I love it when you establish that a society is brutally racist and that black people are an underclass who live in abject poverty, and then having a black woman decide to fight against that society before having white characters (one of whom was at WOUNDED KNEEE), start moralising about how awful this woman is for wanting her freedom and then comparing her to the racist leader of the very city that oppresses her as "basically the same." This is such a normal thing to do and definitely not racist. I love it when your white character who literally did a genocide is given more moral complexity than the one black character who is a freedom fighter who just becomes willing to kill a child out of absolutely nowhere just so you can justify having another white character kill her. Also that character is both a daughter figure for the MC and also a love interest for the player because how else can men interact with women right.
This game isn't actually half a star, there are some okay parts and also some good parts, mainly the Lutece twins who are fantastic. Also that scene where songbird dies in rapture. The dlc gives Elizabeth actual autonomy which is nice and booker isn't even in the second chapter which is great.
Look the reason i hate this game so much is because the writers probably thought they were being politically progressive, dealing with themes of christian fundamentalism and the bloody history of America. They essentially start the game by giving you to throw a baseball at an interracial couple. The developers are screaming at you that this is going to be a serious game, and all that build up ends up them scolding the one black character in the story for daring to stand up to a society that hates her, all under the guise of some faux liberal progressivism. This ends up with a game thats political message that is completely soulless. The one conclusion you can draw is that fighting racism is just as bad as being racist, and if that isn't the most cowardly thing I've ever heard then I don't know what is.

Thanks RPCS3. My favourite Souls - Blanketed in sorrow and an intoxicating ambiguity. An artstyle akin to a faded picturebook you've plucked out of an ancient water-logged library. I love so much that all of the environments feel restrained and utilitarian. A soundtrack that is wholly unique, doesn't feel a little inspired by the Hollywood Orchestral Epics nor does it even attempt to hit those notes.
The one title in the franchise that actually feels like a fantastical adventure, with encounters and environments that are more often a challenge of wit and intuition than attack pattern memorisation or a side-flippy shounen damage value race. It reeks!!! But it reeks beauty. I genuinely don't believe FromSoft in their current form have it in them to create a boss battle like King Allant again.

Solid and innovative, continues to be the breath of fresh air now as it was when I first played it in 2009. Nothin like it!!!!

All I'll say on the Bluepoint demake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5z2-hpZB1w

I'm probably stating the obvious opening my review this way, but whether or not Metroid is truly BACK with Dread depends entirely on what you look for in the series. It's Samus, it's caverns, it's bombing random blocks, but is it intricate world-design and schmovy survival action? Ehhhh.

Mechanically, Dread picks up where Samus Returns left off, which itself picked up where Fusion and Zero Mission left off more than 15 years ago. Samus snaps onto ledges, automatically curls up into a ball when you approach tunnels, accelerates and decelerates immediately and falls like a rock. For the average person, the adjectives that will come to mind when comparing these controls to the "old" and "clunky" Super Metroid are likely "tight" and "slick" and "modern."

I find it interesting to think about Dread in this context, because it illuminates how we often cling to obvious answers for why certain games are the way they are, instead of simply looking at the experience for what it is. And the experience Super Metroid provided was to let the level design essentially act as a blank canvas for your consistent, non-arbitrary moveset. The tiniest bit of wall can still be kicked off of, and the morphball lets you squeeze through whatever gap you feel you should be able to, because so little of Zebes's geometry was put in place specifically to require the use of individual movement mechanics. One of Super's most famous skips involves barely rolling under the metal gate in Brinstar just before it shuts, which works not because it's a set piece specifically crafted for the morphball, but because the collision boxes are so generalized and speed is retained so naturally.

Look at Zero Mission meanwhile and if you try to wall-jump off of a small platform at a low angle, you won't be able to, because for as saucy as its movement tech may look, the game still expects you to contend with its rigid ledge grabs and pull yourself into arbitrarily positioned morph ball tunnels. All the way back in 2004, we were already playing a Metroid game where speedruns end up hinging more on deliberately hidden shortcuts in the level design, rather than deep exploitable movement tech à la Super.

