A moderate step up in most areas from Drake's Fortune, the second entry in the Uncharted Series leans into what worked the first time around and tries to go bigger and better. There's definitely more of a focus on action set pieces to change up the gameplay this time around, and they work fairly well. The controls for those can be a bit weird at times and it's immersion breaking when you do die during them, but it's better than the slog of pure combat the first game turned into by the end. Speaking of the combat, it's notably improved. The scenarios you're put in are more varied and feel more like real environments rather than zones designed as a cover shooter first and a visual location second. The gunplay and cover systems are still just passable, but there's a bit more variety in weapons and enemies which helps, even if it was starting to get a bit old again by the end. The last major component of the gameplay is the climbing and puzzle segments, and these feel the least changed going into the sequel, though that's still fine as it was what I wanted more of the most after finishing the first.

The story here is fine, and I won't critique it too hard because it's obviously supposed to feel like a campy action movie, but the new characters and especially the new villain really didn't do much for me. I did like how the game starts with jumping around in the timeline, showing how you got to the intro of the game. It was simple but effective, kind of a shame it was dropped for the second half. That style aided the feeling of variety that comes from this game having a lot more locations than Drake's Fortune, and while they are well done and the variety is welcome, there's something about the location and scale of the first game that I slightly preferred there and was missing a little bit. You're paired up with another character during gameplay much more often this time around, where the first game had you constantly splitting up. This doesn't do much for gameplay besides occasionally having to boost them up to a ledge or hold a door, but it adds a lot more dialogue between Nate and the supporting cast. This is mostly a welcome addition, but I have to complain a little bit that Nate comes across like a real psychopath here. There was the occasional thing in the first game that was a bit awkward, but in Among Thieves he's constantly making jokes and comments with a complete lack of social awareness, sometimes the other characters will react negatively to it and sometimes they act like nothing's wrong. I don't really get the decision to lean into that part of his character, and I guess it's not a big deal but it was just a bit annoying. I'll also say that the "twist" here, if you can even call it one, pales in comparison to what they did before.

Overall Among Thieves was a good time, a step up from Drake's Fortune in most aspects, and while I did like the first game I can see much more with this one how they turned it into a series without it getting old fast. I'm looking forward to continuing it.

Linelith is a really creative and short puzzle game, the only mechanics are walking around and drawing lines on tiles on the screen, but even in its very short run time it shows a remarkable number of different ways these mechanics can be applied. It's hard to go into much detail on those without spoiling the game, but it's an easy recommendation at $3 and taking around an hour to 100% complete it. I do kind of wish that there was a bit more here, I feel like there could have been additional puzzles with certain mechanics before I got tired of them, but on the other hand it certainly doesn't overstay its welcome and it's a nice change of pace from my pile of uncompleted puzzle games that got too hard at some point to have one that I can complete in a single sitting.

A prime example of a game feeling like more than the sum of its parts. There's a lot that feels dated about this game, and a lot to dislike, but it still has a certain charm to it that made me want to finish it out. The combat mechanics are passable but get overused in boring combat rooms that are unnatural looking and apparent as soon as you walk into them. There's some variation added at the very end of the game which is nice but it's too little too late for how much combat there is in the game. The exploration and climbing is fine, and probably the best part of the gameplay even though it's been done better since. The puzzles are very basic but do enough to be a change of pace and add to the vibe the game's going for. The story really isn't anything special either, it's like a trope-filled mix of indiana jones and national treasure, but it was still fun enough to want to see it through. I will commend how the major twist is handled. I was spoiled on it beforehand but still enjoyed the execution of it a lot. Very interested to see how they polish this formula in the later games and see if they live up to the hype.

Coming into this having played the Dark Souls trilogy but not the original, Demon's Souls is a very unique and refreshing experience. As someone who doesn't like the direction From's modern games are headed in, this is the opposite. It's Dark Souls but more out there, more experimental. In some ways, that feels rough around the edges, but it also makes for a much more worthwhile experience that isn't just rehashing old ideas while missing the point of them. The level and world design here isn't as ambitious as its successor, but it's not trying to be and what's here works fine. The remake is excellent, as far as I know the gameplay is untouched, but the graphical work here is some of the prettiest I've seen, and runs much smoother than From's own games do. If I have any complaints, it's mostly that the replayability here seems limited compared to Dark Souls. There's definitely some things I want to try out still, but the bosses are much easier in general and many of them are puzzles that seem like they wouldn't be as interesting a second time around, and there's less variety of weapons/builds to use in general. One of the later game areas (4-2) was also incredibly frustrating until I looked up a way to cheese it, not looking forward to revisiting that. Overall I had a really good time with it, it's nice to have a new (to me) Souls game that doesn't feel tainted in the way the newer ones do.

