The camera sucks half the stages suck walljumping sucks and dying is overly punishing this is one of the best 3D platformers every made and not enough games took the right lessons from it.

The lack of a double jump or gliding and the near complete lack of air control makes platforming actually rewarding unlike most other 3D platformers. I get that the genre is mostly aimed at toddlers but kids fucking loved Mario 64 so I don't want to hear any excuses.
Mario 64 also manages to avoid the "every collectible is just lying on the ground" problem that every other collectathon including mario odyssey has by having some platforming or exploring involved behind getting most stars.
What I'm trying to say is that I fucking hate Banjo Kazooie. Bitch fuck Banjo Kazooie and its fans hope they get exactly one new game and gruntilda marries a man.

With most Sonic games, even the ones I dislike, there’s enough of a unique flavor to them where I can understand why someone might vibe with a certain game’s quirks. I can understand someone’s favorite Sonic game being Unleashed, or Adventure 2, or Sonic R, or even Shadow the Hedgehog. I legitimately cannot understand how Lost World could be someone’s favorite Sonic game. Lost World is a game whose only noteworthy feature is how little of it is worthy of note. It’s missing the secret sauce that makes each Sonic game special, it’s bland and flavorless. It’s a Sonic-branded saltine cracker.

I just don't think this game is for me. This is coming off of about 15 hours of gameplay, with me just finishing one dungeon and then running around for a while before deciding I'm not having enough fun to warrant putting a hundred more hours into this game.

I feel like this game is in a great conflict with itself, in terms of not knowing whether or not it wants to be nonlinear. The greatest example of this that I can think of is right at the beginning, where TotK decides to release you into the world without giving you the paraglider. Compared to BotW's treatment of the paraglider as the keys to the world, this is an extremely interesting decision. The paraglider is optional now? Something that I have to find in the world?

Well, not really. See, exploring without the paraglider is not fun or easy. I think this is fairly self evident, but an easy example is how if you ever ride one of those rocks up to a sky island you'll quickly run into the conundrum of getting back down. You'll also have a rather difficult time entering the Depths. Even if you want to do a challenge run of sorts, you'll find out that there is at least one dungeon in the game that requires the paraglider, both to access it and to explore it. So in order to unlock this essential part of my kit, I eventually asked a friend what the deal was and was told I had to go to Lookout Landing. It was also at this point that I discovered that Lookout Landing is also how you unlock the ability to actually use the towers, and that if I hadn't come here I'd have been unable to update my map upon reaching one of the towers.

I hate this! My instinct when I start up an open world game is to run in the opposite direction as the main quest indicator. In fact, when I played BotW I did exactly this, going to Gerudo Desert before I even met Impa. And you know what? That first bit of blind exploration was one of my favorite parts of the 100 hour playthrough, as I challenged myself to just barely survive exploring this dangerous region and take out Thunderblight Ganon with a measly 3 hearts. I can't do that in this game; my ability to explore is actively held hostage by the main story.

This pattern of excitement followed up by disappointment would be a recurring theme for the rest of my short playthrough. Take the Depths as another example. I love horror. When I found out that there was an entire map in this game full of darkness, corruption, and more danger than the rest of the overworld, I was incredibly intrigued. I spent an hour or two wandering around in the Depths and felt completely bored. It turns out that, while it makes for a cool atmosphere, an extremely dark overworld is a bad move. What it does is essentially remove any element of "ooh, what's that over there?" that serves as the baseline for the flow of most open world exploration, leaving nothing but going from point A to B for most of my time in the region.

Shrines were often unsatisfying. I'll go into that in detail, because I think the change in shrines is actually the most significant change between BotW and TotK. In BotW, Shrines were (assuming you didn't get one of the dreaded Tests of Strength) entertaining puzzles. I think shrines in BotW hold a more subtle purpose as well; they are changes of pace. While exploration is fun, there is only so much running and wall climbing one can do before it starts to feel tedious. Shrines serve as a reward for exploration. They give the quantifiable reward of an Orb and a fast travel point. More importantly, they give the intrinsic reward of a fun, mentally stimulating experience that leaves you refreshed and ready for more exploration when finished.

I would hesitate to call the shrines in TotK puzzles. Some would argue with me here, but I think putting a balloon, a source of fire, and a few wooden platforms in a room with nowhere to go but up to be a set of wordless instructions, not a puzzle. To me, this is what most shrines in TotK are. They provide you with the tools needed for you to set up a physics demo. This isn't to say they're badly designed. Doing this allows the player to invent things in the shrines and then recreate those same things in their overworld exploration. In that sense, shrines in TotK are covert tutorials on this game's physics engine. However, in terms of providing fun or mental stimulation, they are lacking. To me, this makes shrines less appealing. The quantifiable reward is still there, but I was left feeling more "oh, I have to do that shrine over there" than "Oh good, a shrine!". Having the main reward for exploration in this game be a tutorial on how to do better exploration is something that, to me, doesn't work out. Another thing with how the shrines are designed is that, as mentioned previously, the tools needed to "solve the puzzle" are almost always clearly presented before you. In this way, the famous "you can come up with a hundred unintended solutions for any given puzzle" attitude from BotW is barely present. Don't get me wrong, you can pull out Zonai capsules and hijack the puzzle all you want, but there's never a reason to spend resources when the game gives you perfectly functional ones. I don't envy the developers, because the alternative is no better; when a solution is obvious but the player has no way to achieve it without pulling things from their inventory that they might not have, it's even more unsatisfying. Also, slightly unrelated, I found that the game would often arbitrarily limit my efforts to move through the skies. Platforms or wings just disintegrating after long enough, despite me actively spending resources to make these things functional, feels like Nintendo personally saying "no, not like that" whenever I try to use them to get somewhere.

This is a lot of words. A lot more than I'd usually write for a 6/10 score. While a lot of this was just venting into the void, I do want to sum it up by saying that, more often than not, the game is still passably fun. It's like going bowling when you can't think of anything better to do. Like, sure , we can go bowling for a couple hours, I don't have anything going on tonight and we'll probably have a decent time and then go months before we ever think about going bowling again. But I wouldn't wanna go bowling for 100 hours.

Superliminal is a really solid game, initially i thought it would be a stanley parable clone with a twist but it does its own thing.
The main gameplay gimmick was really well done mustve needed a lot of work to get it working. While the gimmick stays mostly the same its the level design that evolves to make the game interesting.
However I wish it got more ambitious with the level design and the weirdness of being in a dream. A funny thing that happened in my playthrough is when there was a setpiece hidden in plainsight my steam deck chugged a bit giving it away, but kudos to the devs for making a linux version.
The puzzles did get hard but I didnt need a guide for them. However some of the collectibles 100% need a guide cause no average person would ever find them all.
The game is really good looking with some especially nice parts in the levels. The music was another highlight perfectly accomponying the laid back gameplay even picking when the stakes appear to pick up.
The story was a decent affair with a fun twist, the final words before the end actually hit me pretty hard and made me glad I played this.
I finished the main story with all the collectibles, might do another playthrough in the future to try out the other modes or the dev commentary.
All in all, a really solid experience.