Let me start by saying that Horizon threads a very dangerous line -- it's a game that attempts to do the very tired open-world action game formula and still stand out. To me, it succeeded, thanks to its narrative, worldbuilding and inventive combat, but a lot of people are going to give up if they're not as tolerant with the hiccups, and I want to discuss those too. With those things in mind, let's talk about Horizon: Zero Dawn.

In the distant future, humanity exists as primitive tribes, fighting each day for survival among the overgrown ruins where our civilization once stood. In this world, animal-like machines roam, machines whose origin and workings are unknown, and that grow more and more aggressive each day. A girl is born to a tribe in the mountains, a tribe whose elders deem the baby a curse and have her be raised as an outcast. As she comes of age, she sets out to find her place in the world and discover the truth about her origins.

The game sets off to a fantastic start, with an opening that sets up a lot of mysteries to be unraveled later. How was Aloy born, and why was she cast out? What kind of society is this? Who is the man she's entrusted to, and why is he exiled as well? As we move on to a section that shows Aloy's childhood, we're thrown into a ruin of the old world and a record of the final days of its inhabitants. The questions keep piling up.

We're presented to the game's main mechanics as well as a bit more of Aloy and her adoptive father's characters, until a point where we reach a festival at a bustling village, and here it is evident how much production value goes into building this world. You get to see rituals, dances, shamans telling stories of their tribe -- the culture and people Aloy has been shut out of.

This is one of Horizon: Zero Dawn's positives: so many post-apocalyptic games fall into misanthropic tropes, where humanity is fundamentally rotten and its survivors devolve into warring gangs that know nothing other than sex, substance abuse and, in particular, violence. Any attempts at rebuilding society are presented as shallow, corrupt and/or ultimately doomed to fail.

Games like that are always hard to finish, because regardless of being right or wrong, they lack a world worth fighting for. Horizon, on the other hand, puts a lot of work in fleshing out its societies and their cultures. The festival at the beginning of the game is quite the experience, presenting a variety of characters and setting up several different potential plot threads.

But then comes a part where the game drops the ball for a bit. As the prologue ends, the story does a triple backflip and the game enters a bit of a slump. Maybe several sequences got cut and their plot points smushed into one, or maybe they wanted you to spend some time alone with the world at this point. Or both. Either way, I figure most people who turn out to dislike Horizon are going to drop it during this part, as it's when the game plays to its weaknesses the most by putting the spotlight on the generic parts of the experience.

By that time, Horizon has yet to show off most of its tricks, leaving you only with sidequests to do and collectibles to chase around for, with not many different enemies available or weapon types unlocked. At this point, you'd be excused for thinking Horizon doesn't have any interesting gameplay to speak of.

Since we're on this subject already, let's get it out of the way: the side content in Horizon is simply baffling, and there's a clear divide between the level of care given to the main campaign and to side missions, the writing and polish feeling very off in the latter case. This is actually the first game I've seen that basically admits lots of its quests are pure filler busywork, so much so that they get a separate category called "Errand" in the quest menu. They aren't even considered "side" quests.

There's also an obsession with creating setpieces that often backfires. If you happen to explore the world early on, you'll notice there are conspicuously large, empty areas at dead ends in various places of the map. In almost every instance, that area will be used for exactly one quest later on, and outside of that one quest, it's just pointless. A carefully crafted corner of the world with nothing and no one in it that only serves to remind you that this is not a world, this is a videogame.

But then there's the flipside, the quests that actually build on the world they're in. While the disparity in polish levels is still evident, these quests not only present more interesting storylines that often span multiple missions, but also include important characters and have tangible impacts on the world and its societies, even affecting the ending sections of the game.

It's no wonder that most of these good quests branch off from events and characters the main story, because that is where Horizon shines. Horizon's main campaign, apart from that bit I mentioned, is incredibly well-directed, meticulously unraveling its plot, leading you on until the very end of the game. Every quest area is filled with audio logs that slowly form a bigger picture of the civilization that came before yours, and how your civilization came to be.

The narrative explores themes of environmentalism and war, as well as the fragility of life. The opposition between nature and technology is a core component of Horizon's world design, and it's also ever present throughout Aloy's story. Speaking of Aloy, there's also her personal journey, someone cast out because of a tribe's tradition who then sets out to learn about her origins. She's pragmatic, easy to emphathize with, and a lovable character overall.

Even if you don't care about story at all, though, you might still like Horizon due to its combat, especially the enemy design, which is most inventive I've seen a game have in a while. While the game looks like it might be focused around melee, Horizon is for the most part a third-person shooter. You could theoretically poke enemy machines with your spear until they fall, but that's an easy way to get stomped on, and it's far more effective to use the myriad ranged weapons the game offers.