Sable is such a flawed gem of a game. It's a beautiful experience that I really loved, but it's also plagued by technical issues and certain things feeling rushed that it takes away from the game just a bit, and that's really unfortunate because the good parts of this are truly great.

It would be very easy to dismiss Sable as an indie version of Breath of the Wild, and mechanically it's not far off - you're exploring an open world, climbing using a similar stamina system, searching for hidden collectibles, and doing self-contained shrine-like puzzles. I love Breath of the Wild, so none of that is a bad thing, but Sable's story and atmosphere are really what set it apart. It's an emotionally touching coming of age story that works in a way few game stories do, largely in thanks to two things. First, the dialogue does something I've never really seen but feels obvious in hindsight, you're shown Sable's own thoughts and feelings as she talks to people, and often this skips over the actual dialogue and just summarizes it. This really lets you connect with the character even with a minimal amount of dialogue in the game, it feels a lot more like reading a book, but in a good way rather than just dumping loads of text on you. The second thing is how well the story meshes with the gameplay. You control Sable on her Gliding, a chance to explore the world and find her place in it. Exploring is what you're doing for the whole game, there's no combat or extraneous systems, you're just meant to see the world, and sometimes help out the people you meet to get a sense of their roles they've chosen. If you're looking at this purely from a gameplay perspective, it's fun but doesn't really do anything unique, but it's the combination here of story and gameplay as one that's a special experience.

Unfortunately, that experience is marred by a large number of minor issues that took away from somewhat. Playing this a couple of months after launch I would've expected it to be cleaned up with some patches by now, and I kind of want to urge people to wait more but at this point I don't even know if most of this will ever be fixed. On the technical side you have things like awful performance in certain areas, glitchy animations while climbing (which you do a ton), objects you're climbing on going invisible, random very loud noises while you're driving around the world, quests constantly un-track themselves so you lose the quest marker, UI elements that are meant to be temporary get stuck on screen, when you restart the game your selected outfit and certain game settings get reset, I had NPCs fall through the world while talking to them, whenever performance dips (pretty often) the audio gets really choppy sounding, and I could go on more but the point is it's a very unpolished game. Aside from the technical stuff there's also some rushed feeling things that are there by design. For example, I missed the place that lets you upgrade your stamina for the majority of the game, and thought the climbing sections were just supposed to be difficult. There's only one location do do this at and as far as I can tell no quests or dialogue pointing to it. I knew I needed to turn in the upgrade items somewhere, but either pointing the player to this better or having more turn-in locations throughout the world would have gone a long way. Also certain things that appear in multiple areas across the game start to get a bit repetitive towards the end, especially if you're going for 100%. I feel like the designers probably would have had some more variety here if not for budget constraints, just a guess though. There's an item that helps you find collectibles that you get after completing the quest for collecting 100 of them. The bike customization is a cool idea, but you can get the fastest bike parts pretty early on and since the top speeds aren't really that fast and you'll be traveling with it a lot (especially if you choose to ignore fast travel like I did, I felt it would kind of ruin the point of the game) you really don't get much chance to experiment with others. Money can go from very tight to not at all a concern very quickly with how the item prices are balanced and how easy some high value items are to get once you find them. There's probably more I'm forgetting, but all of this to say that the game really feels like it could have used a few more months in development.

Despite the negatives, you've already seen my very high rating for this, and while the problems with it make me sad that it's not just a tiny bit better it's still not quite like anything else.

Really fun and pleasant action/adventure game that's very similar to Hyper Light Drifter, which is a pretty good game to be compared to. One of the biggest strengths is definitely how varied it is, the game never lingers on anything for too long. That does end up making the runtime a little on the short side, and I think I still would have enjoyed a longer version of this game, but the pacing here is excellent.

The combat is very nice feeling, if a bit simple. There's nothing really unique to it, but it's still engaging and a bit challenging. The upgrade system is a little weak, you just get some minor and not very interesting stat boosts, I thought the alternate weapons and upgrades to your abilities were much more interesting but at least in my playthrough I didn't really get those until late game. I feel like it's a bit of a misstep how fun the last of your four main abilities is with how late you get it in the game, there's still a lot of optional exploration at that point but the main part of the game left after you have your full set of abilities is fairly short. I also would have liked the final mountain area to have a bit more exploration like the previous ones, it felt kind of lacking in comparison.

