It's a great game plagued with a bad story, uninteresting characters, open environments that don't have enough in them to be interesting, one boss fight that was a lot harder than it needed to be (especially on the second easiest difficulty) and dialogue you could have been taken from a Marvel movie. Oh yeah, and JD is the most annoying character in videogame history.

If you ignore all of that, the potential for an awesome game was there; stunning graphics, great music, the combat was really fun and most of the set pieces looked amazing.

Hopefully, the Coalition will take all of the feedback from this game and make Gear (of War it will hopefully be called) 6 a satisfying ending for both Epic-era and Coalition-era fans. Overall, the reason for my score being so high was not only because of the positives that I listed, but I enjoyed playing it with a friend. It made what may have been a boring solo campaign into a co-op campaign that we couldn't wait to continue.

A very impressive recreation of a long-lost demo! As someone who knows a ton about the various iterations of LM, this is accurate to the point I can’t really pick out any differences between the E3 demo and this, with amazingly closely recreated music, models and animations. I really don’t have much else to say due to it being a literal 9~ minute demo recreation, I just would like to bring attention to this as a really cool act of preservation/recreation of a long since unplayable version of Luigi’s Mansion.

Let’s get a bit personal, shall we?

I’m not at all happy with my journal/review I made last year. It was hopelessly optimistic. Don't get me wrong, I still am optimistic about a ton of things in my life, but I think it says a lot that about a month after writing it I went through an awful period of my life due to my arm injury that I still haven’t fully recovered from, mentally or physically. A lot of the sentiments just don’t reflect what I felt even a month after the review, and sure don't reflect me now. So let’s try this again.

This is really one of the only games I can say I’ve played dozens of times without speedrunning or randomizers as a strong motivator. I love it to death. Luigi’s humming to the haunting main theme, the mansion’s sprawling layout, the ghosts shouts as they startle the man in green, and each and every room are all sights and sounds forever ingrained in my memory. Every playthrough I try to learn a new little something to add to my bag of tricks, or memorize a couple new treasure or speedy spirit locations (though admittedly I’ve run out of those to memorize). It’s partly all these in combination with the fact that you can get through the whole thing in an afternoon that keeps me coming back again and again. However, that's not the main factor. Long story short, I am where I am in part due to Luigi’s Mansion. Despite my first interaction with the game being fear at 3 years old which resulted in the game being hidden in a garage out of my reach and eventually sold, it went on to be a major part of my life ever since, from making weird powerpoints of renders from the game as a child, to it being a game I played all the time starting from the beginning of high school, a major low point in my life for a great many reasons that continued until at minimum until my graduation and some continuing to today. Luigi’s Mansion has been a great source of joy throughout darker periods of my life and even now I keep playing. And y’know what, me from a year ago? Fuck you, that’s fine. I don’t need to grow past this game. It’s not something I should be moving on from, really ever. Because life isn’t just going to keep going up for me forever. Life’s a lot like a roller coaster. It goes up, sure, but also down, and every other direction. And as the still love of my life MJ says, “You’re never on a roller coaster alone”. But the people on that roller coaster don’t have to necessarily all be people. They can also be objects of sentimental value, pieces of media, or anything else you hold dear. That’s what Luigi’s Mansion is for me. A precious item that I’ve taken with me on this roller coaster of life, and hell if I ever let go of it. Even while I improve myself and my situation in life, I think it’s okay to keep this with me. To, ironically, keep coming back to these haunted halls for comfort and support even when I’m by all means mostly doing great! Because, of course, life isn’t that damn simple.

Just to end this off in a similar way to the last one, I’d like to record how I’m feeling about my life here. I’m certainly not at my lowest, but not my highest either. I’m working hard at college even though it's a struggle, and I’m about to transfer between colleges anyway. I’ve been attempting to recover from my arm injury through nearly a year of physical therapy and 2 surgeries under my belt, and it's going alright. I now have a second partner to love with all my heart along with MJ, who is still as important to me as ever. My interests have grown further in number in games and I’ve also been trying to branch out to other forms of media, which has gotten me into Revue Starlight, which is becoming/has already become the most important piece of art to me in a very long time. And I played Luigi’s Mansion a couple times this year. Because when I’m feeling either down or up, great or awful, it’s there as a place I can go when I need comfort and support, or even simply just for some fun ghostbusting.

