When judging a piece of media, I think it’s important to meet whatever it is you’re judging where it’s at. One of the most frustrating things in media critique space for me is how often will the critiquers either misunderstand the intent of a work, misrepresent it’s budget and scope, or mismanage their expectations of it going in, and then proceed to levy criticisms at this work that, essentially, have nothing to do with reality. Like when people say that New-Vegas is a shitty game because it has shitty combat, or that Minecraft is dumb because “there’s no point”.

With Cult of the Lamb my only real expectations from playing the demo back in June were that it was going to sound and look amazing, and (puts on a satanic cowboy hat) by golly – they did it! (the hat runs away). You’ve heard this a million times by now since the visuals pop out like crazy, but the art-style Massive Monster were going for was realised almost perfectly, and I really dug the soundtrack. Sure, the theme for the first dungeon is the only real memorable one out of the four that’s there, but the rest are bopping too, and other tracks like the ones playing in the village or in the other NPC areas are really nice and soothing.

The combat is also pretty awesome, even though after the demo I wasn’t expecting much from that department. The sheer agility Da Lamb always has is amazing, with you being able to dodge roll-animation cancel out of any action besides casting spells (which gives you I-frames anyway). The weapon selection is not the best, but each one feels different from another in pretty substantial ways, and adds variety to your base moveset. With a dagger you’ll be zipping around as fast as you can doing small damage quickly, with a hammer you’ll be carefully weighing every opportunity to strike vs every opportunity to eat a fireball to a face, and an axe allows you to do massive damage twice if you roll after every slow-ish attack you make to negate recovery time. Spells also work nicely, though I wish there were more opportunities for you to use them in combat; right now they feel constrained. Overall, it’s kind of one of my favourite melee combat systems of any roguelike I’ve played so far, which I guess is not high praise given that most are either about shooting or are turn-based, but still.

But honestly, my favourite part of this has to be the tone. Yeah, probably sounds weird, but I’m a big sucker for disparate ideas, emotions and influences coming together in a way that reconciles and harmonises them, instead of keeping them separate. Cult of the Lamb could’ve easily been a straight-forward cute action-game where the fucked up Eldrich Horror shit was downplayed or not done with enough effort, but this game works because it’s authentically both cute and horrifying all the time in almost equal measure. It could’ve been as bland and annoying as Happy Tree Friends, where a story about cute animals doing cute stuff was just sometimes interrupted by gore, but the different tones just click in the best way possible.

Unfortunately, Cult of the Lamb game is perfectly willing and able to hook you in and get your mind racing from your earliest minutes with just the premise alone, which, to put it mildly, gave me expectations.

So what’s the premise? You’re a cute little lamb being dragged off to an altar to be slaughtered for the sake of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, before a mysterious god, locked in chains in some ethereal dimension, gives you his power and recruits you as his servant, giving you the task of starting your own cult of other cute animals and killing off the gods that tried to kill you. And gameplay-wise, what you’re looking on with this one is a whole ensemble-cast of genres: action-rogue-like, farming sim, management game, and adventure game, with mini-games thrown in.

With all that being considered, I don’t think it’s physically possible to not be excited for what’s to come when you get going. Sadly though, while being a well-made game I was glad to play through, I don’t think Cult of the Lamb really delivers on any of it’s (admittedly implicit) promises.

The weakest part of this genre-mashing is definitely the rogue-like. It’s okay-ish with enemy and item variety (though all the fucking “Receive X-amount of blue hearts” items are definitely annoying to have), but like I’ve said, the weapon variety is sorely lacking. This game basically went the West of Dead route, – having a small number of weapon types that have a few variations that apply a unique status effect. Specifically, Cult of the Lamb has 5 main weapon types and 6 variations, including “Godly”, which just gives you basic weapons, but they’re stronger now! That’s not even to mention that only one of those status-effect variations is really useful – the poison one. The rest could be interesting, but they…just don’t seem to work? I mean, they technically do, but the chance for effects like “Heal after killing an enemy” or “Posses a slain foe” seem so small that I’ve seldom encountered them even a few times during all of the runs I’ve picked them up on. “Critical damage” weapon variations are better, but even then, they just don’t seem to make a tangible difference. The same goes for spells – there are like 4 or 5 types of spells you can get, but all the same status-effect special editions, which are almost exactly as boring and meaningless as those of the weapons.

The management/farm sim part of this game is not the best either. It doesn’t take even a few hours before you’ve found enough cultists, unlocked all the OP rituals and built enough infrastructure before your sect is almost entirely self-sufficient, automated, and fully taken care of, and you only need to actively visit to, bizarrely, cook food, take care of dead bodies and unclog the outhouses, which I guess my cultists are not able to take care of themselves. In fact, they’re so dependant on Da Lamb that they will piss, shit and cry forever, until their Messiah comes to bury the body they’re just vomiting on when walking by, or to unclog the toilets they abandoned to shit in behind the temple instead, or to eat some fucking grass instread of starving to death. Kind of off-topic, but the funny thing about shit in this game, in particular, is that it’s given tons of attention: there are a few dishes you can make that will instantly make a cultist shit themselves in public after eating, there are quests you can do for your cultists where you make them or their brethren eat literall bowls of poo, and there is a whole-ass Janitor Station that allows your flock to (finally) wipe after going № 2, but even that doesn’t give them the ability to flush after visiting an outhouse. Sad!

Especially sad given that your cultists can die and go to hell for all you care – you’re literally given no real gameplay incentive to take care of them. They can dissent and leave, they can die of illness or old age constantly, but who cares? What you need to progress the game is just to have a certain number of guys in your cult, which is not hard to do considering how easy it is to find new recruits or to quell the rumblings of the old. Just keep the bare minimum standard of living up and you’ll do fine.

