Is it sacrilegious to say I think I prefer the first game? Yes? Ok, that's fair.

Portal 2 is a fantastic game, which you don't need me to tell you. The first game's tighter pacing, more subtle and deadpan sense of humor, unnerving atmosphere, and narrower scope just appeal to me more. Tonally, Portal 2 is closer to a more generic adventure game, down to Chell's more appealing and less disheveled design. Criticizing this game's humor is a bit unfair, considering it wasn't nearly as overdone as it is now and overall, the comedy in this game is excellent. However, I didn't find Wheatley or Cave Johnson especially funny. Wheatley was a little too good at his job of providing nonstop idiotic blabbering, and shooting the little fucker to space was very satisfying. I prefer fewer more deliberate and punchier lines. If you let him, Wheatley will talk longer than the timer during the boss battle lasts. As for Cave Johnson, his lines also tend to drag out too long and kill the joke, and honestly, you really can't satirize the hubris and cruelty of eccentric billionaires more than they do in real life all by themselves. I wish more time in the old aperture area was spent dedicated to Caroline (who I know is very much in the background on purpose) since there's remarkably little to go off of considering what a revelation her role is supposed to be.

My only other minor issue is some of the level design in between test chambers. It's a lot of zooming in to look for a tiny portalable surface across a massive, mostly empty space. Portal excels at tiny, claustrophobic spaces filled with details for those paying attention, so vast stretches of nothingness are very out of place.

That's more than enough complaining. Now that it's all out of the way, it's gushing time because this game is great. GLaDOS may well be one of the greatest characters of all time. Every single line of hers is fantastic, and her character development is believable, funny, and touching. She manages to walk the line of being sympathetic and a monster almost effortlessly. Something that helps her with this is her far more animated and expressive design on the occasions where you do actually see her. In fact, everything in this game looks great, especially considering it came out in 2011. Wheatley is also an extremely expressive character, and he's just a sphere with an eye!

All the new puzzle elements mesh perfectly with the idea of using portals, and allow for a lot of fun, creative chambers. The structure in which there are several chambers dedicated to learning a specific mechanic and increasing its complexity before moving onto the next once you've mastered it prevents the game from ever feeling stale. It would be nice to see some concepts pushed even further or combined more, but the puzzles are extremely fun and solid. I'm excited to try playing the co-op mode with my sister, which I'm sure will also be fantastic. I'll update this review when I do!

The ending is perfect, and I would want nothing else. I have no notes. GLaDOS just goes "I had a crush on a girl in my laboratory and didn't know how to deal w it so I wrote her a letter that just said 'get out of my facility'".

I've been a fan of Endless Ocean for years. Not once did I imagine I'd actually get to see a new entry in the series, so I was shocked and delighted when Luminous was announced. Even when mediocre review scores started popping up after the game's release, I was undeterred. The first Endless Ocean game had pretty average reviews when it was released after all. So the day I got back from college after finishing my finals, I immediately picked up a copy. In retrospect, the warning signs were all there, but I am still bitterly disappointed to say that this is a poor, bland excuse for a game.

The first red flag is that, for the first time in the series, the titular ocean is truly endless. Each time you start a new dive, you are dropped in a randomized location that can contain a few different types of biomes and structures. Initially, it's fun to explore and see all the different things, but there's only so much room for variety. Within a few dives, you'll start seeing the same simplistic structures again and again. It makes me yearn for the wonderful diving locations in Endless Ocean 2, filled with unique touches and genuinely breathtaking set pieces. I would rather have a few well-crafted maps than an infinite amount of generated slop.

But the scenery isn't what you're going to be looking at in this sort of game, no, you're looking at the marine life. And as far as that goes, I am baffled by the decisions this game made. There are over 200 more species in this game than there were in Endless Ocean 2, but the variety feels much smaller. With the exception of some special encounters, Luminous has no pinnipeds, sirenians, otters, sea birds, modern marine reptiles except turtles, sea horses, jellyfish, nautiluses, horseshoe crabs, sea sponges, or sea slugs (all of which are present in at least one of the previous games). There are also significantly fewer cetaceans, upsetting to a whale enthusiast such as myself. So if they cut so many species out, how did the roster get beefed up to 578? The one thing I will praise the species roster on is the inclusion of tons of prehistoric marine life. That's new, and very cool to see. But as for the rest... well, there's 11 nearly identical species of tuna. That helps. This game has a lot of very similar looking fish species and when that isn't enough, it turns to good ol' palette swaps. Sometimes these swaps are fun references to special creatures from the other games. Sometimes these swaps are just slightly green tinted whale shark. I love fish and it doesn't need to all be charismatic megafauna to get me to care. But this game couldn't even do that right, because it removed zoom spots from the first two games. You're no longer able to zoom in on dedicated spots for small creatures to show up, instead you get to scan a few pixels that are allegedly a fire goby or something. You never get to appreciate the beauty of the smaller life you're finding because you can't see it most of the damn time. And speaking of not seeing! The title of the game, Luminous, is a reference to its most confusing decision. Every creature, prior to being manually scanned by you, is covered in a blue, silvery sheen that obscures their features. This makes it easy to tell which creatures you've already scanned or not, which is nice if you're just trying to get through the game. But maybe you want to use the diving game to, I don't know, relax and look at the fish?? No can do, you've gotta manually uncover every critter you want a good look at. There's no passively swimming around taking in the sights. If you want to look at fish, you've gotta earn it.

