This game is so baffling and just awe-inspiring in its clunky, cumbersome, QTE-laced, barely functional gameplay and its message, that is delivered in the most CLUMSY way possible, along with simply laughable in your face symbolism evoking slavery and the fucking holocaust to drive home the point.

And to top it all of, this shit-stew is presented with such a genuine earnestness that one really has to wonder if David Cage has any capacity to understand human emotion at all. Or has never talked to a person in his life. Or both.

I have not finished this yet, but it has proven itself to be such an abominable piece of garbage that I struggle to even think about putting the disc back in.

Maybe someday.

But I already know this: This might not be the worst game I ever played, but it is without a question the most incompetent and infuriating one.

Edit: Reduced to 1/10

I overcame my struggles and finally finished this... video game, I guess, and now I feel a myriad of emotions. None of them good, really.
There is sadness, disgust, anger, despair and most of all, overwhelming boredom and a general sense of uncertainity if my love for video games actually survived contact with this apocalyptic piece of unfathomable incompetence.

Second Edit: It did. Thank god. I still like video games quite a bit. And all the negative emotions vanished over time too.
And now there is one positive thing I can say about the game:
It left me with a sick sense of amusement about life, the universe and everything else that makes me feel like I am on the brink of insanity.
It's actually quite... interesting.
.. I like it.

cough Anyways: Do not play this... thing. Ever.

Deadly premonition is horrible.

The graphics suck, the animations suck, the audio editing sucks, the sound mixing sucks, the voice acting sucks, the textures sucks, the controls suck, the camera SUCKS, the combat sucks and so on.

Basicailly every technical aspect of this game except for the OST itself has been fucked up beyond belief.

And it's also one of the best horror games ever because of it's engrossing story, magnetic characters, sublime protagonist and unrelenting horror atmosphere.

And these positives utterly obliterate the legendarily bad technical execution.

Deadly Premonition is still an absolute masterpiece. The worst masterpiece of all time, but a masterpiece nonetheless.

SOMA tells an incredibly nuanced, gripping and intelligent science fiction story that stayed with me for a long time after I had finished the game. It is propably one of the great video game stories.

Its gameplay is servicable walking sim stuff, for the most part, until it wants to be a Horror game. Then it gets bad.
The Horror Elements are boring, underdeveloped and really don't mesh well with the rest of the experience.

The amazing story and the way interactivity plays into the experience of this story and lifts it up still make this game a masterpiece though. The story and the storytelling are just that good.

Def. play it if you're interested in SciFi at all.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is one of the jankiest games that ever janked ever.

But it is also a stunningly imaginative RPG with lots of immersive sim sprinkled in for good measure.

The main hook is that this is a historical RPG. It takes place in early 15. Century Bohemia during the throne war that happened at that time. And whilst the developers do not get everything right, it just floored me how rich in detail and historically accurate the setting is, along with the meticulously recreated geography of the region. That alone made that game sooo unique.
And it absolutely was a joy to play despite the noticable jank that invaded all parts of the gameplay and presentation, especially the combat.

If you are interested in RPGs, and/or interested in history and/or interested in unique gaming concepts, then you owe it to yourself to actually try this game out.

Planescape Torment is truly special.

When I played it for the first time, it was already "a classic" and more than 10 years old. Yet, it felt fresh and new and completely floored me with everything it had to offer.

The party members are some of the deepest and most compelling characters I ever had the pleasure of getting to know.

The eerie setting and atmosphere with its sense of mystery, adventure, poetry and philosophy simply blew me away. It manages to buck every single trope and convention that has ever been conceived in (esp. tolkienesque) fantasy fiction. And it does so effortlessly and without even explicitly trying to do that.

And on top of all that, this game gifted me with my favorite "magic moment" I have ever experienced in any medium ever. I cried during that moment. And not out of joy or sadness. I cried because I was so overwhelmed with the serene beauty and gratification of this one moment and how every single fiber of this game lore, setting and storytelling were woven together and intertwined to create this exact moment.

With this game, the Black Isle Studios and Chris Avellone built a monument not only to the power of storytelling, but also to the ability video games have of utilizing that power.

And it is for these reasons, and many more, that this is my absolute favorite video game of all time, as well as my favorite story out of any piece of fiction I have ever consumed in my entire life.

And even now, more than 20 years after its initial release, Planescape: Torment has lost none of its toppling radiance. Not even visually.

This game is one congealed triumph.

11/10

.
.
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make it 12/10.

You can slander Shadow of the colossus all you like for its endless pathfinding, clunky controls, awkward camera, but the fact is:

Shadow of the Colossus is still a one of a kind experience. And you know it.
A truly special video game that feels so different from anything else I have played before it. Or since for that matter. That sombre, almost tragic atmosphere is just something else.

No game feels quite like Shadow of the Colossus.

A remarkable achievement in daring vision and creativity.

Horizon Forbidden West ist just absolutely fucking obnoxious.

The story is flimsy as all hell, a fact that is not surprising since the first games (far better) story barely justified a continuation.

So where the story of the first game offered an interesting coming of age story with a life, death and rebirth theme in a new world, laced with some great ludonarrative synchronicity with Aloy and the world, the second game has a hard time even managing to keep everthing cohesive and have the events make sense.

The premise of the world is also just braindead, it's like: Oh, there is this new "west", that we've never checked out because of the violent people that we've never mentioned before, let's go look there.. like... what? I hate this.

Also: Unlike the first game, Aloy is a bad main character here. Her personality just doesn't work. She is overly confident and capable in cutscenes, which does not translate to gameplay, like, at ALL!
So there is no ludonarrative synchronicity and we have ludonarrative dissonance instead.

The combat sucks major ass, it drops loads of uninteresting, awkward, underdeveloped and uncomfortable systems and mechanics on your head that makes the scrambling of the combat nearly unbearable and far worse than in the first game.

The open world overall is tiresome and outdated at this point with all its icons and logs and prompts and god knows what and about the manipulative crafting: Whatever. That was to be expected. It's still infuriating.

On top of all that, the game is faulty on a technical level. The audio is constantly cutting out and Aloy gets stuck on geometry all the time. The other glitches are miniscule.

Now the game is not without merits: The game world is colorful and vibrant, the lore is still interesting and the characters (with the exception of Aloy) are interesting, unique and work well in the story. The exploration is fun and worthwhile and the side quests are surprisingly well made and memorable.

But even so, this game is so aggressively mediocre that the mediocrity takes a noisedive into below average, because it is just so fucking infuriating how utterly dull and inoffensive this porridge of boredom is.

I liked the first game. But this ended up being everything I feared it would be. It really is a pity.

4/10