Unfortunately, this one was pretty disappointing for me. The game has been in the back of my mind for a decade, since I first saw it in the documentary Indie Game: The Movie when I was about 12. At the time, it really caught my eye, although admittedly not as much as its "co-star", Fez.

To a certain extent, I still think this game is important; it was one of the earliest major titles of the indie boom of the 2010s, exuding the vibe of the Xbox Live Arcade era to which it was released. Without games like this becoming massively popular on Newgrounds in the early 2010s, drawing the eyes of the major publishers like Microsoft, I do not believe we would have the indie scene that we have today. In some ways that might be better, as now we often refer to games with publishers like Annapurna, as indies, despite them very obviously not being indies, while Baldur's Gate 3, which is actually independently published, is triple-A. It was games like Super Meat Boy that made this change, the blurring of the lines, occur. Unfortunately, despite having a major impact on the industry, I do not believe the game has really earned any more respect than the exact amount it is owed for this impact, however much that might be.

I do not just want to compare this game to Celeste, like so many do, but it is hard not to do that. All I'll say on that front is that if you haven't played either Super Meat Boy or Celeste, I would tell you to play Celeste first. Still, I want to mainly focus on this game as its own thing.

Throughout the experience, I really felt like the game was trying too hard, and failing at what it was trying to do. Over the course of 6 chapters (the 6th only has 6 levels, mind you), you are faced with only a few different mechanics and enemies, but none of these are really that creative, and I felt that they were rarely used to their full potential. I will say that I have only beaten the light world and a couple of the dark missions, so there is the possibility that I'm missing something truly spectacular, but I still don't think that excuses the fact that the main game is so lackluster. None of these missions were that memorable, apart from maybe how frustrating and counter-intuitive they can be.

That was probably my main gripe with the game: it always feels as though it is at odds with itself. There is a massive emphasis on going fast in Super Meat Boy; one of your only abilities is to run, every level is timed, and the leaderboards are 100% based on the times you set. Despite this, the game often forces you to wait for things to happen, such as the timing of temporary platforms being such that you must stand still for a couple of seconds at the start of a level in order to land on the first one. Incredibly, the final level of the game, the boss fight with "Dr. Fetus" (this name, by the way, is a decent example of the poorly aged 2010 edgy/epic randomness humor that was prevalent at the time), is the worst offender for this. The level is set up so that you have no choice but to stand dead still for about 15 seconds before the boundry obstacles begin to move. This is utterly absurd to me, because it is not just a case of me being faster than the devs expected me to be like in earlier levels, but them actually just not letting you move for the first few seconds in the last level of the game.

The level design also leaves something to be desired. It seems to me that any time the devs spotted a playtester pull off a cool move, they made a special point to put an obstacle directly in their path, just so that having fun and theory crafting is not possible to the extent that it really should be in a game like this. The levels all just have a general vibe that the layout was constructed first, then the obstacles were placed in order to make the path more annoying for the player, as opposed to the level being constructed with a particular idea in mind. If I had to guess, I would say that this was done in order to construct this artificial sense of difficulty. The game is not actually that hard, it just often feels more like you are trying to persevere past the difficulties, rather than overcome them through mastery over the mechanics.

I also have to mention that the boss fight with the worms is probably one of the worst boss fights I have ever played. Not only is it badly designed, but it is also super easy to cheese. If you just jump between two of the saw blades at the edge of the map, you can basically just wait for the worms to jump into obstacles by themselves, without needing to do anything. This still takes forever though, because the worms seemingly choose their moves by just picking a number between 1 and 3. Unfortunately, this makes it pretty likely that they pull out the "pop up out of the ground and do nothing" move, once again leaving you to just wait on the game to be ready for you to start interacting with it.

