This game made me break down and cry thinking about the ending, hours after I had finished it. It felt like it ripped my still-beating heart directly out of my chest and then proceeded to gently caress it, which is a sign that it's good art. Probably.

Portal 2 goes for something far more ambitious than the relatively self-contained original Portal, and doubles down on everything that made the first great in my opinion, all while serving up themes almost good enough to make me forgive my parents.

So yeah it's pretty good I guess.

Given it's been years since this game's original release and controversies that came with it, it's easier to look back now and ask "were we too hard on this game?"

And the answer is no. Absolutely not. In fact we weren't hard enough.

I say this with love in my heart for this series, the love that was one of the only driving forces for making me want to complete this game at all: these games are not good, and this revisionist history is something that can only end up hurting the series in the future.

Even ignoring all graphical hiccups, lazy animations, and a Pokédex locked behind a paywall, this game still has no idea what it wants to be. The disconnect between gameplay and story felt particularly bad with this one, and in the end I feel as though it made both end up feeling more hollow. The wild areas bombard you with options but give you very little realistic means to use the them because of the way the game is structured. Gmax raids are a genuinely dreadful experience that you can't even run from once you begin, it makes you wonder why they even give you the option in the U.I, though that's a bit of a theme with the game as a whole. The illusion of choice.

Most disappointing is the story though. Though I joke about it being used as a faulty defence, SwSh DID have cool ideas. I actually genuinely liked Hop and his character arc - at least in theory. But it's clear there was a lot holding it back from being what it should be, and that really goes for most of the other characters as well. Eternatus is a cool Pokémon - cooler than even the box legendaries if you ask me - and Chairman Rose had concepts that could have led to something genuinely intriguing, but it's so clear none of these concepts had the time to cook that they needed to make something properly satisfying.

It just makes me sad. This game could have been good.

At the risk of sounding pretentious: Hades is a game greater than the sum of any of it's individual parts. You can view all of its elements individually, and you'd have yourself an incredibly challenging and addictive Roguelike with a killer soundtrack. However, I think that would be to undermine the point of the art itself, and rob Hades of the credit it's due.

It's the way that all of the individual elements come together, and the way developers account for everything, that makes Hades such a unique experience. I can say stuff like "You can 100% complete the game and never hear a single line of repeated dialogue." or "no one run will ever be exactly the same," but I don't think any of that could do justice to just how well designed this game is.

Even if you don't enjoy it nearly as much as me, and regardless of whether you're a fan of roguelikes or not, give this game a chance for your own sake.