Lords of the Fallen (2023) is a game that I felt had some incredibly high peaks and some incredibly low dips. Despite its inconsistencies, it has cemented itself as one of my favorite games of 2023 and my favorite soulslike game.

This game is absolutely dripping with atmosphere and has charmed me like few other games before. Incredible graphical fidelity paired with a stellar art direction has created some of the most gorgeous environments I have seen in gaming. The world and level design is sprawling, complex, and interconnected in a way I haven't seen since the original Dark Souls. The layout is intelligent and confusing with layered worlds and branching paths that feel expansive at first but click together and fill me with wonder when I piece it together. This level design combined with the umbral world and the sparse nature of checkpoints lends itself to a feeling of dread and urgency that completely immerses me in the experience. Beyond the layout of the world, the environmental storytelling is ominous and dark, the lore is deep and layered, and the sheer variety in player builds, both visually and functionally is incredibly impressive.

Lords of the Fallen's biggest distinguishing features from its inspirations are it's umbral lamp and the ranged combat system. The umbral lamp and corresponding world are an impressive layer on top of an already well-designed one without feeling gimmicky. It feels smooth and both the umbral lamp and world feel like they have a place in the Lords of the Fallen without feeling slapped onto the game. The ranged combat system is probably the best designed ranged combat system in any game I have played in this genre. Seemless spell casting or ranged combat without cycling spells or swapping weapons, a well-designed and scaling ammo system for non-magic options, and the presence of a ranged option for every build even with no investment lends itself to a really fun approach to the combat in this game.

Unfortunately, level design, gear variety, and atmosphere are the real selling points of this game and the low points hold it back from being something phenomenal that I could recommend to every fan of the genre. Performance at launch was awful for many players and while my experience was fine, it wasn't perfect. The lock-on system is terribly implemented and one of the worst I have ever seen. An enemy seems to be introduced every new level but the variety still feels very lacking and leaves a lot to be desired. The enemy density, which was nerfed since launch, definitely also contributed to the feeling of a poor enemy variety. The moveset variety between weapons is limited and although this game allows seamlessly meshing different attacks, this variety is still noticeably missing. The quest design is absolutely atrocious. Characters are cryptic in standard Fromsoftware fashion but Hexworks took it a step further and make the quests even more obtuse with easy to trigger fail conditions that lock the player out of completing those questlines. The bosses were rather easy as someone experienced in the genre but they weren't terrible for the most part. A number of them introduced small gimmicks with their arenas or movesets that didn't feel intrusive to the fight which was fun but a lot of them had ranged or AoE attacks independent of their normal attacks that make certain moments feel like a waiting game.

Overall, Lords of the Fallen is a game that I am really conflicted on, on paper. For me, the variety, atmosphere, and art direction outweighed a lot of these negatives and I find myself unable to stop thinking about the game almost 2 months after I had beaten it. Much of both of the positive and negative reception surrounding this game is valid, but I hope the developers can both take the feedback to heart and continue to experiment and take risks in the genre. Lords of the Fallen is a soulslike game that is good to have around for the future of the genre and while I cannot recommend it to everyone for a number of reasons, I find myself drawn in by the charm and I look forward to seeing what Hexworks will do with their consistent updates to Lords of the Fallen and whatever they have planned for the future.

Y'ALL, SCRATCH EVERYTHING ELSE - South Scrimshaw, Part One is genuinely one of the most engrossing pieces of video game storytelling I've played. It's also free.

The game presents itself as a nature documentary a la visual novel - with genuinely staggering art evoking a sense of place and groundedness to what is explicitly an alien world. The game specifies that, while this is an alien world, it's extremely similar to Earth's climate, and is hypothesized to be an example of panspermia - evolving from the same extrasolar seeds that birthed life on Earth. As such, the organisms represented are familiar, but altogether spectacular in their newness.

It's a take on science-fiction that I'm not sure I've seen before, wholly focused on familiar-ish xenobiology with nary a concern for the space-tech that brought humanity to another planet. Because, of course, that's outside the scope of the nature documentary.

Its story follows a young whale from birth to adolescence, across the first four chapters of the story. The structure of the narrative is indistinguishable from that which you might expect from the likes of a Blue Planet or Planet Earth, but the cast is completely new - and completely fascinating.

It is without a doubt going to be in contention for my Game of the Year, which I CANNOT believe I'm saying about a Visual Novel - a genre that I've previously held no real interest in.