Shout out to small rural towns overtaken by an evil or dark presence that corrupts them or brings hellish creatures. Gotta be one of my favorite genders.




Deemon, the incompetent reviewer, started off his write-off with one of his usual jokes, so unfunny that one might wonder if he was doing it on purpose or if he really has such poor comedy taste. He was trying to hide the fact that he really didn’t know where to start; the path to take might seem clear, but like the streets and forest of Bright Falls, it’s more deceiving than it may look at first, like a maze that’s also a downward spiral.

Deemon pondered, searching for a way to salvage the review, desperately trying to find out which step he should take, what words he should use. He sighed. He decided to let the words write themselves, to let out all the thoughts that had formed while the darkness and light of the town surrounded Alan Wake. He surrendered himself to the unknown, one that might be already written after all… Though he knows he had to talk about the music for sure, that selection of bangers had to be celebrated somehow.




Ambition almost killed Alan Wake, in more ways than one. I mean, I may not know much about Remedy Studios, in fact, it is the very first game of theirs I have ever played and beaten, but I do know the story of Bright Falls and how it was initially going to be something else, an open world of sorts, something that didn’t quite work, as it seems. Translating an already crafted open world into a linear style of game is such a monumental task that if I were in that predicament, I’d have considered outright scrapping everything and starting from zero, but that probably wasn’t even a realistic option for the team to begin with.

But that’s not even what I’m specifically referring to. Alan Wake, the game, the package, the copy made out of code and specific sections, is riddled with hiccups and bumps; it’s filled with padding, sections of trees and mist than don’t offer much aside from one or two manuscripts pages and combat sections that can feel overbearing at times, the remnants of its troubled production remain in aspects such as the barren areas and driving sections that don’t have much of a place and are so frustrating to playthrough even if you ignore any cars I just wish they were taken out —tho it’s kind of cute how it also uses the same light mechanic as the rest of the game—,  the encounters with the Taken or the groups of mad crows often lack imagination and enemy variety or don’t jam very well with how the camera works in the case of the camera, and at one point I just kept thinking how much the experience would have benefited if some sections were repurposed in different ways or outright removed.

The imperfections of Alan Wake mostly come from this, factors outside of the game itself, of its story, but they still impact it negatively; I can’t scratch off the feeling of something being lost a bit when all of the boss enemies behave the exact same, the only thing that changes being the creepy lines they spat out and the character model. If the game wasn’t anything more than a series of levels where you shoot at things, then these issues would have rotted its pages…

…luckily, it has a dragon.

Wouldn’t it be funny if I started to praise the actual combat itself after spending two paragraphs criticizing some gameplay sections? Yeah, it would be hilarious! ... ANYWAYyeah I fucking adore the way Al controls. It occupies that same space as Simon from Castlevania, where how slow and imprecise it feels actually benefits the gameplay. You truly get the feeling Alan has never picked a gun in his life in any major capacity; he’s slow, clunky, imprecise, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. The tense dance of using light to weaken the Taken and gen emptying the chambers of them, or hell, simply using a flare and trying to activate the closest generator, it’s a super straight-forward system, and I love it. It’s incredibly satisfying to come out of encounters on top, because even if there isn’t much scarcity in resources (even if you start off each chapter with nothing each time), they are still somewhat limited, especially the most powerful weapons, and little things like mashing X to reload faster or the camera panning out to warn you of nearby enemies are things I didn’t know I needed until now.

It would be a far cry to call it a survival horror, but it’s tense; it’s tense to try to manage the purge while a bulldozer is charging full speed at you; it’s tense to try to outspeed a force you cannot do nothing against; and Alan gets progressively more and more tired. I can make the argument that there should be less of it or at least more variety in what it offers enemy-wise, but nothing will take away from the fact that the core itself is some fantastic shit.

Like… there’s something about fighting against waves of enemies on stage while the sickest rock tune ever plays in the background and the lights and flames fill your eyes that I can only call ‘’fucking awesome’’.




