I had a great time with the first 3/4ths of this game. There's a nice sense of exploration, and though there's obviously some padding with a game of this type/size, it didn't feel barren or monotonous like many others (looking at you, Breath of the Wild). There's a good balance between the open world environments and the "dungeons" that feel like regular Souls levels.

Unfortunately, after Morgott, the game tanks hard. Pouring one out for my fellow Strength builders, because they decided to make subsequent bosses straight out of Sekiro, and actively hostile to anyone who isn't a fast weapon iframe master. Bosses healing on hits, or stacking dots on you even when blocked? Now that's some garbage.

Then, finally, you get to the last boss. It's alright! And then you get to the second phase, which is maybe the single worst boss in any Souls game. After about 5 hours I finally won because it glitched out and stopped moving. An appropriately anticlimactic ending to a game I enjoyed once upon a time.

The newest Kirby takes a lot of inspiration from Super Mario 3D World, which is definitely a good thing. It's a pleasant, though mind-numbingly easy, trek through a variety of worlds with fantastic art direction. The optional objectives are a neat way to increase replay value, and there's a good amount of secrets to find in each level. I would have liked more Copy abilities, in particular I miss the Fighter ability, but the various Mouthful Modes make up for it.

On a technical level, it's a mess, with a low resolution, zero anti-aliasing, and transparencies that are dithered like it's a PS1 game. The framerate can be unstable in some areas too, but I found it mostly solid. It's a Switch game, though, so all of this is to be expected.

And, by the way, this game does follow in the grand tradition of Kirby games having bizarre, dark ending sequences. This time, it's equal parts Resident Evil, Oddworld, Bloodborne, and Devil May Cry. And that's AFTER the world that looks like Hell on Earth from Doom Eternal.

Recommended.

I have not played GTA V since its original release on PS3, so I was prepared for disappointment when revisiting it. Instead, I think I liked it even more than I did then.

Of course, a large part of this is because of what's come since: Red Dead Redemption 2 is so laboriously paced, its devotion to "realism" at the expense of gameplay fresh in my mind, that it makes returning to a Video Game-Ass Video Game a pleasure. Sure, you can hold all the guns you want. Need to be on the other side of the map? You can drive there in a few minutes, or take a taxi to get there instantly.

The quicker pacing is also evident in the story. GTAV, unlike other GTA's, doesn't really take many detours from the main story. Apart from Franklin and Trevor's introductions, almost everything here is in service of the FIB/Big Heist/Devin storyline.

And, hey, it looks pretty good and runs well. Not too surprising given the original game's age, but it was a technical miracle at the time. They didn't have to do too much other than upping the resolution and adding RT shadows.

At the moment, it's $10 on PS5 even if you never bought it digitally before. I'd recommend revisiting it if you haven't played it in a while, and definitely checking it out if you haven't played it at all. There will probably never be another Rockstar game like it.

I love everything about Ghostwire: Tokyo, except for actually playing it.

The game has massive Vibes, and feels almost like a first-person action spinoff of Shin Megami Tensei. The blend of supernatural elements and technology is interesting (transferring spirits via payphone devices is very SMT), and the art design is top-notch. The story is good enough, following a guy who is brought back from death by a spirit that co-inhabits his body. There's nothing incredible there, but the banter between the two can be entertaining.

It's unfortunate, then, that everything else doesn't live up to the game's style. The combat, where you launch various projectiles via hand-signs, looks pretty, but has no sense of impact. Your default "rapid-fire" attack, Air, particularly feels like an ineffective peashooter. Water is far more useful, being the equivalent of a shotgun, and Fire is your "rocket launcher". They can all be upgraded, but that's another issue...

See, almost every upgrade only exists to make the game feel slightly less sluggish. Normally, when you damage enemies enough, you can rip their cores out to finish them. You don't actually have to, but it gives you some ammo back. Kind of like a Glory Kill from DOOM or something. The problem is that enemies can interrupt this animation. So the game's solution? Give you a bunch of upgrades that make it faster. Or give you other core-ripping abilities that can't be interrupted. My solution? Just stop doing it and hit them a couple more times to kill them.