What can you do with those critters once you've scanned them anyway? Put them in an aquarium? Feed them? Train them? Pet them? Use a highlighter in the water near them? Blow a whistle at them? Nope. All of these options you had for interacting with creatures in the previous games are gone. You can take a picture if you want. That's it. Listen, we're already going for verrrryyy unrealistic with these games. No, you shouldn't be encouraging people to touch wildlife, but there is a magical glowing coelacanth the size of a car swimming past me. I think we can take an acceptable break from reality to actually. Have features in the game you can use.

There is no aspect of this game that doesn't fall far, far short of its predecessors. The gorgeous (if geographically out of place, seriously what the fuck was an Irish folk song doing in the Amazon) vocal tracks in the first two games are gone. The story in this game is so bare bones it might as well not exist. There are NES games with more complex plot points. The first two Endless Ocean games weren't exactly Moby Dick (aside from the presence of whales), but they had a real earnest charm about them, and did actually try to deliver an engaging experience. GG and his very real and cool American saying "Hasta la pizza!" live in my heart forever. Calling Sera and Daniel cardboard cutouts would be an insult to cardboard. I can't believe this game honestly tried to pull a fake-out death on us like anyone would give a shit. And how do you even access this mediocre story? Well, you can't progress organically through maps since there are infinite maps, so you just need to grind between bitty chunks of the story. Awkward, but not unbearable, ok. But to actually complete the game and finish the story? You gotta fill out the mystery board. The mystery board is a board with 99 squares on it that each represent a mystery of the ocean. Performing a task will unlock its square, and you need all 99 squares cleared to access the final chapter. A pain, but this must be where all the side quests and stuff went, right? Fun tasks for the mystery board? Solving riddles, doing guided tours, photographing something specific, something, anything we actually had in the last games? No, there's not hints about how to unlock the squares on them, you just need to wander around aimlessly until you open a randomly generated chest or scan a particular animal (one of them was even broken for the first weeks after launch and would softlock your game!). There's no side content to speak of. No unique encounters outside of a few brief story missions. The special creatures in this game, UMLs, are unlocked the same boring way every single time. They look cool at first, until you've seen them spawn at least a dozen times because did I mention that this game locks the ending behind finding an extremely rare variant of these UMLs three fucking times?? Imagine if a Pokemon game wouldn't let you see the credits until you caught a shiny. It took me almost 40 hours to find three variants and see the lackluster finale for myself. and that was with grinding with other people.

It's miserable seeing my beloved Endless Ocean dragging its carcass ashore in such a state. I didn't have zero fun, swimming around with people on multiplayer was cool, it was nice to zen out and scan fish for a while, and some of the new creature designs are very cool. Is that worth your time and money though when you could just play Endless Ocean 2? No. Go play Endless Ocean 2. That's the takeaway. No more ocean games, we've peaked. Everyone else go home.

It’s very important as a human being to engage with things that are not about you and you cannot relate with. I know this, and try to do this. However, I have always struggled with stories about religious trauma, as someone who hasn’t had religion in either a positive or negative sense play much of a role in their life. I can understand what it’s saying, but there’s a barrier that prevents me from being hit as hard as some people.

We Know the Devil is one of those games. It hits for the right person, but that person is unfortunately not me and I don’t think the rest of the game is good enough to compensate. Not bad by any stretch, but not the best. The writing ranges from poignant to stilted and ham-fisted. I played through all the endings, and the writing was by far the strongest in Venus’. The ostracization of a closeted trans woman who struggles to connect with male peers and can’t relate to the “real girls” as well as they can with each other is painfully believable. The other routes aren’t as strong.

The visual design is good, and contributes to the atmosphere. The audio is also mostly good, but sometimes poorly mixed, with certain tracks being much louder than others. The tracks themselves are good though.

I think this is just a game that isn’t for me, but I can see the merit in it. I do quite like the three girls and wish they all had a bit more depth and organic writing.

I'm really not sure what to think of this one. From a purely technical standpoint, it's really fun seeing pokemon recreated in bitsy, complete with music. The dialogue is often poorly formatted or confusing, but English isn't the dev's first language, so that's excusable.

As for the messaging, I really have no idea what my thoughts are. Politically, I too want a better world freed from the shackles of capitalism. The presentation leaves something to be desired. Some of the worldbuilding is cool, like people and Pokemon trying to learn each other's languages. But jokes about Pokemon being oppressed are as old as the games are, and they're really tired. And I have a lot of problems with the animal rights movement, and I don't know how I feel about some of the animal rights rhetoric here. The last thing you want is to make someone think of those PETA Pokemon games. This isn't quite the same thing as those people who insist on making kid's stuff edgy for the sake of it (Phineas and Ferb are actually dead and Candace is hallucinating everything ooooooo!!!) really get on my nerves and this is a bit too close to that sort of thing. There's so much better stuff to sink your teeth into.

In conclusion, I have no idea. Get back to me later.