For the longest time, I thought that the prevalent issue weighing down roguelites/likes was excessive RNG. Later on, I slightly adjusted my stance: RNG was okay, but a lack of player control to combat any unexpected changes as a result of RNG was not. In one fell swoop, Mosa Lina has neatly proven both of those issues to be mere symptoms of the root cause: modern roguelites/likes overemphasize the macro over the micro.

This problem I think, stems from the genre's overreliance upon meta-progression and run investment. While these would at first appear to be opposite ends of the spectrum (after all, meta-progression often relies upon you throwing away successive runs to gain some kind of advantage/pass certain checks), they both point to the same core issue of ultimately not respecting the player's time. In the former case, the moment-to-moment gameplay often isn't interesting enough to sustain a run. In the latter, the player either succeeds with the "god-run" and has to chase the high through more grinding all over again, or throws it all away due to mistakes/RNG and feels like absolute shit, lamenting what could have been with their hours spent, just inches away from the finish line.

Mosa Lina doesn't fall victim to this, because it was never about winning in the first place. There's no end to the game: the core concept infinitely loops and you'll never hit the credits roll unless you decide to manually mash through them in the pause menu. There's a scoring system in place, but the descriptions themselves often mock how points are handed out arbitrarily. On top of this, there's no meta-progression whatsoever because practically everything is unlocked and randomized from the start: you've got three randomized toys to play with out of a pool of nine randomly selected for the particular loop out of 21 possible toys, and if nothing works (which the game outright warns you will happen), just reroll until something sticks.

As a result, the game solves two problems at once: the aforementioned issue of filling up a player's time with weak moment-to-moment gameplay, and the classic issue of "lock-and-key" solutions creating linear puzzles that lack replayability. Although the game characterizes itself as "a hostile interpretation of the immersive sim," I find it to be more indifferent if anything. It doesn't guide you towards solutions, it never provides any incentives for finding solutions, and it never even bothers to explain its underlying mechanics aside from listing the control scheme and being forthright with its unpredictability. Yet by doing so, it sets itself up as the perfect player-driven sandbox. The difficulty and learning curve is entirely up to you; sure the types of tools are randomized, but half of the battle is figuring out what to do with the tool combinations given and exploiting the game's floaty gravity and set pieces with your heavy character and tight jump. If you can't succeed, a refresh is just seconds away!

I don't think I've yelled so much at a video game since my high school days of grinding Dota 2 (a very dark period in my life, I'm aware). However, these were not yells of frustration or exasperation in the slightest. No, this was me shouting in excitement every time something batshit crazy happened on screen (read: pretty damn often). Sometimes the game really does ask for the seemingly impossible with huge gaps to cross/jump and absolutely garbage or ill-fitting tools that I can't even say feel balanced at times; I swear the fish have been useless in 80% of their appearances. That's what makes it so damn enthralling though: savoring the thrill of discovery when I learned how to bomb-jump in mid-air by properly timing my placements, or somehow finagling a solution by pushing and juggling around some crazy contraptions made of dead frogs, some wire, and a ladder. The possibilities felt endless, and while I do have some critique for the initially unintuitive aiming (you shoot upwards/downwards at a 75 degree angle from the horizontal and can't fine-tune your trajectory any further), this game really is the full and realized package it claims to be despite (or perhaps as a result of!) its lack of excessive streamlining. With Level Editor updates on the way, I can 100% see myself returning to mess around more in the future. I'm nothing but pleased as punch that a game which wasn't even on my radar has sufficiently blown me away: in a year of flashy major releases and tired conventions, Mosa Lina pulls back the curtain to reveal that the basics are all you need for a good show after all.

My spooky season wouldn’t be complete without some Wii jank thrown into the mix. Granted, Deadly Creatures is by no means a straight horror title, but my first two Wii picks in Escape from Bug Island and Calling were unfortunately a bit painful to play through, so my third pick will have to do! In this game, you alternate between controlling a tarantula and a scorpion, navigating the Sonoran Desert while fighting off local wildlife such as rats, gila monsters, an angry rattlesnake, and of course, one another. The majority of these levels are linear romps through dark tunnels and buried human garbage, and as the player progresses, they’ll also unlock additional abilities such as a silk-web grapple for the tarantula and a slash for the scorpion that lets you cut down tall grass barriers. Most distinct to Deadly Creatures, however, is the ability to creep up walls (and in the case of the tarantula, eventually walk and cling onto ceilings), which allows the player to more easily weave through the chaotic obstacle courses as well as better convey the intricate and vast micro-environments scattered throughout the Sonoran Desert.

