⌚ Time to finish - 9h (70% complete - I tried to play through crushing for about an hour+ and found it very unfun so I stopped. Rest are into the main game and trophies).
🤬Difficulty - easy unless you play crushing, then its unfairly crushing. Crushing requires a bit of stealth where in a game stealth is somewhat of an after thought at higher difficulties.
🔊 Soundtrack - awesome! On par with the main series.
🌄Graphics – Drop dead gorgeous. This is the first game in series apart from uncharted 2, but more so here, where i felt they had both outdoor and indoor beauty. I come from the india culture so I could appreciate the love and fine details they put into the interior of the temples and buildings. The art work is authentic but not a copy. So they learned things about the Indian architecture, ingested, and created something unique. absolutely mind blowing. I stared at the architecture and art work for a long time and even showed my family.
🌦 Atmosphere – Awesome.
📚 Main Story / Characters – Story was simple to follow unlike other in series and I appreciated that. They had a short time to tell everything and they kept it crisp. Chole returns as her best version ever and I was unhappy to not see her in 4, and poorly show in 3. Other chars that show up are great too! It does NOT feel like an after thought. I love playing as Chole, and the best part is all the color commentary she adds about the Indian mythology and symbolism. Its stuff most Indians don't even know about. I am glad they did this and just didn't represent Ganesha with the common cliches. Go Naughty Dog!
🤺 Combat – Awesome! On par with rest of series.
🧭 Side Activities / Exploration –Definitely worth exploring and completing fun trophies. Plat does require collecting stuff so I did all the trophies except collection.
🚗 Movement/Physics – Super fluid.
📣 Voice acting – Excellent. Infact the side conversations the thugs have very much represent some of the sentiments Indian people feel. Wow! They captured that too!?
🥇 Best thing about the game - Mind blowing architectures and interior designs. Culture sensitive and informative commentary. Very memorable set pieces that are even better than the main series. Sure some of them are a rehash of things they know work well, but I don't care. If something works well do it again.
👎 Worst thing about the game - the damn truck and slipping on mud. Its fun to drive that truck. But....
💡Final Thoughts:

I maybe a little biased being Indian, but this is the best game in the series. I could clearly see the attention to detail that went into this game from design to cultural representation that it took a 4.5 game to a 5 for me. They even mention the name of the snake around Shiva's neck, which majority of Indians don't even know. Indian kingdoms before invasions were mighty, but no one knows much about it, this game brings that to light as well. I am glad they didn't do the Indiana Jones temple of doom or Simpsons Apu racist bull shit. Everyone should play this game! What a cool and unique setting. I hope others also see how great this setting can be and make more games in this setting. Egypt, Norse, Chinese, Japanese ahs been done guys! As an indian person I 100% endorse this game.

Manages to lose almost all of the magic of the RESIDENT EVIL 2 remake, while also having only about a third of the content. What is here certainly looks good and works, but weirdly not quite as well as before. Even things like the zombie AI, dismemberment, and general controls -- all stuff that you would think would be ripped straight out of the last one -- feel inferior somehow. And of course the characters and locations are much less interesting, with a quick return to the RE2 police station feeling more insulting than anything. Oh, and as for the Nemesis ... after how well they did Mr. X, why in the world did they make him so lame? Totally scripted encounters only, no chasing you persistently around big environments. What a letdown.

Judged in isolation, this is a quick, passable horror game with a nice sheen, but it's impossible to assess it like that when its predecessor was such a standout. Total missed opportunity. I would have been furious if I had paid $60 for this.

I was at the rope in the chandelier room early on trying to get yorda to descend with me and quickly got frustrated. she kept noodling about at the top, pacing in place, occasionally looking down at me, and for the life of me I couldn't understand why she can't just climb down (at this point I had seen her climb ladders so I hadn't realized that ropes were off-limits). every so often she would look over to the windows to our left and stare for a bit, and after I had exhausted my options on the lower floor I decided to return to her. what I found was that these windows were actually my key to progressing, and once I had scaled them and explored the collar beams above I soon realized she was pointing me in the right direction all along. that was the moment I transitioned from simply seeing her as just another mechanic to keep track of to trying to respect her autonomy and trust her as an actual companion. there's a point late in the game where she's been weakened and will trip if you drag her along too quickly, and I found myself legitimately gently keeping pace with her arm in arm.

