iD Software should probably go down as one of the best set of devs in history, because they have made a work so excellently crafted in its design and innovative in use of arena fps mechanics that it's easily the best game that has come out of this year so far as well as one of the best of all time. It manages to take every single lesson that needed to be learned from Doom 2016's failings and applied a perfect fix from a top-down level.

I've never played a singular fps that kept my adrenaline pumping at full blast for most of the way through, with encounter design so phenomenally set teeming with particular enemies that make true on its core gameplay loops. Doom Eternal juggles loops of resource management, enemy prioritization, and utilization of movement all intertwined to each individual enemy. From the Arachnotron, probably the best enemy of the lot that forces you to utilize its weak points while it dodges your fire and pressures you down, to the Cyber Mancubi, each enemy makes use of your weapon variety and asks for the best play you can muster especially on Nightmare difficulty (which I played on the whole way through). The waves are also set perfectly to where as you take heavy enemies down there's new challenges to surprise you, with especially the slayer gates and later levels showing the best of this wave design.

The weapon balance and depth is also excellent, with two alt fire mods you can swap with that each bring their own costs and benefits, as well as the resource grind constantly asking you to use your entire loadout. Good play isn't just tuned to dodging enemy fire and spacing yourself correctly, but also utilizing every single weapon to their fullest extent while keeping track of loot pinatas to keep yourself in the midst of carnage. You'll know when you're in the zone when you're hook jumping into the air and constantly keeping yourself up above them dashing and jumping as you pelt rocket damage down upon your foes. If you have a single thing not on cooldown you're not using everything that you have.

That's probably the most ridiculous component that iD managed to do, the huge complexity that the game slowly eases you in before letting you become a walking one man army of rip and tear. The pacing of unlocks is fine tuned to where you're always getting something new from level to level to play around with, with excellent tutorializing that makes sure you have the knowledge you need to play efficiently and work on mastering your kit.

Music and aesthetics are also fantastic, with every single level looking amazing compared to Doom 2016's mostly same-y color palette. This is probably Mick Gordon's best work too banging in the background, especially with its remixes of 2016's great hits and the final level keeping that blood pumping. Probably going to be listening to it long after I'm done replaying the game.

There are of course, some miscellaneous and weak components for a game so ambitious in its design and extremely accessible. The platforming serves as nice downtime to let your blood cool down, although some of it especially the swimming portions being kind of boring if not impeding on the nonstop joyride. Ideally I'd probably layer the mostly-and-intentionally-nonsensical codex-loaded story to be cutscenes between combat to give you downtime if you need it and allow them to be completely skippable, with some walking if out of dev time. Not that I don't appreciate some of the environments and sense of scale that you walk through, but one specific level i.e. Sentinel Prime seems almost like a weird pacebreaker that could've used way more over time development.

There's also some overtuning and balance issues in some places. The Marauder, while I can find him somewhat inoffensive, makes you play a different game. When you've killed all the rest of the heavies and he's the last one left, you play Sekiro and just time your shit to kill him. He's not an interesting enemy and I'd prefer better use of Archviles to force you into a "deal with this enemy while you fight the others" instead. Also some of the weak point exploits are too powerful, with Cacodemons especially taking one sticky or rocket to make them nothing. The bosses also ALL SUCK, and either need complete reworks or wayyyy more dev time to make them interesting and fun to fight. I give a pass to the Icon of Sin for being an amazing spectacle but even his fight is twice as long as it needed to be, serving as a bfg dump that's one phase too long.

Other combat issues: The BFG, Unmakyr, and Crucible are underdeveloped, although at least they're easily ignored. I can kinda get it with the BFG and Unmakyr, one's pretty much a get out of jail free card that requires no skill to use other than uhh don't hit a wall loser, and the other is a close range meltbox. I just wish the ammo was either one per level at MOST or in a different mode entirely (like a survival mode! they'd work like shmup bombs), because while they don't exactly make encounters entire jokes they do undercut the design by a significant margin. The crucible especially is probably the biggest disappointment. You have a whole level building up this sword that you craft over time, and all it does is IK for 3 pips, a get-this-heavy-off-me weapon with only one move. It could've been a way more fleshed out weapon with more utility and less breaking the game.

