Relics of the Old Faith is basically a NG+ mode without being a NG+ mode. You use your existing save so you keep all your cult progress, but the dungeon areas reset allowing you to play them again on a harder difficult with some adapted boss fights. It's nothing revolutionary, it's not going to wildly change the core loop of the game, and the random new random reward system kind of sucks, but the various new modes, new items, relics, and new cult buildings are all solid additions to an already great game. And the best part is - it's all free!

I was pretty worried I would find Signalis to be too scary. Instead, I found Signalis to be too boring.

I’m not really a fan of horror and, as such, I have played basically zero games in this genre, including any of the Resident Evil games. So my closest analog to Signalis is “it’s like an old adventure game but with creepy monsters that keep getting in your way”.

Most of my major criticisms of this game are things that I think fans of this genre would consider to be standard features of survival horror games - things like an extremely limited inventory. I know this is done to make me pick and choose which tools to carry, but 50% of my time playing this game was just running back and forth between rooms and my storage as I juggle critical quest items with my three open inventory slots.

I also think fans of classic Resident Evil games will be no stranger to weird aiming, movement, and shooting controls. I never thought having to shoot 2-3 enemies slowly hobbling toward me would be annoying but it’s honestly some of the worst shooting controls I’ve ever experienced in a console game, new or old, and this game came out in the year 2022. I will never understand why modern game devs feel the need to make a brand new video game that feels and plays like a game from over 20 years ago. It reached the point pretty quickly where I began just running around the enemies to avoid combat because engaging with them was just annoying.

Beyond the bad combat controls, navigating the world with a controller sucks and is made all the more challenging by the overly dark environmental design that makes it difficult to see the items you’re supposed to be interacting with. I cranked the brightness all the way up and I still found myself bumping into black objects on the dark ground that I couldn’t see.

This game also has puzzles! Some of these puzzles are fun, some are incredibly simple, and some are as obtuse as the game’s story. From what little I could glimpse of the story from the cutscenes comprised of static images and flashes of screens that say “INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK”, it seems like there’s maybe an interesting mystery here, but I’m not really one for abstract storytelling and that’s the only language Signalis knows.

Overall, there were parts of Signalis I enjoyed - like when I was running around, collecting objects, and solving puzzles like a classic adventure game. But that is all bogged down by terrible inventory management, opaque storytelling, overly dark environmental design, and frequent annoying combat encounters.

+ Some neat puzzle solving and exploration
+ Cool art design
+ Interesting world (kind of)

- Terrible inventory management
- Combat feels bad
- Frequent enemies are a nuisance
- Obtuse, abstract storytelling
- Environmental design is far too dark

A great remaster of one of my favorite PS2 games of all time.

Katamari Damacy is a delight. The gameplay of starting small and rolling up stuff to get bigger and bigger is still cool as hell almost 2 decades later. The art style, the vibe, the music - all flawless. God what a perfect game. It's so weird in the best ways.

+ Extremely fun gameplay
+ Perfectly weird
+ 10/10 soundtrack
+ Best vibes

- Controls are occasionally frustrating especially when you get wedged between two objects and can't move
- The level timer can sometimes be stressful

Few games measure up to the amount of satisfaction that Neon White delivers when you manage to ace a level, whether it’s on your first try or after it’s been giving you some trouble. It is an immensely satisfying game. So much so that, several hours after finishing it, I was bummed that I didn’t have more to play. I’m not usually one for time chasing in games, but the loop of trying to get the best time possible, ace every level, and find every gift, was incredibly addicting.

That said, there were times where my frustration outweighed the fun I was having. For the most part, it only happened on a couple levels that were too long and relied too much on perfect execution. I’m fine with the rapid restarts on shorter levels when you’re only losing 15-20 seconds, but there were a few stages that were over a minute long (one was over 4 minutes), and it got a bit annoying to have to restart after just one missed jump 75% of the way into the level.

