I feel like I say this every time but damn if there was a game I was certain I wasn’t gonna like upon revisiting it, Skyrim would’ve been my number one choice. It’s a big budget western game made by the developers of all of my least favorite Fallout games, it simplifies the remaining Elder Scrolls RPG systems even more than Oblivion did, and, I mean, it’s just so lame to be like “I LOVE SKYRIM” in 2023. BUT JUST LOOK AT WHAT HAPPENED!!!

Basically, as much as Skyrim’s design builds heavily off of Oblivion’s, it’s setting and mood are much more reminiscent of Morrowind. Not that it feels the same, Morrowind is all alien and ash-covered, where Skyrim is all vikingy and snow-covered. It’s a more classic setting for sure, but there’s a lot of unique flavor on top that Oblivion simply didn’t have, with its throwback-to-daggerfall tone. There’s a culture to explore, a land to learn, and a complex system of faction relationships to untangle, whether they be classic TES guilds or almost Fallout-ey political factions. What’s really great about these factions is that the division between them, the civil war that sets the scene for the game, is incredibly morally ambiguous, in that classic way that no matter who wins, so, so many people lose. Morrowind had wonderful factions as well, but the factions in Skyrim feel more active, more direct, like you should choose a side even if you don’t really want to. The flora and fauna are less varied and less… strange than Morrowind’s, but put Oblivion’s collection far to shame. All this to say Skyrim feels fleshed out and thick in the places Morrowind did, in all the places Oblivion felt thin and repetitive.

The design systems Skyrim continues from Oblivion aren’t my cup of tea generally, but they’re also not the kinda things you can walk back. In particular, the non-diagetic fast travel cat is out of the bag, and the amount of people who want it removed and/or the game designed to be fully playable without it is.. not that large, and it was certainly tiny back in 2011. However, in the recent versions of the game, there’s a survival mode you can enable. Basically, it makes you need to eat, sleep, and stay warm, and removes your ability to fast travel. Since I wanted a more detail-oriented experience than my fast-travel-laden sprint through Oblivion, I decided to try it out, and honestly I’m glad I did. While it’s suuuuuuuper tacked on and clear the game is not built around it at all, for most of the game it was great to have to plan my routes, stock up on food, and make sure to rent a room every time I went into a city. I used the carriage to travel from city to city all the time, and would hide out in caves along paths if I was getting too cold. I would definitely recommend trying it out, but also being ok with turning it off at certain points of the game (at one point I almost froze to death during a particularly long story-required dialogue on top of a mountain). It’s dumb and tacked on for sure, but putting it on during the early and mid game really accentuates the rpg elements of the game, and makes you treat the world as a place instead of a backdrop.

Really my only large issues with the game are that 1. they really needed to hire more voice actors, so many (sometimes major!) characters have one of two voices and it really hurts the immersion, and 2. for a special edition rerelease of one of the most successful games ever made, wow there’s so many bugs and weird bad-feeling failure modes. Like, and this is carried over from oblivion, if you’re walking up a slope and it becomes too steep to walk up, you just stop. You can’t jump, but you can move laterally?? And if you stop moving you VERY SLOWLY slide down the slope. Feels terrible. Also like, the shouts and the magic are tough to use in a pinch, as their animations have strange timings and the shouts in particular just like, don’t happen sometimes. I’m ok with this kinda stuff in general, and most people know skyrim is buggy as hell, but it’s also wild that it’s so buggy at this budget and level of success.

But yeah, broadly, Skyrim is a return to form while still keeping the grandeur of Oblivion, in a way I’ve never really seen a studio pull off before. It feels bigger and more streamlined, but also well detailed and deep if you look at it, and most importantly it lets you know “HEY, LOOK AT THE DEEP COOL PARTS, DON’T JUST GLOSS OVER THEM”. It’s considered and well made and goddamn I feel so lame for gushing on Skyrim lmao

At first I thought Oblivion might actually be great. Mechanically it didn’t seem much shallower than Morrowind at all, and now the world felt so much more alive! People moved around on a schedule, the grass and the sky threatened to poke out of the screen with their vibrant colors, and when I swang my gotdam sword I could tell if I got a hit or not finally. Vvardenfell was a land under blight, in the shadow of a volcano, and Cyrodiil is almost the opposite; despite literally being under attack by the forces of hell, it feels like all the crap has been cleaned off my windshield (funny, considering the bloom-filtery nature of Oblivion’s graphics). What a false omen.