And don't misunderstand; it is cool that these newer Metroids try to specifically cater to that kind of player mentality. But it's also at least a little mistrustful toward those same players, to expect them to learn all these incredibly specific ways the level design can be broken, rather than hand them a deep set of movement mechanics and let them look at any given part of the game world and say "hmm yeah I can probably do that." If anything, these games have to rely on deliberate speedrun shortcuts because the mechanics on their own give you so little to work with.

Dread's exact place in this debate is confusing, as it's already proving to have far more speedrunning tricks up its sleeve than I personally expected. Originally I was going to go off on how dumb it is that the game bars you from using your power bombs if you find them early, how that proves that the game doesn't really work in a systemic fashion (like Super Metroid, where pick-ups function completely independently of each other within the game's logic,) blah blah blah.

Clearly though, a lot of the skips we're seeing in this early stage of Dread's life are simply the result of clever hitbox manipulation and routing. With how many power-ups come as direct rewards for completing set pieces and killing bosses, I sincerely didn't expect people to reach sub-two-hour playtimes within mere weeks of Dread's release; my expectation was that Dread would be too reliant on tight event triggers. For what it is, it's impressive the game doesn't just come apart at the seams when you break its sequence, and it would be short-sighted to dismiss Dread purely based off that earlier power bomb example.

That said, that fundamental philosophical difference between Dread and a game like Super is still deeply felt in every fiber of the experience. Dread is ultimately still a game that tries to restrict you at every turn, with its rigid wall-jump arcs and doors that conveniently lock behind you even when you're closing in on the final boss already. You can go into either experience with a solid grasp of Samus's movement, but no knowledge of specific level design skips, and Super will feel far more spontaneous and freeing than its 2021 successor; that sense of "yeah I can probably do that" is never coming back. And I feel this says a lot about MercurySteam's priorities with Dread: dogged surface-level adherence to Super's tropes, items and hands-off vibe, without genuine mechanical follow-through.

Instead, Dread is a 2021 video game through and through, meaning it's highly concerned with having you go through a tight progression of escalating challenges. Here's the part where you pull out blocks with your Grapple Beam, here's where you Shinespark through a billion walls in a row for a bit, here's where you're ambushed by a mini-boss. And you know what, I'll say Dread pulls off that modern action romp thing as well as you could hope for. The high movement speed, instant acceleration and low input lag make for a game that's immediately fun to pick up, being able to 360-aim or parry while running and slide right into tunnels without ever breaking momentum makes Samus feel like a fresh bar of soap in your hands. Sprinting through ZDR's many expansive rooms, evocative panoramas stretching out behind you, rays of light softly flowing in, thumping sound effects massaging your ears as you light up the entire screen with big neon-yellow laser shots -- it hits.

The bosses are a surprising highlight. They'll often use different types of projectiles in conjunction with each other, which either can or can't be removed from the screen with your own shots, and some even have relatively dynamic movement and spawn patterns. As rigidly as these enemies tend to cycle between individual attacks, there is enough variation and opportunities to stay on the offensive within those attacks for them to stay remarkably fresh over repeat attempts. I was especially impressed with this duo of mini-bosses you encounter a few times over the course of the game: you can freely bait each one of them to any given part of the sizable fighting arena, resulting in dynamic outcomes and spontaneous situations that feel like relatively uncharted territory for this kind of 2D action game.

But Dread's pursuit of action movie bombast comes at a cost. As I said, it's a tight progression of escalating challenges: the game never stops funneling you forward, often going as far as locking anything that's not the critical path behind you, the proverbial carrot always right in your face. In fact, if you've gone through Dread with the creeping suspicion that the game never actually lets you stray from its single intended path (unless you specifically sequence break or backtrack for capacity upgrades,) then I'm here to rip that band-aid off and tell you that that seems pretty accurate. I'd do more serious testing into this if I were writing something a little more legit than a Backloggd review, but: every one of Samus's key upgrades (minus Space Jump and Scan Pulse) has a corresponding type of lock in the world, and it seems there's never a point where getting one upgrade opens up enough paths that you could, for example, choose the order in which to get the next two.