There's actually so many that it's hard to name them all by heart: you can tie down machines using ropes to make them collapse, set tripwires that explode or electrocute them, sling mines and bombs with different elemental effects, fire at least nine different types of arrows which different effects and/or damage types. It's a lot, and the game does a bit of Souls here by letting you find these weapons and figure out their effects by yourself.

Like with Souls games, everything hinges on how patient you are. If you're willing to spend time at the Hunting Grounds scattered across the map to learn the game's mechanics, there will come a time where everything will click. If you're not, well, the slump I mentioned just got worse, because enemies are getting harder as you move through the map and all you know how to do is chuck arrows at them until they die. This is another reason people might find Horizon boring.

The great payoff from understanding your own arsenal comes from the way enemies are designed. Apart from the human bandits and cultists you face, all enemies are animal-shaped robots of varying sizes whose armored bodies consist of many different parts -- sensors, batteries, fuel cells, fans, weaponry, etcetera.

The trick to Horizon's combat is scanning enemies with Aloy's Focus, learning about these parts and methodically targeting down each enemy's weaknesses. Batteries can be shocked into overload. Fans, exposed when temperature rises, are gaps in the armor. Gas chambers under pressure can be pierced and detonated. For some enemies, you can even use pressure blasts to rip their cannons apart, then pick them up and shoot back.

There are so many different ways in which machines can be taken down that encounters seldom feel alike. And mind you, it pays off to learn all of them: contrary to my initial expectations, Horizon's combat is surprisingly challenging. This is a game that expects you to know how to shoot, to know when to move, but also when to stand still, and even, in some cases, expect you to know to dodge into enemy attacks to get into a better position.

It's funny to even think about it now. As I played, I had a list of enemies in my head that I thought were broken, that I felt were basically unkillable without spamming health potions. That list proved to be entirely composed of skill issues, and dwindled as I got further into the game. The last enemy to be crossed out was the Rockbreaker, a robot that can dig into being invulnerable and then leap out straight into you, in an almost undodgeable fashion.

I thought that move was cheap, until an NPC in a quest told me that the Rockbreaker senses you from the vibrations of your steps, so if you stop moving, it cannot leap out at you because it doesn't know where you are. As I stared in disbelief, reflecting on my own stupidity, I could swear I heard the entire Horizon team laugh at me from somewhere.

And now, I laugh at it too, this moment becoming one of my fondest memories of the game. I loved Horizon: Zero Dawn. I think its gambit of trying to stand out in a saturated genre did pay out, and I earnestly recommend it. All of that said, I must reiterate: it is a gambit. Depending on how patient you are with learning games, and with how tired you are of the current state of the open-world genre, your mileage may vary a lot.

The Frozen Wilds is an expansion to Horizon: Zero Dawn that adds a new region to the map, where the Banuk, often cited throughout the game, live. It doesn't feel like an expansion, though-- like Rise of the Tomb Raider's Baba Yaga or Control's The Foundation, it gives me this feeling that it's a piece of the main story that hit the cutting room floor due to being complicated to develop and not essential.

Which is not a bad thing in itself -- a lot of people will jump and say that games nowadays cut content and sell it as DLC (which, in fairness, is true for some publishers), but cutting things is an normal part of game development. Basically every game in history has had stuff dropped from it, be it because it didn't fit, detracted from the pacing, or time constraints. And if I'm right, I'd risk saying Frozen Wilds was a mix of pacing and time.

The DLC opens up a new mountainous region to the north of the map, the area where the Banuk, a people mentioned many times over the main game, live. Aloy heads there in the hopes of finding out more about the mysterious ally she meets during the story, and ends up helping the Banuk defeat a mysterious threat that lurks in the mountains.

It tells a complete, self-contained story that is tangentially related to the main one, and there are slight changes to dialogue during main quests if you finish The Frozen Wilds first, which I feel was a nice touch. But it is still a side story, and you don't necessarily have to own it.

As for its overall quality, it's... more of Horizon, and it's not going to change your mind about the main game. Although, to be fair, Aloy's interactions with the Banuk did make me appreciate her even more as a protagonist. Her being an outcast, as well as being somewhat familiar with machines helps a lot with representing the audience's point of view.

There's also puzzles in the DLC! Not super complex ones, mind you, but they beat the completely braindead ones in the main game. It's almost like some higher-up was afraid some players wouldn't get it and completely dumbed down the main campaign levels, but let the level designer have their way on the DLC. Add that to the long list of AAA quirks you can observe in Horizon.

