morgandeatley
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Demon's Souls
2020
Demon's Souls sits in a uniquely unfortunate position in FromSoftware's modern catalogue of action RPGs. It was the progenitor for many of the gameplay, world design, and narrative innovations largely associated with Dark Souls, yet having been a commercially unsuccessful PS3 exclusive, it never fully attained the audience and recognition of the team's smash-hit follow-ups. With the release of 2020's Bluepoint-led remake (itself a console exclusive for the PS5), the game was ripe for discovery by a new audience of fans raised on its successors.
As a result of this, its many innovations in design and style play like half-formed suggestions toward what games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne would realize - if, like me, you have played those games first.
I found Demon's Souls (2020 - I have not played the original) to be an overall mixed-bag of an experience with more promise than delivery, design choices that feel confusing, and a jagged imbalance between the quality and experience in exploration versus in the central combat encounters, but it is difficult to distinguish how much of this is informed by my far superior experiences with later series entries. It's like hearing Rubber Soul for the first time after you've already spent months swimming in Revolver, Abbey Road, and The White Album.
Some of the aspects of challenge that Demon's Souls presents (the HP halving in soul form, the lack of an automatically replenishing healing resource, the world tendency system) have been targeted by critics of the game's difficulty as things that make it unfriendly and antagonistic as a player experience, but I want to be clear: I have little issue with these. The HP halving in soul form, and the world tendency system affecting difficulty when you die in human form, force the player to engage in a unique and challenging bit of cost-benefit analysis in order to determine how to mitigate your overall weakness. The lack of an Estus flask system is less ideal in the way it necessitates farming (a shared weakness with Bloodborne), though I found overall that, like with the HP conundrum, the game offers you additional workarounds if you are willing to explore, get creative, and engage with its systems of play. These gameplay mechanics present a challenge that not everyone will find welcome, but that add to the richness of the experience more than they detract, and overall encourage creativity, logic, and experimentation that the game does well to reward.
Having already played the Souls trilogy, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring, I found Demon's Souls to be a significantly easier game on the whole (it helps that it's by far the shortest in the series too), with only one real moment of particular struggle that dampened the experience in that regard. My issues come into focus with the unconventional structure of the game, where the intended order of exploration is unclear, but every possible sequence presents some kind of unbalanced or fragmented experience.
Spoiler Zone Begins
The first couple of hours playing Demon's Souls is fantastic - challenging, at points brutal, but elegant in item placement, level design, and combat encounters. Being forced to explore the first level of Boletaria and defeat the first boss before you can level up adds a sense of urgency, weight, and increasing desperation to the gameplay, as you venture deeper and further around the castle ramparts, hoping blindly to trigger whatever will eventually let you save and put your souls to use. It lays out the kind of adventure experience that Demon's Souls will provide expertly in a similar manner as Bloodborne (a game with which it shares far more similarities than Dark Souls), though ultimately many of the subsequent levels will feel comparatively underwhelming after this. By the time you reach the end of Boletaria's second level and the infamous Tower Knight boss, you're presented with one of the Demon's Souls's most imposing and thrilling encounters - hands down the best boss experience of the entire game, for me.
Then you are forced to explore another Archstone world before you can proceed deeper into the Boletarian Castle, and at first, this acts as a nice (if a little inelegant) reminder that all Archstones are open to you, and that the order of progression of the overall worlds is largely non-linear - this is exciting, giving players the choice to progress through whichever worlds seem most (or least) appealing in whatever order they want. The issue lies with the way these worlds are balanced: the first level of each world is consistently the easiest, and each world's first level has a roughly equivalent difficulty. In this way, the game suggests (though you can only learn this through experiencing them) that you should sample the first level of each Archstone before delving deeper. However, each of the five Archstones, as a self-contained world, is a single, flowing experience through an independent place with its own lore and atmosphere, so playing the game in such a way that you bounce across each world to do its first level ultimately disrupts that atmosphere and experience and means that as soon as you've gotten comfortable and immersed in an environment, you're incentivized to back out and go somewhere else.
