Pros:
- The pixel art’s exceptional and the synth soundtrack gives it a very atmospheric sci-fi vibe that glued me to finish in one sitting
- Well written, the tone’s somber but also weird, and the dialogue’s surprisingly entertaining with its humor
- There’s technically a combat system? It’s minor but does add some welcome variety to the gameplay

Cons:
- The ending’s kinda abrupt
- A bit cumbersome with a controller since it’s like an old school point and click game and the cursor moves pretty slowly
- More a nitpick, but there are small sections where you control an annoying boat that I could’ve done without

Pros:
- Like the rest of Key’s VNs, the music’s lovely and easily the most noteworthy thing about it. Plenty of great and nostalgic sounding piano and vocal tracks
- The baseball and fighting minigames were cute (if repetitive)

Cons:
- Apart from the last route Refrain (of which I was still underwhelmed honestly), this wasn’t for me. It’s a largely mundane slice of life VN that felt like a slog to get through and rarely had any of its humor land. Wasn’t affected much by its more emotional moments either cause it was just hard to care about by the end
- I found Riki to be a dull character and thought his drawn out dialogue was very boring to follow. And the rest of the cast try to be endearing but I just thought they were obnoxious
- Didn’t like the romance portions of the heroine routes at all

Pros:
- Excellent presentation and art style reminiscent of the manuscript illustrations of the 16th century
- It's a bit difficult to discuss the story without mentioning specifics, but it's interesting. Initially Pentiment sells itself as a murder mystery, but really it's more focused on the village of Tassing and how the events that take place and your decisions gradually affect the people who live there over a 25 year timespan. More than anything, it succeeds in being as authentic to the time period as possible through its setting and characters
- General dialogue is very well written, and has a unique way of presenting itself with the use of different text fonts that represent how Andreas perceives the social status of the characters

Cons:
- While I liked the direction the story goes, I have mixed feelings on the pacing. In general it's a very slow burn, but this is particularly so in its third act which compared to the first two felt like a drawn out epilogue that was hours lengthier than it needed to be. I also wouldn't really say I was satisfied with how the mystery wraps up either
- Exploring the town is pretty dull, Andreas is clunky to control and every area is separated with a book flip load animation that, while cool at first, wears thin very quickly. You'll also be walking through the same few areas for the entire game which got exhausting by the end
- I can't say I was into the way the gameplay was structured. Deciding how you spend your limited time between the characters was cool on paper, but this was only prevalent in Act 1 with the next two being more linear. And even despite that, you only have very limited time to speak to characters because two events of the day are spent sitting down and eating with someone. This became annoying when I was trying to uncover evidence close to the deadline but I couldn't pursue it cause other events weren't open during these times
- I know this was a relatively small project for Obsidian, but I wish Microsoft invested more into it as a first party title. It would've greatly benefited from voice acting, and while I usually don't mind that there aren't any voices for a text heavy game like this, there's also very little music to make up for it. Most of the game is just ambient noise and silence as you read through its dense dialogue, which made it feel like it was missing something to me

Serving as a direct sequel, God of War Ragnarök carries over much of the same appeal as its predecessor, only now it’s grander in scope as it widens the Norse mythos and builds toward a climatic finish for the saga. Rather than the relatively personal story of Kratos and Atreus journeying to spread Faye’s ashes, Ragnarök sets focus on prophecy and fate as Kratos and Atreus try to understand their role in combating the Aesir gods and Ragnarök, widening the cast of characters and opening up all the Realms with plenty more to uncover.

What stands out the most about Ragnarök is how lavishly presented it is. Cutscene direction is still exceptional with the “one shot camera” never breaking away from the start, and the way it follows the chaotic action and battles through the game was pretty spectacular. In general it looks amazing, from the textures on the character models to the gorgeous environments of the Realms, there was rarely a point where I wasn’t impressed by it visually.

Ragnarök mostly plays similarly to 2018, though they improved on small things that I appreciated. There’s a bit more momentum to combat and they also touched on enemy variety which is improved from what I remember of 2018, though I still have mixed feelings on that which I’ll get to. The Axe is still a really creative weapon and a joy to use, and also starting off with the Blades adds more to your arsenal from the jump which was good. And the shields you can use give more options for building Kratos’s stats, though I just stuck with the default for parries which was always fun to do.

One big improvement though is how side content is handled. While the main quests are pretty linear, they usually result in a side quest or multiple to follow afterwards. These are always well worth doing since they branch away to more open areas in the realms that are entirely optional, and there’s plenty to explore in them.

I mentioned that the main quests are linear, very much so. GoW has a loop of fighting waves of enemies in small zones separated by crawl spaces or climbing rocks, I’d guess a design limitation to still accommodate PS4. While this was fine in 2018, it’s more noticeable here that it isn’t doing much to take advantage of the new hardware, and that also extends to loading. For instance there’s still mystic gates that make you walk around the same area every time you travel between realms, which yes does serve as a way to deliver more dialogue, but didn’t seem necessary either.