That’s not even to speak of the fact that there is little to no personalization or characterization involved with your Sheep-Believers. You can change what animal they are when recruiting, change the colour of their skin and give them a name, but it’s still hard to even remember them, let alone get attached. Even when you have pink unicorns with bloody horns and people with white Cthulhu heads named “Dickn’balls” running around your camp, from that far away they all begin to blend together, and they don’t have any interesting behaviour to call upon when trying to tell them apart. There was definitely an attempt to give some traits to your guys, but there are like 8 possible traits your cultist may have, all inconsequential and all completely unrelated to their behaviour on camp or how they respond to your actions. Sure, some might get sad for a minute about the fact that a fellow cult-member died, but this, in reality, doesn’t affect shit, and you always forget who has what even after seeing it a dozen times, not to mention that a lot of these minute set-backs can be mitigated by upgrading your cult to automatically value stuff like cannibalism or human sacrifice.

Speaking of cult upgrades: they kinda suck. It is fun, at the beginning, to declare a fast because of your religious value of hard work and humility, then to sacrifice an old guy to your god because of how much your cult loves ritualistic homicide and the olds being eaten, only to then give them mushrooms and do whatever the fuck you want for a whole day, but this whole Ritual and Doctrine system is really unbalanced. At first I thought that the Doctrines were mutually exclusive or at least synergetic, meaning that having a doctrine of hard work will somehow connect with a doctrine of “big money and house good”, but no – every one of the five doctrine trees can be fully upgraded all at once, and it’s not even hard to do. In the beginning every new doctrine/commandment stone I’ve unlocked was a real reward for a series of challenges, but quickly I’ve amassed so much that I’ve upgraded my cult in every way possible, with no feeling like that was an actual achievement. Again – this game is like 20-ish hours long, and in terms of progression fizzles out at 12 or so. That is super upsetting, because just making every new level of all the upgrade trees cost a bit more would make this system a thousand times more satisfying.

It’s especially upsetting because Cult of the Lamb partially exists in two whole genres known for how long or potentially infinite they are, and it fails to live up to both of them in terms of the breath and the depth of it’s content. Cult of the Lamb is a well-done game, and given that it’s a game made by a total of about 20 core developers, it is kind of amazing how great it turned out to be. But playing it I just kept thinking “what if that was a bit more developed”, or “what if this was expanded upon”, or “what if they changed this”, while enjoying or even loving the stuff that’s already there. That’s the worst kind of great game – one that promises to be even better and just fails to deliver in a million tiny ways.

Maybe I’m just being petty or entitled, but I can’t stress enough how fun and addictive Cult of the Lamb has been. It’s just a shame that the ambitions or the budget of the team didn’t allow for it to grow into something more than a game that I will mostly only remember the visuals of a month from now.

This might sound weird, but throughout my life works of art I've connected the most with have been those I had major doubts about going in. Works that look bad or sound weird from their elevator pitch that do end up being great in the end are those I tend to remember and cherish more than works that promise to be great and just deliver on that, no strings attached. The other kind of thing I usually end up loving the most is the kind that's bold and tries something new and totally pulls it off. If a show has a weird premise or a game is built on some weird gimmick, but then the end-product turns out to be great – those are the kind of products I go back to more often than any other. I guess respect is something I often need to feel connected to something.

When Elden Ring's gameplay was revealed, I was incredibly disappointed. Sure the visuals looked great, but in terms of design a lot of the areas and enemies they've shown off have felt straight out of Dark Souls III or Bloodborne; the combat looked exactly like FromSoft's previous games, down to animations ripped directly from DS3; in general, this didn't feel like anything all that 'new'. The big new thing was the open world, but the descriptions given about this part of the game in particular were scarce and pretty secretive. Really, from reveal to release, I imagined this game to be Big Dark Souls with a new NPC summoning system and a crouch button.

And the crazy thing is, on a basic level – that’s all this game is, but just saying “It’s Dark Souls IV but big” and just leaving it at that would be selling the game insultingly short.

What I didn’t expect is just how well the Soulsborne formula maps onto accepted and expected open-world design. Going through dungeons and forests, fighting weirdly horrific goons, opening chests and battling with the occasional boss here and there – isn’t that just what you usually do in these games? Well, not exactly, having a whole-ass continent to roam around does change things a lot in terms of balancing, discovery, the sheer time needed to go from one big piece of content to another, but it’s still incredible how essentially unchanged the structure is from older Soulsbornes to Elden Ring. If anything, having an open world now feels like the logical next step in the evolution of these games: the feeling of venturing into the deep to fight the evil transformed into the freedom of conquering a whole world. From an adventurer surviving dingy caves and sewers, the Soulsborne player has been transformed into a hero surviving a war for the throne, or at least swording their way through the war’s remnants. Now you feel like you’re on an epic odyssey with a whole world of stuff to find at your own pace, with the quality of stuff generally being the same or better than what was found in FromSoft’s previous outings. And now your journey feels truly never-ending, like there's not even a set in stone final boss or a certain number of fights or dungeons you'll have to go through to reach the end. With how the map reveals itself only a small piece at a time, and how the minimalist UI facilitates real immersion into The Lands Between, for most of my playthrough of this game I legitimately didn't know when will it finally roll credits, and I was digging every minute.

