Unfinished and flawed in some core regards, it's nonetheless hard not to love Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver at least a little bit. This is an action game before its time: cinematic, story-rich, and awing in a scale that pushes the hardware of its time to their limits. It's impossible not to see flashes of both Dark Souls and God of War in Soul Reaver's DNA now.

The writing and worldbuilding are equally rich in their attempt to build an epic both gothic and Miltonian in tone and themes. The quality of the voice acting was peerless in 1999 and still impressive as hell today; there's never been a narrator more suited to a story like this than Tony Jay. Other aspects of the game's presentation do their best to rise to these standards, and while the primitive PS1 graphics engine can't quite produce emotive characters on this register, it produces a convincing impression of both them and the colossal, decaying landscape and swooping camera. The Dreamcast port helps a bit with its smoother framerate and detail, but in some ways that just emphasizes the muddiness of the texture work.

More dated than the visuals, arguably, is the gameplay. It's mash-to-win combat and block-pushing puzzles all the way down here, and while the game's dimension-bending design and puzzlebox bosses can be uniquely clever, they also get tiresome really quickly. God of War would improve on this formula by finding a way to make mindless combat so kinetic it becomes engaging by sheer force of spectacle; Soul Reaver cannot. Every enemy is defeated by mashing square, then either impaling them with a weapon or throwing them into one of any number of vampire-killing environmental hazards.

More egregious than any other flaw is the one that most betrays Soul Reaver's ambition: the story is unfinished. Soul Reaver doesn't just end with a sequel hook; it ends without any kind of conclusion to its narrative at all, at what clearly was intended to be the middle act climax of the game, not a finale. Luckily there are sequels. Less luckily, their returns are diminishing, as the Legacy of Kain series falls further and further into history with its failure to improve on the core mechanics. It would take a full decade for another action RPG set in a ruined, decaying world of the undead to do the epic tone established here justice.

Repetitive combat, uninspired level design, and a sluggish narrative that doesn’t have nearly as much to say about mental illness as the breathless advertising and media coverage of this game would lead you to believe. It does some interesting visualization of nightmare PTSD scenarios, but that too quickly grows repetitive (get ready for lots of tall sword dudes in demonic armor. And fire.). There’s close to zero accuracy in its depiction of schizophrenia according to a bunch of mental health professionals and actual schizophrenic people out there, so strip that away and I’m not sure what you’re left with but a dull action game with a thick layer of mud caked over its otherwise lovely visuals.

By the end of the first two hours it hasn’t communicated as much as even a mediocre genre film, which is pretty much my metric for a badly paced video game. It’s also just plain not “fun” to play, though you could probably have guessed that going in.

A lovely game with lovely characters that's unfortunately a massive drag to play. Spiritfarer is a grindy busywork simulator masquerading as a town-building sim or platformer. In reality it's a clicker game where, unlike other click games, you have to spend enormous amounts of time traveling between the things you click on. There's no challenge to any of it, just tedium and a continual test of patience.

I stuck with it for >5 hours expecting it to get better as I unlocked more features. Instead it only got worse as I uncovered more of the world and was forced to spend more and more time on mindless errands which in turn only unlock more mindless errands. The game occasionally rewards you with cute bits of character dialogue, but those are a few and far between compared to the amount of time you'll spend operating click-to-complete chore machines and engaging with possibly the most annoying fishing minigame I've ever encountered.

I've heard there's a beautiful ending, and it saddens me to say I won't stick around to see it. When I saw the average time to main story completion on How Long to Beat was 24 hours, I nearly died.

For me it's like, BotW's dungeons aren't as good as other Zelda dungeons (and I'm long tired of Zelda dungeons), combat's not as good as Soulsborne's, monsters aren't as fun to hunt or fight as Monster Hunter's, riding across the big ruined countryside lacks the emotional weight of the same exact thing in Shadow of the Colossus (though BotW's terrain climbing is better), narrative rewards for exploration don't compare to Morrowind's, and bokoblin base raids sure as hell don't hold a candle up to Far Cry's. Doesn't help to have played it pretty close on the heels of Witcher 3, whose world I found way more gratifying to nook-and-cranny.

On the other hand it's a grab bag of features from a bunch of my favorite games, so even if it's a weaker version of all those features it's still got some scale appeal. I did enjoy a lot of the shrine puzzles. I'm hopeful the sequel will Majora's Mask the hell out of it and draw me in more with the story and character stuff.

The biggest chunk of fun I got out of BotW was watching all the crazy shit the people who love it get up to on streams and videos.

Cute but unchallenging and insubstantial. Levels are too short, meaning about half your time is spent on the interstitials between them. The simplicity of the central hole mechanic doesn't scale in the same satisfying ways as that of Katamari Damacy, Donut County's most obvious source of inspiration. You're always doing the same thing in the same way with little additional challenge. So despite the game's extremely brief length, it gets old quickly.

The soundtrack's got some great stuff going on though — especially that post-level recap beat.