The art and music here is really excellent, the environments all look great and are very creative, as well as the characters being memorable and having really nice animations. The soundtrack is surprisingly good, it's a little understated at first but I found myself humming the songs a lot between playing. These tie really well into the story and world, which were pretty interesting. I don't know if the story would have held my attention as much in a longer game but it was good enough for the short length here. I do think some of the individual characters worked better than the main narrative did, I really enjoyed the sub-story of your companion as well as your main enemy throughout the first of the three main sections of the game, and while they tried to do a bit of the same later I didn't think those landed quite as well.

Really pleasant experience overall and especially easy to recommend when you can play through it in just a couple days. I don't know if a sequel to this would really make sense, but I hope the devs make some sort of spiritual successor at least, I could definitely go for more of this.

Don't play this game. It is a technical mess. I ignored a friend talking about how buggy their playthrough was on PC thinking it was probably isolated, or even if it wasn't surely playing this on console this long after release with plenty of time for patches it would be stable. I ran into multiple obnoxious progression-blocking bugs. This game is broken.

With that out of the way, I'll actually talk about the game. Control's strongest point it has going for it is visual and world design. The game world is pretty consistently fun to explore and has a good amount of variety, it reminded me a lot of Half-Life in a good way. While I feel the overall world building as far as lore and story go is much weaker than people give it credit for, the actual visual and physical design of the world add a certain something to the game that I really liked.

The combat is nothing to write home about at the best of times but it's enjoyable enough, until you hit some random difficulty spikes and really start wishing that the game had a fucking dodge button or a competent cover system. This is compounded by probably the biggest issue in the game outside of the technical problems which is the checkpointing. Cleansed Control Points are yet another variation of bonfires in a game that really didn't need them. As fast travel points they work fine, but for a mostly linear game having these as the only checkpoints got quite annoying. You often have to make a lengthy trek back after dying, but this isn't through rooms with carefully designed enemy placements but instead through random respawning enemy encounters and repeated cutscenes that make it very annoying to just get back and retry a section you died on. This is especially egregious in side missions, which led to me skipping the majority of them.

The other aspect of gameplay that hardly deserves a mention is the puzzle sections, which never really go beyond walk around and interact with the interactable items in the room. I bring it up only to say that some of them were actually very frustrating despite the simplicity. One I was stuck at for a while I was convinced was just a path I couldn't go because the game never explained a mechanic properly, and I instead spent a long time banging my head against the other path through that area which was a combat section with a massive difficulty spike that it turns out I wasn't supposed to be doing. Another I got stuck on because the game just bugged out and wouldn't let me interact with something required for the solution. There's also a particular puzzle you encounter early on but can't solve that's built up for a while and I'd heard such praise for it that I was expecting it to have a very clever solution that you always could have done but just never would have thought of, but no, you just get an item late in the story that completely bypasses the puzzle. It's kind of a cool sequence I guess, but I really don't get why people loved it so much.

I've heard the story and lore get a lot of praise and I really don't think much of that is deserved. The lore and world building I might call amusing, but it's very surface level ambiguity to create a feeling of being mysterious without ever actually giving any answers, or having them in the first place. I really disliked the main story overall. I found Jesse pretty annoying most of the time, her internal monologue during conversations is obnoxious, as boring as nearly every other character you can talk to is. I was still curious enough to see if they answered any questions to push through to the ending, which was incredibly lackluster from both a gameplay and story perspective, and unsurprisingly answered nothing at all.

Overall there was a certain quality to this game that I enjoyed despite the individual pieces being very lacking, but a lot of it just doesn't quite come together and it's very lacking in polish.

A breath of fresh air in an era where deathmatch shooters feel all but dead. Splitgate is a very simple pitch of "Halo + Portal", and it delivers on that concept well. For me at least it was a bit of a slow start. I played this a year or two back in beta and it didn't stick with me. Now it's released? Maybe? Still sort of feels like a beta in some ways but that's getting into semantics, it's very playable currently and is being actively developed.

I didn't have a moment where I clicked with this game, and wasn't in love with it from the start. If you go in expecting Halo, and the game seems to really want you to feel that way, everything feels slightly off. The weapons handle just a bit differently, time to kill is faster, getting around the maps feels weird until you get used to using portals properly. None of this is bad though, and is more just a learning curve to get past. I kept playing just because it was easy to pick up for a short session, and now that I've been playing daily for a few weeks I really like it.

The map selection is one of my only real complaints, it's not terribly small but it could definitely use more variety, and some of the maps currently aren't great. The most successful ones are the ones basically ripped from Halo with minor adjustments, honestly though I just want more of those. As unoriginal as they are, they're just the most fun. This is a problem I believe will get better with time at least.