It’s not like nothing has been lost or changed in this transition, though. It’s undeniable that Elden Ring can be a lot easier than, say, Bloodborne, because in that game a challenge was a brick wall that you would either be broken by, or break yourself. But in Elden Ring, a lot of the time most challenges can just be put on the list of things you’ll have to do later, and after you’ll complete all the easier tasks and gain some levels and upgrade your equipment, the initial challenge would be much easier, if not just easy, period. That’s exactly what happened to me with Radahn: after trying to kill him for an hour and a half straight, I just thought “Ok, this isn’t even mandatory, and it kinda sucks, I’m probably underleveled for this guy. I’ll come back later”. And after like 15 hours of gameplay off-Caelid, I came back and pretty much walked all over Radahn’s fight. It wasn’t a steamroll or anything, but using the freedom to essentially skip the fight made it worse for me, and I struggle to say whether this was my fault. A shame, too, ‘cause Radahn is one of the coolest bosses in FromSoft history, and his moveset makes him really fun to fight.

The good thing is, that is pretty much the worst example of this game’s structure working against it that I had personally experienced. Other than that, I actually found this whole “go do something else if you don’t like this” thing to be a really enjoyable part of my journey. If I thought that I was underleveled for an area (like with Caelid, to which I arrived like 40 levels too early through a shortcut), or that the optional boss I’ve been fighting sucked ass and I didn’t want to fight them at all, or that I just wanted to go someplace else for no reason – I had that choice, and it didn’t seem to impede my enjoyment of Elden Ring all too often. In fact, this game kinda introduced the fun of being overpowered in a Soulsborne to me in a way I wasn’t expecting. When I realized literally halfway through my playthrough that there was a whole subsection of Limgrave below the main zone, I was way overleveled for most of it, so I was plowing through enemies in Castle Morne like it was nobody's business. But at this point my character had killed several demi-gods, as well as numerous knights and sorcerers, amassed an arsenal of powerful weapons, and was on their way to conquer The Lands Between capital. So why would this person have any issues with fighting through a castle overtaken by it’s former slaves? Why would they struggle with the local Misbegotten chief, or his underlings, or Castle Morne’s footsoldiers? They are clearly not on the level of danger I’ve seen already, so why would they be any trouble? In a weird way, Elden Ring’s ability to make you an unstoppable force of nature purely because of a lack of level scaling was an additional marker of progress, just like the prowess I’ve shown in killing the main bosses or going through the main dungeons and areas. Now more than ever a FromSoft’s Soulsborne feels like an RPG, where being overpowered one minute and nigh on powerless the next is the norm, and while not all From Software fans will appreciate this (clearly), I enjoyed this part of the game a lot. You may say that challenge is the core of these games, but I really thought that Elden Ring wasn’t about the challenge anymore; now challenge shares the spot-light with a few other elements, both mechanical and not.

And really, this game felt pretty even for me in terms of what elements were core to it. The game is incredible visually, both from a technical and art-design perspective, with a lot of awe and epicness being facilitated by the visuals alone. The mechanics are tighter and more varied than ever, with ‘trying out different builds and weapons’ being one of the most fun things you can do in Elden Ring, with any variation of weapon, spell, Ash of War and consumable being fun and valid. The lore is more upfront and engaging than in any previous Soulsborne, now finally being explicitly about politics (instead of using politics as a soapbox), a struggle between ambitious people fighting for their ideals, as well as a struggle between higher powers vying for control of this world and it’s inhabitants' lives.

It’s been said a thousand times before, but Elden Ring feels like the logical conclusion of most everything FromSoft has done up to that point. It doesn’t just reuse ideas and concepts from it’s predecessors, but carefully utilizes them, transformed and/or upgraded, to craft a new experience that, despite sharing 90% of it’s DNA with it’s ancestors, feels nothing like the games that came before. As it turns out, a developer using years of experience to craft something new out of the best parts of their previous works can only make for a genuine masterpiece and one of the best games of all time. Haters seething, Tarnished – Rising.











P.S.
That Malenia, Blade of Miquella sure does suck huh guys, also have you seen that some bosses are kinda like other bosses from DS3 and Bloodborne? 0/10 game

P.P.S.
I forgot to mention that, but I think that the reuse of content was handled really well in ER for the most part. I liked how the soldiers were given different equipment and coupled with some different enemies depending on the area, it really did make the world more lived-in and believeable. I also liked how some bosses sorta tie your journey together, or bring cohesion to it. Like, The Ulcerated Tree Spirit -- that thing was a bitch to get through when I met him in Fringefolk Hero's Grave, but after that each encounter with him was like meeting an old friend, I swear to god. Helps too that his moveset is fun and exciting, at least in open spaces. And fighting him like 6 different times, each time in a different part of my quest, gave me yet another idea of how far I've come each time we've met. The same kinda goes for the cave dungeon bosses like the cats, it just feels good to bumb into a challenge you've beaten already from time to time, just to see if you can still do it, I dunno. On the other hand, there are definitely bosses that I hate or enjoy much less than I would've if they weren't repeated. The biggest example is Astel having a bigger badder version in some dingy cave, but others include all of the dragons aside from Placidusax, the wyrms after you kill your first one, Loretta, and all the bosses where the boss is just a regular enemy, but now there's two of them, and one or both have a stupid gimmick.

I must state at the front that I’m really not an RPG guy, mainly because I just haven’t been too exposed to these games all that much. What games I have played in this genre have mainly been main-stream Action RPGs like the Witcher, The Elder Scrolls and the Mass Effect series, in which role-playing can be scarce if not entirely non-existent, and the story felt fairly linear for the most part. And when I think about some actual RPG games I’ve played, I feel like they’re often more focused on the build variety and the stat games, with players receiving some cool powers that they can minmax effectively to plough through enemies. There can be great characters, great storylines and great quests in them, but one thread common to most of them is that your main character is definitely not the star of the show. That especially goes for the classic RPGs like the Square games on SNES, classic CRPGs like Fallout, or more modern CRPGs like Divinity: Original Sin or the Shadowrun series, where your character takes a major backseat to the supporting cast and, really, these games bank completely on your party-members and the bad guys to carry the story in terms of emotion and engagement. You can always sorta choose how to respond and what to do, but with a blank-slate protag you will always have a major empty space in your narrative that can only really be filled with the player filling in the details with role-playing they have to do in their own heads, instead of having any meaningful control over your player-character.

