basically a straight-up, roguelike touhou fangame. it's pretty tough, not very flashy and will probably filter anyone looking for a straightforward survivorlike. planning out builds requires a good amount of forethought (lest you be stuck with absolutely unusable dogshit) but the experimentation is fun

finished on hard without talents to prove i'm a real gamer™ but still trying for lunatic and the extra stage

"fuck it, finally a fantasy"
~fred durst (2021)

consistently fun but bogged down by way-too-frequent mmo-esque fetch quests, a dogshit main antagonist and jill's comical lack of characterization

when it hits though, it really fucking hits. clive is a terrific lead, (kupka is also a fantastic rival) every major set piece manages to one up the last and the combat, while a bit easy for an action game absolutely braindead, is really fucking fun

only ps4/5 game thus far to feel like a truly "next gen" experience and a crystal clear reminder of the heights this series can reach when it's not rife with developmental problems

edit: that last line is still mostly correct but not in the way i'd like. it's certainly next-gen in terms of scope and scale with regards to spectacle, but the actual writing is piss poor. this was very much a honeymoon game and ng+ made it clear. xvi feels like a first draft

pretty fun but it could do without being the easiest game ever made. crisis city was better in 06 and colors is still trash

much more fleshed out than the original and equally as funny

previously, nicole's sociopathy was more or less justified by virtue of everyone else being worse than her, but here she's downright wretched and hellbent on ruining peoples' lives for little to no reason - i don't want to get into spoilers, but just take my word for it and know that's a good thing

the protagonist immediately outs herself as a sociopath, but she's by far the most righteous out of the entire cast. this is also one of the few pieces of media i can think of that accurately displays how fucked in the head white supremacists are... among other things

if that makes your head tilt in a positive way, check it out. i don't even have to hesitate giving this a 10. i laughed way too hard at the godlike voicework (some of the best va of any game/vn/whatever) to care about the shitty renpy engine

this is what the base game should've been - concise missions with minimal objectives and enemies fucking everywhere. still as grindy as you'd expect, but manages to stay engaging because killing titans is fun. best spider-man/donkey kong crossover yet🦧⚾

anyway, unrelated: aot's ending is great and eren is the best character

wanted a game about slashing lots of titans. got a game about sometimes killing titans but mostly just waiting for things to happen. not a fan of the "create your oc!!!" format and i'd much rather play as the actual cast

fun core mechanics but lacking in substantial content and abundant in filler nonsense. final battle is much better

2018

blood quake sandwich but with less meat and extra mayonnaise

more impressed by this being made with rpgmaker in 2004 than most of its actual content. there's cool tone-setting atmospheres and imagery here and there, but generally you're just slowly wandering through boring random voids

as a straight, cisgender man i frequently find myself unable to resonate with a lot of queer media and resultantly assume it's simply not for me

heisei pistol show proves to me that's a reductive sentiment

this is a clear reminder that raw emotion is a universal language. even with how esoteric and intangible much of the narrative is, there's so much heart here that "heart" is literally the name of the goddamn protagonist

started sluggishly and initially had me rolling my eyes. but that turned around quickly enough and i'm eager to run it back to get a better grasp of the story really being told

2019

this was one of the coolest things i'd ever seen until the last ten minutes or so where it totally lost me with its downright silly ending

feels like it has a bit of an identity crisis but at the same time that quality gives it a certain rawness that you can only really get out of an amateur developer. would eagerly check out anything else by this person in the future

seeing people talking about this "aging poorly" as if it wasn't fully intentionally designed to piss people off and wasn't a technical pile of shit on day one is amusing to say the least

it's a game that opens with someone kicking their dog before visiting a stereotypically-ran convenience store which houses suicide bombers. playing postal 2 while being the kind of person who gets angry at postal 2 is like going to a television broadcast and clapping when the blinking lights say "applause"

for most others, though, it's pretty damn funny

i like to call games such as toem and here comes niko "pseudo saccharine". i also label them as "wife's boyfriend bought me-core". they're (probably) usually made from a place of goodwill, but there's something frustratingly disingenuous and toothless about it nonetheless. kinda like the idea of eating pixy stix for nutritional value

naturally, i'm totally open to making fun of these things

but holy shit - you cannot just assert your message by writing a stilted, overly long discord conversation with yourself and padding it out via long ass philosopher quotes. i've never disagreed more vehemently with something i fully agreed with

i really adore the kind of aesthetic and vibe that this game is trying to achieve, but it's too tedious and overly simple to convey any feeling of fear, discomfort, or even uncertainty

levels are too estranged from one another (literally separated by a hub area) and they all function in the same way: you walk through some procedurally generated mazes with almost nothing of interest, collect randomly-placed tickets (required to access new locations) and - sometimes - solve "puzzles" that feel more like calibration exercises than actual challenges. no threats exist. there's no sense of urgency. you're essentially walking around someone's unfinished blender project

i wanted to love this but there's almost nothing here to feel any way towards at all