"This is crap. This is an unbelievably bad game."

man. this was so bad that it made me start getting really annoying about gaming remakes on twitter which I'm continually embarrassed by, but it's hard for me to not be cynical about this thing on a level greater than 'i don't like what they did to a game that i think is good' bc to me it speaks to almost everything I find frustrating about the games industry at the moment

and like, I don't like to be miserable about media that isn't actively harmful! so what a shame that this remake feels actively miserable about the original game itself. it feels like the gaming zeitgeist at large sometimes have to be told when they're allowed to like old games instead of giving them the sweeping dismissal we generally give to anything older than a decade. if a game hasn't had a popular youtube essay about why it's good, actually, then it needs a remake to be playable in the modern age, right? jim ryan got absolutely demolished for asking why anyone would want to play a ps2 game nowadays, but we'll still eat this up because it has pretty lighting or w/e?

anyway to actually speak about the game itself, I think a lot of really questionable details in its presentation were largely overlooked when it came out. most people agreed that the new UI kinda sucks, but I've seen much less focus given to the janky facial animations (which will look worse in a few years than the original's lack of animation does now btw, there's a reason fromsoft straight up didn't bother) and questionable cutscene lighting and direction. a lot of scenes that from's team evidently gave a lot of care to in the original, like the dragon cutscene in 1-1 and king allant's entrance, look flat and lifeless in comparison - perhaps lit more realistically but cinematographically botched and much less effective. NPCs emote too much when they don't need to, and too little when they do, and every edge on most of the character designs has been sanded down to an unreasonable degree. the voice acting is a huge step down, the animation is all more weightless, etc, etc

fromsoftware are such an unlikely success story, and demon's souls has a weird place in their catalogue where it often gets dismissed as a kind of janky dark souls prototype instead of being taken on its own merits, so it kinda sucks to see it finally given mainstream attention only when its original paint job is stripped away in favour of something that exists primarily to show off the ps5's ability to push polygons. fromsoft's name isn't even attached to this in public, the vast majority of their original work taken out and replaced with presentation that's completely detached from the original's quiet, subversive style, despite bluepoint insisting that it's the same because they kept the gameplay intact or w/e

anyway this review is way too long and idk if i'm even allowed to post this here when it's so irrelevant to the game itself but I think this thing's mixed reception should prompt a lot of us to reconsider how we think about criticising games. is it an example of obnoxious purism when someone criticises the sweeping change in architectural style here, or the brighter colour palette? personally I think we should appreciate those details a lot more even before a new studio arrives to replace them wholesale, I have a lot more fun getting nerdy about the little things in games than I do trying to not be pretentious about them, and I think the push for better game preservation is allowed to point this stuff out without being shot down for nitpicking or w/e

(mask off, I think bluepoint are artistic terrorists and sotc ps4 was just as bad as this! give me my atmospheric haze or give me death, cowards)

It's a peaceful and laid-back kind of industry/crafting/management/whatever game. The crafting UX is one of the worst I've ever seen and the exploration aspect is extremely limited for a "space exploration" game. Once you fully explore one planet you've basically seen all of them. The only thing that changes is the terrain generation itself, which does give every planet a unique visual feel and a somewhat unique way to be traversed. But in terms of what you're actually doing, which is collecting resources and building a factory, every planet is exactly the same. The only thing that changes is the color and name of whatever resource is semi-unique to that planet.
I'm still giving it a 3/5 because that one thing you do is very fun and all the little toys you get to build along the way are fun to play with too. It's a shame that they're basically useless outside of some fetch-quest.

I'm gonna go ahead and say that I completed it even though my brother blew up our very important item storage and may or may not have bricked our save, shortly before stranding us somewhere else by clipping our ship into the void.
I don't get why people say this game is good with friends. Maybe we were playing it wrong, but to me it feels like it would be the perfect game to play while listening to a podcast or music or some random 3 hour long video essay.

Maybe I'm a bit jaded, but at 29 years old and gaming for almost every one of them, I think it's safe to say there aren't many "firsts" left for me. Today, I found the first game that actually sickened me in a way I've never felt before. I've played bad games, far too many to count. The kind that put you in something like a trance while you just go through the motions, muscle memory getting you through level after level until game is over and your time sufficiently wasted. But today I played High on Life and even though I uninstalled it over ten minutes ago, I still feel nauseated from my time with it.

After typing that paragraph, I went to the bathroom to get acetaminophin. I don't know if it'll even help this type of brain pain, it is very reminiscent of a hangover headache. The kind of burrowed anguish and mental fog that only goes away after a deep, REM-heavy sleep.

I played High on Life for about three hours. Halfway into that journey, I had to look up a way to change the FOV, as playing the game felt like I had binoculars fitted to my skull and over my eyes constantly. I had to use Flawless Widescreen and change the FOV from there, as it isn't an option in the game's settings (bad sign). Though the tweak "worked", all it seemed to do was flip the binoculars around: now I saw more but I still felt like something was very wrong. Maybe it was the oversaturated world, everything a hideous and piercing neon color. Maybe it was the squeaky-voiced characters -- who I had altered to speak less frequently, mind you -- shouting at me almost non-stop. One character's entire joke is that he will follow you and blabber. You cannot shoot him, you cannot trap him in a room, he will follow you until he is done and every time you TRY to speed this process up by popping off a shot at this flying asshole, his timer merely extends as he chastises your aim before beginning his interrupted sentence anew. His whole bit is he sucks. Great stuff.

