everyone praises hollow knight for its sheer amount of content, but that strikes me as backward. the biggest issue with hollow knight by far is pacing. put simply, the game is too long. way, way too long. let me put it this way: super metroid has about 14 core power-ups which are necessary to complete the game without sequence breaks, and that game is about 8 hours long. hollow knight has about 6 necessary power-ups, and it's about 25 hours minimum. in other words, in super metroid, you're getting a meaningful upgrade on average every 30 minutes to an hour, whereas in hollow knight, it's every 4+ hours.

in a genre centered around exploration, you need that exploration to feel rewarding. most of the time, you can get away with small rewards, like missile packs in super metroid. but the player needs to feel as though scouring areas will lead to meaningful progress, or at least incremental boosts in power that add up over the course of those areas (an individual missile pack isn't much, but 3 of them from one area is great). in hollow knight, you go massive stretches of time with nothing. even the filler stuff, equivalent to missile packs, is usually pointless. money mostly unlocks benches and fast travel points, so you could remove those fees and just remove money as a mechanic and the game would hardly change. lots of stuff you find is also only used to trade in for more money. most of the equippable charms are useless, so those are a bust. grubs also mostly only get you money, the big rewards only coming in increments of grubs rescued, and most of those big rewards are also useless (because a lot of them are also just money). at absolute best, you find weapon upgrade materials or health upgrades, which are so rare as to, again, be stretched extremely thin across the game. all this results in hours of wandering around, finding new places and seeing new things, but nevertheless feeling like you've gotten nothing done.

the game world is too big. WAY too big. ludicrously big. there is no reason for it to be this big. i expect backtracking in a metroidvania, but this is way over the line. if i know where i'm going and how to get there, it should not take 20 minutes to do so, plain and simple. this isn't helped by the controls being built for snappy, precise boss combat rather than exploration. in super metroid, you can fling samus slingshot-style with crazy momentum, use cool walljump tricks to get places faster, cool skill-based movement tricks like that. because the game is built for speed and navigation first and foremost, not combat. in hollow knight, you slowly plod along at a mild jog, no run button or anything. you have a dash, but it's short, and you have to spam it if you wanna get places. you have one powerup which is like the shinespark from metroid, but you have to stand in place and charge it, and it can only go left or right in a straight line. whereas shinesparks could go in 8 directions, be used anywhere so long as you built up the speed, and even be stored for a short time. because hollow knight is a game made by people who thought they wanted to make a metroidvania, when what they actually wanted to make was a boss rush hack and slash, so they built a boss rush hack and slash character and stuffed it into a world three times bigger than even fast fuck samus would know what to do with. complete mismatch. no wonder all the major expansion content was boss rush content.

the map system is also bizarre and bad. i'm glad they tried something interesting with it, but it sucks. not getting to lock in any of my progress in charting out an area until i've found a special NPC in each one contributes massively to the feeling of non-progress. and why in god's name do i need to equip a charm to have my position pinpointed on the map? why do i have to spend a valuable charm slot on a basic feature like that? it feels like they were trying so hard to shake up the map system and make it something interesting that they forced themselves to try and fix what wasn't broken.

the combat is simple but fun. the platforming challenges are satisfying. the aesthetics are generally beautiful, though a bit too samey. there is something here. clearly a lot of passion and talent went into this game, and i don't recommend against playing it or anything like that. but it's fundamentally and deeply misguided. the aesthetics, atmosphere, and bosses are compensating hard for basically everything else being bad and ill-considered. hopefully silksong makes serious changes.

"Maybe you find a barcode laying around and then you put it down and it turns into a forest!"
"Ah cool. And what does the forest do? Do you solve a puzzle with it?"
"No. But it's cool!!"
- Viewfinder's entire vibe.

The very first moment you place a 2D photo in the world and see it come alive in 3D is genuinely rad. And the game is full of those kind of "wow neat" moments. Sadly, the game as a whole never really amounts to more than a series of cool moments in a mostly pretty easy puzzle game.

The idea for this game was so good. The core mechanic of taking and using photos to manipulate the world around you to solve puzzles is dope! But it almost feels like the devs didn't fully know what to do with the idea after they thought of it so they made a bunch of puzzles and then decided to tell a pretty random story I did not care about with some bad voice-over I wish I could've skipped.

+ Really cool and unique game mechanic
+ Some neat moments that had me go "Oooo cool"
+ Some decent puzzle-solving

- Story's uninteresting and voice acting is not great
- The 2D to 3D translation can feel a bit unpredictable and finicky sometimes.
- Puzzles are generally pretty easy
- Lots of random cool things around the world to showcase the mechanics but are rarely actually used in puzzles
- Last level in the game is randomly timed!!? Why??

The whole time I was playing The Artful Escape only one thought was going through my mind. "Do I like this?" I don't hate it, I don't love it but Do I like it?

The issue is for everything I do enjoy there is a counter negative. Whilst the space faring teenager running from the shadow of his famous folksinger uncle is an interesting premise for the story, I never really warmed to the protagonist overly and the ending feels a bit lackluster.