And about combat, it’s fun and they did improve on variety where they could, but it still wasn’t quite enough given the game is pretty dense. After the first few hours you’ll still be fighting mostly the same enemies the entire game, and it just got fatiguing as it reached closer to the end. Bosses were well done but also somewhat of a letdown, starting off with an amazing first one but none that really match it in spectacle past that in my opinion (a same complaint I had with 2018).

Another gripe is how chaotic combat can be with how constrained the camera and level design felt. It kinda seemed like there’s too much going on at times, especially when there’s multiple enemies at once and they also throw projectiles at you. The camera’s so close you can hardly focus other than a small arrow indicator and enemy callouts, and I can’t remember if this was also the case with 2018 but it seemed more annoying to me here. But I also played on a higher difficulty so this may not be as bothersome on lower ones.

About the story itself, I think it’s good but I also felt it was a bit overstuffed? It spends a lot of time with build up, perhaps too much and some portions of the game can really stretch on pretty long. Yet despite the slow pace for most of the game, it kinda goes to a breakneck sprint to wrap things up in its final hours which I found kinda disappointing. Most of the side characters are fine, but I also wasn’t particularly attached to them either which may have made latter portions of the game fall a bit flat for me. Still, Santa Monica does a great job exploring their take on the mythology and I was mostly satisfied with how they handled wrapping up this duology.

Pros:
- Great level design with plenty of puzzles to tackle and strong atmosphere/music. With top down survival horror gameplay that emulates those of the PS1 era, it wears its influences on its sleeve but stands out as a well crafted game in its own right
- Its pixel art and visual style are really cool, managing to give a continuous sense of dread as you progress deeper into the facility and the game grows more chaotic
- The story’s a bit difficult to follow as it’s told through disjointed scenes and you’re never sure of what’s actually happening, but it’s really interesting nonetheless. And you can tell it takes from the likes of Evangelion in how abstract the presentation can be

Cons:
- You only have 6 equipment slots the entire game, which did feel a bit restrictive when you have to hold weapons, modules (like the flashlight), ammo and collect numerous puzzle pieces. The only reason you’d need to backtrack in this is to dump stuff into storage cause you couldn’t pick up what you needed, and this happens often enough to be annoying
- Combat is just serviceable. It’s usually easy enough to run by enemies and avoid fights, but boss fights are unsurprisingly a weak point. I wish they weren’t always in these kind of horror games, but they weren’t a frequent part of it at least
- A nitpick but sometimes the door prompts don’t appear unless you move away from them and back again, this tended to be an issue whenever you were in a room running from a bunch of enemies lol

I technically wasn’t able to finish this because my save crashes on Act 3, and since the game’s autosave system is so infrequent I had to lose over an hour of progress I didn’t care to redo. But seeing as how I didn’t have much left at that point anyway, whatever

The most positive thing about it is from the jump it’s clear they nailed the art and atmosphere of this world. Inspired by HR Giger’s work, this captures the same disgusting and otherworldly alien aesthetics wonderfully, and for the first hour I was pretty into it. Exploring these barren ruins with no company but the endless flesh and corpses, setting off with no idea who you are or where you’re trying to go with little but vague tools to guide your way. I liked the focus on loneliness over blatant scares

But its actual gameplay left much to be desired. Puzzles weren’t particularly complicated and most of the game’s basically spent doing bland mini-games or moving objects in the correct order, then it quickly turns out you aren’t actually alone and that leads to Scorn’s biggest fault. Why this needed to include combat is beyond me, but it really drags it down. Your weapons are terribly clunky and you have to get really close for them to even register, enemies throw projectiles you can hardly dodge, ammo and health is too limited for this system to work well, etc

And of course I hated the lack of enough checkpoints, seeing as how it’s easy for the game to randomly corrupt save files or soft lock progress. Visuals aside, it’s disappointing

It’s The Last of Us so gonna rate it the same, but since it already has a remaster that’s playable on PS4/PS5 and still holds up perfectly fine, there was little reason for something like this to be made yet here it is…

While this is considered a “remake”, they’re very technical with their definition here. I went through a chunk of it just to see how significant the changes were, and aside for the visuals it’s pretty much the same game I’ve played numerous times already. There’s a notable improvement with more refined gameplay animations and much better audio, but the level design is completely unchanged, I didn’t notice much difference with AI, and there’s no additional mechanics from Part II that would’ve made this much more interesting to revisit

