There are some gaming experiences where I realize that the best thing I can do to enjoy them is to shut-off the analytical side of my brain for a while and just go on whatever journey the developers have crafted. If for no other reason, I will always remember Omori for the way it just does "whatever it feels like doing."

But there are certainly more reasons to remember this experience and no matter how eccentric it got, it never felt like it forgot the player. This was an experience made to be shared.

[A Sketchbook World]

The most regonizable elements of Omori is also one of its strongest. The crayon and color-pencil art was executed so wonderfully. Every sprite and scene glows with character. The color palettes are often extravagent and playful but never to me felt "childish" or gaudy, and when the tone shifted drastically the purpose behind it could be felt and was never jarring. Animations were often fairly simple in terms of frame count, but they accomplished what they needed to and sometimes more.

I'm also quite in love with the way they used blurring and shading effects to give that feeling that you were sometimes looking at actual paper puppets.

[It is a JRPG]

It actually was a bit of a surprise to me how much traditional JRPG gameplay was here. There is a lot of exploration, sidequests, secrets, and combat. From the exploration side, I had a delightful time scouring Headspace and Faraway Town. They both presented all sorts of unexpected events and neither got too expansive, making sure you can hit all of the key points without derailing the pace of the game.

What a I really loved was that it didn't use checklists or neuron-firing loot rewards to bait you into it. I explored because I wanted to see where the long chain of destructable traffic cones would take me, or if the next NPC I talked to would show me another hilarious doodling of theirs.

The combat was fairly well done as well. It's never a demanding system, but it's engaging enough and is executed with the same sense of charm as the rest of the world. "Spectacle" isn't quite the word I'm looking for, but what carries it is something like that. There's a lot of little Quality-of-Life details as well which was nice.

If I want to get technical (which I can't help it, I do) I think the 'emotion' system was underdone and too easy to bypass entirely, especially late game. There could be an argument there was some intention to this, but it's very implicit if that's the case so I won't write it off as such.

[I can't process how much work this OST was]

179 tracks, most of which are very distinct and cover a fairly wide range of styles and instrumentations. From the synth/bit-tunes of Headspace to the nostalgic piano pieces and even some EDM combat music with a harpsicord mixed in, yet it all feels right in context. The music here is incredible and yet it never felt "forceful." It was an accompaniment to the visuals and narrative not the dictator.

[A painful narrative but not a bleak one]

My biggest concern going in was that the story would be either hamfistedly clumsy or esoterically pretentious. A concern that probably didn't come from the game at all but rather my own perspective on modern discourse around psychological matters.

I don't wanna write that essay now (or maybe ever), so I'll put it this way: for all the more abstract elements of Omori, it knew when to touch the ground and speak clearly without becoming long-winded. I really appreciated that.

A lot of elements of the story felt very familiar to me, so that hurt a bit. But a good hurt, I think.

[Yes]

I'm firmly of the belief that video games are a form of art. Omori is a good "game" but that's not the reason I would recommend anyone play it, that's just a nice sugar coating on a journey that wants you to experience a lot of different things, and one that was crafted with a lot of care and effort. Like all art, it will mean something different to every observer, and it might not mean anything to you. But, if the mood seems right, I can absolutely recommend looking for yourself to find out.

    Baldur's Gate III is the most ambitious, high-production Computer Roleplaying Game since Dragon Age Origins. The degree to which they realize that ambition is astounding, but its scale also amplifies the effect of the many footguns in its design.

Footguns I can talk about with confidence because I put well over 100 hours into the game. That said, the fact I put that much time into it in a month should be seen as a glowing endorsement for the game.

In terms of core gameplay, technical depth, the presentation of the story, and visual aesthetic I can't call BG3 anything less than a superb evolution on what Larian has been building since Divinty Original Sin. It's pretty, it's flashy, it's deep, and it's densely packed with handcrafted encounters for you to discover in ways that will be unique to each player and playthrough.

Almost everything has narrative context. Every character is voice acted and most are motion captured. The writing has many great moments: rich layers of character, surprising plot developments, capturing moments of drama, excitement, intrigue, levity, and—more often than I expected—some rather dark turns.

    | The meat of it |

Exploration is immensely rewarding and varied. Talking to every NPC can lead to unexpected quests and opportunities and sometimes even open new paths on the central narrative. The nooks and cranies of the map hide unique treasures that often have the potential to completely change or enhance your playstyle. And the various fights you'll end up in are almost never repetitive and allow for a great deal of tactical approaches while still being quite challenging.

Compared to its Computer RPG peers—Pillars of Eternity, Dragon Age, and of course its own predecessor the original Baldurs Gate—the game is borderline an "immersive sim" with its mechanics, level design, and quest progression. My greastest point of evidence being how much I relied on my characters being built to abuse stealth and really high jumps.

Locked gate? Jump over it. Blocked Bridge? Jump past it. Running enemy? Jump on it.

Too many enemies? Hide, jump up to a high place, and pick them apart with arrows.

But I've played with alternate builds enough to know that you could have a party of physically inept nerds and still have a rip roaring good time with combat and adventuring.

Its hard for me to say how approachable it is, given my many hours of experience in the Original Sin games carrying over almost completely, but given how many CRPG newcomers I've seen enjoying the game, I wager it does well enough.

Overall, it really is a beautiful digitalization of the tabletop experience it intends to emulate, just as its predecessors were in their time, but perhaps even more dramatically so now. From the on-screen dice rolls to the sense of humor and adventure, its an almost 1:1 emulation of D&D 5e.

What then are these issues I speak of?

    | Inherited flaws |

Firstly—and most cheekily—that tabletop game it's emulating is D&D 5th Edition. 5e has some longstanding design problems as a tabletop ruleset and a few new problems in the context of a video game where there is no human Dungeon Master to fill the holes on the fly. (I'll still take it over 4th Edition every time, though)

For one, class design and scaling is erratic. Some classes, like the Ranger and Barbarian, get left in the dust after a certain point while others (Paladin) rocket up to the moon with all of their damage and utility. A lot of this Larian thankfully smoothed over with some reworking of class progressions and changes to specific class ability rules, but some of its is in the core designs which didn't get changed very dramatically.

    | Illusory viability |

I would even say that 5e is generally not very flexible or experessive in terms of play styles. Or at least not flexible and expressive in the ways it thinks it is. Take for instance Shadowheart's starting class as a "Trickster" subclass Cleric that focuses on Stealth.

If you try to play into that concept, you either lock yourself out of a Cleric's secondary role as a tank by picking armor that doesn't negate your bonuses to stealth, or you're locked to very particular sets of armor that you may or may not find, and to add insult to injury there's not a single useful action a Cleric can do that either maintains or benefits from stealth. Half of their spells are giant glowing AoEs for crying out loud.

Ah, but they could buff your actual stealth character to make them more effective... which is fine until your Rogue gets a few pieces of gear that give the same bonuses with less hassle, and by then their skill is more than high enough for every scenario where stealth is even a viable option in this game.

Oh, and their unique decoy ability takes a full action for a mere 1 HP on it and uses your "concentration," blocking you out of any of your other actually useful spells. By the start of Act 2, enemies will delete it from existence by sneezing in its general direction then proceed to pummel you anyway.

Then on the other end of the spectrum is the "Light" Cleric who gets free explosions on every short rest and the ability to "nope" an arbitrary enemy's attack every round.

If you're playing on Exploration or Balanced modes, none of these class design issues will likely ever matter to you, as they are balanced well enough for casual play. But it's one of the more frustrating parts of the system in how it promises certain combat archetypes and playstyles but doesn't actually support them either through poor decisions on the classes or just by flaws in the fundamental rules.

    | "You notice that you can't see the treasure. Sucks to suck." |

Speaking of: pass/fail dice rolls still don't translate well to computer games. They work on tabletop because tabletop is casual and abstract. A fully realized virtual environment is not so much the latter. Especially one where I can just rewind time with a reload if I can't make it (You call it save scumming; I call it "respawning after a failed attempt."). And this is ultimately just a clumsy attempt to replace the narrative smoothing a good Dungeon Master would be able to do in tabletop.

Sure, all is well in good when your Charisma 8 fighter fails a DC18 Persuasion check to convince the guard to let you off scott free. That's just getting what you paid for and hoping for a rare exception. But try and tell me you won't reload when your master thief character fails a narrative sleight of hand check that you need to save an NPC you like.

