So I played this ages ago when it first came out and even then I remember thinking, "Why is this game a shooter and not an adventure game where you have to like sneak into the engine room of creepy-ass racist Laputa and throw a wrench in the works?"

Now in 2022 with post-Disco-Elysium-glasses, and with half of the stuff in Columbia basically happening in real life, it's pretty easy to see how much cooler this game could have been if it wasn't dead set on being another stubbly-man-shoot-thing simulator, except it still probably would've kind of sucked, because the writers are weird liberal centrists who don't actually understand any of the themes they are writing about. Ah well. The setting had potential is what I'm trying to say. And building a relationship with Elizabeth (or any other character) could have worked so much better in a less pew-pew-centric genre. Unfortunately in this cursed timeline we are stuck with White Man Go Blam Blam MCMXCIXVIII: Why Slave Revolt Is Bad, Actually. When we could have had an infinitely more horrifying and more compelling Exploring the Twisted Funhouse of American Fascism Simulator! Damn you quantum physics.

The prevailing mood of Disco Elysium is so melancholy it is easy to forget how funny it can be. I was taken aback in my second playthrough by how often I found myself laughing because I didn't remember it being a particularly funny game—until I realized I was playing a goofier and less self-flagellating character the second time around. Not many games are so responsive to how you play that you can shape the tone of the story.

I don't really have any criticisms of DE in the usual sense, but I was sometimes put off by its cruelty. I mean that most games—even, or dare I say especially, the "edgy" ones—filter out certain parts of being human we would rather not contemplate. DE feels more realistic than other games not just because of its incredible worldbuilding but because it leaves all that stuff in. It is basically a stream-of-consciousness simulator in which you are forced to grapple with every nasty thought that flits through an unpleasant man's neurochemistry. On one hand, this allows you to build a level of empathy for the protagonist that is on par with great works of literature; on the other, it can lead to some ugly places. Pretty much any awful thought you have you are free to indulge—I mean this game lets you be a neoliberal for christ's sake. Bleak af.

For me, personally, the fatphobia that rears its head every so often (I think a character is described as "gelatinous ooze") crosses a line—I believe that this is a thing the protagonist would think, but am I convinced this is a thought the writers of the game needed to share? No, but then again, equally if not more terrible things are voiced in the game all the time, so I guess how that line is drawn is up to each player. Just be warned that, while I do think the game is designed with love for its characters and encourages empathy, it also requires you to confront an unusual amount of hatred and cruelty of a far more realistic kind than you typically see in games, and at times almost seems to take pleasure in rubbing your face in it. If only for the sake of accessibility, I do wonder now and then how much the impact of DE would be diminished if its world were just a tiny bit kinder.

I should love this game. I wanted to love this game. I tried to love this game. Even now I am disappointed—mostly in myself—that I did not.

I think it's a "me" problem, not a problem with the game itself. Most players don't seem to find Outer Wilds even half as frustrating as I did. I resorted to using a walkthrough pretty quickly, and even with the guide, I still almost gave up out of frustration. It's not just that the controls are tricky, but that the way to progress is often unclear, the puzzles are obscure, and the physics-based challenges are no cakewalk, either (%!$& that #$&!ing cyclone to the end of the universe and back). The moments of pleasure and discovery I had with the game, and there are plenty, were fighting a constant war with a horde of annoyances, and on many occasions the annoyances almost won.

The fact that they didn't is a testament to the game's many good qualities, which are real, so please believe all the other reviewers when they tell you about them. I just wish all the lovely parts didn't have to coexist with so much stuff that bugged the living hell out of me.

Oh, and while the game receives a lot of praise for its story, I found it...a bit less than revelatory? It suits the style of gameplay perfectly, but you more or less know the basic contours from the beginning, and there aren't many surprises along the way. I think part of the reason I didn't enjoy the game more is that I was playing mostly for the story and was impatient to learn more, which is the wrong way to go about it. Really Outer Wilds does not mix well with impatience of any kind. I think you are meant to explore haphazardly for the sheer fun of exploring, piecing things together little by little, in which case I can easily imagine this game lasting a good 30-40 hours or more. I don't think I personally would have had the endurance to play that way, but kudos to anyone who does have what it takes to get the most out of the experience.

A lot of people love this game, and I don't want to rain on their parade. Maybe it is a good game, mechanically speaking? But when people talk about Nier: Automata, and why they loved it, they don't usually focus on the mechanics. They talk about themes and emotions—narrative stuff. And on a narrative level, this game, sadly, just did not work for me at all.

