The first smartphone game I played and got really hooked on for a while. Until I figured out the optimal play and then once I went as far as I could go with it, got bored and uninstalled it in order to avoid wasting more time on its mindless movements.

Then a few days ago I decided to reinstall it to show to a friend and promptly got one of the highest scores I've ever had. But what I found out was that I didn't really care; however, there was something I did care about:

The simple zen-like activity of moving blocks around and getting these little pleasure shots from seeing them merge.

There's nothing much to the game, and it doesn't require much brainwork, but that's exactly what makes it kind of enjoyable when I'm feeling bad and just want to stare at something mindless, lightly lessening the pain in my soul with each box merged on a blandly colourful screen that suits its zen mood.

There's little to recommend here, besides the first high and the following zen, but doesn't that actually sound like quite a lot? I do not know how long I'll be playing it for this time, but as there are enough bad things in one's life to often take one's mood down, I guess I'll soon find out. For now, I'll be doing and playing anything else when I can, and when I cannot, I'll be moving the boxes, each a tiny but potential step closer to peace.

And then, having written that, but before posting, I played a bit more and saw the number climbing higher and higher and found myself excited enough about it that I suddenly wanted to see how far I could go, and just like that, the zen was gone and instead it became a slightly anxious long slog towards every higher numbers where a few wrong moves can suddenly gridlock you to an annoying loss.

After a few days of occasional play, quite unexpectedly, after a few bad moves, that's exactly what happened, and I considered quitting the game for good. Again.

So much for zen.

Death is an inevitability.

Yet we spend such great parts of our life worried and anxious about it, trying to escape it, feeling sad and crushed about meeting it, grieving everything that we cared about inevitably succumbing to the great reaper.

It is as natural part of life as birth, perhaps even more so - you might not be born, but you will die.

What Remains of Edith Finch might seem as only about death. You will notice it for the first time when you open the Options menu - the book with their family tree is right there, and if you look at it for even a bit, you might notice something strange - only one name doesn't have a death date.

And far too many that do, have one too close to birth for comfort.

Indeed, the Finch family seems plagued by death, some in their old age, most in young, one terribly so; and you step into the shoes of the only living member of the family and through her eyes explore the huge family house from which no room of a dead person has ever been removed, only new parts have been added for the newly received.

It is a house of death, a literal museum of the family Finch, the rooms of its members kept in pristine conditions of the day they died - so deeply obsessed are the leaders of the family with memory that even a living twin had to share their room with the dead one for 8 years. It's a tragedy, and suffice to say, this family should really have moved on.

And yet the game is not nearly as morbid or as depressing as it sounds. Even within the most tragic of tales (even within the one I had the most difficulty playing through since my own child is the closest to that age, those moments mere miniature drops of time behind), there is hope and the acknowledgement of the beauty of life. A boy dies, but also flies; a man dies, but also lives; a girl dies, but within gives the greatest performance of her life; and so on. Within their deaths, they are not dying, but living, however short it might seem.

And you see it all through their eyes - within their rooms, you come upon the missives of their last memories and by entering them, you will learn what made them tick, and see their final moments; and again - while it sounds depressing, in the moment, it is not really so.

It is only afterwarfs that the real weight of this empty house and all those dead kids really hit me. The game, even within its very last moments, looks at death with acceptance and not with despair, but just a little dry sense of loss, as if it's too bad we didn't get to take the afternoon tea, but oh well, such is life.

Such is life, and such is death; and What Remains of Edith Finch is the best walking sim I've ever played, and a surefire inclusion in my all time favourite games.

What's more, I yearn to walk again through the cluttered corridors and hidden passages of the childhood home of Edith Finch, even if all I'll meet there will be my lonely thoughts, the lingering ghosts, and the unavoidable fact of death. But what beauty as well!

Why do game developers think that adding QTEs to a lousy movie will make it into an exciting game?

Seeing as The Quarry was leaving PSN, I thought to try it out with my partner, and so on one cosy autumn eve we cuddled up on the sofa for an enjoyable spooky-month event, and made the mistake of choosing this.

