calling your parents and your mom nudging you and giving you advice that's designed to prompt you into remembering something important or asking you a rhetorical question to remind you what you're doing, but then you can ask to put your dad on the phone and he will give you exact, explicit, step-by-step instructions to the next objective, is SO funny and inspired. i love that.

i did not love painting stuff or the puzzles or traversals that involved painting stuff and did not feel compelled to continue. but the parents thing, i can't get over.

absolutely one of the most fun games i've ever played. everything feels so good. the music is incredible and puts you in a trance to help you knock out repeated attempts at these levels. this is a game where level design is put front and center to the point where you NOTICE how good it is, because you have to. the game flaunts it - it wants to show you. this window? it's here because the fast way to do this is to not even enter this building but just fall past it, and shoot a rocket through the window to clip the two enemies in here. these enemies? skip them until the very end when a barrel explodes and destroys the platform they're standing on. and everything is so READABLE. even your first time through a level feels fast. you can play so much of the game on reflex, and you glide through the levels shooting enemies and using powers when it feels right, blasting through red barriers and scanning the screen for the next little miniobjective that you are always perfectly equipped to overcome. ultimate flow state game.

also the book of life is i think honestly the best-feeling button press in a videogame. it's so insanely powerful and the levels are still designed to accommodate it. the distances you cover in that chapter are absurd. and the music. thousand pound butterfly is perfect for getting you as wired as possible. i was giggling to myself between stages of that chapter. it's exhilarating.

very good and fun video game. some excessive flashback scenes with peter imo. damage feels low at first - recommend pumping upgrades into that to make it feel right. especially with the absurd amount of goons they throw at you. at times feels like chewing a big wad of flavorless gum. like alright can we stop, my jaw is getting tired. didn't like peter as much as in the first game but liked miles more than in miles morales.

venom peter is very fun to play especially when you go hulkmode. sounds and feels SUPER good. i wish they had made you a bit scarier when you're like that because everyone's so concerned about how the power is corrupting you but honestly you're only like 25% stronger than normal spiderman so it feels a little overblown. they gotta have you actually ripping people apart if they want to make it feel uncomfortable.

highlight of the game is easily the black cat sequence. for a second i thought "holy shit are they really going to let me unlock this portal wand as a tool i can use?" and no, they are not.

not fun

got a quest from the rat and thought "hah! awesome!", tried to do it, people kept seeing me trying to open the door and i got thrown in jail. rest of my party went out to find a way to open it, get some lockpicking tools, get my main guy out, leave, immediately someone is like "get back in jail". i talk my way out of it and go back to trying to get past the door but people see me again and now the entire town is fighting my party

that's the sort of story i've heard about this game 900 times over the past year. and it's kind of funny that that's happening. the problem is that absolutely none of it is Fun To Do. combat is boring, flipping through your action wheels is boring. i don't like coming up with creative solutions to things. i feel like it's YOUR job to make the game fun, not mine

it's just frustrating. this didn't seem like a game i was going to enjoy honestly, but the hype was SO massive that i figured i'd give it a shot. but cmon the first thing that really piques my interest is this silly encounter with a rat and you immediately throw eight boring obstacles in the way of me trying to do this silly little thing you made. my guy is a thief, PLEASE just let me pick the lock on this door and see what the rat wants.

also why is my protagonist silent. that's a pet peeve of mine in a game focusing so much on character and story

not trying to be super edgy with a 0.5 star rating, i just use this for my own tracking and it's basically divided into tiers and this is the lowest tier for me. almost nothing enjoyable.

Man I just kinda am not into this, huh? Got pretty far in and finally got my first game over on one level where I listlessly tried to do the same jump the same way about eight times in a row and realized I was barely even paying attention and I didn't care to continue playing. Not especially fun or challenging or engaging imo.

The final nail in the coffin was when I got to a point where there was apparently some alternate exit to a level and I had to put on a special badge that let me "sense" it and I got to roughly where it seemed to be but it wasn't obvious to me within about three seconds what to do and I thought "yeah I don't care to figure this out actually" and turned the game off.

It's like I was going down a slide stone-faced and got stuck on a flat bit and someone yelled "push a little bit to keep going!!" and I got off instead. Just not doing it for me.

Liked some of the Wonder Flower... events? And I like the bubble power-up.

Moves and plays well. Looks pretty good. Enjoyed the combat and bosses.

