesn't change. The dungeons get boring fast and they're really long and tiring, especially the memento area which is extremely bland. Unfortunately, it also affects the pacing as you'll have a time limit to challenge a dungeon. I find it paradoxal that they made the slice of life events short as not to overwhelm the player, but the dungeons are so long and tedious. The game offers SMT combat but I really am not that much of a dungeon crawler fan to invest myself into it.

I think this is what ultimately tires me out everytime. It's also the same for every Persona, but at least the dungeons in this one are pretty good unlike the previous games where they were awful corridors.

A horror themed game with a pretty good setup where you play as the monster, the atmosphere is definitively very good throughout the game and so is the feeling of being a dangerous monster.

However the game itself can get pretty plain. The puzzles are the same throughout the entire game and the system of reducing your health to switch between powers gets boring and annoying really fast, even more so if you happen to get hit when you needed health and have to walk around looking for ways to recover your health.

The level design is perhaps the most disappointing part. While the game looks huge, it's extremely linear and at almost all times there's only one direction to go to which is very easy to guess. Even when it branches out, it's only because you need to go through multiple small branches to unlock the main path. There's a bit of backtracking to find optional upgrades which require later powers but it's very annoying due to the nature of the game: there's no map, it's very linear and getting to early areas can be very tedious. The game also makes an extensive huge of "teleportation" through gates that take you from one area to another, which doesn't help with mastering your environment. What's more, half these gates are one-sided and can't be used again (there are also areas you can only access once, because it requires a human to be alive and they'll die when you access the area).

Archvale is fun, but at the same time it is a painfully average game that feels like the developpers just didn't care for it, because there are so many things that seem easy to fix or terrible design choices that could be avoided from the beginning. I have checked the development process of the game and it seems to be a sort of mess, especially now because the main developper acknowledged to not having funds to keep working on it consistently, even though they intended to release a major rebalance patch.

The game is essentially Enter the gungeon but without the roguelike aspect and a consistent world to explore instead. Unfortunately, all that there's to explore are squares upon squares of the same thing. There isn't a single secret on the map and it is procedurally generated every adventure apparently, it's just a succession of areas where you need to fight enemies to progress until a new checkpoint or an eventual point of interest. The dungeons provide a bit more but they are few of them.

The bullet hell part is a pain since the very beginning. There's just too many bullets all the time and the patterns are pretty terrible. In the first place, you can't even make such complex patterns with a dozen randomized enemy per arena and the bosses aren't any better. They hardly have openings and just spam insane attacks with a lot of annoying gimmicks every time. For example, one boss is a slime that will not only cover the area in so many bullets you can barely see yourself but it'll constantly go off screen, there's no way to distinguish between its jumping attack and the one with a jump animation but where it remains motionless, you can't get close to it safely because there's not a single tell that it'll just jump at you and not only does it have its standard bullets but it also has AoE earthquakes that chain together and shoots dozens of small balls the same color as the ground to chip away at your health. And the worst is that they're VERY tanky and take forever to kill.

Overall it's still fun to play but the biggest issue here is that you have no indication of where to go in the open world, EVEN THOUGH there's actually a very precise order with each area being a specific level. So it's easy to end in a high level area without even realising it, especially when you aren't aware that the game is actually super linear, and waste a lot of time being stuck there and get frustrated. The game was really fun when this didn't happen but I spent multiple hours like this, just trying to beat a boss or clear a very hard area before I realised that I would have actually not have trouble elswhere. The bullet or boss patterns aren't a big deal when you're in the right place, but if you're not then they're very painful to deal with and the game is obviously not made with the intent of being cleared on challenge runs (not that it can't be done, but doing a no hit for example would just be extremely painful and would involve a lot of RNG).

The build system is pretty poor but still offers fun choices. The game offers three types of weapons : melee, ranged and magic. Magic has a gimmick of picking up enemy drops that supposedly make you temporarily stronger but I couldn't even tell the difference. The game heavily discourages playing around by having specialised equipment that increases only one type of damage, requiring you to constantly change your gear if you want to change your weapon type. As for the weapon themselves, I found myself nearly always using the same ones and only occasionally picking something else and, once again, not using anything else. Why? Because the weapons are fixed and most of them are essentially a mix of damage type and a different way of firing. Unfortunately you can't mix your own weapons and since you'll usually like a particular type of gun, you'll stick to the one same thing you're comfortable with. It doesn't help that everything is so tanky, so you REALLY need the buff from specialising.

Not a big loss anyway, because damage types and debuffs are almost useless. Does slow even do something? And the damage of poison, bleed and burn is so ridiculously low that a single hit from my weapon would do much more than maybe 30 seconds of poison. Hell, even the pots you can find and throw on the map and the bombs feel so underpowered as if the devs didn't even bother to check them. After an hour of playing, you'll probably do way more damage than any pot throwing could hope to achieve.

The camera is also pretty terrible, especially in coop where the enemies will constantly be out of your screen. I think the zoom on the map is just too much and decreasing it (at least in coop when players distance themselves) would have helped a lot. In coop the other player is your biggest enemy because of the camera moves and my experience was that most of our deaths were because of the camera.

Overall this game is pretty frustrating, it can be fun and has potential but many of the flaws are so obvious that players were bound to criticise them, and they're not so fundamental that a quick patch wouldn't have helped. For example, if you teleport to another area, your checkpoint doesn't change until you use the teleportation statue again, or how the two players are so hard to distinguish themselves... ! There are a lot of bugs like that that are easy to fix and it's hard to figure out why the devs, that are apparently still involved with this game, haven't fixed them yet. So it is saddening to see how the game is just stuck in its mediocre state.

It's hard to make a serious game and in my opinion, most big franchises have very corny and boring writing. They're very boring, full of annoying cutscene moments and various gameplay interruptions or other annoying this. This game... did not try to be anything like that and instead focused on being fun, and it's much easier to make a fun game.

From beginning to end, the game is mostly comedic and the story is very easy to follow, without too much cutscene or too many interruptions. Everything in the game seems to be designed to just be fun and not too serious. The gameplay is very similar to a GTA game but the guns are more crazy, the characters walking down the street are goofy, there are many mini-games which are just some sort of arcade games to have fun for a while... And all of this ultimately makes Saints Row 3 a pretty fun game.

That's all I have to say, really. I enjoyed my time with the game and I never felt like it was too long, too boring, too annoying. Hell, I could have even left midway through the game and not finished the story because it doesn't matter at all, it doesn't hook you or anything. It's mostly just some funny interactions between the funny characters. But I actually replayed this game like three times just because I thought it was fun.

Oh and the character creation and the fashionista potential are pretty strong, so that was cool too!

This DLC does something truly unique: one entire area of the game is recreated... into the past! I was seriously baffled when I saw this, it was amazing and extremely captivating to me.

The DLC also has three great bosses and they're FAST. Having such fast paced combat into this game was a nice unanticipated change and made for some tough challenge.

I didn't like some parts (the Sanctuary Guardian and how to access the DLC) but the good parts overshadow those.