At the end of the day though I can't deny that this is not only the best fps game I've played but maybe even my all time favorite action game. These issues are something I can tolerate on my own, and the game gives free reign to fine tune a lot of the elements yourself. It's ridiculously accessible. I look forward to the dlc, and I think the rest of this year nay the decade has a lot to live up to after this. (10/10)

MMOs and what they mean for its players and how they vibrantly connect people, places, things, etc. is all fertile ground to explore. But I don't think employing its conventions for the sheer sake of, what I feel is just having them for tribute, while having nothing really emotional on offer throughout a painful exchange of 'well, grinding is core to feeling that time and investment yes?', is good. Partner quips and npc dialogue that rudimentarily remark on things-that-people-do-in-mmos is not enough connecting tissue to simulate that there is LIFE here. I would sincerely trade away the game's rather functional and alright combat, and solid zelda-like puzzle design, for something much worse if it meant that there was sincere emotional depth to its personality, history and real internet-like connection between factions and people here, etc etc. Like there's almost something unnerving about playing through an 'mmo' with this much polish. I'm not saying it needs to be more realistic but it feels so ultimately constructed and lacking in every punch put within the first handful of hours. Even your avatar is simply emotive early-on, in a situation I feel would at least incite so much more vulnerability (there's not even, like, real awkwardness or emotional unevenness between any of its cast so far. You think vr mmo players are going to communicate this perfect?). Idk, not every mmo reconstruction needs to be DOTHACK, but gosh does this wish it was dothack

This is currently my favorite game of all time, so making this review was an inevitability, but I found it hard to word myself for the longest time. This entire review will most definitely contain elements of spoilers.

I would I guess, like to preface that it isn't perfect. Much of the known Genocide Route and Pacifist Route is a rough draft in terms of narrative design, pacing is kind of thrown to the road in both of them in terms of how events are revealed, specifically the tapes in the True Lab come to mind, or how it unceremoniously saves all of the genuine good storytelling in Genocide to the latter bits.

It's also quite limiting on a gameplay front, to an extent. I think the bullet hell combat is genuinely good, and by nature of how it's designed, better than most other rpgs. Dancing between bullet patterns as they combine on top of other enemies is a core part of any decent bullet hell philosophy, and seamlessly tying that to its rpg core and narrative is something to be praised and serves far more an execution test than most rpg's knowledge test design where ultimately optimal strategy is a once and done affair for most encounters. It is still limiting however, since only about 1/3 of the encounters actually make use of patterns building atop of each other, and the game saves its strongest bullet hell tests to the Genocide run, and the hard mode is literally an intentional joke.

That being said, and god that last paragraph wasn't even too negative, I'd say UNDERTALE is absolutely brilliant. It's the finest execution of the ensuing theme of "determination" I've ever seen in a work of art, surpassing general examples like Gurren Lagann by supplying its theme at an individual character level and wrapping it around an excellent metanarrative to boot (that you don't even have to be aware of to enjoy).

UNDERTALE works off clear character ideas, humanizing its characters around the world it sets up in extremely well written ways. Alphys is my leading example, which is weird that it's people's least favorite. She's built up as a stingy incredibly annoying type, a character who is increasingly irritating to deal with. She stops you at every point, wanting attention, to be something like the shows and remnants of otaku cultures she was able to consume. She ultimately gets betrayed by her own work, and ends up pushing back her own war crimes she's committed. She's not a justified person in what she's done, but she is sympathetic to understand. Her actions are communicated exceptionally for people to understand what kind of person she is, and the arc she gets is fitting and she learns what it really means to be determined and what she actually needs to do to be loved.

This reflects on every character not just her, and on top of this, is how flawed each of these characters are as people really works back to how honest they truly feel, and they’re all fleshed out personality wise to a point where tobyfox can publish them talking about whatever topic and I could hear their fonts come off the page and imagine them emoting in real time. They're very humanized people.

