knowing nothing about pocket mirror going in, what drew me in most about it was its structure; your only sort of objective to begin with is to remember who you are, and with no idea how to go about that other than just pressing on through its dreamscapes, this allows the game to seemingly do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, varying wildly in tones and aesthetics and objectives, you'll start out in some sort of dungeon then emerge upstairs to a spooky hallway that ends in a tea party, with a ballroom right next door. You'll spend one minute in a gingerbread dollhouse and the next in an old creaky manor. The tone can change wildly between individual rooms, effortlessly ping-ponging between silly and whimsical, to dark and foreboding, to quiet and calm, to occasionally horrifying, without ever feeling inconsistent, the juxtaposition is always effective given the context of the game; who can you trust? what's going on? what will happen next?

this isn't to say pocket mirror is just a load of nonsense, it's all very deliberate, but the game keeps you at arms length as to what's really happening and leaves you to interpret all sorts of notes and riddles and pictures and poetry to understand it. a first playthrough will likely be very confusing, as it was for me, and this lent the game this absolutely engrossing atmosphere that felt akin to a very long nightmare, the game does have a structure to it but that only really becomes clear in hindsight, there's not really like a sort of hub area that you return to nor do you really revisit places you've already been, and as i said before only really the vague goal of rediscovering your identity, so the whole game just has this feel of venturing deeper and deeper and not looking back, no idea what will what happen next, and whether what happens next will be pleasant or not, i was on the edge of my seat despite not really understanding what was happening, and my first playthrough felt unlike anything i've really experienced before

that's not to say it was perfect, pocket mirror's gameplay consists entirely of exploration and puzzle solving, there's no combat or anything of the sort, so the only way the game is really able to raise the stakes and kill you is with death traps, such as getting a puzzle wrong, picking the wrong dialogue option, or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. What trivialises this whole system is the bountiful save points around every corner. if you die, unless you forgot to save, you will usually be seconds away from the spot you died once you reload.

now this does have an upside of encouraging curious players such as myself who want to see what happens in every alternate scenario, there are even multiple achievements for getting a game over in various ways, there are also some situations where an outcome is just completely unpredictable and having to be sent back a long way because of something like that could be quite frustrating. However, the downside of this approach is that it does distance you a little from the character you're playing as, you won't value your life in the same way she does and really think situations through in the way you would if you were really in the character's shoes because there's never really anything to lose is there? this system also encourages trial and error with the puzzles, i really like some of them and enjoyed figuring them out but some are just absolutely baffling and have very strange logic, at least to me, and the worst part is that i still don't understand some of them even now i know the answer, i don't have to because i could very easily go through all the options one by one until i got it right if i got stuck

i was also very let down by the ending, it felt super rushed and didn't feel like much of a culmination of anything really, nor did come with a sort of 'aha!' moment i was expecting where the story finally made sense and everything clicked into place, instead it just kinda ended and then it kicked me into a new game plus

i was bewildered and a little miffed, but after looking it up it turns out i'd gotten the bad ending, and there were four others i could get, i also read into what the game was really about and, i don't want to spoil it (as i want this review to also be a recommendation of the game) the game does elude to it very well and i probably would've figured it out eventually had i just thought about it long enough

over the last week i've now played pocket mirror five times, and done pretty much everything there is to do in it, and god did i love every second of it, this has become such a comfort game for me

going back in and experiencing everything with the knowledge i had made me appreciate the game more and more the more i played it, the pixel art is absolutely gorgeous and every little room feels bespoke and dense with detail, the music is genuinely some of the best i've ever heard, it is consistently pitch perfect of matching the tone of every beat of the journey, and as i said before there are a lot of tones, it is so absolutely crucial to the game's atmosphere and even listening to soundtrack outside of the game i choke up at some of the pieces just because they're so striking

i won't delve too deep into the story, but just something about the way it's told and paced is absolutely captivating to me, and actively trying to interpret all sorts of meanings in the game's dialogue and everything is very fun, you don't spend that much time with any of the characters as it's quite a short game, and i think their dialogue can be quite repetitive, but i ended up really caring about all of them anyway. the way your character ends up relating to them and what happens as a result is really beautiful, and covers topics seen very rarely in media, or at least discussed in such a respectful and sympathetic manner.