Other upgrades are similar: higher rate of fire. Slightly wider splash damage radius. It's all very incremental and feels like a waste of time. That's appropriate, though, because most of this game feels like a waste of time. If it had simply been a straight-ahead, linear first-person action game, the combat's flaws could be more easily overlooked. However, because More Hours = Better Than, the fine folks at Tango Gameworks (or, speculating, their parent company Bethesda) decided this should be an open world game with copy-pasted sidequests and, uh... 250,000 spirits scattered around the map to absorb.

Yeah. 250,000. Sure, those are in bundles of, like, 100-300 at a time, but holy cow, that's still a LOT of things to absorb!

And then, if all that wasn't bad enough, there are segments of the game where you're separated from your Ghost Man, so you have none of your shitty little magics, and instead have to rely on the Very Good™ stealth.

I liked talking to the Tanuki. They were cool.

Remaking RE4 was always a pretty strange proposition. Unlike 2 and 3, 4 was already in the same general over-the-shoulder style of game as the 2 and 3 remakes. Sure, you couldn't move while aiming, and the aiming and movement were pretty clunky (I've been told this is "part of the charm") but it's still in the same wheelhouse.

So what, exactly, do you do with a remake? Other than the moving-while-shooting thing, that is. It turns out the answer is mostly "make it look better".

RE4R has, I'd estimate, about a 70/30 identical/new ratio. Nearly all of the Iconic rooms and setpieces are almost entirely untouched, but most of the connective tissue between them is new. That fucking water hallway? Still here. The hedge maze with the dogs? Oh, you know it's still here! It makes the few parts that were significantly changed really stand out, but I won't mention those here for spoiler reasons. I will say that, thank god, the Truck Drivin' Ashley segment is gone, replaced by something way funnier.

And if you're worried that the campy tone would be lost, have no fear: it's almost as stupid as the original. No, Leon doesn't say "your right hand comes off?" anymore, but he still mentions bingo and has a very funny repeated line whenever the Las Plagas pop out. Which happens a LOT, by the way. I feel like it was much more common than in the original, it seemed like half the enemies turned into Twisties.

Enemies are much more aggressive, as you'd expect. In the original, to compensate for your wonky movement and squirrelly aiming, they would spend about half the time pointing at you like Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and slowly creeping forward. This time, they know you have controls that work, so they're coming for your ass. It makes the big fights feel so much more hectic and dynamic.

Apart from the game's general pacing issues, not really alleviated due to its fairly strict adherence to the original, most of its flaws are small annoyances. The crafting system sucks, for example, because the only things worth making are shotgun shells, magnum ammo, and flash nades. Those require more gunpowder, plus a "Resource™" (either Small or Large). This means you'll often be out of gunpowder but with lots of "Resources™" left in your inventory. And you can't put those into storage, you can only store weapons. Sure.

I'm not a huge fan of the original RE4, but I consider this pretty much a straight upgrade, just like the recent Dead Space remake. There's not much reason to go back to the original outside of curiosity or wanting to enjoy the more... "outré" camp factor.

I do wish the remake still had the stomping Little Lord Boy statue.

The decade-later third game in the Zeno Clash series, Clash is a fairly significant departure. Rather than a linear first-person brawler, it's now a (mostly) third-person action-RPG. Hand-to-hand combat is still the core of the gameplay, but exploration is key.

You play as Pseudo, aka The Hermit, a guy living in the freaked-out world of Zenozoik who happens across The Boy, a little bird fella with special powers, orphaned when his grandfather dies. As is standard for this sort of Lone Wolf and Cub riff, the Empress wants the Boy's power for herself, and so pretty much everyone you encounter wants to fight you.