If this was a 10 or even 20 hour game, I'd say sure: maybe you will let the dice roll as they do.

This is a 100 hour game and there are hundreds of significant dice rolls with many ways for things to go wrong. Not just a little wrong, like ruin-your-story wrong. Lose-your-spec'd-out-Cleric wrong. You aren't going to wait until a replay you never actually do just to get the sequence of events you actually wanted.

You are going to reload to redo dice rolls.

So why does the game waste so much time on them?

This is why almost every other series in the genre threw out dice rolling for pass/fail conditions. Larian found ways to do it better than its been done before: inspiration, active bonus selections, a cool interface, and plentiful alternate methods if one fails (in most cases). But that doesn't fix the problem, it just makes it more tolerable. The fact that Larian dropped the "Honour Mode" option that both Original Sin games had—limiting you to one save and erasing it on death—is very telling to this fact.

I will say, though, it was refreshing in some ways for a game to try this method again so wholeheartedly. The little dice noises are very satisfying.

    | Fickle People |

Another long standing issue for Western RPGs in general is diplomacy in its many forms. The wider genre is pretty infamous for "No u" style dialogue options to talk your way through "tricky situations." Ideals dismantled, higher reason found, passions cooled (or maybe ignited?) all because a pretty guy said "have you tried X instead?"

That isn't actually that unrealistic on its own (human history is full of a lot of hard to explain decision making) and Baldur's Gate III does a much better job avoiding this tendency than a lot of games. A certain pivotal moment in Shadowheart's storyline stands out to me, as the skill marked options actually made things worse when I tried them. But, despite Larian's immense effort on the writing and motion capture, there's still a few too many important moments where characters change their minds way too quickly and for far too little.

Act 3 in particular suffered this in my experience, with Gale's storyline there being one of the prime examples of that kind of emotional whiplash. One minute he's venting pent up frustrations and resolving to go one way on a decision, then the time comes to choose and he talks like he had always intended to go the other after you say one line of your opinion on the matter.

    | Almost too chaotic for tactics (almost) |

A good amount of my core issues with combat are downstream of the dice rolling problem as well. It's hard to feel tactical and clever in the moment to moment when the deciding factor between your plan handing you a quick victory or a miserable defeat is a mostly arbitrary 30% chance for a spell to either work completely or not at all.

This kind of chaos is fine for a casual tabletop session with the boys where the DM is probably fudging the roles for the most exciting outcome anyway. Or even a faster paced game where the individual chances aggregate more. It's less fine for a game that offers you a "tactical" difficulty, tunes things relatively decisively, and hits you with some pretty insidious encounter designs.

Is it an unmanageable tactical experience then? No. The tools at your disposal are just well enough designed and plentiful enough that there's almost always some way to recover and wrest out a victory. But those recovery options burn a limited pool of resources.

    | Resource management and risk mitigation (the HR way) |

There is almost no item farming in this game: once an area has been looted, it's empty. So, if you rely on chugging potions and burning scrolls on every fight, you will only make future fights more difficult by exhausting most of what's available. Not to mention the rest and recovery mechanics require a steady supply of food and can advance certain time sensitive quests so you have to be mindful there as well.

There are shops that replinish some consumables every day, but that requires gold which you also can't farm. (Those willing to pickpocket, however, bypass this issue entirely)

Where this led me was the practice of intense pre-fight risk mitigation and stingy consumable usage. Most fights ended in 2-3 rounds for me because I had already scoped out the field and used stealth to position myself for the greatest advantage I could, leveraging my power-gamed character builds.

That might sound very enticing to many of you, and it is, in fact, a lot of fun for a while.

But I'm a bit too familiar with Larian's mechanical design at this point and know a lot of really nasty, tension deflating exploits that have ironically been reintroduced from Original Sin 1. Yes, I could just not use them, and I try not to. But when the first two fights of a potentially expansive dungeon drain most of your resources playing the normal way and you don't know what's next, you tend to stop pulling punches.

And the main set piece fights really hammer in the long term immersion issue with this risk averse playstyle as I often ended up reloading after a failed first attempt only for "divine inspiration" to tell my characters exactly where to stand and what pre-fight buffs to use before triggering the cutscene. All because the alternative is risking another 15 minute failed attempt because some bad dice rolls foiled my most important plays of the fight.

Which brings us to another inherited issue.

    | D&D 5e does not scale gracefully |

Both up and out.

As mentioned Larian did tamp down on the worst of the power scaling. They limited player levels to 12 as opposed to the tabletop game's max of 20 and smoothed out some of the class designs. But what I'm actually focusing on here is the "action economy" of the game (how many actions per round each side of a fight has available) and the time scaling of combat.

The further the game goes the more health everything has, the more actions they have, the more effects get layered into fights, and the more enemies there are. In Act 3 especially the combat tracker is frequently overflowed because of how many combatants are actively fighting, and that's before everyone starts summoning more. None of this scaling comes free from a real-time standpoint. The bigger the fight, the slower it goes as a rule. The variables at play, the more you and the AI have to figure out to make good decisions.

Larian did introduce a nice mechanic allowing allied characters with adjacent turns to act together, but that's another thing that gets mangled by dice rolls and class balance. Eventually characters' "initiative" values vary too much even on the same side, causing allies and enemies to get evenly distributed in the order and forcing everything back to one-at-a-time.

By the late game it wasn't uncommon for a single round of combat to last 10-15 minutes. The finale getting the absolute worst of this and unfortunately deflating the rest of any emotional momentum I had at that point.

    | There's no "oil field" moment for me |

Ultimately, I walk away from the combat of Baldur's Gate III a bit disappointed as a fan of Larian's last two games. 5e has some fun stuff, but its ultimately not as interesting of a tactical sandbox compared to Original Sin. Abilties and effects have relatively unintuitive, restrained interactions in general and have to rely too much on special cases and rule exceptions. And the ruleset's general lack of determinism only multiplies that effect.

Most people won't engage in the game to a level where what I've been talking about matters, and there's still plenty of fun to be had even if you do.

I was just hoping the game would eventually give me another moment like I had in Original Sin 2, where a seemingly non-descript fight next to an oil drill organically evolved into a desperate fight for survival on a smoke filled tower amidst a sea of flames—and that was after multiple attempts. But everything in BG3 felt rather tame in comparison. Often creative, surely... but tame.

    | That's enough about 5e |

It feels unfair to critique problems with a ruleset Larian didn't actually design and which the majority of the gaming sphere has determined they are fine with. So I'll focus now on what they are actually responsible for.

    | Scope |

If this was 10 years ago, I would have nothing but praise for their ambitions and be perfectly willing to overlook every rough edge, disappearing player model, out of sequence dialogue, and Vulkan rendering crash. But now we're in a world where Final Fantasy games are considered "shorter" compared to the average AAA release.

The first two acts of Baldur's Gate III were fantastic. Act 2 definitely a bit rougher, but constrained enough that most of the polish of Act 1 still carried through.

Then Act 3 arrives and is both larger and much messier than both. The hard part for me analyzing it, is that it doesn't have any less heart. There's a lot of cool things going on in the Act and clearly the team at Larian was excited to do it all. And a lot of it is good. Like 80%.

But that other 20% is cripplingly problematic: screwed up quest progression; rushed dialogue; pacing sinkholes; immersion killing glitches. The works. I was fortunate enough that none of it broke my solo playthrough entirely, but my co-op partner was not as lucky with his solo games and had two of his playthroughs borked by glitches.

    | Plot juggling |

And by Act 3 there are just too many active plot threads going on in general for me as a player to follow meaningfully. As an example, there was a major companion questline that I let end with the companion's (permanent) death in an unrelated event because I just couldn't spare any more brainpower to figure out how to reconcile it with all of the other threads I was trying to resolve.

In this game, quests do not just automatically resolve because you follow a marker and they often spill into each other in both symbiotic and conflicting ways. That is special and I love that.

But that also limits how many you can actually handle dealing with in a single playthrough.

If this was a 20 hour game like Obsidian's Tyranny, that would be fine. But this is very much not that short and the overwhelming majority of players will not be seeing Act 3 a second time. So it's pretty frustrating when a plotline you were interested in gets borked because of a decision you made 10 hours ago without quite realizing it (sorry, Lae'zel).

