Death Stranding was as incredible as I knew it would be, though it's also a game I can understand others wouldn't see the same way. Every step is a puzzle, and every action serves the narrative. Of course, it took Kojima to discover the best way to make a walking simulator. It's also very convoluted in classic Kojima fashion, but I enjoyed trying to make sense of it. I don't know what the replay value will be like, but I put in 100 hours on one playthrough, so I'd say that's pretty good. Recommend to anyone who likes long walks on the Beach.

Say, Junpei... Have you ever heard of [Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors]? They say it's a game where you can solve puzzles... And they're actually really good... But not only that... The story is also supposed to be really good, too! It makes me wonder... What if the words I'm saying right now... Aren't even real? What if I'm not even a person... I could just be a [fake character] in a [pointless bit] at the beginning of a [Backloggd review for 999]! I'm not saying I believe that, of course... It's just something to think about.

I'm not as good at exposition dumping about pseudoscience as Kotaro Uchikoshi, but you get the point. Zero Escape's writing is easy to joke about, because it's very silly. The silliness, though, is targeted. It's crafted to serve a purpose, to build out a series of ideas that, over time, take shape as something with real meaning, and even beauty. You begin the game by chuckling over speeches about Ice-9 and glycerin. You end the game sobbing over a game of sudoku.

That's the thing about Kotaro Uchikoshi, the reason why he is my single favourite writer of video games. He doesn't just write deep characters and beautiful, thematically coherent narratives - he goes about it in a way that nobody else would ever even think to do. Nobody, nobody else is writing something like 999 but him. Nobody else is crafting a game in which the artificiality of player choice is expressed as an act of love. Nobody else is turning exposition into an inherent source of comfort and meaning. Nobody else is going to make you cry by asking you to physically flip over your Nintendo DS.

Cyberpunk 2077 (ver. 2.0 onwards) is a technological, narrative, gameplay, and visual masterpiece. CD Projekt Red clearly poured their heart and soul into fixing this game up, and in doing so, they made the new gold standard for western RPGs. With all the noticeable bugs out of the way, I can finally appreciate everything this game has to offer. The story is heart warming and heart wrenching, Night City feels so alive and lived in, combat is experimental in the best way possible, and the things they managed to pull off were mind blowing. Everyone should forget what they’ve heard and play this ASAP. The game is fixed.

System Shock 2 has to be one of the richest games I've ever played. What does that mean? It means that in every single category, System Shock 2 excels at something. While the game isn't perfect by any means, it has easily rocketed to one of my favorite experiences. The game's design is so mechanically deep, with multiple different routes you can go down as a player. Soldier acts as a canvas for you to fully customize your playstyle, whether it be a combat expert who goes into every encounter guns blazing, a hacker who can manipulate security systems and turn turrets against their masters, to a psychic god who can manipulate their environment around them. Going for a weird mixture of all three, I found the game never limits you with the build you want to make, each one is equally viable. Even disregarding this, the game's mechanics contribute heavily to a highly immersive and most importantly - scary - atmosphere. There's nothing scarier than seeing a mutilated cyborg midwife bolting down a corridor only to have your pistol break on you when you try to fire. Very few games have given me that "holy shit oh god oh god" reaction on such a visceral level. Combat feels surprisingly good in this, thwacking hybrids with a wrench while sprinting at them feels fantastic and the gunplay has a surprising amount of oomph. What makes the game special among other things is the environmental exploration and how the level design feels entirely natural. Never once does the game ever feel like you're exploring levels, but rather lived-in environments that people used. This increases immersion tenfold and it's impressive how seamless everything feels, especially regarding backtracking. I will say that hunting for restoration bays doesn't feel nearly as nerve-wracking as they did in the first game, since they're usually immediately available to the player with a few exceptions.

The game isn't perfect, however, and that comes down to some of the weapon balance. Some of the weapons just aren't very good, such as the laser pistol, whose advantages of theoretically infinite ammo are outweighed by its small damage output even against mechanical foes. The laser rapier, a weapon that would burn fear into even the strongest of enemies in the original game, is significantly less effective in this one, with its high skill requirements betraying its general lack of usefulness. The hacking is also far inferior in this game. While not necessarily amazing in SS1 either, in SS2 it feels like random chance with little skill whether you succeed or not. It's not a massive problem since leveling up your hacking ability and using certain augmentations can make your chances better, but I would have preferred something with mechanics for me to learn and master, rather than just brute-forcing past them with stat upgrades. These are minor problems at the end of the day. System Shock 2 has to be one of the most mechanically satisfying games I've played in a long time.