We played for an hour or two, and it was after a long boring setup for a couple of characters instantly discarded, and then another long setup for a whole new cast of characters, when I had the choice between taking a fast route back to the cabin, or the scenic route, and I opted for the scenic one, that my partner decided that enough was enough and they were just too tired to continue that evening.

The tiredness lasted right up to The Quarry leaving PSN, and while I still harbour some interest in this campy slasher, I will never pay 60 euros for it (or, for that matter, even a quarter of that), when there are so many better actual horror movies to pick from, or actually engaging coop games to play.

I've played through one of these games before, and while it was no masterpiece in horror game storytelling and whatnot, it spent its intro on developing characters that mattered to the plot and giving them some poignant conflicts. It also didn't paragraph all their feelings in a "Policeman Joe will remember this" kind of flying emotions in reply to your most "important" dialogue choices.

They also didn't all move and smile like an AIs understanding of how human faces and necks work. The Quarry might not have a single good scare or dread to its name (in the first few hours), but it sure can creep you out. Too bad it's accidental.

I might return to it one day, because I'm a sucker for stuff like this; but I sure hope I won't.

Clunky as hell, but kind of endearing, the story of a small girl searching for her sister in a world government by randomness and a cruel Queen, you'll mainly be spending your time talking to weird-looking people or fighting angry automaton-looking creatures. Oh, and you also have a dice with feet and hands that you throw to do battle with and who's your best friend ever.

There's quite a bit to complain about in this game, thanks to the clunkiness alone, but I don't really want to. There were times where I even considered quitting it - because it's long and clunky - and perhaps I would have if playing it on a handheld hadn't made it so easy to keep picking it up again.

But I kept wanting to return just to see what's going to happen to Even and Dicey next, and what intriguing world will wait for me in the next district.

Because the game is basically divided into 6 phases, each corresponding to one district, which in turn corresponds to a number on a six-sided die. You start in one-town and work your way up, and the way the number is expressed in some towns is pretty cool, e.g. everybody having two conflicting sides in two-town, including the mayor who has literally split in two, with the bad version of him building a whole other town in the sky (on the flip side).

You need to keep upgrading your die to be able to roll higher numbers in order to enter higher towns, which in turn allows you to also roll higher numbers in combat encounters, and the sense of progress and joy you can get from going from rolling only ones and twos to being able to roll a five or, god forbid, a six(!) is something remarkable. It's one of the most satisfying growths I've ever seen in a video game.

And the combat is pretty fun, gathering energy to play the cards you've put in your deck beforehand, that can give you weapons, placeable cannons, heals and whatnot, even if it's still pretty clunky and somewhat repetitive and you'll be done with upgrades and deck-building long before the game is done with you. It's also not too easy and there were many a times I was kept on my toes by it.

But it's the quietly endearing writing and worldbuilding that really kept me in it for the long run (even if I did play most of it on silent, seeing no need to hook up the headphones for its subpar soundscape). I don't know what I would have done without Dicey, but I probably would not have seen the end credits.

To compare this to Dead Space is a cruel joke - while the ambition is there in its influences, The Callisto Protocol achieves nothing that comes even close to the vicious horror of the Dead Space series (well, most of them).

For one, playing it often feels less like a survival horror and more like a walking sim with the occasional moment of repetitive action. There's nothing wrong with being a walking sim, but one would expect the game to then have better writing and level design. But the quality of both is perhaps best exemplified in an early scene:

You take an elevator down to solitary confinement in error, and the guy in your ear whispers with fear "be careful, that's where they keep the worst of them". Well, first of all it's just offensive to all the people that have ever been put in solitary confinement, which in reality is an inhumane method of punishment that can easily be abused and used as a power play. There's nothing inherently more terrible about the people in solitary confinement than there is elsewhere in the prison, and the quick jump to uninformed prejudices betrays a lack of sophistication on the part of the writer.

But perhaps the most disappointing thing game-wise is that there's actually nothing in solitary to justify the other man's fear. In reality, it's perhaps 10 minutes of nondescript corridors, a few doors you open painfully slowly (that, to be fair, manage to be a bit scary, exactly once), and a few encounters that are either laughably theatrical or trivial.

