cool game, cool puzzles, really easy to understand despite the game not uttering a single word through it's entire duration.

but also, what the fuck is the meaning of ANYTHING in this??? I genuinely think there's no explanation at all and it's just cool stuff randomly thrown at you, with the only objective of letting the animation and art deparment flex (and a well deserved flex to be honest).
however, while playing the game this comes across as "this alien shit is incomprehensible so don't even try" and i think thats pretty cool.
It also fits into the game aesthetic perfectly: you are constantly looking at these weird organic/robotic creatures, sometimes more fleshy sometimes more metalic but always a mix of the two. The level design is the same, with this natural landscapes, broken paths, corridors that lead nowhere... as if they were trying to tell you a story; but you also have the puzzles that are implemented in this environments in a very unnatural way, almost as if they were Portal test chambers. Again, a mix of organic and inorganic, of real and false. It's incredible how they took something that is often considered a "mistake" in videogames (take for example ICO and how nonsensical it's level design was) and implemented it perfectly into the vibes of the world.

Lightfall itself was highly disappointing. Neomuna was not fun as a patrol zone, drop rates for weapons were awful. The story. God, the story. Congrats for adding the first(?) nonbinary character to Destiny, but the writing for them was truly atrocious. Caiatl should've been way more important in the story than she was, too. Sadly, this whole campaign is a filler arc from an anime. One big training montage while old man Osiris yells at us.

The complete revamp of buildcrafting is godsend.

The seasonal content hasn't excited me as much this year, but it's still solid enough.

The soundtrack is great but I do prefer the music from The Witch Queen.

Dungeons this year have been pretty good. Ghosts of the Deep is unfortunately a bit of a slog to me, but I still think it's gorgeous and interesting. Warlord's Ruin is genuinely extremely cool and gives me some great Grasp of Avarice vibes. My only complaint is that the final boss mechanics for standing in circles while transferring hex is quite finicky in practice, especially when the AI is so unpredictable, and it really pushes your team super hard on add clear to stay alive. Otherwise two incredible boss fights and just a super original design.

I don't raid much any more, but frankly I didn't like Root of Nightmares. I know it's derided as being too easy, especially compared to Vow, but I just wasn't feeling this one mechanically. The jumping puzzle with the death mechanic especially was an absolute fucking slog. The visuals are great, though, and I love the concept, but it just wasn't as fun as RoN to me.

PvP is still pretty fun. Still too many abilities in PvP I think.

Loot is getting really out of hand and I feel like we're due for another round of sunsetting. Idk we've just got ridiculous power creep in the game but whatever.

Also fuck the layoffs.

I still love playing Destiny, but this year my interest dwindled a lot.

I had very little familiarity with Batman when I bought this game years ago. I tried playing it once and was put off by all the references I didn't get. I didn't have access to comics as a kid, and my only understanding of Batman was from the Adam West series. I remember when the Michael Keaton one came out thinking "Wait, they're trying to make a serious Batman?"

Still, it's the only super hero franchise I have any connection to at all, and with it being such a beloved game I thought I should give it its fair due. This time around, to prime the pumps a bit, I watched the first season of Batman: The Animated Series. This was extremely helpful to get a bunch of the backstory and feel like I was in on the references.

It's a ton of fun to see how many gadgets and activities from Batman's escapades they were able to translate into gameplay. I don't remember him crawling through quite this many vents though; seriously the guy spends more time in ducts than Harry Tuttle, heating engineer. I don't normally like stealth gameplay; it makes me feel weak and I feel like you spend all your time waiting for something. But here they did a great job making me feel like a predator. I like the way the chatty enemies slowly getting more and more freaked out as you thin their numbers gives you a sense of power even when you're hiding in a drain.

Both the gameplay and the stakes of the plot built up at a nice steady pace that kept me moving forward. I really liked how Batman looked more haggard and unkempt as the game progressed. The voice work is amazing; I know it's been said a million times but this is the performance of a lifetime for Mark Hamill. His voice is in every scene but I never got sick of it because it was always in flux. He's constantly sliding between high and low, rough and smooth, fast and slow, loud and soft; he uses his full vocal and emotional range and through all of it never lets up on the energy. It's like 10 straight hours of him dialed to 11.

All in all it was a grand old romp; the combat was sweet, the bosses were a little iffy, the environment was amazing, the stealth was exciting and it really made me feel like ductman. I'm looking forward to the second one!

I thought it was a hoot! I mean, let me be a skateboarding dog and everything else is pretty much window dressing right?

