Hypnospace Outlaw was a masterful expression of turn of the millennium Internet culture and thematic exploration of the increasing corporatization of the Internet. Slayers X, its boomer shooter spinoff, continues this deft grasp of Internet culture though this time through a complete parody of what was considered cool by teenage boys on the era. Slayers X is the in-universe game that Zane made himself and it’s the kind of self-aggrandizing work only a teen boy could pull off. Zane is the chosen X-Slayer out to stop the Psyko Sindicate and to avenge his loved ones. (RIP Zane’s mom) The whole game is just such a great parody and it’s funny throughout. The aesthetic is also just so good, one of my favorite aspects being how it feels like it hearkens to Blood what with its Build Engine look and how the cut scenes reminded me of Blood’s style, though much more exaggerated.

The gunplay is pretty much all fun, my only complaint is the starter dual pistols feel limp. One of the standout weapons to me is the shotgun which shoots out glass shards so to get ammo for it you have to break glass cases, mirrors, and windows, this added a nice facet of being more aware of the environment when scrounging around. The level design is also really great too, with a great deal of location variety and different avenues of approach. Zane will be blasting his way through Psykos across his hometown among such as locations as a suburban cul-de-sac, trailer-park, and state fair. The levels are rather expansive but rarely confusing, which is what really pushes a boomer shooter to greatness I feel.

The game is unfortunately rather short and I would have liked a few more hours out of it, but on the other hand the game never outlasts its welcome and is always throwing new things at you. Slayers X is just overall a fantastic shooter and genuinely funny game. Now I just eagerly wait for the next Hypnospace game, Dream Settler, because this series is quickly becoming one of my favorite in games.

when i read Neuromancer back in 2011 i think i was never able to quite picture whatever William Gibson was trying to describe. there's a thing with sci-fi text based works where everything is described by comparing it to a familiar object, connected to another familiar object and somehow you should be able to imagine the whole picture going by that. well i can't, i don't think it's a particular lack of imagination, i think it might be the exact opposite really, because i'm sure whatever i'm imagining has nothing to do with what was described. this is not frustrating in any way though, i think it just makes my experience with this type of work a tad more abstract. citizen sleeper is already inherently abstract, so in some level i imagine i was supposed to imagine whatever i wanted, however i wanted.

it's a good game about befriending people, listening to stories, hating capitalism and corporations, accepting physicality and transience. or at least that's how i played it. i don't think the game gives you too many options to branch out, but i still think each individual input can make this experience a whole lot different. i'm eager to know how many people were experiencing money issues while Ethan forced you to pay their tab, or unlocked places and or situations far earlier than the game expected you too. it's just fun, short and sweet, i enjoyed my time with it even though for a while i didn't think i would.

Calling something "good with friends" is often the cruelest thing you can ever say about a multiplayer game. Yeah, you can have fun with friends in basically anything, it turns out friends are good, not Phasmophobia. And it's so easy to see that in Lethal Company, especially from the outside looking in - some bullshit lame horror coop horror game to scream at, acting as the new steam flavour of the month game to merely moisturise the slip and slide of socialisation.

Despite the resemblance, Lethal Company is not that. Flavour of the month, maybe, but versus the thousand souless PC games out there of it's breed it's truly closer to something like Dokapon Kingdom and hell, Dark Souls, for the kinds of emotion and socialisation it brings up.

Because truly, Lethal Company is a game about having a really shit job. There's no real sugarcoating it. It's a game about being explicitly underpaid for dangerous, tedius work salvaging objects from ugly factories, where the corporation you work under and the true majesty of visiting planets and experiencing it's fauna are so stripped back and corporatised that you don't even notice it. This setting and the gameplay really sets out a very clever vibe for the game, as frankly, it on it's own, is almost deliberately not fun, but it is a wonderful way of building up a camraderie between players and really get into the boots of a worker in a bad job slacking and goofing off a bit. On my first playthrough with friends I found some extraodinary catharsis in one of the gang spending some of our quota on a jukebox playing license free music and just having a jam for a while, and likewise, a good haul which takes some of the pressure off others is appreciated, and the "man in the chair" - the guy left behind at the ship to deal with doors, turrets etc, feels both valued as part of the team, but also themselves lonely, tense, awaiting their friend's safe return.