The alternative to this (completing Archstones 2-5 individually, from start to finish) would therefore seem a better choice for gameplay experience then, right? Well, despite the fact that the game has already disincentivized this by making you abandon Archstone 1 after two levels, you can indeed play all of the other Archstones from start to finish as self-contained stories. However, the difficulty curve within each Archstone means that you will quickly run up against hurdles that force you to explore elsewhere in order to be sufficiently levelled - the second boss in both World 2 and World 3 are the hardest bosses in the entire game, essentially forcing your hand unless you're especially tenacious. So, if you seek to have a holistic experience doing each world from start to finish, you will be overlevelled for subsequent worlds before you even reach them.
It's not inherently a fatal flaw that the game incentivizes a method of exploration that I happen to find immersion-breaking and unintuitive - however, the Archstone worlds themselves are constructed like funnels of content: they start out in larger levels with more exploration and discovery, and end with an underwhelming combo of simplistic, often puzzle-oriented bosses that end the whole experience on a whimper. The Dragon God finale of World 2, the forced-PVP finale of World 3, the find-a-trick-weapon-then-spam-it finale of World 4, and the underwhelming-phantom-duel finale of World 5 are at best trivial and at worst banal experiences, supplemented by interesting lore to a degree but ultimately lacking in any kind of dynamic gameplay (or in the case of the Dragon God, with such broken AI that what could be a cool experience is initially a series of practically unavoidable one-shots if you're a new player).
Spoiler Zone Ends
I mentioned the lore - and it is good lore. Demon's Souls seems to have some of the most accessible and intricate lore of any of these games, and it's one of the easiest to follow and piece together. The way the various worlds have their own stories linked by the overhanging narrative of Boletaria and King Allant is also nicely done, and it's mostly a joy to discover new information that lets you piece together the characters of the world and the events that led to its downfall. The finale of the game, which I won't spoil, is really well-done too.
There are more aspects of Demon's Souls I could get into; the abundance of different types of upgrade materials for different weapons (a thing I like), the comparatively OP nature of sorceries relative to melee (a thing I dislike), the design and function of the Nexus as a hub (a thing I'm more mixed on vis a vis immersion, but I think Bloodborne does better), how utterly fucking stupid the Maneaters fight is, but overall Demon's Souls is a good game I have a decent amount of fondness for, and I enjoyed my time with it. It's just hard to look past the ways it does fall short of the excellence FromSoft would go on to establish, and for me personally, maybe impossible to examine in a vacuum.
If you're interested in playing through all of FromSoft's Soulsborne games and getting the full Souls experience, make no mistake: I would heartily recommend starting with Demon's Souls. It is an indispensible part of that progression and it will set you up to appreciate the many ways subsequent games build on its systems. However, if you don't have a PS5 and aren't feeling the investment for what is the smallest of these games in multiple senses, don't let it hold you back. Demon's Souls is a good game worth playing, but the bizarre duel nature of its existence as a largely forgotten PS3 gem and a ridiculously overpriced PS5 token exclusive puts it in a precarious place, perhaps destined to fall by the wayside as action RPGs move further and further from the initial template it built.
As a result of this, its many innovations in design and style play like half-formed suggestions toward what games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne would realize - if, like me, you have played those games first.
I found Demon's Souls (2020 - I have not played the original) to be an overall mixed-bag of an experience with more promise than delivery, design choices that feel confusing, and a jagged imbalance between the quality and experience in exploration versus in the central combat encounters, but it is difficult to distinguish how much of this is informed by my far superior experiences with later series entries. It's like hearing Rubber Soul for the first time after you've already spent months swimming in Revolver, Abbey Road, and The White Album.
