It was fine, but it didn't have nearly enough thought put into its design to rival DOOM. It does carve out its own space, but when it feels so close to another franchise, you can't cut a lot of what made the inspiration work and have everything soar.

The problems with dodging and general gunplay really revealed themselves whilst fighting the copy paste bosses at the end of each stage. I just couldn't organically dodge most attacks and it completely broke the fun for me.

The fact that the game always locks you in tight arenas with a lot of enemy waves and forgoes any platforming didn't help the flow of the game either. The repetitiveness set in much too quickly.

All in all, the musical concept works well enough, but I didn't feel Metal : Hellsinger was built on a strong enough gameplay foundation to leave much of an impression, or keep me hooked until the end.

This is, no doubt about it, the most boundary breaking game I've played this year, and it will surely not be topped.

Baldur's Gate 3 is a massive, and I mean beyond undersantably MASSIVE game. Knowing this, it is unavoidable that it has some kinks here and there. For now, later parts of the game have trouble loading all necessary textures at once, and some tiny freezes happen in combat which forced me to reload previous saves. I'll also mention that, knowing almost nothing about D&D before starting this makes it hard to get into. Tutorials are almost non-existent and auto-saves very rare. I had to restart a few 30-minutes of gameplay before I learned to quick-save by hand often. There's just a lack of guidance for completely new players that makes it hard to approach, though I do like this better than having a million tutorial pop-ups every 5 seconds. It just takes a long (and confusing) while before gameplay mechanics an story start to coalesce into something clear.

But really, all of this doesn't make a dent in the immaculate video game experience this was.

The deep freedom that every moment, area, NPC and party character affords is unparalleled. The writing is so, so, so good. Seeing all the other open world games with flat «video game» writing gets me thinking at times that nothing better can be done. Baldur's Gate 3 simply smashes those preconceptions. It's at once poignant, hilarious, charming, surprising, and genuinely jaw-dropping more than once. I love and care for more characters in this one single story than all of the combined Horizon and Hogwarts Legacies' NPCs out there. It's just that good across the board. Original ideas and characters keep coming in such a frequent flow that it seems easy to just pump out all those fully fleshed, one-lined, throw-away NPCs. But it's not easy. It's terribly hard, as most other games keep showing us. This is just an even bigger compliment to everyone at Larian that it works as well as it does.

Gameplay is basically as good. It's full of choices, in and out of combat. Everything feels deeply affected by you, and the experience of playing Baldur's Gate really made me engage in Role-Play. Most RPGs don't really let you go that far in this aspect of actually playing a role made by you. This game provides that ultimate fantasy through and through and give the player so much room to experiment, it's mind-boggling.

I simply cannot believe all the cogs in this game come together as well as they do. Not only is it massive in scope, it maintains a level of quality in gameplay, graphics and story throughout that's hard for most AAA studios to even touch for a couple of hours. It was an absolute joy to discover and partake in this epic adventure, and I'm glad to see such a heartfelt effort by a big studio be celebrated for making something intelligent and different.

What a delight to discover this now !

This might've been one of the toughest rhythm games I ever played, mostly in terms of how it just slaps you in the face right at the start and doesn't let up.

My fingers hurt now that I've finished it, and that feeling of mashing your controller frenetically really fit it with the idea of «musical combat» in the game.

I felt like my life was on the line.

And then there's the visual style (which is lovely) and the music (which kicks ass) that totally make this great little game.

Although it's a bit short and simplistic story-wise, it has a distinct personality as a rhythm game which I can't say I've seen before. I love it for that.

After playing more than half of Prey, I feel like it's and overrated underrated game.

I was sold at first on its immersive sim premise. It was supposed to be a mechanically rich game, where every system connects with another in order to give the player a huge breadth of choice in how they approach every situation.

While there was this feeling of systemic combat/puzzle-solving, the main thing that kept bugging me down is how stiff and inelegant everything feels. Maybe playing this on the PS4 didn't help, but framerate and loading times were terrible and really discouraged exploring the station. Opening a door to another level afforded me about enough time to go make myself a coffee.

The gameplay on its own was so cluncky that it got me killed up to 10 times in certain encounters. I'm not expecting Call of Duty levels of flow in the first-person shooting here, but being able to escape enemy attacks would have been appreciated. The player's health drains at such a speed that one hit K.O.s are frequent, and it never gets out of that rhythm. You either throw everything you have at enemies to annihilate them, or die trying to be more cautious with your resources.

The story is not much to write home about either. It starts off with an amazing premise, then forgets to elaborate on it while making you go on various fetch quests until the end reveals a quite cliché twist to top everything off.

In the end, I wasn't charmed that much by Prey. I did love the enemy design and the mimic's mechanic of hiding as plain objects. I liked the promise of systemic gameplay that could be felt in the multi-use weapons and powers you were given. I still could never get into the game that much. Constantly getting killed for no reason and waiting in interminable loading screens did Prey in for me.

I've been listening to a podcast called «Something Rotten» a lot lately in which the hosts talk about how video game writing is often time much poorer than other mediums by comparison. It feels like video game writers only consume game writing, and don't take the time to learn from all the richness cinema and novels have to offer for example.

I'd posit Silent Hill: The Short Message as a prime example of this problem.

From my point of view, the love for this franchise comes from rich stories of trauma told in oblique, yet thoughtful ways.

