contextura
Not much to say about tears of the kingdom that hasn't been said before. Trying to play as a completionist was a mistake and I enjoyed myself a lot more when I just did the side stuff I wanted to instead. The last few hours are incredible. I love the story a surprising amount too.
Resident Evil Village is a very fun and goofy roller coaster through different genres of horror, both in terms of horror games and iconography. There's werewolves, vampires, fish monsters, a witch and a weird industrial wizard guy. It's very silly and very fun. I also played a solid amount of it in VR which mostly works really well. It's much more scary that way (in that it's scary at all) although the way control of your body is taken away in cutscenes is never not nauseating.
2022
Signalis is amazing omg. This is so 100% exactly my shit. I never played any of the old fixed camera survival horror games but I might now. It's so tense and fun exploring the areas and collecting a million keys and saving your bullets. The visuals and story here are wonderful. The story is this amazing, it's like a sci-fi Lovecraft/David Lynch mashup but through the lens of a tragic gay love story. I played this entire game in a single sitting, and there's no better sign that I loved it.
Horizon 2 is genuinely very good, there's just way too much of it. It's a very 2020s open world game, a little Ubisoft, a little Witcher 3, the tone of the maze runner, but it comes together well. Also it's gorgeous and has better combat than any open world game bar Elden ring. I like this just like I liked the first one. I played half of it on release, got distracted, and couldn't be bothered to finish it (doing halfish of the open world stuff and most of the side quests) until more than a year later. Make smaller games dear god. Oh also there was a wild graphical and audio glitch in the final cutscene which shouldn't happen given how obviously high budget this thing is.
2022
Citizen Sleeper is outstanding. I played it in one sitting on a day (today) when I was really depressed, and it alternately made me way more depressed, and got me to cherish the wonderful people in my life. It's amazing. Also it's a lot like blades in the dark which is cool. No game has ever made just trying to get by feel this realistically oppressive, which just makes it all the more amazing when you realise the in game solution to it is literal communism. I love this game so much, it floored me. I cried 4 times.
2023
Lightfall is good! I'm kind of a Destiny (we all have our tragic weaknesses) and a lot of the players seems mad about this expansion which I don't get. Shit was fun. The story is a lot less coherent than The Witch Queen was, but it's better than just about every other expansion. Also it's a really fun campaign! The "Legendary" difficulty is hard but manageable if you have a decent build. The final boss is a cunt but was so satisfying. The new "Strand" subclass is really fun and I love zipping around. I'm really looking forward to doing all the post-campaign and seasonal stuff. There's loads of crazy new weapons and perks. Also they finally added loadouts which is amazing and should have been done years ago. Destiny is in the best condition it's ever been imo. Root of Nightmares raid is fun as fuck. BUT it was fun for me because I asked to do all the hard mechanics, and for a lot of the encounters the other ppl on the team were just fucking around, which must have been dull.
2022
Stray is fine? I dunno. It's cat uncharted but not as fun as that sounds. The presentation is immaculate, the cat animations are crazy, the story is simple but affecting. But to play it ranges from passably pleasant to awful (the stealth bits are awful). It's very cute tho.
Finished the last of us remake. Still a good game! Definitely showing its age in just how linear it and how gamey the levels are (and the "puzzles" my god), and it's more tropey than I realised when I was 20, but man that ending still hits like a truck.
2022
Cult of the Lamb is good! It reminds me of that Jedi dark souls metroidvania game from a few years ago in that it's a pretty good mishmash of popular genres with a distributive coat of paint. It's very cute and I like how amoral it is. It also doesn't overstay it's welcome. If you play a dedicated bullet hell roguelike or a dedicated survival sim they'll be deeper and probably more satisfying in the end, but I dunno, it's a fun game that made me smile.
2019
Outer Wilds is revelatory (wow hot take). I'm dumb but I love astrophysics and it plays with so many of those concepts. I love that you have to actually manage your ship's acceleration. The time loop structure where you have to figure out all these mysteries is so cool. Also it's genuinely unnerving a lot of the time! It sucks you in with the folksy charm and then surprises you with all the cosmic horror. I didn't play the DLC cos I didn't wanna lose my momentum near the end, but I'm gonna enjoy it when I do. One of the best games ever.