In 2013, before such a thing as "media literacy" was in my repertoire, I played Bioshock Infinite. I walked into the game being excited from all the pre-release trailers and teasers and behind-the-scenes peeks - and the sad, sad reality is that most of what I had seen was not the game that I or anyone got, but sawdust on the floor, scraped from the rough surface of the featureless wooden plank that is now left.

I slogged through Bioshock Infinite. For 30 hours. I had my golden guns, and my pre-order bonuses, and I died against a ghost a bunch, and when it was over I woke up and felt nothing. In a last spark, started up the DLC I had also pre-ordered, and eventually quit, and didn't touch it again for 8 years.

Now here I am. I played about a third of the game as a refresher and- Now it's worse! This game is the most harrowing, violent dissociative psychosis I have ever played (barring Postal 2), hollow and subtly reprehensible. It is deeply disquieting to be in the body that plays this thing and was actively detrimental to my mental health.

I gave a small mercy-star on top of my desired half-star rating just for the art direction and for the poor, unfortunate souls that must have killed their careers trying to save this cluster car crash of a game. Do NOT play it. It was never good, and has only gotten worse.

I'm biased on this one- I translated it to English. But, yes, OFF is good: A triumph of boundary-breaking aesthetic and off-beat narrative depth. A trailblazer in a few respects too, taking up condemnations of game violence as early as 2008.

Its puzzles are lovely notebook-and-pen riddles, with some hard nuts to crack; where it falters is its combat, which is at worst tedious and at best negligible once you've reached a high enough level.

Even so, this is one of the RPG Maker game greats of its day, and is still worth revisiting now.

A delightful stealth game that spearheaded some major design-shifts in the genre so subtly that most people don't even seem to know who copied it, or that it exists. Further: The first stealth game I had fun with in my life! I loved the intricate little gears that turn inside both the moment-to-moment mechanical interaction with the playspace and the satirical plot and its characters.

My one gripe with it was the light amount of jank that rears its head every so often- I recall sometimes thinking I had saved my game only to find that something malfunctioned, making me lose progress. Of all the things to fuck up, you don't want it to be your save system!

All the same, this gets a big recommendation from me. It's got charm, and character, and a big exciting toolkit to use on its world, and it's highly affordable these days to boot.

A deeply affecting work of audiovisual art that washes over you and takes a part of you as tribute. The cynicism of its story manages to somehow not dismantle its emotional core, but strengthen it, showing the signs of a game that has been hurt by the world and screams that hurt, asking you to examine yourself in relation to it.

Nothing else looks, sounds, or feels like Dujanah. The half-star taken off my rating is owed to repeated issues with bugs during my more recent playthroughs - Maybe I will never get to play it in its purest form again. Maybe that's okay.

The act of existing as a player character in this game is disquieting. The excellently constructed silent-film shader that swallows the entire world creates dark nooks and crannies that you shudder to consider the contents of. The tension can be cut with a knife, and when shit hits the fan, the very shape of the horror is difficult to parse.

The half-star was removed just due to the game being very slow and quiet when more horrific scenarios could have done it good. Still: Can't wait to see where the "Letters to a Friend" series goes from here.

Beeswing sketches the corners and boundaries of empathy from a string of memories. It's about a lot of things, and it is all of them effortlessly. Its art is warm and welcoming, its wit cold, drab, but real.

Also, when I was unable to find the final bullet-point on Beeswing's short but worthwhile list of people to see and things to do, I hit up the dev and he sent me a in-game screenshot postcard with the location written on it.

Thank you Jack! Also this game is wonderful.

Half-Life 2 is, by definition, my favourite game- Insofar as I revisit it more frequently than literally any other. To this day, 14 years after I first got it, I will occasionally fire it up.

It's hard to put my finger on exactly why I feel this pull for HL2 specifically, but I can wager a guess: I think that this game is beautifully bite-sized in its pacing, meaning you can hop into any of its chapters and know that you have an absorbing gameplay challenge ahead of you. Every chapter has its own set of problems to face and its own vibe, and I've frequently found myself itching for a specific part and needing to replay it.