Once you get to the other side of the level that was described as the scariest thing around, you should feel a release of pressure that had been building up through its dreadful passages; instead I laughed thinking "that was it?"

The endless corridors punctuated by the occasional action encounter describing the first part of the game (and, frankly, most of it) was enough to sap any goodwill that had been built up by the simple joy of entering a space horror setting. What's the point of even talking about the underwritten characters and the uninteresting villain figure or the simple action loop that quickly grows numbingly repetitive and the melee combat that keeps undermining the seriousness of the setting with its clunky silliness (it truly is so kind of all the enemies to wait around for a but while you clobber them on the head after every attack).

It could be a better game with less meaningless corridors (e.g. if the feeling of dread was real when walking through them), no annoying enemies (e.g. constant quick-time tapping annoyances that inevitably drain some of your life), better checkpointing (again with the one-hit-deaths after an annoyingly long crawling sequence and whatnot; do they not play their own games?), bigger inventory earlier, less telegraphed scares (it quickly stops being scary when you know the scare is just a cutscene happening in front of you), and more enjoyable weapons (the melee is okay, for a while, even if it gets a bit repetitive, but the worst failure when comparing it to Dead Space is the lacklustre shooting with the run-of-the-mill guns). Oh and some writing that would actually make us care about the characters.

But it's possible there never was much hope for the game because the central gameplay loop itself works against the dread - when killing enemies is all about timing your dodges and hits around their well-telegraphed attacks, there's not much tension, especially when even in groups they wait in line. Every time the fear of the unknown grasped me when entering a new area, it was wiped away as soon as I met the first enemy - I know you, I thought, or I'll know you soon enough, and you are not scary. It started working against it - the few times I did feel scared, I just reminded myself how unscary this game is, and lo and behold, so it was.

The action in DS was sudden, desperate and nail-biting, but in Callisto it is, for the most part, a silly dance, and there are few silly dance numbers in the world that terrify one's soul.

Why then did I still persevere?

Cause I'm a sucker, a sucker, for space horror with weighty movement and action. It might not be that much fun to fight in Callisto, but it sure feels good hitting a monster in the face with your baton and then shooting them as well, just to be sure, the bullet ripping out your weapon like thunder. And the fighting does get more involved later on (and there was one corridor fight that felt legitimately great and I might remember years from now). And I've played so many mediocre shooters like this that it's actually a bit nostalgic going through the dumb story in the boots of Video Game Protagonist Man #334. And it really does look gorgeous (I especially loved walking through the scrapyards covered in snow with a blizzard blowing at your faces and the tall sparsely lighted buildings towering above you in the distant dark).

But it really is a game made up of poor decisions, from its basic gameplay to its enemy, encounter and level design, all working in tandem to undermine any chance of an effective horror atmosphere. The action can be fun and involving, but its silliness and predictability just further undermine the rest of the game; and that's long before you get to a long sequence with enemies who work on hearing alone, it's just that they have very, very bad hearing, so you can be loudly stomping their buddies to bits and pieces right behind them, just to then turn around and sneak kill them next. It's ludicrous and kinda not scary at all, y’know.

And yet. And yet. When I wasn't playing it, I kept thinking of wanting to play it. It doesn't make the game good, but it does up the rating a bit. Or just shows what a tool I am.

Tool enough to even finish it - but not a step more because the game, in a desperate attempt to really prove what a failure it is, ends on a cliffhanger meant to promote the story DLC - the actual end of the game, cut off to parcel out at 1/5th of the full game’s price. What a disgrace. But really - it's the most appropriate ending for a game built on disappointment upon disappointment.

I came for the space horror, I stayed for the pretty graphics and weighty action, and I came away amazed how utterly a game can still fail. A riot.

A comedy game that is trying its best to zap away its fun with frequent annoying repetition (even more before the game informs you of a skip button) and absurd puzzles and continuity. The absurdity is the joke, but if even the settings menu is so incomprehensible that I just gave up trying to understand it, you're pushing it.