I might have set my expectations too high. I was expecting a little depth, complexity, or subtlety from the story, and hoped the game might treat its existential themes with some nuance. But the whole thing just...feels...so...adolescent?? Like 67% goofy anime melodrama ("EVERYTHING MUST DIE!!!"), 23% "I just skimmed five Wikipedia entries, took a rip off this bong, and am now prepared to embark upon my grand philosophical treatise," and 10% hehe robot gurl thicccq.

I don't want to berate anyone for finding meaning in the game or being moved by it, but I can't help but feel like video games, as a narrative form, can and should aim a little higher than this "Philosophy 101 with waifus" stuff.

At least the soundtrack still slaps. There is that.

(If you want a much more thorough critique that doesn't oversimplify everything as I've done here, I recommend the Youtube video by Pixel a Day, which addresses the plot structure, combat system, and many other things as well, and is really worth your time.)

Okay possible hyperbole, but I think Raz might be one of the best video game character designs ever, up there with Mario, Pyramid Head, the King from Katamari, et al. He embodies so perfectly (apart from a lack of gender options which would have been nice, though I understand logistically why they were nigh impossible to provide) what every ten-year-old kid imagines they would look like as a cool spy. Like, oh hell yeah, I would wear some big-ass goggles on my head. I don't know why, I just would—and you bet your ass they would start glowing whenever I put them on. Oh and as a spy I would naturally rock a trenchcoat and gloves. And maybe, like, a turtleneck? Yeah, adults wear those. They seem classy. And one unruly lock of hair would always be escaping from my cool helmet, to show that I live on the wild side...

I fixate on this point because, if Psychonauts 2 illustrates anything, it is the power of good art design. The art team pretty much carries the game imo. Of course there are other elements at work here—gameplay, level design, writing, acting—and they certainly do their part, but I don't think any of it would have gripped me without the visual presentation. Maybe I am just a sucker for stylized graphics over realism, but I found this ineffably mid-2000s vaguely Dreamworks-adjacent eccentric animated film world so gosh-darn inviting. Given that I haven't even played the first game, I was surprised by how nostalgic this one made me feel.

So the throwback vibes are A+, while the rest is...a solid B? I have no major complaints—everything works insofar as I was compelled to keep playing until the end. But I was left feeling that, despite the nostalgia factor hitting me like a bull's eye, the substance of the story was aimed at someone younger. The characterization is, ironically, a little on the superficial side—although you ostensibly spend the game delving into the darkest corners of the psyche, I never felt like I got to scratch too far below the surface. The internal worlds, although visually dazzling and richly varied, are often quite simple thematically, reducing characters to a primary habit, illness, or fixation ("uh oh, this one's got anxiety!"). I am probably asking the game to be something it is not; if more time was spent developing complex character portraits, there would be less time for all the conventional game stuff—the hopping around and punching things and so on. But in my perfect world, there would have been fewer characters and fewer brains to explore in Psychonauts 2, with more unexpected depths revealed in each one.

I have to give a special shout-out to Raz's goofy family of circus acrobats, who are one of the most endearing families in video games. It's kind of wild that I can hardly think of any other games in which the main character has a big family. Usually you're some detached lone wolf with no connections, or your family is dead, or you have, like, a Pokémom who never leaves your house.

EDIT: Upon further reflection I'm docking another half-star because I really think the game bites off more than it can chew thematically and and there are inconsistencies in how things like consent are portrayed—like the game wants to say that tampering with minds, especially without permission, is bad and can't "fix" anyone, but then [redacted for spoilers] in the end?? Ultimately the game oversimplifies its subject matter a little too much to leave a good taste in my mouth, and I really do wish the characters were given more attention and development.

As many others have noted, this is basically Little Nightmares but Swedish. Also there are a bunch of boss fights for some reason. (Who asked for so many boss fights in a game like this??)

The strength of Bramble is definitely its pretty woodland aesthetic which approaches photorealism at times. The world of the game feels so organic and lush I wanted to lose myself in it. Unfortunately the game itself prevented me from doing that. The gameplay is functional but offers no surprises to anyone who has played a cinematic platformer before, and despite being fairly short, Bramble manages to wear out its welcome by reusing many of the same challenges.

