This game is just great.

It has a rich atmosphere, incredible world building, strong characters, believable scenarios, engrossing horror elements, smooth stealth and a perfect pacing.

The only drawbacks are the gunplay, which can be really wonky at times, and the fact that the game is not that good at communicating what you are supposed to do when the taks is anything more specific than "go there".

But these are the only subpar elements in this very worthwhile horror fps.

You should play it.

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The open world overall is tiresome and outdated at this point with all its icons and logs and prompts and god knows what and about the manipulative crafting: Whatever.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

It's fine, I guess.

But you're better off just playing Hyper Light Drifter.

Or replaying Hyper Light Drifter.

"The Good Life" has loads of Swerys Goofiness that I've come to love so much and the art style is quite enchanting. The slice of life-ish elements of a farming simulator are inconvinient, but I actually do not mind them too much.

The real problem is that the story here is a choppy and incoherent mess that is clumsily told, hard to follow and seems to be going everywhere and nowhere.

It jumps Genres like it's on crack. It's starts like an Animal Crossing Style slice of life sim, then goes to regular small town mystery crime thriller, then to UFOs and Aliens, then to Government Conspiracy, then to Legend of Camelot and then all the way back to crime thriller again.

... just an absolute clusterfuck.

All in all, the game just went everywhere and nowhere at the same time, making much of the storytelling feel like a pretty meaningless waste of time and energy. And Dialogue.

"The Good Life" has some effective moments and made me smile and even laugh at times, but the overwhelming feeling I had when I saw the credits roll was indifference.

This is actually more interesting than a lot of games in its genre and the great style and vibrant look does loads to make this game more appealing.

But for me, the general boredom that this kind of walking simulator comes with always shines through in the end.

... it's only a little boring though and I do not regret playing it.

I can see the appeal here, but large parts of the game were just a huge chore for me.

The plot is chugging along with some weird pacing, I felt barely any escalation over the course of the game and the way everything about the story is structured is bizarre and off-putting.

The lore barely matters and remains incomprehensible and foggy.

The cast is fine, but every character except Tear is unlikable or cringeworthy in one way or another. And yes, I know Luke is supposed to be unlikeable in the beginning. But some spoilerish parts about his behavior just irked me all the way through.

I just... I don't like Tales of the Abyss. I mean, I do not hate it either, but I really do not feel like I needed to experience this game. At all.

Ever done something really fluffy and comforting?

Like listening to a Billy Joel song while reading your favorite book and drinking a cup of hot chocolate?

Gazing up into the starry sky on a snowy winter night while holding the hand of a person you love?

... that is what playing this game feels like.

Transistor is a bit of an oddball.
It looks amazing, sounds beautiful and has a magnetic style that is just an absolute pleasure to experience.
The combat is awkward and confusing at first, but I eventually got the hang of it.
And then it got pretty fun.
That being said, the story of this game is incredibly hard to follow, to the point that I just completely lost the plot somewhere along the line and had no Idea what was happening and why. It just became me randomly doing things in linear progression to the conclusion.
... the game just did not do it for me in the story department. And I had to lower the score quite a bit because of that.