The story, though basic and somewhat derivative, is told well, and Pseudo and The Boy's performances are especially great. This game also gives you far more backstory on the world than either of the first two games did, and I could understand if fans of the series don't like it. In a way, it removes a bit of the mystery of Zenozoik, but it made me more interested to see what the future might have in store, especially considering the ending.

The vibes, by the way, are immaculate. This is the most Nier-ass game I've played since, uhhhh, Nier: Automata. Specifically, if you like Nier 1, I think you'll get a lot out of Clash.

Some have described this as a souls-like, and I don't think that's accurate. There are similarities, but if you go into it expecting that, you'll probably be disappointed. To get into the nitty-gritty of the gameplay, you pick from one of three combat stances at the beginning. You can unlock more through totems you find in the world, and you unlock special moves via the same method. You can have 3 special moves mapped at once.

You gain XP through fights, which levels you up and gives you skill points to put into your core attributes. You also collect figurines in the environment that are sorta like weapon upgrade materials, as they're used to power up your stances and specials. Because of their limited availability, you're best off picking a core loadout and sticking with it instead of spreading points around, as there is no respec function.

The game also has a day/night system. Not in realtime, but more like a LTTP-style Dark World phase, where Pseudo can go to sleep and "dreamwalk" in a strange Groot form. At night, the enemies change, you can access areas unavailable when awake, new items will be available, and the Night Avatar form can be customized with different body parts you find while asleep. If you die during normal gameplay, you also respawn in this form to do a corpse run, but if you die again, it's back to a checkpoint.

One interesting, though under-utilized, twist on the gameplay is the Ritual. The people of this world only abide by the One Law, which is that if you're challenged to a weird little dice game, you have to play. You can challenge any hostile, intelligent being you come across, and then whoever wins gets to impose a certain stipulation on the fight, chosen via one of the titular Artifacts. For example, being forced to drink a slow-acting poison, or being allowed to summon an ally, or, my favorite, getting one free hit at the beginning with a giant stick like Bart smashing Homer with a chair.

The issue with this is that there's not really much of an incentive to do it. The complications usually don't make a huge difference, and after a few hours I started just walking up to enemies and punching them.

Lastly, I'll say that the game is still a bit buggy as of this writing. Playing on Xbox Series X, the optimization isn't quite where it needs to be. It's mostly fine, but some areas in particular bog the framerate down to the mid-40s for no apparent reason and it feels pretty bad. A couple of other bugs I encountered:

- UI elements getting stuck (weapon info panels still on screen when moving between tabs at a trader, etc)
- random fade out/ins, almost like it's loading something. These are very quick, maybe a second, but it would occasionally happen during combat. No idea what's happening here

To their credit, the developers have been very good about fixing the game's bugs already. They're super responsive on the Steam forums and whatnot, and actively patching it. I would bet in a couple of months everything will be ironed out.

Even as it stands now, despite some minor annoyances, I loved this game. I'll check back later this year, and if the issues have been fixed, revise this to a 9.

UPDATE: As of December, most issues I had have been fixed, and the developers have also added NG+ and various other features. Performance can still be spotty in some areas on console, but regardless: Revising score to 9/10.

Vanillaware's first game released in the US, coming out only a month before Odin Sphere, GrimGrimoire has a pretty interesting premise: an RTS, on a console, played from a sidescrolling perspective instead of the usual top-down.

Do these ideas work? Not really!

Using a controller for an RTS is already a pretty hairy prospect, but the perspective makes it even worse, as units often overlap with each other. This means the best strategy is often "select everyone, move them to enemy". This is exacerbated by the skill trees new to this version, where you get coins to power up certain unit types. It ends up creating a feedback loop where you just keep using the same types because they're what you've put points into.

There's supposed to be a rock-paper-scissors type dynamic between the schools of magic (Glamour [Nature] -> Necromancy [Ghosts] -> Sorcery [Demons] -> Alchemy [Golems]) but I cruised through the game by simply sticking to Glamour, which you start with. Depending on the level, either amassing huge amounts of leveled-up Fairies (sending them in groups of 10 or so to avoid getting wiped out by AOEs) or Morning Stars (bigger units with AOE blasts themselves) would win every time. I'm not 100% sure, but I think the difficulty was lowered in this version because I remember the original being balls-hard.