this "design by substraction" methodology interests me because in a lot of ways it's more of a process of substitution. as an early representative title for the ps2, it spends the vast majority of its time playing up the strengths of the hardware's rendering at the expense of its mechanics. this isn't a bad thing at all. these simple environmental puzzles encourage the player to explore each room and contextualize their location in this vast castle that interconnects the more you progress. long sequences of riding elevators or scaling walls are framed with far-off vistas in the background, detailing a sense of time and space that simply couldn't exist in a prior era with poor draw distances. objects bleed together in murky rooms to highlight bloom effects from light streaming from windows, which often higlight where to go next or what objects to examine. the gameplay itself is perfectly functional, and its simplicity enhances the world around it in a way that earlier generations absolutely could not replicate.

while I do like the majority of the puzzles here, it's the platforming that really pulled me out of the fiction and into frustration at multiple points in the adventure. ico has a weird contextual jump that is fickle about when it follows realistic physics, and thus it can be distressing when the dev's design implications don't quite reach the player and expected actions can't be performed. upwards and backwards leaps feel interchangeable at points, and it's tricky to determine forward momentum during certain leaps when it's obvious that they're semi-scripted. the game's final main section is an uncomfortably long platforming challenge that kills the mood at what should be a critical emotional point, and I wonder how my opinion of the game would have changed had this part been shortened or changed to be more puzzle-driven (it doesn't help that the section before this is an abridged and somewhat disappointing redo of the east arena section, which is my favorite part of the game).

I also have to admit yorda is a bit underused in terms of actual puzzle design. at best she serves as a virtual tether on ico; anytime he needs to explore an area without her, it becomes a race to solve the puzzle before she is taken by the shadow creatures. this creates multiple nice parallel puzzles where you are searching both for how to progress through the castle as well as how yorda can follow without navigating the same treachery. other than a few simple puzzles where she must hold down switches for you to get through certain doors early on, she rarely ever actually directly interacts with the puzzles, and as the game progresses more puzzles arise where she can remain by your side constantly and thus is more just there than anything. the shadow creature sections also could have served as tense moments where block puzzles or similar must be quickly solved while keeping yorda away from the creatures. however, in most cases they can simply be extinguished without progressing nearby puzzles, and by the latter half of the game they barely register as present given the power of the sword.

what this game really nails is fulfilling this chaotic destructive urge in the player while also refusing to give into any sort of alienating or cynical aesthetic to justify it. in many ways it's a flippant creation mythos, rendering the earth asunder to create the sky anew. keita takahashi's sculpture student background can instantly be seen through these stellar structures that form from societal detritus, expanding and growing and taking on unique forms of every permutation of the level. each run is a celebration, with joyous rhythms from a range of latin, jazz, and electronic influences intertwined with screams, cries, and gunshots as the existing structures crumble and make way for astral creation. and it's so bittersweet when it finishes too.

gameplay is also masterful of course, not really shocking anyone by saying that. control this giant haphazard clump as you ricochet off of obstacles and absorb everything in your path. they could have easily left the game with no opposing force and instead intricately laid out a full playfield of different sized objects in each level, constantly forcing the player to make snap judgments about what can be picked up, where they should proceed next, and how they should weave through these patterns. the perfect push-pull of precise object management sections with the catharsis of finally breaking through to the right size where nothing can stand in your way.

One of the most joyful games I haver ever played in years, so in love of being a game and having you play it.

With a background in pre revolutionary France, you play a game of spies and court intrigue cheating all the way through a conspiracy in card games. Learning each new trick is a wonderful experience that makes you feel like a true arnaqueur of the aristocracy, grinning all the way to the card saloon of the high nobilty while you take both their livres and secrets.

But not only that, the game is also beautifully drawn, reminescent of drawings and sketches of the period with vibrant colors and quite articulate animations. But the music steals the show for me, with a live orchestra performing classical pieces and folkloric songs of the different people that inhabited France during the tumultous time.

All in all, an incredible experience that just goes to show how amazing gaming can be as a medium to tell a story.

