Celeste is a game that I just keep coming back to. I have beaten this game twice and have started a third playthrough. The difficulty of the main game is perfectly fine tuned, and the extra levels give players who are looking for more of a challenge a reason to come back. For me, the b-sides of these levels is the highest difficulty I'll attempt, but I am happy to see this game provide more for those players looking for it. A very human and simple story with razor tight gameplay mixed with interesting and fun mechanics. What more could you ask for in a platformer?

Tunic is a wonderful 2D Zelda-like that feels like a love letter to the genre. Between an extremely charming aesthetic, fun and interesting items, and being extremely packed with puzzles and mystery, it would be hard not to recommend this game to any fan of the genre. The inclusions of things like a made up language and the instruction booklet all work to great effect to simulate that feeling you had when you were a kid trying to play a game like Link's Awakening. Discovery is always well rewarded and always feel earned by the player. I feel as though there are very few handouts in terms of progression through the game, so even just simply navigating the world feels meaningful and accomplishing. Level design is top notch in this game and I love all the secrets and hidden paths they provide using the game's isometric view. I think the weakest parts of this game compared to its contemporaries is the mood of the game.

When you have a game like Tunic that is told mostly through actions without dialogue and supplemental text that would have to be translated in order to understand, it becomes incredibly important that you nail the mood of the story you are trying to tell. I think Tunic struggles to do this within its game due to how vague and convoluted story beats along with how the aesthetic and tone feel contradictory. Like Link's awakening, the charming aesthetic feels as though its masking some underlying emotions that the story is trying to tell, but for Tunic it never quite gets to that sweet spot. At the biggest turning point of the story when player engagement is at its highest, I feel as though it doesn't capitalize as hard as it could on this feeling. In the end it is not a total wash and does succeed in a lot of places, but I wanted more to really sell me on it. A good example of this sort of stylistic choice (no words, made up language supplementary text) working extremely well would be Hyperlight Drifter. Even if I didn't understand completely what was happening in that game, I always strongly felt the intended emotions implied by each scene.

Despite the criticism, I really did love my time playing Tunic and I love that it exists. At all times you can feel the developers love and passion for their own game, and that is wonderful. I would have no problem recommending this to others, and I hope to see more from the developer in the future.

Slime Rancher is a fun life sim with an interesting world and fun mechanics. It's a game that scratches that farm management itch I have, and it was a great game to for me to play and unwind. While the game has all the ingredients to be a great game, it fumbles a bit on the execution.
The material grind that starts in the later half of the game, where you build drills, pumps, and aviaries in order to get building material for teleporters and other gadgets, is not fun. It is an RNG based loot system with mandatory wait times and no active participation from the player. I think that the idea of having a secondary resource grind in the later parts of the game is good, because it gives something new to do for players who are well established in their ranch. The execution however could have been done much better. In my perfect version in my head, materials would have to be gathered by some sort of active player action in specific areas of the game and this system could still keep some of that RNG that currently exists. I know certain material in the game already demands you place a pump or a drill in a specific part of the ranch, but it ends up feeling like you are just running through the environments in order to access your drills/pumps instead of meaningfully interacting with the area.
Later rewards in Slime Rancher also often end up not being interesting or fun enough to warrant the grind to get them. Color palettes are cool and all, but more steady upgrades to the vacuum pack, stamina, jetpack, etc would be much more incentivizing. Instead of 5 different colors of teleporter, give me some new interesting items to play around with.
Another aspect that could be improved upon is that this game would have greatly benefitted from giving the player a bit more options in terms of automation. I believe the intention is not to make it possible for the farm to run itself, but I think having a little more automation could have helped give importance and priority to the secondary material grind I had mentioned earlier.
Lastly, the world of Slime Rancher is really fun and cool to explore, but I wish there were more ways to interact with the environment. Most areas you end up running through feel more like a safari rather than wilderness for the rancher to tame. One thing that the later half of the game nails is the introduction of the Glass Desert. Its a dynamic environment where fire balls and fire slimes will occasionally rain down from the sky and this impacts how a player interacts with this environment without making exploration not fun. The glass desert also introduces some puzzles that if completed help you manipulate the surrounding environment. It's genuinely great and I just wish that more of the environments in this game had the same amount of interactivity that this one did.
Overall I enjoyed my time with Slime Rancher. The first half of the game is exceptional, and while it fumbles a bit in the later half, if you are a life sim fan I would have no trouble recommending this game to you.

- This review is edited and now takes into account the epilogue added Patch 5. For a quick summary of the changes I am making, this patch addresses all of my issues with the games ending, so I have revised that paragraph. I decided to add extra notes as well about the performance patches for Act three, but as this is a review of MY experience with the game, I kept the majority of that part of the review the same.

Baldur's Gate 3 absolutely blew me away and ate up so much of my time this year. On the first week of the PS5 release, I sank an ungodly amount of time into this game, exploring every corner of Act I and trying to pick up on all of the diverse mechanics present. As someone who has never played DND before or any of the previous Larian Studios games, there was a bit of a learning curve, but that didn't matter; I was immediately immersed in everything Baldur's Gate 3 had to offer. For me, Baldur's Gate 3 offered an experience I so rarely have in games today. When I played Baldur's Gate 3, it felt magical.