This is my fancy way of saying that Dread is basically a straight line, except for those few cheeky shortcuts that let you adjust the item sequence a little bit. But that's really only shocking if we forget that, again, it's Fusion and Zero Mission that set Metroid on this exact trajectory in the first place. Comparing Dread to its GBA predecessors, I can kinda take or leave individual aspects of either style. Zero Mission for example showed that you can have a pretty linear game without inhibiting wall-jumps so aggressively, but at least Dread has the decency to not put big glowing waypoints on my map. Etc., etc.

Dread is forcing me to accept that I'm a bitter 16-bit boomer and how, for as much as games can't stop using the same ingredients, the particular way the Super Metroid dish is assembled has just not been matched by anything. Everyone who's played Super Metroid remembers making it back to the surface, to Samus's ship, the dreary rain giving way to triumphant horns, after running a whole lap around Zebes and getting all the key power-ups you need to explore the rest of the planet. It's not only emotionally powerful, it's where the real game begins, finally letting you search for the path forward in whatever way you see fit. This is complimented by a whole slew of genuinely optional upgrades like the Spazer or Plasma Beam, which present a much stronger backtracking incentive than Dread's endless supply of Missile Tanks.

This structure -- first a guided tour around most of the planet, then letting you loose to kill the game's remaining bosses -- hasn't been replicated by any other Metroid. But approaching Dread in particular under this lens reveals just how haphazard MercurySteam's approach to level design is, and how it and Super are too fundamentally incompatible to really be compared, even though Dread is constantly setting itself up for that juxtaposition.

I urge you to play close attention to how Dread's world is assembled. The game world's elevators always connect to these one-way horizontal tunnels: a dead-end to one side, a door to the rest of the area on the other. Individually, many of the rooms have dense, zig-zaggy layouts, but they're stacked together in a relatively linear fashion: the path keeps snaking West for example, until you reach the end of the respective map and the room suddenly curves backward, to naturally guide you back toward where you started.

This way, Dread essentially always auto-pilots you exactly where it wants you to go. Try any alternative door on this path, and they'll always feed into some kind of dead-end (again, unless it happens to lead to a sequence break.) It's to the point where, sometimes, you're funneled into a random teleporter that connects to a random room in a totally different area that you would never think to visit otherwise, and once you're there, the cycle I just described begins anew. Unlike every other Metroid, even the games outside Super, Dread never actually asks you to backtrack or figure out where to go yourself. The level design always curves and bends conveniently to guide you forward, and at best you might have to intuit which wall to bomb next.

The difference is easiest to explain with Super: here, every area is instead entered via a vertical shaft, which ends up functioning as a kind of hub, with many different spokes on either side. These can fork into one-off rooms, long horizontal tunnels, or even another hub-like vertical shaft. You play around in that set of rooms for a bit until maybe you get a new power up, which is where you're meant to draw the connection that "hmm maybe it's time to go and check out some of those other rooms."

It's not just that Super is asking you to understand its level design as an actual world, it has the knock-on effect that you can understand it in the first place. The layout feels planned and internally consistent, rooms have actual navigational functions (again, singular tunnels and shafts that connect to many different rooms on their own) instead of just being video game levels for you to blast through.

Maybe you also played through Dread and couldn't shake the sense that it was kind of flavorless? That it lacked pacing? And the sense that I'm actually moving through a world? You may find those feelings hard to pin down exactly, but they have real game design reasons behind them, and as much as Dread tries to wow you with visually stunning one-off rooms and events at key progression junctures, the way there can't help but feel hollow. MercurySteam stacked together all these set pieces and micro-challenges in the most seamless 2021 way they could, but once you take a step back and look at the whole picture, it's clear you're dealing with an un-traversable clustered mess of mini-video game levels, rather than a world you're meant to understand every inch of. It's telling you unlock the ability to warp freely between any of the game's previously one-way teleporters in the post-game: the map is just too fucking cumbersome to navigate otherwise.

This lack of commitment to actually capture the essence of those older Metroids is even more evident in Dread's use of a modern auto-checkpoint system: we're at least back to dedicated save rooms to lock in your progress and get a break from the action after Samus Returns, but anytime there's even a slight chance of death, you can expect to respawn just one room earlier. Under that light, you can't help but feel incredibly underwhelmed with how inconsequential the EMMI prove to be to the overall experience, considering they're the game's only major gameplay element not cribbed verbatim from older Metroids.

