It's starting to occur to me that I might be a weenie. The avid FNAF fans, whom I might add are much younger than me, regard this one as NOT that scary. Look, whenever the yellow thing moved I smashed escape like it was the Mfing Like Button.

I also have so far liked this series quite a bit! I know a lot of backloggd are Too Cool For School to like Five Nights Freddy, but I am a big fan of this crap. I still absolutely fucking love Phone Guy's cheerful company man persona even while he is describing some truly grisly stuff, like a springlock failure suit and that you should go bleed out in a different room if it happens.

Really, if you have ever worked a shitty service job before, this series really hits different. Like I said, this could almost be mistaken as a left-leaning series if we knew the guy who made it wasn't donating 100,000 dollars to right-wing politicans who want to kill homeless people for being an eyesore next to McDonald's.

Speaking of eyesores, this Springtrap fella! Yikes! Seen better days! Scared the crap out of me, he is much more of a predator than the last 2 games' animatronics, and the way he looks at you through the window...look I really don't get the reputation this game gets as not-scary. The way he just approaches you in the jump scare really seems like he is just going to KILL kill you. Like, beat the piss out of you. None of this shoving you in a vending machine shit, he is going to murder you.

My only real issue is that Scott really lost the plot in regards to the door. Slamming the door in these bastard's faces really feels good, it had such a great sound effect attached to it. I really do think you lose something when you don't have something that works 100% of the time in halting them in their path. The mask was delightful in how it really never felt like a great solution, and the audio cues to lure him away are nice here, but man I think Scott peaked too early in regards to the design of these things. He got it PERFECT from the word go and had to work backwards from there. Although I do think he was onto something by making the cameras in this game REALLY shit, and Springtrap much more careful at hiding in darkness so you lean in closer to the screen. His horror instincts are totally there.

Anyway, I would safely now call myself a fan of these games. I like the creativity on display here, the dedication to slick world-building, and wonderful audio design. Even though the guy who makes these would vote for General Greivous if he ran on the GOP ticket, I still think he can design a cool horror game!

Scott Cawthon proves himself to be the most savvy bag chaser in gaming history by immediately pivoting to a furry audience in the sequel.

i honestly didn't think FNAF needed a sequel proper, as it is a really perfect slice of horror, but like i said, my man wants to pay some fucking bills. i respect how this entry takes everything up another level. you have so many problems to deal with at once, and not a lot of great options to be dealing with them. in a way it's a lot like my shitty life. unfortunately i couldn't actually beat this one so i won't rate it, but i respect the great sound design, the scare chord that plays when an animatronic is near your office, and that it focuses more on exposing you to danger than letting you slam a door in its face. However I found the rules for avoiding death a little more unclear, and the focus on the music box means that the other camera feeds might as well be completely redundant. Also a God-Fearing Christian Republican made Chica that cheeked up? I have questions.

Speaking of that asshole, I still adore Cawthon's performance as the phone guy. the way he toes the line between a company man and letting it slip just how dangerous your job really is, while also barely hiding his dislike for the puppet, it's such a great character. It's a double-edged sword, because him dying in night 4 of the first game is genuinely really upsetting and makes the lonely standoff of night 5 have much more impact. It's great horror writing. But if you're gonna make a sequel damn it sucks to kill off such a gem of a character.

my journey to becoming a FNAF Fan in my mid-20s is almost complete, and FNAF 2 is pretty cool!

Finally beat this. I stopped at Ezra Shields for a year, came back, and whooped his ass in one-try, and basically just cleaned house through the rest of the game.

This is my new favorite souls-like, I adore The Surge games cyberpunk presentation, and while the Surge 1 focused more on a sci-fi horror System Shock thing, The Surge 2 goes for what I can only describe as a 90's Anime OVA aesthetic. This includes the mediocre voice acting, which I think is a POSITIVE. Even though I said it was my favorite Souls-like, I do ultimately think that calling it a Souls-like is what has doomed some really underappreciated gems from getting their day in the sun. These games have similar verbs to Dark Souls but ask different things of you, and I know Souls fans struggle with anything that isn't I-frames and dodge rolling, but there are other ways to approach game design!