Again, that would be exciting in a short game. This is not a short game. So instead I experienced snowballing apathy for the last 20-30 hours of the narrative.

    | Faerun's babysitter |

This apathy I think also really colored my experience with the companion characters and a lot of the supporting cast. I'm not sure if the apathy was the start or the result, but by the end of Act 2 I began to feel less like my character was a "budding hero with his band of troubled but ultimately dependable allies," and more like I was "the designated driver after a particularly bad bender and we have a group assignment due tomorrow."

That example is maybe a bit too hyperbolic. The character storylines are quite interesting in their own rights. The issue is that once you mix in the rest of the supporting cast failing miserably to resolve their own issues without killing someone, themselves, or selling their souls to the devil (literally) you start to have flashbacks to your college days. Or at least my college days.

I did not get any sense of reward or accomplishment when the other characters showered mine with praise as a hero. All I heard were the desperate pleas of my fellow back row sitters looking for someone to tell them what to do.

In one sense, that made one particular villain character's offer very compelling near the end, but I can't abide ends-above-the-means logic so I had to refuse it and trudge on as the reluctant babysitter.

I would perhaps recommend to other to pick one of the origin characters instead of a custom. The story might work better when your character is also damaged. My great weapon fighter and his pristine moustache were simply too untainted, reliable, and self-sufficient for what the story was trying to do, I think.

Off the top of my head, the only characters I can think of that got by fine without your handholding were an 8-year-old orphan, a strange ox, the literal devil, and the final boss. The last two of which I killed, so...

I understand that it being an RPG means the story is geared to give the player as many important things to help with as possible, but there's a point where you compromise the believability of the world. The investigators are incompetent. The guards are useless. The freedom fighters are outmatched. The gods are impotent. Their champions are failures. The "good guys" are all wearing red shirts under their armor. The defenseless civilians emulate deer on the road. The villains are self destructive. And even the thieves guild is outdone.

Your character is not just a "factor" to tip the scales of the conflicts in the story, they are the single, final brick holding up an entire collapsing building.

    | The exploration really is quite excellent, though |

Despite all of the critiquing (or perhaps complaining) prior to this paragraph, I still hold this game in rather high regard. That's because as an immersive sim experience it's so intricate, varied, and reactive that my disappointments about the narrative couldn't spoil my whole experience. Even if I no longer really had much emotional investment in the proceedings, I was still really curious to see what routes and outcomes were possible.

    | What about co-op? |

I had fun with it, but this is going to be so heavily dependent on who you're playing with that I can't comment much, other than to say that it's the most properly accomodating co-op CRPG I've played, just as Original Sin was before it.

Actually, it shouldn't be understated how well it works. You can even properly quick save and load safely while one player is mid conversation and the other is in combat on the other side of the map.

Any other game I've played, that scenario would be unthinkable. But it's effortless here. So major props to Larian on that.

That might sound small, but multiplayer in CRPGs is usually tacked on at best so everytime its good I'll celebrate.

    | Not the crowning achievement I thought it'd be, but an achievement nonetheless |

Between great art direction, a rich world to traipse through, plentiful moments of genuinely entertaining dialogue and action, and a wide array of possible playstyles, Baldur's Gate III is a very impressive game and Larian should be proud of their work so far and enjoy its great opening sales and acclaim. But it's a shame that so many of the fibers of the game are left loose at the end and easily frayed.

I recommend anyone interested in RPGs and especially D&D to give it a go, but I also think most people could probably wait a bit longer for the first few big post-launch patches before they get deep enough to hit Act 3. My reaction actually seems to be a minority view on the story as well, so maybe you'll fare much better than me.

In any case. Cool game but glad to be done. I will probably not finish my co-op games anytime soon.

This is a game that understandably causes mixed feelings in the wider gaming audience and especially the franchise's own playerbase. That's pretty much an expectation for the series at this point, so it's hard for me to say what even my own expectations for this game were.

Whatever they were, they were blown away. I enjoyed its direct predecessor, but that game had very visible seams and glue. That's all gone here. Every decision made with the direction of Final Fantasy XVI felt to me intentional and clear. Even when it was obvious those decisions were made for budget and time constraints, I was left to believe they were the right decisions to not compromise the beautiful gem at the core of this work of art.

[Yes, it being a "Role Playing Game" is debatable ...]

I don't like formulating my opinions reactively, but I've heard so much disappointment expressed about this game's status as an RPG that I can't help but address that point directly.

I don't care about this game as an RPG. I come from the pen-n-paper RPG traditions, even to the point that I've gone back to first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons when running games for my friends (actually Old School Essentials, now, which is a much cleaner representation of that ruleset). Final Fantasy to me has always been "baby's first RPG" at its deepest.

While I couldn't resist that snarky phrasing, I don't say that disparagingly or as any kind of criticism. I've been enjoying Final Fantasy alongside the likes of Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights ever since I was a 4-year-old. Its simplification of the Western tradition has been a feature since day one and in my eyes a nice, lighter alternative.

Even FFX, what I consider the best game in the series for "tactical" combat, is still a bare as bones "RPG."

Final Fantasy XVI then isn't that huge of a change to me as it finally goes all in on being a character action game. It still has Final Fantasy grade presentation, which was the important part, and now it's also captured a bit of that classic BioWare magic with its character driven moments. One might even call it Squeenix's Mass Effect 2.

Everyone complained about ME2's lack of heavy RPG systems. It's also considered one of the studio's greatest works. Yes, this a fairly odd take. Don't think too much about it.

[... but it's a smooth and approachable "Action" Game]

Sure, you can argue that even ME2 probably has more "build choices" with the suite of weapons and power upgrades. But in my experience with FFXVI, I was regularly playing around with my combat power selections until the last 3 hours of my 60 hour playthrough. That seems like a good amount of playstyle options to me.

You know what I don't spend any time thinking about? The Green/Blue/Purple/Orange gear shoehorned into a lot of games today. Not that they're automatically ruined for it, but as an example, God of War (2018) is a game I recently played that epitomizes what I consider "tacked-on" RPG systems. None of it felt like it did anything for my playstyle.

I played Diablo 2 and especially 3 for hundreds of hours. I do not get a high just from item-make-number-go-up anymore (more power to you if you do). I do get a high from inventing and executing a series of actions that make a damage number double in size without having to even change my equipment. I got that a fair amount in Final Fantasy XVI.

And a funny thing happened as I got used to the timing of the abilities and enemies... I discovered there's an oddly deliberate amount of downtime woven between many of the actions. Abilities, especially big ones, have a tendency to have fairly long executions with either minimal additional input needed, or they outright stop time for the animation. That gave me a fairly tactical experience at points as I took a couple seconds to double check my available abilities and plot out my follow up action when was either in a bind or trying to figure out how to best capitalize on an opportunity.

Maybe the future of JRPGs has been fighting games all along.

The combat here is rarely that "punishing" but that's quite certainly because it's tuned for a narrative driven experience and an audience looking for that. I consider it quite rewarding, though, as it's fluid, flashy, impactful, and as mentioned, if you dig into its systems you get the satisfaction of completely demolishing your foes. There are a few fights that require that, as well, so it's not all rose lined paths.

[A minimal distractions experience]

This is a case where my opinion is that the only-what-matters approach to gameplay systems was the correct one. I do think the equipment systems might have been stripped a bit too bare midway through development, as they still show signs that more was once intended, but otherwise I like the very reigned in approach this game has to the content.

Maps aren't overly expansive but they have a few key explorable parts. The only real drivers are the marked story sidequests, the unmarked "hunt" fights, and some hidden accessories. Otherwise you're in it just to see the beautifully crafted world and soak in the sights. Even when the side quest log hits its longest, you can still mop it up and return to the main story in an afternoon. And for most of the runtime you'll never have much more than 2 or 3 additional objectives in a story chapter for about 3-10 minutes a piece.

Overall, my impression is that it kept its sights close to the central narrative at all times without resorting to the infamous "hallway" design. This is not a game where you can eff off for 30 hours then come back when you're bored to "mainline" it. It's a meaty, focused narrative with a few optional breaks to soak in the world and characters.