I suppose this is another aspect that has me thinking on how design and player sensibilities have fundamentally shifted over the years. To me, many of Dread's challenges felt fleeting; often satisfying to learn and execute, but ultimately with no real tension or significant room for error... and that last part is what's crucial. I'm going to state the obvious again, but if EMMI kill the player instantly, that means a single mistake will be enough to erase all their progress since the last checkpoint. It stands to reason then, that as a designer you'd make these runs as short as possible to keep possible frustration at a minimum.

So really, what makes the EMMI fall flat is less the lack of real consequence for failure specifically, and more how that reverberates on the design of the EMMI sections themselves. You never actually spend significant time with the first four EMMI (this does not include the first tutorial variant,) the run to the exit is so short you're actually likely to get it on a random attempt without having had to consciously study their behavior or the level design much. Early gimmicks like having to stand still to raise the room's water level do get the blood pumping a bit, but they're far too infrequent to turn the EMMI zones into something more substantial-feeling.

Here's the contradiction many game designers and players don't seem to want to acknowledge: if you give me a trial & error challenge that lasts a minute, kills me instantly, and will take ten attempts to get past, you actually use more of my time than if you'd given me a more substantial challenge with more room for error that sets me back circa three minutes in the event that I fail (which I might not.) Not only that, while the latter situation actually has stakes, the former will have me go through the motions and get used to it so much that I'll be too emotionally numb to feel much of anything by the time I succeed. It's too easy to forget that the idea behind game design is to elicit feelings from the player; you have to understand that they're going to be way more afraid of punishment than they actually need to be. That's the whole point.

It wasn't until the purple and blue EMMI where I got into extended tugs of war and felt legitimate... well, dread, having to move through their domains. The way water is used to slow Samus down in places is especially intelligent, as it becomes impossible to outpace the EMMI once you enter. You'll have to carefully estimate how long it will take you to get across, and you may even want to lure your predator somewhere else first based on your planning.

Consistently exciting was the use of the Omega Blaster, where you get to flip the tables and need to assess the ideal spot in the level design to shoot at the EMMI from (since you need to deal damage consistently to take out their armor.) It leverages your previously gained knowledge of the room layout back when you were the prey, and having to gauge distances and movement timings in this way feels legitimately original in the 2D game space Dread is occupying.

And UNLIKE Metroid Dread, I don't have a smooth convenient segue into my conclusion for this review. It's ultimately a game that left me excited and disappointed in pretty much equal measure. It's undeniably fun to have Metroid's base mechanics back in this giga-polished AAA 2D 2021 Nintendo game, but Dread is not really any less conservative than Samus Returns was four years ago. And even if all you wanted was "more Metroid," is Dread really meeting that bar when it's following up at least FOUR games that were all incredibly daring, sometimes even groundbreaking in their time? The most disruptive thing Dread does is not giving the normies an Easy Mode.

an appalling, self-righteous, insecure act of apologia for a generation of emotionally distant fathers that characterises motherly love and affection as smothering, manipulative, and toxic, whilst characterising casual emotional neglect and abuse as Good, Actually.

god of war 4 is just as sexist as the earlier games in the series, it's just more crypto about it, and the vast swathes of people taken in by this completely surface-level nuance baffles me to a degree not seen since DmC: Devil May Cry was hailed as the "more mature" reboot that series needed despite the existence of a literal sniper-rifle abortion scene and the fact that every single female character in it was called "whore" ad nauseum.

the "one take" gimmick is just that: a total gimmick, adding absolutely nothing to the story and in many ways detracting from it. the staccato nature of this journey, of going up and down the same mountain and teleporting all over the place is only made more absurd by the camera framing this as an uninterrupted trek which it clearly is not.

also it plays like ass and you fight the same boss twenty times. i hope you like that animation of kratos slamming a big pillar down on an ogre because you're going to see it an awful lot.

