The Dark Souls of video games.

The worst Dark Souls by a good margin is still easily one of the best video games. How’s that for overachievement?

Every now and then, a game comes along that changes your perception of what games can and could be. Outer Wilds is one of those. A masterpiece of tone whose mechanics of solar system-sized exploration meld beautifully, perfectly with the story the player discovers by engaging with them.

The end result is sublime enough it sent shivers down my spine. Game of the Year 2019; please go experience Outer Wilds.

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.

This game is 1,000 hours too long and the writing gets progressively worse as it goes. But the visual style and music are absolute fire, so it’s at least worth experiencing the first handful of dungeons.

Neat little Nintendo DS gem, you've probably never heard of it. The writing's whatever and most of the characters remain undeveloped, but the game's got a fun sense of humor and some rad art designs (even if it all does look a bit like a Dragon Ball ripoff in parts).

On the other hand it all felt a little generic to me, a little old hat — except for the really cool stuff it does with multiple endings! Probably at least worth a try just to support the indie dev scene.

A very bad dungeon crawler and an even worse strategy game eking by on a solid hook and an incredible aesthetic.

This game was a bug-ridden mess at launch, but I kinda still loved it. Must be pretty stellar by now with all the patches.

Phenomenal core traversal and murder mechanics crushed under the weight of all the tedious chores and terrible dialogue this game expects you to slog through for hours between every assassination.

It cannot be overstated how bland and generic this game’s central story is (including its primary antagonist, practically a nonentity). The party members are cool and there are hints of interesting political conflicts in the background, yet the main quest is lowest common denominator Tolkien fan fic.

It’s also got some incredibly tedious copy-paste-encounter dungeon design. The dwarf knockoff Moria level in particular is a labyrinthine hell of repetition no one should have to suffer through for the wet fart that is Origins’ finale.

Why three stars, in that case? Idk, I’m a sucker for Flemeth and illusory moral dialogue trees I guess.

Feels good to shoot waves of things in this game while you ignore the characters blathering on about some poorly explained, context-free mess of cosmic stories and listen to a podcast instead.

Truly, if you didn’t play Destiny 1 the narrative here is indecipherable nonsense. The game doesn’t even tell you what missions out of the gazillion available missions you’re supposed to do next to advance the “main story.”

But the guns do feel good to shoot, that much is true.

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.

Groundbreaking storytelling. A then-new standard in 3D platforming. Charming as hell in its presentation.

Also the combat sucks hardcore and you will repeat the exact same sequence of moves about 5,000 times before you even hit the halfway mark. Sours the whole experience, if I’m being honest.

Criminally good. Like a fantasy of every Star Trek and Firefly ship simulator I ever wanted made real. The final boss structure is eventually kind of a bummer, but FTL is otherwise an all-timer.