It is also, as a more obvious point, very funny. Basically every run of this game you'll make something funny will happen. A comrade fumbles a wonky jump to their death based on bad information. You walk just inside the range of your comrade's voice to hear them screaming for help for half a second. You watch as the man in the chair as a giant red dot slowly bears down on your comrade, try to warn them and then see the red dot taking delight in eating them, and there's so much more. It's surprising really as a game with so little going on in gameplay and so limited in variety of stuff that it keeps on bringing up new stupid shit to happen.

Its rarely legitimately scary, even in the rare case you're alone amongst monsters with all your friends dead. The stakes established are just set too low, the animations a bit too goofy for the intensity to ever feel too much. And that kinda folds back in on that "shit job" thematic of the whole thing. Being almost indifferent to the surprising variety of monsters, seeing them as much as obstacles as hell demons that want to eat your face, is ultimately part of the job. Yes, the fourth angel from Evangelion wandering around whilst you slowly crouchwalk across the map to your ship is tense, but almost amusingly tense. Gotta roll with it.

It's a delightful experience, really. If you wanted to you could linger on how cobbled together the whole thing feels right now and how limited the actual gameplay really is, but they do nothing to take away from the truly great times Lethal Company sparks. The closest a game will ever get to being on the last day of your christmas contract with debenhams and just slacking with the other temps, giving people discounts on their items for no good reason and occasionally the weeping angels from doctor who come out with a giant spider and they're in the ONE hallway that leads back to the exit and Ernesto is dead, damn.

IMO Dishonored is one of a scant few series with such masterfully interwoven area design that organically accommodates a variety of playstyles and tactics--without losing its aura of verisimilitude. This economical little cutie puts premiere games like Deus Ex / Cyberpunk and their shrink-wrapped route segmentation to shame; there's little to no "here's the stealth approach air vent, directly beside the combat approach cover corridor! Time 2 pick ur actually kind of meaningless, overbearingly highlighted choice!" bullshit here. Like Souls, you actually have to pay deep attention to largely un-signaled opportunities in the architecture, enemy behaviors, and level design in ways that successfully make you feel like you're discovering exploitable weaknesses in both the diegetic AND directorial structures of the game world itself. Blink/Far Reach still feel like you're playing debug mode and hacking the game but in a totally intentional way and it RULES! It's exhilarating to have to constantly re-evaluate your approach and compromise whatever binaristic roleplay you initially set out on due to the vibrant, chaotic texture within every area, and when you're on a roll it's absolutely some of the coolest zonefeel and adaptive stealth EVAR!!!

Sadly I am kind of godawful at this series despite being a fan, I and struggled immensely to play in the rough style I find most satisfying (stealth-predatorial, with the occasional quick firefight when discovered), especially at the start. D2 is almost immediately much less forgiving than the first game, and the enormous, punishing opening areas do very little to get you acclimated. I was constantly abusing quicksaves and moving at a snails pace until getting my sea legs 8+ hours in, and by that point I had become a bit too reliant on some cheesy, avoidant strategies. This may only be an issue on console, but I found the reload times to be especially ridiculous for such a high-risk game that encourages you to frequently retry; I spent maybe 1/5th of my playtime in the first 3 zones inside a loading screen and that does not feel acceptable!!! I was able to push through this klutzy phase because I knew of the pleasures 2 come once I got my groove back, but the lengthy downtime very likely could have turned me away for good if I were a first-time player. Happy I stayed onboard because some of the later zones are a delight to navigate, especially with a more developed arsenal of abilities. Maybe this isn't a problem on PC, but it really aggravated me on console.

The lore of this world does very little for me and I don't find the story or the characters at all engaging, but the whalepunk theming does lend itself to some areas with interesting mechanical/structural concepts (the 13 Ghosts/Cube-style morphing inventor mansion and witchy taxidermy conservatory were NEAT!). I'm glad for the attempts at stylization that are here, but wish they had taken things even further. The overarching story of braindead political retribution is basically a huge yawn but the lived-in sensibility of individual spaces remains excellent.

