I thought it was a hoot! I mean, let me be a skateboarding dog and everything else is pretty much window dressing right?

Honestly though I love the colors, the diversity and the way it maps familiar gameplay mechanics to social situations. It was a bold choice to structure it the way they did; they drop you right into the middle of this person’s life and you get to know her and her family and friends as they all fight about what happened in the past. There were moments when the negativity got a little overwhelming. But your sweet dad is always there at the end of the day, and I think they managed to pull off all the various reconciliations without becoming too saccharine or contrived.

Some individual elements felt a little undercooked, but it didn’t really bother me given the small scope and big ambitions. I’ll take a slightly unpolished passion project over something super safe any day. All in all I really dug it and I’m really looking forward to what’s next from this team.

…and you get to be a skateboarding dog.

I loved this; I think it's my favorite PS1 game so far. It's the first time I've finished a game and thought "Yes! THAT was worth buying a PS3 for!"

I found it surprisingly scary. The sound design in particular was incredible; I was recently impressed by the soundscapes in Doom 3 and I feel like that pulled a lot from this. Just a huge range of atmospheres from unsettling to outright panic-inducing. It blended so well with the cold rusty aesthetic of the graphics which, again, wow.

What really stood out to me throughout Silent Hill was how well they made the system's limitations work for them. Low resolution, polygon count and draw distance would be a fetter to a lesser team, but this game leans into them as strong artistic choices that end up being the pillars of the game's aesthetic.

The whole game is a testament to the Jaws thing: the scariest things are unknown. The graphics, sound and plot all use ambiguity and limited information in the best ways possible. Even with the stilted acting and muddy graphics I was glued to the screen every cutscene trying to soak in any scrap of information to understand what was happening to Harry. Understanding would give me power, but this is the kind of game that withholds more power than it gives and it constantly kept me wanting more.

My favorite TV show of all time is Lost. I love how the plot is doled out in tantalizing chunks, each a degree weirder than the last. I felt that same drip-feed of "Wait what?!" moments playing Silent Hill.

In addition to loving the creative choices, I was also really impressed with the technical presentation. The camera in particular seems ahead of its time. Third person cameras even today struggle in small interior spaces and I was kinda blown away by how they were able to split the difference between a curated experience and full player control. I felt like I could always see what I needed to see, and I was hardly ever fighting the camera.

It's actually kind of funny to see how much of Sony's first party formula is all right here. Cinematic presentation, over-the-shoulder camera, wide linear world design with open segments, ranged/melee action, in-engine cutscenes, sad dad... hell this game might as well be Last of Us Part 0.

I think the game's biggest weakness is its boss fights. I had to retry each one of these a bunch of times which really drained a lot of the momentum and tension. It would be different if it weren't so clunky to control, or the fights were designed around that clunkiness. But it felt like they required a level of dexterity that was hard to achieve, then wouldn't be needed again until the next fight.

I'm not really holding that against it, though, because they always gave you a nice checkpoint and they were good pace breaks. Considering you spend 90% of the game running around and like 5% of it in boss fights, it's probably a good thing that the running around is the best part. Being scared of what's behind you, dreading what's ahead of you, piecing together clues while a horrible sound plays at an uncomfortable volume is where the game is at its peak.

Silent Hill is in such an intriguing position historically; it feels like it sits on a little sliver of the Venn diagram between 20th and 21st century design. You've got these forward-thinking, gorgeous lo-fi 3D environments that are filled with old-school touches like giving each little cabinet and desk its own text description. It really feels unique and special and I'm really glad for my time with it.

This is a much-deserved re-evaluation. When I first played this, I was high off beating Doom Eternal. I was not impressed; I didn't like a lot of the ways it was different from Eternal and having not yet finished Doom 3 or 64 I didn't have the context to understand where the game fit in the series.

This is mostly a positive review but first I have to say something about the game's stability. This was far and away the buggiest Doom I've played, and one of the buggiest games in my Xbox library across the board. Falling through the floor, warping around in weird ways, enemy AI snafus like pathing into walls and just endless crashes. I mean endless.