EDIT: removed a shitty joke.

you hear the one about avid players of tetris? their minds basically get rewritten because of exposure to the damn thing. thing is, this is true of any earthly activity that brings together body, mind, and soul. its psychosomatic, kinaesthetic. any activity that informs consciousness will bleed into the subconscious. my dreams aren't really like the ones LSD presents, but my fear is that they will be.

a product of its time in all the ways that matter and bolstered as a result. psx architecture struggling under the weight of hell and failing to load in the density of its worlds in time leaves the mind incapable of guarding itself for whats going to happen next - legitimately unsettling, unpredictable, uncanny, uncaring. youre sieved through textures and atmospheres at a rapid clip. no barriers exist here, everything is simply a permeable membrane. every scene, vignette, happenstance, and interaction a stitched-together quilt one night and a tesseract the next. like any work of its kind it requires a certain level of maturity and commitment - particularly these days when the only thing you can reliably bet on about an audience is their urge to demystify - but you ought to take the leap. this is really affecting work here that i cant possibly be cynical about and a great alternative to melatonin

Systematic Genocide Simulator, brought to you by Nintendo. Complete with jump scares, labyrinthian and borderline non-euclidean oppressive spaces to stumble through, bizarre and uncomfortable musical choices, a camera that manages to convey uneasy claustrophobia in a 1991 handheld game, and an ending that gives you the very companion that you set out to kill and makes you contemplate your actions through 5 minutes of uneventful walking set to melancholic yet vaguely friendly music as you realize you're the monster. How did this get made?

FYI this is still the best one. Most inspired soundtrack, most painterly and phantasmagorical setting, best hub zone and maiden, and laden with the most lyrical sense of tragedy and loss. Sure the gameplay is a little bit clunky compared to (some of) the later titles, but Deal With It!!

it makes me deeply sad that the online has been discontinued and we haven't heard anything about a re-release. Still totally playable offline, but the full experience deserves to be remembered and kept alive!

EDIT: WAIT I SAID RE-RELEASE NOT SLEEK HIGH POLY REMAKE DEVOID OF ATMOSPHERE AND RESTRAINT!!! WHY MUST THE DEVILS AT BLUEPOINT CONSPIRE TO MURDER EVERYTHING I LOVE

I don't think I will ever play another game in my lifetime that is so stubborn and insistent on defying convention every time it gets a chance. When an opportunity to abide by convention presents itself, Killer7 simply says "no", turns in the opposite direction, and walks away.

This game is the essence of Suda's entire "punk" attitude towards game directing and for me, his masterpiece. Everything down to how it's stylized, the control scheme, the general esoteric nature of the game is handcrafted to the tee.

Also, this is by far the most quotable video game ever made, like it's not even close. Sorry Metal Gear Rising.

killer7 may be the first game where I've actively sought out analysis of the plot and themes beyond just basic examinations; it reminded me a lot of NGE where it's pretty digestible once you lock down the core concepts but still rich enough to make exploring various interpretations worthwhile. part of this is because of how the game expresses its ideas both from a modern political context as well as a timeless, cyclical myth. on top of all of that, it's a fun adventure/light gun game in its own right thanks to having a consistent design language and an expansive amount of hints. suda has called this his crowning achievement, and in a lot of ways I think this may be a perfect expression of his narrative ideas with his unorthodox gameplay design.

it's hard to go over the plot without getting into spoiler territory, but I'll try my best. the plot details the affable combat between a set of idle demigods who frequently dabble in world politics. meanwhile, around the turn of the millennium, a new semi-communal world order is established that cements continual peace and anti-terror initiatives within the tight grasp of US hegemony. as a new sect of spiritually-enhanced suicide bombers (the Heaven Smiles) begin wracking havoc across the world and as japanese political forces convene to secede as an independent nation, the US government influences paranormal assassins Killer7 (also known as the Smith Syndicate) to intervene on the side of pro-globalist japanese operatives to promote US interests. in a series of vignettes in the middle of the game, Killer7 are tasked with continuing to deal with downstream effects of their prior operation as well as previous US overreach both public and private. as the game draws to a close, the true nature of the powers of Killer7 are revealed to its members as well as their long-reaching ties to political apparatuses within america.