Oblivion feels thin. Not particularly bad in any way, just thin. It’s a great large world full of dungeons and epic quests and ancient ruins and yet, once you start actually doing these things, journeying across mountains and into portals to hell, once you get used to the way things work, it all goes stale. Part of this is a lot of visually similar locations. All the portals to hell look and feel the same, even if they’re laid out a little differently. All the castles and cities (excepting the Imperial Capital, which is honestly visually striking in a way few things are, even if it’s just medieval skyscrapers). Of course cave dungeons and ruin dungeons are samey as well, but I’m not as pressed about that, and I’m not sure I’d even be able to explain this issue at all if I hadn’t just come from Morrowind.

Morrowind’s cities, or at least the group of cities in each part of the map, all had different feels to them. Houses were made out of different things, guards wore armor that looked different beyond a sigil and color on their chest, and the game went out of it’s way to highlight these differences in the main quest. There’s a similar beat in the main quest here as well, going around to each city doing something there, but this beat is much less involved. Morrowind made you figure out where each member of the city council was, how you could gain their trust (even if you really just needed to find the right one to start with), and what the ~drama~ in that city was. Oblivion has you go to the ruler of each city and ask for aid. They all say their forces are tied up with the nearby hell gate. You close the hell gate. They agree to send aid. It’s so rote, and with the new fast travel system it’s SO repetitive. Maybe I should’ve hung out in each city, done some sidequests or something to break up the main quest, but I never really had a reason to. The cities didn’t feel like they had unique histories outside of being ruled by a different person, and by rights they should’ve. Why do the city in the upper mountains and the city all the way to the south feel so similar, when they border different regions populated by different people.

I get that the larger size of the game probably took focus away from quest writing and location diversity, but man I don’t think it was worth it at all. Oblivion tightened up Morrowind’s loose parts, but accidentally cut the part I loved out and replaced it with empty spectacle, and I’m not convinced the rest of the game has the heft to make up for it. Why would I play this when I could play Morrowind, or Fallout New Vegas, or any of a million other RPGs that care enough about the worlds they’ve built to push you to explore their intricacies, rather than just assuming you will because it’s what players do.

I haven’t played a Bethesda game all the way through since Fallout 4 came out, and every time I’ve tried I’ve fallen off. The earlier ones start slow and open, with almost no direction (let alone plot) and RPG systems that seem designed to intimidate. This isn’t necessarily that unique among 90s RPGs, but compared to my favorites of the time they just felt focused on different things. The more recent ones have gone all in on what those older games hinted at, throwing out almost all of the strenuous, simulation-ey flavor in favor of a more frictionless experience that lets you indulge in expansive escapist tourism in a medieval world. Morrowind sits in the middle, intimidating and slow at the beginning and diving into wide open tourism as it goes on, but once I pushed past that opening and began paying attention to the tourism, I found an island that’s refreshingly alien and starkly gorgeous in a solemn way.

Trudging around from city to city, taking stock of the unique (or at least non-traditional for a western RPG) architecture, and just breathing in the destroyed air. Vvardenfell is a surprisingly small place for an open world game, but it’s packed full of cities different cultures, set in a couple different biomes, none of which feel normal. The forests are filled with giant mushrooms, the entire north side of the island is covered in dark destroyed wastelands, and the swamps seem to grow directly out of the forests. The greenery is a dark deep green, verdant and comforting, and as that falls away in the mid game, the wastelands’ scarred rocky landscape pull that back.

The landscape just hints at the insular culture of the Dark Elves, or Dunmer, who live on Vvardenfell. Most of the game is about you exploring their myriad cultures from an outsiders perspective, learning to be respectful and diplomatic of their customs, their legends, and their religion. I’ve got a soft spot for games that do this, and I really think Morrowind might be one of the more interesting in that crop. I won’t go too far into it because, you know, it’s a huge part of the game, but I just loved the way the whole dunmer and ashlander societies were set up and explored. Not to mention the way that the game provides you with a near-infinite amount of reading material to explore the lore if you want it.