And what’s genius about Disco Elysium, and why it stands out amongst any other role-playing -- hell, any other videogame, is because the character you play a role of is clearly defined, and not just by your intrinsic thoughts about them, but by the game's own mechanics. The brilliance here really starts in the premise: your man Harry Du Bouis (a.k.a. the Firewalker) wakes up from a bender so apocalyptic that he literally forgets everything about his life, his world, the nature of his reality, and whatever the fuck he’s doing in this damp motel-room; from the darkness of his mind he’s woken up by voices, all representing different parts of his being. Here the other part of Disco Elysium’s totally unique and hopelessly badass genius comes in: the mechanics. In this game, where you travel with a single guy and you don’t have any combat at all, most of your time is spent talking to the many parts of yourself – things like your willpower, your sense of authority, your fight-or-flight reflex, your perception, down to some real weird shit like your ability to sense the world around you and “tune into the streets” to literally hear and feel the city (a.k.a. ‘Shivers’), as well as the famous ‘Inland Empire’, which is your ability to understand the world at a meta-physical level, imagining the unreal, “animating the inanimate”, like talking to a hanging corpse and your own funky necktie. And those aren’t just different parts of Mr. De Bois’ inner-voice, your skills are presented as though they are actual entities existing inside of Harry, talking to you and arguing with you and each other constantly. Some of them even have nicknames for you, like the Drama skill, reassuringly calling you “sire” whenever it checks for lies or inconsistencies. This is all not only sick as shit, but extremely creative, and it not only helps you internalize Harry’s struggles and make them your own, but guide him into the next part of his life as a new guy made out of part of the old guy.

Simply put, in Disco Elysium you play a pre-made character fractured to the point where your choices shape him up into someone you feel you created yourself. This is why in my original review of this game I’ve described this game as one when you truly do get to roleplay whoever you want. That’s not technically true, but it feels like it, and that’s rare and awesome enough, even without the fact that the game acknowledges that your Harry is just a part of the whole that got broken up. This journey Disco Elysium takes you on is as much a mystery crime drama as it is one of self-discovery and of the power to define who you really are through your actions and how you treat others.

This is one reason why I really, sincerely hope that a Disco Elysium 2 doesn’t happen, at least not with Harry and/or Kim. Because if you were to just continue this journey with like one of your old save-files, or worse, if the sequel tried to tell a new story with these two without considering the characterization Hobocop went through in the first one through the player’s actions, it will kinda rob this whole first game of it’s significance for me. Okay, well, maybe not all of it, but one of the things I love about Disco Elysium is that it doesn’t feel the need to tie every loose end and give players closure on every conflict in this story. By the end, even if your Dick Mullen was the coolest friend to Kim AND solved the case AND somewhat reconciled with his feelings about his traumatic past, it’s still unclear if he will ever be fully ok, if the dreams about Dolores Dei will stop appearing, if he won’t just die because of his own buffoonish behaviour (as he no doubt has at least once during most people’s playthroughs) solving some other case. And the world feels even less understandable by the end of the game as it did at the beginning, and you don’t know if you could’ve handled the case better, if your actions brought on a possibility of a revolution or a crackdown on the workers, and especially those with the Union. What will happen to these kids at the church, or with Cuno; what is Klaasje going to get herself into next, and how will the racial, religious, and class tensions bubbling just under the surface in Ravachol will be resolved – you just don’t know. All you can hope for is that your actions did more good than bad. As one wise YouTube guy and his wise ferret once said: Disco Elysium is a game concerned with our present, and in that concern all it finds is ambiguity, if not for small glimmers of hope. And I do mean ‘ambiguity’ in a good, if not extremely terrifying way. For lack of a better word, Disco Elysium feels life-like, more than any serious drama about drug addiction or political corruption could ever hope for, despite it’s fairly consistent stream of trippy goofiness and a somewhat surreal aesthetic.

But the reason I would want to see more of this world and these characters is your partner - Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi. It’s weird to say, but Kim has pretty quickly become one of my favourite characters in fiction, and it’s not hard to see why. At first he comes off as an uber-professional no-nonsense cop, one you’re embarrassed to even be around because of how lost you feel. It seems like he’s the kinda person that doesn’t lose his cool ever, and can withstand just about anything to get the job done despite his obviously bad eyesight and slender build. When you start getting the hang of being a cop and also open up to Kim about how fucked up you truly are, Kim starts opening up to you too, and you start peering into the depths this character has. He’s a kind man that does what’s best for everyone, always trying to de-escalate and find a way for justice to be served with as little violence as possible. Like most people in this world, Kim’s political views greatly inform his character. Being a dirty lib, he’s explicitly concerned with the facts and very little else. He’s not in the habit of pontificating on the fact if the Union or the Wild Pines are good or bad; he’s not interested in spiritualism of any kind; he’s a guy with the job to do, and one thing he sure believes in is the law. Kim is a compassionate person, and he’s extremely progressive on most social issues, so he doesn’t feel like he’s a grey-goo centrist, more like he chose not to concern himself with things out of his control, and now tries to, once again, get the job done. In that sense, Kim is an amazing companion and friend, as he can act as your guide through this world, but also allow you to discover and dissect the most interesting stuff on your own, knowing he’ll always have your back. Such an unambiguously morally good character is hard to come by especially in this kind of a setting, but Kim manages to be that with a lot of complex thoughts and feelings he holds in unless you really get to know him. I found it interesting how easy it is for Harry, and in turn for the player, to relate to Kim. Both him and the protagonist are filled with guilt, anxiety, feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt, but also because of how differently these feelings manifest in the both of you, Kim almost becomes a role-model you can try to follow from time to time. But you probably won’t be 100% successful even if you try, which leads to a really entertaining relationship where Kim is a good cop that can turn bad if need be, and Harry is a goofball drunk that is secretly a genius-cop, who both before and after the amnesia-bender is weirdly good at his job. It’s the reason why these two were memed into oblivion and continue to be to this day; Kim and his relationship with the player-character are so fun and endearing that it’s hard to let them go from your mind.

