Crash Bandicoot returns, fresh off the massive success of the N. Sane trilogy remaster with a brand new, from the ground up built platformer with more ambition and more challenge than ever before. The results are mostly pretty great.

The sixty five teams that have credits before you get the to the main menu every time you boot up the game have smartly come to the realization that only those intimately familiar with the Crash franchise are those who are going to tangle with a brand new entry in the modern age - Crash Bandicoot 4 is an intense challenge from the get go, with bonus levels that you must solve like rubiks cubes, hidden gems in places even the best sleuth will struggle to track down, and platforming challenges that demand more precision than ever before to allow you to progress. Going for a 100% completion run would drive anyone but the most faithful to madness, with each level having not only its own set of collectibles, but also a counterpart inverse world that pushes you to play each level in essentially a wireframe format that reverses each level like mirror mode in Mario Kart. If that isn't enough, each level has a death counter to track your failures, with a collectible offered for coming in under 3 deaths for each level, and a series of brutally precise time trial medals offered for each of the levels as well. If that isn't enough, there are tapes scattered across the main game that unlock even more bonus levels, and alternate side character perspectives on several levels that allow you reimagine the already explored areas using new move sets - the new characters offer weapons like a vacuum pack or a grappling hook, or even a frustratingly limited laser weapon to plow through these levels with.

There is an absolute Scrooge McDuck bank vault level of game here to machete chop though. It's wonderful for those who wish to push themselves to the absolute edge.

For the rest of us, we'll appreciate the added checkpoints to each of the tastefully designed boss battles, the circle that is placed underneath the player character indicating where Crash is going to land whenever he takes to the air. We'll also appreciate the consistently fresh level design that uses different masks to augment the gameplay; one slows down time, one turns Crash into a spinning top, etc....and the way the game starts layering these masks into sequences on top of each other to force us out of our comfort zone and learn how they work intimately to succeed.

I don't think every single new idea Crash 4 brings to the table works completely; adding the masks in, which each have their own distinct button sets, adds too many buttons to the already demanding basic moveset. In levels where they demand you constantly switch through masks in sequence, you're pressing the Y button to activate one mask, a trigger for the next, and then a different button for the next one; it shifts the complexity of the controls in a direction that becomes overly confusing when mixed with the inventive level design. And the new characters add very little to the game; whenever you play as them you just wish that you were playing with the moveset and flexibility of Crash proper, which makes an entire chunk of the game a chore.

Crash Bandicoot 4 is a genuinely great follow up that should have revitalized its franchise for a bright future. Four years later, its ideas are mostly still fresh and well executed; the people who built this game should absolutely be allowed to build a follow up or a successor that refines on the excellent ideas laid out here. Good times all around.

What if Dark Souls was more aggressive, darker, and dripping in flesh. A napkin pitch spun into an Odyssey scale epic of body horror and gothic architecture.

Bloodborne, baby.

The idea is simple: the world is being overrun by nightmarish stuff, and hunters are let loose into the real world to keep the nightmares tamed. It’s up to you to leave the hunter’s realm and her into Yarnham to cut off every single piece of flesh in front of you.

Bloodborne emphasizes speed and brutality as it provides you with a fresh slate of weapons that all have multiple forms to dispatch enemies with, and a gun to keep your enemies at bay as you seek the best approach. There is no means to block attacks this time around; you must duck, dodge, flank, and charge at your enemies to take as much of their blood as possible. They’ll do the same, but in larger numbers with worse appearances to ensure that they do the same. In the course of attempting to clear out the nightmares, you’ll encounter many bosses of varying degrees of grotesque-ness, each with their own horrible arena to do business in. Pop items, collect blood vials, dial in insight and blood echoes (souls by any other name) and climb your way through the halls of Bloodborne’s urban design in order to find success.

I found Bloodborne to be tighter in execution, but thoroughly less pleasant to vault through with my hammer in toe than Dark Souls, my previous soulsborne game. I got stuck quite a bit less, and experienced way less friction progressing in this far more linear game. In that sense it feels like a lesser experience - there’s less puzzles to solve, and most of the game’s large areas serve as means to lead you to shortcuts that streamline the experience even further. It’s a phenomenal game on its foundation, but it feels like less of a mountain one climbs and more a hill you jog up.

It also runs poorly and gets real murky during daytime sessions! Oh well. Such is life.