Maybe it's odd to use the phrase magical to describe a video game, but I mean it sincerely. As someone who plays a lot of games and has had his fair share of experience with all sorts of RPGs, Baldur's Gate 3 feels special in the way that it is distinctly different from most of the other games in the genre. My largest gripe with most RPGs is the lack of consequences to the arbitrary choices they present to you. In games like Skyrim, you can be the Dragonborn, an assassin of the Dark Brotherhood, the Jarl of Whiterun, and the most powerful mage in the land. None of this means anything in the terms of the main narrative of the game. They are all side stories, disconnected in any meaningful way to the main storyline and your character's development/role within that story. Obviously I have played other RPGs since the release of Skyrim and this is a problem that permeates most RPGs at some level. There is simply no way to account for every single action you have taken as a player and have it meaningfully contribute to the narrative of the story. When I say Baldur's Gate 3 is magical, I say this because for a lot longer than I expected, I couldn't see this problem within the game. The game was a black box. Every thread I pulled on, even the most absurd ones, had some sort of worldly consequence, or was at least referenced back to in some meaningful way. It felt like this game was something that should have been impossible to make, and I absolutely loved it. The façade I'm describing does eventually show itself to be just that, a façade, the further into the game you get and the more choices and decisions you stack upon each other. As I progressed far into Act 2 and Act 3 it became a lot easier to make out the cogs in the system just as I had seen in all the other RPGs I had played. But at that point I was so sold on this game, so invested in the characters including my own avatar, that it didn't bother me. I was still determined to do everything and save as many people as possible on the Sword Coast, and after 140 something hours on my first playthrough I did just that. Unfortunately, the game does suffer a bit in Act 3, and really that is my only complaint with this game.

I had heard Act 3 of Baldur's Gate 3 did not stack up as well as the first 2 acts of the game. It was a long time until I reached the point where I could see it, but by the end of the game I had some noticeable experiences where I felt like the game could have handled its story threads better. The patch I was playing on at the time also had significant performance issues with Act 3 as well. It never ruined my experience, but at times it did take me out of the game. As I understand, these performance issues have been largely addressed post patch 5, but for the purposes of my review I was still impacted prior to this with Act 3.

Post patch 5, I absolutely love the ending of this game. The recently added epilogue was a much needed piece to the narrative. It brought each party members storyline to a much more satisfying end point, and it felt extremely personalized to me. It was exactly the ending I was hoping for and felt so fitting to my in-game experience and narrative I had been building in my head. I wish it had been there from the launch of the game, but I'm extremely grateful its here now.

I would also like to specifically compliment each of the writers and voice actors for the party members. Every single one of their storylines is compelling, and every single performance given is amazing. It's rare for an entire cast to knock their characters out of the park, but they all wildly succeeded. I loved them all.

To wrap this long review up: Baldur's Gate 3 was the most jaw dropping RPG i have played in a long time. My time with the game was some of my favorite in recent memory and I already feel that bittersweet sadness you experience when something you love has come to an end. It seems Larian Studios keeps adding things in updates to the game, so it'll be a game I continue to keep my eye on for a long time still.

It's a particular scourge on the video game industry that old games are not easily accessible without emulation. Since I don't have a PC build, I had to resort to paying more money than I should have to get just the PS2 disc with no case included. The Silent Hill 2 experience however was shockingly worth the hassle.

Silent Hill 2 is old and while it is one of the most prominent examples of its genre, psychological horror, you rarely ever see a game that looks quite like it. In game, the developers worked wonders with their use of shadow. Its impossible to completely hide that signature polygonal roughness that comes with the PS2 era games, but the first time I wandered the halls of the Silent Hill's apartment buildings I was completely blown away by how good the game looked. The fully rendered FMVs also work extremely well for this game. Graphically, they're leagues above what we see in engine, yet they have a surreal uncanny quality that feel intentional rather than a failing to capture realism. Silent Hill 2 is also rife with visual symbolism and absurdity that perfectly aligns with its visual style. Apartment doors leading directly into brick walls, basements below basements below basements, inky black pits that you must delve into over and over again, and water everywhere you don't want water to be. In this way, Silent Hill 2 creates a nightmarish vision that works because of the limitations on the hardware it runs on, not despite it. The visuals are also helped out a lot by the amazing audio work done for this game.

Out of all the things I was expecting out of Silent Hill 2, I was most surprised and floored by the quality of its audio design. I had previously watched a lets play of this game some 10 years prior to me actually picking up the game for myself, and while I remembered some of the visuals from that experience 10 years ago, I completely had missed out on the audio design. Despite not having headphones, this game still sounds amazing. I'm not just talking about the soundtrack produced by Akira Yamaoka, which may just be an all time favorite of mine now. While playing Silent Hill 2, you will experience a large range of sounds that get under your skin. At times you will hear a disorienting cacophony when faced with some of the monsters in this game, other times you'll be alone in the dark with the sound of dripping water that always sounds like its coming from the back of your real life room. Several times I actually paused the game just to make sure my house hadn't sprung a leak. It delighted me, it terrified me, it disoriented me, it made me paranoid. By even modern day standards, the audio design team deserves the highest of praises.

I don't want to conclude this review without at least touching on the story of Silent Hill 2, yet I don't want to delve to deep into either. It is easily the most interesting part of the entire game, but if I even dip my toes into it I know I'll lose the rest of the plot of this review by gushing over it. If you haven't yet played the game and would like to, just do it whatever way you can. The story covers extremely heavy topics so beware. I will say this: even knowing the big twist at the end of the game, I was still heavily invested in everything the game was presenting to me narratively. The effectiveness of the narrative is not placed in where it ends up, but rather the maliciously winding path it takes you on.

22 years late to the party, I don't have much to say about Silent Hill 2 that hasn't already been said 1000 times over. Everything that has aged poorly with the game has been outmatched by the wild success it finds with what it was trying to accomplish. Even by modern day standards this game stands above most psychological horror games. It's rare to see a game sync up audio, visual, and story telling themes so effectively to deliver one cohesive product, but Silent Hill 2 does it all.