[A deluge of spectacle delivered with excellent performances]

One thing I've always appreciated about Final Fantasy is the series penchant for larger than life fantasy and imagery that I will never forget in my life. Like the opening of FFX as Sin swallows Zanarkand, looking into the Jenova tank in FFVII, or the whole city of Burmecia in FFIX.

XVI stands on equal ground for me. There's some fight sequences in particular here that I can only imagine are what the developers of the original games always dreamed of putting to the screen. The sense of scale, the color, the detail the motion the lighting —

(Breathes deep, finds calm)

It's so good.

And the voice acting and motion capture performances during the directed cutscenes, along with the most natural and nuanced writing the I've seen from the series yet, were a pleasure to see. Just as I was floored by the big moments of the game, the little moments and "blink and you'd miss it details" kept getting me too.

This is the best character work the series has seen. I won't try to argue on a subjective matter like the "most interesting cast" but I'd certainly die on the hill that this is the most "fully realized" cast in a mainline title. It's hard to sum up exactly what I mean in a way that won't bloat this review into a full thesis, but the sum of it — I think — is that they all feel "present" and in the balances they should be for their roles. And frankly they feel more "real" than any other FF character I can remember.

And the camera work and facial detail and THE MUSIC ahhhhhh—

This is a bittersweet story about the struggle to keep living and to find a reason to do so in the face of world breathing its last whispers. And every bit of it sold that for me and got me entirely invested in Clive's journey.

I love it so much.

[This probably isn't a game for most people]

I'm not going to make a pretentious claim like "modern gamers are too hooked on the digital casino of modern AAA to appreciate this game." For one because, while I've seen a lot of takes on this game's story and pacing I just cannot understand, lots of people are enjoying this game just fine. So it's not my mission in this review to make everyone "see the light."

And secondly, because I know that this game is decidedly made for people who look forward to sitting through an hour of dialogue and cutscenes between 15-30 minute bursts of gameplay (not that the game is always that balance). And the game does start light on the gameplay.

While I personally find a heavily cinematic gaming experience very natural and compelling, I can understand those who don't want that.

So I won't call this a perfect game.

But it sure was near perfect for me.

Well, I think I took the advice to "focus on the main questline" a bit too literally and now at a mere 20 hours in I have seen the credits roll. I do think this has given me a good taste of everything in the game, but I certainly feel that I missed the point and yet I'm not entirely sure I'm bothered too much by that.

    | I'm one of those people, just to set expectations here |

If you've been in gaming circles long, you've probably met one of us. A jacka— a firmly-opinionated-person who insists Morrowind was in fact the best game Bethesda put out and every release since has been on a decline design-wise. Now… I actually enjoyed Fallout 4 for the 100+ hours I put into it and will readily admit it. So, I'm not the worst of these types. But, after 15ish years of playing every BGS release, modding them to hell and back, then resetting for a few vanilla sessions before getting frustrated and modding them to hell again—

I got some opinions.

    | This could be their best game since Morrowind |

See, to me the biggest marker of the difference between Morrowind and everything before and after it in BGS's library was that: in Morrowind, you could play for first 5+ hours of the game without leaving any of the towns or cities and for the next 20 you could get away with only a handful of quick stops at the local caves/tombs. You could just fast travel hop around the population centers and explore for random quests and faction storylines. It made the world interesting because you actually engage with its people in a way that wasn't necessarily measured in quarts of blood.

Starfield brings that back. I spent a good 3-4 hours near the start letting myself get pulled adrift by the random questlines you discover just by walking through the byzantine settlements and future-cities. And everytime I was just gleefully enjoying the game it was usually from such an encounter or a moment where the major questlines took some time to breath and dwell on a nicely crafted environment for you to explore and which actually took some thought to do so.

At its best the game spectacularly captures that sense of wonder and adventurous optimism that many of us feel towards Space and humanity's long history speculating on it—and our short history of exploring it.

The dialogue here is also a significant step up from their previous titles and you can really tell they were "trying" to reach a new level of narrative presentation here.

    | Unfortunately its broke and it ain't in a fun way |

There's a limit to how much I can care about what an NPC is saying to me when they're chronically turning away or in the process of phasing into the next plane of existence. Dramatic moments like a character's death don't hit as hard when the one holding their corpse in lament is teleporting back and forth to seemingly act out two roles in the play simultaneously. And I don't really feel the gravitas of a great discovery if every NPC in the room interupts every other line to say "WHEN YOU HAVE A MOMENT LET'S TALK."

GREAT. LET'S TALK NOW. OH. YOU HAVE NOTHING TO SAY. COOL.

It only hurts more because of how much potential the game shows at times. There are some quests in this game that had me more engaged than the whole of Skyrim's main storyline. I would get a nice little cozy tingle of SPACE ADVENTURE!™ and a smile would spread across my fat mug.

But then the next hour of gameplay would shove an icecube down my shirt.

    | The primary point of pain |

I could go on about combat at length, but it's better to just summarize with an explanation of how Stealth currently works in the game. It seems to operate on a system where upon each time you load the game each NPC rolls a dice to determine if they are a bloodhound or a rock:

"Bloodhounds" will notice the scent of the paint of your armor as you stand on the other side of a wall and can spot your invisible companion with ease. And once a bloodhound becomes even the slightest bit suspcicious you exist, the entire dungeon will be alerted to you and stare at you through those walls until you move somewhere they can finally trace a bullet path to you.

"Rocks," meanwhile will let you land sneak attack criticals on them as they shoot in your direction because you're kinda far away and they need to update their prescription. They honestly think they're simply in the middle of target practice and they're very confused by how their bullets keep bouncing right back at them.

And, as mentioned, if you happen to reload a save all roles will be shuffled. Good luck.

Stealth is usually my preferred build in a game and it has existed in every BGS game since at least Daggerfall.

So yeah.🙂

    | There are other points I could make but I'm not sure I care |

For instance, I could probably double the length of this review just commenting about how this game tries to balance scripted and player directed content and how well that does and doesn't work. But quite frankly I think the game just made me too darn upset with its UI jank, physics issues, animation misfires, and obscene balance flaws to care.

I will reiterate again: there is cool stuff here. But you have to have a higher tolerance and better luck than me to walk away feeling good about it.

Although, there is one other point I want to touch on.

    | Final aside on the main plot |

I'll avoid the specifics for spoilers but—contrary to what I see as a common opinion—the main story doesn't really have the weight people say it does unless you've invested some time into the world and characters. So learn from my mistake and don't mainline the whole thing.

There's a point with a pretty obviously significant gameplay unlock. From that point I would suggest setting the main quest on the back burner and doing side quests until you're just about sick of the game (which, hopefully for you, will be many hours later than it was for me).

Personally, I didn't really find the main plot all that interesting. However, there were two surprisingly fantastic segments in the last third that I quite enjoyed for their own merits.

    | The average player will probably enjoy this game just fine |

I'm too familiar with this studio. The lingering pain points are too glaring to me. I was hoping it would be a new start for the studio but they snuck an overstuffed suitcase onto the flight. They are at least in a new city, but we still have some work to do.

If you move your frame of reference a few years forward, however, things are looking amazing and I hope many people have fun exploring the Cosmos.

This game feels like it was stewed in the preserved essence of late 90s to early 00s Sci-Fi gaming. It was like my memories of playing MechAssault and watching the Zone of Enders demo were manifested into a modern reality. It is ultimately a simple game compared to the evolutions the medium has experienced since, but that means its elements have had time to ferment into a pungeant beauty.

This is a very retro title in its structure and gameplay. You progress through a series of self-contained missions in a mostly linear order with a few opportunities to switch up order or take a handful of mutually exclusive excursions. You get an opportunity to outfit your mech with a set of unlockable parts. Then you drop, zoom around for 2-10 minutes, finish one of a variety of mission objectives, and extract.

The story is told through comm voices and mission briefing videos. The controls are arcadey—almost exactly what I remember from an arcade PvP mech game once fights start in ernest. A single playthrough would be considered short these days and there's an emphasis on just replaying the single campaign or the PvP multiplayer if you want more. There's no inclusion of some "souls-like" element to the progression, either. You either restart the mission on death or restart from a checkpoint on the longer ones.

You can even run a mission select and go for S-ranks if you're so inclined.

At the high level, there's almost nothing "novel" in this game—as a game. Yet the details of its execution show the developers' years of experience and passion: missions are well paced and varied; the controls are responsive and well balanced in function versus simplicity; combat supports a wide variety of viable playstyles and challenges with a consistent set of rules that the player will gradually master over time.