The Short Message in contrast hits you with its themes like a hammer to the face. It's so on the nose and badly written it's hard to believe. Everytime someone screamed «DUMB» as a bullying slur, I rolled my eyes. It works when written on post-its on the wall, but good god, less is more when it comes to voicing lines of dialogue.

It has a fair level of polish in its aesthetic and some interesting chase scene ideas (although they are more tedious than fully realized), but when a narrative experience leans on a script so appalingly poor in subtelty and subtext, the whole thing falls apart.

I absolutely loved Cocoon.

It was a very successful exercise in simplicity. The puzzles never feel like an annoyance as they're all briskly solved. It's just a joy to explore the meticulously crafted world that's on display while figuring out the weirdo puzzles.

The boss battles were surprisingly fun as well considering there's only one button to press !

But the main strength really is its visual flare. Animations are all so detailed, just opening a door is always a wonderful experience as they all have unique and intricate designs.

It does not overstay its welcome at only a couple of hours of runtime, but that's perfect. Every second feels catered to perfection, and that's just what I like.

Still one of my all time favorites.

It does what it sets out to do perfectly. It's a hermetically tight experience almost single-handedly orchestrated by Lucas Pope and it floored me how flawless it is once again.

It knows when to bow out after 6 hours, leave you with a great story in mind and the best feeling of detective-accomplishment.

Simply a classic.

Very simple and touching.

It's shirt and sweet, but Venba uses its cooking mechanics to great effect to delve into a quite rich story about identity and immigration.

Just a joy to experience all around.

Sonic Frontiers was a lot more fun than I expected.

I'd heard about the mesh pop-ins and the jankiness but honestly, it really wasn't that big of a deal.

It's a very fast and acrobatic game that asks you to zoom around rails and dash pads as fast hedgehogely possible. All of this is great fun and where the game's controls and level design shine.

The problem is when the open world tropes start to kick in. All the boring and superfluous cutscenes with Sonic's friends. All the side content which really isn't all interesting in the slightest (I'm looking at you time trials). These bog down the experience quite a bit and totally kill the fun as keep popping up again and again.

All in all, this ends up being a very decent game. It's fun at times when you can enjoy running around so fast your TV might break. It's really tedious when burned out tropes are there too often to pad the game.

If only they'd have pushed the acrobatic mechanics to their limit to make a game all about movement and completing challenges... Oh well. Decent fun all the same.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder was a delight !

I'm really glad a necessary shakeup was done to the 2D Mario formula. The art direction in general was stunning and magical, and the gameplay ideas very inspired and fun. It truly felt like a big amusement park ride with a bunch of little weird moments every time you pick up a wonder flower. You never know what you're going to get, which makes each one feel special. Ideas aren't always fully developed, but they went for more quantity (with quality) then depth here.

The talking flowers were surprisingly funny to me. Also, put em' in Canadian French and they become 100 times better.

I was really pleasantly surprised by this game since I'd heard a lot of critiques. I generally thought it was a win for Nintendo and this franchise even if it's not the most innovative or memorable of all the Mario games. It was an extremely polished, simple and very enjoyable romp in the Flower Kingdom either way.

I could see potential here and there, but the fact that nothing has really kicked off after 5 hours completely lost me.

The art style is very rich and cements Omori in a world that begs to be explored. It feels like there's symbolism everywhere that pushes you forward to find out more about this colorful world. And then, nothing really happens for 4 hours...

Not only does the pacing here completely kill any interest I had, the combat is also not fun. It's so repetitive and necessitates zero effort on the part of the player. You simply attack enemies, heal and basically always win.

I was waiting for something similar to Undertale here and for Omori to really wow me, but it feels like pretty empty calories that doesn't come close to the mechanical and world building ingenuity of its contemporaries.

This game was an exercise in disappointment.

None of the trailers made me want to play it. Then the reviews came and it seemed like a great time. Now I'm about 20 hours in and I can't go on.

This has got to be one of the most puzzling experiences I've had playing a video game.

It starts out really strong and spectacular. The one thing the game has going for it is the quality of the action sequences and the jaw-dropping scale of them all. The story seems decent enough, and there's no anime grunts ?? What could go wrong ?

After about 15 hours of play, everything comes to an absolute flatline. The gameplay is insanely repetitive and simple. I Iove linear games, but this requires so little brain power that it's almost insulting to the player.

There also SO MANY CUTSCENES. This cuts especially deep since I love Metal Gear Solid ! I can get the argument for games to be cutscene heavy, but here it's more akin to Kingdom Hearts. They are utterly boring, slow, mostly devoid of any narrative substance and they happen every two steps you take. And then, to pace this out, you get the braindead gameplay.

I cannot believe the reviews this is getting. It's one of the most hollow experiences I have had with a game and, apart from the art, the music, and the (sometimes) simple fun of mashing the square button to beat down beasts, this is a complete failure.

This is one of the most thouroughly addictive games I've played in 2023.

Dave the Diver really gets bloated towards the end as it's a game that keeps adding mechanics and systems until the very end of its runtime. They're all fun enough, but it loses its balance a bit when you get 20 things to juggle at once. It also gets very grindy and has a couple of systems of navigation that are just slow enough to become an important nuisance as time goes on.

I'll say though, the variety in gameplay is truly impressive here! It reminded me of the best flash games that were on Newgrounds in the mid-2000s all rolled into one giant package of fish-hunting.

I had a great time with Dave the Diver, it sunk its hooks in me way more than I care to admit even if it was a bit longer than it probably needed to be.