This is a really good first attempt at a commercial video game for sure, but ultimately I don't love it quite as much as I'd like.

The idea of an oblique and subtly creepy metroidvania game really appeals to me, and I do think the game has some very memorable moments and imagery in it (I love the fuckass Kangaroo even though he made me shit my pants in fear every time he showed up), but ultimately it fails to really come together as a compelling whole. The world doesn't feel quite as alive as I think it intends to, and it mostly just ends up feeling like a vessel for cool little things to go 'oh thats neat!' at or for big ARG puzzles that I frankly do not care about beyond seeing the solutions on my twitter feed before going 'oh thats neat!'. It just feels empty, and once the 'vibe' wears off you aren't left with much to dig in to.

Same goes for the general puzzle solving, the items are all very cool and the puzzles are generally fun to work out but very few really stick with me the same way something like the puzzles in Portal do. Plus there is a LOT of backtracking through sections of the map that are objectively just dead air after you've finished with the puzzle they contain.

After completing what is generally referred to as 'layer one' of the game, I think I've had my fill. I basically know what I'm supposed to do to complete 'layer two' of the game (it isn't hard to work out considering how many obvious loose ends the game leaves you with) but I can't say I give a shit about doing any of it. And as I said before, I don't really give a shit about big community ARG puzzles beyond watching from the sidelines. So for now, Animal Well just kinda sits as a neat start for both its main developer and its publisher. I'm excited to see what both of them do next, and that's not nothing!

This would genuinely be a billion times better if it was just a linear platformer. Every good thing about the game (engagingly challenging level design, cool ability unlocks, excellent boss fights) is nullified by needing to conform to the Metroidvania structure, with the exception of the music and art direction.

Those cool level designs become real fucking tiring when you have to backtrack through them again to use the item you just got on the door it unlocks (seriously they don't even wrap back around to let you skip the return journey, its not even good metroidvania map structure), or find maximum stat increase items hidden behind future ability unlocks

The abilities are cool until you realize that some boss fights basically expect you to have unlocked them, despite hiding them behind unmarked breakable walls.

The bosses themselves are all challenging and creative, but the stink of 'Am I supposed to have gotten a higher level/found more max stat increases before I fight this chick?' taints them in the heat of the moment.

I usually hate acting as though I could've done better or would know how to 'fix' a given game, but in this case the better scenario is so blindingly obvious and staring me directly in the face whilst playing I can't help but be that asshole in regards to this one.



...Also Sakuya's run animation is fucking terrible, why does she hunch over and shuffle her arms like that???

If you're going to flash the suicide hotline number 5 times over the course of a single playthrough, you should probably have more of an understanding about the mindset of a suicidal person than 'Watched the first season of 13 Reasons Why and think you get the gist'. Also maybe don't bother having chase sequences if they're going to take up like 5 minutes of the total playtime, especially if they only really tie into an aspect of the game's story that somehow gets less focus than the chase's themselves do.

On the plus side this is maybe the funniest possible introduction to Silent Hill I could have had!

A game that unfortunately fits into the category of ‘I love thinking about the times I’ve played it more than actually playing it’. The first chapter is an absolute joy to go through at least, admittedly a joy superseded by its sequel but still a joy nonetheless, but from mid-chapter 2 onwards it becomes less of a noir-ish heroic bloodshed simulator and more of a game about brute forcing every enemy encounter and quicksaving the second you’ve cleared a room of its enemies.

It’s a similar problem suffered by a lot of super-hard-but-fast-respawning-2D-platformers, eventually the game becomes so trigger happy with killing you that it becomes less about skill and more about how many times you can headbutt this particular brick wall before you pass out from the blunt-force trauma. It never feels insurmountable, in fact quite the opposite as each encounter is over so quickly they become a formality that the encounters in something like Dark Souls never devolve into. Ultimately actually playing Max Payne is a relatively inoffensive experience as long as one remembers to quick-save as often as possible, and its been made pretty much obsolete in this regard by the aforementioned Max Payne 2 (and honestly both of them are completely blown away by Max Payne 3 if we’re talking purely on a gameplay level).

But to experience Max Payne is another thing entirely. The game doesn’t quite reach the levels of delightful verisimilitude that later entries in the Remedy-verse would delight in, but this game oozes atmosphere with such intensity that it cannot be mistaken as anything other than the direct precursor to what would later arrive more fully formed in Alan Wake.

The world of Max Payne feels permanently stuck in the last hours of its own personal Ragnarök. A seemingly eternal tempest rages through the streets refusing to let up for even a second, the sky throbs with crimson veins as though signaling the end times, psychotic mob bosses practice black sacraments to beings beyond human comprehension, and one man stalks through this eternal life with nothing but his wits, his luck and a whole army’s worth of bullets. The game never goes into the realm of the overtly supernatural, but in many ways I prefer this approach to something more directly magical.

It has a similar approach to the paranormal as the first season of True Detective. It’s clear to the audience and the characters that SOMETHING is lurking just beyond the edges of our perception, but the figurative curtain is never quite pulled back far enough for us to be at least secure in the knowledge that all our fears and anxieties were true and justified. All we are left with are the effects of these fears, and it is this sense of apocalyptic dread that propels the story of Max Payne from a fairly bog-standard noir revenge story to a mythical saga of world-ending proportions. It really is what elevates this game into classic status, and thankfully gave a head start to the folks at Remedy who would only see improvements on both the gameplay and atmosphere of their subsequent works.

With anyone else at the helm I can imagine Max Payne getting very stale very quickly, but the (admittedly amateurish but nonetheless charming and evocative) writing of Sam Lake and the clear love the dev team had for the project (those graphic novel cutscenes rock btw) shines through to make for an unforgettable gaming experience that, as I unfortunately implied at the start of this review, I’ll mostly be content to fondly remember rather than play for the time being.