It's like the game is too afraid to do anything interesting. In order to avoid the game becoming confusing or frustrating to the player, Donut Country only scratches the surfaces of the mechanical potential it offers. Sure, the aesthetics and polish is definitely noteworthy and should be praised, but the puzzle design lacks any flavor and results in the game becoming a boring slideshow to play.

SPOILER AHEAD

Throwing a boss fight at the end of the game doesn't really radiate any confidence in the game's design. It's disappointing to see a developer introduce a bizarre, "Katamari-like" premise and aura to the game, only for them to fall back to conventional game set pieces.

Lobotomy-core.
A frankenstein's parody has been birthed from excessive market research. Pure and utter slob, the gunk is thrown wayside to the masses and the public seem to love it! Sure, I can see shimmers of gusto and vibes past it's mechanically stapled together body, but is it really worth to sit next to the soulless stank just to breathe in those few and far-between moments of joy?
I feel for the paranoid hostility players have shown of the maybe or maybe-not generative AI, but it just seems like the devs just ripped them off by hand and lol.
7 million copies sold in just 5 days... and in the end, the general masses really do only care about a feature-checklist stapled on a clipboard that reads the following: It shall have combat, survival mechanics, resources, base-building mechanics, crafting mechanics, catching mechanics, climbing mechanics, stamina, an open world, co-op multiplayer, skill trees, leveling and progression. Does it work well together? Absolutely not. In the end, it feels like you are just playing 5 ripped-off games melted together into one hotpot of mechanics and rules and nothing more. No identity, no message, nothing. A silent shell that just spits out the steam chart trends back at you.
How is anyone supposed to feel but indifferent to a game that says nothing and dares nothing?

The climbing in this game is great, lets get that out of the way real quick. Okay now that that's done how about that fucking soundscape huh? The audio team really went off in this one. Easily the most stand out part of the game for me. At any given point you can close your eyes and be taken away noticing usually at least 4 different layered, but unobtrusive, sounds. It was obvious that this was something the team cared a lot about.

Beyond that the game is quite enjoyable. Breezy runtime that doesn't overstay it's welcome. The last chapter did some pretty interesting things with the core mechanics that I really liked and wish the game had done more of, but it is what it is. Each chapter brings something unique to the table and they boast a lot of variety. The 4th chapter was probably my favorite. Definitely would recommend this to anyone looking for a quick game to occupy a night, or two, or three in my case.

There's a lot to write about with Alan Wake II, especially considering that writing about this game requires writing about the first one, as well as Control and Max Payne to some extent. I wrote a decent amount in my newsletter, but that's PAID CONTENT BABY so here's the basics:

Narratively, it's a legacy piece for Remedy as much as a standalone story. It ties together so many things from the studio's history in such a satisfying way, and now that I've played through Max Payne, I'm wondering what they would've done differently here if Rockstar wasn't holding the rights to the IP. It's already pretty blatant that Alex Casey is Max Payne, at least to some extent, but I wonder if they'd go further if they still had full privileges to the character.

Mechanically, it surpasses the things that people thought were lacking from the first game. It flips between insidiously scary, deeply conspiratorial, and intently comedic at a moment's notice, and goes above and beyond to do so in a way that feels unlike anything you've seen before, and only possible through the medium it uses. This is probably the best case I've ever seen for a triple-A game being artistically driven and unashamed of being a game that's trying to say something instead of mimicking film to cheaply emulate an emotional experience.

Personally, it's an incredibly story about art and what it means to be an artist, especially one with an audience and an obligation towards that audience. What does consent mean in an artistic context, both in terms of your work being taken from you, and in terms of who and what you use as inspiration and means to create that work? What obligations do you have to yourself as a creator, to your health and to the people around you, and to your creations if they remain unfinished or unsatisfied?

It's imperfect, sure, but there's no way I can give it marks off for "having puzzles" or "the combat being hard sometimes" when this is something I'm going to be thinking about as often as I inevitably will be. I love these characters, I love this world, I love the implications of everything happening here, and I love that a game like this can exist. I'm beyond excited for whatever Remedy's going to do next, and forever from here on out.