Okay, hear me out here. What if... a social deduction game, but as a single-player RPG? To some, it must sound like complete lunacy. How can a genre of game that is fundamentally about its human aspect have that removed from it? Well, the folks at Petit Depotto took that idea and ran with it, and the result is, simply put, one of the best games I have ever played.

The starship D.Q.O. travels across the galaxy, its crew a mishmash of displaced people from different planets, all of them fleeing from an invisible, terrifying threat called Gnos. This alien presence of unknown origin aims to erase humanity from existence and, to achieve that goal, it infects those who come in contact with it, taking over their minds.

Indistinguishable from their peers, these infected, called the Gnosia, seek to deceive and eliminate their own kin, and by the time the story begins, have caused the fall of entire worlds. Within the D.Q.O., the crew's worst fear comes to pass: someone, or some people aboard have become Gnosia, and they must be unmasked before they can take over the ship.

Taking after social deduction games such as Werewolf, The Resistance, or the more recent Among Us, in Gnosia, a pool of players is split into different groups, each player's role known only to themselves, that must identify each other and defeat the opposing faction. These types of games are common at parties, and are very fun. If you have never played them before, though, don't worry, as the game will carefully walk you through the rules in the beginning loops.

Yes, loops. Gnosia takes place in a time loop that begins as the Gnosia infect a set number of crewmates and a contingency plan is put in place: on each day, the crew will vote to cryogenically freeze a person who they suspect is Gnosia, in the hopes that all of the enemies will be neutralized. So long as there's at least one Gnosia free, during the night, they'll erase one of the humans on the ship. Humans win if they can freeze every Gnosia, who in turn are victorious if they come to outnumber humans on the ship.

Like in Gnosia's inspirations, there are other character roles that are introduced as you progress, all of which change the way the game is played when they're present. What makes the game more fascinating, however, and what I think is Gnosia's greatest achievement, is how effectively they mapped the social deduction gameplay to an RPG system.

During each day in Gnosia, a debate takes place, which consists of five rounds during which you and the other characters can use different commands to steer the conversation. Don't let the initial simplicity fool you: while, at first, it's only possible to accuse or defend other characters, as the game progresses, the discussion becomes more and more complex.

Characters in Gnosia have six stats: Charisma, Intuition, Logic, Charm, Performance and Stealth, all of which allow the use of different commands and affect various aspects of gameplay. As the game progresses, both you and the NPCs increase their stats and, from them, gain access to a myriad of different commands that help steer the debate, commands that can enhance the effect of others' speech, outline logical conclusions, and put other characters in tight spots, among other things.

At the end of the debate, you and your fellow crewmates cast your votes on who to eliminate. Hopefully, you didn't talk too much so to become annoying nor too little so to become suspicious, and were able to guide the conversation to the direction you wanted. Should you avoid the fridge, during the night, you can interact with other characters and get to know them better.

These mechanics form the core loop of Gnosia, which is brilliant for many reasons. First, it's one of those "one more turn" types of games that are hard to put down. So many play sessions of mine were made a couple hours longer because I just felt for going for "one" more loop before stopping, which then became four or five. It might feel random at first, but once you get a hang of the debates, the game becomes hard to put down.

More than that, the stat system in itself is beautifully realized, both mechanically and as a storytelling device. Mechanically, when building your character, no stat is useless: while there are some parameters you might want to focus on depending on the build you like, all of them serve an important gameplay purpose and there isn't a single stat that feels safe to have low.

Stats are also a means of characterization. Much like yourself, each of the NPCs in the ship has a specific build. Some characters easily make themselves loved, while others will find themselves under crosshairs for minor missteps. Some rely on their perception to catch others lying, others use logic to tear a hole in their opponents arguments.

There are also preexisting relationships between NPCs -- and even between them and your own character -- that you'll uncover as you see more character events, but that can be perceived from how they act towards others during debates. Some characters have a predisposition to liking you, and might protect you even if it isn't in their best interest for the vote, while others are the opposite, and you will learn to fear them.

It's important to pay attention to these sorts of details because whenever a character happens to be Gnosia, their behaviour might change, and an attentive player can use this to their advantage and sniff them out. This is a game where mechanics and storytelling are deeply entwined, one feeding into the other,

The overarching narrative that surrounds the time loops is engaging and set up in a way that makes it very fun to uncover. You will laugh, you will cry, you will fall in love with many of the characters, and as the story comes to a close, you'll wish there was more to uncover. Just one more excuse to go looping again in this game of lies and deception.

From beginning to end, Gnosia was a delightful experience, one I will recommend wholeheartedly to others even if my track record of getting people to play quirky Japanese games is... less than positive. I wish I could erase it from my mind so I could do it all over again.