This was a progression run and I died a LOT. And there were some checkpoints that would just consistently crash the game after a handful of respawns. The final checkpoint at the start of the last boss fight was the worst. I was lucky if the game would survive past 3 or 4 deaths. In a tough fight where I was trying to experiment with different tactics against a baddie that could kill me in literally half of a second, this was really frustrating. The bugs were a major hindrance to my enjoyment of the game and as a longtime id software fan I was very disappointed with this.

I also want to clarify that I'll be referring to this game as 2016 here and everywhere. Doom is one of the most successful, influential and important video games ever made. Can you imagine painting a picture of a woman and just calling it Mona Lisa and expecting everyone to take you seriously? Aside from the inconvenience to game enthusiasts and databases everywhere, how huge of an arrogant, stupid asshole does it take to full on pinch a household name like that? Turns out, a super nice guy and brilliant game designer named Hugo.

My own experience with artistic collaborations has made me pretty cynical toward anyone who stands in front of a team effort and claims the work as their own. Some charismatic man (it's almost always a man) fancies himself the visionary of the endeavor and, usually through some kind of emotional manipulation, squirms his way into a position where he gets to take the credit.

Informed by this, I don't normally like to talk about individual game designers. I don't believe in auteurs and I think art should stand on its own without conflating it with its creators. AAA games in particular are very much a team effort and I'm just not impressed with someone whose job is to sit in a chair and tell other people to make it good, even if his name is at the top of the credits.

But just this once I have to talk about Hugo Martin. I like Hugo; he comes off as a fun guy to hang out with and he's constantly bigging up his team members and the great work they do.

I was already thinking about giving 2016 another try anyway, but it was watching interviews with him that made me want to do it on Nightmare. He said straight up that's the difficulty the game was designed to be played on. I've been an Ultra-violence guy since the old days and I thought hey, if I'm going to give this game another chance I should meet it on its own terms.

It'd been a while since I finished The Ancient Gods, which was the last time I really had to push myself and sweat through an FPS. 2016 is kind of a creeper in this regard; it's not until several chapters in when the harder monsters start seeing play that the difficulty ramps up. By the last few chapters, I was retrying most checkpoints many times, in a few cases it was like several dozen. That's the kind of challenge I don't mind when I'm fully engaged; it's the same kind of stubbornness I get when playing Souls games.

That level of intensity meant that I was skin to skin with the mechanics much more this time, and it didn't take me long to realize what Hugo meant about Nightmare being the intended experience. It's like the difference between a walk through the forest and crawling through it on your belly; there's so much texture and variance that you miss when you're just sailing through it.

There's a lot of detail here to stop and appreciate, too. Plenty of environment details straight out of Doom, but painstakingly reproduced in 3-D. You can really see the love for the source material here. Where Doom 3 felt like they were trying to leave the past behind, 2016 feels much more like a loving homage. Like Doom 3, there are a lot of places with tons of environmental detail. However this felt inconsistently-applied; it seems like the farther you get into the game the more abstract and arcade-y the levels become.

In the context of bridging the gulf between the highly-naturalistic Doom 3 and the completely arcade-y Doom Eternal, 2016 threads the needle pretty much perfectly. As a game and cohesive experience, I sometimes found it lacking though.

Mars here is depicted as just red rocks with red dust, even a red filter is applied at some point. The interiors are much more interesting. The naturalism looks great, but doesn't always mesh well with the gameplay; you spend an adrenaline-pumping 10 minutes ducking and weaving and blasting demons, then 20 minutes poring over every inch of a level for a keycard that's literally a tiny little card hanging off some corpse's neck (and to make things worse, you don't pick it up automatically; you have to point the camera directly down at it and press an action button. Boooo!)

I think the most ill-advised vestige carried over from Doom 3 is the duck button. Duck makes sense in a horror game. But in a power fantasy where survival is only achieved by constantly moving toward the next kill, it makes no sense at all. As a combat mechanic, it's used in a single fight and is otherwise a dead button.