Your gun is Justin Roiland doing an almost-Morty voice. That kind of whiny, slightly crying voice. This quickly gets old. You ever put Rick and Morty on for multiple hours straight? Of course not, you're not 11 years old, you can only tolerate dumb shit in brief sessions like a normal person. Well this game is that, only the color of your television is warped beyond repair and someone has seemingly wrapped the damn thing around your skull. It's an assault on your senses and you will not enjoy your time with it.

This is a game absolutely no one should play. Children, whose minds are still malleable and can survive the nonstop coup and contrecoup injuries, will only learn how to be incessant, misery-spreading viruses. Adults will be violated in more ways than they thought a game possibly could. I hated my experience with High on Life and I am quite positive anyone else would, too.

checked out the ign walkthrough to see how far through this chore i was and almost started crying when i saw the video linked for "how to find the infinity gauntlet easter egg" guys i can't do it

this is literally stale white bread in video game form like i don't get it!! what do we all like so much about this?? i see the upgrade menu and the quest log and all the useless extra skills and my eyes glaze over instantly. i literally have not felt less of a drive to keep playing something since i trudged through bioshock infinite. this thing is 20 hours long apparently and even with my relatively generous amount of free time i absolutely cannot imagine getting through all of that

also the combat is barely functional and contextually boring as shit, i've been spoiled by other games that make an effort to characterise their enemies bc seriously - what is there to be engaged by while i'm fighting generic troll #8 or a fucking stone golem. at the worst of times there's absolutely nothing here

i'm gonna go retreat back to my cave. fallout 2 here we come babeyyyyy!!!

There is something deeply ridiculous about Gamers™ complaining endlessly about games that are not action-orientated ("walking simulators" etc etc), whilst a game like this gets away with pushing all the most exciting and intense moments of action into cutscenes whilst the fighting you get to actually engage in is largely the repetitive, in between grunt-work. The game thinks having a bunch of quick-time events included will make up for this but being forced to constantly be alert for button symbols appearing on the screen rather than getting to enjoy the show is somehow even less immersive.

This kind of style-over-substance approach echoes throughout the whole game. The myriad climbing sequences feel oddly emblematic for this; nothing can actually go wrong in them meaning that despite the perilous context for them (clinging to the side of mountains and buildings by just your hands, leaping great distances from one to the next) there's never any reason to feel any actual tension or danger, it's just meant to look flashy and plays out closer to an interactive cutscene than actual gameplay. The single-shot gimmick is another great example, there's no narrative or thematic reason for it, it leads to the camera feeling needlessly claustrophobic a large amount of the time, but it looks impressive and that's apparently all that matters.

The combat is largely tedious. The occasional moments of excitement from the first few hours largely dissipated as the game made me fight the same collection of enemies, and the same troll and ogre mini-bosses, over and over right up until the end of the game. This overuse of the same enemy designs starts to feel even more grating considering the game's habit of cramming in additional fights wherever it possibly can, even when it doesn't make narrative or tonal sense, out of fear that if you go more than five minutes without attacking something you might get bored. The two modes for most of your fighting, beyond special attacks that leave you invulnerable or near-invulnerable for their duration thus draining tension from what's happening, are either keeping your distance and using projectiles whilst your son Atreus keeps the enemies distracted (which is both painfully slow at times, whilst also just feeling bizarre because Atreus is with seldom exceptions actually invulnerable to damage in combat), or getting in close and mindlessly button mashing until the enemies roll over and die (which is just boring). There are lots of fancy additional close-combat moves you can use but the game never really gives you the motivation to learn them, so it largely ends up being just this for the entire playthrough, as you fight the exact same enemies fifteen hours deep that you were fighting at the start of the game.

There are many ways to make the combat not get quite so tedious by the end, but the simplest one is to just have the game be more compact and streamlined, yet all throughout the game instead pushes to be larger, more expansive, with as many features as it can fit in. People like rpg systems, so why not cram in gear crafting and upgrading and all sorts of different enchantment systems? Never mind that it never makes the combat feel like it plays any differently, or that the best approach to these needless sprawling menus is to just use the things that have the biggest numbers. People like open world games, so why not do that too? But God of War's notion of exploration is mostly just wandering around the lake in a circle, ticking off locations one by one. The game also just features countless collectables, all kept track of in the map screen, as if you can't include anything within a game without it making some resultant number go up.

God of War had a surprising amount of narrative focus, and there's some genuinely cool moments. I enjoyed a bunch of the early-game content surrounding Freya, Baldur is compelling right until the game just forgets he exists for the vast majority of its story, and there's some potentially really interesting stuff in here about familial trauma, abuse and neglect that the game doesn't come close to having anything impactful or coherent to say about in the end. This is its whole own problem as hinting at Kratos's abuse and neglect towards his son (and never even confronting that in any sort of meaningful fashion) clashes pretty harshly with framing him as someone whose every punch should be thrilling to us, in the same way that his talk towards the end of the game of stopping the cycles of violence clashes with the fact that all game long the finishing moves zoom in on every gorey detail, trying its best to make the tearing of flesh and sinew seem salacious. Even the framing for the story is off here, and downright enraging; every single time you're sent to one corner of the world to see a character who can supposedly help you on your quest you can bet they'll be ready to retort that sure they can help you but first you need some obscure item from some other corner of the world. The story is never allowed to flow, always nestled between countless fetch quests, and sometimes fetch quests within fetch quests.

By the half-way point I was extremely ready for this game to be over, but I kept persevering due to some combination of sunk-cost fallacy, a curiosity to see where the story would head, and irritation that the game seems near universally acclaimed. God of War is certainly very pretty, but there's so little of worth here beyond that.