I don’t know why I wait so long to play some games. Portal is a big one that I can finally mark off the old checklist. I know I’m not telling anyone anything new here as I’m one of the last people in the world to play it but wow what an inventive, clever, wonderful game. I am not usually a fan of puzzle games but this is easily the best puzzle game I’ve ever played. The puzzles as I said are inventive and clever but not to hard to figure out after just a minute or two but Valve did a great job of making you feel like a genius when you figured each little thing out. It was amazing the amount of high level intelligent puzzles they put together using the most simple concept of just using two portals, some switches, and some blocks. GLaDOS was an excellent and hilarious villain. The comedy hit just right as well. I purposely died to GLaDOS the first time just because I wanted to hear all of the dialogue and it was worth it.

This games deserves all the hype and praise it has gotten. It’s a joy to play all these years later and feels like a game that could have come out this year. I played the first chapter of Portal 2 last year and decided I needed to play this one first to get the full effect but I am so excited to finally play it now!

I thought I was done finishing games in 2023 but I squeezed one last game into my list.

https://www.backloggd.com/u/DVince89/list/games-i-played-in-2023-ranked/

The gameplay and loot loops are satisfying enough. But everything else just lacks vision. Procedurally generated dungeons and encounter zones that you will see repeated over and over again until you've memorized the location of every single chest credstick and enemy spawn in the game really ruins all the exploration mechanics.

This game is like Cyberpunk in that it is a game that tries to be 2 games at once. However instead of GTA and an ARPG it is trying to combine No Mans Sky with the gameplay loop of Fallout 4. This leads to an incredibly jolting and disjointed experience where nearly every system in the game is completely disconnected from the game itself. You can play the entire main story of the game without once touching the exploration mechanics because they just aren't necessary and really end up detracting from the experience as a whole.

This game is fun and overall a soulslike that I find more accessible than many others in the genre. The parry and dodge mechanics seem much more forgiving than a game like Elden Ring or Dark Souls while the boss fights have been surprisingly almost TOO easy after I struggled to beat Pieta. Fortunately for me my favorite part of souls games is fighting the minions between boss fights which may sound silly as I really enjoy the combat and grind of souls games I just hate spending 5-10 minutes chunking a big health bar after memorizing an attack pattern. Thankfully it is saved by very strong combat. The fighting mechanics are fun and much more varied than similar games in the genre.

A lot of critiques I have seen of this game I find to be relatively fair critiques. The two worlds mechanic is the biggest selling point and also one of the biggest dissapointments. It sure isn't a Dishonored Time Travel or Titanfall 2 phase shift level of quality but it is mostly well done. It just begins to frustrate you once you realize that so much of the world is functionally identical except for key sections where you are clearly meant to switch worlds. There isn't any creative problem solving here it is just a method to force the player to dimension hop for a few minutes before immediately hopping back.

The critique of "too many enemies" is valid but I don't necessarily agree with it. Most of the enemies in this game are very easily dispatched and it is pretty easy to aggro only one or two enemies at a time. I feel like a lot of people are just sprinting into rooms and then getting swarmed and not being careful. Sprinting in this game has a huge aggro range and 9/10 my deaths have been due to me sprinting into a room like a dummy and then aggroing every enemy for 3 rooms around me. With all that being said I don't think it is an unfounded complaint. The devs definitely padded the difficulty by just spamming you with more enemies rather than making less enemies that were more challenging to fight. The worst examples of this are boss fights where the devs clearly knew the boss was too easy to fight so they throw ranged minions or cannon fodder at you to add difficulty. A game like Elden Ring didn't need this kind of difficulty padding because the bosses in that game stood on their own as a difficult beast to take down.

Overall I would say this game is B tier. I like it quite a lot personally but I can see how many long time souls fans will dislike it or outright hate it by the time they acquire the Pilgrims Perch key.

Don't even have that much to say about this one. Went in with no expectations and Sega delivered on exactly that once again. Boss fights are a drag, Senoue is back to Sonic 4 synths, and copy-paste is amok in basically every level. I hate to say something like this because I don't like valuing the work of hard-working individuals on the monetary scale that games come out on... but Christ, $60 is embarrassing for the product at hand. Mania is $20 right now. Fucks sake. At least Sonic controls like Sonic should in this one. Seems to be what Sega's spending all their time on figuring out now.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder is a breath of fresh air in more than one way for 2D Mario games and has easily become one of my favorite platformers out there.

The artstyle is great, the controls are responsive and precise and the animations are just smooth. You can really feel the amount of dedication the developers put into the game, every level has an unique Wonder Flower gimmick and the talking flowers were a personal highlight for me. It's really just a blast to play!

There are still some nitpicks I have with it. First of all, why can't different players in multiplayer equip different badges? I don't think this can be blamed on hardware limitations. Second thing, there should've been a way to play traditional online co-op and not just the "ghost mode". Oh well, maybe Nintendo thought it wouldn't work after the amounts of lag in Mario Maker 2's versus mode. Who knows! Then there's the thing with the Yoshis and Nabbit (you've probably heard it a thousand times now). They really shouldn't be locked behind a whole difficulty and the other way around, cause if you're a legit fan of these characters you can't play them without having a whole different experience. Last but not least, something feels off about the structure of levels in general. While they all feel unique in a way, they're... too simple at times. I'm not talking about the difficulty, I'm talking about the placement of things. Can't quite put my finger on what it is.

Overall Wonder was a fantastic experience though and I'll surely be going for 100% completion. Despite the small flaws I've mentioned, it's one of the most fun games this year and I really appreciate the hard work of the developers, hope they got a fat paycheck for working on this :p