This kinda rocked. I haven't played a CoD campaign since the first Black Ops and had heard good things about this, especially the campaign done by Raven Software. Certainly scratches that itch of well-polished, expensive-looking, run-and-gun shooter with barely any fluff. Cannot tell you what the campaign was about at all outside there being the big bad of Perseus, and it was a welcome surprise that they just let you be "evil" in the end and wipe out your original team that you've played the whole campaign with.

This is what they were crunching for?

The Callisto Protocol is a man drowning. He’s been swept out by the tides deeper than he can swim, and now I feel compelled to go and be the one who drags him back to shore. I’m not looking forward to it as I swim out there. This always ends badly. I know he’ll kick, and flail, and panic, and drag me under with him. But something compels me. I dip beneath the waves, gliding on the current. Every kick is met only with more water, never ground; it’s been a while since either of us has been able to touch bottom. I get to the man. All of the dread that I felt swimming up to him — the growing pit in my stomach warning me that he’d kill us both — fades as I get a hold of him. He’s calm. He doesn’t fight. He wants to be rescued, and he's coherent enough to tell me as much. So much worry on my end, and for nothing. We’re both going home, and my doubts were unfounded. The two of us make our way back to the shallows, and my heart swells. Nobody’s gonna believe this. I get to be the one who brings back the guy that everyone thought couldn't be saved.

We make it from the depths to a point where the ocean reaches our shins, at which point the man panics and submerges my head in about two feet of water until we both die. I knew I should have let the fucker drown.

What we’re looking at here is a bad start that leads into a remarkably strong middle, hitting an impressive stride just in time to trip and break both legs three hours before the finish line. But that middle section is good. It’s really good. It’s so good that I was ready to come in here and lord a massively inflated score over the heads of all of the doubters who didn’t get it. Reality hits hard when it hits, though, and there’s no denying that The Callisto Protocol just runs out at the end. It runs out of ideas, it runs out of money, it runs out of employee morale — it runs dry and it runs empty until the engine shears itself in half.

This is pretty, but a game "being pretty" hasn't impressed me for fifteen years now. Everything since the early-mid 2010s has given me this shrug-your-shoulders feeling of "yeah, I guess it looks good" and spurred little in me beyond that. I know it's a tired truism to trot out — "art direction is more important that graphical fidelity!", as if we don't all know that already — but even games from that era that were trying to look as realistic as the latest titles don't read as being all that different to me today. Honestly, I think the face-scan mocap shit that's everywhere in AAA games these days looks kind of bad; they're all sitting deep in that uncanny valley where everyone's head looks like it's got a video of the actor's face wrapped around it. Even with (perhaps due to an overreliance upon) all of the tech in place, some of these animations look incredibly bad. Here's a shot of Josh Duhamel's character screaming in agony as he gets an implant stuffed in his neck that hurts so bad that he has a heart attack and dies. It's silly. This is not an expression of pain. He's making a YouTube thumbnail face. Fuck, the source of that image is a YouTube thumbnail.

So, yes, this is all very technically impressive, but in practice it's all just bloom and haze and fog and I can't fucking see any of it because someone turned all the lights off. None of this sparks joy. Everything is gray and bland and devoid of life. There's nothing that even remotely scratches at iconic Dead Space setpieces like the Church of Unitology or the cryopod rooms, because the art direction on display is kind of shit. It's a just-so approximation of enough of Dead Space's elements to provoke familiarity, but it's off in a way that betrays the fact that Visceral was a team made up of a lot more people than just Glen Schofield. He isn't Visceral, and this isn't a spiritual successor to Dead Space. It's a spiritual regression.

But as desperately as this wants to stay latched to the teat of Dead Space, it isn't open to those who want the game to be Dead Space. This is a melee-focused system based around dodging, combos, and environment kills; Dead Space is a shooter based around positioning, dismemberment, and, uh, also environment kills. You've gotta meet The Callisto Protocol on its own terms; playing it like Dead Space is a losing position. You should be doing this for everything you consume, by the way. Don't try and cram a work you don't like into a box that doesn't fit it. Play the game that they designed, not the one you wish they'd designed. It took a little readjusting over the course of the entire opening hour of The Callisto Protocol, but I eventually came to understand what it was going for, how it wanted to be played. And I liked it.

Actually, I really liked it.