an interpretation I'd like to discuss is the messaging on east-west relations presented in the game. while the context is lopsided (both in-game and in parallels to the US's vulgar displays of foreign power irl), I don't see this as a game explicitly singling out the evils of western powers over those of eastern ones. I originally had this interpretation myself until I reached the ending, upon which I realized the futility and perpetuity of conflict between sides as presented in the final scenes. with that in mind, the game uses a real-life context familiar to those of the early 21st century (a single global superpower and an exceedingly violent anti-terror movement) to contextualize an evergreen tale of nations jockeying for supremacy. the game does an expert job of dissecting the death drive the individuals involved have for power at any cost. virtually every character is deeply entwined in the existing power structures, and those who are not desperately claw their way into new ones (see Ulmeyda's cult/corporation during the Cloudman episode). the mortals and their grasps at legacy, relevance, and pleasure contrast nicely with the reincarnated demigods who walk among them and absent-mindedly reorient the world order at will in a sort of "long dark tea-time of the soul" to pull a phrase from douglas adams. this is all not to say the game doesn't indulge itself at all - far from it - but the underlying currents of the plot are grim towards the coexistence of different powers even in a globally-enforced peace arrangement.

as others have pointed out, I did want to briefly mention the mid-game sag that makes the plot a little hard to follow. as mentioned previously, there's three chapters in the middle of the game that are self-contained intersituals centered on dangerous forces within the US. the Cloudman chapter is definitely the best of the three, thanks to how it draws parallels between religious cults and the cult of personalities around business tycoons (a too-easy real world example: elon musk's following vs the sketchy finances of his company tesla) all being seasoned to taste by the US intelligence community. a lot of this is conveyed through animated sequences as well, which are in a western style that reminds me of older Korn music videos for better or for worse. the Encounter chapter covers an organ trafficking operation as well as Dan Smith's backstory, which is fascinating with context from the supplementary material but doesn't cover much interesting ground in the game itself. finally, the Alter Ego chapter tosses some interesting ingredients into the mix such as government involvement in private media and corporate exploitation of creative works, but without enough time to simmer these threads feel too underdeveloped to analyze in detail. this chapter is animated in a more traditional anime style, though everyone's faces are lopsided in an exceedingly ugly way that I'm not sure was intentional. this middle section is very playable so it's not an immense drag on the game, but I feel like I have to bring up the faults as well as part of my honest opinion.

on the flipside, the gameplay is pretty easy to parse thanks to a nice heap of quality of life features and smart design decisions. as everyone probably knows, this game is controlled on rails with one button moving you forward and another moving you backwards. while it takes a bit to get used to, it's mapped to W and S on k+m as if it were WASD controls, and at the same time it keeps everything important directly in your path, keeping the player from missing an important item or objective. this also allows for creative camera angles when it isn't locked in the classic grasshopper manufacture worm's eye view perspective. in your way moving between areas are plenty of Heaven Smiles, which you can deal with in a first-person aiming mode reminiscent of a light gun game. enemies are initially invisible but have distinctive laughter that let you know when one is in the vicinity (a godsend considering the odd camera angles), and each can be scanned to visualize them and find weak points. I was surprised by the variety of enemies in this game, many of which encourage experimentation to determine the best way to take them down. minibosses can get annoying here or there, but once the mechanics are learned and you have a good grasp on your combat options it becomes more rewarding to encounter new enemies.

one of the big draws here are the switchable characters, both for puzzles and for combat. there are six that can be swapped between at will via the menu as well as Garcian, who is mainly used to revive other characters when they are killed. by sitting through all of the optional tutorials you can find out the ins-and-outs of each, though I did not do this and found that I was able to sus out their differences just from organic trial-and-error. each one has a unique method of combat that goes beyond simple differences in stats and instead alters the gunplay for each. getting a handle on each character's abilities is key, as most of the chapters lock some personalities behind a set amount of kills that you must meet, though generally it isn't difficult to unlock whichever ones you're missing. I personally focused on coyote in the early game thanks to his wide applicability to puzzles, fast reload time, and solid damage, and I eventually branched out to the others. dan is powerful in combat thanks to his collateral shot charge special, while kaede and mask are situationally useful for certain enemies that require precision aiming/large explosives respectively. the only one I didn't get a lot of juice out of is kevin: he can easily skip large groups of enemies with his invisibility but is rarely useful in puzzles and lacks the firepower of the other characters. then again, I can't fault the game too much for this considering that it was more personal choice that I chose not to use him.