that being said though it's important to note that while i did do a little research into the topic the game is mainly about, i'm certainly not an expert, i would love to hear from people more qualified than i am what they think of the game's portrayal of it, especially if they feel it's being misrepresented, but from what i gather on my own the game's intentions are good and it's very tasteful

pocket mirror is one of those games where you just feel the love and passion the people behind it had while they were making it, and it's infectious. as i said it's become a huge comfort for me and any game where i can play it five times in a row is probably doing something right. i was overall mixed on the game's other endings, i definitely liked some more than others, but they all felt a little abrupt to me, but luckily i'm a completionist, meaning i unlocked everything in the extras menu, and i will say the stuff in there could not be more perfect to me and gave me a warm, fuzzy sense of closure, a perfect reminder of the love i have for this game overpowering all of its issues. fuck you it's game of the year

Tyler is a refreshingly genuine depiction of a trans person, there were a lot of moments in the story that i related to as a trans person myself and it helps that he's a likeable character in his own right, so i was invested in seeing his story through

the story was enjoyable enough with some very good moments but it's hurt by being one of those silly games where you just walk around in rooms full of white bubbles and press A on them to make people say stuff all stiffly and it's just like the most boring way to make a game anyone has ever come up with probably, some of the puzzles were alright though

you're also bombarded with notes and letters and documents and other walls of text scattered around which i just couldn't be bothered to read properly after a while

that combined with a pretty unsatisfying ending, Tell Me Why didn't exactly set my world on fire, but as i said it's like an epic trans game so i enjoyed it anyway

also very cool that they made it free for pride month (happy late pride)

while i think Rez Infinite is a perfectly well made score attack game that i overall enjoyed, i also have a host of issues with it that i think will prevent me from replaying it in the future

i quite strongly dislike the aesthetic first of all, it's got like a computery wire-framey thing going on and it's incredibly boring on my opinion, none of the background elements stick out and all the enemies are just kinda shapes with an eye with like other shapes attached to them, they don't really have like a clear identity to me

this goes for the bosses as well like i can't really tell what they're supposed to be nor do i really care, i do quite like the guy that like turns himself into different stuff made out of blocks like a snake and a big robot guy but even this idea feels a little played out

the music generally was also quite weak or in some cases just straight up annoying, like the stage 2 boss which is very whiny or the stage 4 boss that sounds like a load of monkeys fixing cars like it's soooooo full of itself omg like academy award search party over here

it is cool that shooting stuff like adds to the song though it does make it feel more satisfying

the gameplay is generally quite solid but it also feels a little limiting, i haven't played the Panzer Dragoon games yet but i've watched a friend play through them and are familiar with how they work, and apparently a lot of people who worked on those games also worked on Rez and this is a sort of spiritual successor to those games

in Panzer Dragoon you're able to make quick 90° turns and this adds another layer of challenge as you need to be more aware of threats coming from all sides, making for more dynamic and engaging play

Rez has camera changes too but rather than putting the onus on the player to execute them they happen automatically, which is not only far less interesting to me, but in places where you have a full range of motion, usually in boss fights, you have to make these slowwwww sweeping turns behind you when the guy you're shooting at suddenly zips behind you, which is one of those things that just doesn't feel good

this rears it's head especially in the stage new to Rez Infinite, Area X, which is far more open which makes navigation feel even more clunky and tank-like, though they did add a useful option to move backwards as well which helps, i assume it feels much better in VR which it seems clearly designed for but normal mode is kinda rough, it also has a weird issue where you have to tap A again to start aiming at stuff again every time a new section starts, where normally just keeping A held down is enough, which was mildly annoying and also killed my family