Combat is simple, but raw enough to be really satisfying once you get the loops figured out. Each fight will take place either as a gauntlet of enemies that pour out one after the other, or as group battles where you'll be caught between three or four monsters at a time. It's a game of dodging, waiting out the combos, finding an opportunity to strike, and then going all-out until you're forced to stop. Weave around a three-hit combo, dole out one of your own that takes the arm off of a monster, get whipped around by another, block his strike, take his legs out, get shoved, pop one with the new space you've been given; it's a wonderful little system that isn't hard to come to grips with, but is punishing enough to mean that eating a bad hit or two will send you back to your last checkpoint. The added complexity comes in the form of your GRP (pronounced as "grip") and your guns, though you'll be rocking with the starting magnum for the vast majority of the game. The GRP can pick up enemies and hazards to toss them around, and your guns are your combo enders. You can also open with gunfire if you've got some distance on the monsters; they've gotta come to you, so you can filter a group down a chokepoint and take one of them out before you're forced to rely on the melee to take you the rest of the way. Combo-ender gunshots can sever limbs, decapitate enemies, force staggers to open up rushdown opportunities, and generally just act as a major force-multiplier to make sure a crowd of monsters is never unmanageable. If you're thinking that this sounds like it's not really a system primed for a horror game, you'd be right. The Callisto Protocol sucks dick at being a horror game. As an action game, though — much like big brother Dead Space — I thought it was great.

Eventually, you'll progress to a point in the narrative where hitting the monsters for long enough will make worms rupture from their body. These worms need to be shot within a fairly tight window of time, or else they'll cause the monster in question to undergo a transformation that makes them bigger, stronger, and faster. You really do not want to let the worms make the monsters evolve. In theory, this is an interesting escalation — you can't afford to drag fights out the way that you could earlier — but as we've seen throughout this write-up, theory is distinct from practice.

In practice, the worms will always erupt from the same place; the generic guys who smack you around will have them erupt from their guts, and the spitters will have them erupt from their heads. These are the primary enemy types that you'll be fighting against for the overwhelming majority of your playthrough, so combat encounters go from frenetic punch-ups where you're desperately trying to make the right call to something that's solved by a flowchart: three or four hits always followed by a gut shot or a head shot, rinse and repeat. There's basically no reason to ever open up by firing your gun now that enemies can heal by evolving, which leaves you the options to fling the enemies with your gravity glove and hurt them a little bit, or to swing at them with the baton. The baton expends no resources, is fast, is always guaranteed to connect, is a safe option, and will open up enemies for the instakill gut/head shot in no time at all. So many tools, and no reason to use any of them besides the fucking stick. Everything was useful only two hours prior, so being boxed in to what's obviously an optimal strategy to repeat on every single monster serves only to squander a system that was working just fine before.

Where things really fall apart, however, is in the third act. Jacob, our protagonist, falls down a gutter or some shit into an underground area where all of the enemies are blind. They've got super-hearing, but they can't see. Firing a shot or swinging at one with your baton may as well spare you the ceremony of kicking off a fight and just reload your checkpoint the second you press the button; you'll get swarmed by too many monsters to deal with, and they'll chew through every resource you have before they kill you. What you have to do instead is pull a page from Joel Thelastofus's book and crouch-walk around while shivving these clicker expys to death. Unlike in The Last of Us, however, the shiv that you get has infinite uses, meaning that you can very easily just crouch-walk around and kill everything without alerting a single enemy. This is optimal. They don't hear you shivving them, even as Jacob grunts and growls and the monsters gurgle and shriek, and there's no reason to sneak past them; they still drop ammo and money and health packs just the same as everything else. If you could just blast your way through this section, it'd be over in thirty minutes; instead, you have to play the most boring stealth section ever devised by human hands and it takes upwards of two and a half hours.

You get back to the regular action combat in time for the game to end, but the damage is more than done at that point. You fight the exact same boss four times in the span of an hour, and his pattern is literally just doing right-hand swings. You hold left on the control stick and auto-dodge everything while shooting him once per dodge. It's so boring. I knew while I was going through the ridiculously long stealth segment that they were padding for time, but repeating the same boss fight four fucking times really gives it away to anyone who wasn't paying attention that they were running on empty. I went from itching for more in the middle act to wishing it would just hurry up and end by the start of the finale.