beyond understanding the above mechanics, most of the game really consists of learning the language of the design concepts for each puzzles. when I first played this briefly on gamecube I was quickly confused by the abstract language, frequent codewords, overwhelming amount of abilities, and the unfamiliar combat. on returning though, I feel like I understood how each in-game mechanic maps to a classic game mechanic pretty well, ie thick blood = exp, thin blood = mana pool, warped guitar riff = unsolved puzzle, soul shard = plot coupon, gimp suit guy on wall = soul shard nearby, and so on. learning to separate out the random musings from the side characters from important puzzle hints is vital to getting by, though the puzzles aren't that hard to begin with. the majority just involve using the correct character ability or ring in the right place, and which you should use where can generally be figured out just from whether a given object is interactable or not. more complicated puzzles generally involve passcodes or tiny quizzes or other things that don't really take mental gymnastics to figure out, and there's a built-in character who will give you clear hints in exchange for thick blood/EXP. I'll mention the bosses here as well because they're all puzzles to some extent: they're hit and miss, but nothing terrible. a couple times I got a little confused on the mechanics of a given fight, but none of them are strenuous to the point of being frustrating. some of them are straight-up scripted, and the rest should be easy to deal with as long as you keep your characters leveled up.

some other quick bullet points I wanted to mention:
+so many people have already mentioned it, but I gotta bring up the sound design. the soundtrack is great front-to-back, sound effects are vibrant, and you can even pinpoint enemy positions thanks to the clever stereo panning at play here.
+upside of the steam port: this game feels really natural with k+m controls. downside: all of the FMVs are super compressed and look pretty ugly to be honest.
+the chapter selection menu is really fun, and I love the way that you shoot each target when the chapter is selected and they explode into particles.
+definitely read Hand in Killer7 after playing, it helped me organize my thoughts on the plot and it adds a lot of context that didn't make it into the final game
+the remnant psyches are all a joy to talk to, though I wish I could clicked through the dialogue at my own place sometimes. I initially thought they had animal crossing-style babble, but it seems like they actual speak from an alternative engrish script through a modulator? hard to tell, but neat nonetheless.
+I like the way the mad doctor holds his hands up while cooking up serum for you to level up your characters with, and how he bangs the machine when it stops working aka when you've produced as much serum as you can for a given level.

it's a singular, unique game that goes down smooth while also packing a lot of punch thanks to the amount of depth in its story. after my mixed experiences with no more heroes I think this is the game that really made me appreciate suda's work. I already want to hop back onto my gamecube save just to get that experience, and I'm excited to play his other early games that I've had sitting in my backlog for ages. none of them may unseat this game for me, but anything even approaching this level of quality would be worth playing in my book.

Bayonetta 2 was made for people who only did one playthrough of Bayonetta. At launch critics and fans praised the game for fixing a lot of the glaring faults of the original. It's more vibrant in colors, removed all resemblance of insta-kill QTEs and terrible After Burner levels, and made cool new additions such as the introduction of Demons and Umbran Climax. However, over time the game's reputation devolved, and if you ask any Platnium Games fan about the game, they'll tell you it's a weaker entry than the original. I share that same sentiment.

You see, the main problem with Bayonetta 2 is that it revolves too much around Witch Time. Now I know what you might be saying, wasn't Witch Time the central mechanic of Bayonetta and so naturally they would want to keep focusing that clear central mechanic? That was never the case.

Witch Time was made as a crutch for newer players to get used to the game on its lower difficulties, but even then there were enemies that spawned that outright ignore Witch Time. On my first playthrough, I thought that was a bug or something, but no, it was intentional. The highest difficulty of Bayonetta 1 you unlock after beating hard mode, Infinite Climax, outright removes Witch Time altogether. That seems insane for anyone who played the original once, some encounters seemed like they're impossible without the mechanic. But no, Witch Time wasn't made for these encounters, it was Dodge Offset.

