"Oh hello there! My name is Nern. I'm considered the greatest historian of our time... I've gathered a wealth of knowledge about Olathe and what happened here. Many tales... Would you like to hear? Hmm... I wish you were more enthusiastic... Oh well, I'll tell you anyway. Let's see.... Oh right! It all started with what I like to call, THE FLASH. I was sitting with my wife, god rest her soul, sipping on sweet lemon tea. I believe it was homemade by my sweet wife, God rest her soul. Or wait... Maybe she bought it from the store in a bottle. You know, like a plastic bottle? Well hold on now, that would be ridiculous to buy a bottle of sweet lemon tea, then transfer the contents into a glass. Why not just drink it from the bottle? I guess maybe so she could put ice in the glass? But then again, making tea homemade would be just as time consuming, if not more! That sneaky bitch... Anyway, I'll save that story for later! So, I'm sitting on my porch drinking sweet lemon tea. From a glass of course, ho ho! When suddenly... A great strangeness fills my body... Something was wrong... I've lived many years, and I've never felt something like this before. Do you know what it was? Yup! It was my rocking chair! That wooden son of a gun stopped rocking! So I looked down and realized a little rock had gotten caught beneath my chair! A rock under my rocking chair! What a day! I decided it was time for bed, I had had a little bit too much excitement for one day! Hoho! I slid into my jammies, brushed my teeth, and said my prayers. As I was climbing into bed I noticed my wife, God rest her soul, brushing her hair in the bathroom. As I peered across the hall my body swelled up with emotion...

not a poorly crafted experience in any sense and i'm sure theres a lot here i lacked the generosity to find but i felt like i could completely visualize the creators' concept and reference stack with such exact clarity that it became distracting:

femininely morose akihiko yoshida and ayami kojima art/
lilting twinklechoral keichi okabe-wave ost/
vanillaware storybook Spine animations/
folklore character collection combat/
soulstroidvania wielding its genre structure of labyrinthine sparseness to spin a ludically obvious yarn about seeking ~ absolution amidst decay ~

-- and I had to uninstall because the returns are so diminished for me at this point and it was genuinely making me sad that such a clear and passionate labor of love could feel so utterly taxonomizable and consumed by its own clockably interrelated references

at this point idk its just kind of upsetting to play something with such a rigorous and dogmatic commitment to its reference material that doesnt seem to extend very far beyond the world of games themselves, even if said games are all things i find personally beautiful and worth emulating. felt like a very workmanlike and glossy medley of touchstones from works that clearly moved the creators--but executed in a sort of surface way that belies their inability to cogently, personally express how said works resonated beyond mere facsimile. no judgies girl i relate and its why i havent reliably maintained any true semblance of a dedicated art practice for years!!!

tldr; i saw myself in this and i didnt like it

There is something deeply ridiculous about Gamers™ complaining endlessly about games that are not action-orientated ("walking simulators" etc etc), whilst a game like this gets away with pushing all the most exciting and intense moments of action into cutscenes whilst the fighting you get to actually engage in is largely the repetitive, in between grunt-work. The game thinks having a bunch of quick-time events included will make up for this but being forced to constantly be alert for button symbols appearing on the screen rather than getting to enjoy the show is somehow even less immersive.

This kind of style-over-substance approach echoes throughout the whole game. The myriad climbing sequences feel oddly emblematic for this; nothing can actually go wrong in them meaning that despite the perilous context for them (clinging to the side of mountains and buildings by just your hands, leaping great distances from one to the next) there's never any reason to feel any actual tension or danger, it's just meant to look flashy and plays out closer to an interactive cutscene than actual gameplay. The single-shot gimmick is another great example, there's no narrative or thematic reason for it, it leads to the camera feeling needlessly claustrophobic a large amount of the time, but it looks impressive and that's apparently all that matters.

The combat is largely tedious. The occasional moments of excitement from the first few hours largely dissipated as the game made me fight the same collection of enemies, and the same troll and ogre mini-bosses, over and over right up until the end of the game. This overuse of the same enemy designs starts to feel even more grating considering the game's habit of cramming in additional fights wherever it possibly can, even when it doesn't make narrative or tonal sense, out of fear that if you go more than five minutes without attacking something you might get bored. The two modes for most of your fighting, beyond special attacks that leave you invulnerable or near-invulnerable for their duration thus draining tension from what's happening, are either keeping your distance and using projectiles whilst your son Atreus keeps the enemies distracted (which is both painfully slow at times, whilst also just feeling bizarre because Atreus is with seldom exceptions actually invulnerable to damage in combat), or getting in close and mindlessly button mashing until the enemies roll over and die (which is just boring). There are lots of fancy additional close-combat moves you can use but the game never really gives you the motivation to learn them, so it largely ends up being just this for the entire playthrough, as you fight the exact same enemies fifteen hours deep that you were fighting at the start of the game.

There are many ways to make the combat not get quite so tedious by the end, but the simplest one is to just have the game be more compact and streamlined, yet all throughout the game instead pushes to be larger, more expansive, with as many features as it can fit in. People like rpg systems, so why not cram in gear crafting and upgrading and all sorts of different enchantment systems? Never mind that it never makes the combat feel like it plays any differently, or that the best approach to these needless sprawling menus is to just use the things that have the biggest numbers. People like open world games, so why not do that too? But God of War's notion of exploration is mostly just wandering around the lake in a circle, ticking off locations one by one. The game also just features countless collectables, all kept track of in the map screen, as if you can't include anything within a game without it making some resultant number go up.

God of War had a surprising amount of narrative focus, and there's some genuinely cool moments. I enjoyed a bunch of the early-game content surrounding Freya, Baldur is compelling right until the game just forgets he exists for the vast majority of its story, and there's some potentially really interesting stuff in here about familial trauma, abuse and neglect that the game doesn't come close to having anything impactful or coherent to say about in the end. This is its whole own problem as hinting at Kratos's abuse and neglect towards his son (and never even confronting that in any sort of meaningful fashion) clashes pretty harshly with framing him as someone whose every punch should be thrilling to us, in the same way that his talk towards the end of the game of stopping the cycles of violence clashes with the fact that all game long the finishing moves zoom in on every gorey detail, trying its best to make the tearing of flesh and sinew seem salacious. Even the framing for the story is off here, and downright enraging; every single time you're sent to one corner of the world to see a character who can supposedly help you on your quest you can bet they'll be ready to retort that sure they can help you but first you need some obscure item from some other corner of the world. The story is never allowed to flow, always nestled between countless fetch quests, and sometimes fetch quests within fetch quests.

By the half-way point I was extremely ready for this game to be over, but I kept persevering due to some combination of sunk-cost fallacy, a curiosity to see where the story would head, and irritation that the game seems near universally acclaimed. God of War is certainly very pretty, but there's so little of worth here beyond that.