Mario is the one video game character that will outlive them all. He's one of the few 2D mascots that survived the transition to 3D unscathed -- possibly stronger -- and since his inception, every Nintendo console has brought with it a new spin on his franchise. The N64 had Mario 64, the GC had Sunshine, the Wii had Galaxy. The WiiU's offering was 3D World, an expansion on the 3D Land formula that proved successful on the 3DS and was thus improved and brought to the home console.

This formula hits a sweet spot for casual play that I really appreciate. When the series went fully tridimensional, it began to have stages that were far more complex and harder to navigate, which is not necessarily bad, but makes for a much different experience than the 2D counterparts, which were far more approachable games.

But then there's the issues with the 2D games, especially the more modern ones: New Super Mario Bros never quite caught me because stages almost always devolve into a rush for the flagpole, as there aren't as many ways to hide secrets in purely 2D sidescrolling stages. Super Mario World was, I think, the most successful game in this regard, but it was still limited.

3D World's stages are right in the middle of those two things. It being a 3D game, its stages open up, allowing for freer movement and for more nooks and crannies to hide secrets in. Still, every goal and challenge is clearly defined, and you're still moving from point A to point B. This makes for a game that is very easy to pick up, play a couple of stages and leave, and also makes for a more interesting co-op experience if you feel like playing the game like that.

Each level is only a few minutes long, but they deserve the time they get. There's an immense variety of stage designs here, from mechanics, to enemies, to setups. There's autoscroller stages, there’s stages that play with shadows, stages focused on one of the many power-ups or blocks, stages that are built very tall or very spread out, a myriad of devices you can control…

The design methodology behind Super Mario 3D World is brilliant, and there's a Game Maker's Toolkit video about it if you're interested. The basic gist is, the game has an enormous amount of stage mechanics, but each stage chooses to roll with only one or two. Each mechanic gets introduced by the level in a safe environment, then is presented in a situation that can cost you lives. This makes for stages that are entirely self-contained and require no prior knowledge other than the controls. It's another reason why the game feels so pick-up-and-play.

In each stage, you can pick between Mario, Luigi, Toad or Peach to play as, and they have the same bonuses they had waaaay back in Super Mario 2 (the western one). Luigi can jump higher, Toad runs faster, Peach can hover for a few seconds and Mario... He's Mario. You can safely play as any character, and trying each one out is part of the fun, but Peach is probably the best due to her extra precise jumps. When playing co-op, it's a good idea to let a less gaming-savvy guest play as her.

Super Mario 3D World is a fantastic take on the Mario series that is worth everybody's time. It's sad that it came out on the worst performing Nintendo console of all time, but hey, at least it got a new chance to shine on the Switch recently. I recommend picking it up over there if you have the chance.

Tokyo Jungle was a recommendation I picked up from the Games You Might Not Have Tried series from Extra Credits, way back when. In that series, it is explicitly stated that the games are not necessarily good, just interesting enough that you should try. I think that defines TJ rather well. It's a very neat idea that could probably be iterated upon, but the gameplay, as it is, is not that great. On the other hand, you get to play as a dinosaur in a pink dress and straw hat, so it's peak videogames.

The premise is simple enough: humanity has disappeared from the planet and animals have taken over the streets of Tokyo, and now fight every day for survival. In fact, Survival is the name of the game's main mode, in which you get to pick a species of animal and are tasked with staying alive for as long as you can, hunting for food and trying to win over the best mates, all while avoiding predators.

Yes, the game is about just that: you are an animal that needs to feed and procreate. You also get handed bonus objectives to complete as each species, which, if successfully fulfilled, unlock larger and/or stronger species to play as, as well as clothing and accessories that you can equip on the playable animals. This includes a dinosaur, and also a pink dress and a straw hat.

Animals come in two main types, Grazers and Predators, which determine the kind of food they have to eat. Curiously, though, they don't really alter gameplay all that much otherwise. In fact, my first criticism of the game is that most animals play the same. There are stat variations that define what you can do with that species, but a large part of the game is spent in combat, either hunting prey or running from predators, and combat mechanics are the same for every species: press square to attack, and once the indicator shows up, press R1 to do a finishing move.

Then there's the fact that the game is heavily biased towards Predators. Attackers are surprisingly hard to lose, often to a point of absurdity, with your pursuers running by packs of easier prey, completely uninterested. Besides, as a Grazer, you can get killed by surprisingly small animals. I was surprised when I managed to kill a pack of sheep as a Pomeranian, but then later, playing as a horse, I was slain by a pack of unprovoked house cats.

