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 I kinda loved this game and kinda hated it. Loved: the aesthetics, the oddball comedy, the surrealist touches, and the gameplay, which has just the right amount of balance and variety to keep you engaged for ten hours or so.

Hated: the fact that all this game's excellent style and design is basically in service of...nothing. Based on the title you might expect Yuppie Psycho to have something to say about corporate culture, institutional dehumanization, upward mobility, bureaucracy...something! But the few promising gestures at satire in the beginning fade quickly into the background, and it becomes clear that this game is not really about yuppies (or psychos) at all, the developers just thought a sinister corporation would make a good setting for a survival horror game.

Which, fair. It is a good setting, and the developers do, as I said, knock it out of the park with the aesthetics. The horror is more conventional than the premise suggests (you won't get much commentary on the more mundane horrors of an office job), but well-done as these things go. The plot, however, is some hot nonsense. I understand the mystery-box style of storytelling they are going for here, and I'm definitely not averse to a little ambiguity or confusion, but the plot is just so obviously cobbled together from spare genre parts, it really feels like they had some cool character designs they wanted to use and just kinda tossed them in a story-blender. I dutifully earned every ending, clinging to a desperate hope that one of them, just one, would provide some faint sliver of thematic resolution, but it was not to be. Maybe the biggest flaw in the end is the flatness of the characters; everyone is colorful and quirky but no one is very human or memorable, which sadly dilutes what little message the game has.

That said, if you like horror, and you're in it more for the style than the substance, Yuppie Psycho is worth playing. Despite my reservations, I did enjoy it enough to play it to completion. I just wish the aftertaste wasn't so bitter.

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.

Jenny LeClue pretty much did the trick for me. It delivers the kind of cozy-rainy-afternoon-with-a-cup-of-tea Nancy Drew mystery you would expect, with a level of polish and flair you would not expect from a basically one-person development team. Some people who have never met a teenager in their lives find Jenny annoying, but making her a bit mean makes her a better character, and honestly she's probably on the nicer end of the spectrum for kids this age lmao. Anyway, this was not my favorite adventure game of all time, and there are some mild annoyances here and there along the way (Jenny herself not being one of them), but overall I feel like this game deserves a little more love. It is basically the adventure game equivalent of comfort food but I would play the next installment in a heartbeat.

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.

Replaying this years later, the characters and story were even better than I remembered, while the puzzles were even WORSE :( A flawed gem with some of the best written (and best voiced!) characters in video game history stuck doing some of the most godforsaken nonsensical tasks. (Seriously tho the voice acting in AAA games these days cannot hold a candle to these fantastic performances, the actors completely bring these blocky characters to life.) As a fan of this game I implore you: just use a walkthrough and experience the story. Spare yourself the agony. But please do play the game because it's worth the hassle and the soundtrack is SO GOOD.