The story is also pretty flimsy. I love fairy tales, especially dark and spooky ones, so I am pretty squarely in the target demographic for this game. But Bramble’s story is really just a clothesline for the developers to hang whatever folklore reference happened to pop into their heads that day on. The only unifying theme here is “creepy and Scandinavian,” and the creepiness often feels forced in a cringey grimdark sort of way. (The tone is not far from a Hollywood movie trailer; you can almost hear the voiceover guy: “These aren’t your grandma’s bedtime stories...”) Folktales are dark, yes, but they are dark because they are about real things in life that are scary. The horrors in Bramble never feel human; they feel like things the developers thought would be cool to put in a video game.

The main problem I suspect is that Olle, our sweet little blonde boy, is boring as hell. I honestly have no idea why we are playing as him. What would a boy his age be afraid of and why? What conflict might there be between him and his sister? What lesson is he supposed to learn? The developers don’t seem to care, so there’s no emotional thread pulling us along, just a vague aesthetic interest in what spectacle they’ll throw at us next. It was enough to pull me through to the end, I guess, barely. But my patience was wearing mighty thin by the end.

Oh and SPOILER WARNING I guess the lesson we are meant to have learned from our trek in the woods, after enduring five hours of nonstop mortal peril and trauma that would leave any child permanently scarred, is...not to be afraid of the woods? lmao

Paradise Killer is the "not like other girls" of games but in, like, the cool trans girl way, not the internalized-misogyny way? I can truly say I have never played a game like it and I don't know why any of it works. Why is every single character name so cool? (Lady Love Dies! Lydia Day Break!! Carmelina Silence!!!) Why does Doctor Doom Jazz live on a yacht? Why is the soundtrack such a banger, with the most satisfying end credits music I have ever heard in my life? Why does a Phoenix Wright investigation-slash-courtroom sim have fun 3D platforming and exploration in it? I don't even know why cruising around this brutalist vaporwave death cult island is so enjoyable, the collectables are mostly pointless, but there are just so MANY of them (an absolutely bonkers profusion) that no matter where you go, you always feel like you are uncovering something.

That the gameplay works is something of a miracle, but then there's the fact that the story is good. Don't ask me how the developers pulled this off. Writing a good mystery is hard enough, but setting your mystery on a transdimensional island ruled by a cult of immortals dedicated to resurrecting Lovecraftian horrors with names like "Silent Goat" through human sacrifice...presents, uh, another set of challenges, I imagine. In most games, a world this wild would be the mystery, and the whole game would be a boring lore hunt. There is lore in Paradise Killer, but none of it really matters, and once you acclimate to the general weirdness of everything (which is admittedly a pretty steep hurdle at first), the mystery itself is surprisingly easy to follow, although there are lots of layers to it, and even some intriguing ethical dimensions, which are not deeply explored but make the story more thought-provoking than you might expect from a game that initially seems to not be about anything more than its own bizarre dedication to an aesthetic.

I am convinced Paradise Killer must have been made under the auspice of some capricious but temporarily benevolent alien deity, because a game this audacious at every level should not work. I kept waiting for some overreach or misstep to bring the whole thing tumbling down—the quirk that broke the camel's back—but it never came. Playing this game is like watching Icarus gleefully flip off the sun and fly acrobatic circles around it because it turns out actually he's a psychic vampire possessed by a demon trapeze artist or something. It is miraculous and delightful and kind of freaks me out and I'm glad there's only one of them.

In defense of the Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, the presentation is fabulous. The steampunk character designs are snazzy, the animations are full of personality and life, the soundtrack is exhilarating, and there is plenty of the signature Ace Attorney goofball charm on display. As a cherry on top, one of the main characters is a broody gay Castlevania villain who alludes with suggestive frequency to his “hallowed chalice” and probably does nothing but listen to Wagnerian opera and file his nails in his free time. (Also, Susato and her little book <3)

Unfortunately it’s also possible to build a strong case against GAAC. Because I’m a killjoy, and because these games seem to get a free pass from most people, let’s look at some evidence. In this massive and lovingly rendered cast, there are, by my count, roughly forty named male characters, of every shape and size and age, two-thirds of whom are canonically older than thirty. (Of those over thirty, six play prominent recurring roles.) If you are beginning to suspect there might be fewer women in the game, congrats, you would be right! There are, in contrast, fifteen named women, four of whom are over thirty; of those four, only one is a semi-important character (the bad one, naturally).