I'd also like to talk about how UNDERTALE ties its metanarrative elements well. The game in short, is a living breathing game world that operates on world mechanics riffed from a general audience understanding of how rpgs work, using a morality system that is defined on a character to character level rather than strict moral good/bad. You're allowed to kill in self defense, you're encouraged to be pacifist but the game doesn't vilify you for kills, it asks you to reflect on them. The monsters' world is as much a world to them as your own world is to you. And the only basis to understand them is to take them as living people where act of murder or self defense is a last resort. Especially when you yourself have the power to save and reload, so death is never truly an end for you, so death until you SPARE them is a legitimate option that only costs you time.

Even if you don't care for the meta elements, even if the characters aren't someone you jive with, even if the gameplay isn't particularly your own thing, it still has its own comedic writing to back on, and one of the best vidya soundtracks I've had the pleasure to listen to. It's also an excellently paced journey, gameplay and narrative-wise. But I would still be surprised personally, if there wasn't a single character or emotional moment that resonated with you.

I think UNDERTALE stands above all other games I've played in my lifetime so far, and it certainly has had a huge impact on my life going forward that I can't give it any less than my 10/10.

When I first mentioned I was going to go back through the entirety of FFXIV, now that it was functionally complete with the release of Endwalker, I was given looks of concern. This will be the fourth time I’ve played what amounts as A Realm Reborn, and just that inkling alone is really fair enough for people to give me worry. It’s really only off the honeymoon sentiments that I can just stare at the screen going “Yes I will gladly scrutinize myself to play the bullshit parts again for the sake of being comprehensive.”


That is to say, A Realm Reborn is not good. Awful for most of it even. This return trip, where I plan to overturn every rock to give the whole of Final Fantasy XIV its fair shake with the combined 1000+ hours of experience I have with it now, requires going through this patchwork prologue. To an extent this is relaxing to me now, I’m so attuned to FFXIV’s world that I can just pop a reshade on and get lost in doing countless fetch this and do this quests and feel a sense of affirmation. I also get to experiment trying to find a more affirmative body in the world by messing with my character design. This might sound like a superfluous intro, but really the best thing ARR can offer as it is is a world to get lost in.

The real prologue certainly tries to bring you in, although haphazardly. I have a strong preference to Gridania start over the other two as it’s the only consistent highlight of 2.0’s main quest. It really gets the rags to full adventurer right as you help out with menial but nice lovely worldbuilding quests, even if tree-hugging The Shire clone is the most it amounts to. It feels good though, and it helps that the area is decently pretty. I can no longer stand Limsa’s pirate speak prose which poisons that affair, and Ul’Dah’s intro can simply fuck off for all the good Scheming Monetarists amounts to.

The rest of the main quest pretty much follows suit. I’d scorch earth it, as for all the good it does at creating political spheres and cultures to understand and vibe with, it never really amounts to much bar a few scenes that the patch story content would add. Especially where I stand now, where fundamentally so much of the region’s story becomes inconsequential and at best only leads to a couple pathos moments. I actually had more fun sidequesting, even if that never quite becomes good it at least affirms neat political stuff like Ul’dah’s failure to become anything other than poor business startups across the desert. There’s a quaint scholarly feel to seeing how the corruption of capitalism does not really lead to any wealth, while a dead monster’s remains has wealth of its own. A sidequest story describes how a monster near Camp Drybone saved countless fauna and flowers across its back during the calamity that led to a beautiful conservation monument in its wake. It fits so snugly into the region, this contradiction to how the most wealthy inspirational parts have to do with acts of good in people and ‘monsters’ both rather than any business venture will do. The general puzzle pieces of FFXIV’s world remain this solid, but what I’ve described alone is a needle in the haystack.

It’s most telling that the biggest sigh of relief was when I finally got through the awful Praetorium once again, collected a bunch of optional quests, and felt free. FFXIV’s 2.0 is quite literally stifling, forcing you through all of its areas in painful uninteresting nonstop introductions. Even its strongest moments are retconned or swept away. You do everything in your power to try to prevent region threatening gods from being born, and only succeed at stopping one and said one is so temporary that a few patches later it gets summoned anyway.