And really, Kim is far from the most complex character in this story, and there are a shit-ton of others just as interesting and fun to interact with. They all, even the most optimistic and easy-going, carry a lot of pain and regret with them, and those who aren’t have drowned their suffering in as much right-wing kool-aid as you can even imagine. But even though there are a lot of bad people doing terrible things to people who are yet to turn bad, the world of Elysium is still filled to the brim with joy and beauty. For a game so unabashedly political and so smeared in the ugliness and despair of the human world, the strangest thing about Disco Elysium is how hope-pilled it is. For all Harry’s faults, there is a faint hope that he’ll be ok, do something with his life to fully turn it around. Even though the situation seems hopeless in Martinese, you can see how it can be made good again. Whether it’s by workers standing for each other and their rights, or by everyday people caring for each other, or for one drunk cop doing his job, this world can be changed, and it’s inhabitants don’t have to lead these awful lives forever. This is the fundamental idea of Disco Elysium in my mind, and with how beautifuly it expresses it through well-realised characters, I can’t love this game enough. A mastapeeessAH










P.S.
For real though if they ever did a sequel I don’t want either Kim or Harry anywhere close to it

It's fun when it works, but it almost never does, and all the challenges the game throws at you feel discouraging in the worst way possible: instead of defeat pushing you to get better at the game, in DD defeat never feels like your fault, and "getting better" feels like a very nebulous goal concidering the RNG at the core of this title. I guess I can commend a game going for a "you can die at any moment and you'll just have to eat it" kind of gameplay loop, but without any meaningful narrative to support it, and for how grindy this game can get, I can't say Darkest Dungeon worked for me at all. The visuals are cool and memorable, and I do like this one in concept, but in execution I just can't seem to get it

I've been playing this game for years (basically since it launched), and only recently got tired of it. Now that I'm officially kinda sick of EtG, I can finally gather my thoughts and reevaluate it somewhat critically.

SIKE

This game is perfect in every way, and I can't stress this enough. Where as other roguelikes and roguelites tend to either have small amounts of content thus not keeping you playing for long enough, or the combat is dull and the only thing keeping you going is powerful items, or they're too random, or they're not random enough, Gungeon just zips past all of these issues.

There are hundreds of fun guns, actives, passives, bullet modifiers, companions, dozens of fun bosses and secret bosses, NPCs, banging tunes to be listened to, and so on, and so on, and so on. And all of that can be run through several fun systems like the Curse and Cool meter to spice things up run-to-run, not to mention things like Skipping floors, Boss Rush, Blessing and Challenge Mode that allow you to have fun even when you've truly mastered all of the game's basic systems.

And the great thing about Gungeon is that it does allow you to master all of it's systems, while not limiting the amount of content in the process, or being obtuse about it's inner-workings. One thing I absolutely hate about some roguelikes is that they are just allergic to accessibility. In Enter the Gungeon, you don't (really) have to consult a fan-wiki everytime a cool looking item is in view or when there is some ambiguity about how this or that functions. All the necessary info is in the Ammonomicon, and the info that's not necessary, all the stuff about the fine details and strategies is gathered naturally by the player, so you feel like the game is fun and easy to enjoy, but if you want to squeeze every bit of awesome out of it, you'll have to work for it.

Another thing I hate about some (most) roguelikes is that often mechanical complexity and/or any semblance of a high skill ceiling is sacrificed on the altar of RNG. In other words, randomness and vast amounts of content often take a big bite out of having fun mechanics you can get good at (which applies to like most roguelikes), or a good combat system exists in not a lot of water for it to swim in. Hades is a good example of the ladder: there, a good if not simplistic combat system is bolstered by barely anything in terms of items/perks The boons get old fairly quickly, and a lot of the gods' offerings feel similar to each other on an immediate level. And this is personal, but I was really not feeling like half of the arsenal in Zag's disposal, and the enemy roster gets old FAST, both because the mobs are not too visually interesting, and that there just wasn’t a lot of them. And kinda the same thing goes for bosses - even though the heat modifiers help keep them fresh, they still don’t change the fact that there weren’t a ton of them, and only 40-50 hours in, I felt like I basically exhausted Hades in sheer amounts of content.

And it’s not a bad playtime for a single-player game, but it’s amazing how vast Gungeon is, and how fun all that vastness is to explore and exploit. Before Synergies were implemented I would think otherwise, but since the summer 2018 update, literally every weapon can be fun and useful in its own way, and this is a FEAT for sure. In most roguelikes, hell, in most videogames different guns don’t feel different, at best – they sound different and do different damage. But in Gungeon, there are tens of weapons with each having a distinct look and feel, and more often than not, every gun will have some sort of gimmick either in design, in gameplay, or both, and most gimmicks are fun and memorable: from the fish-barrel gun, to the baseball bat not-gun, to the famous Bullet-That-Shoot-Pistols-That-Shoot-Bullets. The items are not as varied, with a lot of them being different versions of the same thing, but they often compensate for that by being funny and stupid in a way that doesn’t get in the way of your gameplay.