Deemon knew that wasn’t just it. He could talk about flaws and shooting Taken all he wanted, but something else lied within the light. He ran into it.

‘’But there’s something else’’, he said




But there’s something else.

A story already written, touched by the darkness. Written already as a part of it before birth, its muse trying to corrupt it. An ending yet to be typed out.

I have never seen a videogame story that trusts so much that the player will be intrigued enough by it to stick with it and engage with it all the way through. The tale Alan Wake, Alice, Barry, Sarah, and the whole town get tangled into is not intriguing; it is fascinating. I have never felt such closure from getting answers to questions I never realized where there in the first place. From being pretty disappointed about how Nightingale and Mott had such a poor presence as antagonists to being in awe of how their actions fell into place after the truth of this unfortunate series of events was revealed. Alan Wake offers a hell of a mystery. Alan Wake solves it.

The pages of the manuscript are as essential as the cinematics and interactions, so many pieces of the puzzle fit, it’s almost like getting spoiled before something happens, which in a way is exactly what’s happening. At first, I felt pretty disappointed that this would be a jarring light vs darkness story mixed with a thriller. Then it ended up being a meta-narrative within its own meta-narrative. The fact they did that without it feeling overcomplicated or screwing it up is ovation worthy.

But I also feel a huge sense of admiration for the micro-stories at play; hearing and talking to the inhabitants of Bright Falls, listening to Maine’s night radio, the echoes of the Taken and stellar ambience sounds ringing through my ears, the fucking incredible Night Springs shorts that had me HOOKED... It was the little things scattered in the trees and buildings and the small talk that gave this spiraling world even more meaning.

It ends with the darkness hungry for more, just like me. I’ve seen people call Alan Wake ‘’the most 6/7 out of ten game I’ve ever played’’, and even though I do not sympathize with that statement at all because it feels reductive in any context, I kind of get what people mean by it. Alan Wake is profoundly flawed, but most of them do not come from the game itself, but rather from the complicated production it had to go through.  In the face of such adversity, I’ve never seen such confidence, such talent, or such a desire to tell a tale like this. Alan Wake isn’t just *a* story, there’s more to be written and read, but at the end of the day, it’s also its own story. And what a story it is.

Maybe this isn’t what the champion of light could have been if the circumstances were different, but the hardships cannot be avoided, and even after going through them, they really sold me on this novel.

Is it close to the Silent Hills of old? No not particularly.

Does it absolutely stumble on getting across some of its ideas and concepts? Yeah.

Are the chase sequences a bit rough? Yeah.

I still really fucked with this and everything it was doing. It gave me a dose of what I've wanted from Silent Hill for a long time, it had a vision and it sees that vision all the way through while trying to mix things up a bit.

I think it handles its themes of trauma and abuse trapping someone emotionally within cycles of self destructive and self distancing behaviors causing lashing out at anything that harms the ego and whatever normalcy one can cling onto fairly well.

I feel like even if it was a bit heavy handed at times (the beginning really tries to hammer home how depressed Anita is in ways that feel really corny) I cannot ignore the earnestness and the willingness to just fuckin try something here. The art direction, the atmosphere, the music, the tones.

No it's not Silent Hill 3 but it worked for me and captured me in ways that I really didn't expect. That last chunk of the game really fuckin hit me.

