you hear the one about avid players of tetris? their minds basically get rewritten because of exposure to the damn thing. thing is, this is true of any earthly activity that brings together body, mind, and soul. its psychosomatic, kinaesthetic. any activity that informs consciousness will bleed into the subconscious. my dreams aren't really like the ones LSD presents, but my fear is that they will be.

a product of its time in all the ways that matter and bolstered as a result. psx architecture struggling under the weight of hell and failing to load in the density of its worlds in time leaves the mind incapable of guarding itself for whats going to happen next - legitimately unsettling, unpredictable, uncanny, uncaring. youre sieved through textures and atmospheres at a rapid clip. no barriers exist here, everything is simply a permeable membrane. every scene, vignette, happenstance, and interaction a stitched-together quilt one night and a tesseract the next. like any work of its kind it requires a certain level of maturity and commitment - particularly these days when the only thing you can reliably bet on about an audience is their urge to demystify - but you ought to take the leap. this is really affecting work here that i cant possibly be cynical about and a great alternative to melatonin

Weirdly, I think sitting through a nearly 90-minute-long debate between my coworkers about whether or not Diablo 4's dash is "lazy design" has helped me clarify my thoughts on this whole affair. I'll be comparing it to Diablo 3 a lot because that's the entry that's most clear in my mind.

I think it's an improvement over 3 in most ways. I can understand that someone might be a little put off by the shift away from the third entry's maximalism, where player health could be in the millions within an hour and landing crits for billions of damage within 5-10 hours. I suppose my level 52 rogue with 1300 health in D4 might be a little underwhelming in comparison, but the gameplay effect is the same - I run up to a pack of enemies, build up stacks using one ability and turn them into a smoothie by casting a second one.

It's generally a little more accessible and a little less frustrating, though. The aforementioned dash debate was on the subject of the new, universal mobility skill: every class can press a button to do a short-range dash, and if they want more mobility they can use a skill slot to pick up a class-specific ability. It allows for more interesting builds, more interesting enemies, and even some puzzles designed around this new button. Nothing to encourage over-reliance, of course - you're not going to be using this very often - but it's certainly nice to have. You stock multiple charges of health potions instead of having just one with a cooldown, you can actually upgrade stuff at the blacksmith, and nicest of all? All those weird shopkeeper functions in D3 that required you to burn some rare resource (upgrading gems, re-rolling gear properties) just cost gold. That's it!

The best changes to the gameplay, though, come from a couple key changes.

The first is the shift away from assembling sets of gear. In Diablo 3, picking a build mostly meant finding an ability that you could buff to comical levels by wearing one or two sets of equipment. It really limited what you could do, and it meant that improving your gear took the form of upgrading gems or finding copies of the same set with better secondary stats. D4 doesn't have any gear sets. Builds are dependent on the skills you take, the ways you choose to enhance them, and then, once you've done all that, you go and you find a legendary item and you throw it in the fucking trash. Okay, that's not technically true. You take it to a vendor who rips the legendary property from the item and allows you to apply it to a different piece of equipment. I love this system. I never would've assumed I'd play a new Diablo game where the loot actually feels meaningful, where I'm encouraged to look at items below the highest tier of rarity, where I only have to upgrade gems 2-3 times.

The skill tree: Diablo 3's system of assembling complementary skills and passives wasn't bad for veteran players, but even then, it was pretty difficult to visualize the opportunity cost of picking one enhancement over another. Now, skills are broken down into clearly defined groups, and everything from a group (plus all their enhancements) is visible on one screen at the same time. Uh oh, you've just picked a passive that applies to all your "imbuement" abilities, those are scattered ALL across the tree! Mouse over each ability at the bottom of your screen and you'll see that each one is clearly tagged with a couple properties that will make it obvious which buffs apply to which abilities.

As for the player's stats, my rogue has a lot of gear with buffs to intelligence on it. If you told me this in Diablo 3 I would ask how you even managed to do that, then I would assume that fate has played a cruel joke on you. In Diablo 3 you ignored every single stat that wasn't your class' favorite and had a loot system that did most of the work for you - nearly all the gear you would get would favor your class and buff that stat. D4 doesn't do this. You'll still get gear your class can actually wear, but that gear can have any kind of attribute on it, and those stats will always provide some kind of benefit to you. Intelligence isn't optimal on a rogue, but it's not the end of the world because INT gives rogues extra crit chance. This is shuffled around for each class to remain useful, but you don't have to memorize any of this because you can immediately check what applies to you when you open your inventory.