That’s not to say this is a low effort re-release, as the graphical facelift for PS5 does look fantastic to their credit. Facial animations are stellar with real time cutscenes and the general jump in fidelity brings this in line with Part II, making it one of the best looking games out right now. There’s also the usual DualSense features and a wide amount of accessibility options which are nice to see

But to me there isn’t much incentive for existing fans to get this unless they really want to replay it for the visual upgrade. For new fans sure, this is the definitive version of an already excellent game so no reason not to go for it if interested. But even then, the remaster’s also there for much cheaper (and has Factions which this disappointingly doesn’t include)

Honestly the biggest jump in quality I’ve seen for a sequel in a while. The visuals are far better presented (if still a bit janky), the characters are more endearing, it’s better paced, the combat’s refined and much more enjoyable, and dungeons aren’t nearly as tedious as before

The music is absolutely awesome too. Like the first, the dungeons play instrumentals with vocals coming in during combat, but here pretty much every single song sounds soooo good. Especially when you reach the bosses and the dungeon track turns into an EDM remix by TeddyLoid

My only real gripe has to do with side content. It carries over “causality links” where you can take quests from any NPC you come across, but it still isn’t a system I cared for. But thankfully it can be easily ignored for the story and main character episodes so not a big deal

Also while the story is technically set after Overdose, it’s basically the exact same premise. To the point where this more felt like a do-over than anything which could make it feel a bit formulaic, but I didn’t mind

Intriguing game. Can tell a lot of work went into not only making three full FMV films to sort through, but having each feel convincingly part of their separate eras from the 60s to the 90s. The acting also does an effective job selling the idea of looking through real lost footage

I haven’t played Sam Barlow’s other titles yet to say how similar this is in structure, but it was cool piecing together what happened to Marissa Marcel out of order since you don’t know where clicking each person or item in a scene will jump you to next. And while combing through each scene, you’ll also get audio cues and vibrations that cause bizarre changes to the footage which made it more interesting to figure out what was going on. Though eventually it can feel a bit aimless as you go back to comb through all the scenes for the cues

This makes a really rough first impression, starting off with one of the most bizarrely structured intros I’ve seen from a JRPG, its low budget immediately apparent with the shoddy presentation, and following up with dungeons that I had to drag myself through to stay interested in continuing. Still, I pushed past the first few hours and by the end I guess I didn’t hate it? It does have some good qualities that aren’t apparent at first, which could’ve made for something more compelling if it weren’t let down by its other aspects

The game revolves around a bunch of students trapped in a virtual world called Mobius that’s meant to be an escape from harsh reality, and your group called the “Go-Home Club” tries to fight the Musicians keeping everyone captive and break out. The story itself’s kinda lackluster, but where it shines more than I expected is with the characters. Each get their own scenarios where you can learn more about their trauma and what secrets they’re hiding about themselves, eventually figuring out their true personalities in the real world. In addition you can actually decide to side with the Musicians early on and become one of them as Lucid, secretly working with both teams throughout the game. Some are handled better than others, but it generally does a good job fleshing out not just the main cast between dungeons, but also the villains who get their own scenarios too. I enjoyed this part of the game the most

Though there’s also another aspect called Causality Links, where you can actually talk to any NPC in the game and form a bond with them for passive skills. But instead of just a handful, there’s over 500 walking around each with their own name and quest. Conceptually this is interesting, but unfortunately doesn’t work well since that’s far too many to keep track of and their interactions are shallow. So beyond a couple I didn’t bother with this part much

The combat’s fine if too simplistic. It’s turn based, and you can see how everyone’s turn plays out before you chose it which lets you set up stronger attacks and combos (it won’t show if you miss your attacks though which does happen very often). But there’s not much variation to speak of aside for a few basic skills you’ll unlock as you level up

Unfortunately it gets pretty repetitive simply because of how bad the dungeon design is. Every single one is just a maze of the same environment asset that gets progressively more tedious as it forces you to take the most long winded paths toward your objective. You’re likely to wander aimlessly if you aren’t staring at the map since the pathways go on forever, and it’s made even worse that you’re running into the same type of enemies the entire game. On top of that you have to go through all these dungeons twice if you opt to join the Musicians…

I did like the music at least, especially with how the dungeon tracks only switched to vocals whenever in battles which made them less fatiguing to listen to. And despite the lackluster 3D visuals, the menu and character art was cool

I’d hesitate to recommend it given its flaws, but wouldn’t say my time was wasted. If you can get past the frankly awful first few hours and it's poor dungeons then this might be worth checking out. I’m curious to see how the sequel improves on it

(Update: The sequel's a dramatically better game to the point I would just skip this one and go directly to that lol)