this may be shocking, but ive somehow avoided a good chunk of the discourse surrounding this game since its release. so when i say that i had low expectations, that negativity mostly stems from the numbing experience that was the first game. but also because of my bottomless ire for neil druckmann. druckmann is a wannabe, constantly wanting to live up to the names of sam lake, hideo kojima, and shinji mikami. in pursuing fame, the fake auteur clutches onto the medium of video games with pitiful fingers. although he and naughty dog catch a lot of flak, the developers deserve credit for their hard work. the game looks outstanding, feels great to play, has some sick art, and has a neat scavenging gameplay loop. but as a director, druckmann deserves all the shit i and other people throw at him. the story's plot is alright, and there are also some good tidbits (ellie's missing fingers at the end was a great touch). however, the gross romanticization of misery and inspiration for the story throws all the good under the bus. the game wants you to feel bad. it wants you to feel bile in your throat, dried blood on your gamer hands, and an uncomfortable twist in your stomach. violence is cruel, revenge is cruel, but to have players succumb to it for 20+ hours paired with the discord of satisfyingly explosive headshots, the last of us part 2 fails to evoke those feelings outside of cutscenes. it fails so badly that dogs are introduced to the combat as a cheap attempt to guilt the player. which is so odd when the story is already geared for emotional compulsion.

the characters you play as are bad people. they are selfish, violent, and vengeful. they have little to no redeeming qualities outside of helping those they care for. and that's the point. i don't understand the bashing of the protagonists for being unlikeable. they're anti-heroes; you're not supposed to like them, but you root for them because of something they've done that shows some glimmer of humanity. that's probably the one saving grace of the masturbatory playtime (inflated by how almost disrespectfully long cutscenes can get). but even then, the game's idf propaganda. one half, it's a venture into a foreign land for blood. the second half, it's a disgusting dehumanization of the palestinian people. druckmann's gone on record citing the lynching of 2 idf reservists as a major inspiration to the story for this game. and it shows because it's so clearly written from a zionist's point of view. "wow look how barbaric and violent these religious zealots are. theyre so transphobic and misogynist! the wolves (IDF stand-in) are normal people; look how cool they are with their militarist regime!" at times it tries to show that the wolves (WLF) aren't as good as they seem, but it's never fairly compared to the seraphites. it's so excessively biased, only making the WLF a full-on enemy in abby's story when she wants to be her own person. it's never a complete decry of the WLF, but it's always a condemnation of the seraphites. at least the game's version of the idf are just as much of a warmonger lol.

if i could strip away the politics and my ingrained distaste for the game's creator, the game is just mid. it's a run-of-the-mill AAA third-person shooter blockbuster. it looks next gen but it plays like Sony's stuck in 2009. there's nothing special going on here. It's the first game with some new guns, skills, and enemies. the level design is improved, but the visual clutter of photorealism sometimes detracts from the enjoyability of exploration. the story did not deserve the gut-twisting and palm-sweating reactions of its players. this game did not deserve to be heralded as the future of video games. neil druckmann did not fucking deserve to be awarded as a legendary "innovator" of games for directing the same game he did 7 years prior. if this is what AAA games are expected to become, i'll just continue digging into my hole of indies and classics. developers are being abused, neglected, and vacuumed into obscurity just to put out something to fulfill the dreams of the vainglorious. the games industry is fucked.

alas, im but a measly gamer... i dont know what's right for gaming. hail druckmann, the savior of the medium! we've truly found gaming's citizen kane! finally, our hobby is legitimized in the world of art!!1! miss me with that bullshit. im going back to silent hill 3 or some other good stuff.

Expressiveness is the quality that defines roleplaying games: they’re judged by how freely players can assert themselves in a reactive space. Players want to convey their personality and make choices, but while these are the obvious core concepts of the genre, Baldur’s Gate 3 has proven to me that they’re not what makes an RPG great. Having the capacity to make decisions is certainly a necessity, but decisions only matter when players care about the outcomes. Choices surround us in every moment of our lives, but most vanish from our minds within seconds for that very reason; they’re so emotionally inconsequential as to be hardly worthy of notice. So, more fundamental than allowing for choice is providing a real adventure in which to make those choices, and defining a journey which has players encountering challenges, learning, changing, and overcoming. This is the critical component which Baldur’s Gate fails to establish, most glaringly from its narrative structure.