Honestly though I love the colors, the diversity and the way it maps familiar gameplay mechanics to social situations. It was a bold choice to structure it the way they did; they drop you right into the middle of this person’s life and you get to know her and her family and friends as they all fight about what happened in the past. There were moments when the negativity got a little overwhelming. But your sweet dad is always there at the end of the day, and I think they managed to pull off all the various reconciliations without becoming too saccharine or contrived.

Some individual elements felt a little undercooked, but it didn’t really bother me given the small scope and big ambitions. I’ll take a slightly unpolished passion project over something super safe any day. All in all I really dug it and I’m really looking forward to what’s next from this team.

…and you get to be a skateboarding dog.

This is pretty much everything I look for in a game, and then some. It's bright and colorful. It's got a giant pile of incredibly wacky guns, like an acid sprinkler and bowling ball launcher. It's unique, with its own voice. Its core mechanics are polished to a shine. It's bombastic and surprising. It's funny. Like, really really funny.

Unfortunately it's the kind of comedy that occasionally veers into being completely annoying, but generally you only have to tolerate these detours for a moment before the genuine guffaws start again. Parts of it are very much "of a time," but that doesn't bother me. I've done a bit of comedy writing, enough to recognize that this sheer volume of jokes only happens with lots of work and iteration. Video games are the hardest medium to be funny in; every element both technical and artistic has to be tuned just right. My hat is off to the whole team, here; the animations, sound design and snappy load times all bolster the writing in what I found to be a truly jaw-dropping display of artistic prowess.

The biggest flaw is one that a lot of games fall prey to: absurdly aggressive hinting. There was one quest where I had to get into a factory. "The front door is blocked; see if you can find another way in." Literally 3 seconds later: "Try looking around the yard for something that you could use to get in the factory!" Literally 2 seconds later: "Use the crane to smash the wall of the factory!" Literally 4 seconds later: "What's taking so long? Use the crane to smash the wall!" Like at this point I'm still getting my bearings trying to figure out what building they're talking about. It's an incredibly common problem and for a game of its era it's not surprising to see, but it is one that I've always been baffled by.

The repetitive voice lines during missions only got super bad during a couple moments. The final boss fight in particular I had to disable dialog for because it was purposely written to be grating, and the fight was challenging enough that I had to retry it a few times and hear those same grating lines over and over. Again, forgivable, but annoying nonetheless.

The voice acting is top notch; I played with the female protagonist and voice actor Stephanie Lemelin brought an incredible energy and bravado to the character. She simultaneously sounded like she was born of this weird world while also being the most relatable part of it, a tricky needle to thread that had me cheering for even her most eye-rolling quips and one-liners. Her voice felt like mine.

The traversal is fantastic. I think this is the only open world game I've ever played where I basically never used fast travel because just getting from point A to B is so much goddamn fun. Bouncing, wall-running and grinding my way across this city never got old. The stunt scoring system that enhances your damage output ties it all together in a multiplicative way.

In a lot of games it feels like they give you the fun parts to get through the challenging parts. In Sunset Overdrive, they give you fun parts to have more fun with the other fun parts. There's still plenty of challenge, especially in the boss fights and base defense segments, but even when I'm dying it's usually because I'm so overwhelmed with weird guns to shoot, barrels to explode, and cars to bounce off of. If Assassins Creed is like a gumball machine, giving you one piece of candy at a time at a steady consistent pace, and Dark Souls is like crawling through a bombed-out munitions factory looking for the last grimy jawbreaker, Sunset Overdrive is like diving head-first, mouth open into the candy vault, Scrooge McDuck style.

Playing Quantum Break right off the heels of Alan Wake 2 and a replay of Control is a very interesting thing. Add to that the fact that I had no idea this game existed at all prior to looking up Remedy's catalog lately, and it did make for a pleasant surprise.

This game really feels like a stepping stone for future Remedy games. Many of its faults have been adressed in future games. For instance, jampacking all the narrative pickups in cramped corners just completely kills the flow of the game. In Alan Wake 2, there's way less flavor text of the sort, and it's trickled through the environment at a much more pleasing pace. Improvement.

The same could be said about the FMV episodes. They are an interesting experiment which has some merit, but always cut the gameplay when I just felt like shooting bad guys. Once again, it was handled so much more seamlessly in Alan Wake 2.

The best things about the game are absolutely the time stutter sequences. They have that signature Remedy vision about them of creating something wholly unique in a game that is such a pleasure to experience.

And so, the game kind of works. It's also got a decent story with mostly generic and unremarkable characters, but hey, its functional. From my perspective, it was more of an fun experiment to play this to see the process of Remedy maturing into a new form storytelling and game design.

The studio still has stuff to improve on the Alan Wake 2 formula, but if we compare the progress made between that and Quantum Break, we can estimate that we have some truly fantastic games to look forward to in the future.