It's a classic sort of game done really well and I really appreciate that.

It's also the most clear narrative I've seen in a FromSoft title to date (having never played another Armored Core game) and I was rather surprised how invested I was in the plot and characters—of which there were many and with good writing.

The delivery was often subtle and appropriately sober for the industrial-surrealist world it presents, but contrary to what I expected it stayed fairly grounded as a "human" drama and delievered its story beats in a pretty traditional, direct way. Per the studio's modern reputation, it does not spoon feed your every relevant detail, but its plot is driven by the goals and ambitions of its characters and their dialogue and development makes them feel very present in the game. Every mission you go on serves someone's agenda, and you'll see the effects of your actions—both good and ill—on each of the pilots and commanders you encounter.

It's not hard to tune out and play the part of the uncaring mercenary, if you so desire. True to the studio's style, it will not force you to sit and wait for the story to be told. However, the pacing and method of its delivery makes it easy to digest during normal gameplay, so even the most unga of action players will at least find the atmosphere of the action well setup as opponents scream, scoff, and applaud over a fight.

The visuals are one of the game's biggest strengths. One could say they are heavily influenced by the art of the Souls titles, and I'm sure some contingent of purists to the older AC games has some petty bone to pick. As for me:

These vistas slap.

These battles are beautiful.

And the audio accompanying the ballet feels just right. Punchy but not too exaggerated. Distinct sound cues that don't get lost to the trained ear, but still layer into the challenge. And the track "Rough and Decent." chef's kiss

The learning curve will be steep for a lot of players, especially those with no prior experience with arcade mech games or similar 6-directional action games. But if you're into that kinda of thing, this is a much needed hit in a AAA industry that has otherwise forgotten it. And if you wanna be into that kinda thing, this is a good start.

Frankly, this has reminded me that *I* want more of this in my life, and I should go play more of this series.

I always find it particularly interesting when I find a piece of media that doesn't do anything novel, but is wholly unique all the same. Momodora: Moonlit Farewell is that. It has made a clean, inviting home in its niche, and it is inviting you to come visit for a nice chat.

Momodora as a series does not bring any wild ideas to the metroidvania genre, but you do play as a priestess with a maple leaf for a weapon, and I'm fairly confident in saying it's the only metroidvania like that. These are games whose strengths are in how they tailored a set of existing gameplay ideas to the developers particular tastes. The appeal is less in discovering some new place to explore, but in exploring a familiar place in a different way. It's something fresh, but not something that requires you to learn a whole new way of living.

Moonlit Farewell is a what you'd expect from the genre, but it's not everything you'd expect from the genre. It's a carefully chosen subset of elements that are a result of the developer's limits and experience—having already released several games of this style and learning what they do and don't like to do.

This is a long-winded way of saying the game is a lightweight, streamlined, and polished metroidvania, and I quite like it for those qualities. Compared to Reverie Under the Moonlight, the previous in the series, it feels better to play, is more satisfying to play, sits at a perfect length, and maintained a pleasant experience for almost the entire runtime—though I'm sure my familiarities with the quirks of Reverie may have biased me a bit in that aspect.

Oh, and above all of that, this game is gorgeous and I adore the art style. I played it on a Steam Deck OLED and made sure to show it off to all my friends and family and they all quite agreed. The scenery, the effects, Momo's animations. It is all very pretty. The artist(s) should be proud.

From a gameplay side, I will say that I did find some of the boss fight balancing a bit uneven. Mostly dipping into a bit too easy on several of them. But one counter to that is that I seem to have become a bit of a power gamer over the last three years, and I found a particularly lethal combination of the traits available which the average player may not. The other counter is that easy is fine if it means it's staying smooth and relaxing.

Maybe it's the FromSoft brainrot that causes me to even feel the need to justify that, but there it is.

Whereas I would have only really suggested Reverie Under the Moonlight to people plumbing the depths of this genre niche, Moonlit Farewell has reached a point of polish and artistic appeal where I will happily recommend it to anyone. It is the type of game that—to me—justifies delving into a niche and which can introduce the curious to that kind of spelunking. It is a very nice little game and I would love to see more people appreciate it.

SOMA was… kind of relaxing. Obviously not when the monsters are chasing you. But, when the quiet and the dark set in and you explore the crumbling underwater facilities, occasionally chatting with the single other lucid entity in the depths… it's quite calming.

I started on the standard mode, but after a while I found the stealth more of a nuisance than tense so I just restarted in the "Safe" mode and focused on the story. To my surprise, the game still managed to freak me out pretty well at parts with just sheer set design and soundscape. I may have even put off finishing the game for a month just because I found the noises the creatures made so unsettling, but I won't admit to that here.

Even if that alleged event happened, it never really spoiled my overall feeling that the game is ultimately very low-key. The dialogue in the game I think being the main reason why this ends up being the case. If the game had never introduced Catherine, it would have gone on to feeling like a fairly generic haunted house adventure dodging monsters, solving puzzles, and soaking up the creepy environment.

But then she's introduced and the whole scenario is recontextualized with the narrative details that come with her.

I won't go into those details for sake of keeping readers fresh to their own interpretation of the story here, but I will say that the tone of the dialogue was entirely unexpected to me for a horror game, and yet it felt so thematically fitting that it worked to create something that worked so well for me.

I'm not entirely in love with some of the ways the game doles out the details of the backstory and world, with frequent use of audio logs you can't listen to without stopping or greatly slowing down. But at least the pace is set properly such that I would usually listen anyway without too much grumbling.

The other major factor in the rhythm of the game was the way you interacted with its elements. Every mechanical interaction (aside from simple buttons) requires a small mouse motion to follow through. I wish the sensitivity on it was just a touch higher, but otherwise I found these interactions smooth and cathartic to execute. They made what could have just been menial box ticking to continue the game into a fun and tactile little performance.

Isn't too much more to say. SOMA is a well put together exploration game that does well to capture both the peace and terror one can find on the ocean floor. That duality is something I've rarely heard of let alone experienced in a horror game (not that I play many) and I think with the Safe mode letting players tune the balance of that, I can heartily recommend this to anyone looking for something more narrative and ambiance driven—and don't mind a few spooks.

One thing I can say quite definitively about this title is that that the world designers were cookin'. Very few things coming off a Nintendo console can be considered "high fidelity" — even with the fresh coat of a remastering — but fidelity is only ever one part of a game's visual toolset. Creativity and an eye for detail are what truly make a work special, and the world designers at Monolith Soft clearly had it.

I've been into sci-fi tales from the cradle, so I'd like to think that I've seen a lot in the long list of works — both new and old — I've read, watched, and played. I have vague memories that I've seen a general setup like Xenoblade's "universe for two" before, but... there's a magic to the execution here that got even my desensitized, open-world-burned-out self to spend 30 minutes in areas just "looking around." Something I haven't done much of since I was first awed by Mass Effect back in 2008.

Original or not, it sure feels unique. Even when I knew that I had probably found all of the interesting gameplay elements in an area, I still would feel compelled to look.

So for all of the more mixed opinions I'll give after this, I will say right off the bat that I now see why this game has been held in such high regard by its fans since its original 2010 release.

I also understand why people compare it to a single-player MMO, because beyond just the combat, every technical aspect of this game feels like it was derived from that space of the industry. In more good ways than bad — I say as an occasional MMO enjoyer.

[Combat]

Combat on the surface is almost one-for-one with the likes of World of Warcraft or (more relevant to me) Star Wars the Old Republic. You can move freely and it's in "real-time," but it uses the same style of targeting and action queueing any MMO player would immediately recognize. With that said, as an offline game it's far more responsive and willing to push for tighter timings on actions. They took the liberty to add features that its online contemporaries could not, like a system that plays out a possible future action from the enemy as a warning for the player to shift their tactics.

Frankly, I find the combat very satisfying with all the little tools they give you to maximize your damage-per-second and balance that with defense. It's not too complex when you're being introduced, but over time you find added layers that can create some pretty dramatic effects when you figure them out.

My only real problem with it is tuning. The game wants to encourage a diversity of team compositions and character builds, but it has two particularly grevious misfires to that point: the "Medic" character is way too effective as a healer compared to anyone else (and the team size is a mere 3); the main character has only one set of skills and most of his variety comes from special mechanics related to his weapon which don't have as much organic interplay.