I would have unbound the duck action entirely and used the button for something else except that you have to duck to get into some of the secrets. Boy does this game have some diabolical secrets. The ones where you have to find a tiny, nondescript lever amid an entire massive level's worth of clutter gave me huge anxiety. Most levels are strictly linear, and often employ surprise gates that close behind you. I assume this was to aid in navigation, but it made secret-hunting an ulcer-inducing experience.

Once the naturalism gets left behind and we're firmly in Doom Eternal's lock-you-in-a-room-and-throw-waves-at-you-based combat loop, and the keycards are ditched for Hell's brightly colored skulls on pedestals, the gameplay really picks up. This is where it feels the most optimized, but also the most rote.

One of Doom Eternal's boldest design choices is the predictability of its arena-based encounter schema. You know that once the DMC walls goes up that you're now firmly in the combat part of the game, which will be followed by a more slow-paced platforming section for you to catch your breath, followed by another combat arena, over and over until the game ends. It never bothered me in Eternal--indeed, I found it to be a strength--because the combat in that game is so dynamic and tightly-tuned.

2016's combat just has a lot less going on with it. There's no sprint, dash or grappling hook so your mobility options are limited to environmental stuff like jump pads, which are pretty underutilized in the levels. Several of the weapons have pretty limited utility and the chainsaw isn't really part of your rotation. The super shotgun is appropriately overpowered, but even with reload canceling there's hardly any incentive to switch weapons. I think I played 90% of the last half of the game with the super shotgun + missile launcher. I feel like if you're going to strip your game down to its barest essentials, those essentials need to really stand out.

All that said, it did get my heart going every time that combat music kicked in. And then when it starts that riff that means "Ok, now the REAL nasties are coming" there were times when it was damn near euphoric. The monsters all look incredible and blasting and tearing them to pieces never stopped being satisfying.

My favorite by far is the lowly imp; he has so many incredible animations that interact so smoothly with the environment. Like you're trying to chase one down and the little bastard will be chucking fireballs over his shoulder while he dodges and weaves to get away, then as soon as you lose track of him he'll find some column to climb up and blast you from off camera with a charged shot. He's in basically every fight and he never gets old.

You know what does get old? Unskippable cutscenes. One of the selling points Hugo extolls, that I've heard echoed by many fans, is the first scene when one of the Plot People starts monologuing at you and your character knocks the video screen away. This is a great start, and in my opinion holds up as one of the strongest video game title cards of all time. Unfortunately this promise is almost immediately broken, as nearly every level has a spot where you're locked in a room with a Plot Person and aren't allowed to shoot anything while they sit there and flap their gums at you about god knows what.

I really wanted the full Hugo-brand experience with this playthrough so I read every codex entry and tried to pay attention any time someone was talking to me. It's just too much though; these things need to be skippable or simply entirely absent. I expect a giant pile of proper nouns if I'm playing a Dragon Age or whatever, but I don't come to a Doom game for its exposition.

My first review of this game was terse and dismissive: "A competent modernization of the classic." Ironically, after chewing through this thing on Nightmare and this whole reappraisal I still agree with that assessment. At the time I meant it negatively: they made a modern shooter, gave it some Doom flavor and called it a day. Now, though, I see it as a positive: warts and all; they did a good Doom! Simply meeting that standard is a feat in itself, and for all its missteps I think 2016 does a lot to move the series forward. It's obviously a labor of love, and it's so great to see that even 30 years later with a whole new crop of big brains, id is still making great Dooms.

Holy crap I finally beat this incredible game! That last stage took months! It had become a sort of ritual; once or twice a week I’d fire up Streets of Rage 4 and make another ill-fated attempt at stage 12 before bed. I knew I had it in me to do it without handicaps so I just kept poking at it over and over until I finally broke through with Shiva of all characters; literally my first time playing him. All the other stages I beat with Cherry; I loved jumping on guys’ shoulders and punching them in the face.