Many of the puzzles also run out of steam long before you are done with them (especially some minigames), forcing you to repeatedly retry scenes that have already lost all of their humour potential. The absurdity here works both for the benefit of humour but also to the detriment of solving the puzzles, often relying on trial-and-error to find the correct answer, with a lot of tiresome cutscenes upon nigh-inevitable failures. And if I have to see Steve, the harbinger of repetitive actions for (mostly) lacklustre jokes, one more time …

Ultimately, if you are open to its absurd and frequently scatological humour, there's enough laugh-out-loud moments (and occasional snickers) to justify the game's existence (and the one euro I paid for it), but I still finished it on YouTube.

A pretty-looking and smooth-riding experience, it lacks the thrills of a first-/third person camera due to its isometric view, but amply makes up for it in other regards. The only reason my grade is so “low” is that I quickly found out that these kinds of storyless repetitive sports games aren't really quite for me (I prefer different kinds of repetitive games, e.g. first-person shooters :p ). It also means I haven't made it far into the game and considering I haven't played it once in months, it felt weird to keep it under my actively playing games. But for what it's worth, I still have it installed so I might return to it for a ride or two now and then. That too is a recommendation of a kind.

This nonviolent game about becoming an adult after you've already come of age would be easier to digest if it wasn't from a company led by a known emotional abuser. I mean, you'd still have to accept its very middle-class fantasy approach to growing up and achieving your dreams, but it sounds good and looks nice and doesn't play quite like any other game I've played; even if I probably wouldn't play a longer game like this for, well, long, because when it comes down to it you're doing very simple things that would probably suit a flash game or something (and if I have to put together one more goddamn speech bubble, so help me god …).

The mechanics also sometimes seem ephemeral - for example I wonder how the relationship survived me replacing the girl’s family photo with the guy’s stupid action figure during moving in or the guy answering with a happy face when I put three sad faces as the girl; the gameplay often doesn't really matter much, is what I'm saying.

But the central relationship is exactly as cute and mostly believable as it has to be for what the game is trying to accomplish story-wise. Having gone through somewhat similar experiences, and being at the beginning of another relationship, there’s some inherent resonance in the story, especially on how the end isn't the end and life goes on, and how fulfilling and enjoyable it can be, even when it feels like that could never be. I didn't find the game not nearly deep enough to matter much, but there's enough verisimilitude to give the game some effect.

Just too bad about that abuse, y’know. From the person apparently still leading the company, y’know. Just too bad.

I think I regret giving them that one euro :>

Seems like a perfectly acceptable Devil May Cry, but I don't think I really have any room in my life for these games any more.

I loved DMC3 (though when I discovered the penultimate (?) level was just all the previous bosses again, I quit without even bothering), played most of DMC4, and enjoyed DMC (the remake), but there’s just something about the gameplay and feel of DMC5 (and probably dmc overall by now) that leaves me cold. Perhaps it's the clean yet fumbling gameplay, crisp yet unexciting visual direction, or the extensive yet meaningless writing.

I liked that there seems to be a nice variety to the moves and enemies, but it wasn't enough to call me back when there are so many other games vying for my attention (partly coming down to preference because the game I'm playing instead, Evil West, really isn't better, but hey, it works for me).

The female sidekick also has some problems, as expected. She is cool, fast-talking and arrogant in an entertaining way, her dynamic with Nero rife with amusement. But she still confirms it's men making the game, the male gaze for example when she bends to pick up new items in her workshop being rather annoying, and while I cannot deny that it works as titillation, it also works to undermine her character (and my respect for the game).

It doesn't help that every male character also feels like he was written by a 15 year old, typing out their “cool” fantasies.

10-15 years ago I might have loved it, but now it's another series that I just don't have the time for. It's not bad enough for me to be sure I'll never try it again, but since it's leaving PSN, and I have no intention of ever buying it, well the chances are not great. I don't mind much.

Funny, until it's not. Intriguing, until it's not. Meaningful way to spend one’s living time, until it's not.

What a disappointment. A game about life and death and partying, it does have a few moments of poignancy, but it's mostly filled with empty blather.

