Supergiant doesn't miss. Fantastic art, world building, and music ect. Probably just barely my least favorite of theirs but obviously with Pyre being a 4.5 that's less an indictment on Pyre and more a praise to the rest of their catalog. I do think it's impressive how they keep, what essentially is the same progression loop the whole game, fresh the whole time. Always at the perfect time, a new character, a new mechanic, a new little twist to keep it fresh and engaging. It really continuously reveals itself to be immaculately paced the deeper you get into it. Choosing who to liberate from your party is also brilliantly done both mechanically and narratively, the balance of wanting to liberate characters you like vs trying not to liberate characters your best in combat with. The conversation of Supergiant being a premium studio in the industry is way long overdue.

The mods and outfits are completely unnecessary additions, it's honestly subtraction by addition in my opinion. It also has a distractingly bad soundtrack. I do really like being able to see the physical cars in the garage as opposed to the pictures in 5 and 6. But then it easily has the worst looking garage and menus of the three Xbox one Forzas in my opinion, it also removed the forzavista. But either this or Motorsport 6 does have the best driving, 7 also has the best graphical fidelity of the three obviously, but at points I feel like it's colors don't pop quite as well as the other two.

Forza Horizon 5 has it all, a gigantic map, hundreds of activities, a roster full of the most exciting cars in the world and almost instant access to all of it. You want for nothing in Horizon but when you want for nothing you end up having little to strive and work towards.

Horizon 5 is still a great game, it looks great, sounds great, plays great, it's well made, it's polished and you could get lost in it for hours at a time or just hop in for a race a day. But it didn't quite hook me after playing Horizon 3 and Horizon 4 for hundreds of hours each. Maybe that's just a bit of fatigue on my part but ultimately I feel there's just too much Horizon 5 and too much all at once. Even going slow unlocking festival sites there's dozens and dozens of map markers in just a few hours and a garage full of half a million dollar sports cars almost instantly. I get that it provides full freedom in what you want to do and when you want to do it and even with that accelerated pace there's still hundreds of hours of content but the trade off is you don't really get to savor any of it. I have like 5million dollars in 25ish hours of playing but why buy cars when Horizon gives them out like candy. There's plenty of excitement to be found in playing but no excitement upon unlocking anything, no excitement on finally saving up to get that expensive Ferrari or Lamborghini after driving Golfs or beat up off-roaders for a while. You can only go so big with these games and I would love to see more purposeful and focused progression for Horizon 6 a bit more restraint in rewards, I just think Horizon is due for a bit of a change up.

Mario 64 × Dark Souls

Movement, physics, atmosphere, sound, and level design all are phenomenal. It's open ended design, paired with super high skill ceiling movement makes traversal, progress and finding little secrets and skips really rewarding. The negative side of that open ended level design and movement that let's players skip parts is there is nothing to get players back on track if they get lost, there were a handful of times I didn't know if I wasn't doing something right or was missing an ability, or figured out I got partly into an area I didn't have the ability for by breaking sequence a bit, for me its middle just lost a bit of focus. But it's worth a bit a wondering in the middle because so many of its elements are among the genres best, forget platformers, if every game had the movement and physics of Pseudoregalia they would be the better for it.

EDIT Actually can't begin to fathom how anyone played this before they added a map. Got lost/frustrated a handful of times WITH it.