And the enemes, OH, the enemies…They’re alright.

Here I have to admit something – like 35% of why I love this game as much as I do is because of the visuals and the sounds. The technical complexity of all of this stuff is not anything to write home about, I mean on a baseline level, visually this game is a pretty straight-forward retro-throwback, just with a lot of particle effects and high-quality animations. But the thing I adore about EtG’s presentation is just how earnestly fun it is. And it’s not just in the silly-wacky way where you dab on the final boss to activate an item or whatever, but in just how adventurous it all is. With how frequent the NPCs are, and how every character in this game is some videogame archetype guy, and how you’re always doing challenges and opening chests and killing weird monsters, and also with how sci-fi a lot of this game is, and how it’s filled with pop-culture references, this game, all at the same time, feels like Star Wars, Elder Scrolls and some sort of a western. I mean, just the menu music fills me with joy everytime I hear it, with the “AAAAAAAH ENTER THE GUNGEON, ENTER THE GUNGEON, ENTER THE GAAAAAAAAAH” thing priming you to go into the depths once again to kick ass and kill da bullets, and it’s all very tastefully done despite how campy EtG is.

And yeah, gameplay-wise, da bullets are ok, but they’re all so charming that it’s hard not to fall in love with all of them. Just the regular Bullet Kin is so simple, yet so fun to just fucking demolish (or put on a key-chain), and every single enemy in this game is as simple and as fun to just look at, let alone fight. From the Shotgun Kin, to the Misfire Beast, to the various Bosses and mini-bosses, the roster of grunts in this game is possibly the most fun I’ve ever seen in any game. The locations I feel the same way about: from the colour-palette to the background theme song of every floor of the Gungeon, they’re extremely memorable while being simple and typical of the stuff you’ve seen before, like a castle, or a Hell.

Part of why EtG is very fun in terms of audio and visuals is because it combines a lot of influences into a very unique feeling package, that also reminds you of the stuff you’ve seen before – in a good way! Like I’ve mentioned, this game pulls from a few genres and settings: there’s a lot of sci-fi/science-fantasy with all the laser-guns, cyborgs, and space-ships; regular fantasy with all the magic, fairies, dragons and cults; western-esque shit like table-flipping and lots of cowboy imagery; pop-culture stuff with all the movie-guns, movie-references in item descriptions, and gameplay elements pulled directly from other videogames, starting with tropy stuff like lockpicking, and ending in weapons fully ripped from other videogames, like the Klobb and the Shovel.

And the genius of this game’s general tone and style is that, by unifying all of the game’s influences by a single (admiteddly goofy) theme, Enter the Gungeon manages to breathe new life into some otherwise stale references and rip-offs, and to make all parts of this game seem natural with each other, like they’re pieces of the same puzzle. I’ve never really seen this done to this extent, but somehow, by making every part of this game all about guns, or being framed as about guns, every disparate element here feels at home in this insane cocktail of inspirations. It would be dumb if in the new WWII shooter you were suddenly fighting a wizard in a mine-shaft, after which you would explode an actual Metal Gear Ray in an underground lair, concluding all this with a fight against a dragon you kill with a wooden bat, but in Enter the Gungeon, – a goofy game where everything is guns and cultists, everything goes together, because it has been put through the same “Gun” filter. This sounds dumb from the outside, but playing this game, everything just makes sense, this is just a game where anything can happen and it will all seem completely in-line with the previous stuff you’ve seen. This world feels unique, even though it totally and 100% isn’t (maybe excluding the time-travel shenanigans and how Gungeon deals with them), and that is frankly something to celebrate.

At the end of the day, I know a lot of people won’t feel about this one the way I do. No matter how hard I try, I can’t find flaws worth discussing here, but there are probably some, and the humour and style of this game may not be up everyone’s alley. Nevertheless, I can’t stress this enough – this is the best game I’ve played in all my life, and it would be hard for any game to change my mind. It’s not only masterfully done, but is effortless to enjoy, from the gameplay to the audio-visual level. A mastaPEESSSah.
















P.S.
I couldn’t figure out where to put it but the story is kinda sick, potentially. I mean it’s a story about a rag-tag crew of dumbfucks trying to literally kill their past with a magical bullet, and I guess when they do it they create like a split time-line before being plucked from it back to their shitty cursed-castle ransacking? That’s kind of awesome. I’d love to see a show or a comic with this premise someday. A shame this game couldn’t be more in-depth with the story, but that would probably make it worse, the arcadiness is one of the best parts.

I’m not a big fan of card games, if you don’t count solitaire, so it was pretty surprising how much fun I had with Slay the Spire. The thing that really amazed me is how distinct each character feels from one another, and how within each one’s deck there could be huge variety in how you play, and it provides for some fun RPG escapist fantasy. Every character has a distinct, if not simplistic archetype that is very fun to embody, which is something I can’t say about, really, any of the rogueli(t)kes I can think of that have different characters. Usually in other games of that type the classes or the characters feel more like just different starting stats & item kits, and their actual character is never expressed; they feel very interchangeable. And for what it’s worth, in Slay the Spire the roguelike part of the equation is handled pretty well. You don’t have amounts of content that can last you for hundreds of hours, but every run does feel distinct, and it’s fun to sway the RNG in your favour, trying to optimise your deck for the build you’re going for. And the ability to not just be at the whims of RNG is something I really value with roguelikes, so kudos for that.