This is a really fun game overall right now, but I feel like its longevity depends a lot on the updates it gets down the road, it seems on a good path though. I'll likely keep playing this over any of the big AAA shooters this year. I don't think I've been this into a free-to-play shooter since Blacklight Retribution, hopefully it has a better future than that did.

If you check out the game because of this use my referral code and we both get cool stuff :)
KGBESY

The Forgotten City is a pretty cool experience that's still a little rough around the edges. While a time loop game isn't 100% unique they're definitely few and far between, and really cool when done well. This one mostly succeeds, and does so while being very heavy on NPCs and dialogue which I think are difficult to get right. While those aspects aren't perfect I think it still did an admirable job with them. My problems with the game are mostly minor but sort of add up to it feeling like a less polished experience overall than it could have been.

While the dialogue is pretty well written for the most part, the dialogue choices feel forced the large majority of the time. You start out with the same handful of options when talking to pretty much any character, which is pretty uselessly repetitive when you could just have fully scripted conversations. Thankfully the player character doesn't actually speak so there's no dialogue choice mismatch nonsense, but still even past the initial options I mentioned it feels like your choices aren't very meaningful. You can play into the role the game wants for your character, or not, but if you don't you probably won't be making much progress. Overall I'm fine with that, I don't need this to be a roleplaying game, but the presentation of it is in conflict with that and feels like a leftover from its origins as a mod.

Speaking of leftovers, the combat sections are just awful and really unnecessary to the extent they're used. Don't get me wrong, it's not a ton, but I still didn't need to do it more than once. I also ran into an unfortunate number of performance issues and glitches that did affect gameplay, I did play this fairly close to launch so hopefully those will be fixed but it is worth mentioning.

Before I get into somewhat spoiler-y territory I'll say that I would recommend this overall and it's a very interesting game if you're into this type of thing.



==Minor spoilers for the ending below==

The endings for the game are kind of a mixed bag in my opinion. The first two are pretty much the same, and while they are unsatisfying I doubt anyone is going to stop there, I just wanted to see them out of curiosity. The third ending is actually my favorite, while it isn't the "true" ending I thought it was very strong on its own. Maybe this is because it's the first one I saw, and some of the others reuse content from it which I mostly skipped through, but it felt well thought out. The true ending I think was still worth getting, and the very end I have to say was touching, but the conversation with you-know-who was ultimately kind of boring and unneeded, and I didn't really like the design of that final area. It was fine though, I didn't hate it or anything. I also thought it was a bit awkward at the very end how most characters didn't really recognize you if you did the ending towards the beginning of a loop, it makes sense but probably would've been better if they plot-magic'd that away. Thankfully all of the endings are pretty quick to see if you have a save in the late game anyways.

Cute game that's basically a playable picture book. The gameplay is really simple, just walking around mazes and pressing A to interact with things, but it was pretty enjoyable. There's a good visual variety here in the different mazes, some decently hidden collectibles, and a lot of the interactions you can find are cute or funny. The cutscenes/story didn't really do it for me, they're mainly just there to connect the levels together, but it's not too much of a detraction. It's just about the perfect runtime too, I was starting to be ready for it to be over when I got to the end.

SNKRX is a really neat execution of a simple concept, what if snake was an autochess/autobattler game? It works pretty well for the most part, but the glaring weakness here is that the core gameplay stays pretty same-y throughout. Building a team and managing your economy is really cool and well done here, it may seem like it doesn't matter much at first but as you climb in NG+ levels it's more and more important to master. I think I'm ready to quit playing it though, because even if that challenge is fun and seeing your completed build doing work is a lot of fun, the majority of the actual playtime is spent in the early game with few units while you save up gold, where damage isn't a concern because you can dodge forever with no problem. This problem is exacerbated the higher you go in NG+ which is a real shame, because the late game becomes better but the early game gets more waves of tankier enemies that aren't actually any more difficult, and saving gold for later rounds so you get the maximum amount of interest becomes less optional. For reference, I'm on NG+4 and have nearly beaten that a couple of times. It's still a fun and unique little game, and is an easy recommendation at around $3, but I feel like there needs to be some more variety or less tedious early game for it to have more staying power.

Alien Soldier is a really cool game, and feels very ahead of its time in a lot of ways. The game's kind of difficult to get into because it just dumps you straight into things without much explanation, but once you actually start learning the systems of the game all of your abilities and weapons are really satisfying to use. Boss rush games don't really seem like something anyone was doing back when this was made, and it mostly does a really good job at it aside from some weird difficulty spikes. Stage 20 is brutally difficult and the few after that are kind of anticlimactic because none of them were anywhere close to as difficult, I even first tried the final boss (which was not very good imo). That aside though, really cool game overall, I could see coming back to this and trying to complete a Superhard run sometime.