(Minor spoilers through act 2)
In the opening cutscene, your character has a mindflayer tadpole inserted into their head, so your call to adventure is getting it out. This is fine in itself, but the game is quick to tell you that there’s no urgency to this task, relieving you of the burden of care. Every quest you receive to accomplish this goal, across the first ~22 hours of gameplay, results in failure where your party just sorta gives up. It takes another ten hours before the main villains are established, a stale group of evil zealots of evil gods who just love being evil, pursuing an agenda which players can't feel meaningfully aligned against. The simplicity of the central narrative gives the impression it’s just supposed to be a foundation for a character-driven story, but the interpersonal aspect is similarly lacking. In what feels like a symptom of the game's long stay in early-access, your companions put their love and trust in you in act 1, before anyone’s had the chance to organically develop relationships or encounter life-changing struggles. Characters don’t have the time and space to have an arc, and you don’t get the chance to express yourself alongside them, you simply skip to the end for an immediate and vacuous payoff. There’s no journey here, you’re simply being presented with scenes from an adventure without actually going on one.

The same can be said for the mechanics, even when they’re lifted from the tabletop game, thanks to a design philosophy where every playstyle is thoroughly accommodated. This seems like a good strategy in a genre where players want to assert themselves, but the refusal to challenge players leaves unique approaches feeling irrelevant. Even with a party led by a Githyanki barbarian, with very little in the way of charisma, intelligence, or skill, there was never a time I couldn’t overcome a situation in an optimal way. I could pick whatever locks I wanted, disarm whatever traps I wanted, circumvent any barrier I wanted; the game never asked me to think ahead or prepare. I didn’t have to be ready with certain spells or proficiencies, it never demanded more than following a clear path. Even if it did, the cheap respecs mean that you’re a maximum of 400 gold away from having a team perfectly suited to the task at hand, and even if you don’t end up using that option, knowing that your choices are so impermanent is a detriment to any feeling of growth.

That’s the key here: growth. My characters leveled up, but I don't feel like they grew. I traveled, but I don’t feel like I went on a journey. I made choices, but I don’t feel like I went in new directions. After a fifty-hour playthrough, all I remember was that I chilled out, ran around some nice maps, and managed my inventory. I spent all that time relaxing well enough, but I didn’t overcome challenge, feel much, or learn anything. All I could confidently state that the game did for me is live up to its basic selling point, of being an adventure I could take at home, a journey where I go nowhere.

After about 100-ish accumulated hours, I think I've had my fill on Baldur's Gate 3. Some of that is just how much I'm able to tolerate the sort of loosely content-driven nature of the western-developed open world RPG -- which BG3 isn't necessarily open world, I actually really love how tightly designed its overworld maps are, but unfortunately it does happen to share many of the same pitfalls that tend to wear me down in those games like endless vendor trash and dogshit inventory management. But I also feel like there's something missing from the game itself that would elevate the experience to something truly incredible, and I can't quite put my finger on what that could be.

Maybe it's that the game's narrative feels somewhat devoid of meaning or message; it feels like a means to an end for the developers and writers to get to the important combat set pieces. But even then I can respect how difficult that can be to implement in a game that's largely about fulfilling personal fantasies through diverse and emergent gameplay. On the other hand, Larian has kinda compromised true freedom for a facade of sorts, dialogue trees are bland and the dialogue pacing itself can feel jerky and awkward -- and I say this having not played the game as the Dark Urge, so maybe that could potentially alleviate this little peeve of mine -- but it doesn't feel like there's enough functional variance to make that feel more understandable.