Unfortunately, though, there are some severe problems with this game’s structure and gameplay loop. The main one that I think of every run that I do is the fact that, ultimately, for all the variety and opportunities for unique decks that this game has, you just have to forfeit most of it if you want to win. You can’t really go for crazy set-up decks, or for aggressive play styles that favour attacking more than blocking – you will HAVE to go for high-defence and cheap offence decks. If you want to kill the final boss, or just survive on higher Ascension levels, there’s one type of playstyle you’ll have to go for with every character: obscene amounts of block that you either get passively or for low energy-costs, lots of cheap and individually weak attacks that stack up a lot of damage, and maybe some bullshit passive like Ironclad’s Fire Breathing and Demon Form, with the first melting your foes for essentially free if you just add every curse card you find (which is not hard), and the second giving you an infinitely stacking damage upgrade every turn. These kinds of overpowered decks where you’re just a giant turtle that summons lightning for you are fun to run, but it sucks that there’s not some crazy set-up you can ever attempt, or some highly aggressive deck that rewards attacks as opposed to constant blocking. Because the bosses just deal too much damage, you can’t help but build your character around constant defence, which can get pretty tiring at times.

And this is another thing about Slay the Spire: it doesn’t really wow you. There’s a lot of creativity to this game’s card selection, judging from a baseline “how hard does a person try” perspective, but Slay the Spire rarely excites you to the same extent as other card-collectors I’ve played/heard about, and I can’t help but feel that that comes down to the fact that this game is a roguelike that has to juggle randomization and complex strategic gameplay inherent to deck-builders. I’m not some Hearthstone aficionado, but I can even think of several insane strategies in this game that just wipe the floor with Slay The Spire’s most exciting options. This may not be a fair critique, but it’s one I can’t help but express, given that, when you break it down, the most interesting this game gets is when you have to strategize when to stop blocking and to start dealing damage directly instead of through a passive. There are some exceptions, of course, but I wish there were more “do this crazy 9 step setup, kill everything, or commit suicide if you fuck up” kind of situations you could put yourself in.

And look, I don’t want this review to read as “StP is boring and shallow”, because I really did enjoy my time with this game and I’ll probably keep playing it for at least the next few months (after having played it for months), because there is a lot to love here. In addition to all the gameplay goodness, this game’s presentation, in my opinion, is very solid. The music seems drab at first, but it really grows on you, and all these simple orchestra pieces do a good job of setting up mood or highlighting fun gameplay scenarios. The visual style is simple with VERY limited animation, but it’s very admirable how much the devs do with so little: how every little flash symbolising a punch or a slash feels really visceral, how bosses doing little jiggles in your directions feels menacing and imposing, and how buffs feel empowering JUST from very good effects accompanied by great sound design. And I have to commend this game for not only creating (or popularzining??) a whole subgenre, but for still having more charm and being more enjoyable than most of the games inspired by it. Not to mention that for all the comparisons you can make between this game and traditional deck builders, be it digital or physical, this game has more personality than any Magic the Gathering rip-off that came out in the last 10 years.

So yeah overall I hate this game

Talking about a game in a genre you're not familiar with is hard, but, if anything, this was a nice introduction to ARPGs. The build variety is kinda lacking, with every class being kind of a different side of the same fundamental playstyle, but they all play fun enough. The story is weird, because the plot on paper is kinda awesome, and becoming Vladimir Lenin Da Monsterhunter halfway through was pretty fun, and it was handeled pretty well, but the characters are each and all boring fucks whose names and voices escape your memory at surpising speeds. The world is kinda sick if not unoriginal. I liked the spirit companion idea and it does give you a lot of interesting gameplay opportunities. Also the funny thing in this one is that the challenge is non-existant because you can literally buy your way out of death, and money is very easy to come by.

In conclusion: kinda goofy but also fun

(16.02.22., Early Access)

Blood West, even in the state that it's in right now, is very charming, and there is fun to be had with it's wanky stealth and corny-yet-creepy enemies, big and empty (in a good way) areas, and pretty fun-to-use weapons. But it is severely incomplete right now, and while it can captivate pretty easily, it's not the best at keeping you coming back at the moment. In other words: when I booted this one up for the first time, I played 3 hours straight without even noticing, which is a lot for me, but then couldn't bare coming back to it and stealthing around for resourses and quest items. I hope that they iron out some of the pacing issues, because as fun as it is to travel a long way from the "hub" to the next interesting area, encountering enemies and detour opportuinites along the way, it's not that fun to then journey the same way back every time and not have any opportunity to fast travel to where you've already explored, because Blood West is fun when you're seeing new things or going through new locals, but redoing anything is not enjoyable at all.

Other than that, the special ammo mechanic is very lacking in meaningful decisions for the player, just as the artefacts. Special ammo is pretty scarce and it's not as exciting as it could've been - the Gold variants are just stronger, but not to a degree that feels good, and the anti-spirit ammo feels pointless concidering how little spirits you encounter in any area, and how little difference the special ammo makes. The artefacts kinda suffer the same problem - the effects are just really flacid. In general, it's kinda what can be said about a lot of elements of this game at this point, but these are just the things that stuck out the most to me. Overall, I have high hopes for this one, though I'm not holding my breath.

I don't have much to say about this game other than that I was surprised at how demonized it is now that I've actually played it. Sure, it doesn't have an ounce of horror to it (aside maybe from the fish boys in the sewer), and it's probably terrible as a remake, but I think the shift to action from REmake 2 was pulled off well, and REmake 3 honestly is a better game that REmake 2 in terms of anything that isn't horror or exploration. I really liked the dodge and the punch, - it feels great to pull them off, and the difficulty with doing so seems fair. I also really liked the story, which does a much better job of being a fun and campy RE plot with a lot of human drama and relatable characters to meet. Jill is a super fun protagonist to play as, and Carlos is da best boy. The bossfights are incredible (especially compared to the single allright-ish bossfight of REmake 2), again, doing a good job of balancing different tones, with Nemesis being both a dumb JRPG monster that does laps around you like a werewolf or grows into a tentacle monster or some shit, and feeling genuinely kinda scary. The balancing in 3 is also super neat: on the harder difficulties you won't be "running out of ammo" nessessarily, but you're still encouraged to stand in place and not waste any shots, especially when you get to the Hunters or when Dogs start swarming you. Also, there are a lot of QOF improvements with things like UI, shot feedback, item pickups, etc.