as well as being able to turn quickly, Panzer Dragoon also had a minimap to help keep track of threats coming from all sides but Rez has no such thing so the only way to check for stuff off camera is just to slowly turn around like a dork, probably opening yourself up to more danger in the meantime

the challenge of the game is also like in this weird place where sometimes it's incredibly easy and it feels like nothing is fighting back, to suddenly a million tiny pieces of shit are right in front of you and you don't know how they got there and you take like seven hits and die instantly which is infuriating

i keep harping on about the bosses but i really don't like them like what are they even doing especially the first two like the first one periodically will just shoot at nothing like an idiot and the second one has this stupid attack where he just keeps making these walls that come for you really slowly and you have to shoot four bits on them and it's like the easiest shit in the world but he just keeps doing it, they improve a bit after that but even then they still feel like they take too long and are too repetitive without enough really going on in them, with some very awkward streches of just nothing happening

i've also had the stage 4 boss like weirdly rubber-band to me and instantly doing damage without any of the wind-up because i was like beating him too quickly or something

a lot of the stages don't really stand apart from one another for me but i think the final area is fantastic, it has a distinct look, really cool music in the background that keeps building and keeps getting cooler, and even a little story going on about the universe or something that i admittedly didn't really care about but it's well told since it's just a couple of sentences each in the transitions between sections with like a cool background change

the stage also demonstrates how to do a boss rush well by having the rematches be much shorter than their first encounters, but also having new attack patterns and movement, so they still resemble their first forms but they feel like new fights, rather than being boring padding like boss rushes usually are

the final boss is a bit dull though and getting interrupted to watch an unskippable cutscene of a woman being rebuilt over and over throughout it, even in score attack mode, feels like needless pomp and circumstance and a case of mixed up priorities, the story just struck me as one of those things that wants to be all up in your face looking like it's saying something really deep but not actually saying anything at all, but it's possible i could be being close minded about it though but either way it failed to engage me personally, and feels a bit at odds with an hour long rail shooter you're meant to replay a bunch

this review is just a collection of stuff i've written at like 3am which is just things i was thinking about while playing the game and i fear i sound overly negative and whiny, but i really did enjoy myself, building the highest combos you can and memorising enemy patterns is inherently satisfying to me, even in the more uneventful sections there's always some stuff to shoot so i was never like bored bored

i liked the game enough to get all the achievements and spent a good deal of time in score attack mode just trying to perfect the first couple of levels, this along with some cute extra modes and unlockables mean there's enough hear to keep me occupied for hundreds of hours probably, but unfortunately, all those little issues i brought up really added up for me over time and i could start to tell that i'd had my fill

i had my fun, but my hyperfixation lies elsewhere

a fun game overall, usually has a nice momentum to it if you're playing well and the simple stuff like breaking boxes and collecting wumpa fruit is very satisfying, the game looks really nice as well

the problem for me is that any% is a bit too easy and boring imo but 100%, while more interesting overall and sometimes a very satisfying challenge, can other times be exhausting due to kinda slippery controls and some very long levels with a lot of start-and-stop moments

the 100% ending is also a bit of an anti-climax but luckily i was kinda checked out by then anyway, still a good start to an epic series though

the original metroid 2 was a game about the mindless genocide of an entire planet, piece by piece. everything about it, intentional or otherwise, felt fit to purpose

the environments lack colour and distinguishing features, the metroid fights are messy and repetitive, the music can be just horrifying

it's not a fun game in the traditional sense, but it sells the themes of the game perfectly and the feelings it elicits are unlike any game i've ever played

it's a long, one way descent into the heart of a dying planet that becomes even more lonely and alien the deeper you go, with plenty of time to be left alone with your thoughts

i resent the idea that this or samus returns are replacements for it; there's a lot of games out there like those two, but none quite like metroid 2

