I fondly remember watching a friend play the original MediEvil in the late 90's. We were both attracted to the gothic environments and enemies. I'm glad this remaster kept the charming dark design. It was fun to see the old levels transform.

I had some issue with the camera; it's not easy to navigate in certain areas. The small amount of platforming could be improved, namely when you're trying to jump onto small surfaces to avoid falling to your death.

The difficulty felt absurd on specific levels (looking at those scarecrows in particular). I couldn't believe how easy it was to die when enemies can simply run into you to deal large damage. I'll admit, I had some grievances.

Then I completed a trophy that unlocked the original PS1 game, within the game. Why not, I'll play it for awhile for nostalgia. Immediately the camera was absolute shit and Daniel runs so quickly, it's easy to harm yourself with all the dangers around. Then I realized what an awesome job this team did with the remaster. The camera is an improvement. The movement feels more natural. You can swap weapons. It all makes more sense.

The game has frustrating levels, but overall it was fun to revisit.

What an improvement over the first game. They can make a likable main character and add fun banter with your side characters. Most of the missions are fun to play. You have new gadgets, and skills, to help you explore and hack. Although, half of "exploring" is you looking up to get on rooftops. It's the same solution: find a crane or moveable lifts.

It's a huge improvement....after I shut off many in-game options. I was close, very close, to quit after the initial first hour because the game was incredibly overwhelming. After your tutorial mission, the game dumps you in the open world. The radio constantly plays while characters are speaking. (I couldn't hear myself think!) The news video randomly plays, showing you what you literally finished. Other players can jump into your game session without your input. I'm not joking when I say I was in audio hell. I was overwhelmed to the point I was visibly frustrated. I played the entire game without the radio because it does not tune out like it did in WD1.

I initiated when I wanted to join a pvp mission. Much better when I get to choose what plays. If I didn't have those options, I'm not even certain I would play this one.

There's some minor adjustments I miss from WD1, such as, hacking was one button vs four buttons. It was easier to lose sight of a target here than the first entry. But overall, a better game. I don't even miss Aiden Pierce. He can stay gone as far as I'm concerned.

I've heard of this one years ago and it has been on my list for a long time. Finally hit start and I'm not disappointed.

I liked the combination of 2D platformer with RPG battle system. There's a ton of recruitable characters with their own skill trees to level. Some are more useful than others and a couple are extremely similar.

The art style and fairy tale theme is fun. I don't think I was avoiding fights but the final handful of bosses were suddenly difficult. I would be okay in small battles, then destroyed in bigger fights. It took a few tries but thankfully I did not have to level up at the end.

The time length felt good at 5 hours. Any longer and the battles would be too repetitive. I'm glad most of the "platforming" was flying too. More my speed to fly to places than make timed jumps.

Essentially, a walking sim inside a cult compound. You arrive in the late evening, because why would you want to see anything? You don't need the sun, here's a tiny missable flashlight you can use to barely see. What do you mean blundering around in the dark isn't fun??

Everything is told through written notes and tape recordings. If you're hiding a secret in a cult, what better way to hide your guilt in a note someone could find laying around??

You begin to ignore the same creaking noise because it has proven to never be anything. It's the same noise, over and over. You lose all sense of dread.

It's a short, cheap walk with nothing original. You hold out hope only to be disappointed in the end that it is indeed, a walking sim spoken through notes. Bummer.

I had fun with this slasher-inspired horror game. I really enjoyed the monster design. I'm glad they went in that direction.

Most of the characters are enjoyable (or barely tolerable in Jacob's case) and the banter isn't too annoying. My main negative, with the survivor cast, is the group is too large. This creates an uneven time spent between the characters. There's a couple of the kids, after the initial 3 chapters, that are gone from the rest of the night.

It didn't stop my enjoyment, but damn, these kids can really hold their shit together over major injuries. I had to laugh a couple of times when someone brushes off a serious injury to keep the night moving forward. I know some of that can be attributed to adrenaline but not everything. I did have fun with the violent death scenes when you screwed up.

My biggest negative is this studio's game mechanics. You are encouraged to play their game multiple times; that's fine, but you only have one auto-save file and you cannot skip cutscenes. It's a huge drag to watch the same cutscenes 5+ times and it changes nothing. You also can't skip chapters. You have to play the run to the end. There's no real reason for that, other to waste your time. It's giving me great pause to play their other titles because it's so time consuming.

I did not realize this was a Bloober Team until the moment I started the game. I will now be extremely careful anytime I see their logo on a future project so I can stay the hell away. Far, far away.

The only positives are the pretty graphics and the unique perspective when you're viewing both worlds. The negatives here far outweigh the good. You can't cover up the absolute shit message with pretty graphics. Every time I think about The Medium, I remember the victims are portrayed as monsters.

I have no idea what's going on with their writing team, but they cannot handle traumatic themes at all. They have failed again, and again. This being the most egregious of all. It's not even "it's so bad, it's good." It's shameful. The entire message can boiled down to: Victims can never heal or overcome their pain. They can only pass it on with more pain by becoming a monster.