Coming off of Shredder’s Revenge, which had a lot more mobility options, Streets of Rage characters can feel a little stiff and heavy, but I found this eventually grew on me. It gave the combat a more methodical, deliberate feel that I grew to appreciate. Once I started using the back attack regularly, I felt like I was finally in the Streets of Rage zone again.

The tight controls, bright colors and faithfulness to the series style and gameplay make this an amazing sequel and just what I want out of a modern beat ‘em up. I’m definitely going to keep coming back to this one.

I struggle mightily with the PS3 controller. I'm not actually even certain the one I have isn't counterfeit or something; I only got a PS3 about a year ago. It's probably just decades of Xbox controller muscle memory, but I can't hit jack shit with the sticks on this DualShock. The stick height, width, position, deadzone and tension all feel wrong and it's like trying to game with mittens on. Basically this is all my way of saying I played on Easy because I was completely incapable of hitting anything. And I'm glad I did too because Uncharted is a real romp.

No one can accuse the folks at Naughty Dog of not giving a shit, that's for sure. Everything about this game demonstrates a AAA studio firing on all cylinders. The acting was engaging, the levels were super detailed and (mostly) well paced. I ended up liking it better than the Last of Us due to the wider variety of activities and emotional texture. Good checkpointing (with a couple rage-inducing exceptions) kept the action moving forward at a good pace.

Of course, the cost of this level of polish is in player freedom; as gorgeous as it can be, the game is still ultimately a tunnel down which the player is consistently pushed. Every step, every handhold is as pre-ordained as hopscotch; while it can be fun to follow a narrow path and not have to worry about going the wrong way, it can also start to feel like Guitar Hero after a while. The prompts are different, but you're just pushing the button they want you to in the order they want you to push it. Even the climactic final fight is a QTE for maximum cinematic flair (and minimum player agency).

The main reason I'm giving it kind of a bad score though is that I felt like it took too long to get good, and most of the climbing was super annoying. There was no freedom to it, you could only climb on the paths they laid out and most of the action amounted to trial and error: "Is that a handhold? I'll try jumping--well now I'm dead. How about that... is that a handhold?" Sometimes your boy would fall 15 feet and be fine, other times he'd fall 5 feet and die instantly.

I was also kinda grossed out by the demographics of the characters. Especially with Nathan Drake being so obviously inspired by Lara Croft, it felt bad playing this chinny white man protecting his white girlfriend and their white dad from endless waves of bloodthirsty brown-skinned people. The whole time I was thinking "at least it's less racist than Resident Evil 5" but then Drake's final quip is "Adios, asshole" right before he blasts the last Hispanic person off the face of this island and his whole Caucasian contingent laughs and watches the sun come up on a new, whiter, day. I think calling this "dated" would be undeservedly generous.

Regardless, I had a good time; I'm going to try the second one next since it seems to be the fan favorite; now that my thumbs are warmed up a bit maybe I can even try it on Normal.

Wow I had this one SO wrong. I thought it was some kind of psychological thriller or something (I could have sworn I heard someone compare it to Twin Peaks). But it seems like it’s mostly a zombie shooting game? Zombies, collectibles and a damsel in distress: the beige, tan and khaki of the video game design palette. Completely drained all my interest over the course of 90 long minutes of playing it. I did like the design of the protagonist; I think more games should feature characters who don’t look like fashion models.

Am I being too hasty? Does the gameplay get more interesting deeper in?

Finishing Doom 3 is a big deal for me, because it's the last Doom I still hadn't played, and Doom is the video game franchise I feel most attached to. When I was a kid I spent countless hours making wads and dehacked mods. Compared to what people are making now these were crude and paltry things but I didn't know any of that; I was just having fun building things. I was starting to outgrow my Legos but this scratched the same itch.

By the time Doom 3 came out, I was grown, working dead end jobs and broke as a joke. Whatever clunky old computer I was running definitely couldn't run it. I heard some negative buzz so I decided it wasn't for me and didn't really think much about Doom again for like 15 years. Until I got pulled back in by Doom Eternal, with its revolutionary gameplay shot through with indulgent nostalgia. Ever since I've been working my way backwards through the series which, let me tell you, is a very bad way to experience this franchise.