I want to write a more in-depth review later, but I enjoyed the hell out of this entire game. The boss fight with Delver was so good I messaged Deck13 on Twitter to tell them it was the best boss fight ever. The level design is just as complex and winding as The Surge 1's, and I found the story compelling if unfortunately undercooked. I think what is clearly a tight-budget has to do with that. Honestly, I would prefer static shots with no voice acting if I could get more world building, which Deck13 are really good at.

Deck13 are one of our most important developers, as I would DIE for more AA games like this that are incredibly ambitious while also being really solidly put together. The size and scope of a game that costs probably the fraction of a Dark Souls title is awe-inspiring and I really hope they continue to have success.

I'm puzzled why these games don't have difficulty modes though. I don't see any reason there can't be difficulty options, these games could be so much more well-liked if there was an easy or normal mode to cut your teeth on its mechanics. Ninja Gaiden Black has easy mode fellas we don't need to act like we're above it.

Also the directional parry rules, A+ work guys.

One of the most unfortunately Mid games of all time. Every vertical slice of this game LOOKS amazing, FEELS really compelling, and seems as if it is amazing, but it does NOT stretch across an entire game's length. It's one of the most bizarre feats of game design ever, to make 30 seconds of fun but not one whole minute of it.

I adore the game's commitment to darkness, utilizing beautiful 2004 stencil shadows to create a true sense of claustrophobic darkness that only the Thief games can match, and the willingness to surround you in that darkness. But I absolutely fucking despise the BFG Edition for capitulating to morons who thought the darkness was a NEGATIVE and not something Doom 3 should have doubled down on.

What really kills Doom 3 is a few things: the terrible spread on the shotgun that renders a weapon you are going to use a lot really bad. The terrible damage indicator that shakes and flashes your screen, which makes getting ganked more annoying than it is frightening. But most importantly: this game is boring.

It starts off so promising, an effectively tension driven survival horror game, and as you get more powerful weapons you start to feel more in control of the situation, but there are so many grey corridors you can go through before you are just like, "I don't really care anymore." Unfortunately, Doom 3 ends up here when you still have like, 9 hours left of game to play. It's a genuine chore to beat this game, it isn't able to sustain pressure like System Shock 2, which it clearly was paying attention to. But it also isn't paced like Half Life, where you are never doing the same thing for too long. Hell, its gameplay loop isn't as perfect as FEAR, ensuring you wouldn't want to do anything else. It's just a kind of annoying gameplay loop that gets old real fast.

Like I said, a huge shame. As the way the game looks, the panicky way the guns swing around as you are getting swarmed in the dark, the animations on the guns are just superb, there is so much here that makes me wish I was a diehard Doom 3 defender, but unfortunately the bigger picture proves everyone right: this shit is Mid.

Finding out some of you played this when you were a kid, and this is a "nostalgia game from childhood" has officially made me feel like a fucking geriatric. This came out when I was graduating high school!! I was taking the damn SATs while you were going goo-goo-ga-ga over Freddy Fazbear??? I was at Barnes & Noble and a mom and daughter were looking at a book of the FNAF characters, and while it was very, very adorable to hear the little kid talk about Nightmare Freddy, it was still a stark realization that a long time has passed since FNAF 1 came out.

As such, though, I regard this as the last time I ever had a pulse on what was "hip" and "cool," as ever since I have been deeply uncool, and I remember FNAF when it was new!! It was genuinely really exciting, no joke. It had this anarchic charm about it, as it had such a lame-ass graphic on steam that looked like any other shitty steam greenlight game, but was really effectively scary resource management. Just from how minimalistic everything, up to and including THE ADVERTISING is, you can really feel this was a hail mary by Scott Cawthon just to see if SOMETHING stuck, because shitty Christian games for Rod and Todd Flanders certainly wasn't doing it.

If we're keeping it 300 like the Romans, I actually think this game is still pretty cool. The sound design is very effectively unsettling, as that fan's constant buzzing really does capture something about working a terrible job that few games really can do, and the scare chord when an animatronic is just casually watching you never fails to make me flinch. There is a lot to the presentation of this thing that really makes you forget it's just a fish-eyed lens applied to a nearly static screen.

The world-building would result in many masterpieces by Matthew Patrick, but here, it is largely focused more on a much more enigmatic aspect of the series: the Fazbear Entertainment company is just absolute shit. They are cheap as cheap can be, their restaurant looks like shit and is generally nasty, and their laughable paystub is just the perfect punchline for what is essentially a tale of how much minimum wage jobs fucking suck and how evil these companies are. If I didn't know some God-fearing Republican made these games I would have assumed the absolute OPPOSITE, it's that overt.