Also why the hell would you show me the depraved acts of a character and THEN expect me to feel sympathy afterwards? It doesn't work that way.

There's no reason to play The Medium. This has killed any future project of theirs I may want to try. I want nothing to do with them moving forward.

Quick and simple puzzle game where you repair gadgets. Incredibly easy to get started and it's a chill experience to the end. I love the bright pastel colors and art direction. The story plays like you are reading a book. I do wish there were more illustrations of the characters during dialogue. They have a lot of the same expressions. Maybe that's just me trying to see more of this style.

But I greatly appreciate the attention to design and typography. I love seeing more indie games having amazing design elements in their games.

It's an entertaining, turn-off-your-brain, battle simulator. I picked this up because it was a free monthly. I would have not bought this for myself or previously thought I would enjoy something like this; but I'm glad I tried it. It was something new and enough to get my completionist brain to platinum it.

I am still surprised how many modes are included. With all my time, I didn't even try the 1v1 duels or mounted combat. I mostly enjoyed the 64 player battles. There are many different maps including: snowy peaks, tropical beach ship docks, and large castles surrounded by dense forests. The mix objectives have a wide range too. You can help push battle rams, put out fires, protect ancient relics, to much more. I'm glad not every map ended with "kill/ protect the party leader." Instead, they got creative and mixed it up.

There are four classes and each class has 3 subclasses. Each has pros and cons; you can swap during the battle to find what suits your play style. There are different weapon sets in each class. Maybe you want to play as a healer knight with a large one handed mace and shield to protect your squad mates. Maybe you want to stay in the back and chip away as a archer and use fire to your advantage? I was pleasantly surprised by the different options.

I originally played this back in 2014; I dropped it very early because of the gameplay and real life. I wanted to give it a second chance since I liked the concept. This is gonna sound like a long rant but please remember, not everything is taken so seriously. I have fun with these.

Let's start with the concept and story. Playing in an open city as a hacker vigilante appeals to me. Most of the gameplay mechanics are generally fun. You can hack terminals to help you catch criminals on foot or while driving. You are able to spy on people and use cameras to plan your routes. While some missions require you to be hidden and sneaky, most of the open world missions let you start and end with a gunfight. I had more fun exploring the city and playing the side missions.

The main story is a revenge-fueled cat and mouse. It may sound interesting but it's less fun to play. Aiden, your playable character, is a combination of a stoic, stubborn hero (he is the only one that can save his loved ones) with a violent streak (he will do whatever is necessary to protect them). This makes him quite boring and predictable. He makes every situation worse. Because he has a one track mind and zero ability to reflect on his emotional state, he continuously uses others to get what he desires while ignoring the people he claims to care about.

Cue the two female characters that only exist to push his character forward. His sister that constantly has to hold his fragile, guilt ridden baggage over her deceased child and the hacker friend that has to pay the price for his poor actions. The two women are only there as caregivers for this poor, beaten down vigilante. Story and characters are not this game's strong suit. (However, I will give points to the mature level of crime shown.)

Now gameplay, because that's what kept me playing after the game opened up. I believe most people know about the atrocious driving. There's many missions that require you to drive all over the city while avoiding cops and race timed sections. You will be taking out half of the city's districts by the time you have completed the missions. (I always wonder if he's doing more harm than good.) You cannot shoot while driving. The game loves to point out when a target is fleeing, you can shoot the tires. But NOT while you are in a vehicle. I am still utterly puzzled by this gameplay decision.

The WORST side missions are the ones where Aiden, (who for some odd reason after shooting innocent civilians, destroying half of Chicago, assists other criminals), decides he needs to capture THIS particular criminal alive to "teach him a lesson and go to jail." It makes no sense logic or story wise. As I stated earlier, Aiden will kill if it helps his goals. He's not on some moral high ground. But gameplay-wise these missions are completely frustrating because you are at the mercy of the game itself. You cannot use firearms to "clip" your target, even in the foot, because they will die. You cannot use grenades, because it may clip the target and they will die. You cannot hack the explosives expert because they may panic, throw their hacked explosives towards your target and the target will die. You cannot get into a car chase because they may leave their car and get hit by a passerby and will die. These missions fucking sucked and completely sapped any fun.

There are smaller nitpicks that are not executed well and some of the gameplay mechanics are mediocre; maybe because it was released in 2014? Despite this unhinged rant, that I'm enjoying writing btw, I did buy Watch Dogs 2. So in the end, it did something right! I was generally having fun playing it, when it wasn't a knockdown or main mission. I want to see what the other games bring and pray it does not break my spirit.

I enjoyed this visual novel. It starts off more horror with some jumps then turns more into a thriller detective. Which worked for me; I do enjoy more thriller/suspense rather than supernatural horror. I liked the storytelling and the different paths was laid out nicely. The game tells you when you have done everything you can in an area and even saves your progress where you left off to avoid replaying the same content. That was super helpful and more VNs with branching paths need to take notes!