The narrative plot of these games is basically a non-factor; the real story of Doom is how its mechanics and gameplay have evolved throughout the series. Going backwards can be jarring, and I found both 2016 and 3 initially off-putting until I stepped back a bit to re-contextualize them and adjust my expectations. I'm glad I did, though, because what I first dismissed as a failed experiment I've come around to see as a critical waypoint in the evolution of the series.

Everything looks good when you can't see anything

I'm revisiting Doom 2016 now, and in that review I'll be going into a lot more depth about what I see as the core Doom experiences and the broader arc of the franchise. What sets Doom 3 apart from the other entries is the degree to which it leans into horror, even "survival horror" territory at some points. That means small, often downright cramped, game spaces and deep ominous shadows and "creepier" monster designs (will someone please let all game designers and movie directors know that human infants aren't scary? Not even if they're like half bugs or whatever. There's just nothing scary about babies. While you're taking notes, could you also let them know that children singing nursery rhymes are also not scary? Yes, even in a house with the lights off. Yes, even if they're British. Thank you).

The shadows are pretty much the star here; I believe at the time Doom 3 had the most realistic (certainly the most "dramatic") lighting of any FPS, and boy were a lot of sacrifices made to get there. It's wild to compare this side-by-side with Half-Life 2, which came out only 3 months later. While both are high-budget followups to beloved FPSes, the difference in design goals could not be starker. HL2 is bright, open and expansive, while D3 is dark and cramped. HL2 is a romp, a wild adventure through incredibly diverse levels; D3 is a harrowing gauntlet of repetitive beats, narrow hallways opening up only slightly into medium-sized rooms before constricting down into even more claustrophobic air ducts and crawlspaces.

Despite the limitations of the engine, these spaces are masterworks of environmental storytelling. When I finished 2008's Dead Space my main takeaway was how detailed and fleshed-out the world felt. Doom 3 felt like it was pulling nearly the same level of detail but years earlier. I totally dig a highly detailed environment; even simple stuff like bathrooms help get me more immersed in a space that feels like it has a bigger life than just this one moment of game.

These are supplemented with audio logs (not yet played out; remember it's still 3 years until Bioshock) featuring some surprisingly fantastic voice acting that, "Illusive Man"-style, elevates the sometimes clunky and utilitarian writing. The sound design in general is actually fantastic; from the ear-piercing screech of the chainsaw against metal to the truly disturbing soundscapes of Hell, my hat is off to the whole audio department. The creation of plausible, atmospheric spaces I think is this game's biggest strength.

How long was he in there?

Unfortunately these gorgeous environments are pretty seriously undermined by the basic, repetitive encounter design. Enter a new space, the lights go out, something spawns in front of you, something spawns behind you. I think this pattern may actually repeat over a hundred times throughout this game; it's basically Doom 3's only move. It's a major bummer to have these incredible, immersive, otherwise naturalistic levels with these wild diegetic panels everywhere and then just fill it with blatant monster closets.

Not that there's anything wrong with monster closets; Doom and Doom II used them all over the place. But there's ways to be classy about it. Doom II might have an entire wall of a hallway raise, so that the next time you come through you're like "Hey, wasn't this hallway 50% narrower, and 100% less full of demons, last time I came through?" But it doesn't completely pull you out of the experience. Doom 3 banks so much on immersion and scares; to see an imp step out of a literal 3ft x 3ft closet, a tiny space with no credible purpose, that the creature could have no conceivable reason for standing around in... it just ruins it. Not only that, but the rote repetitiveness of the encounters completely robs them of any tension.

How do you Doom?

I played Doom 3 on Veteran difficulty with the BFG Edition that's available on modern consoles. Looking into the differences, I'm really disappointed I wasn't able to play the original version. To try to capture the original artistic intent, I manually turned off the flashlight every time I fired or reloaded my guns, but of course there were times I forgot. The most frustrating element I missed out on, though, is the dynamic lighting. This is a game where lighting and shadows and mood are everything and not having muzzle flashes and enemy projectiles be light sources makes a huge difference on the presentation.