Jacob gets to the escape pods, meets a zombie warden who's managed to keep his personality (generic asshole), and then the zombie warden does the Resident Evil boss thing where he talks about having superior genetics and then turns into a big meat monster with glowing orange eyeball weakpoints. I'll take the opportunity now to point out that this game was written by two people. The lead writer has never worked on anything else in his entire life. There were five times as many employees dedicated to the face scanning as there were on the writing team. Remember that the facescanning looks like shit, so adjust your expectations for the quality of the writing accordingly. Whatever. Nobody was ever playing this for the story. It's still a weird choice for a game like this, though; with everything being told to you through audio logs and exposition from characters who have a clue what's going on, you'd think you'd want more hands on deck. Then again, the only thing anyone ever seems to say is "Jacob, go to [the place], I'll explain later", so you probably don't need to put too much effort into putting that together.

But my mind keeps wandering back to the thought that the people at Striking Distance were working twelve hour days, seven days a week — and for what? What about The Callisto Protocol demanded such brutal hours for such a long stretch of development? I can't find anything in the time leading up to the game's release that would indicate what was sucking up so many resources; all I've come up with are some vague gestures towards "new lighting techniques" and "haptic feedback", all incidentals that barely add much of anything to a work that's remarkably standard. This cost $160 million to Dead Space 2's 60 million and it looks and plays worse.

There’s an excellent game within The Callisto Protocol, and one that I imagine would have been able to flourish if made under the banner of someone who actually had a clue. Literally all it takes to turn this from mediocre to great is a better manager. Talented people were overworked and underpaid to make something that broadly isn’t good, but shines in parts; had they been treated properly and overseen by a real leader instead of an MBA meathead who stepped down the second shit got hot, they would have made something that could actually eat Dead Space’s lunch. Instead, we got this, and it’s begging for Dead Space’s scraps.

Glen Schofield can go fuck himself.

Sea of Thieves is a really strange game I've been struggling to understand.
The game is incredibly simple in almost every single way. Combat involves one of three guns and a sword that has a swing and block function. There's extras such as throwables but at its core it is shoot first or swing first to win. There's no stats to level up, there are no better guns or swords to get; what this means is that someone with 10 minutes of playtime can go up against someone with 1,000 hours of playtime and stand a fair chance of winning, everything is completely balanced across the board. Larger crews have a distinct advantage of being able to man more cannons at once, repair faster, split up tasks, etc. but a skilled two man crew can hold their own in the more agile sloops assuming they have the coordination and supplies to outlast larger crews.

The lack of stats/levelling system for your player also means there are no significant rewards. Everything you work for in this game is cosmetic, new paint jobs for your ship, different looking swords and guns, tattoos, decorated cannons, clothing, etc. If this doesn't sound rewarding enough for you then you may not enjoy the game. That being said most of the fun I have had has come from my experience in the game and not from the rewards earned.

The gameplay loop involves completing missions for factions and levelling them up, some factions ask you to fight AI enemies, one wants you to find hidden treasure, another asks you to engage in PvP, etc. There's a nice variety of ways to grind out the game. If you're cautious you can essentially ignore all other players and do your own thing, however by the nature of the game you will inevitably run into other players. A majority of players seem to avoid confrontation, however those that don't wont be shy about engaging you from the second they spot you, regardless if you have any loot or not. You may have spent two hours completing a quest with your ship now stocked up with chests but you can lose it all to a crew that just logged on. This can be very frustrating if you do missions that require a large amount of effort such as the events, however this is exactly what makes the game unique and keeps you on alert.

The game in general is quite easy but there are strange difficulty spikes here and there. In particular the red-tornado event asks you to take down a skeleton captain who has multiple phases, the first two phases are fine but the third phase gives the enemy 8,000hp and the ability to rain down fireballs from the sky. You'll need to use cannons on your ship to inflict a steady amount of damage but if the fireballs hit your ship you'll be stuck in a loop of putting out fires, repairing and by the time that is done it will get hit by them again. Larger crews won't encounter this problem but as a two man crew it feels unfair.

The community is a mixed bag, as mentioned plenty of players will avoid conflict but like most multiplayer games you'll run into players who have the single aim of trying to ruin your experience. The worst example of this was when a 4 man crew sunk our newly spawned sloop and kept spawnkilling us over and over by camping the tavern. There was no point to this as we had just logged in and had no loot for them to take. We had to scuttle the ship and respawn in a new area of the map. No big deal but a waste of 15 minutes. So far we have had a few very positive encounters, including max level pirates who gave us late game missions to earn easy loot and players who just want to sing sea shanties alongside us.

