I think if after all the hours that I've put into Isaac and all the DLC, if I didn't list this as one of my favourites of all time then I would just not be being true to myself.

As my first roguelike, it ruined roguelikes for me. Being able to consistently get so overpowered through bending everything to your advantage using mechanical knowledge built up over dozens of hours of playtime that by pressing fire once you genuinely risk crashing the game from how much damage you deal is an experience no other game has provided for me.

Isaac is not perfect. In fact, if you closely analyse everything holistically, it's probably not even great.

There's too much shit, it doesn't tell you shit, it takes too much time to unlock shit, some of the shit you unlock isn't that fun, some of the shit is downright awful to play, so much of the shit is not worth unlocking, some shit downright makes the game worse, some of the shit is so overpowered it feels like cheating, and generally there's just a lot of actual shit.
But God do I love this game.

(Mastered - got Dead God (all steam achievements))

Most games I play I usually know more than I should before going in. I've watched let's plays of it, seen reviews, sometimes I'd already experienced everything the game has second-hand before going in myself. I don't think I even read the itch.io description of Echo before I downloaded it.

I probably had close to the perfect possible experience, I was at the perfect age, doing okay but not great mentally, and I had absolutely no expectations whatsoever. The reason I picked it up was to play it 'ironically,' and I really did think this was just going to be a dating sim, because what else could a visual novel even be? I was playing with the mindset that the end-goal was seeing whichever character I picked getting naked, despite the fact that basically everything was telling me otherwise.

I don't think there was a particular moment when it hit me, it just slowly washed over me that there was something wrong. Something was fucked. And then it hit me anyway. After every ending I immediately went back to re-read parts of it to figure out what the fuck just happened. I already knew what happened, I just couldn't comprehend my feelings or the fact that they were triggered by this default ren'py UI 'game' I downloaded for free on a whim. My assumptions had been turned one me, expectations subverted, I was physically shaking. DDLC could never.

It was one of the few times in recent memory that I felt a primal compulsion to talk to someone about a piece of media, about what I had seen and felt, about the fact that it was this of all things that left me so disturbed in a beautiful way. Although of course I couldn't mention that what I played was a gay furry visual novel, that would be mortifying. Describing something with those four words is like a hex that repels almost all who hear it. Maybe that's for the best, because being one of those people who wasn't repelled made me feel even more like this was something special just for me to find.

I will say the one thing that prevents you from being able to show the game off is that presentation-wise it is as barebones as it gets without just being bad. It got way better with the updates that added extra CGs and sprites (I first played when Kudzu's reaction to everything from a pleasant conversation to a death threat was " ,:^l ") Like, of the best scenes, some are enhanced by the CGs and some take place on a completely black screen. And the sound design, with the exception of the original music tracks that I all really like, is mostly stock and not all that effective (Me and the boys jamming to trailsteps.ogg while listening to neutral by Audioblocks). This is all honestly fine. They needed to allocate limited resources on a Patreon-funded budget and they did that well. However, all of many spelling and grammar mistakes are pretty hard to ignore. It's a novel (with visuals) -the words being correct are kind of important. Also why are most of the ellipses only two dots what's up with that why is that..

I liked it. And the extent to which I liked it was so surprising to me that it made me love it.

(Completed - I got all the endings and I'm pretty sure I read all the dialogue)

I think puzzle games are uniquely positioned to be precisely 'perfect' in a design sense. If a puzzle is tightly and thoroughly designed, information is clearly communicated, and achieves its fullest potential, then theoretically it could reach a state where it cannot be improved. By comparison, in a first-person shooter you could always make the gunplay 'feel better' or the movement 'more responsive.' There is always room for improvement and what counts as an improvement is subjective. Puzzles (actual logic-based puzzles, not like adventure game moon-logic puzzles) are, I think, abstract enough where subjective improvements can be negated. And if you don't ruin it by putting in silly things like a 'story' or 'characters' then you could, maybe, I think, perhaps, have a game that cannot be improved - a functionally perfect game.

Baba is You (since this is a review for Baba is You) is probably as close to the functionally perfect game as you can reasonably get. I really can't think of anything that could be added or taken away from the game to improve it. And yet it is not perfect because we humans are not perfect. Our brains are not developed enough and we are just not intelligent enough to fully grasp this game.

My working theory is that Baba is You fell out of a portal from a dimension where humans are an average of 20 - 60 IQ points smarter than we are. They had grown bored of the simple puzzle games that they had played and wanted a real challenge. And so the smartest minds of their nerd-ass society, in between their rounds of quantum chess and hypercube 18x18 sudoku, decided to make Baba is You. And they rejoiced for they couldn't figure out some of the solutions immediately.

Unfortunately for our society, a copy of the game fell through a dimensional wormhole and onto our digital storefronts. Even more unfortunately, some of those smart people from that nerd dimension fell through too and now live online to tell us that the solution is actually very simple and we're just not thinking hard enough and it only took them a couple hours to beat the penultimate puzzle within a puzzle in the secret room in the hidden area unlocked by finding the second way of beating the level that the majority of players couldn't figure out normally. And they solved it before pushing a single button because they could simply observe, visualise, and then deduce the mechanics of the puzzle within their mind.

No, I'm not mad at this game. It didn't make me feel intellectually insecure at all. I think I'm gonna go play a Lego game or something.

(Completed because I saw the credits)