AM2R feels reverant and respectful of the original in the sense that the map and structure and all that literal stuff have been lovingly recreated and modernised, but those very abstract, specific qualities metroid 2 has have been lost i think

but that aside, it's a very well designed, polished, professional and fun game that stands alongside the very best of the official games, and if i didn't know any better i'd probably mistake it for one

it understands on a very deep level what makes the later metroid games so fun and satisfying, but maybe not what made metroid 2 satisfying in its own way

basically what i'm trying to say is, they're both awesome, play both! (and maybe samus returns as well idk i haven't played it)

bland and paper-thin in almost every regard, stretched out to an absurd length making for an overall miserable experience in my opinion

from the very first moments of the game you're assaulted with walls and walls of just the most boring, repetitious dialogue, and it's always either banal exposition about the ancient evil corrupting the land, or a prophecy or other played out fluff like that, overbearing tutorialisng about stuff like don't like walk into fire or something, or incredibly tepid attempts at humour that almost never landed for me, your companion character issun's constant harassment towards like every woman you come across was particularly painful

i found none of the characters interesting or likeable, aside from amaterasu because she's really cute

it doesn't help that almost all of these long conversations are presented in the most boring 'A cam to B cam' kind of way, near the end of the game i realised i was reading the words, but i was retaining nothing, i found it tragically funny when near the end when all the characters you've met along the way were praying for me and giving me words of encouragement and all that, i didn't know who half of them were

the game has dungeons akin to ones you'd find in zelda games, but if you're hoping for some good puzzles like i was you'll be very disappointed, they're usually just a long series of rooms with puzzles i figured out in like a second without effort, turning them into a slog

this is partially due to the brush techniques, the main gimmick of the game. these allow you to manipulate the environment around you, but they're all pretty uninspired; draw a line from some fire and you can melt some ice, use some wind to make a thingy turn, use some ice to freeze something in place, slow down time so you can run past a fast guy, make specific parts of water go up, etc.

these are not only boring and kinda clunky to use but the way they're set up is part of what makes the puzzles so obvious, if a room has fire in it, you're probably going to use it, if you see a swirly bit of water, you're probably going to use it, and it rarely gets more complicated than that, you rarely have to like combine them together in an interesting way or anything like that, and you can't really give a 'wrong answer' to any of the puzzles if that makes sense, it's just drag this one thingy to this other thingy and a door opens more often than not

the slowing down time ability is also funny because once you get it, 99% of the combat encounters become just spamming it and mashing X, meaning most of the brush techniques are on par with bad zelda items; being glorified keys rather than tools for general use

if these were the only issues i would find okami to be merely mediocre, but it's so ridiculously long for how shallow it is that it crosses a line

the game is essentially JUST this, along with running back and forth across an oversized overworld, for over thirty hours, and i wanted it to be over after two

it never gets any better, i had to take breaks from it for days at a time and considered dropping it at multiple points, it was heartbreaking whenever i thought i'd killed the final boss and then like a dark cloud comes out of it and it goes somewhere else and the narrator lady is like 'wow their journey is FAR from over!!'

this happened multiple times, and it got even worse when the game started needlessly recycling content as well, making you re-fight a load of bosses you've already fought

i was kind of indifferent to the artstyle in all honesty, but that underwater area looked amazing. i felt similarly about the music, i mostly found it kinda dull but there were a handful of songs i really liked and enhanced some moments i otherwise wouldn't have cared about. i also liked feeding all the animals as well because they're cute and i like them :3

unfortunately that's the nicest i have to say, okami is just one of the most painfully boring games i've played in quite a while and the only thing i feel after finishing it is a sense of relief. i've literally just finished it, and have already forgotten most of it

what at a first glance may seem like a return to its franchise's roots, is quickly hamstrung by adopting many design sensibilities of other modern AAA games