Luckily, with such delightful character designs, I’m sure there will be plenty of variety in how the women look, right? Heck yeah—as a matter of fact there are two (2) female characters who are not conventionally attractive! (Both characters are simply fat—hardly the kind of inventive caricature we find in the male designs.) For further diversity, we have a Cute Judicial Assistant, Sexy Victorian Assassin, Cute Prima Ballerina, Cute Cockney Ragamuffin, Cute Girl Genius/Newspaper Serial Author, Cute Newlywed, Cute Yuri Bait, Sexy Witch, Sexy Housewife, Sexy Coroner, Spooky-Cute Goth Daughter, and uh Feisty-Cute Firecracker Salesgirl.

I know this might seem like outrageous nitpicking, and yes I know video game characters are designed to be appealing, and yes some of the men are hot. I’m not anti-hot-people. But in a game with so much care put into the art style, the disparity is bleak. If you can come up with forty different faces for dudes, you can probably come up with more than three faces for women. Jesus.

One could raise the old familiar argument: “Something historical blah blah but it was like that back then!” To which I would say: Holograms. Also this is a game in which a top-secret case highly sensitive to British national security is handled by a visiting student and a mysterious amnesiac. Absolutely nothing in GAAC makes any goddamn historical sense whatsoever. If the creators cared about history, color photography would not exist, and the queen would be aghast at all the foreigners running rampant in her courtroom.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to the story itself, which inhabits an awkward limbo between wacky cartoon and social commentary. Takumi seems to want to say something about racism, imperialism, the justice system, and government corruption, but he is significantly hampered by not understanding any of these things. Racism in the Takumi-verse is the result of a Japanese guy murdering your family. Corruption is the result of bad apples. Crime is the result of “letting the darkness consume you,” rather than, say, not having food. And so on. Worst of all, his critique of empire is one-directional. There is no attempt to draw any parallel between the British Empire and Imperial Japan. In fact, the narrative goes to some length to exonerate Japanese characters (except a tiny few) of wrongdoing; none of them have the racist misconceptions that the European characters are shown to have.

Lastly, holy moly, this game is looong, and I don’t think the fact that it was originally two games is much of an excuse. Way too much of GAAC—a solid 40% in my estimate—is artificial and unnecessary padding. You would not BELIEVE the mind-boggling number of gavel thwacks and podium pounds you will endure before end credits. It is at least four billion. The jury system is a pointless contrivance that only serves to draw out trials to agonizing lengths, and there is so much mind-numbing repetition of witness testimony and Herlock hijinks. Considering there is really just one big story being told here, there was no reason (except ¥¥¥) to release it as two games in the first place.

There is, however, a neat tap-dancing bit near the end that is almost worth the slog.

VERDICT: Guilty!! (of making me spend more than 60 hours on a game—using a guide no less, yikes)

Subnautica puts a few too many ingredients into the mechanics blender imo, or maybe I’m just not a big fan of survival games. Thankfully you can turn the surivival mechanics off and the game is much more fun and no less complete without them.

Despite the gameplay feeling like a derivative buffet calculated to please everyone (the generic maleness of the protagonist, which serves no narrative purpose, likewise feels like pandering to an imagined audience), Subnautica ends up being really good, thanks to its world just being so damn cool. The alien ocean of Subnautica feels more real to me, more alive and vibrant, than almost any other gaming environment, and the atmosphere strikes a perfect seesaw balance between horror and wonder. This is not only one of the best exploration games out there but maybe the game that comes closest to capturing the spirit of classic science fiction, with its mixture of reverence and terror regarding nature and the unknown. Even the story is good, which I wasn’t expecting at all!

Umineko seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it experience for a lot of people. It was more of a love-it-and-hate-it kind of thing for me. There is just...so much packed into this story, both good and bad! The good is super good, but the bad is also pretty bad. For the sake of my sanity, this is going to be more of a list than a proper review.

Loved:

(1) The premise. Umineko is, from the start, just a really fun genre parfait. You’ve got mystery, horror, and fantasy tropes in there, mixed with nice crunchy bits of gothic family drama, and it’s all drizzled with a metafictional fudge on top. It’s a unique set-up with tons of atmosphere and so much storytelling potential.

(2) The characters. Umineko has a huge cast of memorable characters brought to life by some of the best voice acting I have ever heard. I could listen to Ohara Sayaka cackle all day long. (If you like evil laughter, Umineko occupies at least, like, six out of ten spots in the Top Ten Best Evil Laughs in Video Games.) The character writing in general is extremely good. It’s possible to forget—for hours at a time—that these are silly-looking sprites in a goofy anime game, because they feel so much like real people. Even the most despicable characters remain compelling (Rosaaaa), and all of the relationships, especially the family dynamics, are believable and complex.