I want to talk about probably the most contradictory portion, a part of the main questline I used to say was the best part. The Coerthas story follows ‘the lowest point for the main characters’ and has you getting partially involved in civil warfare between religious zealots and devout heretics. On the surface it’s just far more interesting than what’s come before, because there is such an intrigue in how easily corrupt the theocratic institutions are and what the heretics’ truth could be. However, it’s the most painful area by design. You get one aetheryte to teleport to, and plenty of the quest have you going back and forth across the desert snow area that feels less like Cold Hell and more like overbearing busywork. You have to climb all the way to the top of towers five plus times not even including sidequests just to talk to two people. Alongside the most inefficient use of time and the region, the sidequests themselves work against the narrative being foiled. The heretics you talk to are literally insane, sacrificing to a ‘blood god’ (What?) and painting them as such an unjust evil that I was aghast at the thought that Heavensward really completely overturns this. A Realm Reborn isn’t just patchwork, it's quite literally writing themselves into a hole that they had to gracefully jump straight out of and act like the hole didn’t exist or was not as deep as it looked.

I’ve done a lot of kicking in ARR’s face which frankly it doesn’t completely deserve. Past its failures I ended up somehow enjoying my time, although it’s clear that a lot of that is from retrospection. Not to bring up its disgusting dev crunch, I’d rather push towards what it Does get right. The job quests, for the most part, are all enjoyable times. Bar the Archer’s sickening vibe that amounts to “earn the racist’s respect and force a family that hates each other to continue being with each other”, the vast majority have very earnest and funny stories. I love the Thaumaturge’s cute family, and their themes of facing cowardice and becoming their own mages. I adored the Pugilist story which is just a lighthearted boxer story. I especially gushed over the conjurer story which thankfully side-steps Gridania’s endemic issues in favor of giving a great narrative about listening. You watch a girl come to terms with her buried family and her own mortality as she is forced to understand what it means to have perspective, listening to the world to find beauty in it, while coming to terms with the loss that prevented it.

The patch story is also still a setup and takes a strong amount of the time. I found myself more bored on this playthrough, but I remember how happy I was when ARR was finally taking its characters with, well, character. It weaved threads, set up downfalls and arcs while beginning to critique the structure and ground it. There was finally an intelligence to how characters act and react, instead of say, pre-praetorium’s entire Mor Dhona arc where you simply walk into high-tech Fascist Mordor and everything just works. I’d still say it only really gets good from Hearts of Ice-onward, where things finally start coming together instead of going in such a roundabout fashion. But moments like facing the keeper of the lake hit me as much as the final glass that clinks on the floor with The Fall. Just excellent stuff that really lets the kickoff to Heavensward settle in.

Not to mention, it actually starts being rather fun to play around that time too. I still find it difficult to criticize the early leveling that much, but it’s certainly not fun to ever replay any of those sections. Working with an incomplete rotation where you pretty much hit one to three buttons at best for 10-20 hours is just not interesting, even if the idea is to engrain all of the moves in your head. I’m all for the tutorial making sure that even the people who skip Hall of the Novice have leeway to not ruin the whole party, especially since a lot are playing to care about the story alone. But that doesn’t change that the vast majority of the dungeons need considerable reworking, just so I don’t feel like I’m slowly going insane. They are by design this way since ARR was an experimental phase, but again, we can do better now. FFXIV is certainly not above redoing sections, and I mean, Yoshi-P announced he was going to fix the Cape Westwind trial of all things.

Still, it does get significantly better in the patch content, and ARR’s gameplay still brought me a few of my favorite moments! Coil of Bahamut is laughably poor for most of it, but Turn 9 is such a beautiful dance of mechanics that simply hasn’t been replicated yet. Titan Extreme too, which was my first hardcore content in general, is such an adrenaline rush and showcases exactly what makes FFXIV combat special. Not only having to fulfill your role to react to a profuse amount of mechanics at once, not only weaving your abilities appropriately, but being able to match how your team moves and filling in for their mistakes. 90% of the time, your party is not going to move efficiently and cover everything. But even as a single person, you have the ability to make up for that in most hard instances.