It's deeply silly that the Lost Soul, an enemy that is perpetually engulfed in flames, needs to be illuminated with a flashlight in order to see it. With the flashlight off, much of the game is literally blindly firing into pitch blackness, waiting for the reticle to turn from red to blue, because even a monster directly in front of you chewing your face off won't be illuminated by the muzzle flash. A baffling and irritating step backward, especially since the original Xbox version was apparently fully intact in this regard. I would love it if this title were re-released with the dynamic lighting restored, a weapon wheel added (cycling through weapons linearly is just too slow for a game like this) and an option to use the original flashlight.

What does Doom 3 bring to the series?

The meat of these games is the mechanics, and Doom 3 introduces more mechanical changes than any other mainline entry. Most, like the flashlight, ammo reloading and extreme camera shake when a demon smacks you are good additions for a survival horror entry. Outside of a specifically horror-themed Doom, they really don't make a lot of sense. Ducking is a particularly toxic addition; I could never really work it into combat making it an exclusively traversal-focused tool. It's certainly atmospheric to duck down to crawl through a vent, and adds to that feeling of claustrophobic terror, but I strongly prefer Eternal's vision of a Doomguy who is never scared, and never ducks.

It also introduced headshots, jumping and stamina to the franchise. I think these are all great additions. Jumping is an obvious one; the double jump + mantle combo introduced in 2016 adds enormous potential for verticality in the level design (although it really wasn't exploited in 3 outside some minor platforming). Headshots reward calmness and precision which then elevates combat beats of relative calm and gives them more contrast against chaotic moments. Stamina-fueled running makes perfect sense for a series where movement is the primary verb; of course you want more tactical choices related to how you get around. Eternal cleverly remixed this as a dash ability on a cooldown, probably because it feels good to be given something, but feels crappy to run out of something.

A Doom to grow on

These days I try to judge a game by how well it communicates and then fulfills its own ambitions; in the past I've had problems letting my own preconceived notions blind me to a game's actual strengths and I end up disliking it for what it's not, instead of appreciating it for what it is. Already feeling so possessive of the series due to moments of childhood joy, I really wanted to meet this game on its own terms and "find the good in it" as the Video Game Podtimism guys like to say. At the end of the day, even with all its faults, I'm a fan of Doom 3.

I never get scared by anything that happens on my TV, and there was this one spot where I checked the corner, empty, checked the other corner, empty, room's clear; I turn around and a DOOR SLAMS OPEN and dude jumps out and smacks the shit outta me and oh man I jumped about a foot in the air. It was a cascade effect with the lapcats spazzing out and then the dog had to chase them out of the room; the whole family was impacted.

The foray into horror looks kind of incongruous when you look at the series as a whole; but I think it's actually a logical evolution of the Doom formula. Doom and Doom II both had a lot of scary, dark, resource-starved moments. I call this the "haunted house" part of Doom. If you don't remember this, maybe go back and play e2m6 on the next highest difficulty, with a pistol start. This is the Doom that Doom 3 is building on, and I think it does an excellent job at that.

Personally I could have done without all the cutscenes and extra world-building, but in a post-Half Life world it probably felt compulsory and I think they pulled it off admirably. Put together with the incredible level design, it's a deeply immersive experience with some genuine moments of very Doom-y horror. A lot of mechanics were rightly refined or culled later in the series, but I think this entry is a solid length of the trunk of the Doom tree, and not some peripheral branch.

The BFG edition seems like a major misstep but maybe a Nightdive remaster or something is in the cards one day. In the meantime, after finally finishing the series 29 years after starting it, I think this is still a fantastic Doom that left an unforgettable mark on the franchise.