I love the party members, but it's disappointing how rarely they ever play off each other. I get that there's so many variables at play that they can't reasonably have a conversation ready for every set of characters in every situation, but even just having banter at the campsite would've gone a long way. The vast majority of the game's dialogue is the game talking at you, but even then it rarely even feels like a conversation. The whole romance aspect is probably the most revelatory of all though: I'm just really, really not a fan of how western RPGs (and a few non-western RPGs like modern Fire Emblem and Persona) implement romance as this utilitarian content thing. I think the only time I've walked away from a modern game with player character romance options somewhat fulfilled was Judy's romance in Cyberpunk 2077 (and even that had its issues, like the "sex" scene that felt like they just stole animations from a Second Life NSFW server). Anyways, my point is kinda just, in the pursuit of making a world where they want you to go about things in your own way, they've created an entire framework that exists purely for the player at all times -- even within the facets of the game that should feel more human.

And before I let this whole thing run away as purely negative, which has not been my intention at all, because ultimately I think very highly of the game and there is A LOT that I do love about Baldur's Gate 3: the main party has cool and distinctive designs, the music (while a bit safe) is always pleasant and appropriately utilized, like I said earlier the scope of the world and the design of its maps are how I wish more modern devs would handle the scale of their games instead of just big open maps, I really enjoy the combat even if the 5e power scaling kinda hurts the pacing more than it helps it, the game is gorgeous on the whole, and I think the voice acting is pretty fuckin' great! The entire package of Baldur's Gate 3 is undeniably incredible; it's a landmark title and it honestly deserved getting so many GOTY awards (though personally I just found 2023 to be lacking in amazing experiences, mostly being a deluge of decent to good titles, and Baldur's Gate 3 was the real standout for me).

But, I think it also has illuminated a lot of Larian's weaknesses if their other games hadn't done so already, and Larian being able to address those or not in future titles is gonna be the deciding factor on if they become the next BioWare/Bethesda (in a bad way). Like, they seem to have solid writers, but the structure of the game just does none of that narrative justice. Dialogue is exhausting and annoying for the most part, more CRPG devs need to do the Disco Elysium thing of putting it in an easily readable sidebar. If what I've heard about Dark Urge origin is to be trusted, it makes me want to see them do something more focused on a specific character framework instead of spreading themselves thin with seven origin characters and a blank slate -- say what you will about the Mass Effect trilogy, particularly its politics lol, but having a singular character anchored into the world was clearly economically effective (in terms of development resources and probably money) for the scale of each project, and effective at allowing the player to roleplay meaningfully at the cost of freedom. Or just lean harder into that freedom aspect, make the dialogue a more meaningful part of the experience, and not just feeling like the part of the game where you have to eat your vegetables before getting back to the good stuff (i.e. murdering all the bad guys on the map).

Maybe I'm talking out of my ass, but I'm at least speaking for what I am personally craving from one of these RPGs. It was a bit frustrating how close BG3 came to satiating this feeling I've been left with post-Mass Effect 3 disappointment, but ultimately BG3 didn't really stick the landing for me and that has kinda sucked, especially when I think it's otherwise a pretty fun experience. Also like, at least allow me to have Karlach, Shadowheart, and Lae'zel be in a relationship if you want the game to be hinged on this design theme of indulgent, hedonistic freedom. Not sure if that's a real complaint or if I'm just trying to find an excuse to bring up gay things in my reviews like usual, I just want to see them all hold hands or something, all these party members very clearly want to kiss each other and Larian won't let them... I don't even really want a romance when I'm playing as Tav (cuz like I said the romance feels so empty when it's just a game talking at nothing lol) I want to see the actual characters be happy with each other!! Idk let Astarion make out with Gale or something, if these people really are so horny, they should canonically be fucking each other too or something, man.

Kinda lost the thread here, but uh, what's something inflammatory I can end this on. Oh, how about: Baldur's Gate 3 is the first game I've ever played that makes content-driven media seem good actually. Hm, too back-handed and maybe not even true. Baldur's Gate 3 is the Chrono Trigger of CRPGS? Not sure what that means tbh. Let's just take a little of both: Baldur's Gate 3 is simultaneously the best Dragon Age game and the best Elder Scrolls game released in the past 15 years. It's also somehow less racist than Mass Effect? Idk man, maybe I should've played Planescape: Torment instead.