Gameplay wise this game has a wonderfully executed loop that kept me coming back to every level until I hit that platinum rank. Its challenging but doesnt demand perfection, but mechanically it leave plenty of room to pursue it if you want to. The visual novel story is what keep this game from being perfect. The story is wonderfully, painfully, and I believe intentionally, 2000s anime cringe. It can be tough to it through some times, especially when Neon Violet is in the picture. However it the weight of the story I take issue with. Even with the serious stakes later expressed in the story, the emotional weight of the story just never matches up, and it definitely never matches the intensity of the gameplay. All in all I'd still have absolutely no problem recommending this game to anyone and enjoyed almost all my time with it.

This is probably one of the best and most interesting single player Star Wars games to come out and its potential is exciting. However, every time I boot this game up to keep playing though it I get put off by either glitches or just general jankiness that happens when platforming. Facial capture also is off putting to me as well. Lastly, having played Sekiro within the last year (what I consider to be the best in class for this sort of combat style), it makes me want to play the mechanically better version and just restart Sekiro. While I mostly listed negatives about the game, this game does a lot of things well, it just could be a lot better.

Returnal is a game I never thought I would beat. It's first stage and boss are so brutal I feel most players will spend most of their total playtime stuck here. Once you start to master the game and beat the first boss, the rest of the game starts to come significantly easier. Because of this extreme difficulty curve its hard for me to try to convince people who have given up on it to try again. They will most likely fail, and fail, and fail until hours later when they finally get it. I can't in good conscious say to those people struggling here that they have to or should suffer through this in order to make it through to the end. But, if somehow you do claw your way out of the first stage like Selene fighting through this impossible loop, I think the game is absolutely special and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since I beat it.

The art direction in this game is absolutely mesmerizing. Glowing flora and fauna in a dark rainy forest, a giant lifeless desert that hides a tall mountain among its rock formation and sandstorms, gigeresque city scapes that blend mechanical veins with stone, its all done fantastically well. I loved being in the ever-shifting world of Returnal, and I feel sad that the difficulty/pacing of the game had me spend so much more time in the forest rather than the later areas.

Gameplay is fast paced and addicting, and while it gets easier to overcome the more you play it, it never becomes easy. It demands your attention all the way through. The bullet hell attacks are done in cool shapes and styles and keep the pressure on always. The bosses, despite them being very few, were all absolutely fantastic in design and mechanics. After I beat this game, I wanted to play more. The story was also a very unexpected plus for me in the end.

I wont spoil the entire game's story here on a review, but while I was expecting much more concrete progression in the logical events of the story, I was instead given something more unexpected. The story is like the world, illogical and impossible to fully understand, but the focus of the story is much more interested in the emotions of the player and the character. Symbolism, allusion, and subtext are king when it comes to putting everything together. I haven't played a game that pulled off a story quite like this ever. It's very impressive with what they were able to tell with what little direct story telling they provide.

All in all I loved this game. I can't in good consciousness give it a perfect review because of the issues with difficulty and pacing I outlined in the first paragraphs, but I would have no problem recommending this game to anyone with a PS5.

-PS, the adaptive trigger alt fire is EASILY the best and most innovative feature I've seen with a controller ever and I'd love to see more of it.

Sifu is an unrelenting challenge that demands a lot of learning from the player in order to complete and later master the game. Its a daunting experience if you are unfamiliar with Sloclap's combat loop, but if you give the game and yourself enough time you will come to love it. This is a game that will inherently turn some players away by its difficulty. Similar to Sekiro its a game where there are no shortcuts to success: you have to learn the skills necessary to win. Combat is fast and flashy, and there is an incredible sense of empowerment when you dominate an enemy. I'd be cautious to recommend to friends who might not want to commit the time or effort, but for anybody who is looking for an incredibly fun and visually stunning challenge, look no further than Sifu.

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.

Having restarted my journey with this game recently on Hard Mode, it kills me to see this game not get the love I really think it deserves. The game is absolutely gorgeous to look at, and most importantly it is incredibly fun to play. Navigating through these environments as fast and stylishly as your character does it is always satisfying and rewarding. The movement mechanics are the heart of the experience with this game and it never gets dull. Every environment in this game is like a beautiful surrealist painting, and generally the art direction is a masterclass throughout.