The characters are fun and vary. The art style is well done; minus the constant puckering lips. What is going on with that? Every character does it. It's incredibly odd.

I made a couple notes where the translation was off. But honestly, I only found two misspellings. That's amazing considering the amount of text. Very nice work from the team as a whole.

I can only think of one thing I did not like here. Sometimes you were given a choice to respond, but really all of the choices lead to the same outcome. I don't understand that. It's already telling a story and the game is leading me to that final conclusion. So why even bother giving me these "choices" when immediately it won't make a difference. It happened a few times and it doesn't add anything to the story or experience. Just cut those parts out.

I tend to enjoy the older FF games that allow me to change my team's jobs. I like to switch and experiment, rather than a character set in stone. There are 22 jobs in total to collect. While it's fun to gather, 22 is A LOT. There's a few that aren't really helpful/fun to use. You will most likely only use them for achievement purposes.

One good news is that this Pixel Remaster game finally figured out how to hide the mouse cursor! I also enjoyed that magic is cast immediately. (Take that FFIV.) The characters actually attempted to use spells in story cut scenes, like Cure and Raise. Instead of you know, uselessly watching and shrugging.

I didn't understand how "Flee" worked. The majority of the time, your character couldn't get away and suffered hits from the enemy. It was better to fight, instead of "saving time" to flee. I wish I knew what stat, if any, was related to that.

I realize the initial release makes this 30 years old, but I still found the antagonist silly. There's no reason to have any writing where the "bad guy" is so OP with multiple opportunities to make quick work of our heroes but then never kills them off. We're knocked out, helpless, but this bad dude is like, "I'll finish you off later." WHY? Just do it now???? He's literally described as a "being of pure evil" but conveniently never kills us. It's silly. This isn't the first media with this trope but I can't take the antagonist seriously when they pull a Dr. Evil and assume it all went to plan.

Best characters hands down were the sassy turtle and sweet, baby GIlgamesh.

Um, it wasn't great. The first chapter started fairly strong. You're in this decrepit family mansion, sneaking around and solving cryptic puzzles. You are trying to follow your father's footsteps to stop this supposed family curse. Sounds interesting right? Well, sadly all that cool stuff was at the end. Since I didn't play the previous games, the ending felt rushed and not clear to me.

There's a ton of cutscenes and black loading screens in this game. I am not one to knock a game down for animation quality, but for the amount of cutscenes, it does leave much to be desired. The characters are incredibly stiff, with little mouth movement.

There are so many loading screens! An unreasonable amount. You will be sitting silently, looking at a black screen for a long time. I don't understand why some of the rooms or locations couldn't be connected to cut down on the shear amount of loading. There's a tiny hallway that literally only connects you to the living room from the parlor. Anytime you need that room, you get not one, but two loading screens. For a relatively small room. It's poor planning.

After chapter 1, there's less puzzles. Only one specific puzzle toward the end I can think of. The gameplay turns into a couple of boring tasks. Either run here and talk to this person then go back to speak with this person, or there's a "puzzle" but you just guess or mash a button until you get it correct. What happened to the multi-part desk puzzle that was thought out in the beginning?

There are fixed camera angles, which is part cool, part annoying. It was cool for atmosphere; but gameplay wise, trying to find clues was annoying when the camera had a mind of its own. I don't even know what to say about the characters. Everyone was so bare bones that when a name was mentioned you forgot who they were, lmao.

I don't know if this deserves a two, but I'd feel so bad if I gave it only one star. I feel like the team was TRYING. However, the finished product has so much wasted potential. I was looking forward to it but in the end, I couldn't stop laughing how absurd it turned out.

Generally the story was more solid. You get a better sense of the characters and their resolve. That doesn't stop the main character from being plain stupid at times.

Uh, I'm trying to find positives but all I see from my notes are negatives...so without further ado.

You can't see the buffs on the bosses. So if you're trying to cast a debuff or remove a buff from them, you can't tell what is on currently. Game tells you everything on stat menu BUT what your commands do on a character. How am I supposed to know what my actions do if you don't tell me? Good thing Google exists now.

There's an annoying amount of unwinnable fights in the story. You'll give everything you got until, oh, it was scripted. Cool. There's hidden walls you cannot see. I guess you're supposed to use your face and walk into every single wall for something hidden. Again doesn't hide the mouse cursor. Whyyyyyy.

I initially didn't think much of this game until I played FFIV. Then I wished I was back here.

More effort for story and world building. I can see where the mmo FFXIV found its inspiration. I like the freedom of the open jobs, any of your characters can be any job. The dungeon maps are much smaller and easier to navigate than previous entries; while the world map is larger and more creative. It's a welcomed change.

The battle turns felt more inconsistent here. Sometimes enemies would go multiple times before you had a chance to move once. Other times you could fight the same enemy and you would go first. It would make fights, particularly boss fights, aggravating because you set up actions for your party members only for the enemy to take turns randomly and screw up the order. Also despise the spell Mini. Yuck.