The difficulty curve is also remarkable: Rather than being a steady incline or decline, it has peaks and valleys that smoothly bring you back up to speed even if you've put it down a while.

And all of this is not even to mention the story! Sure, the Source Engine style walk-and-talk cutscenes are a bit of a pace-killer, but the world of this game can support it, collecting aspects of some of the biggest stories in science fiction into a cohesive thing, and supporting it with extremely solid, contrasting environmental designs, a sallow colour palette and an extremely dense atmosphere, owed to its sound design and music.

I don't know another game that I have so little bad to say about. It's a piece of history and, somehow, holds up nearly 20 years after its release.

Rogue Legacy is one of the earliest titles in the now well-trodden genre of Roguelikes- And a lot of the gripes I have with it today stem from iteration having led to unfair comparison.

When I say this is a "Roguelike", I mean that is what it is, in its purest, blandest form. Back then we didn't know yet that attaching a bog-standard run-and-jump mechanic, sword-slashing and upgrade system wasn't enough to make your game last.

I have fairer issue to take with how bereft this game is of interesting, or memorable, or even well-designed characters. You barely meet any NPCs, and those you do meet lack any deeper characterisation. And sure, I shouldn't expect a shakespearean plot, but something to hold onto does help with making your game feel worthwhile. Also, the protagonist starts off as a bargain-bin, nondescript "hero" and, with every death, turns more and more into an unfunny, borderline eugenicist joke at the expense of disabled people.

This game's biggest flaws, however, are its level design and its lack of visual variety. The procedurally generated rooms blend into each other and are terribly balanced in their difficulty (or lack thereof, depending on the room). You begin to see way, way too many recolours of enemies and even bosses as the game progresses (and it really isn't a long game if you know what you're doing). There is nothing remarkable or interesting about the environments, characters or enemies other than a vague sense of "medieval fantasy" that goes unquestioned and barely explored.

In short: This really didn't hold up. I couldn't tell you if Rogue Legacy 2 is any better, but the first one is not worth revisiting.

Man, back in the day, this one was the shit.

However, as with most early Roguelikes, time wasn't kind to it. The level generation system, despite drawing from a very limited set of map parts, can make some goofy-ass mistakes and place important objectives in unreachable locations. Since RoR is made in Game Maker, you also experience slowdown if too many elements are on-screen at once. Particle effects stacking quickly makes it impossible to parse what the fuck is happening on your screen, leading to unforeseeable deaths.

Also, once you've unlocked and stacked certain upgrades enough (getting lucky with the RNG), death is barely a problem anymore! In which case all that stands between you and victory is just a slow fight against framedrops.

Why did I give it 3 stars then? Nice spritework, great music and just some cool character variety. There were a lot of ways of playing RoR back then and all of them were fun while they lasted. The attack cooldown system was an interesting carry-over from different genres and created an appealing rhythm to play. There was also an intriguing sense of "threading the needle" between sufficiently upgrading yourself and hopping from world to world before the difficulty rises unmanagably. It had a thrill to it! Co-op was also good fun- It makes me nostalgic for an internet that no longer exists.

Still, by this point, Risk of Rain 2 is your safer bet.

Briefly entertaining and certainly cathartic - at least when you're one of those non-specific people who've lost 24+ hours of their life 100%-ing Johnathan Blownathon's "The Witness" for no reason other than a craving for a slow and aimless dopamine dripfeed while you're at your most suicidally-depressed.

Some genuinely very funny moments in this one, and quite creative - where it stumbles and falls flat on its face is before its ending, where it invokes the exact type of tedium it aimed to parody. Please, learn from Kikiyama: A maze where you can't at any point see the entirety of it, where all walls look the exact fucking same, is NOT GOOD DESIGN, and will frustrate your players, no matter how hard you strain your eyelids winking at them.