System Shock has never been a franchise that prided itself on story, but rather its excellent worldbuilding. With the first game pioneering the now commonplace audio log, it only makes sense that the sequel would continue to improve upon that formula. Like the first game, SS2 primarily delivers its story content through these logs, following the lives of the members of the Von Braun before their inevitable demise at the hands of The Many. These accounts are detailed, well-acted, and even terrifying. You get to hear first-hand accounts of people in the process of transforming into lumbering hybrids, staff begging for their lives as their mutated boss blasts them into pulp, and the last survivor of the Hydroponics deck chronicling his observations while awaiting his eventual consumption within the body of the many. Such a richly detailed and dense world does not go to waste here, and the player even follows the same characters via these logs and even gets to see the results of the events described, such as finally watching two lovers escape on the Von Braun's last escape pod after hours of searching for one another. Every single item in the game, even a simple beaker, has a thorough explanation and worldbuilding, and small details like that help make System Shock 2 feel more alive. While I mentioned the series is typically somewhat light on a conventional scenario, the plot twist midway through the game is simply brilliant and I didn't see it coming at all. The ending is terrible and entirely atonal to the rest of the game, but it is simply the ending and doesn't prevent the rest from being taken seriously.

System Shock 2's visual presentation is a bit of a mixed bag, but it has some highlights. Looking Glass Studios' Dark Engine was a pretty antiquated beast even back then, and Irrational Games couldn't quite overcome its limitations. Even for 1999, the game's character models are truly horrendous, with games like 1998's Half-Life featuring much more lively and detailed models. Weapon models are beyond basic, featuring little detail, and are visibly more polygonal than other games. Environments flip-flop between being insanely detailed and a tad too basic, but when the game fires on all cylinders, it can far eclipse its contemporaries in this category. The pulsing masses of annelids on the walls and other animated textures are a nice touch for sure, but the lack of blood decals after combat does take away a slight bit of oomph from the combat. The game's sometimes lacking detail is made up for somewhat by Irrational's choice to target a somewhat comic book-esque art style, and the strong monster designs and environmental concepts do shine through. The midwives and hybrids that stalk you through the Von Braun are genuinely terrifying creatures, with intelligent use of body horror and sound design to evoke fear whenever they may appear. Even the robots are terrifying, mostly due to the danger they present to the player. The character portraits are somewhat variant in quality but generally add to this style.

System Shock 2's audio design is the stuff of gaming legend, primarily directed and music composed by Eris Broseus. Irrational put a lot of focus on this area of the game and it paid off - it's part of why the game is so scary. The game makes fantastic use of surround sound, and hearing a mumbling hybrid or psychic monkey far off in the distance while hacking a storage crate is frighteningly realistic. From the broken radio screams that midwives make when struck, to the hybrids' pleas for death, the game's gruesome palette is written by the audio. The soundtrack is often described as "unfitting of a horror game" but I couldn't disagree more. While the intense breakbeat fitting of a laser tag arena might seem unfitting, the high tempo of the music and pounding beats perfectly match the panic that the player experiences while being chased by the screaming hordes. Med Sci 1 and Hydro 1 are perfect breakbeat tracks, while still conveying tones of dread and panic. Even so, the game still has plenty of more conventionally scary ambient music, such as Hydro 2, which has a spaced-out ambiance that naturally fits the outer space setting of the game. It honestly makes me wish more game composers put more small rhythms into their ambient tracks rather than just drones, even if I still greatly appreciate good drone music. While I do miss the dynamic soundtrack of the first game, System Shock 2 has one of the best soundtracks in late 90s gaming, and Brosius and his team of composers deserve all of the praise for creating something both creative and terrifying.

System Shock 2 is often seen as a landmark title in the world of video games and I'm beyond happy to discover that those assessments are truthful. Its game mechanics, methods of storytelling, detailed worldbuilding, player freedom, art direction, audio design, and soundtrack are beyond worthy of praise and deservedly are the stuff of legends. Even if the game suffers from occasionally iffy weapon balancing, questionable hacking mechanics, and a thoroughly unsatisfying ending, these flaws feel almost negligible in comparison to the monolithic quality of the rest of the game. It's a worthy successor to the already outstanding original game.

SOMA told a phenomenal story about consciousness, identity, and preservation. Sure, I've come across the existential crisis of what makes us human a number of times in horror and science fiction alike, but it was done so damn well here, each new revelation drip-fed over time.

Stealth was necessary for getting past the game’s monsters, with each type having their own detection quirk depending on location, either relying on sight, sound, or movement. There was a balance between struggling to stay alive against the assortment of enemies and the quiet moments where the atmosphere seeped into my bones. I’ll recommend this game for years to come.