That said, Deadly Creatures' biggest draw is its combat. Throughout the game, local fauna relentlessly assault the player as they intrude upon their territory. These scores of gritty and grueling close-quarters encounters remind me heavily of Cubivore’s combat; the player is often forced to contend with multiple foes at a time in claustrophobic settings, and while it’s not particularly complex (classic bait-and-punish using the scorpion’s dash/block and the tarantula’s jump defensively before striking back), enemies can punish complacent players quite heavily with stun-locking thrusts while surrounding the player to corner them into unfavorable situations. The obligatory waggle controls for several of the stronger/better-ranged attacks further accentuate the tense fights, and are a rare case where I can at least appreciate the implementation of Wii motion control QTEs considering how much fun it is to slam rats and beetles into the dirt as part of the scorpion's "execution moves."

The downside then, is that the game wears out its novelty fairly quickly, and concurrently, the external circumstances fail to necessitate any additional player experimentation that could otherwise provide significant changes in gameplay. Enemy differentiation and AI are huge culprits: while there are a variety of different hostile creatures thrown at the player, the fairly barebones AI and general lack of different enemy attacks means that the same bread-and-butter strategies can be abused regardless of the exact situation. In particular, the tarantula can spam the quick jump attack while the scorpion can simply block single attacks before stabbing every vulnerable foe to death. Alternatively, the player can abuse the standard attack combo to trap foes in eternal hitstun, which by itself can trivialize the majority of the game’s encounters. Even though the player creatures unlock more attacks over time, there’s never any incentive to try them out because button mashing is all that the player needs even at the highest difficulty to win almost every encounter. As a result, the game’s fights never really get harder, but instead become longer by throwing more enemies in a row during single encounters or relying upon spongier foes that now take a half-minute of mashing to finish off. The sole exceptions here are the enemy horned lizards, but they are even more laborious to fight because they spend so much time blocking hits rather than proactively endangering the player with their own attacks. The optimal method is to bait the lizard to charge at you and immediately strike them after dodging (or if using the scorpion, try and get close enough for a Burrow Strike), but this can take a solid minute or so if the enemy AI does not cooperate and instead spends its time meandering about and defending whenever you approach instead.

This eventual slog of enemy encounters is all on top of the slew of strange technical issues and design decisions that slowly but surely bleed the game to death by a thousand cuts. The most intrusive problem is the persistent stuttering and mid-level loading throughout the game’s runtime that slow exploration and combat to a literal crawl. The disorienting camera also becomes a liability, thanks to the very narrow FOV that doesn’t automatically rotate around if the player character turns and walks towards the camera’s source. In a mostly flat 3D game like Cubivore, a lack of full camera control is not as problematic when only one vertical angle for an isometric perspective is really required. However, in a fully 3D action-adventure game like Deadly Creatures where the player needs to see how the world warps around them while walking up/down walls, the lack of camera control is far more egregious, especially when the camera constantly gets uncomfortably close to the player model (often pointing down towards the ground so you can’t see approaching enemies) and at times, gets caught or stuck on walls. Then, there’s the usual layer of 2000s era jank surrounding this with strange object geometry collision, enemy/player models getting stuck on edges and vertices, seemingly random invisible walls, indistinguishable unclimbable surfaces, and so much more. I can certainly tolerate any of these issues in isolation, but together, they form this onslaught of sheer struggle that absolutely wore me out. If the game's length was cut in half, then it’d be a much easier recommendation: after all, the game stops giving you new traversal toys to play with by the halfway point and the actual level design itself never noticeably branches out. As it stands though, you’ll need more than just a penchant for stretched-out textures and 3D polygonal jank to really get something out of this distinct yet sadly tedious experiment forever stuck in its time.

Basically Super Mario 64, with the ability to correct your jumps midair and plenty of way to skip a star requirement. And a shotgun, obviously.

Simple in concept, great in execution. You can shoot basically anything that you would think it would get destroyed. See a wall that is bothering you? Shoot it! Don't want to grab Bowser by the tail and break the lifespan of your analogue stick? Shoot him. Baby Penguin being too loud? Don't try it. But you can commit first degree murder to the mother, if you feel like it. A lot of details went into the interaction both with characters and the objects themselves. Not to mention a couple of QOL improvements that makes this ROM hack a really enjoyable experience.