The RPG elements are fun but admittedly not incredibly deep once you get used to them, but that works for me, as that’s not the focus in this game. Morrowind set the future focus for Bethesda at the time, and it’s still the high water mark, the most specific and intentional, and for me the most beautiful.

I’d assumed Blasphemous was primarily a derivative game when I originally played the demo sometime around April 2022. I mean, on first glance, it’s just so Dark Souls. From the dark fatalism to the deliberate pacing of combat, not to mention the whole bonfire thing, it just seems to wear its influences on its sleeves. If you look at it for a bit longer though, there’s a lot of unique flavor and feel here, and a lot of smart changes to that old souls formula. Where originally I saw pure opportunism, what I see now is people taking a formula they liked and really truly taking their own spin on it.

Let’s start with their variations on the formula. First and most obvious of all, the game is 2D, so pretty much by default combat is much tighter and more intuitive. There’s no third dimension to add uncertainty to your sword swings. That’s not exactly revolutionary though. On the other hand, when you die, you don’t lose your “Tears of Atonement” (read: souls). Instead, your magic bar’s maximum level gets reduced until you go back to where you died and pick up your “guilt”. What’s more, that “guilt” pickup stays there beyond multiple deaths. In fact, you can have multiple pickups all over the map if you feel like it. This, along with a lot of smaller changes, pushes the pacing forward at a much steadier pace, more akin to a classic metroidvania than a soulslike. “Take as many risks as you want!”, they say, “your stuff will still be here when you get back!” On top of that, the game just isn’t super huge. The areas tend to be fairly short, and as a whole the game only took me about 15 hours, normal for a metroidvania but wildly short for a soulslike. It just feels less punishing, less grueling, and less daunting than a true souls game, and honestly I think it works really well.

Even with all that though, the obvious standout of the game is the art. Actually that might be underselling it. This game has some of the most gorgeous art I’ve ever seen in a game. You see, it’s got this wonderful pixely art style, which is great in the moment to moment gameplay, but then these short cut ins and massive sprites come up and it’s really just unlike anything else. Everthing feels more detailed and more… fleshy? than pixely styles like often get across. The only point of reference I can come up with is FAITH, but that’s completely different in its own way. Blasphemous just really uses the indie pixel art 2D style to its fullest, its most mosaic-esque, which fits the content wonderfully. You see, Blasphemous was developed by a spanish studio, and the art and story heavily reference spanish catholicism. It’s a dark fantasy soulsy perversion of it of course, but even through that this is one of the most unique sets of designs for any game I’ve seen. For example, the protagonist (The Penitent One) wears a big pointy helmet that’s heavily based a Capirote, a spanish catholic hat heavily tied to… penitence! It’s more than just cute references though. You journey through gorgeous churches, cathedral rooftops, buried holy sites, and all in the name of carrying out your penitent duty, and cleansing corruption from the church. It’s unique in its religiousity among most other games, and even more unique in its depiction of the religion, and I fully wholly love it.

So yeah, I’d say you should at least try the demo. The combat gets more fluid after the part in the demo, so if that’s the only thing holding you back, I’d say go for it. Also, if you’ve been looking for a hard but more forgiving souls experience, this could be a good place to start (especially if you want something shorter than hollow knight)

oh, so this is how you make an amazing game even better, huh.

After finishing Tactics Ogre and finally understanding the hype, both about that game and SRPGs in general, I thought to myself “maybe I should go back and finally beat Final Fantasy Tactics?” It was the only MEGA CLASSIC of Matsuno’s I had left to play through (march of the black queen notwithstanding) and now, I felt comfortable enough with tactics rpgs to actually push through it. While it certainly required more pushing than the Tactics Ogre remake (there are some TOUGH difficulty spikes and less QoL), I think the mechanics and story on display here are worth the effort.