It starts well enough, with a surprising and amusing introduction to its world, but it quickly becomes clear how little the writing really matters and how slowly any development happens, with the main action being leading your twin leads around chasing social macguffins. When around the middle of the game I finally met the devil and he told me that I have to visit two more people before I can challenge him, I groaned at the meaningless stretching of its playtime. Not to mention the long silent runs with occasionally repeating dialogue or sending you from island to island for no good reason or revisiting islands that you've already been to but have nothing visually new to offer while you silently run across through the same boring area, wasting more time whenever you take another wrong turn.

In short, the game doesn't seem to have much respect for its player’s time; or itself really, with its many “meta” jokes about limited player interactivity and barebones world-building and whatnot - it really isn’t that cute to call something you made bad when it really is lacking in what you're making fun of, and I wish creators understood that and instead of trying to be funny, laden with heavy “hi us kids” energy, they would just concentrate on their strong suits instead of mocking the player for even playing their game.

Which is all to say that it's a shame. I would have gladly finished the game on my own, but I just couldn't get myself to boot it up again and so just finished the second half of the game on YouTube. Reading the comments, I wasn't the only one.

And having now finished watching it, I'm not sure whether even that was worth it. There are still some entertaining moments, even some intriguing happenings, and I quite liked where the story of Satan's siblings headed ultimately, but I'm also glad I didn't have to play to get there myself and that really doesn't bode well for something trying to be a “game”.

So much for being excited for Oxenfree 2 ...

Having completed the tutorial and one level in coop and basically uninstalling it after my partner announced that they don't really like it, I can't really fault them.

While I, as an action-game fan, can see the potential here, and that it's not nearly the worst of its ilk, it's also just not good enough of an introduction for the uninitiated, with its weirdly off-centered character placement on its isometric camera, or how it lets you choose classes but then gives you no class-specific abilities in the first mission (instead overwhelming you with an upgrade screen afterwards), or how the guns feel so light that you can't even feel when they're running out of ammo and they're reloading again (which happens a lot - and the only good mechanic here, tap again to reload fast, was present in the much better Helldivers already), or how there doesn't feel to be any difference between how the guns shoot, or how godawful the writing is, or how the game just doesn't feel much fun and cohesive and you're just running around spraying, praying, and reloading.

Perhaps it gets better, but first of all it should have convinced us to continue. What a shame. I guess I'll try introducing my partner to Helldivers instead.

Pretty pointless timewaster. Lots of stats to balance on the items, if you're so inclined. I'm not though, so the gameplay has to suffice, which it does, to a degree, a bit like a better looking Vampire Survivors, but I found it to run out of steam fast, especially how it seems that on Android you could constantly continue respawning as long as you are willing to watch awful trailers for other games. I did, for a bit, putting the phone aside, until I understood the meaninglessness of what I was doing. Perhaps the paid version on Switch is better - I don't know, and probably never will.

The game is so good that the moment we finished the campaign in the PSN version with my partner, we went out and bought the full version with both games and all the add-ons. It's simple the most fun I have had in a game in a long time and it's one of the funniest and (occasionally) most thrilling games I have ever played, and amongst the best coop experiences, both when you work as the prefect team, throwing out meals like clockwork, or when some little-big things go wrong and you can't help but laugh out loud at it all.

However, I can imagine this game going really wrong if one of the players is very competitive, controlling, or serious. You have to take it in good humour, both the successes and failures, or you might end up hating it instead (or, more likely, your partner will, and perhaps you too).

Well, I'm off to playing Overcooked! All You Can Eat - already, it looks absolutely delicious.

How fun it is to play evil.

That is, as long as you don't take it too seriously what you're really doing, be it sacrificing your most loyal followers in tremendous torment to horrendous creatures from the deep, or naming your newest cultist “sunflower beauty” and forcing them to marry you, or just making your cultists eat pies made out of their own faeces. It's all in good fun, right?