Everything everyone said about the cheesy writing was pretty spot-on. Honestly, I actually kind of enjoyed the story and world, as goofy as it was, but the moment-to-moment writing and dialogue is pretty unbearable. You have the option to skip the dialogue, but it’s also the only thing that breaks up the levels. So it’s kind of nice to have a bit of a break between acts.

Overall, Neon White is an incredibly unique, rad as heck game that brought me more satisfaction than most other games, even if parts of the game overstayed their welcome.

+ Solid gameplay feel even on console
+ Insanely satisfying to chase a faster time or get all the ace medals
+ Killer soundtrack
+ Great style

- Gameplay loop is basically the same throughout the whole game
- Moment-to-moment writing is cringey and unbearably bad
- Some levels are a bit too long which made trying for faster times frustrating
- Gift hunting got to be a pain as some of them are too well-hidden and require guides

Breath of the Wild is my favorite game of all time. So it’s crazy to think that Nintendo could make a new Zelda game that somehow makes BOTW look like a rough draft for a bigger and crazier game, yet that’s exactly what Tears of the Kingdom sets out to do. The question is - does it do it successfully?
(Skip to the end of if you just want my summary without the rambling. Note: this review has a lot of complaints but I love the game. I just think it could've been so much more)

Against all odds, one thing that Tears of the Kingdom did that no other Zelda has really done before (except maybe Skyward Sword) is it made me care about the story. And not just care with a passing interest, I mean really truly care about the story, the world, and the characters living in it. I wanted to seek out every memory and push the story forward because I was excited to see what happened next. Breath of the Wild mainly felt like a big sandbox that had some light storytelling to get you just interested enough in the world you were exploring. Tears of the Kingdom takes that sandbox, and really digs into it adding more story, structure, and substance that Breath of the Wild was lacking.

While Breath of the Wild encouraged you to rethink how you explore; Tears of the Kingdom encourages you to let your creativity run buck-wild and let that bleed into every single thing you do in the game. The new powers, gadgets, and physics introduced in TOTK make the systems in BOTW feel elementary by comparison. BOTW had cool abilities in their own right but they were limited and created a pretty solid ceiling for what you can or can’t do in that world. A ceiling we didn’t realize existed at the time, but a ceiling nonetheless. Tears of the Kingdom gives you the toolset to smash through that ceiling in a dozen different ways. You are constantly given opportunities to do things that make you feel like the smartest person alive until you go on the internet and see people making literal Gundams, Batmobiles, death machines, and Korok torture devices.

The abilities themselves are cool and all but what’s really impressive is how well the whole game is crafted around your powers in such a remarkable way that capitalizes on the new systems introduced without being overwhelming. Watching the trailer for the game, I remember I sort of had this worry that it would be hard to build cool stuff, but the game eases you into the mechanics and gently guides you to making nifty contraptions in a way that empowers you to then break the mold and try new things using what you’ve learned.

Just as Link gets new abilities in this game, the new champion stand-ins come with new powers to utilize in combat and while exploring the world. The characters are rad and the integration of the sages into the gameplay is a really cool concept, but actually using these new powers is an enormous pain in the ass. Instead of utilizing a skill wheel like you do for Link’s abilities, you have to manually interact with your companions with A to activate their powers. Which means either one of two things: 1. You are chasing your companions around the battlefield to use their powers or 2. You will accidentally spam a power you don’t want to use while trying to pick up an item with the same button. It’s legitimately bad game design and I’m shocked Nintendo actually shipped the game with this.

Beyond new systems and mechanics, Tears of the Kingdom almost doubles the amount of content over Breath of the Wild. Way more side quests, more substantial main story, and more than double the amount of map to explore. But just because the map is more than twice the size of the previous game’s map doesn’t mean that it’s twice as interesting.