I have to say that I sincerely dislike PvP in this game though. Any crew that is of a larger size than yours is at a distinct advantage. Ship combat is rarely about who goes down first, it's about who boards first and spawncamps or who runs out of resources first. It feels like a complete and utter waste of time getting into PvP in this. I have had sessions ended because I've been pursued for 20 minutes, got bored and just didn't want to play anymore, the flow of the game just grinds to a halt and I wish there were PvE servers. I get why people think this opinion is wrong but it's not fun encountering other players in a PvP scenario.

There definitely feels like there is a lot of untapped potential in SoT, it's got a fantastic foundation and I hope Rare continues updating it, we've recently gotten the first seasonal update with the most generous season-pass I've ever seen along with the addition of pirate trials that added more content to the game and fleshes out the lore. Around the world there are journals, messages in bottles, named characters, etc. however you're never encouraged to look deeper into this. The game has a real problem with explaining things to player; emissaries play a huge role but I had to learn the ins and out from asking other pirates, I had to look up how to find ashen keys or how to break red mermaid statues.

It wasn't until we started doing higher reward missions that involved carrying 10+ chests, several bounty skulls, crates of tea and silk and an armoury worth of gunpowder from one side of the map to the other that it clicked with me how fun this game can be. The stress of having to coordinate with your crew to avoid conflict or win ship battles is extremely fun and taking 10 minutes to unload every piece of loot is a nice visual indicator of how hard you worked during that mission.

On a final note, it's quite a charming game. My early hours with it included just playing shanties on different instruments, getting drunk until vomiting while playing shanties, launching myself out of cannons, fishing, etc. Little things like that really draw you in and create some memorable moments.

I'd highly recommend SoT, it is at the very least worth trying even if you think it might not be for you, I was very pleasantly surprised. I can't imagine it would be very fun solo however, bring atleast one other person.

Edit 05/09/2021:
It has been interesting to watch this game develop, I can safely this is a game where the devs really care about it. There is a serious level of passion in the updates and their efforts with the community and that alone is worth suggesting the game for.
The Pirates Life update has shown however that the game itself is pretty average in every way possible, having played for a while now I can safely say the following:
- Combat is boring
- Sailing is okay at best
- Factions are bland
- Items aren't varied
- There isn't a whole lot to do in the world
And in a vacuum these are all bad things, however when coupled together in an open world where player interaction is entirely random it leads to some of the most fun you can have. The whole thing starts to unravel with structured, linear missions however, while I appreciate the efforts to try something new this game is made to be a player driven experience and I am excited to see where to go with it.

if you want the campaign get it on gamepass and save yourself the money.

Most of my MP experience with Halo was splitscreen Halo 3 on the 360 and that was all. I don't really enjoy the slow TTK in Halo, the floaty low-gravity movement or arena-shooter map design but Infinite has really surprised me. The guns feel great to use, combat feels very fluid and although I'm still no fan of the slow TTK I enjoy feeling very big, wrinkly brained when I outsmart someone using a combination of equipment, nades and weapon swapping.
Tactical slayer is by far my favourite mode as it removes shields and lowers the TTK to a single burst of the combat rifle which feels more natural to play as someone who has put more time into games like CS:S/GO, CoD and Siege.

A complaint I have is the lack of variety. They are drip-feeding in new content but 343 are struggling with their battle pass and monetization when they should be focused on fixing big team battle which has currently been broken for nearly a week, adding new maps, improving desync/lag issues and generally building the foundation.
I find the maps in particular to be very weak, they aren't in any way memorable in a way that Sandtrap was in Halo 3, they don't feel particularly fun like Valhalla was, and they don't flow as well as they should for a game that really wants you to make use of its movement.

If I had paid €60 for this game I'd probably be bitterly disappointed at the lack of forge, custom servers, coop but given that I can get the campaign for €1 on gamepass and the MP is F2P I'd say it's a good deal.

The main reason I'm giving it a negative review is the performance - I'm running a Ryzen 1600 with a 1660 super, I can handle MP at 60fps, 1440p on low/medium settings. Campaign is very hit or miss. However hardly anyone else in my friend group is willing to play due to the poor performance even on systems that should be more than capable of running it. In one instance after the game crashed somehow the display drivers on the PC were either uninstalled or flatout broken. Most of my friends report hard crashes or PC reboots in every session. If they fixed this I'd say absolutely give it a go.

I can imagine this game will be something special in a year's time so maybe hold off until then.