For a game explicitly about the impending doom of your planet, the game offers a surprising amount of levity in world and character design that does not interfere with the story this game is trying to tell. The team at Heart Machine are top of their class in emotional story telling, and Solar Ash is no exception. The swelling music as you make your final runs at a boss will always stick in my head when thinking about this game; it's practically magical. By the time you come to the end of your journey in the Ultravoid, the game offers a deep meaningful take away message that I wasn't expecting but absolutely appreciated. What feels particularly great about playing a Heart Machine story is that the themes and story beats, while they may take place in far off alien places, feel incredibly personal to the developers and insanely human. The game is not perfect by any means and could certainly tighten up a few aspect relating to smaller enemy encounters and rewards given by exploring the environment. All that being said, this game is the first 3D title the studio has put out and in light of all the things the team absolutely nailed with this game, it should be far more celebrated and appreciated. It may not be as tightly designed as Hyper Light Drifter, but it is absolutely a majorly positive contribution to Heart Machines catalogue that I'll easily recommend to anybody looking for a stylish movement platformer.

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 game is important." This is what I think every time I reflect on my time spent playing Outer Wilds. What I mean by this is that Outer Wilds is one of those games that I played at the right place, at the right time, and feels as though it has significantly impacted me in a way few games really do. I will keep this review as spoiler free as possible so that others may enjoy this game as I have.

The design philosophy at the heart of Outer Wilds is to give the player a large physics-based solar system sandbox, and let the player progress through their own self motivation. There is no path, there is no directive; just explore and take away what you learned. The culmination of all that you learn in Outer Wilds will ultimately lead you to the end credits. There are plenty of threads to pull on, each revealing an interesting part of the history, mystery, or mechanics of the Outer Wilds universe. But if you are worried about becoming too lost in this game, the developers have a system to address this as well. All of the story threads are cleverly catalogued in your ships computer, and will always provide a starting point for those who become "stuck" in the game. I put the word "stuck" in quotations because exploration and trying new approaches, even if unfruitful or uneventful, are core experiences of the game and can even be highlights of the experience. The game certainly gains momentum when you find the right thread to pull on and suddenly find yourself with the knowledge to pull another three, but your "failures" in exploring this universe never take away from your progress and are just as important to the experience overall. It's important to note that the key to progression in Outer Wilds is largely based on player knowledge. What keeps you from progressing to the end of the game is the lack of knowledge as to what the end game even is and how you could reach it. It's a truly brilliantly designed system that keeps the player coming back for more and makes all progress feel distinctly earned by the player. Even if you choose to forgo attempting to complete the story of Outer Wilds, the game still succeeds in being a massively fun outer-space physics simulation. Once you learn the fundamentals of it all, you are free to attempt any wild feat of physics you can imagine. This can allow you to get to places or see things in ways most likely unintended by the developers, and that alone for many players is exciting. I cannot praise this game enough when it comes to design philosophy or game mechanics, and I have to give similar praise to the art direction, sound design, and music as well.

Outer Wilds has an aesthetic that is equal parts comfy, mysterious, beautiful, and at times cosmically scary. These things would seem to conflict with each other, but Outer Wilds strings these things together beautifully. Your spaceship is a loving mix of ancient alien technology and wood planks. At some point you will switch your audio telescope away from the gentle frequency of a fellow explorer's banjo to hear an inscrutable Nomai signal. When you are admiring the universe around you, you will watch distant stars blink out of existence in beautiful showers that will ultimately leave you more alone in the cold dark of space. When you feel bold your sense of confidence and security will entirely abandon you when you leave your ship in the middle of empty space and you are left to float alone with just the sounds of your suit and your breathing to keep you company. It is truly a one of a kind experience that gives the large, miraculous, and deadly vacuum of space the considerations it deserves. The soundtrack of this game is in a league of its own and deserves to be considered among the best of video game OSTs. I often find myself putting on the Outer Wilds soundtrack when I need to peacefully drift off into sleep or reflect on something important in my life. Andrew Prahlow gave such a lovingly crafted soundtrack to this game and for that I am sincerely grateful to him.