For me this was an extremely relatable story about the complicated relationship we have with our pills. The benefits always have tradeoffs; they make you more normal, but they also change how you think and in my ways who you are. You’re never really sure what you’re putting in your body; you're placing an enormous amount of trust in complete strangers and making yourself both vulnerable and dependent.

I really like this creator’s work; it’s simultaneously cerebral and visceral. It’s validating in the ways it mirrors my experience and elucidating in the ways it doesn’t. I need to get my hands on more of this.

This game was hard as hell. My experience was identical to @JimTheSchoolGirl's; I'm pretty sure I never won the first swordfight. But I was obsessed with the graphics; they looked so much better than anything else at the time.

I'm mostly even writing this because this clip from the production of the game was just posted on social media and I want to archive it somewhere.

It really makes me feel lucky to have been born at a time when I pretty much got to see games grow up.

I'll probably come back to this eventually when I'm less Soulsed-out. The atmosphere and character/enemy design are fantastic; I really love gaslit cobblestone streets and the little bit of this game I saw nailed that look in spades. I've also got a soft spot for the gritty clockwork aesthetic ("clockpunk" as @FallenGrace so aptly put it). At the moment I have no patience for this finicky parry so I'm putting it down.

What I really wanted to say, though, is that I am down, 110% down for Dark Pinocchio. I love seeing different twists and takes on classic stories, that's what makes them fables right? Everyone has their own way of telling it and I love that. I think going all the way back to being a kid and reading The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and later Wicked that really turned me on to this kind of storytelling. I really hope we see more of this kind of reimagining and remixing of classic stories.

I'm also 110% down for a fencing soulslike. How perfect! Fencing is fast, skill-based and it's not hard to make it look super cool.

But... these two things together is a little strange to me. If you're going to put this much work into a fencing soulslike why not use a folk character actually known for fencing (or wielding any weapon at all for that matter)?

It's no reflection on this, as far as I can tell, excellently-made game, but for my brief time with it I couldn't help but pine a bit for the other opportunities out there. Where's my Three Musketeers soulslike? No seriously where is my Zorro soulslike? NO SERIOUSLY. WHERE IN THE WORLD IS MY SCARLET PIMPERNEL SOULSLIKE?! Can you even imagine? Stab a buncha dudes then taunt like in Yakuza except it's some flowery Victorian quip? The gilded age classism reflecting on modern life gaahhhhh it practically writes itself!

But clockpunk fencing Pinocchio is cool too. I'll be all over it when I have the patience to learn that parry.

I was 22 when I had my first psychotic episode. I had dropped everything and moved to Austin with a girlfriend who was not a good fit for me, pursuing my dream of (somehow) becoming a professional actor. None of this was going well; the relationship and the jobs I was working were all dead ends that I wasn't really acknowledging or dealing with.

Eventually all the stress and self-deceit came to a head in a giant fight, and I started thinking things that were decidedly false. I came to believe that I was the center of a conspiracy of surveillance, Truman Show style, that was being run by my friends. Every detail that I noticed confirmed this: I saw a car make a weird U-turn which to me was proof positive that it was following me. A dump truck passed the window with a flashing yellow light; this was clearly someone trying to signal to me that they were in on the conspiracy. A cat sitting on the hood of a car must have been some kind of sophisticated spy camera.

I never experienced hallucinations, I was never violent and I didn't cackle maniacally like every single clueless, no-effort depiction of mental illness in Hollywood and elsewhere. The only thing that was missing was my capacity to critically examine my own ideas.

You know how when you're thinking super hard about something for a long time, and you finally figure it out, and you get that big rush of endorphins like "ahhhhh I finally got it." It's a great feeling, but you have to work to get there right? You have to come up with and reject a lot of ideas before you find the one that fits. Well, I was having that "ahhhh" feeling with every fleeting notion. You don't realize how many thoughts you reject as nonsense until you lose the ability to do so.

You might see a squirrel run toward you and think "Wouldn't it be cool if that was some kind of little robot?" then immediately reject that idea without a second thought. That rejection is what was broken in me; even the most momentary flight of fancy became the unassailable truth. I saw the squirrel and it was self-evident that it was being remotely-controlled as a way to keep tabs on me. Not a single thought in my mind that any of this stuff was wrong.