Breath of the Wild’s map size was pretty perfect. Not too big, not too small, and every inch of it was worth exploring. Tears of the Kingdom’s land map offers much of the same quality and explorability, but it adds the incredibly cool sky and the underwhelming depths on top of that. The sky is rad and, while sparse, it’s designed in such a way that every skysland you could go to had something to do. I never launched into the sky and felt like my time up there was wasted. In contrast, a majority of my time in the depths was pretty boring after the initial wow-factor wore off.

The depths are 1:1 the exact same size as the surface, but with only a fraction of the activities to do. By their very nature, the depths can’t have towns, NPCs, quests, Koroks, or puzzles to solve, so instead they filled the massive, barren landscape with cookie-cutter enemy camps and minibosses that are no different from what exist on the land above. The only unique activities the depths have to offer are the Yiga Camps which, while neat, can be beaten pretty quickly. Activating all the lightroots to light up the depths, should be a satisfying endeavor, instead it offers little pay-off. When you activate a lightroot, a handful of greenery sprouts around it and the immediate vicinity gets a bit lighter. Beyond that, the depths remain unchanged - it’s still dark, barren, and riddled with gloom. Why not take the idea of the green plants that sprout and take that a step-further? Make it so that activating a lightroot really banishes the darkness, gloom, and bleakness from the depths. Make it so that the ceiling of the depths turns into a cool illuminated underground sky. Something. Anything! Maybe the depths would be more impressive if Elden Ring hadn’t done a way cooler “whoa there’s a whole land underground” thing just last year, but as it stands, The Depths in TOTK feel like one giant missed opportunity for something genuinely cool.

The new side quests TOTK offers are great. They were easy to stumble on due to how many there are, and I enjoyed doing all of them. That said, at a certain point I had to come to terms with the fact that the journey very much is the reward, because the actual rewards it gives you for doing anything are laughable. Whether it’s finding all the wells and caves, repairing signs, or just helping someone find their friends, it’s clear Nintendo doesn’t really think much of your accomplishments judgings by the rewards you’re given. I lost track of how many times I would put in the work and time to help someone solve one of their problems, only for them to give me 50 rupees and some soup. You get more money from killing a single moose and selling its meat than you do from doing 95% of the side quests in the game. To be fair, I did enjoy every minute I spent doing every side quest or discovering every cave in Hyrule, but that deoesn’t change the fact that the economy in this game is absolutely fucked.

I was shocked by just how much money was required to do things in Tears of the Kingdom. You need 80,000 rupees total if you want to upgrade every piece of armor in the game. And that doesn’t take into account any other spending you’d do to buy armor, arrows, materials, or the ludicrously-priced custom house parts. You could do every single side activity in this game and still not have enough money to upgrade your armor without farming for materials or meat to sell. Using an exploit that Nintendo quickly patched out, I was able to cheese my way into 120k rupees, and I somehow went through all of it before finishing the game. And don’t even get me started on the actual upgrade materials themselves. Between the insane rupee cost and absurd amount of materials required, a duplication bug was the only way I was able to even stand a chance of upgrading all my armor. Yeah I did some dragon part farming in BOTW but nothing even close to what TOTK requires.

It feels weird to criticize a game this good for missed opportunities when there are so many things it gets right, but it’s hard not to dream of what could have been. TOTK adds several new armor sets, but disappointingly keeps every armor from BOTW with no changes. I was excited to get a snow outfit, but disappointed that it was identical to the last game. I was excited that Link has a cool new hairstyle, but then realized that every piece of headwear just puts his hair up into the same styling it had in the first game. Several new armor sets give you bonus attack damage in cold, hot, or stormy areas, but they’re not all that practical. If I’m in freezing temperatures, why would I wear my cold-damage armor instead of my outfit that protects me from the cold? An easy solution to this would be to let you extract abilities from armor or to fuse armors in some way. The game even lets you buy duplicates of most armor pieces available. Let me take my cold-resistant Snowquill set and fuse it with the cold damage Frostbite set to create Frostquill armor. If you’re going to recycle 75% of the armor from the last game, at least let me do something new with it in a game where you literally introduced fusing objects together.