But sitting there looking at my map for two minutes trying to plot my route to a door ten feet above me because there's a little tunnel in front of me that's six inches too small to fit through, and then checking my map every step of the way to make sure I haven't veered off course, is not fun. I don't know if this is a required part of the metroidvania genre and you all are just wild for it somehow or if I'm seriously directionally challenged but yeesh

Enjoyed it for a few hours and then hit a series of "where the fuck am I even supposed to go" moments and looking-at-your-map simulator sucks. Put it down for a while and at this point not even a walkthrough would save me because I have no idea what's going on or where I am - would have to start over and I'm not sure I'm willing to do that.

EMMIs are just annoying.

Tried a couple times to get into this. It was the first game I bought when I finally got a switch! I wanted to like it! It looks pretty!

Combat is boring and there's no reason to do it soooo... I didn't. Exploration is pretty boring (looking at you, climbing. do you want so slowly shimmy up this big rock? no? what if I told you you could do it ten feet to the right, too! use your imagination to slowly climb the plain rock! what's on top? nothing, why would there be something on top?) and there's basically no reason to do it soooo... I stopped. Shrines are boring (can I interest you in a janky physics puzzle designed to be solved by actual children or a fight against the same single enemy you've fought ad nauseum? no?) and there's very little reason to do them sooo... I didn't. The story is boring and there's no urgency to draw you into it soooo... I wasn't.

After a few hours I was standing there thinking, well, do I want to awkwardly climb a big hill and then jump off of it to experience the thrill of a big empty field slowly getting larger, again? And I did not. So I turned it off.

People talk about intrinsic motivation for this game and oh ho ho you must not have enjoyed it because you aren't intrinsically motivated and nah, I can be, I don't need the rewards, but the problem is that there were no meaningful rewards AND the part where I was Doing Stuff wasn't fun. The problem isn't that korok seeds aren't shiny enough for me, it's that I don't want to pick up the rock and put it next to the other rocks.

Basically fine. Enjoyed a majority of my time with it and really enjoyed a few of the scenarios but I would often reach a point where I had ALMOST everything filled out, and knew the gist of what occurred, but there was one little ancillary mystery that I didn't have all the details of pinned down, so I couldn't finish the level. And at that point I'd already looked at everything and really didn't want to go over it all again with a fine-toothed comb to pick out the one or two extra little details that I'm Just Not Seeing that would let me finish.

So what often happened is I'd get like 85-90% of the way through finishing a level and decide "alright, I've spent enough of my life looking at this" and look up the final thing or two.

Basically, I was often sick of what the game was asking me to do before it was done asking me to do it. There was one party scene and one of the paragraphs you have to fill out was like "blank and blank went to blank to blank and ran into blank and blank before going to blank and seeing blank" and I was pretty sure that could describe about four things that happened and I didn't even try to fill it out, I just looked it up.

And the last scenario where you have to put the events in order? It was not interesting to me to figure out which of these largely independent events occurred at 7:30 and which occurred at 7:35. It doesn't matter, and I'm not going to sit here for an extra fifteen minutes trying to figure it out. I'll just guess.

Kinda cute. Don't like the dash-based platforming. Played on PS5 and would frequently accidentally dash the wrong way. Skill issue, obviously, but I took a good hard look at myself and thought "am I actually interested enough in this game for other reasons to try to get better at this" and decided no, I was not. Could I have turned on some of the assists? Sure but

Honestly what heralded the beginning of the end for me was the strawberries. No reason to get em - great, right? Except when I'd go into a screen and see one, it's like the game was directly asking me "hey, are you enjoying playing Celeste? Would you like to play some more Celeste, for fun?" and my answer was often "no, actually". Thought about that for a few minutes and decided I was done.

Shelving instead of Abandoning because maybe I'll eventually give it a try on PC so I can cut out some of the dash mistakes with M+KB but like... eh

I also hear a lot about the music in this but didn't care for it basically at all. hides

nahh

Clearly ingenious puzzle design but doesn't work for me as a game at all. Feels like sitting-there-waiting-to-have-a-eureka-moment simulator. Did a couple dozen levels and never really got that excited by successfully solving a puzzle and it's not Fun To Play in the meantime. In, say, Portal, you have a portal gun and can kinda mess around a bit while you prod the level for holes - plus, the writing is excellent. In this you're playing a sliding box puzzle.

Kept playing a couple levels and then thinking "why am I doing this?" and closing it.