the opening at the guest house is a deadly combination of forced walking segments and unskippable cutscenes that make you mash a button or something occasionally to keep up a guise of interactivity. these not only harm the game's replayability, but even on a first playthrough the way they play out is quite stilted and hard to take seriously. between the limp animation and the abundance of cartoonish jumpscares, the only knot in my stomach was one of second-hand embarrassment

after a texas chainsaw massacre pastiche introducing our cast of villains, the main segment of the game begins, and this is where the game momentarily hooked me; jack baker is immediately intimidating, and being thrown into an unfamiliar environment with the looming threat of him coming to get you made me move with a lot more trepidation than usual, but after playing the game a little more i realised that jack's words were merely empty threats

if jack discovers you he'll chase you down and if he catches you, he does a bit of damage after which you can easily keep running, this combined with plentiful healing items and automatic checkpoints makes just going about your business and tanking the damage an all too inviting prospect, evaporating any and all fear or tension the game initially created

this is a major problem because the game hangs its hat on this one gimmick to make things interested because it has very little to offer otherwise. classic resident evil games are set in maze like maps that need to be slowly pieced together through puzzle solving and remembering points of interest and what goes where, the game's limited inventory and resources and well placed enemies adding another layer of strategy to navigation, saving your progress also being a limited resource in itself was always often a source a source of tension and relief as a resourceful player could go long stretches without their progress being locked in

meanwhile the house in resident evil 7 is like three floors right on top of each other that are all tiny and can be fully explored almost immediately, aside from jack being a mild nuisance (as you'll sometimes need to run in circles to shake him off to progress) the navigation lacks any sort of friction; aside from the basement, there are no other enemies, puzzles that almost solve themselves, unlimited saves and once again a mountain of resources around every corner. there is exactly one locked door that's more than a couple of rooms away from the key to it, which even then isn't too taxing, it just takes a quick trip down to the main room in the basement and there's the scorpion key, practically staring you in the face

to make matters worse, once you defeat jack in the basement, not only does he (obviously) stop chasing you, but all the other enemies, regardless if they've been killed or not, just magically vanish. the basement can very easily be tackled immediately, leaving you with a completely empty house, with a load of boring rooms with stuff to press A on in them

the rest of the game unfortunately follows a similar structure, the old house segment has an interesting gimmick with lots of hives blocking you which swarm you with bugs when approached, and you have to find the parts to build a flamethrower which has quite limited ammunition, meaning you have to pick and choose which hives are the most important to get rid of and make yourself a safe path through the house

except this isn't what happens at all, this segment is so short and the map is so tiny this concept barely has a chance to get off the ground. in other words, why would i even consider burning this hive when circumventing it takes seconds, this house is like six or seven tiny rooms total, and once again if the bugs do attack you they do far too little damage to become something to worry about. the biggest challenge here is noticing that you're supposed to crawl into a tiny fireplace behind one of the two mandatory hives which i didn't even know existed because it's so fucking dark all the time

marguerite has even less prescence than her husband, beginning her chase mere minutes before her boss fight and she won't leave her house for some reason, go out near the waterhouse and she'll just stand in the doorway cackling like a dumbass, one time i shot her in the head a few times to make her leave and she glitched out and ran back and forth up against a window before teleporting on top of me to do her janky animation where she knocks you over or whatever, it's impossible to take seriously

take away these poorly executed central gimmicks and you're left with more of the same; banal, unskippable cutscenes, shitty jumpscares, and the bare minimum for what could qualify as puzzles

lucas baker is the cheeky one with his house full of tricks, except his tricks are just like a load of tripwires and boxes that explode and boring shit like that. cheating his escape room is an enjoyable and clever sequence though, and i like that because there's a tape you can watch earlier that has someone solving it normally and getting killed, there's also an in-universe reason as to how ethan would know how to cheat it

after that's over though jack returns this time as a big blob with a silly voice that you have to defeat by shooting his fucking eyeball weak points, at it was this point that i felt myself fully checking out