This doesn't rear its head much in most fights, but once you get to the actual challenges you're heavily pressured into taking those two and one of two effective tanks. You can finagle the system to make other things work or level over the challenge, but to me it always seemed like I was intentionally hamstringing myself to do so.

[Checklisting]

The rest of gameplay revolves around exploring the world and collecting items. There are some interesting aspects to this, but its mostly fairly rudimentary in implementation. Smooth and neuron-activating, but simple and potentially very time consuming if you're a completionist or nearly one.

On the more interesting side, there is a mechanic that tells you if a random item you pick up will be part of a sidequest that fits the plot. That's a very cool bit of QoL that I loved. Also, there's a whole system around building reputation with the named NPCs of the world, and a big ol' graph showing all of their connections, likes, and tradable items. The further you build out that graph, the more side quests you unlock. Some of which even have alternate outcomes if you talk to specific characters before mindleslly setting out.

It's just a bit unfortunate that most of these quests are piled in with token fetch/kill quests so they can be easy to miss and there's little additional presentation for them. Just the same text boxes only with more involved dialogue. Great if you notice it, but no one will blame you if you don't.

There was one aspect of this system that I feel particularly let down by (though, maybe unfairly) which is that your party members have affinity values for each other as well, which unlock passive combat bonuses and, more importantly, "heart-to-heart" scenes that give their individual relationships more development. The "unfortunate" part to me was in how much time commitment it would take to fully engage with the system and in how obnoxious it was to actually trigger the scenes. To the point where I gave up on doing them in normal gameplay and opted to watch them on YouTube.

In my 41 hour playthrough where I tried to do the significant side content I could find, I got about 3 party members to full affinity with the main character, and none of them higher than 4/5 with each other. In addition, you have to find the locations for each scene on the large maps with no option to at least fast travel back to them later, and you definitely won't have them unlocked on first visit.

So great idea, poor execution.

[Narrative]

The tale that sets the context for your long trek through this alien-yet-inviting world fittingly evoked my nostalgia for both Gurren Lagann and Final Fantasy. The broadstrokes being close to the former and the details of the characters and atmosphere closer to the latter.

I ended up liking the whole cast more than I had expected after seeing their visual designs for years (I have a prejudice against the kind of not-shorts Shulk wears, apparently). I'd even say the writing had some great moments, just not consistently. Still, the only real "negative" moments were a couple fairly repetitive beats in Shulk's character development, and I otherwise liked him. He was much more direct and brash than I expected, but not in a thoughtless way.

I can't say I ever felt "surprised" by the twists in the story, but there were some details to it that caught me off-guard at times. And in the end, like the exploration, I was always happy to just soak up the sci-fi goodness.

I do really think the game needed a proper "point-of-no-return" in the last 2 or 3 chapters and drop off the exploration elements at that point, because there was a bit too much dissonance between what the gameplay and narrative were trying to accomplish pacing-wise at that point. It's not the worst I've seen, but it let out a bit of the steam it had built for me.

[It's not 'Incredible' but it's certainly 'Memorable']

There's a lot of cool stuff going on in this game, and I'm really looking forward to catching up with the series now. It's hard to pinpoint anything other than the world design that it does particularly well, but in a "whole greater than the sum of its parts" way, I left with rather warm feelings about the whole experience.

If you're a JRPG veteran and haven't gotten to this one yet, I absolutely recommend. I think sci-fi fans who want something a bit low-key on the gameplay side will generally enjoy this as well.

A charming though uneven experience that captures a lot of the feel of the original Sonic titles and creates some genuinely exciting snapshots of gameplay. It's a little too faithful to the old style for my taste, however, particularly in its level design and use of screen real estate.

I did have some preconceptions about the game going in, but much to my suprise the opening monologue from our titular hero managed an impressive feat for the indie mascot platformer and it actually made me interested in the character and setting. Not in some deep or emotional way, but in a, "Ah, okay, this was made by someone real who cares about this and is having a lot of fun."

And by extension, it made we want to dig right in even if I'm frankly not the biggest fan of 2D Sonic games and picked it up out of a sense of curiosity after one friend's journey with the series.

The art style was also a bit of an unexpected hit. I'm not one to be nostalgic for the 8/16-bit era platformers that aren't called "Super Mario World" so it didn't hit immediately, but quite a few of the zones, backdrops, and sprites are quite well done and look great in motion. I'm also particularly fond of the animated cutscenes. While Pizza Tower is the newer release, I can't help but compare because the animation style is very clearly of a "cheap digital paint tool" style, but they also feel like the person making them has used that tool for a while.

It's a bit unfortunate to me, then, that this was not the title to convince that I'll ever be a big fan of how Sonic-style Platformers play. There were a few levels in the mid to late part of the game where I felt like I was starting to get it and it made a decent enough flow. Otherwise, some of my lingering issues with the genre were present here—and they certainly weren't helped by a handful of sections that used some naturally frustrating platforming tropes without the finesse to make it work.

For one, I'll never understand how a game designed around speed and flow does everything it can to make a player trip and stumble on their first playthrough. There's a physical limit to what a human can react to, and for visuals it's around 0.2 seconds.

To put it another way: if an unexpected object crosses the screen in 1 second, it will be 1/5th of the way across the screen before your brain registers its existence. The brain then has to decide the correct response. Now throw in a small multiple sources of surprise and potential conflicting response options, and the time needed to actually engage with the controls, and a half to full second to respond becomes likely.

Of course, people who play a lot of 2D platformers can short circuit most of the decision making with their reflexes and heuristics, but even then: if your player sprite is 1/6-1/5th from their edge of the screen, and the object is moving faster than than 1-screen-width-per-second, then that decision making time starts to evaporate quickly. And so playing the game well becomes impossible without trial and error.

Which you won't do, because the punishment for blunders is not severe enough to make you run it again and try to be better. You will just keep blundering along.

I should reiterate that this is a problem I have with a lot of retro sidescrollers. So don't take that as a slight against Spark alone. If you enjoy 2D sonic, you will have little issue here. I just think these games would be objectively better if they zoomed the visible space out a bit, ran at a minimum of 90fps, and had a bit more responsive camera look-ahead (it's never cool when your sprite sits at the bottom of the screen when you have to fall).

Sparks only sin here is emulating its heroes too closely.

Oh, and the time-gated platform sections. I will never like those.

The last thing I think I feel compelled to mention is the swappable, kirby-esque powers. I thought a lot of them were pretty fun, but unfortunately some of them were too fun and holding onto those ones when you're stumbling around is difficult. There was a sword that came with an acceleration buff and a wind hat that gave a passive double jump and float and had an ability that let you rocket yourself in any of the four cardinal directions.

Those two combined made the levels fluid and fun to the point where the game felt sluggish as soon as they were gone (after a good 6 stages with them).

In any case, the game is good, but it sits comfortably in its niche and isn't looking to move out aside from dipping its toes into its next door neighbor's pool. If you find the original Sonic games fun, this will be too. It's not my favorite cup of tea, but I hear the third game of the series is like Sonic Adventure, so I will be returning for that.

I've never seen so many unlocks of such variety in a game. It's a shame that so few developers take the diegetic approach to unlocking basic HUD elements like enemy healthbars and combo meters. Understandable from a practical perspective, but a shame.

As for the rest of this game... and it is a game not a VN... I went in thinking it would be like 90% reading given the 70-90 hour runtime, but oh no... it's like a clean 50/50 split, if not weighted towards gameplay depending on difficulty....

This game is a roller coaster. Except not the kind with any slow sections, but the kind that oscillates between a clean andrenaline rush and whipashing corkscrew nonsense. I can't ever remember being bored during the entire journey, but boy did it get me with shock value at times.

As a sci-fi I actually really enjoyed this narrative. It was a blast from the past of turn-of-the-millenia and early internet, both in that era's hopes and fears. There are concepts of technology, society, and existential quandries used here that I've seen very rarely in the last 20 years (not that I'm some super well read individual) and it uses them in interesting ways, even feeling downright novel at times. It tapered off a bit near the end for me, but I wager at the time the ending would have felt more fresh. Unfortunately some of the final additions are the concepts most overused today.