All that said, getting better animals with time makes progressing through the animal unlock tree all the more satisfying. It's the weird thing about the game: it starts out very frustrating, with you getting murdered by anything that looks at you funny. However, by fulfilling the objectives, you get to move up in the food chain, and in every new attempt, you are able to survive longer, and the map begins to open up. All the better, too, because to unlock further sections of the story, you'll need to move further and further away from the starting area every time.

Ah, yes, the story. There was a rather odd decision to lock the game's story mode behind Survival. It's counterproductive, even, because it teaches you mechanics in rather late chapters, by which time you'd probably have learned it by yourself in Survival so to be able to unlock said chapters. It feels like a bit of an afterthought.

Either way, the plot and backstory of the game are... I'm not going to spoil them, but they get really crazy, really fast. There are explanations to uncover for why humans disappeared, as well as why all these animals are around, and even, for why there are dinosaurs roaming around, dinosaurs which, mind you, are very playable and very, very fashionable.

That's the basic gist of Tokyo Jungle. I miss it. Not necessarily the game itself, but what it represented. It was a time when Sony was reinventing itself to try and stay competitive, and when it let its studios do their thing and come up with some really quirky games. "It wasn't a multi-million seller, but that was not the point" and all.

It is a repetitive game and has a lot of flaws, but it manages to keep you hooked. Distinct, not necessarily great, but you probably never played anything remotely like it, and you're unlikely to ever forget it. Also you get to play as a dinosaur donning a pink dress and straw hat, making it basically criminal that it never got ported to the PS4/5. I demand high-res textures and raytracing.

Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments is a 3D adventure game that follows the titular director in a series of cases across Britain. Each case has him travelling between locations, searching for clues, questioning people and making deductions in order to point out the culprit.

The game strikes a nice balance between linear storytelling and detective work: it forces the player to get every relevant clue and solving all puzzles before proceeding to the next parts of each case, while also allowing for them to take on some more open-ended tasks by making links between pieces of evidence on their own and arriving at the conclusion they want.

On that note, I particularly like how the developers mapped Sherlock's abilities to gameplay. There are two (admittedly underused) forms of detective mode, one centered around deductive reasoning and another, around his imagination. The player can also profile people by pointing out details on their person as the camera pans around them.

Last, but not least, there's a deduction screen that contains the information gathered until that point in the case. Here, the player is able to decide on what they think are relevant -- for instance, is the explanation offered by a certain suspect satisfactory, or are they lying to conceal their involvement? Is an event a coincidence or an important link? By making these choices, different conclusions start to form, with the player ultimately deciding on who to pin the blame on, and whether or not to turn them in. Your choices lead to a different ending to the case, but the game continues regardless of whether you were correct or not.

A friend described C&P to me as the archetypal 7/10 game, and having completed every case, I think I agree. It's not mindblowing, but is a pretty fun time, and while it's clunky, that clunkiness never becomes particularly bothersome. Heck, if a puzzle or minigame proves too annoying, and some of them will, you can even skip it with no penalty whatsoever. The game is pretty honest about its own level of polish.

So if you're looking for a detective thriller to spend a weekend on, check out the Frogwares take on Sherlock Holmes. They're a good rendition of the legendary detective, and are definitely worth your time.

Machinarium is a charming point-'n-click game about a little robot on a quest to save his robo-girlfriend. It's pretty neat: not only it has the high-quality visual design Amanita became famous for, but its simple inputs made it very approachable. These factors made it rise to prominence in a time when Steam wasn't so overcrowded and there weren't many point-'n-clicks of this caliber outside of flash games.

That said, the fact that it is approachable does not in any way mean it's easy. Machinarium is home to some fiendish puzzles, and I think the only reason I avoided a walkthrough back when I played it was because I was playing it with someone else -- which, by the way, is a fun way to experience it.

Another one of Amanita Design's point-'n-clicks, Botanicula certainly explains why the studio is named after a hallucinogenic mushroom. The game is set in a microscopic world, filled with whimsical creatures, but that is threatened by a foreign presence. It's all very surreal, and while I'm not sure how the competition looks like these days, at the time, I remember calling it the trippiest game you could buy on Steam.

Like Amanita's previous games, Botanicula is a competent point-'n-click adventure that's very charming and approachable, though I do feel that the fact that it's less grounded in reality (much less than Samorost and Machinarium, at least) makes some puzzles a bit too obtuse. Still, it's a fun game to play with someone that isn't too experienced with videogames.

Home is a 2D sidescroller where you wake up in a house which is not your own and discover a dead body. Still a bit shaken, you then try to get home, and along the way, try to figure out what happened.