the way enemies in general are handled is just terrible, mostly due to the fact that this game has literally one enemy type in it, just one (except for those bugs from earlier i guess) and it's just a pale imitation of the regenerators from resident evil 4. there are variants sure, some of them are a little bigger, some of them walk on all fours, but it's all basically the same sludgy lizard monsters the entire game, and flaccidly shooting their heads quickly gets tiresome

enemy variety is important for most games, and for horror games it's also just another tool to be scary, running into a new enemy you haven't seen before is inherently unnerving, you're not sure what they're capable of. returning to the spencer mansion in resident evil 1 and finding that the regular zombies have been replaced with these big lizard guys that run at you and rip you to shreds is terrifying, it imbues this previously conquered area with a whole new sense of life, a feeling resident evil 7 is never able to conjure up because you'll get to the end of the game and see the same enemy you've been seeing the whole game and you'll be like 'oh yeah those guys, nothing to worry about'.

the boss fights are equally terrible, they're overly long, overly scripted, and directed so badly it hurts. if i told you that there was a boss fight where two people fight with chainsaws like they're swords you might think that sounds pretty cool, but no it's just the most awkward looking janky shit you've ever seen it's just a headache if anything. also fuck that second fight with marguerite where she just leaves and hangs out somewhere off screen for what feels like minutes at a time that shit is so boring

anyway after all that is the fucking boat part which even people i've talked to who like the game seem to hate, because my god is it long and paced poorly. this is mostly due to the fact that you have to play through a boring extended flashback sequence on the boat, and then have to do a load more stuff in the same place again but now in the present where's it's like all dingy and old. i'd like to be able to be able to praise this segment as it's more of a challenge to piece together on a macro level than usual, due to its larger size and longer puzzle sequences, but it's just so dull regardless and i'm so tired of the game at this point that i just want it to be over, i suppose resident evil has never been known for its climaxes.

this area is where the game's story comes to a head, which i also find very dull. i don't think it's worth really going into too much but basically going with the 'little ghost girl who's evil because she was a biological experiment' thing they went with is so played out and presented in such a flat and uninteresting way with such nothing characters that it was hard for me to muster a single bone in my body to care about any of it. this is nothing new for resident evil but this game in particular wants so badly to be taken seriously that it's just miserable, especially when compared to something like resident evil 4 which is at least likeably cheesy.

the one bright spot of course being jack baker, who's an absolute delight any time he's on the screen, his manic energy is scary but mercifully also very funny, a perfect character for this franchise. i also think the scene near the end where jack like, contacts ethan from the afterlife or whatever while he's unconscious or whatever is quite effective. we get to see jack how he used to be before he was possessed; he's gentle, and speaks in a loving, fatherly tone, and is filled with remorse for the all the trouble he's inadvertently caused you. when he asks you to please save his family it's hard not to feel for the bakers, who were unfortunately swept up in all this.

the game unfortunately limps to the finish line though, with one more awkward stumble through the guest house as visions of your girlfriend with a chainsaw phase in and out of existence with sad music playing and it's just kind of silly, and the boss fight afterwards is more or less a bunch of cutscenes, not really worth mentioning

like i said at the start, resident evil 7 does seem like a return to the franchise's roots, a spooky house, puzzles to solve, inventory to manage, all the stuff you remember. but it's all surface level stuff, the things that made resident evil such an important staple in the survival horror genre are now severely stripped down, and you're just left with this generic, paper-thin, bottom of the barrel mush that's an absolutely mind-numbing slog to play, desperate to wrestle control away from you at every turn all for an endless barrage of cutscenes that all feel the same as each other or to hit you with a cheap jumpscare that can usually be seen coming from a mile away

what once frightened me, now bores me.

what once brought me satisfaction, now leaves me hollow.

and what should've been a glorious return to form, is anything but.