And I did manage to approach it as such, seeing the cute dark nature of its cult management as hilarious in how horrendous it really is, taking the real life atrocities and lies of cults and adding to them actual supernatural realities. It doesn't really make it any nicer when you strangle your follower in bed for a quest or force your oldest member eat a potentially deadly dish in the hopes of a rare drop, useless as they are for anything else (my god how much ageism this game engenders), but it's far enough removed from reality to amuse instead of horrify. Content warning is still needed though, especially if you do have PTSD from similar experiences.

The combat part of the game is more hit and miss, managing to occasionally be fun but also somewhat chaotic, especially with its weapon selection. But in each and every aspect of its action, it pales when compared to something like Hades, and the crusades quickly come to be in danger of being something you do in order to unlock more things in your camp or to advance the story, instead of something you yearn to participate in.

Speaking of its writing, it isn't deep or particularly involving, but it is delicious in how darkly and forebodingly written it is, the beautiful and moody artistry allowing for more immersion within the Lamb’s eldritch world. I can't say I felt anything emotional at any of the story beats, but I did enjoy the writing for what it was, and I wanted to find out what exactly does happen when I kill the last false God.

The way to that point can be a struggle, and you'll probably fully upgraded all your combat and follower skills long before you arrive there (I hadn't even killed the third boss when I had already maxed them myself). The endgame base management can be a bit lacking then, relying on setting personal goals (e.g. get as many followers you can - quite difficult with the speed the fuckers keep dying) and a late-game free DLC addition (which, granted, is pretty fun, and adds more horrible and amusing options to the game).

But for a few weeks this game was what my partner and I kept returning to whenever we could, developing our cults and swapping tales of new discoveries and our horrific misdeeds. Whatever its faults, its pros are also many, first and foremost how well it suited us gaming together solo, bringing us together in how horrible we were to our poor cultists. For that alone it's one of my favourite experiences of the year.

Y’know what, I kinda love it.

I think I've played all 5 of the Sniper Elite games, and I have some fond memories of the earliest ones (even if I can't differentiate them), but it would really be pushing it to consider it amongst my favourite video game series. The games were always kind of mediocre, relying on the x-ray killshots to draw attention to them; and yet they had this kind of baseline enjoyability that kept me coming back (as a WW2 FPS fan), and so when I heard the fifth one might actually be a legitimately good game, well, colour me intrigued.

And boy oh boy, it really is. Gone is the whiff of mediocrity when it comes to most of it, with the game sporting some truly fine FPS/TPS action, enjoyably semi-open maps, different ways of approaching objectives, beautiful visuals, and more tasty Nazi headshots than you can shake your cane at.

It's not all perfect of course. The story is as dumb and pointless as they come, even with the AAA level of sheen (though I did appreciate the tiny injections of diversity in the cast, even if I don't think I can differentiate any of the characters on anything but their appearance - where the diversity helps too, I guess). The upgrade mechanic is okay as a minor carrot for a while, but the upgrades are mostly boring and I didn't feel the need for half of them. The weapon upgrade system relies on finding workbenches so if you're looking for anything specific, good luck (ultimately I just googled where to get the sniper silencer). And there are so many options when it comes to attachments and such that I personally felt overwhelmed and mostly stuck with the first thing that worked for my style.

But it just goes to show how good the game is at what it's good at that those are just minor complaints. I ignored most of the writing, as you are anyway wont to do usually as an FPS fan, and took from the upgrades and weapons what I wanted and left the rest at that, because what I wanted the most was to already get into another map and enjoy the moment-to-moment action and gameplay.

Though even then, I played 4-5 maps, then felt it was getting a bit samey, and took a break. A few months later I returned, played 2 more maps, and took a break. And then some time after I returned, finished the game, and wanted more. Partly because I had expected the 9th map to be, y’know, a proper map, but it's such an anti-climatic joke that you can't help but feel like something’s missing. The DLCs are priced preposterously high (at least if you only care about the maps) so I can't imagine getting them without a sale.

Be that as it may though, leaving one wanting might be a good strategy because I sure am looking back at the game with rosier eyes than I had at first, and I feel an urge that the alternate gamemodes are unlikely to satisfy, even if I'm desperate to try (the Axis Invasion is pretty much dead, right?)

So as I said, I kinda loved it; and god, I hope the DLC goes on sale soon.