I'm just going to say it: if you wanna play this game, play Lone Survivor instead. LS was released months before Home and does the same thing Home does, except far, far better. Home is mechanically simple, and while it succeeds in building a creepy atmosphere, the narrative goes nowhere, and all that mood might as well have gone straight into the trash can.

I don't say this lightly: nothing happens over the course of the game. The game makes small suggestions about things having happened before the game starts, and it reacts to your choices somewhat, but never to a point where any of it is memorable or deeper than the average pick-your-own-adventure book.

The fact that the game closes by explicitly asking the player what they think happened and linking to a forum is, to me, the most insulting part. Stories that are successful in building this sort of ambiguity don't need to tell their beholders to speculate, because they'll do it on their own. If you have to ask that question, it's proof that your work is cheap.

As a side note, I don't really see what's beautifully realized about the game's visuals. I think the Steam description is too generous.

Every now and then, when you think you've seen it all, there comes a game that completely blows your mind, and makes you think about just how great of a medium games are. On that note, say hi to Gorogoa.

The simplest way to describe it is that it is a puzzle game about manipulating image tiles, but that undersells its brilliance. Gorogoa features a young boy on a quest to stop a monstrous creature, and has you dismantling and putting back together hand drawn scenes he's in, creating and severing continuity between panels, as you shuffle them around trying to get him to his goal.

It's like nothing you ever played before: an incredibly surreal experience that mandates lateral thinking, but at the same time, feels approachable and intuitive -- the pieces fall into place naturally as you play, the game's beautifully hand-drawn visuals and easy to understand controls leading you through its scenes just as you lead the boy in his journey.

Combine that with the game being easily accessible, with it being available on PC as well as major mobile and console platforms, it makes me want to go around showing it to people. And not only people who like puzzle games, not only people who like video games in general, this is a game that deserves to be seen by everyone. It's just that good.

Killing for yourself is murder. Killing for your government is heroic. Killing for entertainment is harmless.

It's no secret nowadays that the US Government actively sponsors media that paint it and its military in a good light. Every new war and every fresh "international threat" is conveniently accompanied by a myriad of movies where American soldiers heroically save the day from whatever the political big bad is at that time.

That sponsorship also extends to videogames, and while its exact influence in this industry can never be measured, if we're talking about an excess of military shooters, the PS360 generation is the one that stands out the most. Call of Duty was at its peak, and military shooters trying to capitalize on that success were a dime a dozen. Not only were those games of, uh, varying quality, but many went so ham on the war propaganda military power fantasy, some made CoD look deeply nuanced in comparison.

(there's an argument to be made that even CoD degraded as that generation went on, but that's a story for other people to tell)

Which is why it's so shocking that this is the context in which Spec Ops: The Line came out. Spec Ops was a dead IP by then, a forgotten tactical shooter franchise that never saw much relevance, and it's said that 2K Games, looking for some way to make use of that property, basically gave carte blanche to Yager to just make whatever game they wanted under the Spec Ops name, provided it was a military shooter.

The folks in Yager, in turn, decided they didn't want to follow in the footsteps of the market leader, instead opting to make a game with a twisted storyline and an unreliable narrator, a game that was undoubtedly critical of its subject matter and its own industry. That is how Delta Squad, composed by Captain Walker and his squadmates Lugo and Adams, came to be.

Delta Squad enters Dubai with the mission of finding and rescuing survivors, and Walker takes it upon himself to find his old friend, Colonel Konrad, who became trapped in the city with his men during a previous rescue effort. As the trio moves through the ravaged Dubai, they are faced with threats they did not expect, and begin to question the purpose of their own mission.

Far from the average military shooter, which paints their protagonists as patriotic heroes, Spec Ops: The Line presents us with a very negative view of war, american interventionism, and even of its own game genre, and Walker's journey takes him to some extremely dark places. There are plenty of good dives into the game online, such as this one. From its visual design, to its themes, to its influences, there's a fascinating amount of stuff to discuss about the game, and that cemented its cult following.

The thing about being a cult classic, though, is that those mostly range from niche products to commercial bombs, and Spec Ops: The Line was unfortunately in the latter group. Despite its message, it looks and plays much like any other cover shooter out there, which made it a really hard sell to the average player, who either did play shooters but had bigger names to choose from, or didn't, and would only be interested if you spoiled the game a bit.

Regardless of its sales numbers, though, Spec Ops is, to me, an unforgettable experience. Its writing and imagery have stuck with me over the years, and, as unlikely as that is to happen, I really wish the game was remastered to have a fresh chance at being seen by more people. Pretty please, 2K Games?