(3) The themes. Umineko is thematically ambitious to a fault, but it’s refreshing to see a story just really go for it. There are so many Big Ideas in this game. While I’m doubtful that it succeeds in saying much of anything sensible in the end, I appreciate that it is earnestly trying to say something—often several things at once—and if I had, oh, a few hundred spare hours of free time lying around, I might be tempted to read it a second time to peel back more of the layers.

(4) The artwork. I know I called the sprites “silly-looking” (they are) but Ryukishi’s art really grows on you—the clumsiness is endearing and the facial expressions are wonderful. (I hate the console and pachinko sprites but ymmv.)

(5) The soundtrack. It’s banger after banger p much.

Hated:

(1) The otaku shit. Umineko was written for an audience of hardcore VN fans. Every time I was reminded of this target audience, and how much I do not belong to it, it was like nails on a chalkboard. They aren’t so pervasive as to ruin the experience, but the pandering in-jokes and fanservicey moments really pulled me out of the story. Moreover, the game was released serially for the most dedicated fans to devour chapter by chapter, line by line, going over each scene with a fine-tooth comb for clues. Many of the storytelling choices make less sense removed from this original context. I often felt like the author was being maddeningly opaque for no reason; in fact, he is being opaque on purpose (to give fans more grist for the theory-crafting mill), but unless you have approximately ten zillion hours of free time to set aside for note-taking and puzzle-solving, this habit of never saying anything directly will likely just drive you up the wall.

(2) The mysteries. Umineko is not really about the mysteries—it’s more interested in the abstract concept of Mystery Fiction than in the nitty-gritty details of each murder—but, on the other hand, it’s not really not about the mysteries, since they take up at least a hundred hours of the time you will spend reading this dang thing (and considerably more time than that if you actually try to solve them). It is a shame, then, that the mysteries kinda blow. Ryukishi wants us to believe that the “whodunnit”—it was Colonel Mustard in the library with a candlestick!—is less important than the “whydunnit,” the tortured heart behind the crimes. But the one time that “whydunnit” matters, it is explained in such a convoluted way as to be virtually nonsensical, and actually made me understand the character less than I did before. You also have to wait seven chapters for this motive to be revealed—and that’s it. That’s all you get. The rest of the mysteries are just soulless logic puzzles. The author has so little interest in them by the end that he just sweeps them all aside in a single scene—and frankly I don’t blame him, because the solutions are so underwhelming, I wouldn’t want to draw any attention to them either. A few questions are raised which do have satisfying answers, but they are mostly regarding background details; overall, Umineko is far more successful as a story about mysteries than as a mystery story.

(3) The themes. I know I said I liked the themes, but the thematic ambition of Umineko is also kind of its downfall. Especially in the second half, the more Ryukishi tries to draw all these thematic threads together into a bow, the more they get tangled up in a big perplexing wad of nothing. Part of the problem is a terminal case of trying to have his cake and eat it too. Like, do the mysteries matter, or don’t they? If the pursuit of a single truth is so wrongheaded, why expend so many thousands of words encouraging readers in that pursuit? Why must love and truth, empathy and reality, be diametrically opposed? The last chapter, rather than bringing clarity to these contradictions, retreats into boring cliches, and sometimes plain old falsehoods. It is quite seriously suggested that the only way to overcome trauma, actually, is to run away from reality and escape into a fantastical delusion, because, uhhh, that’s the power of magic, folks?? Ryukishi’s best writing is rooted in his experience as a social worker, and his sharp observations of human behavior, but every once a while he just runs obliviously into the limits of his own perspective with a resounding smack, and it’s a huge bummer that one of his most embarrassing fumbles comes as he is trying to deliver a grand statement. He simply does not understand trauma well enough to say anything meaningful about it, and I’m not convinced that the other themes fare much better in the end.

(4) George Ushiromiya. He sucks.

This is, of course, an extremely distilled and spoiler-redacted version of my thoughts on Umineko; I could probably write a dissertation or two about this game. While I’m on the fence about whether I think it’s good or not, I am glad that I read it, and I can see why it resonates with so many people. I will certainly remember the characters, if nothing else. As for the rest—well, as Ryukishi would probably tell you if your family had been brutally murdered by goat demons, just use the power of magic, and pretend it never happened!