I always feel bad giving poor ratings to games that I really do not enjoy but feel no ire towards, but I am leaving this review as an epitaph to remind myself that Baba Is You is no longer on my to-play list. Puzzle Games may be joining Metroidvanias in the "game types I thought I liked but it increasingly turns out I actually don't" category

I wrote my initial thoughts on this game in a huff after getting stuck on the first boss for quite a while, but I have persevered and made it over the hump and completed the rest of the game without too much trouble. Having passed that initial frustrating barrier, my opinion has softened considerably.
The good:
The combat systems are cool and fun. I like the health/wounds system, I think that's neat and pushes you to play aggressively and mix up saber/claw attacks which is fun. Unlocking ingredient slots for your healing potions to give them extra effects is a cool idea. I like the various skill trees. I was a particular fan of the one that turns your claw into a shorter-range weapon with a fast combo, and once you get max Offensive stacks it heals you a bit. It reinforces that fun rhythm, of building up wounds and cutting them down with the claw, making sure to keep your stacks topped off and giving you chip heal. It all feels very good once you get everything flowing.
For a while I wasn't using the plague weapons much but eventually experimented until I found some I liked (knife ended up as my go-to!) which made everything feel even better and more fluid, and I’d encourage people to try them out as you unlock them and find one you like.
It’s also easy to reset all your talent points to try other builds which, frankly, I didn’t really do (it seems like the most significant of these would be going down the other claw upgrade path and doing deflect damage instead of window increases) but it does mean that if you allocate points weird or decide you want to do something else, it’s not a problem to fix.
I like the speed of the execution moves you do (in contrast to Sekiro where they take a second) but I would have loved for there to be some special animation for it. As it stands you just kinda nondescriptly lunge through the enemy and that’s it. Something flashier – even if it was just added particle effects – I think could have felt pretty cool.
Several of the bosses are great.
The bad:
There are times when the game throws multiple enemies at you and I never found a way to handle that gracefully. Every time there was a miniboss and a random trash mob with a spear at the same time, it was a nightmare. The bow knights are also annoying – they don’t swarm you with overlapping attacks like multiple melee enemies do, but the sound of them firing is EXTREMELY quiet, and they would almost always hit me at least once before I even realized they were there. I would have liked maybe a louder sound when they draw their bow to give you a second to prepare.
The targeting system often didn't feel quite right when attempting to switch targets; it wouldn't change, or I'd kill an enemy and the next enemy would be right behind me and it wouldn't want to acquire it. Dodging out of knockdown effect also felt like it sent me in a strange direction some of the time.
Some of the minibosses are a pain – the dual sword wielding knight attacks almost constantly and likes to jump away once his combo finishes which makes it harder to retaliate. I probably just needed to slow down and get a firmer grip on his patterns though.
I mentioned several bosses being great, and they are – unfortunately, there are some gimmick bosses that feel rather tedious. There’s one that places an environmental hazard down that kills you almost immediately, and I could never avoid it entirely, I ended up having to time several heals just right to survive until I could run out of it. Not sure what was going on there.
Another thing is that the sound seems weird. It's... muffled? Sometimes it's an enemy grunting through a mask or helmet which makes sense but the whole thing sounds a bit like you're hearing it through a pillow.
There were also a fair few times (especially with the aforementioned bow knights) where I would have an execution move queued up for an enemy that was near a ledge, and I would do it and Corvus would step too far past the enemy afterwards and fall down the ledge. This is only ever an annoyance, but it IS an annoyance. When this happened, and I fell off a ledge with enemies waiting for it at the top (or even when I just saw one of the bow knights in general) I really wished I had a sort of grappling hook that could pull me towards the enemy like in Spider-Man.
There’s not too much enemy variety. It’s mostly okay – it’s a short game, and giving you enemies you’re familiar with is an easy way to make you feel like a champ when you obliterate them – but there is one boss that, in Bloodborne parlance, is more Bloodstarved Beast than Father Gascoigne, and it worked pretty well! So I think some more non-humanoid enemies could have been nice rather than more spear guys or sword-and-board guys.
And, this goes for almost all games, but I hate clicking left stick to sprint. I don’t know what the solve for that is, I just think it feels bad every time and eventually I just stopped doing it. It doesn’t even feel that much faster honestly.
Overall, I think the combat systems here are pretty exceptional even if they don’t always jive with the times when the game throws multiple enemies at you. I would love to see my issues with targeting and dodging smoothed out even though my feedback probably is not specific enough to be helpful. I think this was pretty solid and I hope that we can eventually see more of this – maybe a little more refined, maybe a little more varied, but the core mechanics and systems are really very good.
Oh, also, my advice for someone struggling early on as I was is to put points into the talents that increase the Deflect window asap, and then spend a couple boss attempts just sitting back and trying to deflect stuff. I was going in way too aggressively and it made learning the patterns very hard. They don’t actually have that many attacks!