While my gaming life began with point-'n-click games and RPGs, Super Mario World is a big part of my early gaming memories, and I'm pretty sure it was the first platformer I ever touched in my life. Wow, was I lucky. Platformers were abundant at the time SMW was released, and most of them were pretty bad. For a myriad of reasons: awkward controls, fixed jump archs, bad combat, characters that occupied an unnecessarily large part of the screen... among other things.

Super Mario World was the cream of the crop, fascinating even by the high standards set by the Super Mario franchise until then. It controlled great, was simple to understand and very easy to pick up and play. At the same time, it was hard to master, with stages that ramped up considerably in difficulty later on, and that were filled with secrets. It's the kind of game you'd exchange information with friends about tricks hidden exits and so on.

What really sold the game to me, though, was the way the world was constructed: unlike most other Mario games, there is no such thing as numbered worlds; instead, you explore a sequence of interconnected areas, which to kid me, greatly enhanced the sense of adventure.

Super Mario World is a classic in the truest sense of the word, and I replay it every so often. What else can I say? I have big, fat nostalgia goggles for this one, and I'm not taking them off.

As I look into the recent releases in the Voice of Cards series by Square Enix, I'm reminded of a game that went even harder with a tabletop game aesthetic, but that has disappeared from public discourse since the 3DS era. That game was Level-5's Crimson Shroud, which was famous for going as far as to have the player perform in-battle RNG rolls with 3D dice manipulated via the touch screen.

In that game, you play as a group of adventurers -- Giauque, Frea and Lippi -- sent after a manuscript of religious importance. The relevance of this manuscript, as well as the lore behind the world and its people, is explained throughout the game, and while the story isn't anything to write home about, the storytelling in itself is.

The game being an homage to tabletop RPGs, everything is told in novel-style, with a narrator that follows the crew, describing their surroundings and actions in rich prose, and while, for the most part, Crimson Shroud relies only on static backgrounds and models for its visuals, it is able to tie it all together through well-timed cuts and good camerawork in order to create visually interesting cutscenes.

Crimson Shroud came out as part of the Guild01 compilation of games, developed by Level-5 in cooperation with many big names from the industry. The visual design is the work of Yasumi Matsuno, who worked on Vagrant Story and FFXII, and you can definitely see a bit of those games here. And hear them, as well, since the main composer for those games, Hitoshi Sakimoto, also created CS's soundtrack.

So how come a game with this pedigree just disappears? I can venture plenty of guesses, one of which being that while CS's presentation evokes tabletop RPGs a lot, the connection to those is surface-level at best. Virtual dice are nice, but I tend to associate tabletop RPGs with player choice and open-ended problem solving more than with physical props, and in that sense, CS leaves a lot to be desired.

It's a very railroady experience, to a point where it makes normal JRPGs feel open. To continue the story, you go from point A to point B, with maybe an optional room to visit on the way, and almost nothing in the sense of dialogue and choices. The game's systems, with its cluttered stat screens and a variety of items and magic spells, give off a feeling of depth, but the reality is that the game is too short to make most of it matter.

"But if the game is so linear", one might ask, "why does a google search show so many people getting stuck on it?". Most people I've talked to about Crimson Shroud not only have not finished it, but I was actually able to pinpoint the exact moment in which they dropped it, and this goes back to another one of CS's glaring flaws: a couple of times during the game, it decides to pull an NES on you and leave you to, one, figure out a puzzle through sheer guesswork, or two, grind items to get past a difficulty spike. In fact, there are times when it will do both at the same time.

I'll go into full (spoilery) detail into how these sections work at the end of this review, because they're so ludicrous, they're fascinating to talk about, but suffice to say, at some points in the game, you need to farm a rare drop to progress, and the game won't tell you as much as the name of either the mob or the item. It's extremely obscure, and the first time this comes up is when players will either cave and grab a guide or drop the game altogether.

This contrived design methodology also ties into the one impact you can have in the story, which is the ending. First, you must be in NG+. If NG is already a grindy mess filled with difficulty spikes, NG+ takes it up a notch, but, if you make it to the end of it all... you get the bad ending again. Unless you happen to, at very specific points in the story, revisit certain locations that otherwise have nothing on them. And solve a couple of obtuse loot-puzzles. Have fun!

To be fair, it's during the most difficult parts of the game where you can kind of make some sense out of the jumble of mechanics, strategize a bit, and for a moment, catch a glimpse of what the game could have been. Maybe if the game was more fleshed out, had more enemy/puzzle variety and let you explore more freely, it might have been one of the 3DS eShop's best offerings.