Despite skipping over an entire console gen, Volition managed to put out a Saints Row reboot that’s nearly indistinguishable from its predecessor from 11 years ago. It has the same clunky controls that’s still without a cover system, lackluster visuals with constant pop-in and similar janky physics, Santo Lleso is barren with next to nothing ever happening in it and NPCs that lack any reactivity (arguably worse than before since basic features like mugging and hold ups are missing), it has the same old mission design and repetitive side jobs, the same animations, etc. It would honestly be easy to mistake this for another entry from the 360/PS3 era and not something that released in 2022, though I suppose for some that might not be a bad thing if that’s what they wanted from it

This one follows a new crew of younger Saints as they form the gang from the ground up and take over. I guess the writing’s about on par with the others past SR2, which is to say it’s not good but doesn’t take itself seriously. The new characters were more like normal college friends than criminals who constantly shoot down waves of enemies and their dialogue was generally awkward, but they weren’t unlikable. The worst thing about the story is how it tries to build up a betrayal twist at the start which in no way was surprising and just rushes straight through it in the last 3 missions, but otherwise it’s fine and doesn’t take much time to finish at least

Basically those who liked SR3 (less so SR4 since it tones down the zaniness) and would just be satisfied with more of the same will probably get decent enjoyment out of this. But those who figured it would do anything more to set itself apart after all this time, well… it doesn’t. And the lack of polish in most areas, notable amount of bugs, and sheer lifelessness of its world bring it down further for me

Very cool mix of intense bullet time combat with the momentum of roller skates and stylish air tricks. The best thing about its gameplay is how tricks and dodges give you ammo and a higher score, so you’re in a constant flow of trying to take out enemies without a single hit while also pulling off skating moves, and it’s really fun! I’m always a fan of Moebius-inspired art styles like this too

The game is short since there’s only 11 stages, but since they’re gated by completing extra challenges you’ll be replaying them a few times to progress to the last ones. All the levels are good and get progressively more chaotic with enemy placement, though they did lack a bit in variety since past the first four they all looked pretty similar

There’s also some first person sections at the start of every competition where you can look at items and piece together details about your opponents. There’s not much to it, but a nice addition nonetheless

Liked:
- This was pretty much a standard crime drama about a family on the run, but I think the execution was done well enough to be engaging and have tension with all its choices. Most of the characters are decently fleshed out with their flashback scenes and the voice acting was solid overall (some weaker than others though)
- It actually has a pretty good amount of story branching. There’s a flowchart to follow the pathing for every decision, and while most were just minor changes some can make a bigger impact than they seemed

Mixed:
- The art style. This was what turned me off from the trailers, the use of realistic stills in motion was jarring and initially gave the impression that this was some low budget FMV game. But having played it, I guess it wasn’t as bothering as it looked once I got used to it. It does make the presentation more distinct than it might have been otherwise, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the most divisive thing about it
- While decisions do seem to carry a lot of weight across the story, it’s still more or less the illusion of choice as these games tend to be. All paths will end up at the same story beats, just with a lot of variations for the chapter leading up to them

Disliked:
- The QTEs were basic to the point where they didn’t need to be in this at all
- Another game where you have to drag a cursor around instead of using the menu. Was made worse by how sluggish it felt to move cause of input lag
- There’s no way to skip or fast-forward through scenes, which made going back to see other choices a bit annoying
- The last scene leaving on a cliffhanger was kinda weak, seemed like it was just there to abruptly set up a sequel

Pros:
- Gorgeous art direction
- Adored its cyberpunk atmosphere and detailed environments, they did a great job nailing the intrigue of this world for the short time you spend in it
- The music and audio design are exceptionally good and really sell the whole vibe of this game. For me it’s definitely a solid pick for best OST this year
- You play as a cat which is cute! Movement was fluid to control, it’s well animated, and seeing the world from a ground perspective was refreshing
- The more open areas are surprisingly dense, there’s a lot of rooms to explore even if there’s not much to find aside for a few collectables
- There’s a meow button, you can scratch things, and knock over important stuff like real cats

Cons:
- This is not really a platformer since there’s no jump button and all the climbing is automated, you can’t fall. While that may be an intentional design choice, it does make the game feel a bit shallow and restrictive to traverse outside of the cool perspective
- There are enemies (basically headcrabs from Half-Life) that chase you and you need to avoid. It’s fine, but not really a highlight either. And the stealth sections of the second half I could’ve done without
- Minor bugs like getting stuck in furniture and having to reload, though checkpoints are frequent so wasn’t a big deal
- No photo mode 😭

A short game where you have a cursed sword that kills you in just a minute, giving you a short time limit to explore and look for items before having to respawn again. Each item you find is kept permanently and they open up more areas to progress until you can complete the game. Conceptually it’s a cool idea, though in practice is a bit of a gimmick since there’s frequent save points, and aside for that it doesn’t really leave much of an impression with its puzzles

Still, it’s fairly well designed for how small it is and has a charming style. Fun way to spend an hour or so