Even on Normal they’re all fun presentation wise, and while gear buffs and changed mechanics have rendered much of these instances at launch painlessly easy, I still enjoy them a great deal. Whenever I get Shiva or even King Moggle Mog I just smile, partly because the music for both is a perfect fit, but also just getting to be a bit attentive and optimize my attacks. Even in the most tedious moments of questing, the general gameplay is strong enough to make me grin when an instance unlocks as a result.

The patch content also does such a workload to fill in for much of ARR’s travesties. Besides the raid and extreme trials it also adds Hildibrand, simply one of the best comedic questlines that calls back to Garry’s mod era in a wonderful way. It's consistently good and lighthearted, where having it on the side while I continued the main quest was a lovely feeling. Also I love the Gold Saucer, and while I suck at mahjong, fucking around with triple triad this time around was weirdly satisfying. Can’t say I spent much time chocobo racing or doing much of the parkour though, that’s not really my thing but I did give it a shot and I moderately understand the appeal. The fashion show deserves so much praise just for simply forcing me to try glamour because I keep pushing that off to “endgame.” The RTS mode isn’t anything I’d put much time into but I love that it’s a thing simply for giving you an excuse to collect minions. The optional dungeons as well as the quests around them are quite neat and cute too, of various quality but still particularly memorable.

Certainly, not everything it adds is a hit. The moogle delivery quests are such a tedious apology, putting character backstories into nameless NPCs that barely had any before. That entire storyline should just be skipped completely. The beast tribe quests all culminate in the same too-serious points with only the Ixal crafting one being something I even moderately enjoyed. The PVP… exists. I don’t simply mean the deathball spiral carteneau stuff which just sucks on the face of it, but the 4v4 stuff too at best gives good looking gear. At worst it feeds into a nasty side of the community that didn’t really need to exist and is just a boring timewaster. Not to say that every player vs player multiplayer needs to have the depth of Destiny 2 crucible or WoW’s utility maximizing tactics, but I’d rather this just be excised at all if it’s not going to amount to much. Even as it is now with expansions later, it’s at best an experience grind.

There’s probably more I could cover that escapes me even after all the notes I wrote down, but I think I’ve added enough to this monstrosity anyway. This will serve as a first part that I hope to tie together as a big review on FFXIV as a whole. I know this in of itself isn’t really ascribing much meaning or giving a thoughtful look at the game. As much as I want to have particularly powerful things to say I’ve decided to myself that this is my current project for who knows how long, and for some bizarre reason beyond mortal understanding I enjoy it. I hope this perspective has at least been interesting to read through.

Oh if you wanted a conclusion, basically ARR sucks lol. No, it's still so hard for me to recommend getting into FFXIV this way. If you seriously want my recommendation and just find A Realm Reborn sooooo unbearing, just buy a Heavensward skip and then go to the waking sands to unlock New Game+. All you really need is the patch content main quest for context, I cannot stress enough how completely trivial and inconsequential the 2.0 story is.

As for job stuff in terms of how they play, I’m saving that for Endwalker. I really can’t find talking about all of the job’s leveling process interesting.

There are two wolves inside you

One goes absolutely nuts as the audiovisual downpour waters your soul, lifting you off your feet as transcendental music guides you through the rhythm, rewarding your play with only more heavy sensations to feel. The expertly crafted experience moves through your heart in beats that feel second nature.

The other wolf is hyperfocusing on each block as the difficulty ramps up to where you're trying really REALLY hard to keep up because they may or may not suck at tetris god the last level took me more than an hour on normal I'm REALLY bad.