As a drama this story is nuts. And quite explicit. Like damn. I've never felt so emotionally detached from a group of characters while simultaneously genuinely enjoying and caring about them. It's like the feeling after you've come to terms with something awful happening to someone you care about—or them doing something awful in some cases. You just gotta accept reality, move on, and not become emotionally entrenched.

It does even justify most of those feelings thematically, as well. I'd say the central one here is "crushing nostalgia" as the characters find themselves so far removed from their days of innocence that even just thinking about the good days is a source of pain, even as they find few other motivations in life outside of vague desires to reclaim what once was. It's pretty interesting, and surprisingly not as diluted of an experience as something this long tends to be.

That said—and as I seem to say frequently—it's definitely a game from the early 00's VN scene.

Now, that aside, the biggest surprise here is the combat—the only gameplay but very prominent in its role. It's odd, but it's also oddly good. It's an isometric 2D brawler with 3D movement that plays like a classic arcade mecha game, only perhaps a bit more like an anime fighter than some of its peers.

Given the graphical limitations, you won't be speccing out your mech with specific parts, but you do get full customization of your attack mappings in a system reminiscent of the Tales of series. Each of the four attack buttons can have four attacks mapped to it, each triggering contextually based on range, movement, and a no-repeats limit on moves in one combo string.

The attacks available are varied and their roles in combat seem well defined. The mechanics of combat are nuanced and you can learn to take advantage of them as you work out your tactics to get really devastating effects. There are options you can spam defensively as well early on, but with learning you can take minutes long fights down to 10-15 seconds.

Or, if you're not into that kind of effort in your gaming, you can turn on Very Easy mode and blow everything up with rockets. Up to you. As far as I can tell there's only one or two unlockables that require a higher difficulty and I'm pretty sure they just unlock more combat stuff.

Enemy variety is also kind of absurd for how long the game is. Though I guess that can in part be attributed to it being two games combined into one at this point, but even then, there are probably around 40-60 unique enemies with animated sprites and attack patterns, then a good number of varients on top of that. They're rather creatively designed too, to the point of them sometimes being downright aggravating in that way things can be when creative types are doing what they feel like.

I never found one that didn't have some weakness you could exploit, though. I did get kind of sick of playing on hard by hour 50, though. It's a bit sadistic at times (and I got a new job, so my days of no-lifing games are on hold again).

This is all to say that if you're looking for some classic mech action gameplay and/or a sci-fi that is everything Virtues Last Reward wished it was, then this might be worth checking out.

Just be warned that wholesome feelings are few and far between in this tale.

    Phantom Liberty was in several ways a solid step towards solving what I believe to be Cyberpunk 2077's greatest weakness: a lack of cohesion. Overall, I would certainly call it a memorable and impressive experience—with immaculate visual flair in particular. But, it also slips nearly as frequently and reminds me that the core design goals are oil and water at the end of the day. Yet, I can still appreciate the effort CDPR has put in to stir the beaker for a few moments of a clean blend.

For this review, however, I'll stick to just my points on the expansion content itself.

    The Game is gorgeous

First and foremost and legitimately the greatest pull for me: the visuals. Sweet gotdamn this game already looked good, but the lighting work and scenery composition in Dog Town is—mwah—chef's kiss. This isn't just about fidelity (though running it with Ray Traced reflections at a solid framerate is certainly a plus) but the sheer flair of the visual design. The colors are vibrant but not over saturated, they fit the moods of the scenes, and almost tell the whole story of the game on their own.

It's a gorgeous game, and it's going to be a lot of fun running the experimental Path Tracing renderer next time I upgrade my rig. It's actually "playable" already on that setting… outside of Dog Town

Unfortunately, Dog Town takes all of the gains on performance stability that CDPR attained with the base game content and throws most of them out the window. The new areas are more complex than the base game, so it's not for nothing, but a little bit of a shame that we're halfway back to 2020 performance-wise.

    The gameplay has made some progress

Level design here is a step up from before—most of the time—with environments having a lot more character navigation-wise and feeling a lot more… "independent." In the base game, mission spaces felt like they were squeezed into the gaps of the open world. Important objectives were often a stone's throw away from where you entered a location to the point making the whole proceedings feel like you just walked into a convenience store instead of some secret lab or PMC base.

It's… still weak when comparing this game to an immersive sim, though. And I think that is an apt comparison since it gives all the signs that it's trying to tap into that kind of design.

One particular part of the main quest really exemplifies this problem. I'll avoid spoilers, but essentially what happens is you're given the option to talk or go in loud, but if you're paying attention to the environment you'll also find an option to sneak in. Great!… Which leads right into a scripted pitfall and you're back to fighting.

Some parts were better, but despite the "subterfuge" theme of the expansion and plentiful character ability options for stealth, the encounter design neither gives you much to play with nor changes the results in any satisfying way.

    The story is... well I'm not quite sure yet

Narratively, I'm less sure about how I feel about this game. One thing I can say for certain is that some of the conversations and set pieces are quite phenomenal taken individually. It's just how it all glues together that I'm less decided on. I'm tempted to say it has the same cohesion problem that the game design does… but on the other hand the messiness and lack of clear opinions on the themes it plays with feels right—in a frustrating way.

I think I have a personal hang up with the narrative of Cyberpunk. One I didn't have in my original playthrough of the base game, but has emerged on the replay: I don't know who "V" is.

The short version for now is quite simply that I always felt a conflict between what I would do and who the narrative believes V to be. This was a minor issue in the base game, but it's amplified three-fold in the context of a spy-thriller. It's a story full of nuance and thin-lines, but you as an actor in this story are stuck only able to make 2-3 fairly disparate decisions.

By the end, some of them shake out a bit better with follow up decisions, but the routes to get there put me out of sync with the story until then. As stated, though, that's probably mostly a personal hangup.

Objectively, I just have some fairly petty and likely fairly baseless complaints about the political-tactical maneuvering some of the characters make. But the world just works different in CP77 so I'll ignore those.

    I wouldn't call the game "fixed" but it's still good

In the end, if you enjoyed the base game, this is a good extra hit of that. If you need more eye candy in your gaming, this is that. If you didn't enjoy CP77 the first time, this won't change your mind, I don't think.

A farming RPG for those that felt Stardew was a bit too cozy and need a little more neuron activation on the side of your honest working of the land. In many ways it's a nicely streamlined farming experience with a little extra emphasis on some more classical ARPG elements. Unfortunately, it also introduces new tediums and seems to lack for much in content beyond filling out checklists before the end of the first year.

The checklists are fairly robust, so I can see die hard Animal Crossing/Stardew players having their fill here, but as I was once again reminded, the farming life has a short lived appeal for my ape brain.

I did enjoy it for a good stretch, though, before the final set of main quests plowed the pacing for me and my co-op partner. Everything levels some skill tree and the spell casting isn't just for combat options so there's a fun progression of unlocking abilities and perks to farm/mine/fish/hunt efficiently.

The combat is also a decent step up from what's in Stardew. While the set of options is fairly modest compared to a full ARPG, there's still a good set of skills and weapons available, and the movement mechanics allow for a bit more kineticism to encounters.

What's also fun is that there's an actual exploration aspect to the game. Places to discover, NPCs to meet and befriend, and secrets and treasure to gnab. It's pretty neat...

Unfortunately the longer it goes, the more that side of the game starts to backfire on it. While they do offer a decent number of diegetic quick travel options between the different zones, by the late game far too many of the tasks and quests have you trudging back and forth across the far ends of the maps for frankly rather petty chores that could have been turned into a quick cutscene sequence.

I mean, the first couple times make sense for world setting, but it's not like your spunky new farmer has many other pressing matters to attend to. And if you're already started questing on a given day, you probably watered all of your plants on the way out in the morning, so... would have been nice to have a few more jump cuts to the next scene.

That said, I have a hard time saying whether or not your typical farming sim player would have the hangups I do. It expects that when it shows you a long list of all the plants you should grow, fish to catch, and items to craft that you came there to do exactly that.

I did for a while, then I just wanted to headbutt the "mean" dragon and call it a day.

It didn't seem to appreciate my hastiness at that point. But hey, if they give you an "invinvicibility" toggle in the first page of the options, then I guess they understand that people are going to be coming in with a much wider variety of expectations.