While a lot of the decisions that directly affect moment-to-moment gameplay have been clarified, the game's biggest weaknesses are still issues with information and transparency. I have been asked several times what a "murmuring obol" is. I don't know how to explain the difference between normal dungeons, Whispers, and the Helltide stuff. The current endgame content is confusing, and while it's explained through a pop-up, all of this still feels obtuse when you're tasked with deciding what you should do next after you've finished the story. You could watch a YouTuber explain how paragon levels work this time around, but you shouldn't have to do that, and best of all: my friends who do watch these videos still find it confusing! It's weird, too, because some of the better selling points of the game - e.g. co-op scaling allowing players of any level to play together - are completely reliant on information sources outside of the game itself. The oft-derided battle pass isn't out yet, but that's what makes me fear for everything I've mentioned in this section. Information issues matter less when you know the game like the back of your hand, which is to say that a profit-focused approach to this game will cater more to the Forever Players who pump endless money into this game than the people trying the series for the first time, the people trying to show something they love to a friend, the people most affected by a lack of clarity.

In Defence of Bloodborne

The notion of Bloodborne needing defending is patently absurd; it's one of the ten highest rated games on this site, one of the most beloved games of the last ten years, and seems to be the most common answer when people are asked for their favourite FromSoft title. That said, whilst I really enjoyed the game first time round it was with considerable reservations (a 4 star rating and no more), and only on my recent New Game+ playthrough did the game flourish for me as all my former complaints, amounting more or less to a list of most of the common complaints held against the game, melted away. This review won't address any of the already widely praised strengths of the game (the stunning art direction, atmosphere and level design; FromSoft's best collection of weapons; the kinetic, fast-paced combat brought alive by the rally system; etc etc etc), but instead just seeks to talk through my change of perspective on those weaknesses.

The two most widely criticised aspects of Bloodborne are the blood vial system and the chalice dungeons, and these are both aspects that bothered me in my first playthrough too. Blood vials are very thematically effective, periodically putting you in this bloodthirsty place when you run low on them, desperately searching for sustenance by slaughtering early mobs over and over, truly making you the hunter, but they also necessitate grinding and are ultimately pace-breaking when you're forced to abandon a tough boss fight to go scavenge. Chalice dungeons stand in stark contrast to the tight, creative, intentional level design that FromSoft is known for to instead be more like a Souls roguelike with even the premade chalice dungeons feeling procedurally generated, and it's easy for them to be disappointing with this in mind.

Something widely commented upon about Elden Ring was how the various caves and catacombs allowed you to scale the game to your liking. If you're really experienced with these games already you only had to do a handful of these excursions to stock up on smithing stones, whilst those who are struggling, held up from making story progress by Margit or some other imposing boss, would have a lot of this optional side content to go grind through in order to gain a few extra levels, find a couple nice new pieces of equipment, and return to face The Fell Omen more prepared than before. I think this is how the chalice dungeons are actually meant to be treated. If you vibe with them then cool, go chalice it up to your heart's content; the level design might be a bit janky, but Bloodborne's combat is good enough that the chalice dungeons are still honestly more solidly fun to wander through than I originally gave credit. But if you're getting murdered by a boss so much that you have nary a blood vial left then it's possible what you need isn't just a vial refill, but also a couple extra levels or another good gem to plug into your weapon. People who find places in Souls games to go grind out souls and get those extra levels is already a well-recorded phenomenon, and chalices are honestly the perfect answer to that; near-endless content for people who do want to grind out those extra levels. The blood vial system is the one part of the game I still regard as Decidedly Not Perfect, but I've grown to appreciate the way it says "hey maybe stop just bashing your head against this clearly-too-difficult-for-you-right-now boss and go level up a bit first?", and think that actually listening to those cries and taking breaks from Orphan of Kos to go do chalice dungeons for a couple hours would have led to a better experience than thinking all I needed was to go grind enough blood vials in a mid-game area for a few more attempts at beating that very screamy child.

