Reviews of other games: The deckbuilder combat is certainly enthralling, but I'm not sure if it synergizes with the roguelike structure or if it's just a cheap and trendy cash-in, similar to yesteryear's Soulslikes...

Reviews of P3R: When I was fourteen years old I would lay in bed with my eyes open and ask for God to kill me. My brother left behind a beat-up PS2 after he went off to college where he would later die of an OD

I once saw a streamer promote his playthrough of this game by promising viewers that he openly cries during it, which to me is a good summation of how the game approaches mental health. Crazy the cultural footprint it ended up having!

Had game consumers (and devs) not fallen for the "length = value" lie or the dopamine drip-feed of immanent RPG mechanics, these are the levels of quality we'd be rolling in at all times. We didn't deserve SEGA, the industry's dumbest most beautiful child.

S&P's conveyor belts of scenery and obstacles are so well-considered. You start off running on tall grass against a screaming sunset and it's striking, but so is everything that comes after. You drown in a sea of blood and return as a demon! The best rail shooter ever.

Yeah it worked like shit, you could barely get Pikachu to fish or hit a piñata, it was frustrating like 90% of the time, but I really miss these naturalistic experiments that tried to approach the world of Pokémon through messy, direct interactivity.

Garage's collapsed, cyber-Jungian world of failing bodies and spirits in bondage towers over the thematic and aesthetic concerns of nearly all other video games. The fishing and rail-travel mechanics keep the adventure-game structure engaging.

Under NieR's rote combat is a campaign crammed with novel gameplay and story-structure ideas that raise questions about virtual violence and the player-avatar connection, all set in a beautiful dead world with transcendent soundtrack work.

Every day I wake up and remind myself to outlive Keiji Inafune.

Handles AAA stardom as elegantly as possible, but its gigantic world, pockmarked with copy-pasted content, is too tiring to ever revisit. The main quest is a great experience, but I wish it was smaller and more bespoke. Kinda got me "over" Souls.

A fascinating "rail shooter-meets-ATB" combat system, a brisk and well-paced story that trims the JRPG fat, a rich and mysterious sci-fi world that doesn't over-explain itself, organic and adaptable customization systems... A miraculous game, especially pre-OoT.

Shortly after release I played through this with a friend who was beyond hype for it, and by the 3/4 mark not even he could conceal his disappointment. Lack of direction, undercooked mechanics, an ending that tries to shock-and-awe you into submission.

Combines the crowd control-centric tank-action of RE4 with the juggling, custom combos, and frantic dodge-combat of Devil May Cry to create the ultimate 3D beat-'em-up. Hilariously irreverent, with a low-budget "Tokusatsu Western" theme. My favorite game?

Neopets' decentralized, browser-based, user-driven infrastructure grew organically into a world of mystery: online grandparents, virtual billionnaires, once-in-a-blue-moon events, hidden hyperlinks, and comically account-ruining consequences.

Someone expanded the general layout/gameplay of Elevator Action into a proto-Smash Bros platform fighter, with weapon pick-ups, stage hazards, and interactable scenery; plus, an Austin Powers-tier sense of humor about its spy-fiction premise. Solid gold.

The post-industrial nightmare environs are astounding on their own, but they also elevate the tension and survival elements of its gameplay, which is basically 3D Mystery Dungeon. It's a run-based game where I was genuinely absorbed by the world and story.