So yes, I cheesed the last boss with it and I do feel proud of myself. That healthbar was absurd. There was an alternate path to the ending, but I'm a terrible farmer so it would have taken me another year to get all of the seasonal items requested.

[Probably a great game for people who've actually seen a filled out checklist once in their lives]

Sun Haven a has a vibrant art style, a lighthearted sense of humor, and a clear love for the genre. It's fairly polished where it matters, but I don't think it's quite found the winning formula for this hybrid concept. Can definitely recommend to anyone looking to get that farming sim itch scratched, but one year in game was enough for me.

Ghostrunner took a concept I'd wanted for a while and made it real. Like Hotline Miami, it's a series of touch-of-death, speedrunning, kill puzzles but now in full 3D as a parkouring cyber-ninja. It didn't perfect its own twist on the formula, but it was more than good enough to start and I'm glad we're seeing more, soon.

When you play well, it's smooth and satisfying in a way few other first person games are. When you play bad, at least the respawn is instantaneous and the checkpoints are fair.

When it janks up… it can be a bit aggravating, I won't lie, but thanks to that instant retry it was hard to stay mad. And sometimes the things you do to try and recover are their own entertainment.

I was honestly shocked when I first played the game in a Demo shortly before release that the game controls as smoothly as it does. It's designed from an almost exclusively flow-centric philosophy. Almost nothing is animation based. Input is almost never ceded from the player even when the player control is pushed by something. It's easy to catch a high, responsive framerate.

(Well, maybe that last part was less true in mid 2020 for most people)

It can sometimes backfire a bit: feel a bit slippery and cause some funny physics mishaps for the player. But to me, that's the ideal trade off if you can't yet reach perfection with this concept.

The game's bigger missteps are probably with its attempts to "shake up" the gameplay with the puzzlier sections and the boss fights, and both because they suddenly force the player to go at their speed, not the other way around (with some exceptions).

In my mind, the whole game is a puzzle of efficiency, so having explicit puzzle sections is no issue. It's in fact a great idea to give the player a few low reflex requirement activities to do between the high points. Unfortunately, they have a tendency to involve elements that require waiting for an animation or forcing a fixed move speed while navigating a simple space giving the stuck-at-40mph-on-a-70mph-highway, "Traffic" effect.

Not all of them are like this, and I actually enjoyed a few, but it's a shame the last boss in particular gets the Traffic effect the hardest of them all with its simon-says-esque routine.

It's interesting to compare this now to Hi-Fi Rush (in hindsight) where one of the highlight bosses was even more so a simon-says, but because of the expectations set with the game putting EVERYTHING on a fixed beat from the start, it works amazingly there. So really, Ghostrunner's fault is just in that it occasionally fumbled its player-directed pacing after establishing it so prominently in the core game loop.

The overwhelming majority of the game does not have this problem, however and if you catch with the core game loop, the primary memories you'll get out of this game will be the fun you had there.

…

Mmm. I do feel like I need to state that I love first person platforming games, though. I saw at least one friend on my Steam list with 120 deaths on the last platforming segment compared to my 12. I know the appeal of that kind of gameplay is… niche.

But maybe this is the game that gets you into it? 😅

    I wasn't old enough to go on a bender with my mates in the late 90's, but I feel like this game captures that experience.

It starts as dumb fun; communication is done mostly in movie references; bodily fluids get everywhere; and if you're the first to sober up you're in for a rough end to the night.

    | An aside on self-sabotage |

I played this game on the Project N64 emulator, which was the second N64 emu on Windows that I've tried. Given the behavior of the simulation here, I'm now convinced all three of my attempts to play through Rare's N64 titles this year have been marred by subtle emulator problems.

From aiming, to climbing ropes, to the "pissing mechanic" everything was just a bit wrong for me—sometimes just crossing over into breaking the game logic entirely—even after applying hex-code config injections for "lag" and "FPS" fixes. So I'm going to withold most of my judgement on the game controls and mechanics.

If I play a game on a 2009 LCD with every picture processing feature on, then it's on me when a game feels "mushy." Maybe one day I'll try some of these games again on the Rare Replay or something and see what the actual game feel is like.

    | I can still critique everything else |

And perhaps unsurprisingly there isn't much to say.

Conker is a 10 hour gauntlet of every joke the developers thought to cram into it. It's high on effort, surprisingly, but very uneven on quality. It's the kind of experience where one minute an entire boss fight is orchestrated to an opera song with some fairly impressive vocal range on the performance, and the next you're running into slow moving blades underwater because you can't judge distance with the flat rendering and tight FOV.

Sometimes you'll giggle to a cheeky Terminator reference in a boss fight. Sometimes they're just doing a drawn out remake of the bank lobby scene from the Matrix with no actual punchline. Sometimes its such dumb fun its charming. Sometimes you feel like you need to sit in confessional just for playing the game.

It's very... NewGrounds-esque. Whichever came first.

    | You can never accuse it of a lack of variety |

For those who value novelty in experience above all else, this game can definitely deliver on that. It's 30 different tech demos jammed together, each made special for a joke and thrown away after the telling whether it landed or not. It's very uneven, but I actually enjoyed that part about it (when my emulator wasn't sabotaging me).

It has that sense of dream logic lunacy that made text and point-n-click adventures so charming.

I frankly don't think I'd recommend this game to anyone—as I don't want to be associated with it—but it was a fascinating little bit of gaming history to witness.

The concept behind Eternal Darkness is one I've found intriguing since first mention, and I can see glimpses of the fully realized vision in what was released, but the execution is quite unfortunately marred by what I consider poor pacing and balance issues. Still, I think many of its ideas should be remembered and retried and I would love to see some successor some day perfect the framework Silicon Knights established back in 2002.

This game gets a lot right on the fundamentals: the sound is moody and the use of stereo effects is laudable; the art is effective, cohesive, and distinct; the composition is creative and theme appropriate; and even more than all those the game actually feels nice to play while still clearly being an Adventure game first.

The narrative is probably one of the weaker parts but that seems to depend on how you feel about horror. Personally, I find Lovecraftian horror loses almost all of its distinct allure once you can stab your way back to sanity—so it was a bit of a wash for me. I'd say, "But at least it didn't get in the way of gameplay too much," but that's actually part of my biggest criticism of the game.

The game has too much (uninteresting) gameplay.

While the gameplay mechanics are polished and smooth, what they are not is balanced or deep. By 3-4 chapters into the 12 chapter affair you've seen all of the puzzles, spells, and enemy types you're going to be tackling with slight alterations of for 95% of the runtime.

There are a few suprises and new things later on, but by the time they show I had already become a well oiled machine on the combat and spell casting side, and the challenge faced by most of the puzzles was not in working out a solution but in even realizing the game had a puzzle for you in the first place. Often it would drop vague "hints" after 3-4 unrelated challenges since you briefly glimpsed whatever environment the hint pertained to, and so all that information would just get lost entirely.

The amount of unique content in the game isn't really the problem here, though, the problem I see is how it's doled out. Through the 11-12 hours you spend playing, hardly 5 minutes goes by without encountering yet-another-group-of-zombies. After chapter 3, resource management becomes entirely trivialized by the magic system. You almost always have access to an effective melee weapon for dealing with standard enemies, meaning all the special weapons are easily saved for the few powerful baddies. You see the same baddies so many times that there's no way you won't get efficient at killing them.

What is horrifying is often correlated to what is unknown, and Eternal Darkness will not let things stay unknown. You will pass through the trapped room until you're memorized the layout. You will fight the big boi until you've got a perfect kill routine. You will solve Red/Green/Blue puzzles like you're studying for a programming interview.

I haven't really meant to rag on the game this much. I'm fairly convinced my experience is largely a matter of my perspective on the genre, but I think I'm just really upset at how pointless the "Sanity" mechanic ended up being.

It seems so promising early on, but then they do two horrible, horrible things to it: directly tie it to health so you're pressured into keeping it topped off since it drains so quickly; and make it trivial to top off with a cheap spell (even mid fight if you're quick). I can count on one hand the number of times I remember seeing the "Insanity Events" this game is lauded for. Three of them were before chapter 3.

If there was a difficulty option, I swear I picked Hard but now I feel unsure.

I wish I had more to say about the game, but sadly I feel like I experienced it as one would a play from backstage. I can see the actors putting in a lot of effort that could make a fun show, but I definitely did not experience the vision as intended.