On a minor note, Bloodborne is the FromSoft game that most wants to support the existence of New Game+ with the last couple chalice dungeons, leading up to a super secret bonus boss, very clearly being content that is meant to be scaled to a New Game+ (or higher) character, and with progress on chalice dungeons being retained between New Game+ cycles. Whilst this might not excuse some of the frustration of running out of blood vials on your initial playthrough, the moment you enter New Game+ and proceed through the game for a second time you'll be earning enough echoes that it becomes trivially easy to have 100+ vials available to you at all times. These frustrations are unfortunate but are also only temporary.

The bosses of Bloodborne are also a point of contention, and I found them uneven initially with some standing out as all-time great boss fights whilst others end up being far less mechanically engaging and even a bit awkward at times. To circle back around to Elden Ring again, one strange thing that game did for me was make me appreciate the boss design of Demon's Souls a lot more. Elden Ring's boss designs follow a very consistent style, and that certainly suits what that game is, but with less than a handful of what could be referred to as puzzle bosses a lot of this content can blur together. Demon's Souls definitely has a bunch of bosses that are not very mechanically challenging or that read as gimmicky, but there are maybe only two or three bosses in that entire game that wouldn't count as memorable. I think the best bosses in these games being ones like Artorias, Gael and Lady Maria, combined with the SoulsBorne reputation of being challenging, has brain poisoned us to want every boss in these games to match that template. All of this is a long-winded way of saying that playing through Elden Ring has turned me into the kind of person that will die on the hill that Rom, One Reborn, The Witches of Hemwick and Micolash are all genuinely good bosses, despite not being that challenging nor testing your combat skills particularly, because they all stand as memorable experiences. A year after originally fighting Micolash I would still quote his lines, the visual design of the Rom encounter remained seared into my brain right up until the start of this New Game+ playthrough, and ultimately the fact that these bosses contrast against the rest of Bloodborne serves as a strength rather than a weakness as it stops the overall experience from homogenising.

Finally, the lore of Bloodborne stands out as the one part of the game I wasn't completely onboard with on my first playthrough that most everyone else seemed to love, but this is an aspect of the game that really comes alive with repeat visits. I don't want to go too deep into this, people have done this enough already and this review is long enough as it is, but two things to consider are; what initially seems like a fairly simple condemnation of the church and the power institutions can wield over people gains a lot more depth when you realise that Bloodborne is less about supernatural critters and madness than it is about eugenics, classism and the myth of intelligence; most of the supernatural critters in Bloodborne were initially harmless, just kind of vibing and doing their own thing, and only became so dangerous because people made them so in our lust for knowledge and power.

Anyways, Bloodborne kind of just whips.

next up on this boring wednesday, is a song to get your blood pumping

Barely misses the mark on true five star status- at least for now- if only for how the Leon run slightly drags towards the end (climaxing with the final Mr. X battle which might be the game's only real misstep). By this point it especially hurts after having experienced the superior Claire run and believing the game to be utterly perfect. Beyond that though, this is a genuine AAA horror masterpiece in every way. Skating on narrative (and almost meta) surrealism and packed to the brim with iconic moments of fright and gruesome delight, Resident Evil II's greatest strength is its sheer efficiency in crafting pulpy thrills and placing the naive player in constant states of panicked laughter and sweat-filled anxiety. Simply put, it is just so scary and yet so fun and swings violently between those two modes with immense confidence in itself. In ways this might be the most successful of the franchise on how it balances that dynamic even if it stumbles at times in a way REmake and IV don't. Even still, the extended Sherry and Ada segments, exploring the nonsensical police station and its labyrinths beneath, the bastardized nuclear family illustrated by the Birkins, the abominations lurking in the sewer, the corny expletives shouted by the protagonists when confronting the ass end of biological existence.. and of course the marvel that is Mr. X- a creation so ingeniously straightforward as to suggest inertia but is rather a stroke of mastery by the developers in constantly turning the tables against the player. These and more are all elements that display an insane level of prowess so rarely found in horror games. It is one thing for something to feel bluntly oppressive in its atmosphere (the easy path I'd say) but it's another challenge entirely to structure your overall design in empowering the player yet engulfing them in sterilized environments that instigate vulnerability at every turn. Down that hallway, turn a corner, up a flight of stairs, something's following from behind (or not?), hear a sound from the other side of the room.. perhaps through the walls. It is three dimensional terror that transcends logic and in effect reality itself. The game is its own consuming nightmare and Claire and Leon are themselves manipulated pawns in a manufactured world of ever shifting spaces. I have faith in whatever they're cooking in the next remake.