Camera is a bit iffy and often goes behind walls and such. I don't know if this hapenned because I killed Lakitu while he was giving me advice on how to control the camera at the beginning or is it really intentional. Probably my only nitpick.

Getting the 120 stars was a breeze, not even counting up to 3 hours.

KILL THE LIFE... SAVE THE LIFE... KILL THE PAST... BELIEVE THE NET

Trying to understand this game, is a big messy puzzle inside a bigger puzzle. Not just because the themes it tackles or something more superficial. It's everything undernearth that makes it a really special for me. Kill The Past, and don't let it's darkness to swallow you. Save The Life from the ones that threats it or Believe in the Net and take a glimpse into the future.

If you ever played The Silver Case, the prequel to this game you won't feel that sense of familiarity here since most of the cast is new outside probably Tokio Morisihima from the Placebo chapter. While The Silver Case signature visual style still intact, everything else is brand new. What I'm getting at is you don't need to play The Silver Case to enjoy this game, BUT, it's highly recommended to do so. Some scenes make nods to more than anything, concepts and characters that aren't totally explained throughout the main plot from the main three stories this game presents.

We have three stories with three different protagonists; Correctness, Match Maker and Placebo. Like The Silver Case these three stories are indirectly connected with one another and give form to this big messy puzzle. While Correctness is the surface of the story you'd have to walk blindly if you just have not read both Match Maker and Placebo stories, Placebo mostly. While Match Maker tries to focus it's story in the main characters of that set story, rather than a specific portion of the 25th Ward. Placebo we take control of Tokio Morisihima of the past game. Here is where all the secrets are delivered, while it starts slow and it's somewhat boring in general, it really pays off big on the final bits. You can say Placebo answers most of the questions you'll probably have in Correctness.

The plot is convoluted on purpose, let the game outsmart and surprise you, it's part of the experience. The gameplay believe it or not is more tedius than in The Silver Case, instead of instantly choosing where we want to go, like in Killer7 we're stopped for a few seconds, to then regain control of out actions and then choose where we want to go instead of being a contextual action under the assumption you have a controller. It could work better for a touch screen. Probably because this is a 2005 mobile only game and Suda wanted to be as faithful as possible or as they say in the game "It's part of the job". I'll go with the latter. So investigating isn't really that fun, good thing is those bits aren't as frequent as the game got us to believe from the beginning.

The presentation in this game really is simple, but effective in every way possible. From the angles the characters are drawn, the grey color palette itself making a slight assumption it was inspired by the "Parade" chapter from The Silver Case and giving this game themes it goes perfectly with it. And the music, the songs are as stylish as this game is and set the mood perfectly for each scene. Whenever is intense action, investigating, exploring, or even just for goofs the music will always be on spot. On cases it's not, it feels eerie but still on point weirdly enough. As different persons write the different scenarios of each story, every artist had their own vision on how it's meant to look. Correctness with it's grey color pallete is my personal favorite. It uses a lot of techniques regarding to the angle view where it's meant to be looked at. Even referencing some movies. Tokio Morishima and Placebo uses a specific color to represent a character. Since Tokio's Placebo isn't focused on the city, or specific cases, it's focused on him and the angles where the images are drawn reflect that. Match Maker goes for a more comic-like artstyle, giving the action shots a lot of movement and life others chapters simply don't have. All of them lovely crafted and makes each act feel unique and stand out on it's own.

The 25th Ward: The Silver Case is bigger and has a more ambitious scope than The Silver Case was at the time. Expanding on the themes of Kill the Past and giving new perspectives on all of the presented stories. Personally, I went on a big catharsis after finishing it. "What just happenned?" were thoughts that I couldn't get out of my mind right after finishing Correctness and the credits rolled, so I started going deep in this rabbit hole of a story. And when a story does that, it's a good game in my eyes.

I played through this game on hardened and at times, it did not feel like it. After Act 2 however, it felt like there was a massive bump in difficulty.

Overall the story was interesting, the levels looked great, the characters (like Price) were very likable and the music was EPIC. I love the music so much. I can't wait to play the next two modern warfare games.

I'm not playing this on veteran, I'm sorry. I think I will hate the game if I tried! 🤣