While the skill tree kinda sucks, a welcome new feature for this remaster is the fast-forward function. By default, the game is SLOW, probably to accommodate the awkward controls and micro-management, and the fast-forward makes the gameplay much more tolerable.

The story is kinda... Whatever. It's a time-loop scenario about a girl at a wizard school. Most characters are underdeveloped and the plot made very little sense to me. At the end I was left scratching my head wondering what the hell happened, as it gave me an Animal House-style "and here's what happened to the other characters~!" montage.

Of course, as is always the case with Vanillaware, the art is top-notch. Character and unit designs are excellent across the board. Some of them are very cool (the Golems and Chimera are incredible) and some of them are very funny (the demon turrets are succubi that wiggle their giant asses), but the art is probably the main reason to play this game.

Of course, if you want good art with a good game to go with it... Maybe just check out Odin Sphere.

Sometimes it's best to simply continue enjoying your good memories of games from your childhood. They can remain there in their idealized form, never tainted by being experienced by an adult with a (mostly) fully-functioning brain and sense of taste. This is why Goldeneye is so popular.

Stubbs the Zombie is a game with an interesting premise. You play as a zombie in a retro-futurist 1950s "City of Tomorrow", amassing a zombie army and trying to make your way to a lady with huge jugs that you saw on TV. I can relate to this. Unfortunately, that premise is under-utilized to an almost shocking degree.

The first project from Wideload Games, a studio made up of former Bungie developers (including Bungie's co-founder!), Stubbs was also made on the Halo engine. This was important enough to be noted on the game's cover, but in practice, it only serves to explain why there are huge, mostly empty levels, terrible vehicle segments, and an incredibly inconsistent checkpointing system.

From the concept, you would expect this to be like some sort of gorefest Pikmin, turning hapless citizens into zombies that do your bidding. There are attempts at that sort of thing, as you can whistle to your zombies to make them come to you, or shove them to make them move in a specific direction, but that's as far as it goes. Later on, they'll die before they can do any significant damage to enemies, and mostly act as distractions for you. Which is important, because your combat skills are severely lacking.

Before you can chomp down on some cerebral chili con carne, you have to stun the humans. Most of the time, you do this with a standard 3 hit combo. It feels like crap, and you can also get critical hits that knock their heads off, depriving you of a minion. If you hit them while they're stunned, they'll die and still turn into a zombie, but you won't get health back. Not that it matters, I guess, because you can still be shot while you're in the brain-eating animation.

You have other abilities. They're mostly useless. The one you want is the gut-grenade, especially because sometimes enemies will be in high places you can't reach, or flying around on jetpacks. If you don't have grenades saved up, haha, good luck. You also have an explosive gas that stuns enemies as long as they're within about 10 inches of you, a bowling ball head move that leaves your body vulnerable, and the ability to possess humans via your detached hand. This is occasionally useful, but again causes the problem of leaving a bunch of non-zombified corpses around.

Really, the biggest problem with the game is, perhaps ironically, how lifeless it all is. You get a few cutscenes that are... Attempting humor. That's about it. The interesting setting is almost entirely ignored, as you spend half of the game roaming around farms, laboratories, dams, etc. As mentioned earlier, these levels are often huge, sometimes maze-like, and always barren. Oh, and despite the incredible soundtrack featuring some of the most popular indie bands of the time doing kickass covers of old-timey classics, there's pretty much no music in the actual game. You hear about 30 seconds from a few of the songs during one boss battle, and that's it. Those songs never appear anywhere in the game. You're mostly listening to silence with the same few repeated voice lines and screams for the entire duration.

[Edit: This is partly a result of the current port being clumsily slapped together. There were a couple of instances in the original game where the music appeared during gameplay, but even then, it was very rare. It's not a licensing issue, because they're still present during that boss battle, it's a programming issue.]