Speaking of that guy, I don't blame him for even a SECOND that he just started pumping these fucking things out. I have been releasing music since 2012 and have had absolutely zero success of any kind, it has only occasionally been a financial benefit, and barely that. Making the stuff you want to make is more expensive than it is profitable, and actually getting that small glimmer of success is almost alien when you have constantly failed. That is why I have absolutely no qualms with him milking this cow dry, get the bag, as they say. I know he is a pro-life shithead, but honestly, if you want to enjoy any media in life you are just going to have to accept that some of it is being made by people who hold stupid-ass beliefs, not everything is going to have the squeaky-clean politics of something like Gex: Enter The Gecko.

Anyway check out my music as I have perfect beliefs and opinions and have never done wrong.
https://visitorinformation.bandcamp.com/track/far-away

Finally, a souls-like that asks the question: what if summoning help made the game HARDER? The A.I in this thing fucking STINKS. Like, unacceptable levels of terrible. Stranger of Paradise came out before this!!! What the actual fuck!!

Genuinely apocalyptically bad A.I aside, game is fun! I love the parry mechanics and the deflections in this game makes Sekiro look 100 years out of date, some of these boss fights whoop total ass: Lu Bu being one of my all-time favorites, and the added verticality means that these are more varied and unique levels than you ever saw in Nioh. But I would be lying if I said this game had the secret sauce that Nioh does that makes it borderline perfect action gaming, and it is hard to point out what that sauce is.

It's definitely not this fucking port, which is some serious fucking Stink. Also puzzling because Stranger of Paradise and Nioh 2 had some excellent PC releases, but Wo Long is just for no reason worse in this regard. Team Ninja has taken a page from From Soft's book now: make a sequel worse for no reason at all.

On release this was genuinely unacceptable, as the game would crash after boss fights, and Wo Long does not save quite as feverishly as a Souls game might, so you might have to replay a boss fight, which, to be frank, is Whack. Some patches have mitigated some of the worst of it, but still it was bad for way too fucking long.

The A.I, as mentioned up top, is also just total dogshit poopoo peepee, I have no idea why it sucks so bad. The game starts you with computer allies in the beginning of almost every mission and you NEED to turn them the fuck off as soon as you can or else they are going to hold you back more than A.I has ever held you back. This is coup-de-grace of annoying companions as they talk constantly, tell you when you are low on health, and fail to dodge or attack whatsoever so you are ALWAYS having to revive them. If you don't want to play this solo and don't want to assemble a crew of flunkies you HAVE to get a friend to play with you, or else this is genuinely unplayable.

Btw Stranger of Paradise came out a year earlier.

Also, bone to pick with Japanese game developers: when I beat a boss let me see him die, please. I'm so sick of "actually you DIDN'T beat me" fights and it feels like they are a Japanese thing. So many times you struggle through a real pain in the ass, beat him, only for him to run from the room and the player character show up 2 minutes later somehow! One guy even had the nerve to get stabbed by another character after the boss fight. Yeah man, I tried stabbing that guy about 100 times and it didn't give!! Why is it different now?? This is such a deflating trope that Dark Souls got so right. When you beat a boss you watch that motherfucker dissolve into dust. That mfer is DEAD. You use the power of the ancient dragon to fire a comet at a boss in Wo Long he sprints out of the room only to fall on a banana peel and die in a cutscene. Fuck you.

What there is to like here is so good that I would dare say I LOVE Wo Long. At certain points this is an all-time favorite, the fights are good, the animations are beautiful, and the systems are engaging, but when it is asking you to 1v3 a bunch of fucking dudes when its combat system is very firmly a 1v1 combat system, it makes me worried that Team Ninja are going for the From Soft school of game design to "make it harder by just suffocating the player." It briefly reaches the highs of Nioh 2 just enough to make these dalliances with shittiness all the more infuriating.

I hope to god this is a test bed for Rise of the Ronin, because there are so many good ideas here in so many bad templates for me to believe they would cook up such a fun parry system only to abandon it after one game. Nioh fans are going to like this one, but from what I've played of Stranger of Paradise I would honestly call that the must-buy of these two games, this one is still worth a shot if you are curious.