This game probably is kinda rushed, which is why it's not everything REmake 2 was and more, - which it totally could've been, even if they wanted to make it a nice little 90s blockbuster, but since I've never played the original RE3 and have played way too much of the RE2's remake, I'm happy with this game the way it is. And to mirror my sentiments after replaying that, I feel more and more like if they do plan on doing a RE4 remake, it has a pretty good chance of turning out good, or even great. Capcom, of course, is a chaos-fueled kabal of Jarred Leto's Jokers, so you never know, huh

Wow who knew that horror-focused RE titles can be good haha

Anyways, this game is amazing in almost every way. The exploration is fun and simple due to QOL improvements like the map showing which areas are fully empty and where all the items are, what doors are opened with which keyes, which key items can be thrown away after you’ve used them up, etc; the gameplay forces you to make a ton of meaningful decisions and think ahead, and the combat is super simple but incredibly visceral; the story is one of the most involved and emotional in the entire series, and the game manages to feel extremely grounded and realistic even with all the Resident “every non-zombie is a giant plant or animal” Evil shenanigans. In general, the horror-iness here is just right, with the game not trying to make you scared for your life, but throwing you into a pit with a bunch of monsters you can barely fight and daring you to overcome it.

The game is clearly underdeveloped, and mayhaps there was more attention given to the graphics and all the “pushing the falling corpse away” animations than was necessary, which could’ve been given to polishing out the continuity between 1st and 2nd runs, but RE2 Remake is a fantastic game, and one of the best I’ve ever played.




P.S.
When the Remake of 4 comes out it’s going to be even weirder how Leon looks nothing like himself in-between different games. But I guess it’s kinda RE tradition at this point

There are plenty of things you can say about good and bad parts of Dishonored 2: how the artstyle is cool and well-realized, but the glitches are plenty; how the levels are well-built and feel open-ended, but are oftentimes pretty linear; how the world is interesting and feels unique, but the story is super idealist and the characters are mostly boring and/or feel like caricatures.

But at the end of the day, this is just a game I find hard not to love, particularly because of how immersive it is. Especially in #2, with you having a voiced protagonist (FINALLY), it’s very easy to get sucked into this world and believe the fantasy it presents you of being a supernatural assassin. Unlike Dunwall, this game’s main region, Karnaka, is not ravaged by an uber-deadly plague, making most levels empty and desolate, but is suffering from poverty, gang- and state-violence, and thus is allows you to observe it’s denizens’ lives more closely, getting to know them and their struggles. And the world reacts pretty believably to your actions, both scripted and unscripted, which makes just engaging with the game’s systems a lot of fun.

I also really liked exploring these levels. They are huge with a lot of stuff to find, sub-missions to complete, stories to experience or to read about, safes to rob, etc, and I liked how, once again, alive they felt. I also loved how vertical they were, and how you can pretty much crawl into every other house to both loot them for all their shekels, and to find new ways around. They can feel bloated sometimes, which is not helped by your powers list being way too long, with a couple of powers being really fun and useful, and the other, like, 4 being both too expensive to invest in, and too overpowered to not feel shame using. This is especially the case with Emily, which sucks, because while I didn’t really like her writing or performance, she is leagues better than Korvo both in terms of gameplay and voice-acting. And for both of them, the best way to build your character is just to invest a shit-ton into bonecharms and give yourself the ability to go supersonic if you’re crouching and carrying a body at the same time or some shit.

I am more critical of Dishonored 2 than I ever was before, but what didn’t change with the latest 1-and-a-half playthroughs is that this is still one of the best games I’ve ever played from a level-design and gameplay perspectives, and it’s still one of my all-time favourites. So fun!


P.S.
Tbh one other point Emily gets over Corvo is that I think I might have some sort of female hands fetish, so yeah. Great character

RE4 is not perfect, despite what you might think after talking to it's fans or your initial impressions after beating it. If nothing else, after this latest playthrough I am more open to the idea of a remake of this game than ever before, as there are millions of small things, and a couple of big ones, that can be fixed or changed with RE4. I especially kinda hated the bosses, most are really annoying and give you all the reasons in the world to just skip them via a Rocket Launcher on your reruns. But aside from that - this game is almost flawless, and is one of the most fun action games I'll ever play in my life. It's enemies are so memorable, it's levels are fun to run through, it's progressions system is super addictive, and it's story is absolute trash that I love.

Exodus was no joke one of the best open world games I've ever played, but as time went on, it became more and more closed-in, eventually culminating in a final level that is just like half the levels in 2033 and Last Light, but now feeling worse because of how amazing the rest of the game was. By that point, I couldn't muster any strenght to beat it, and after I've looked up the ending and my annoyances with the game have piled up, it was a death by a thousand paper-cuts situation. 4AGames are one of the most insanely passionate developers on Earth rn, and I respect their craft immensley, but Exodus ultimately fails to completely escape the shadow of the previous games in the series. A lot of problems of those games haven't really been fixed, but new great stuff was added, instead. And that's cool, but I just hope that their next game finds a way to break the mold completely and not be a half-step Exodus ended up becoming.