ALSO I picked Emily and was HORRIFIED to discover that she can not turn into a rat, which was the coolest ability in the OG and legit feels odd to be locked to one player character--esp when "dethroned edgy steampunk princess" feels WAY more likely to have high rat affinity than boring pseudomute assassin man!!!! felt legit devastated every time I saw a group of rats I could not possess. The game literally should warn you upon character select that if you pick Emily you will NEVER go ratmode :'( Her Naruto self-multiplication/shadow crawl power is NOT an acceptable substitute!!!! legit -.5 a star for this injustice!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

look you can give me all these fancy ass magic powers and special grenades that turn anything with a pH value of 9 or above into feathers if u use it on thursday, but if you give me a shotgun and ammo for that shotgun i will use that and nothing else. But this was cool and I enjoyed how u can do whatever even leaving. Ya U can just leave. THats my canon ending bc thats what i would do in this situation. anyways it was pretty sick. Also loved the semi survival stuff. Flying super fast into something and actually getting a concussion??? fucking awesome. what other game lets you get a concussion? i tried to search for lists of games that let you get a concussion but unfortunately I was unable to find what I was looking for. Its a bit more simple than something like deus ex 1 but it feels like deus ex more than deus ex HR so thats got 2 say something.. CYA

A spectacular smorgasbord of setting that fuses more or less everything that's great about the science-fiction genre into a single cohesive and highly-interactive experience, taking pages from Alien, The Thing, The Matrix and everything in between, elevating them gracefully with pop-phil touches of Thomas Kuhn and dynamic lighting effects. I'd go so far as to suggest Prey is one of gaming's most well-realised worlds ever, with Arkane leveraging their Zenimax-Bethesda business relationship in creative-personal-inspirational ways that aren’t just related to the budget and resources their parent company provided - some of the email terminals contain such ruthlessly well-observed treatise on corporate engineering that I have a sneaking suspicion someone may have just find-replaced some exchanges from Arkane's own SMTP server. Seem like the level designers had a real knack for finding horror in conference rooms, employee lounges and HR tribunals.

Engagement with the environment is Prey’s greatest strength. By forcing you to crawl around on your hands like a fucking dog and stick your head into trashcans in the hopes of scrounging up some used cigars and banana peels, the game encourages you to take a close look at everything around you. Every discarded dossier and email chain is a potential piece of practical benefit, which often results in you combing archived arguments between the deceased cafeteria staff RE: Tuesday’s lunch special for mentions of a door code or safe combination - classic imsim fare, but wrapped in mundane-yet-engaging writing that definitively proves that audio logs, post-it notes and graffiti are effective storytelling techniques - it’s just that most games have used them to tell terrible stories.

The killer flaw here is the combat, which serves more as an unpleasant obstacle between you and more digestion of setting than a creative exercise that’s in keeping with the game’s otherwise giddy open-endedness. Fighting the typhon is clumsy, brutal and stupid - and while it’s perhaps an intentional realisation of the game's classic "you saved the galaxy with repair tools?!" design ideology, it harkens too closely to the stiff awkwardness of taking on headcrabs with a crowbar in Half-Life or those moments in Deux Ex where you and a FEMA agent trade stun-gun blows for five minutes until one of your inventories runs out of potato chips. It’s regressive RPG-shooter gameplay (complete with number pop-ups) that ultimately can’t find its place within an otherwise highly-finessed immersion tank. The game offers you ample chance to blow fiery holes in gas pipes and transform into toilet roll for a surprise attack on unwitting plumbing droids, but these moments of brilliance invariably descend into rigid battle-exchanges between you and the AI; blind stat-crunching that never makes you feel as clever as the environmental puzzle-solving does. Excise the guns completely (apart from the wonderful glue cannon, of course) and I honestly think you might have a better game -  the only bullets I took satisfaction in firing were the foam-tipped crossbow bolts that I could use to sneakily activate touchscreens from across a room.

At its best, Prey is a game of corporate archaeology - investigate the sterile halls of an isolated institution and work out why only ghosts roam its corridors now. You can only hide in the shadows for so long , though, before you’re faced with the ugly consequences of industrial actions - both yours and theirs. But don’t worry! Even this nuanced near-missterpiece offers you the opportunity to stand in front of a machine and choose between switches marked “KILL” and “SAVE”. Would you kindly check it out, please? Because I need a Prey 2 to come in and patch up the broken joints in this brilliant mechanical simulation.

probably my favourite system mechanics in any fighting game, battle hub perfectly encapsulates the arcade setting as cordial yet caustic, netcode is excellent, this is the best starting roster any of these games has ever had, world tour gets dry after a little bit but finally manages to capture these characters essences in a personable and human way which has been a rarity in SF up to this point, endless quality of life features officially make this the new standard to aspire to for all pending releases, dhalsim sounds like he’s telling opponents to kill themselves whenever i land drive impact. five stars