God of War (2018) has some of my favorite, and arguably the best-feeling, combat in any video game I have ever played. I'm not sure if it particularly innovates or does anything new but it is so incredibly satisfying and fluid. Pair that with an incredibly well-made game with a solid story and a fun world to travel around, and the final product is one of my favorite games of all time. As a whole, the game may not be the most innovative but it executes on everything it attempts perfectly and delivers an incredibly polished package. My only complaint is that back-tracking for collectibles is a bit of a pain, but balancing that with all the other fun optional side content (like the incredible side bosses) meant that I never got burned out. This is truly one of my favorite games with one of my favorite Plats.

This game is very much the exact kind of checklist open-world game that, on paper, I'm so burned out on. Yet somehow I loved every second of swinging around this city, doing every little thing I possible could. I think most of that can be credited to just how damn fun it was to swing around and beat up baddies. Also the collectibles themselves were just genuinely fun to get. I loved the little bit of dialogue that came with collecting everything. I also never really expected the story of a Spider-man video game to hit me as hard as this game ended up doing. A truly spectacular superhero game.

Sometimes I'll remember that not only did Telltale do a Game of Thrones game in which several stars from the show inexplicably show up in, but that I played all of it for whatever reason. This game suffers pretty severely from the "you're playing this really important character that knows everyone but for some reason no one ever talks about you in the main story" thing that many prequels suffer from. A pretty pointless game that is one of Telltale's weakest and adds nothing of value to the Game of Thrones universe.

Disclaimer: These are my brief thoughts based on my memory of playing this 7 years ago:

Ark is the least user-friendly video game I have ever played in my entire life. This game is not just unintuitive, it is aggressively anti-user experience.

Once you've parsed the terrible menus and fumbled your way into an online game, be prepared for the most opaque gaming experience of your life. Not only is nothing explained to the player, but nothing is even remotely intuitive. Anything you think you might know how to do from years of playing video games, you're wrong. Nothing works how you would expect it to.

Straight-up, Ark is a bad video games and I'm baffled that people choose to play this. I guess it's because it has dinosaurs but even taming a dinosaur (which I had to look up online to figure out) wasn't that satisfying. The time it took to successfully tame a dinosaur was about 5x longer than the amount of time I spent enjoying having a pet dinosaur.

Only reason this game gets 2 stars instead of 1 is because my friends and I had a fun time goofing around for a couple sessions. It's a poorly-made, unintuitive mess of a video game. Do not play Ark.

A game with kind of fun writing, wonderful art, and relatively interesting characters that is an utter drag to play. I really loved Oxenfree, so it's disappointing to find Afterparty to be not very great

If the game had a reasonable movement speed and actions were performed in a more timely manner, this game would probably be beatable in a couple hours. As it is, it drags and takes forever to do absolutely anything.

Imagine Oxenfree but somehow slower and with larger environments that take more time to get around.
Got the Plat in Oxenfree. Could barely get through one playthrough of Afterparty.