Oh and both wolves are gay and really deeply love each other and intermix a lot :3

Felt so at home here...
Characters bleeding into here right from the comics <3 I had such a blast feeling the radiating warmth of the charm, all the little quirks like Tails being such an awesome friend, him talking about his cooking and earnestly roleplaying to the bit in the story, all the way to Blaze (gosh me) and her royal stoicism. It's all so cute, interrogations working like fun Edgeworth Investigations, the care and detail, how it managed to kind of get to me with a scene with Sonic (in all fairness, emotional stability has been tough!). Wonderful high effort gift to the fanbase. I love being a fan of these Mobians ^w^

Simultaneously easier than DD, but also more insane and significantly more illegible. I kind of hate it much much more, and also can't help but respect it more. The biggest issue is that I am personally tired of treating the game as half a manual, things especially here are so counter-intuitive that even the training mode is simply teaching you how you're 'kind of' supposed to be playing at the very minimum. This sort of compounds into a glorious but sort of fucked combo shooter that desires to be as ultimately incomprehensible as possible for you to pass over.

That's kind of sick, but it leaves me rather in the dust. It doesn't induce the panic that Devil Daggers does to me and instead feels like a sense stress test. For its modus operandi of some utter hellish ultraplanar fight against some undefinable deity I can't think of many things in general that's such a perfect match. It absolutely continues on its predecessor of being a congruous entity that you have to fully understand in order to survive and even progress. Its arcadey nature asks for creating clarity out of unwatchable madness.

So as a realized vision I have to like, sort of stan it! But I also feel an utter bone to pick, a sledgehammer I want to take to this sort of approach. From a personal note, for one, this game is absolutely irresponsible. The steam page fine print has an epilepsy warning but the game should fucking start with one, if not more, as should its creator be saying such shilling this game past twitter and youtube. When I first streamed it in front of a friend they felt so unwell they had to tune out for a solid 15 or so minutes because they felt like they were going to have a seizure and they're not epileptic. It's rudimentarily so overzealous in its mission that it genuinely hurts my eyes after a little bit of time to play, and its mixing and sound design just hurts and nails on chalkboards but all of those are Intensely Important Indicators to play. To be blunt I almost feel a sort of noxious "loves its ingroup and hates everyone else" vibe from all that.

But idk, it's like mostly fun past all that. Things connect pretty smartly and it can lead to some intense fun, and it'll certainly satisfy those who REALLY REALLY like Devil Daggers and this uncompromising way of creation. Which is totally valid. It has got crazy good game design top to bottom.

I wish parody in games had bite. Most of them are either too ironic for their own good or end up moving into their own sort of territory abandoning the parody like a third of the way through. I kind of respect Stanley Parable actually, and it lost the coin toss of me playing its 'sequel' over this, but I'm sure it would have had much to tell in its own fashion. Whether played out or not, it would have something to say for itself.

This doesn't. That's the weird part, Jonathan Blow is to me one of the easiest targets ever. You can make some good jokes about him that can turn into many great points. Obviously, The Looker isn't about Blow, but its painful attempts to target what The Witness is going for makes me wish it kind of was because that would've been at least an interesting way of joking about the game. Here you have, puzzle types painfully recreated without any illusion to seem smarmy, and attempts to spin the joke to other genres that never actually quite capture when The Witness actually excels. The jokes have a dual problem of being too reverent of the game to give something really powerful, and too smarmy to land the joke about Witness being up its own ass. From the most charitable lens, it's all cute, but says nothing.

Want to hear another spin? The Witness is a game about someone who is so insecure of their own experience of the world being misunderstood, with walls of libertarian almost incel level thoughts of how they don't quite understand girls, as well as being met with heaps of talk calling their work pretentious already, that they make a work about widening your perspective. Get it, because his own is genuinely really shallow. The irony!

This is a better joke than anything you'll find here, and that fucking sucks.
t. Someone who quite likes the Witness overall

Unreasonably cruel by design, completely decrepit and crusty as an entirely grounded virtue, and still earnestly unplayable no matter how much I or it tries to justify that as part of its core thesis. And that's soooo cool. The surface levels of its completely aware corporate, deterministic, and hellish analogues for depressive and nihilistic thought that you quite literally ascend out of is MORE than worth the thorns, but not for me. Nope. I got several days in before the realization that metagaming would be an encouraged straight-faced requirement and that's when I knew I would never get through this without hotkeyed console commands every single day so I committed the immutable sin of just... watching/reading my way to victory. Sorry! My "reviews" are glorified blogposts anyway, so it's nothing new. And I personally just don't accept this kind of design altogether, especially in the later days of this game.