I mean I’ve loved the way Matsuno designs stories for years now, ever since playing FFXII, but this really feels like it’s on a whole different level. It’s concerned with justice and the nature of power, who gets it and how they keep it, just like Tactics Ogre, and explores these themes with large scale political power grabs, just like Tactics Ogre, but brings the telling down to a more personal level. You are not the leader of a rebellion faction, fighting both domineering invaders and corruption from within, you’re just a man trying to do what he feels is right within a whirlwind of changing alliances and strategic betrayals. You have to live up to a legacy while fighting against it, while fighting the whole system that keeps that legacy in place. On top of that, matters of religion work their way in here as well, in myriad cool af ways that I don’t wanna talk about because they’re my favorite part of the story.

And mechanically, it’s much the same as Tactics Ogre. Still that Fire Emblem-but-more-RPG flavor, but on with smaller party sizes now (a hair bigger than your normal Final Fantasy party). The battles are usually shorter and move quicker, requiring a bit more thinking on your feet to keep your strategies ahead of the enemies. The job system is more expanded as well, allowing mixing and matching between them in that classic Final Fantasy way. I’ve never seen a game push diversifying your jobs to this level, but if you really wanna build a strong team you’re gonna need to really put some thought into who has which jobs and which jobs you need to unlock. Have you gotten a thief to level 5 yet? You’d better, you don’t know what jobs you’re missing. If you slack on this it can get a little grindy, but also you really don’t need an ideal team to get through the game. Hell I actually was way too lax on unlocking jobs and I still made mincemeat out of the last like, fifth of the game?

There’s rumors a remaster of this game is coming down the pipe to match the Tactics Ogre one, and if they add the ability to skip mid-battle dialogue on retries and just like, an option to restart a battle if you feel like you’re doing poorly, the game would be super easy to recommend. Even out the harshest peaks of the difficulty curve and I will never shut up about this game ever.

Even if a remaster doesn’t come out though, everyone should play this, especially if a huge medieval political story with light fantasy elements sounds like your jam. It’s so well done, so well considered, and beyond fully realized.

I don’t think it’s unfair to say that Pokemon Scarlet seems rushed. It’s buggy and unpolished, but also brimming with ambitious ideas that try to bring Pokemon into the modern day without compromising the core of what makes these games so eminently addictive, and not addictive in such a predatory way as many modern games lean. It’s as easy to pick up and hard to put down as ever, regardless of any technical issues, which never hampered my enjoyment in the slightest. But while those are the most obvious way the game was rushed, the part that hurt my experience the most was the way that ambition feels… not fully realized.

Backing up a bit, my first Pokemon game (as well as one of my first video games) was Pokemon Diamond, and playing Scarlet really brought some things that I value about Diamond and my other favorite Pokemon games (SoulSilver, Emerald, Black/White) into focus. Primarily that those games are really streamlined in progression, often giving you only one path forward. No matter what you want to do, you’re gonna do everything in the order the game wants you to.

Scarlet takes an approach more reminiscent of Breath of the Wild, a large open world with a few objectives and points of interest marked on your map, but kinda fumbles this structure. Er well, it’s more just missing any sort of structure. You wanna complete all the objectives, but that’s all your direction, and that works great in Zelda where all the Divine Beasts are equally difficult, but here its more complicated. Broadly, the objectives get harder as you get closer to the top of the map, but this rule isn’t hard and fast, and there’s a big gaping hole in the middle of the map that makes keeping a comfortable difficulty curve tough. There’s a nice sense of freedom and exploration gained from this structure, but the game feels so much less tight as a result. To be as reductive as possible, it’s laid out like Fallout 3 and I wish it was laid out like Fallout New Vegas.

The other main issue I’ve got is that each of the objectives in the game feels a little bit insubstantial? The gyms are all preceeded by “tests” instead of weird little obstacle course puzzle things as they used to, and while the literal things you do aren’t all that different than the older games, there’s a missing sense of place to it all, and it makes each gym feel less unique. Not to mention the tests vary wildly in terms of fun factor and difficulty. The team star bases have a similar issue, but worse, as they don’t vary at all outside of themed type and the boss’s personality. The titans are a bit like this too but it doesn’t feel as weird there, probably because the context is just fighting big wild Pokemon.

Luckily, the end of the game is fantastic, and really pulls the loose threads of the rest of the game together in a satisfying way, which I wasn’t expecting at all tbh. In a game as loosely defined as this, having such a tight ending really felt like a breath of fresh air.