After this game, Wideload would make Hail to the Chimp, a very poorly-timed presidential party game (it was released for the 2008 election...) And then they made some Disney shovelware before being unceremoniously shuttered.

It's odd that this came out the same year as Destroy All Humans, because they're almost companion pieces, both in subject matter and tone. DAH was undoubtedly more successful in every respect, despite spawning several low-quality sequels, and I would recommend checking out the Re-Probed remake. Do not bother with Stubbs. Let him rest in the ground where he belongs.

[Note: I gave this an extra half-star simply for causing the soundtrack to exist]

Arkane is washed. Deathloop was a bad, watered-down "Dishonored's Greatest Hits" with an irritating structure, but this is even worse. There is no Arkane DNA anywhere to be found here, only an awful looter-shooter that occasionally lets you enter buildings through the back door OR the front.

You know what's good about Arkane games? Fuckin' NOT THE SHOOTING! And that's all there is here. Harvey Smith's first stinker. An historic occasion, much like the Hindenburg disaster. I'm so angry.

Normally I would give this 1 or 1 1/2 stars, but coming from Arkane, I have to go Scorched Earth. I'm sowing salt in their fields so this can never happen again.

I wasn't a fan of Fallen Order, but I really enjoyed Jedi Survivor. It's still largely the same: a search action game with very minor soulslike elements, but almost every aspect has been improved. Instead of a scattering of small planets, you have two major ones with a couple of smaller areas. And, thank christ, they have fast travel between save points now.

Over the course of the game you also get even more traversal options, which was the most fun part of the game for me. By the end you're grappling, air-dashing, and wall-running all over the place. Combat is mostly the same, but with two new styles: a slower, more powerful stance that gives your saber the dumbass little vents on the sides, and a saber/blaster stance, sorta like in Ryu Ga Gotoku Ishin. However, for some reason, you can only equip two stances at a time, so you pretty much just want a stronger one for bigger targets and a faster one for large groups. There isn't a whole lot of difference between most of them.

I had a better time with the combat in this than I did in the first game, but I also made the mistake of playing the first game on hard. It made the already sloppy, weightless combat feel even worse, as enemies could take a whole lot of hits from a damn light saber. I played this one on normal, and at least most "regular" enemies will die from one hit, which feels... accurate. The Jedi cut through these guys like butter.

The story is another strong suit. I would say the characters are the main area in which this series excels. They're better Star Wars "movies" than anything since Empire Strikes Back, with the exceptions of KOTOR and Andor. Greez is good and my best friend and also my space dad.

Another plus is that Cal has a variety of sick outfits this time. I hated the stupid-ass poncho in the first game, and the developers seem to be aware that nobody liked it. There was One decent outfit in Fallen Order, and it's the one used in flashbacks here. Characters also joke about Cal's stinky old fuckin ponchos pretty frequently.

So, I would say this is a solid 4/5 game, b--

hold on, the review crashed. I have to restart it. Oh, wait, now it's stuck. Restarting again...

Alright, look. I'm not saying EA are technically "Criminally negligent" in allowing this game to ship in its current state, and I'm also not saying it's "actually fraudulent" to charge 70 dollars for a game that's, at best, an early beta build. But one certainly could come to those conclusions! My total count of Things That Required A Restart are as follows:

- 6 hard crashes to the dashboard.
- 1 freeze.
- 3 softlocks: twice, the game would not allow me to force push an item that I needed to push to progress, and in another instance it would not let me use BD's electro-dart ability to raise a platform. Nothing would enable it, not even fast traveling to another point and back.
- 2 memory leaks, degrading performance to the single digits. One of these ended in a hard crash.

As weird as it is to say, these crashes might not be a huge deal in most games. You know, games that autosave all the time? But, in their strange dedication to providing surface-level Souls elements, this game only saves when you rest at a meditation point. So if you're running around finding collectibles, make sure to rest as often as possible so you don't lose an hour of progress. I did.

