At the moment of writing there’s very little discourse about Laika online, mostly contained within Steam. And with Steam reviews being Steam reviews, people are defining this game through easily identifiable correlative qualifiers. It’s set in a motorized wasteland, kinda like Mad Max! You ride a bike, so it’s Trials with a gun! The combat involves air pirouettes, literally My Friend Pedro! It’s a cartoony castleroidvania, so basically Hollow Knight! It’s easy to dismiss Laika as a hodgepodge pastiche of all things indie, especially in the season motley of overmarketed 90 metacritic releases. The best thing the developers could do in this environment was to release the demo version. It takes 15 minutes hands-on to realize you’re dealing with something special here.

When broken down to bare essentials, the ingredients are pretty familiar. It’s a 2D-sidescroller and you’re on a bike. You balance the bike with the left stick and aim the gun with the right stick. Checkpoints are plentiful but it's always a one-hit kill for you or the enemies. Except, the bike is a large hitbox that shields you from bullets, and you have very little ammo in the clip before you have to reload the gun by doing an air backflip. These two are the brilliant integrals which allow Laika gain its own, completely unique moment-to-moment language. A bump on the road that sends you flying isn’t just an obstacle – it’s an opportunity: either a defensive one to shield yourself from fire or a chance to regain ammo with an iffy flip. It leads to encounters of positional enemy prioritization, risky acrobatics, resource management and split-second decisions. It allows for boss fights that serve as ultimate tests of these particular player skills in more patterned, elaborate bouts. It’s an unusual arrangement of mechanics you definitely need to try for yourself to see if it works for you. If it does though you’ll find such a sick, satisfying system that presses many familiar buttons but plays a totally different tune.

Another structural aspect that impressed me highly is the fundamental purity of Laika’s search action pace. I tend to go on the demo hunts every Steam Next Fest season, and it appears that the current trend in metroidvania design is maximalism – more skill trees, more abilities, more gameplay modifiers, more quote on quote things to mess with. There’s nothing wrong with this approach (in fact just recently I really enjoyed Astlibra, and I’m quite excited for Tevi too), but it makes me appreciate a game like Laika, where every upgrade feels like a radical option expanding power spike. In fact there are exactly two items that give you new traversal abilities – and they are such an exciting change of paradigm that make you rethink the way you approach every gameplay moment. It’s that game from the universe where System Shock 1 was the touchstone game design classic while more numbers driven System Shock 2 was relegated to a curious footnote in history.

The voice of Laika too is diametrically different from what you expect in the medium. Through the advent of prestige sad dad games we've been completely missing stories focused on motherhood and associated female growth – and Laika is that exact tale. The explosive growth of Soulslikes prescribed exposition, The Lore, as the main worldbuilding tool – Laika defines its world without a single written description of an event. The game goes against the established flow if it can benefit from it, but where it matters – Laika preaches to the choir. As in, the anti-imperialist narrative about war, the atrocities it brings and how it warps the combatants, is, to say the least, appreciated in our current world. So are the serene moments of tranquility in-between skirmishes, accentuated by a wonderful vocal soundtrack.

As you can see, I’m very passionately dazzled by Laika. It’s one of the best game I played and artistically it came at exactly the right time. Give it a chance, don’t let it slip through the constant whirlpool of game releases. It deserves to be recognized as a classic.

Calling Balatro a gambling game has become one of my pet peeves, because in essentiallity it's a series of math challenges. You try building poker hands, and the game does card counting for you so puzzle-to-puzzle probabilities are all laid bare. You get to influence statistics of the game in-between rounds, which is where the most random element of the equation comes from. I quite enjoy playing the long game, thinning out and refiguring the deck for my playstyle. Where the game loses me is in HOW you are supposed to win the run. Rather than interesting cardomancy, the way to progress through is to stack payouts, mutipliers and multipliers on top of multipliers until the actual card game requires nothing but non-commital hands. The middle is the most interesting of any run where you form a game plan and look to implement it with tools thrown in your way. But the end result you seek? To make the line go up until your input doesn't matter. And that's just hella dull.

Ubisoft’s best game in years! I had hopes I’d enjoy it a lot given this is by the team that made the exceptional Rayman Legends (a decade ago now oof), but this managed to surpass expectations even and as a Metroidvania it genuinely stands next to Hollow Knight and Ori as my favorites in the genre. Having fantastic combat and boss fights with strong focus on combos/parrying attacks, very fluid platforming controls and traversal powers with razor sharp challenges throughout, and great level design as you explore the large and varied map of Mount Qaf

There’s some minor gripes, had a few crashes and felt like the story it was telling was fine but nothing very noteworthy either aside for the characters just making for cool bosses. Also since backtracking could be frequent, I kinda wish fast travel was a bit less limited and let you move between save trees. But otherwise this was a joy to play and the 25 hours it took me to finish flew by (still have plenty leftover for 100% too)

"Alan Wake 2 is a game that shows what videogames are capable of"

Well, I imagine that a large number of people, when reading this highlighted phrase, will imagine a game that demonstrates cutting-edge technology, photo-realistic visuals, or even surprising performance. But definitely not the case where I wanted to refer to that kind of thing.