Anyways, it’s great fun, but for me it didn’t have that special tightly designed spark the series used to have. Plus it pretty obviously needed another year in the oven, between the missed opportunities and lack of QA testing. I’d recommend it if you like the series beyond the first 4 or 5 entries, or just the franchise as a whole, but if you want a tight RPG you might wanna skip it.

tactics Ogre is one of those games that I’d kinda resigned myself to never playing, almost purely on the basis that I’d heard it was a hard SRPG, and the only SRPGs I’ve ever gotten through are the newer fire emblem games, with the more lenient death mechanics. I did want it though. I’m a huge fan of Yasumi Matsuno’s work, and this (along with FF Tactics) are usually considered his best works, his most complete works. So, when a new remaster of tactics ogre came out, I picked it up and decided to give it an earnest try. This year was already a banner year for me getting into genres I never thought I’d be into (souls and fighting games), and I was quietly hoping there would even be an easy mode added (there was not, but nonetheless!!).

50ish hours and about a month later and yeah, it’s fantastic, and this is also a fantastic remaster. Tactics ogre kinda rides the line between RPG and SRPG perfectly, and Reborn only solidifies that balancing act. Gone are random battles and grinding, replaced with a level cap that rises as the story progresses and training at any of the cities that are friendly to you. There’s more focus on smaller skirmishes with more importance on individual units than fire emblem, but this is still a tactics game first, and an RPG second.

But that’s not really what I love about the game. Sure, the battle system has near infinite depth, but this is a matsuno game! Not only that, it’s a really large scale matsuno game, taking a massive conflict and putting you in the shoes of its leader. It’s huge! And yet often very intimate, really zeroing in on the most effective characters and letting them shine. All of this is couched in matsuno’s usual almost shakespearean writing style, and gorgeously soundtracked by Hitoshi Sakimoto.

The remaster has been a bit divisive though. The visuals were redone, there’s this weird skill card system, and there’s voice acting now. Well, the voice acting is superb, really bringing the characters to life. The visuals I ended up liking, as they really do get the look of the original down, but with added sharpness and clarity. Seriously, when it’s blown up big on a tv it looks great, nowhere near as blurry as the trailer made it seem. The skill card system is really my only gripe with the remaster, and really only because it doesn’t really feel necessary? It’s just kinda simple, in a game that takes great pains to be full of depth. Also they’re very “video gamey”, kinda breaking the medieval war diorama look of the game. Honestly that’s a minor complaint in the grand scheme tho, I promise.

Bottom line is this is a great way to play a classic. If you don’t like the looks and the cards, play the PSP version, but otherwise, bask in the glory of full voice acting for one of the best JRPG stories.

Recently I read an article that called Marathon Infinity an “avant garde” shooter, and as weird as that probably sounds when talking about a Bungie game, it also gets at the heart of a lot of my feelings about the game. Marathon Durandal ended pretty conclusively, even having an epilogue describing the next million years of the major characters and their existences, so Infinity begins right where that game ended, but teleports you out of that ending. What follows is.. hard to describe. You spend most of the game hopping between timelines, playing a few levels at a time in what seem to be alternate versions of Marathon Durandal’s story.

It’s a cool idea, a really cool idea for a shooter, taking the disconnected nature of levels in a game like this and making it textual, making it part of the emotional experience. And in that sense, it accomplishes what it wants to. You’re confused, put in unfamiliar locations with no reference point to where you were, eternally a fish out of water no matter what you do.

I just never ended up hooking in to what was happening. It feels like any semblance of context completely gets lost, and I just kinda felt like I was going through a disconnected series of levels for the first third of the game. Even after reading what was supposed to be happening, and playing through the end of the game, it all feels a bit too disconnected for me. An admirable goal but nothing to tie it together.

The levels themselves don’t help this along either, mostly feeling like outtakes from Marathon 2 imo. They’re more frustrating to an absurd degree, just not at all communicating what you need to do sometimes, or hiding objectives far beyond the purview of what I personally find fun. All of the games had this to an effect, but this has it the most, and has the only story that didn’t feel like it was pushing me along, like I needed to know what happened next, because I didn’t know what was happening before!