Dodge Offset was the secret mechanic to the first game that allows for these Witch Time-less encounters to work. It allows Bayonetta to continue combos while dodging. The problem however lies in that while there's a visual queue for a successful dodge offset, that game never explicitly told the player how to do it, and it's the most crucial mechanic to learn how to master the game's combat. I admittedly pissed farted and shitted my way through the first game without ever knowing it was even in the game until years later.

I feel the team behind Bayonetta 2 without Hideki Kamiya's influence thought because the first game never told the player how important Dodge Offset was only a supplemental gameplay mechanic and felt the need to include it in the game without asking the player to master it. It's most likely why Infinite Climax in this game actually has Witch Time activated, as it's this game's main mechanic now.

Well okay, fine, you want to make the game easier for new players and make learning technical stuff an optional thing. That wouldn't be an issue, but for some reason, Witch Time is notably nerfed in this game too. I guess they didn't want players to gain too much reward from it during encounters, but that requires Bayonetta to do any real damage in this game.

The second issue with this game is that Bayonetta doesn't do any damn damage in this game. I already thought the health pools of bosses in the original were obnoxious, but it's taken to ludicrous degrees here now that Bayonetta feels she hits people with a wet towel, and the new weapons don't give any improvements to her damage output. Why? Oh yeah, so Platnium can shoehorn Umbran Climax to your face. It's fine if you wanted to give the player a Devil Trigger-like mechanic, but it shouldn't be the end all be all for dealing substantial damage. It also doesn't help that enemies can break out of combos easier now, which makes getting that damage naturally even harder. It devolves all of the encounters to just waiting for a Witch Time opportunity to do pixel-health damage and to build Umbran Climax meter then releasing it so you can actually nuke their health bars until either the encounter stops or the boss goes away.

I also gotta say, what was the point of adding in slow-moving walking sessions or the Snake Within or Crow Within abilities that amounts to "helping you move by flying or swimming". These don't add anything to an action game, these are blatant padding techniques to bloat out an already shorter game than the original.

So, while Bayonetta 2 does indeed remove a lot of things that plagued the original release, it adds in a bunch of useless features that not only make no sense but completely unbalances what made the original the more compelling and interesting to master game.

The thing is I never actually noticed these things on my initial playthrough. Like most people, I thought it was an upgrade to the original because it was prettier and didn't have those terrible QTEs, but what I didn't realize that the monkey paw twisted one of its fingers when I asked for these changes when playing the original. I only did one playthrough of each game and when you only have little understanding of those mechanics you will naturally feel Bayonetta 2 is the better game. But it was until revisiting those games with a better grasp of both these games mechanics and action games as a whole is how I figured out that this game was a lot of smoke and mirrors. It's pretty and flashy, but that can only give you so much to work with.

playing klonoa feels like reminiscing about childhood with a friend who came from the same sorta social patch. some details won’t match up and some details are too broad generic to get caught up on, but every once in a there’s some hyper specific throughline. could be as minute as also happening to marching around barefooted looking for pecans sometimes, doesn’t really matter—that mutual nostalgia feels all the sweet regardless

i imagine if you could lift the misty veil off our dreams, you’ll probably see the phantasmic-but-oddly-photorealistic landscapes of phantomile. not to say there was some massive movement here, more so a handful of isolated incidents, but i really dig the odd fixation on oneirology we saw throughout that gen. no idea if this was the product of developers registering that technology was just at the right level to render vague, dreamy approximations of reality but not quite at the level of making new york city replicas, but it works nevertheless

nights played with this and mixed in suggests some analytical psychological theories; lsd dream emulator rejects any sense of formality by haphazardly throwing cultural, social, and religious sign around to create a game that is one part eerie, one part tender. klonoa takes this theming and dials it up on the whimsy, framing itself as a harlequinesque pop-up book concerning around human desires. what should be meek, passing touches on high concepts are deeply afflicting, all thanks to their shared framing device

again, beneath the mirage, there’s a real sense of familiarity ingrained here. they’re distant as they are true to life. it taps into a primordial understanding of our world and how we interact with it. i’d honestly say accurately articulating this is unattainable feat, but i really mean it when i say there’s something about these game’s audiovisual presentation that gives them an unmatched intimacy

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.