Rockstar's involvement in this is blatant, and makes it a rockier experience in some ways, but also a more balanced one than the first game. I think replacing Sam Lake's likeness with a more gritty every-man model sets up a clear expectation; it takes itself far more seriously and removes the humor of the comically brooding protagonist, opting instead for more classic Rockstar gags like "old lady with a shotgun," and "escort mission with a really annoying guy," leaving little room for Remedy's sensibilities aside from the live action skits here and there in the background.
It feels more dangerous - and subsequently less tasteful - in a way that only an early 2000s game can, featuring full nudity, a relatively sex-driven plot, and a lot of questionable schizophrenia aestheticism. It also feels padded by trying to be more narratively fulfilling, where the first game feels groundbreaking and fun to play without the need for unnecessary twists or filler levels. There are more cutscenes this time, segments where you replay an entire level from Mona's perspective with the same dialogue and setpieces, and somehow feels longer than the first game when I think back on it. At the same time, the action and resource pools are more balanced, so it took less time and fewer quicksaves to get from level to level. There are a ton of tradeoffs, and in the end I can't say I prefer one to the other when I try to compare their strengths and weaknesses.
I'm curious what the game would look like if it had stayed exclusively in Remedy's hands, but you can also see where Rockstar is trying to pry the series away and turn it into their platonic ideal of Max Payne with the third game. I'm excited to finally play it for myself and see how it innovates, and if it stands alone enough not to tarnish the things I like so much about Remedy's style and the first game.

“An American tragedy. An odyssey of debt, of grief, of broken promises, of hope. A painful, melancholic fable composed of fables and more fables, spreading out and weaving in and out of itself. A dream ebbing back and forth between memory and fantasy. A plea for you to care about something.”

...This was my original review for Kentucky Route Zero. I still think it’s a good description. But on consideration, I feel as though I need to be bold and say it: Kentucky Route Zero is not only one of my favorite games, but one of my favorite things ever made.

This is not an assessment of quality. I am not telling you what to feel. I am telling you how I feel. And Kentucky Route Zero makes me feel a way.

I specifically say “Favorite Thing”, because Kentucky Route Zero doesn’t affect me like a game. When I think about many of my favorite games, I often think of them as games. They are full of mechanics, of challenges, of systems. That’s certainly not all games are, and games can be many things, but in the capacity that they affect me, enchant me, or fascinate me, it is often within this vague category of “game”. But Kentucky Route Zero is different. To call it “my favorite game” and leave it at that misses something. It’s certainly a game, but it doesn’t make me feel the way games usually make me feel. First and foremost, Kentucky Route Zero is a story. It’s unlike most. The main body of this story is a game, but it’s also a multimedia saga. There’s something quintessential permeating my experience of Kentucky Route Zero that transcends that category.

It is a hauntological melancholy. It conjures a world more like a memory than a reality. Kentucky Route Zero tells the story of people who seem familiar but you’ve never met, with jobs that were never really secure, in situations that could never happen, in a version of Kentucky that has never existed. Magical realism constructs a vision not of reality, but of memory, of a sensate fabric that you swear could have been but never was. Americana is a mythic entity made visible, standing in front of me within Kentucky Route Zero, and it’s on its last breaths.

It’s a hopeful story. That doesn’t mean it’s happy. The world around you is a wasteland. Everyone is dying. Everyone is suffering. Everything is weighed down by debt, pulled deep down into pools of darkness. To live is to work, work, and die. Except… there are other ways to live. There always have been. Should we move on? I think the answer is clear. But that doesn’t make the pain go away. We have to be willing to feel both grief and hope in the same breath.

All of its blemishes are dismissable. Fleeting problems with UI, incidentally clunky writing, weird mechanical tangents, overwhelming scope, these melt away when I take a moment to remember what Kentucky Route Zero is and feel the frisson travel up and down my skin. I'm trying to not be too longwinded here, but it's hard. I can't get into specifics. So I wax poetic instead. I could write thousands of words on every minute I spent with Kentucky Route Zero and still feel like I was forgetting to say something. It is a multitudinous masterpiece, refracting and reflecting endlessly, timelessly, quietly.

Kentucky Route Zero is one of my favorite things.