I’m definitely dissapointed in Infinity. The core fun of Marathon, and most of the Bungie catalog, is intact, and when the writing is there it’s still good and witty and charismatic, but it’s pushed way into the background here, and the avant garde ideas that fill the game out are just far to thinly presented to leave an impact on me. Still, not bad per se. Just dissapointing.

I don’t even know where to start, how to describe this game without spoiling it. I guess I can say, if the game looks interesting to you, go play it right now. If, in addition, you’ve ever liked a game made by Obsidian or a hyperlocal adventure game (Night in the Woods, Kentucky Route Zero, Norco), or some combination of the two (this section is here so I can mention Disco Elysium) then GO PLAY IT RIGHT NOW.

Beyond that, the task becomes workable. When my girlfriend asked me what I thought of the game, I said “I think it’s probably one of the best works of art I’ve ever experienced”, and I stand fully behind that text message I sent like 10 minutes ago. Somehow, Josh Sawyer and his team at Obsidian have crafted a wonderful murder mystery with themes around class consciousness and theology, and a lovely, tender story and cast of characters, and they made it entirely out of historical references you’d literally need an encyclopedia to fully understand. And don’t fret, the encyclopedia is ALSO in the game.

Admittedly the introduction is a little dry. It leans heavy on establishing the setting, your place in it, and a calm before the fall, and it’s important, but until things get going it was feeling a bit like what I was worried it would be: interesting and intellectual, but lacking in heart. Once you get used to the game though, things pick up quick and all of a sudden you’ve been playing for 6 hours straight and it’s 1 in the morning and you don’t want to stop, because you don’t know if the next person you talk to, or the next meal you eat, or the next setpiece you explore could throw mysteries and answers at you in equal measure, pulling you deeper and deeper until the next chapter break.

I don’t think I know how to talk about this game at all actually. Not the way I usually do. Mostly you just have to decide what leads to follow based on what information you have, and what your character can provide based on their background and standing with each member of the community. But that doesn’t really get to the heart of what’s so good about the game, what I love about it. That lies in the seemingly endless depth on display, a hyperfocused depth of character and setting that only exists in those other hyperlocal adventure games and Obsidian-style RPGs, to my knowledge.

It’s just that good, and it gets better and better as you go along. The layers peel back, pulling the sardonic exterior away so you can tug at the core underneath. I’m surprised a game like this could be made still, and by a company of the size Obsidian is. It’s got all the references of a game made by 3 nerds in a basement, all the heart of a game made by 3 indie devs in a basement, and all the technical prowess that being owned by Xbox gets you. I don’t get how a game can be so seemingly mired in itself and yet still so affecting, still such a triumph, and I don’t get how Josh Sawyer’s been doing stuff like this for 20 years. I’ll be buying the collectors edition if it materializes though, you can count on that.

This is another one of those games that’s been talked to death, so we’ll see what I can actually add to the conversation! For the longest time I didn’t think I’d like Hollow Knight, mostly because I’m kinda hit or miss with metroidvania games (in particular, the only ones that’ve really sucked me in are the true blue metroid games) and I’m more miss than hit with hard, precise games. The only really hard games I’ve loved are the Souls games, and I knew HK was inspired by souls a bit, but I didn’t realize the extent. It’s kind of an exact halfway point between the genres it pulls from, and a well designed one at that, and while I wouldn’t say I loved the game as a whole, I certainly loved many parts.

I’m not really sure what about some metroidy games hooks me vs other ones. Right now my going theory is a dark, quiet isolation, going by how I like metroid 2 so much, and how Hollow Knight’s more Dark Souls-influenced atmosphere (imo) gives it more of a quiet resting melancholy than most in the genre. It feels more like a flattening of Souls into 2D than most of these games, I guess. That sense of tragedy definitely helped bring me in, until I was caught up in the adventure, regardless of difficulty.