As it stands, though, apart from its staff and its audiovisual charm, I think the only reason I even remember Crimson Shroud was a thing was because of how quirky it is. It will always be the weird dice game with the crazy loot hunt that gives me a chuckle when I think about it, which maybe beats being completely forgotten, but is a bit of a dubious achievement.

Full spoilers from this point out!!.

Speaking of loot hunt though, story time! Let's talk about why people get stuck playing CS. Do note thata the following is based on years-old notes and some details might be off.

The point people get stuck in is somewhere in Chapter 2 when you reach a room made dark through magic and Frea tells you you need to find a "gift" to break the curse. That's all the info you get. It turns out, this "gift" is an item called an Obsidian Daphne, and it sometimes drops from Skeleton Mages. Skeleton Mages, however, don't spawn anywhere in the map.

You have to go to the far north of the map, where there's an encounter composed of two Skeleton Archers and one Skeleton Knight. The Knight is the biggest threat and you'd normally go for it first, but to get a Mage to spawn, you need to instead put down one of the Archers first, which will bring a reinforcement in. That reinforcement can be another Archer, or it could be a Mage.

Keep redoing that encounter and killing more Mages to get your Obsidian Daphne, which, by the way, is a normal piece of equipment whose description does not mention curses whatsoever, but you have to bring back to the dark room to illuminate it and open the path forward.

So to summarize, people get stuck and drop the game because there's a certain point where they have to farm an enemy they don't know exists, in an encounter it's not part of, for a rare drop no one knows the name of, that does what you need even though it doesn't say so. Keeping track of the amount of guesswork so far? Good -- because now we reach NG+ and the game gets serious.

There's a point in Chapter 3 where you would normally obtain a key and have to descend into a dungeon. So you don't do that, and instead go to the room you used the Obsidian Daphne in in Chapter 2, where a new Goblin enemy group now appears. If you farm those, specifically killing the Goblin Hunters to make Goblin Tanks get called into the encounter, they might drop Aphmal's Key, which opens a chest in one of the first areas of the game.

The chest gives you another key that is used in Cross of Atonement, another previously visited area, to unlock Deepwater and a boss, after which you'll find a lever that opens a gate in the surface to another new set of areas -- no, the game isn't in any of these moments telling you where to go next. A few areas and bosses later, you'll reach Tieffle's Room, where there's a locked chest.

If you backtrack to Deepwater you'll now find a key on a corpse there, with which you can open that chest, and when you head back to Tieffle's Room and open it, you get... nothing! This is the end for now, so you go back to the main quest, and complete Chapter 3 as usual. But then, in Chapter 4, when you're right in front of the door to the final boss and Giauque tells you to go in, you ignore him, turn around and visit Tieffle's Room again, for no reason.

So long as you did all the roundabout stuff in the previous chapter and opened the chest, it makes it so when your characters reenter the room now, they find a hidden passage containing a lever. Pulling it opens a passage in the room just outside of the final boss, where there's a chest, the key to which is in the path to Tieffle's Room, in an area called the Western Arcade.

The hidden passage leads to a room called the Lost Mausoleum. In there, you fight a bunch of enemies in succession, apparently to appease a demon that's hanging out there. When the battle is won, the demon leaves, and if you go and beat the final boss now, the issue that brought about the bad ending is magically fixed, and you get the good ending instead.

Did I lose you? Probably. It's a lot of backtracking and finding levers and keys to put in doors and chests, and because it all starts with an obtuse loot hunt, it's virtually impossible for anyone to find the solution by themselves. And now you know why I always get a chuckle when I think of this game.

I was never a fan of the original Mega Man games, but Mega Man X... The game is almost thirty by now, I first played it at least twenty years ago, and yet it feels like it didn't age a second. It might be the best glow-up a franchise ever got, with Capcom doing an incredible job in adapting their cute little robot mascot to the SNES generation and the much better hardware it offered them.

Speed, as well as ease of movement, are what defined MMX and set it apart from its predecessor, as for the most part, the game's core remained exactly the same: you move to the right, you shoot things, you jump over gaps, you defeat bosses and steal their powers to destroy other bosses. However, getting rid of screen transitions, along with introducing dashing and wall jumping, completely changed the feel of the game, allowing the player to approach stages and bosses in completely different ways.

That's not to say these were the only important changes. The world of Mega Man was completely redesigned to look more serious. No longer are enemies cute robots with googly eyes, or the bosses funny little men with cute hats led by a grumpy old man. No longer is the music cheerful chiptunes. No, this time we're listening to some metal while some mean looking robot bashes your head against the ceiling (did anyone else think Boomer Kuwanger was really scary as a kid, or was it just me?).

The X franchise may have had its ups and downs, but the original stands as a quintessential action platformer.