Where the visuals are gorgeous (mostly due to stellar art design) and the music is excellent, the gameplay however is one note. You move right holding square so your character plays his guitar. This is quite a gorgeous view as the background lights up as you move through it due to the visual design and the music is mostly great. On the negative though the wailing guitar gets repetitive and the levels have nothing else for them except the very occasional double jump ledge grab interrupting the guitar playing, both pointless and sabotages it's main gimmick strangely. When not just being a guitar solo walking simulator there are some almost rhythm game boss battles and while I like the idea they are all exactly the same and add nothing past the first one due to the dull usage of buttons to implement it. They become tedious extremely quickly.

Honestly it feels like it should have been an animated short rather than a video game. One made by a guitarist who loves psychedelic 70's album covers. It's constantly one step forward and one step back, yes it's gorgeous at times, it can be occasionally witty, charming and full of imagination but as a game it's simply boring to play.

I don't hate it, I don't love it but..... I don't think I really like it.

+ Some great art design.
+ Some of the music is excellent.
+ Story Idea is interesting.

- Boring to actively play.
- Boss battles are all the same.
- Main character wasn't to my taste.
- Ending lacked the spark I expected.

Bounced off this pretty hard, abandoning it as Act 4 was about to begin. The biggest problem is the rpg sections take up a huge portion of the game-time despite being largely insipid. I'm given no reason to care about this quest beyond saving the world being a generically good thing to do, and no reason to care about these characters who are at best shallow and one-note (he's the happy one, she's the grumpy one, etc) and at worst have a habit of all blending together and sounding the same. I spent the majority of the rpg sections just bored.

The platforming and puzzle-solving sections are largely fine but rarely achieve much more than that, with the mechanics I saw varying from decent but underdeveloped, to pretty awkward. That said, I strongly disliked the song portions, which depending on which approach the game takes either lack a sense of rhythm or lack a sense of my actions actually mattering at all. Also encountered few small bugs, and the controls for the singing did not feel very smooth requiring you to be very specific with you control-stick movements.

Honestly talking myself down on this the more and more I type.

POV: You have taken mushrooms at a house party and every attempt to play with perspective, shapes and colours is being interrupted by a guy you don’t really know explaining the plot of Inception to you; the door appears to be locked or missing.

This is Superliminal, a game about changing your point of view to overcome problems with out-the-box thinking. You will sometimes have to step so far outside of that box that you will find yourself inside a YouTube walkthrough because you are only permitted to solve each of these puzzles with a single pre-determined solution.

There are some phenomenal visual tricks and spaces here, but ultimately Superliminal has been sandwiched by two 2021 releases at opposite ends of its perception-playing spectrum: Psychonauts 2 uses the same space-within-space and object-outwith-space effects, but doesn’t concern itself with making players understand or break these phenomena into composite pieces to be comprehended - they’re merely decoration in service of psychosis platforming; KID A MNESIA EXHIBITION, in another dimension, has its player observe these technical phenomena without any expectation of conventional interaction, understanding that the act of seeing spectacle is more than enough and that illusions should be protected from close examination. Superliminal occupies an awkward middle ground between these two experiences, forcing players into kaleidoscopes that initially feel boundless, but are gradually reduced to traditional video game boxes as the pre-ordained solutions to their problems fail to reveal themselves and we begin to mash the [USE] key on physics objects.

This is, of course, a really fancy way of saying that I got frustrated with a bunch of the puzzles here and ended up pissed off at cool optical illusions and spatial trickery. But shouldn’t a game about lucid dreams within lucid dreams feel more boundless than this? Why do I have to play with unreliable physics objects to get to a far-off ledge when a dreamer would choose to fly there instead?

There was an amusing bit towards the end of the game where I glitched a bouncy castle through the floor and then stepped through a connecting portal into its negative space, spending fifteen minutes wandering around outside the boundaries of the gamespace, admiring the bugged linedefs and surreal wooshing sounds while looking for my next task. “Ah. This is more like it. This is a dream.” was my thought - imagine my disappointment when I found out one of game’s the most exciting moments was a noclip! A game about boundless, limitless dreams where most rooms look like a dentist lobby. Who among us dreams of block switch puzzles?!

There is a fair amount of excitement-and-wonder-by-design here, thankfully, and most of it is concentrated into the final 30 minutes of this linear trip through the unconscious - but even then, you’ll no doubt drop the ball of building momentum at some point when the game suddenly decides that certain walls can be walked through or you can’t get a slice of cheese to stay at the right size (why didn’t they just let us manually grow/shrink objects?). In my end, the epilogue monologue was drowned out by a twinkly-twinkly “you are special” piano piece, which felt like something of an apt summary of the game at large - big ideas, smothered by technical awkwardness. Worth checking out because it’s only two hours long, but like Inception it’s a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream that will feel like it went on for much longer. You will be relieved to finally wake up.