Edit: April 2022
Yeah they still haven't fixed the performance, they added one new gamemode (then took it away), forge is still broken, custom matches don't work, the game is just dead in terms of actual updates. Can't recommend it at all.

Borderlands 3 makes me sad.
It is SO good. Gearbox nailed the combat in this one, killing enemies is satisfying, loot progression is just perfect, abilities and grenades are so fun, the core experience is nearly perfect.

What makes me sad is that every time I want to go back and put more time into it I am reminded of the writing. Borderlands 3 stands out in my head for having the absolute worst writing of any game I have ever played. The main antagonists are so incredibly cringe, they are meant to be (almost as a parody), but the game takes them so seriously that it fails in its irony and is just bad. They aren't the worst however, Lorelai gets that award. Lorelai is a character you have to endure for atleast an hour, and it's excruciating. If you've ever spent time around someone who thinks a coffee mug that says "don't talk to me until I've had my coffee" is a replacement for a personality then you've met Lorelai.

The writers also smoked crack and decided that Tannis for some reason is a fan favourite I guess because she has been around since the first game? She is bad. Her story arc is atrocious. I can't properly put to words how lame it is, it really feels like an 11 year old creating their Mary-Sue OC. I genuinely burst out laughing at the final cutscene when "That Girl Is on Fire" starts playing earnestly as what can only be described as a YA fiction GMOD scene happens.

All of this would be fine if it weren't for the fact you cannot skip any dialogue or cutscenes. If I could do that I would probably have upwards of several hundred hours in this game but the narrative experience is always (literally) slowing you down or blocking your progression for minutes at a time. I have very little gripes with the actual gameplay, except maybe exploration being boring and vehicles still being bad, but everything else ruins what would otherwise be a 5/5 game.

A let down.

This game has good systems and mechanics but somehow just doesn't work for me. I can't pinpoint anything it does wrong necessarily but the complete experience failed to hold my attention on any of the three attempted playthroughs I did.

None of the stories or quests reach the heights of Fallout: New Vegas (which is the most valid comparison) and even though the combat system is better than NV it is still extremely rudimentary and unengaging.

The Finals is likely the best example of a good live service, free to play game.

This is a game that genuinely offers something new at a time when it feels like all competitive FPS games are trying to converge into the same thing. The weapon/ability variety is fun and interesting, the game modes offer tension that feels missing from other payload/TDM game modes found elsewhere and the destruction in-game is genuinely amazing.

Despite being F2P, The Finals has a distinct level of polish that makes it feel extremely premium, and it's helped by the fact there are (so far) no pay to win microtransactions or predatory sales tactics found in similar F2P games. It has a generous battle pass each season and a cosmetic store, which offers some of the most unique cosmetics I've seen in any game.

The gameplay is smooth, responsive and rewards teamwork. However, luck is a big element too, timing an attack on a cash-out just right can allow you to steal a win from a team who may be objectively better than you. Reshaping the entire map also completely changes how games flow. A sniper is giving you a hard time from the top of a crane? Fire an RPG at the base and remove his advantage from the world.

As of season 3, the only issues that stand out to me are the balancing and the matchmaking.

Balancing is a tough one and I think this is one of those games where it will always be changing as they adjust other things around the weapons. Some weapons are utterly useless (FAMAS, M60, MP5) due to other weapons that fulfil the same role but are better, the same goes for some abilities. The weapon that stands out as the most egregious is the sniper rifle and I believe Embark know this as their newest map seems to be designed with broken sightlines in mind. Snipers completely ruin the flow of the match and have no direct counter apart from another light also using a sniper.

Matchmaking also needs improvement. It was at its worst mid-season 2 but has gotten better. In ranked modes it's not unusual to match with an AFK player, have a teammate who leaves, have teammates who appear to have never played an FPS before while your enemies are a pre-made all running meta weapons and one shotting you with sniper no scopes.

If you're willing to slog out those unfun matches with bad teammates then the good games do make up for it. This game is something very special and if the devs continue to look after it and engage with the community as they have so far then I think it will last a long time and be fondly remembered.

A great Pokemon spinoff game that became my favourite Pokemon game. It’s got everything from an enjoyable battle system that includes using the terrain to your advantage, recruiting different warriors, warlords, and Pokemon, some great music, and a great art style. The different battle fields resembling the kingdoms typing was great (except the capture the flag maps I despise those maps ESPECIALLY VIPERIA). I enjoy the characters and the many side missions you can complete after the main game finishes but I wish there was more variation. My one true qualm with the game is the fact that each Pokemon only gets one move. If Pokemon got two or three moves, this would instantly be a 5 star game.