I still hold so much respect for it though, both in terms of encapsulating such a stark but brutally real depiction of life through its particular lens, and grounding it all in such a way that all of the complex layers can be easily peeled back to the same pathos core. Kind of difficult to dance around a lot of the elements here without spoiling, there's quite a few character cuts that go for the throat on various levels of "how does one find that strength to continue" here that I'm going to think about a lot. I couldn't delve that much into the detail anyways, I've lived privileged, I have not been in the depths of darkness that walk the hallways here. I will say as my single form of criticism to the story that its philosophical quandaries aren't exactly hitting high above the clouds, and I don't mean that in terms of vs. philosophy I mean that the highest highs here don't hit so hard, another victim of the gameplay making you largely senseless to it but also because the pacing kind of crams some of that in all at once.

On the other hand, the music mmmmmmmmmm. Awake in Death, When It Rains, Second Trumpet are incredible. The aesthetic is lovely too, with immaculate detail that's super suitable. If nothing else I'm committed to anything Project Moon comes up with (god I'm really going to get another gacha huh) simply for its irrefutable direction over every single one of its elements, even if this game is barely managing to make its initial mechanical concepts meet by sheer tedium.

To sort of address a last elephant in the room, I'm not going to say that if you are curious you should go down the same path as me. You will ABSOLUTELY most certainly be filtered at some point to like, 90-95% of the people I know who read the shit I write, but you should try to persevere as far as you can. I think at the least everyone should like, TRY, this, to understand the full scope of what the fuck Lobotomy Corporation has in store for you.

This game is so fucking intelligent but I hate playing it.
Welcome to hell featuring:
-your mistakes constantly adding up quick and presented to you in crystal detail
-where as you get better the downtime increases and you relive small annoyances
-surviving tooth and nail for seconds at a time while you fight with your nerves and maybe a panic attack or two (it gets fucking ridiculous)

Not for the faint of heart because it will compound into you. Devilishly addicting game, avoid at all costs, holy fuck how did i spend several hours already.
(Managed to time 231 seconds, #10 of my friends. That's the best I can do atm)

It's weird. I wasn't really expecting a Resident Evil game of all things to get me teary-eyed.

There's a lot of things about the game in general that are a weird intricate combination though. It's oozing with blood from RE4 despite being nowhere even close to that game with 8's current gameplay of keep-stepping-back-and-shoot. It has Silent Hill vibes that eclipses any scares in every other RE game with the dollhouse. Iconography of the series is embroiled in, culminating in a particular 'hype' scene that while nowhere near earned, directly references the action side of 5 and 6 in one extended sequence. A theme park ride and attractions is what I've constantly had the game called around me, but that's really selling it short. They're practically full on Zelda dungeons that you go to between the overworld, each of them tying neatly to the setting and tension and never missing a beat.

And overall it's just grand! A celebratory but earnest almost standalone piece in its own right. Its heart is so strong that thinking of the game now I can only see it retrospectively as an emotional journey about and surrounding Ethan and about family, despite how really the general structure of the narrative only has that come in less subtly in the last quarter, and how it is extraordinarily goofy and far less grounded than 7 was.

Yet I don't think I would have it any other way. I imagine that in time I might even call it one of my favorite games, despite me not really even being attached much to the RE series in general. I'm excited for what the year will bring when stuff like this manages to land familiar punches with meatier landings than anything else of its ilk.

This is the only phone game I’ve touched that made me go back to do every achievement, feeling ever more things clicking while shooting for the 4-jump-orb only clear, and enjoying myself enough to live through a 9 hour flight with zero wifi. It really does strike the wonderful tonality of an arcade game where you keep finding a thing to master with each stage and learning fruit arc priorities and what combination of the like 3 perks you can have for the 4-clear. Elated when finally got that last medal fucker in the last half hour of the flight home.
It’s just a really good game!! Need more phone games like this :(