It may sound arbitrary, but I think going through Flower Zone and Sky Pavilion as a child, with all those poorly textured but legitimately suggestive Wii ruins, heavily influenced my aesthetical preferences in videogames forever.

It's fair to point out I would rather spend 30 more hours in Scarlett/Purple before going back to this thing, but I also earned 100% of it when I was a kid so it's probably my fault for becoming a boring idiot as I grew-up and forgetting just how epic controlling Pikachu actually is.

I played The Last of Us a few years ago. At first, I was skeptical, anticipating your typical parent-child story with a superfluously melodramatic ending, unfairly extolled by a gaming community that saw BioShock Infinite as the pinnacle of scriptwriting back in the early 2010s. That younger version of me was too doubting, for the zombie-themed triple-A that defined a generation does a great job at blending blockbuster codes with very nuanced sensibilities -a better one, in my opinion, than some of its most notable successors, such as 2018's God of War.

As in every action-adventure 2013 game, you can expect some undesirables broken bridges and pace-messing shootings, specially in the first half. But also a ton of jaw-dropping playable sequences, only possible thanks to Naughty Dog's massive budgets, that strike way harder than its HBO's adaptation's aesthetically indier approach. It's an ambitious, original work, accesible for a big audience, and the kind of project more superproductions should aim to become.

Two buttons is everything Exo One needs to create some of the most physically intuitive movement I've played in recent years. Following Miyamoto's famous empty room anecdote, our sheer existence as this shape-shifting ball is extremely fun and stimulating as long as we have a dune to surf.

I love it when progress in a game's curve is based on my understanding of its gamefeel alone, and I loved learning to break the sound barrier with my tiny avatar so badly... that I was a little underwhelmed when I reached the final level without that many opportunities to play around in even crazier grounds. From my point of view, it's a diamond in the rough, really recommendable as it stands, but with the potential of achieving excellency if the team implemented its fantastic kinestesia into some thought through level design that allowed for more complex ways of expression.