bad techland. a foul omen when you first boot the game up and they reference Who Do You Voodoo Bitch from legendarily awful game dead island. much ado in the marketing about the Factional Systems and how they would effect the Storytelling and Map in this game but it seems to have come at the cost of the actually solid straight gameplay systems that the first game cultivated. and then the story fucking sucks!! it's just as bad as the first one and there's so much more of it! there's more to do on a purely technical level but it's all dispersed randomly across the map and it feels useless. the only mildly interesting idea this game has is the darkness timer that still feels wasted by not being tied into any core gameplay loops. it's like if you had volatile stealth from dying light 1 but only in certain building interiors and nowhere else. and now there's gonna be a fucking layers of fear 3. what is happening in poland right now????

mostly a game of unrealized potential. the first half of the guest house opening is so strong but almost as soon as you leave the area the demo covered it stops being scary. unfortunate. i like the idea behind the item placement and pseudo random boxes peppered around to supplement the player but the level design doesn't feel strong enough to really support the concept. rooms are small and simple enough that you're rarely ever actually uncertain whether you've cleared an area. i totally forgot how exceptionally braindead the entire story was but it's funny honestly. the whole conversation with the cop lol

it's so fucking good lol. this is the only game to earn the title of Western Excellence. a game of setups with no payoffs but that only serves to strengthen the experience. every choice feels appropriately weighty and distinct without knowing that only like 3 decisions actually matter in me3. the whole game feels so meticulously put together. a beautiful structure for a title that is essentially one long training arc. i'm honestly even fine with the reaper baby because it's just funny. dead space does the same thing and it's so bland and uninspired but with me2 all i can think is "so true bestie 💋" while fighting him. killer soundtrack too. there's like 5 nightclubs across the entire universe and they're all sick

long. mostly fun and has some really interesting and unique gameplay twists but the story is honestly a total flatline. yoko taro is the kind of guy who writes about how in ed edd and eddy the whole cul de sac is in purgatory. you see exactly where the game is going from the first hour and it doesn't deviate from your expectations. i'm not exactly a super stickler for internal consistency in a game mostly about characters and broader themes over a concrete plot but a lot of the twists in this game just don't even make that much sense. quite a few revelations that are there for the characters and player to get weepy over before moving on to the next boss. i'm not even too hot on the music!! it's good but have you listened to a masashi hamauzu soundtrack.
not a bad game at all and when it's willing to experiment it's fantastic. the ui in particular is stylish in the way you rarely see in modern games, you have to go back to games like dirt 3 or ridge racer type 4 to get the same kinda vibes. the combat is flashy and smooth but if you know what the words "dodge offset" mean then it'll come across rather dry and barebones. if you really want to make yourself cry check out devotion

forgot i even played this thing lol. better then fallout 4. most interesting in how it builds itself to exclude and automate the most annoying development tools. this leads to a jarringly disjointed world where you fast travel from cell to cell which are each individually more detailed and interesting then most of what you would see in skyrim or fallout 3. it all falls apart because the connective tissue of traversing to these areas (intentionally or simply wandering across them through happenstance) was more vital then i think they realized. it was certainly more then i ever realized. i do like a lot of the bigger city zones in this game, some of them quite a bit, but it's just so boring. oh my god it's so boring

i've never beaten vanilla demon's souls before and that's made it really hard to work out my feelings on this remake. my most concrete thought is that demon's souls (2020) is existentially terrifying. demon's souls (2020) and shadow of the colossus (2018) feel like they've taken a major step beyond something like the twin snakes, the total separation between bluepoint and the original developers is extreme in a way that i'm just not comfortable with. superseding a studio's original vision with your own is aggressive even if the intention isn't actively malicious. it's not even a question of "does bluepoint 'understand' the original purpose of a specific texture or line of dialogue." even if there was a perfect, 1:1 understanding of the source material, demon's souls (2020) would still look radically different from its original incarnation as the new developer would express these understandings differently, in ways that make the most sense to them. so we have a refraction of demon's souls (2009) through the lens of an american company who's first and only original creative output was a game called Blast Factor. (most of) the levels are great, the visuals are weird and sometimes out of place and occasionally beautiful. the bloom has been filtered out. some bosses now look like diablo 3. some of them look like league of legends. some of them look like mortal shell. some of them look the same. the box art is terrible now. the game runs at 60 fps (unless you check the box to make it run worse for no reason) and that feels very good. spells have punchy sound effects that are mixed with really accentuated lows so they sound like a marvel movie. the character creation theme has been done so dirty that bluepoint should be dissolved just for changing it. i think i like demon's souls (2009), but i won't know for sure until i play and beat that game. i think i like demon's souls (2020) too, but i can't help getting sad whenever i think about how it was made.