And about the performance... hoo boy. It seems to be bad all around, and PS5 is probably the most stable version out there. I played on the 30fps mode, because the "60" one is more like "somewhere from 30-48" and it was usually fairly consistent, but also a low-res mess. The entire game was blurry, with weird trails following most characters, especially near foliage and reflective surfaces. I don't know enough about underlying tech to say exactly what causes this, but it looked awful. The game was frequently running at what appeared to be 720p or lower, causing me to miss collectibles that I passed by because they simply blended into the rest of the visual soup.

I would say that I recommend this game when these issues are fixed. I WOULD say that, but I won't, because many of the first game's bugs were never fixed. At best, I hope the PS6 or PS5 Pro version can brute force it into running a bit better, like the PS5 version of Fallen Order did.

There's a great game in here. It's a shame that Respawn keeps releasing broken products.

A spinoff of the excellent point-and-click adventure/90s internet simulator Hypnospace Outlaw, Slayers X is, in kayfabe, a game made by a character from that game. Zane, an edgelord teenager working through some issues via violent webcomics and online bullying, started working on his own first-person shooter back in 1996. Now, in 2023, an older and not-much-wiser Zane has finished it and released it for the world to play.

If you haven't played Hypnospace, I'm not sure you'll get much out of this. It's more of a curiosity and stopgap until the actual Hypnospace sequel, Dreamsettler, comes out. For as fascinating as many of the mechanics in Hypnospace were, this is really just a bog-standard boomer shooter. There's one gameplay mechanic I thought was interesting: your shotgun is a gun that launches shards of broken glass. There are no ammo pickups for it, instead you get those "sharts" from breaking windows. It's kinda neat!

The only other attempt at a unique game mechanic is the Hackblood Power. When it's full, your melee weapon gets some Zelda-style shockwaves for a few swings. They do not do enough damage to make them worth switching to. You also, a few levels in, get a talisman that lets you shoot a projectile or a beam, powered by the Hackblood. This would be cool, but it's accompanied by an insane difficulty spike, and getting hurt also decreases your Hackblood Power... For some reason. Oh, and you get that ability in a level where they strip you of your other weapons, so it's likely that you'll be running around waiting for your power to recharge pretty often. Not fun!

Level design is fine. There are some funny and interesting secrets in the levels, but by the end I was ready for it to be over. It's not a long game, but the humor is the same sort of thing throughout. The extra maps that you can get to after completing the post-game were pretty cool, and good examples of the sort of thing a person like Zane would have been making as Doom wads (an uncle's house, a maze that only looks like something if you zoom out, and an attempt at modeling the entirety of Boise, Idaho).

Worth playing to BWL at the various easter eggs, but nowhere near as good as DUSK, Postal: Brain Damaged, Prodeus, etc. This reminds me, I need to play Boltgun...

Bless Teyon for making the sort of competent, 7/10 licensed game that we just don't get anymore.

I'll also give them credit for being ambitious with this. It would have been much easier to make Terminator: Resistance a standard COD-style shooter, but what's on offer here is more akin to the Metro games. There's a large focus on stealth (at least at first), skill points, lockpicking, hacking, crafting, large open areas with side objectives, etc. You have dialogue options and "trust levels" with NPCs, and "multiple endings" (basically the same "this happened to this person" screens as in Fallout 3). It almost approaches immersive sim territory at times, and the effort is admirable.

Apparently, when this came out originally, it was also kinda busted, but I didn't have any issues on PS5 except for trophies not unlocking after putting the PS5 in Rest Mode. Silly me, I forgot Rest Mode is the devil's work and should never be used. Thankfully, the game, despite not having a standard level select, does automatically make separate saves for each level so you can go back that way.

Does this game have problems? Sure. Once you get plasma weapons, there's no reason to ever use ballistic weapons again, apart from the shotgun (which is already the only gun worth using before you get plasma) for non-Terminator enemies. The AI is, ironically, pretty terrible, and throwing grenades is a liability because they'll often bounce off of invisible walls in front of you, leading to a Looney Tunes-ass scramble to get away before it explodes.