There are more things positives that I'd like to include but I do not want to go detail for the sake of players who have yet to explore this game. Just know that the planet designs and take aways from this game are all wonderful and deserve their own separate analyses and essays (if you're interested I know there is a surplus of exactly these types of videos on Youtube).

My review is one of many that have universally praised this game in every way possible, and I'm proud to join that chorus of voices. Outer Wilds is a lovingly crafted experience that has been the subject of a lot of acclaim and romanticism from the community. The developers should be proud of what they created; it is truly in a league of its own. If you're still reading and are on the fence about getting Outer Wilds, please play this game. It has been one of my most significant gaming experiences in the last 5 years, and it could be one of yours too.

Previously I had reviewed Hunt: Showdown as a game I really wanted to enjoy but was put off by the poor performance on consoles. While the portion about console performance is still a large problem with the game, in its current state it runs in a much more acceptable state. I have put in significantly more time into this game since my last review, and I have had to reevaluate my thoughts on this game. Now, I absolutely adore this game.

At the time of this review, its been a little bit since the Tide of Shadows event has ended, and it was during this event that I put a large amount of playtime into this game once again. When I talk about this game to my friends in an attempt to get them to purchase the game as well, I always say the same thing: "This is probably the coolest game I have ever played". The commitment that the Hunt: Showdown team has put into nailing the aesthetic of this game is nothing short of phenomenal. There are very few games that dedicate so much of their efforts to nailing their specific style of how their game is portrayed that the only other close contender I can think of is Persona 5 Royal. There are a couple games that have had their take on Southern American Gothic Horror but none have been quite as well realized as Hunt: Showdown. From the map design, monster design, gameplay elements, perks, guns, and music; everything forms a cohesive whole that entrances me every time I play. The game is rot and despair; a hopeless fight against the odds. Even after mastering the systems of the enemy AI (which will still surprise you and manage to hinder your hunt countless hours into the game), your ears will always pricked up and head on a swivel for the other hunter teams in the Bayou with you. Its almost always a possibility that the back of your head is facing the receiving end of a rusty single shot sniper and you could be none the wiser. The folks over at Crytek on the Hunt: Showdown team have my immense respect for what they were able to achieve with this game artistically, with a special shoutout to the sound team and the Port Sulphur band, a fictional band within the universe of Hunt that always comes out absolute bangers. While for me the biggest draw in for Hunt: Showdown is their commitment to the aesthetic, the game is more than the sum of its artistic choices.

From a gameplay and mechanical perspective, this game also knocks it out of the park. It may have some of the well established extraction shooter DNA that has become a staple of the genre, but Hunt: Showdown manages to shake it up enough to feel as though it has its own distinct identity within the genre. Fighting through the dimly lit swamp with grandpa guns is both scary and thrilling on both the sending and receiving ends of conflict. Death is quick and punishing and emphasizes the players fragility as just a man amongst the decay and despair of the bayou. Sound is your greatest ally and the game is littered with sound traps that will trip up even the most experienced hunters and give away their position. With the game having such a heavy emphasis on sound, it impresses me how the Hunt: Showdown team plays around with its soundscapes to vastly changes the gameplay experience. From the last event, Tide of Shadows, they introduced the thunderstorm soundscape. In most games it would be a seemingly small thing to change the ambient weather of the game, but in Hunt when there is pounding rain and crackling thunder it provides unique opportunities for attackers to make more aggressive pushes on teams without being heard a mile away. The Hunt: Showdown team has also started to explore variations in how they approach boss design with the introduction of the Rotjaw wild type crocodile boss that came along with the Tide of Shadows event. It is a boss unattached to the main points of interest on the map and once found its a lower risk lower reward bounty for a player to pick up. Many developers are afraid to toy around with their established mechanics in such drastic ways, but the Hunt: Showdown team does it so boldly and with a purpose that even if it is not perfected yet at time of release its always fun and interesting to experience.

Hunt: Showdown is an amazing package that I'm always excited to see more from. Console performance aside, this is a game you should check out and keep an eye on in the future. It's already a great product, but the sky is the limit on its potential.