The new house system in the game is another thing that is such a rad concept, but is so poorly executed I almost would have rather they left it out entirely. You can buy a wide variety of rooms to build your dream house, provided you don’t want windows, don’t want any color, don’t want any decorations around your property, and can do it all with 15 max building pieces, all while your construction assistant constantly gets in the way of anything you want to do. And, once again, be prepared to save up another 10k-20k rupees if you want to build a cool house, because it ain’t cheap.


While most of the game feels like a clear evolution of BOTW, other parts of the game feel like Nintendo fell into the same “more = better” trap that so many other AAA game studios fall into. More quests, more map, more armor, but what’s the value added? Time? My total playtime in Tears of the Kingdom was 220 hours, compared to 155 hours on the BOTW base game. 65 hours more on TOTK than BOTW, but those 65 hours does not mean TOTK was a better experience for it. More time is not equivalent to a better time. Ubisoft games have struggled with that for years, but it’s a bummer to see Nintendo doing the same to Zelda.

In many ways, Tears of the Kingdom is better than Breath of the Wild. But for every new and exciting thing TOTK does over its predecessor, it introduces a new problem or missed opportunity that makes me dream of what Tears of the Kingdom could have been. While BOTW was a game where I encouraged people to try to see everything, I'd almost argue that TOTK is best experienced by not doing everything. I don't regret 100%ing it, but it feels like Nintendo put so much in the game so you could do what you want, not so you would do everything. Yeah Tears of the Kingdom is a brilliant game, but it’s not the same level of revolutionary that Breath of the Wild was.

+ Best story of any Zelda game hands-down
+ Builds on BOTW in meaningful ways
+ Empowers you to solve puzzles in your own ways
+ Rad boss fights
+ Shrine puzzles continue to be excellent and utilize new powers well
+ Fuse opens up mind-blowing possibilities
+ New powers make open-world exploration better than ever
+ Weapon fusing adds more variability to combat

- Major economy issues
- Story dungeons are still the weakest part of the game
- Sage ability activation sucks
- House building is poorly executed
- New collectibles with no good way of tracking any of them
- 75% of the armor and weapons are reused from BOTW
- Arguably too large of a game
- The Depths are a huge missed opportunity
- Hand-waving some of the events of BOTW away

I have disliked parts of Zelda games in the past, but I don’t think I have ever used the word “bad” to describe an entire Zelda game before playing Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.

The Adventure of Link has some very cool ideas in it and feels like Nintendo trying to make a 3D Zelda before they had the technology to do so. It’s their first attempt at having actual swordplay in a Zelda game. It’s their first attempt at having towns full of people you can interact with and get quests from. It genuinely has some really cool ideas in it, but holy crap none of it is actually fun to play. This was before the time of enemies having patterns so all enemy movements and attacks are random, making the already rough combat way more difficult. Enemies are incredibly aggressive, so the act of simply trying to pick up a key in a dungeon becomes tedious as flying enemies constantly swoop down at you over and over. The RPG-like overworld map full of random encounters is an interesting idea that quickly becomes annoying as you’re just trying to get from one location to another without getting constantly interrupted.

Honestly, for me, the coolest thing about this game, like the first Zelda, is seeing how this game impacted the Legend of Zelda franchise for decades to come. Not only is it fun to see some of your favorite elements in their earlier forms, but it’s also wild to see how much Link’s representation in Smash Bros comes from this game. Link’s upward thrust and downward stab attacks we know and love from Smash are from Zelda II. The Temple stage from Melee is based on the first dungeon from Zelda II. The Zelda fan in me is loving seeing the origins of the games I know so well, but the larger part of me who just likes playing good video games was miserable basically the entire time I played this.

+ Awesome seeing more origins of the Zelda franchise
+ Some really cool ideas that were ahead of their time
+ The Temple theme slaps

- Playing this game was a miserable experience
- Random overworld encounters are annoying
- Extremely difficult combat
- Very obtuse solutions to quests that feel impossible without a guide