That difficulty is something I’m not wholly in support of in souls games though, feeling like it crosses from fun to frustrating too often, and I have a similar feeling here. When the bosses are good, they’re great, and when you have the powers that some fights are designed around, they can be fantastic. But when they get tough, there can be this feeling that you know how to do the fight, you just can’t pull it off for whatever reason. The quicker fights got, the more I felt like I was flailing around until I got lucky and didn’t get hit, and some fights I Did Not get lucky for a While. My favorites were the fights with some room for error, still tough but built in a way where you can maneuver around the boss and learn its patterns within one or two runs, even if you don’t beat them for a few more. The Mantis Lords, the Broken Vessel, these are my favorite kinds of fight here, and luckily they’re pretty plentiful. There’s just a few in there that soured the experience a bit for me.

But that’s hardly unique to this game, and besides that and some really really too precise platforming, the game is hugely successful at what it wants to be. Cozier than souls and metroid, but still melancholy, still isolated, and still creepy when it wants to be. I mean what, am I gonna complain when an area like City of Tears exists? It was calling my name before I even knew it existed!!

Honestly, 2D games are so much more accessible than 3D games that even if you’ve given up on souls games, you should give this a try. For the most part it’s super manageable, and if you’re willing to explore to the MAX you can absolutely mitigate the harsher edges of the difficulty curve. That just isn’t the way I usually play stuff unfortunately, and so instead of wholeheartedly loving the game, I only like 75% love it and 25% like it! play it

I’m not really sure what Destiny’s reputation is. I think most people agree it’s not as important or impactful as Bungie’s Halo games, but it’s very obviously an iteration on the way those games played. It helped kickstart the live service game hellscape we live in today, but doesn’t feel as insidious as what came after (particularly the first Destiny, Destiny 2 has its own weird issues around content vaulting). Instead it feels like an honest attempt to translate MMO rhythms into console shooters, an exploration of what feels good about MMOs and how they could make a shooter embody those same feelings.

It ends up in a weird spot. It’s more expensive than just like, buying Halo 3, but cheaper than paying for a WoW subscription and buying all those expansions. However, none of the areas feel as expansive as the locations in a big traditional MMORPG, and as such the game kinda lacks some of that replayability. The main storylines are like 6-8 hours long, which is chill (especially for the price you pay these days, 50 bucks for 5 storylines), but none of the storylines really feel like stories. Instead you get these smaller quests, where (for example, in the first campaign) you investigate “the black garden” and how to get in, and the story doesn’t really touch on anything besides that. It’s not that it feels more focused because of this though, instead its typical Halo scale with less cutscenes, less context, and less actual events happening. You get one thing, you get one thing for that one thing, you find how to use that one thing, and you use the one thing. It’s just kinda simple, but not distilled to make up for it. It’s almost airy in that way, and it’s fine, maybe great if you’re just going through it to level up, or to chill with your buddies, but that’s kinda all it is.

Luckily, while you play this thin and airy story, you get to use some of the best feeling shooting ever created and get to look at some really fun and cool art design. It’s cliche to say these days, but Destiny is really a “no thoughts just vibes” kinda game, and the vibes truly are immaculate. The final level of the main campaign has a few views that are just haunting, and the missions on mars could be screenshotted for Isaac Asimov reprints if needed. And the shooting, oh the shooting! More medium paced and deliberate than the competition, like Destiny games always are, but with more modern enhancements and feel (like being able to aim down sights) to keep it from feeling dated. Like, it’s hard to talk about something that’s entirely feel based, but it really just feels satisfying and non-twitchy.

Destiny is pretty obviously iterating on Halo, and in some ways it’s an absolute success. The gunplay, the art direction, and the encounter design (the enemy factions feel like variations on the rhythms of Halo, allowing them to mix and match encounter pace much more freely than before) (also the factions feel more distinct than they do in Destiny 2 imo) are all amazing, all true iterations on what they’d done in the past. But almost all the other ways the game is disappointing, especially in pricing structure and writing/plotting. Destiny is a harder sell than most other games, but it can still be a good time. Just don’t expect anything transcendent. It’s great to play while watching youtube

Honestly I think this game is at least as good as the first. Both have their own quirks, their own little issues that occasionally get in the way of the experience, but man are the highs high. Marathon 2 keeps the slower-paced puzzly focus of Marathon 1 (vs other shooters of the time), but ramps the action and the scale up tremendously. The combat is huge, smooth, dynamic, and has the beginnings of what would become Halo’s unique uses for each weapon, instead of DOOM’s “use the best thing you got” ethos. It’s just so god damn fun.

