Demon's Souls is obtuse, unforgiving, unkind, and unaccomodating. Yet - I loved my time with it so much that I devoured the whole thing in just a few days.

I can't help thinking, though, that without having previous Souls experience and a decade's worth of wiki posts to scounge through, I would have given up pretty early on.

This is a game worth playing, but with a search engine by your side.

This is, for the most part, The Golden Idol Experience crushed down into a 2-hour snack of a game.

However - my favorite bits of the base game were long-term eureka moments. Realizations about the nature of a death from three chapters ago, reveals of hidden identities, etc. Those sorts of payoffs aren't really possible in a runtime this short.

Even so - I'm glad we got more of this game, and I hope this won't be the last we see of it.

Overboard! isn't the most mechanically compelling narrative puzzler I've played, but it is an excellent short story.

Completing an initial run is quite easy, but getting a perfectly clean getaway takes a good few loops. Unfortunately, running back through the day repeatedly looking for a tiny piece of information you're missing becomes grating quite quickly.

Still - a game worth playing, if only for its short runtime.

an incredible game... until the fatigue sets in.

Maybe playing a 90 hour game in two weeks exacerbates the problem, but man... once the magic and mystique of a new area starts to fade, there's a real "Hey! This is just chores!!" moment.

I wish armor upgrades didnt require grinding dragon parts.
I wish the quests were more unique.
I wish the depths and sky islands had more variety.
I wish the koroks were less repetetive.
I wish every Ultrahand puzzle didnt have a solution lying around nearby.
I wish the shrines were more interesting.
I wish the caves weren't so samey.

That being said: the first 10 hours and the last 5 hours were incredible. Also, I played the whole thing like a full-time job because I was so enthralled. So maybe it is very good, actually.

This one has it all -
superb soap-operatic jrpg cinema,
protagonist posterchildren for the Female Gaze,
delicious minigames and exquisite side narratives,
and quest design that we should have left behind on the super nintendo.

The most aesthetically solid racer I've ever played.

Track variety is a little disappointing, and the AI racer systems are underwhelming.

But - when the car is sideways and I'm blasting through a corner, the sheer momentum of the handling model pushes me to death-grip the controller as if I'm trying not to fly out the window from G-force.

R4 lives up to the hype, and is worth returning to a quarter-century later.

Immaculate videogame. It lives loudly in my brain, tucked away in a manila folder labeled "top ten favorite games of all time, probably".

The music is "hype". The pixelart is "gorgeous". The shooting is "clean" and "tight" and "rad". The meta-structure is "mindblowing", "innovative", and "one of like three games to do genuinely interesting things with a modern filesystem".

I've never been a shmup person, but ZeroRanger's extra-life difficulty/progression system perfectly eased me into the genre. It led me by the hand into a pleasantly-sized kiddie pool. It then used hidden hydraulic infrastructure to lower the floor beneath me, deepening the pool. It did so at a pace I found comfortable.

I love shmups now. I play lots of them to try and fill the ZeroRanger-shaped hole in my heart. You should carve out a similarly-shaped chunk of tissue from your own body. It will cost you either nine or eleven dollars. You will have lots of fun.