Public mental health facilities in Texas at the turn of millennium were about as you'd expect. I was there involuntarily and kept trying to escape, so I spent a lot of the first few days restrained (more than 20 years later I still get a panicky feeling in my chest when I think about being strapped to that bed). I was shot up with Haldol that left me a drooling, twitching mess. At no point did I receive anything resembling therapy. After a few weeks the doctor assigned to my case finally came back from vacation and I seemed fine so they basically shrugged and let me go.

"Depression with psychotic features" they called it that first time. Eventually, after experiencing more episodes and being institutionalized and re-diagnosed a few more times, they settled on the diagnosis of Bipolar I disorder and I've been stable on lithium for over a decade now. I was lucky and got basically the happiest possible outcome. I don't think that's the case for most people dealing with mental health issues, especially psychosis.

Mental health is like sexuality, in that we as a society are obsessed with it but only seem to engage with it in the most unhealthy ways. In our entertainment media, references to insanity are constant. Calling someone's sanity into question is an easy and common insult. After every mass shooting, the airwaves are crammed with politicians scapegoating the mentally ill. We're finally to the point where (in some circles) it's considered unacceptable to use "gay" or "retarded" as insults, but nobody bats an eye if you call someone "crazy" or "psycho".

But for all of that, it's basically unheard of for someone in power to say anything meaningful about mental health. When Hollywood approaches the topic, the results are universally rancid. Games tend to fall into two camps: crazy-person-as-horror-villain studio hack jobs, or autobiographical indies that actually bring some experience to the picture.

And that's why Hellblade stands out so much to me. It's not an indie; it has the full weight of a storied and talented (albeit small) studio behind it. But they've done the work to actually try to depict psychosis in a realistic way, that brings the player into the experience as an exercise in empathy, not just a cheap aesthetic choice.

It was a marvel to me how the puzzles in the game are built around seeing patterns that aren't really there, exactly like I did during my psychotic episodes. The scene where all the trees have eyes, but they're really just tricks of the light, was so incredibly true to my experience. I never saw things that weren't there; I saw things that were there but misinterpreted them in critical ways, just like Senua.

And Senua? Possibly my favorite protagonist of any game. Melina Jeurgens gives it so much of herself, and her character design is such a breath of fresh air in an industry full of gross fan service. She looks like a real person! She's still pretty, but doesn't look like a RealDoll that someone dressed up in cosplay gear.

I could only play this game in short sessions because it's so damn intense. The story hits hard, and Senua's agonizing deaths were challenging. Mechanically, the game is really quite light. Only a couple gameplay verbs are made available as the story progresses very linearly. Hellblade aims to challenge the player on a sensory, emotional and intellectual level more than a gameplay one. For me, it was deeply effective and affecting.

With the sequel on the horizon it's exciting to imagine what Ninja Theory has in store for us next. It really feels like the conversation around mental health is starting to turn; the crazies are finally out telling their stories, taboos and misinformation be damned. I love how indie developers have stepped up and started raising the level of discourse around mental health and I really hope that more and bigger studios follow suit. Fear of retaliation or judgment can make mental illness a really isolating experience. It really does feel good to feel seen, and playing a game like Hellblade is really great reminder that I'm not alone.

Just in an incredible effort by Cheello and his very small team. If you want to get an idea of how much work went into this I recommend checking out one of the timelapse videos showing the process. Multiply this by every individual animation frame for every single object and it's easy to understand how this was basically a 20 year project.

The result is truly stunning, though. Finally, using GZDoom's mouselook features feels perfectly natural and like it was always meant to be part of the game. The models look so smooth and detailed yet still completely true to the original art.

Most incredible WADs and mods use Doom as a foundation and build off of it, usually resulting in something that looks nothing like the original product. This is one of those rare cases where I think they've actually fleshed out and improved the base game. Truly a labor of love that's a gift to the whole Doom community.