Marathon 2 runs on a new engine, with significantly larger sprites and environments, as well as not confining the viewport to 2/3rds of the screen. As chill vibes as the HUD in M1 was, it’s nice to see more of the environment. And what lovely environments they are!! Even more than the first one, there’s a HUGE variety of colors and themes used in the levels. Particularly there’s been a lot of work put into liquid rendering (water, lava, some kinda gross green sludge, some kinda PURPLE ALIEN LAVA). This is in service to the greatly expanded role of your oxygen meter: Now a large majority of the levels have you scuba diving or.. slowly burning to death. For the most part this is welcome: The oxygen meter got used in like 2 levels of the first game. The way they’ve implemented water traversal kinda saps some of the fun out though. You move slower, which makes sense, and can’t fire your guns, which I guess makes sense but damn I don’t love needing to either run around or slowly punch the weakest enemies in the game to death 10-12 times. I’m not really sure how it’d be fixable though, and it does help enhance the feeling of exploring every inch of these levels, which (for me) feels like the main swing of Marathon.

Beyond that and some slightly confusing level design though, the main thrust of the story is just fantastic. The last one was good, but this one outclasses it HARD. As the title implies, you spend most of the game working with Durandal, one of the AIs from your ship in the first game, deep in the stages of AI rampancy (a kind of death by overthinking). Durandal’s lines are magnetic, full of wit and anger and the thickest prose Bungie’s ever had in a game (at least out of the ones I’ve played). On top of that though, this game brings themes of mythology and exploration (not just in the level design now!) to the forefront for most of the game, running you through explorations of Citadels and Caverns and Bunkers, trying to find a more advanced civilization before your enemies do. It’s engrossing to the max, and justifies the somewhat more labyrinthine level design vs the first game wonderfully.

I think you should play this game. Play it on whatever difficulty you want, play it in whatever form you want, look up guides for the levels you get stuck on, just play it. It’s a master class in the slower side of boomer FPS design, the side that would ultimately become the norm in the 2000s. Even where it recycles the first game a bit, it does it bigger and better and ups the fun. I don’t really know how else to say it: It’s just really fucking great.

Dusk is one of those modern boomer shooters, one of the most popular ones. I tried it out earlier this year (or was it last year?) on a whim, but wasn’t really feeling it. It doesn’t hide it’s main influences (Quake and Blood) at all, and still manages to come out with it’s own flavor of retro shooter, and I do love Quake, but I’ve gotta say I wish I’d liked this more?

Which isn’t to say I didn’t like it. The level design is FANTASTIC, the soundtrack is wonderful (somewhat DOOM 2016-ey I think), and the game is just fucking gorgeous. This time giving it a shot, I played it on switch, and it was awesome on a big tv, especially when I turned on the retro color palette and 4x downscaling option. Honestly, it feels like Quake but with levels that feel more like places than puzzles, whether those places are culty farmhouses or meaty factories.

It’s split into 3 episodes, each containing 10 levels, in a very throwbacky kinda way as well (all those old boomer shooters, most notably DOOM, are structured like this). Each episode has it’s own notable setpeices and set of themes, though they do interlock much more than other games of its ilk. My personal favorite was Episode 2, which is also when I had the most fun with the game and really felt like it was firing on all cylinders. Episode 2’s got loads of real true horror mixed into the INTENSE action, and the boss fight at the end is one of the most fun FPS bossfights I’ve really had.

The other two episodes are great too, though I’ve gotta say I don’t super love how much of Episode 3 feels like a way to tie up the story. They introduce a new, dope weapon at the beginning, along with some enemies that match it in theming, but none of that really gets a great chance to breathe I think. The second to last level especially just felt more frustrating and boring than a cool huge challenge I wanted to best.

Beyond that, I think I might just like slower paced Boomer Shooters more. More of a Marathon guy or a Dark Forces guy than DOOM or Dusk (Quake notwithstanding). Even still, if you haven’t given Dusk a try, you really should. It’s just a well made quake inspired shooter, and it’s a ton of fun, despite my issues with it.