- 27 hours played

It felt great to be back in Elden Ring. I adore this game but it was a one time playthrough. A very special playthrough yet I find the game is so vast that the idea of starting from scratch scares me. An expansion is the perfect reason to dive back in.

This is more Elden Ring. Shadow of the Erdtree is not going to convince you to love it if the base game wasn’t for you. What I got here was just more Elden goodness, new bosses, weapons and weird yet wonderful locations to explore. The art direction here is sublime. These places are just beautiful to behold. Often I would stop what I was doing and select the Sit down emote. Just leave my character there chilling whilst I myself relaxed and took in the majestic view. They also seemed to just go crazy with the colours in this dlc and each place had a vibe. The royal blue of the flowers in Cerulean coast. The yellow sky of Scadu Atlus. The red unwelcoming atmosphere of the Jagged peaks along with heavy lightning. Despite everywhere being close together each region of the map offered something different whilst fitting together cohesively. I also loved the verticality of the new map. This place was vast but it extended both up and down, as well as off into the horizon. It tantalisingly teased me, offering me a view of an explorable location yet not offering up a super obvious way of reaching it. The legacy dungeons were also great. Massive, twisting and packed full of content, bosses to fight and items to find. Shadowkeep especially, man that place was chefs kiss. This dlc also managed to blow my mind again just like the base game, when I exited a small side dungeon to find out I had exited onto a new unrevealed part of the map.

The main draw of these games for me is the boss experience and despite outcry online I adored these bosses. They are tough and they hit very hard but that’s the usual Fromsoft experience. Pretty much every boss has multi chain combos and very small openings for damage but they are very doable. The community seems to be lacking patience, calling for nerfs already when the dlc has only been out a week. Some bosses have attacks that seem wholly bullshit but when you spend a little time learning them, you realise Messmers multi thrust jumping spear attack can be entirely negated by dodging once into the spear thrust. Roll towards him. When you figure that out the fight goes from bullshit to a glorious dance and he no longer seems unfair. I’m not saying all these bosses are perfectly balanced because it wouldn’t be a Fromsoft experience if it was, but they are beatable and I think the nerfs were too quick to come.

Progression has changed here. For some reason I see a massive outcry online about this as well. Scadu tree fragments have been introduced and these are needed to level up attack damage and negation. As well as that of your spirit summons. Your base game level won’t help you much in the dlc as enemy scaling goes wholly off of this new system. I think people came into this expansion expecting to slap these enemies silly. When they got slapped they didn’t like it. The developers have so much to balance in this game. They have to consider every weapon or dual weapons, pieces of armour, 4 talismans, items used for buffs, Ashes of war and spirit summons. The best way to balance all of that variety in builds is to offer a flat buff to stats. These new items that increase your level can be found throughout the world through exploration. It’s an incentive to stick your nose in every nook and cranny of this gorgeous world. This system also offered a feeling of progression in the dlc. I entered this dlc at level 234. I need over 400,000 runes to increase my character one level. So instead of levelling up a small handful of times throughout the experience, I progressed 20 levels and it felt good. It’s always a satisfying feeling when your damage increases as you level up.

So I adored the visuals, bosses and general exploration of this expansion. Was there anything I wasn’t a fan of? Only two things and they affected my enjoyment very little hence the score. I sometimes thought despite how big these new areas were, outside of the first two areas there wasn’t much to explore. Some big chunks of the map were not hiding any ruins, dungeons or caves. Some big chunks would maybe just have a boss or a weapon to pick up. One area in particular offered new gameplay in the form of a forced stealth section but despite how massive that area was, outside of a boss there was nothing of note down there. Powerpyx claims there is 104 sites of grace in the dlc and on a blind playthrough I managed to find 96. So I didn’t miss much of this dlc. And like I said some of it felt big yet a little empty. I also wasn’t a fan of the repeated use of bosses from the base game. Fromsoft loves to do that but it doesn’t do it for me. I’ve beaten them once, don’t make me do it again and again.

Overall though this was a fantastic addition to an already amazing game. And the two pieces of content together just make this all timer even greater.

If this game has taught me anything, it'd be three things:

1. Don't believe everything you see in a fandom
2. Don't expect much from any kind of endgame with VN's
3. I will never escape my Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei / Mr. Bungle obsession phase, for better or for worse.