System Shock 1 is one of my all-time favorites, and I was really anticipating this remake for about 300 years, but I am so unenthusiastic about this. It basically sands down all of the unique eccentricities of the original System Shock while offering nothing new or interesting to observe. Of course there are many positives: the music is wonderful, the animations of the guns are surprisingly dense, and cyberspace is a marked improvement. The new bad boy attitude they gave the hacker though is dumb as fuck though.

I played through Medical and could honestly just feel that I had zero interest in playing anymore. System Shock 1 is a game I can replay all the time, it feels weighted and frightening in a way few games are, this remake removes all the little things that made me fall in love with that game.

So, have you ever been on vacation from work and desperately searched for a "vacation game?" A game you want to just sink your teeth into with all your free time and play the SHIT out of. Sometimes they are hard to find, I remember when I was 17 and on my summer vacation finally scoured through the entirety of Deus Ex. I remember that summer like I was IN Deus Ex. It was awesome! I also didn't get laid a lot until my 20s.

Anyway, thank fucking god for the Hedon games for being exactly what I was looking for, like no joke, EXACTLY, what I had been wanting. I was thinking, "I really want a first person shooter with as dense of level design as Unreal, but I've played Unreal so much there is nothing new I can find there." Lo and behold, the Horny Orc game was thinking what I'm thinking.

It took me about 35 hours to finish both games while on my vacation, which is almost an entire work week! Maybe I should get a new job battling monsters in hell? I digress.

The way the game presents itself is so unassuming that I think the developer, Zan, is kind of brilliant. Disguise your thoughtfully designed first-person adventure as a generic boomer shooter with a horny coat-of-paint. It's so brilliantly done I fell for it for a few years! It wasn't until this last playthrough that something finally clicked into place. It was after the mission "Errant Signal" in Act I, you are teleported to a mountainside and you have to navigate through a MASSIVE facility carved into the sides of the mountain, and some drop-dead gorgeous music from Alexander Brandon starts playing. Genuinely from that moment I understood perfectly what Hedon was all about and knew I was playing an all-time favorite.

While combat is genuinely really fun, a lot of meaty sound-effects and great challenges, it really is that thrill of exploration and problem solving that I think gives Hedon its own spice. ESPECIALLY in Act II, where the levels become BIG. Like, BIG big. I am deeply in love with games that feel like journeys, that I have just completed and grand adventure, covered the entire world, and maybe even went to Dimension X, and Hedon absolutely captures that sensation in a way that feels like a Dream Game scenario.

So I would like to formally thank Zan for making the game of my dreams so I didn't have to!

An absolutely gargantuan game, the maps are some of the most complicated maps I've ever seen in a shooter, and the shooting isn't even the selling point. Just exploring these massive, really densely built labyrinths is the real fun. Add in to that gameplay based more on completing objectives and puzzle solving, it's very surprising that they've used the big booby orcs with guns to try and trick the Sweaty Teenager demographic into a game that is going to be wayyyyy too esoteric for them.

As for me? I love it!!

I also resent this being lumped in with other Boomer Shooters who are nothing but an extremely loud blast of nothing and nostalgia baiting for the sweatiest 30 year olds you've ever met. Hedon is much more intelligent than it lets on.

EDIT: Also having music from Alexander Brandon in the game is EMOTIONAL MANIPULATION. of COURSE I am going to like a game with that music in it.

The GOATs at Team Ninja do it again and make something I'm going to spend a hundred hours playing obsessively.

I love the action here, as the deflect system is probably the most satisfying parry system I've used since Sekiro, which this game obviously takes influence from. While there is no chance in hell Team Ninja is ever going to match From Soft's superior level design, they sure as hell know how to design a boss fight and combat system.

If you like Nioh and Nioh 2, you don't need ME telling you that you'll dig this, you already own it! I'm the one who is behind.

Oh, it does bear mentioning that the technical issues on PC are FOR REAL. this port is crap and it's honestly unacceptable to have this many crashes in a game.

Now that a new Marathon game has been announced the Youtube Gaming Content Creator machine is now pumping out dogshit videos like "THE DISTURBING STORY OF MARATHON EXPLAINED" at an alarming rate. It used to be a bunch of the most irritating fucking losers you've ever met pining over Marathon's story...and I was one of them.

I'm not too steamed though because Marathon is awesome and more people need to suffer the nightmarish switch puzzle in Marathon 1 to understand what this weirdo series is all about.