One of the most unexpectedly frightening games I’ve ever played, plunging the player into a computational, sisyphean nightmare, a totalitarian paradise where you’re unwittingly assimilated into a protocol of laser-honed destruction. You virtually become a software-based Terminator, at the expense of your free-will and corporeal selfhood. It’s as ingeniously designed as a Mario game, yet it instills paranoia and fear instead of joy. What easily could have been a featureless facade of a concept is given artistic sentience as a work of ominous late-capitalistic portent. A direct oxymoron of fun, creative gameplay and narrative nihilism.

This would’ve been astonishing had it not been for the baffling obscurity of most of the later puzzles obfuscating a cinematic treatise on oppression and purgatorial existence into an all-too frustrating trial-and-error circle-jerk. The “difficulty” bereaves the game of its narrative essence I feel, as LIMBO seems like the type of game that should be played in a single sitting to truly let your emotions be stirred by the bleakness of its tone and the graphic expression of its aesthetic. Still highly recommended for anyone interested in games as more than just time-wasters, but hell, this should’ve been more.

Transcendental, and even for From Software’s unparalleled pedigree, a monument. As others have mentioned, late game bosses and enemies are perhaps a tad too ruthless, to the point where the last 10-or-so-hours are spent beating your head against increasingly egregious walls, but even then the game’s most punishing challenges (Malenia, Mohg etc.) are optional, and there are always tools and weapons to experiment with to find the path to victory. Difficulty quirks aside, this stands as one of the most accomplished works of any medium in the past decade or more, an impossibly vast canvas of endless discoveries both horrific and beautiful, set to the tune of oneiric myth. It’s Miyazaki’s THE RETURN. That is all, I have no more words.

I don't know what they've done with this, but later patches have absolutely mangled what was, at launch at least, if not the most polished FIFA ever (is there even such a thing as a polished FIFA, the gods wondered), then at least the most promising and foundationally good one in years. Hypermotion is a terrible buzzword, but the system alters the flow of everything on the pitch in such a dramatic way that it feels next-gen in comparison to last year's iteration. What we have left after EA has beaten it to death now is a hellishly buggy atrocity that feels just slightly less arcade-y than a pinball machine. Defenders don't track back, which leads to 90% of the goals arising from balls over the top and then a 40m runway. Physicality has been utterly eliminated entirely. Passes are foolproof, and shoot off at approximately 100mph. Hair physics come in and out depending on the cut-scene. It's a trainwreck at the moment. Just genuinely unplayable.

Been struggling for hours to write something of note about this, having just finished it earlier today, and now just laying awake at 4:a.m torn between several essayistic topics to choose from, but they will have to wait (for never, that is). The short thing I will say is that I don't think Miyazaki's intention of meta-reflective nostalgia-baiting really sticks here, as the story (or whatever the hell the russian formalists would call whatever the spines in these games are) are held up here by gameplay fundamentals that are of shocking craft by his/their standards. Totally understandable how the general sentiment around this game on here, and among the community at large, is that this is the natural step from the previous entries, since the surface of this game is so souls-y, but peel back barely half a layer and this'll feel like the most transparent studio-mandated rush-job since FromSoft's rebrand as a certified video game couture brand. From plain (or worse) level-design, to flaccid weapons, this just falls flat for me. Call me old-fashioned, but I don't fancy FromSoftware making easily-digestable content whose intended audience are people who undulates between words like "mid" or "epic". By absolutely astronomical proportions my least favorite FromSoft so far.