New in this Enhanced version is the Infiltrator Mode, a sorta roguelike diversion where you play as a Terminator. It takes place on the Pasadena map, and feels like a dry run for their upcoming Robocop game. You go around the map collecting intel, which marks resistance outposts and weapon caches on your map, which give you intel, and so on, until you find where the commander is and finish. It's about 45 minutes if you thoroughly search the map, and it's a pretty cool little proof of concept.

I'm looking forward to RoboCop: Rogue City, these fellas have moxie.

In some ways an improvement on BOTW, because at least the Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts ripoff mechanics are interesting. On the other hand, engaging with them (or anything for that matter) is made as tedious and convoluted as possible. The controls in this game were made by an insane person, and just because you can eventually Stockholm yourself into making them work, that doesn't make them any less obtuse. Building would be fun if you had an actual Nuts and Bolts or Kerbal style editor, instead of being forced to awkwardly float everything around and stick it together manually.

Anyway, this is more map icon vomit slop, indistinguishable from any random Ubisoft game. Run across vast featureless fields until you fight yet another identical rock monster that will give you 20 rupees for the 40 bombs it took to kill it. Sometimes there's a Korok. Hooray.

Good for kids with nothing but free time or adults who only buy one or two games a year.

One of the best racial profiling simulators on the market.

Alright, so, in this game you play as an insurance investigator figuring out what the Hell happened on a ship full of crazy ass white boys. Your task is to identify the crew members and log their fates, by using a magic pocket watch on corpses that shows you their moment of death. You hear audio from the scene, and then can freely move around a still diorama of the events. Within those memories, you can continue this process to keep working your way backwards and uncover more of the mystery.

The game is one giant Professor Layton puzzle, where you deduce characters' identities by learning about their relationships to each other. Or, like me, you can say "this guy looks Russian" and put down a Russian name and see if it works. To be fair, the game only validates entries in sets of threes, specifically to eliminate total guesswork, but it also tells you that you'll have to guess for some of them. So I dunno.

The main problems I had, and the only points where I had to cheat and look for the answers, were with the game being strangely specific with the cause of death that it expected. The last time one guy is seen, he's dangling on the rigging, so I put "fell from rigging". That's a specific CoD available in the journal. INCORRECT!!! The game wants "fell overboard" and in fact there was nobody who even used the "fell from rigging" option! C'mon, man!

Alright, this game was literally made by one person. So I can cut it a little slack, because otherwise this would be a 2.5 star review, but I got a lot of issues with Obra Dinn, and now you're gonna hear about it!

- First, and this is the biggest one: navigating to specific memories is really annoying. You have a book that already shows you every one, including transcripts and an image from them, but you can't just go into them from there. You have to trudge your ass around the ship, find the specific body that leads to it, and then go in. And then exit again through a ghost-door. This alone makes the game far more tedious than it should have been, because there are a ton of clues that you can only find by exploring the memories thoroughly.

- Second, every time you enter a memory, you have to wait around until it lets you move on and do anything. It's like a minute or two, and in larger scenes, it'll probably happen before you're done exploring, but there are plenty of scenes where it's just One Guy Shot Another Guy and there isn't much to see so you have to stand around waiting until it'll fill in the journal page and let you select a cause of death. Related:

- Third, the game does not let you enter a cause of death until the game determines you've seen it happen. The game is very stupid about this, because there are multiple cases where you see the death happen, but you can't actually log it until a later scene. This infuriated me. I saw the damn guy get crushed by barrels, let me enter it, you hack fraud!!!

Anyway, all of these aspects made me stop playing it when it originally came out. Now that I went back to finish it... I don't feel much differently about it. I was, however, amused by the True Ending, which provides no revelation of any sort unless you're a complete dumbass who somehow reached that point without putting together the basic plot.

6/10