Alan Wake 2 tries to push the limits of what is possible to present and (only) achieve through a game. Using different multimedia formats to convey a plot, whether through meta commentary, live action cinematic cutscenes, different forms of interaction in the environment and fourth wall breaks, may not be a new thing. But it is certainly the game that comes closest to what was idealized by Sam Lake throughout his career, by playing with these elements in a coherent way, and delivering an experience that is unlike ANY other game I have seen playing videogames for more than 20 years.

And speaking of which, I believe that the most important thing in a game is the experience it gives you, and without a doubt, Alan Wake 2 is a game that cannot be explained. I could say that it is one of the best survival horror titles of recent decades, going head to head with classics like Silent Hill 2 or the original Resident Evil, or I could even say that it has one of the best and most ingenious plots and ways of tell a story that you can find in any medium. But it doesn't make sense, nothing I can say could do him justice.

Alan Wake 2 is a game that needs to be experienced above all else, and I hope everyone can give it a chance someday.

Outer Wilds is the only game I can think of where within its first moments, I knew I was in for something very, very special without really understanding why. The title screen is already so inviting, with its gentle acoustic glow fading in over a collage of shimmering stars. The game opens, I wake up on my back, looking up into the sky to see something explode in the distant orbit of a giant, green planet deep in space, and my imagination is immediately captured. I feel an intangible warmth as I speak to my fellow Hearthians and wander our village, a sense of wonder and anticipation as I walk through our peoples' museum, learning about things that I realize I will inevitably have to face or utilize in the adventures ahead. All this before even seeing my ship, let alone blasting off with it into the far reaches of space.

The expectations and tone of Outer Wilds are set up pitch perfectly in this opening. On the whole, the game captures the innate desire we all have to learn more, to reach out for what's next, even if we have no idea what it is we are searching for or why we seek it. It's the only thing Outer Wilds relies on to lead players forward. There are no objectives or goals, no waypoints to show you where to go next; there only those which you create for yourself. What drives us forward is the need to understand the world(s) around us, or at least attempt to understand. Is there a more human desire than that?

Outer Wilds is a masterpiece for its many balances: of warmth and intimacy with the melancholic loneliness of space; a constant sense of wonder with an equally constant fear of the unknown; its charming, colorful art style with its hard, scientific approach; its reverence for the teachings of both classical and quantum physics; its personal, micro-level character stories set against the fate of the universe. The list goes on. And that's without even mentioning the game's emotional linchpin: Andrew Prahlow's incredible score, a healthy mix of folk, ambient and post-rock that is a delicate tight-wire act in and of itself, managing to capture both the vastness of space and the intimate glow of a campfire without compromise.

Whatever feelings Outer Wilds brought out of me in its opening moments were only further heightened and more deeply understood as I began unraveling the mysteries of its clockwork solar system, spiraling faster and faster towards an ending that left me in awe of everything that came before it and soon yearning for other experiences that could fill the black hole that the game's sudden absence left in place of my heart. Outer Wilds is not only a perfect game, but also one of the medium's purest expressions of its most inspiring possibilities. If only I could breathe out a sigh of relief and wake up on Timber Hearth for the first time again.

Completion Criteria: Ending 2

I've been debating whether I should mark this as complete and review it and since the game has told me it's over. I feel like I should, for people confused about what I mean? I can't really be specific without spoilers and I can't even really critique it without spoilers. But I want to provide a review for people who are seeing the high scores and wondering if it's worth it.

I guess I also don't have an answer for you. I don't know. The game is a sokobon intended to be used to provide a detailed and mysterious story, but although the sokobon is servicable (as the genre gets, very standard), and the story itself is serviceable to what I played. They do not gell particularly well. Themes come across and are obvious but for a game that wants to hide secrets from you, it makes it very hard for you to look for secrets. Playing through ostensibly the entire game because I realised a split second too late that the room I was in was the goal of a clue provided earlier does not leave a good taste in your mouth. My gut tells me that the scores for this game may be bloated by those who really put loved it whilest the middling feelings were blasted away by the tedium expected from you. I played the game for a bit over 10 hours and was already not particularly happy with the design choices so when I checked the How Long to Beat Time was over 50 hours, also seeing the recommended reviews on steam reaching upwards of 140 hours, I realized that this game is hitting for people.

Maybe the reason people are so invested are legitimate, maybe they are superficial, maybe they are horny. I don't know. All I can say is as someone who has finished some highly controversial puzzle games like La Mulana, I just feel like they may have attempted to purify their theme and ended up ruining the puzzles of the world (even they kind of mess up there them anyway with <spoilers>

Try it with a word of caution, if you get to a point you think the game asks for too much, don't follow the words of hype. Maybe I'll go back to it but I am definitely not invested in doing so at the moment.