Um soulslite indie surpreendentemente polido e competente, que parece um cruzamento entre o combate de Dark Souls e a exploração de The Legend of Zelda.
O combate é simplista até em excesso. São 5 armas no total, mas não existe uma diferença tão grande no estilo de jogo entre elas. Seu arsenal também conta com quatro ataques à distância, que são duas ferramentas e duas magias, permitindo uma variedade razoável de formas de atacar os inimigos. Uma fórmula divertida, mas não oferece muita profundidade. Não é um jogo muito difícil, mas é fácil se enrolar em certos momentos quando diversos inimigos te cercam.
Isso é compensado pelo carisma dos personagens e da história, além da direção de arte bastante competente e pela duração que não se alonga nem te deixa com gosto de quero mais (terminei a história principal em pouco mais de 11 horas).
Uma pena que o conteúdo post-game não me prendeu tanto quanto a parte principal do jogo. Vale a pena conferir, especialmente no Gamepass.

a sad example of a sequel completely treading water and failing to expand its series concept a single iota. in many ways you could take my ape escape review and just plop it here without anything changed. many of the positives of the original game stemmed from its novelty in the space of 3D platformers and its excellent psx engine that showcased the hardware at its peak. its sequel seems infinitely lazier and less ambitious in comparison, cribbing extensively from the original with little variation and a lot of repetition. not bad, but terribly disappointing.

-all the original gadgets reappear, but the new ones are rather slight lock-and-key affairs that only serve to increase the amount of time you spend menuing to swap them in. the water cannon, bananarang, and magnet each have their own obstacles that can only be solved using them, and in no cases do the developers attempt to expand upon their usage or make legitimate puzzles involving them. lots of "oh the monkey is in a cage labeled with a banana, time to throw the bananarang" and "look a fire pit, time to use the water cannon" etc.

-dunno if I had rose-tinted glasses in the first game or not but good god the controls are stiff and unresponsive here. hikaru has no smooth speed-up and instead jerks into motion at the slightest touch of the analog stick. his first jump has range but is low, and his second jump is high but awkwardly kills all momentum. the sky flyer also feels less fluid than the original, or maybe I'm just misremembering. regardless, precision platforming felt more strenuous this time around, and the devs seem to have taken notice given that they gutted much of the legitimately difficult trials from the original

-level themes are inconsistent and slapdash compared to the mostly focused time-periods schtick of the original. no context for why I'm anywhere doing anything other than just catching more monkeys! the more elaborate interlocking levels of the original are also dumbed down here to mainly linear courses or maybe a loop here or there. might be giving the original too much credit but again I feel like it also did a better job giving monkeys specific challenges rather than just strewing them across the world haphazardly.

-soichi terada is absent this time around and thus the crystalline breakbeat and house of the original is pushed aside in favor of generic and schmaltzy midi abominations that left me with no other choice than to blare podcasts on top of it. going from a game that so perfectly nailed its quirky atmosphere with a polygonal shonen running around catching heavily-armed monkeys with a net all soundtracked by lite-rave blasts and comedown room leads... to this boring happy-go-lucky generic mascot platformer aesthetic that sucks the life out of the experience. dreadful

-ape escape itself is such a flawed design concept that the lack of changes are really striking. I said in the prior review that the right stick is meant for the camera; more specifically trying to triangulate angles between 1) your movement and position on the left stick 2) the angle of attack or object use on the right stick 3) the erratic movement of the auto-cam is actually less accurate than just having the camera on the right stick in the first place. one game (two really with ape escape 2001) should have been enough to prove this, but ape escape 2 blunders along with all of the same issues, inaccuracies, and frustrations of the original. of all the gadgets, the net is now somehow even more annoying because new cinematic swing animations that play randomly (or maybe when the game thinks you have a guaranteed successful catch?) have such severe windup that the monkey can actually simply walk out of your range during it, leading to an embarassing whiff that begs the question of why such an animation even exists.

the game's biggest positive is that at the same time of all of this it is still ape escape and is still a totally competent 3D platformer that I legitimately enjoyed in a brain-dead podcast game way during the middle section. by that point I already knew that the game was a clunker (after playing the first areas and being completely turned off the game for months) and had not quite reached the endgame (which felt utterly perfunctory and totally devoid of any iteration in challenge over the prior levels). bosses are fine too: functionally on-par with contemporaries with easy-to-parse attack patterns. the vehicle areas are simplistic but nice diversions, and thankfully they aren't over-deployed to the point of becoming stale.

ape escape thrives on its cheeky experimental streak, and unfortunately ape escape 2 lacks that charismatic edge to keep the player engaged. I wasn't expecting to see a series with a concept so fresh and flippant trot out the hits so soon in its chronology. somehow not a surprise sony withheld this one from the states for an entire year only to let ubisoft publish it in their stead.