When talking about their inspirations for Super Meat Boy, the developers Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes said the game is "a big throwback to a lot of super hardcore NES classics like Ghosts 'n Goblins, Mega Man, and the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros. 2". But is it really? In my opinion, this is an uninspired attempt at a precision platformer with largely imprecise controls, contextualised in overly-edgy humour which is very of its time, which promises to be extremely difficult, but is actually not that hard to beat and is sometimes even possible to completely cheese. So, no. I do not think this is a throwback, and I don't believe anyone will ever be creating a throwback to it.

Definitely do not understand the overwhelming love for this one despite still thinking it is a good game

Perhaps most of my issues stem from it's DnD chains but I find the majority of its fantasy trappings incredibly generic and not that interesting to dive into.

The game does have incredibly impressive reactions to your decisions, both systemic and narrative.

This is an incredible tabletop game, maybe the best; but to me, the greatest video-games leverage their medium in ways that no other forms of artistic expression can. Think Outer Wilds explorative loop or Nier Automata's take on a new play-through. BG3 offers nothing that couldn't be achieved through a pen, a dungeon master and some stat sheets just visualised through pixels and polygons instead.

A Hat in Time feels like it came out of the GameCube era. It has the charm and flaws from that generation. The game has some jank regarding clambering and especially the camera when in tight areas. However, despite these flaws A Hat in Time exudes boatloads of charm and is an absolute blast to play. All of the acts in each of the chapters mostly feel distinct from one another keeping dull moments to minimum. All of the characters are extremely enjoyable to be around because of their fun dialogue which is all fully voice acted. A Hat in Time, even with its issues is a must play 3D platformer.

Pokémon Sword is like junk food, not good but you keep eating anyway. This is probably the most I have ever played a Pokémon game, I don't know what's wrong with me. It's a bit crusty looking, runs like garbage in big open areas, lazy animations, bad story, and some dumb battle gimmick that hasn't shown up since.

Despite all those problems, I have over 165 hours, completed the pokédex for the first time, and even dabbled with the multiplayer. So it must've done something good, right? I can't really put my finger on it, nothing stands out. I'm not a huge Pokémon person and haven't played many; this one certainly is nowhere near my favorite.

Pokémon Sword is a weird one for me, I in no way recommend it and only consider it mediocre at best. However, I did get some good genuine fun out of it.

A betrayal of nearly everything i loved about Monster Hunter. Being a veteran myself, having experienced the good and bad of generations 2, 3 & 4 i have to say, the beginning of the 5th gen while graphically impressive, was only just that.
It introduced mechanics like open maps lacking areas that are seperated through load screens, but in return are way too big and confusing to navigate for their own good.
Monster AI was more aggressive than ever which made playing slow weapons like Greatsword awful. This game also introduced dumb mechanics like giving some monsters super nova attacks that have to be avoided by hiding behind randomly placed rocks and the worst of them all, the DPS checks that have absolutely no business being in a game like this.
Then there's the clutch claw and it's main mechanic called tenderizing. This is required to deal more damage but the worst thing about it is that Capcom has bloated the HP pools of monsters to compensate for this. So you're required to tenderize at all times. It's horrible game design in every way because tenderizing always stops the action for a short while and you have to repeat it every 30 seconds.
This is also the worst game in the franchise to play in co-op with friends because they decided it was absolutely necessary for the player to "experience" the cutscenes for themselves. Just why??? The next and even prior games can do co-op just fine without forcing every player to go solo, watch a cutscene and then, and only then, be able to finish the story relevant quest together.
The endgame consists of farming completely arbitrary stats in a new area that is made of reused assets. Also this is the only way to gain access to hunt certain monsters because Capcom didn't bother to just give us normal hunt quests.
This game is full of bad design decisions and arbitrary grinding that i fear for Monster Hunter 6, since it will be the same team that brought us World.
I want to be fair though and still give this game 2 stars, because it helped Monster Hunter to gain much more attention. That also had the sideffect of toxic meta players plaguing the community but since i have abandoned this game for good, i don't even care about that. Play Monster Hunter Rise Sunbreak or any of the other games instead.