Some of the aspects of challenge that Demon's Souls presents (the HP halving in soul form, the lack of an automatically replenishing healing resource, the world tendency system) have been targeted by critics of the game's difficulty as things that make it unfriendly and antagonistic as a player experience, but I want to be clear: I have little issue with these. The HP halving in soul form, and the world tendency system affecting difficulty when you die in human form, force the player to engage in a unique and challenging bit of cost-benefit analysis in order to determine how to mitigate your overall weakness. The lack of an Estus flask system is less ideal in the way it necessitates farming (a shared weakness with Bloodborne), though I found overall that, like with the HP conundrum, the game offers you additional workarounds if you are willing to explore, get creative, and engage with its systems of play. These gameplay mechanics present a challenge that not everyone will find welcome, but that add to the richness of the experience more than they detract, and overall encourage creativity, logic, and experimentation that the game does well to reward.
Having already played the Souls trilogy, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring, I found Demon's Souls to be a significantly easier game on the whole (it helps that it's by far the shortest in the series too), with only one real moment of particular struggle that dampened the experience in that regard. My issues come into focus with the unconventional structure of the game, where the intended order of exploration is unclear, but every possible sequence presents some kind of unbalanced or fragmented experience.
Spoiler Zone Begins
The first couple of hours playing Demon's Souls is fantastic - challenging, at points brutal, but elegant in item placement, level design, and combat encounters. Being forced to explore the first level of Boletaria and defeat the first boss before you can level up adds a sense of urgency, weight, and increasing desperation to the gameplay, as you venture deeper and further around the castle ramparts, hoping blindly to trigger whatever will eventually let you save and put your souls to use. It lays out the kind of adventure experience that Demon's Souls will provide expertly in a similar manner as Bloodborne (a game with which it shares far more similarities than Dark Souls), though ultimately many of the subsequent levels will feel comparatively underwhelming after this. By the time you reach the end of Boletaria's second level and the infamous Tower Knight boss, you're presented with one of the Demon's Souls's most imposing and thrilling encounters - hands down the best boss experience of the entire game, for me.
Then you are forced to explore another Archstone world before you can proceed deeper into the Boletarian Castle, and at first, this acts as a nice (if a little inelegant) reminder that all Archstones are open to you, and that the order of progression of the overall worlds is largely non-linear - this is exciting, giving players the choice to progress through whichever worlds seem most (or least) appealing in whatever order they want. The issue lies with the way these worlds are balanced: the first level of each world is consistently the easiest, and each world's first level has a roughly equivalent difficulty. In this way, the game suggests (though you can only learn this through experiencing them) that you should sample the first level of each Archstone before delving deeper. However, each of the five Archstones, as a self-contained world, is a single, flowing experience through an independent place with its own lore and atmosphere, so playing the game in such a way that you bounce across each world to do its first level ultimately disrupts that atmosphere and experience and means that as soon as you've gotten comfortable and immersed in an environment, you're incentivized to back out and go somewhere else.
The alternative to this (completing Archstones 2-5 individually, from start to finish) would therefore seem a better choice for gameplay experience then, right? Well, despite the fact that the game has already disincentivized this by making you abandon Archstone 1 after two levels, you can indeed play all of the other Archstones from start to finish as self-contained stories. However, the difficulty curve within each Archstone means that you will quickly run up against hurdles that force you to explore elsewhere in order to be sufficiently levelled - the second boss in both World 2 and World 3 are the hardest bosses in the entire game, essentially forcing your hand unless you're especially tenacious. So, if you seek to have a holistic experience doing each world from start to finish, you will be overlevelled for subsequent worlds before you even reach them.
It's not inherently a fatal flaw that the game incentivizes a method of exploration that I happen to find immersion-breaking and unintuitive - however, the Archstone worlds themselves are constructed like funnels of content: they start out in larger levels with more exploration and discovery, and end with an underwhelming combo of simplistic, often puzzle-oriented bosses that end the whole experience on a whimper. The Dragon God finale of World 2, the forced-PVP finale of World 3, the find-a-trick-weapon-then-spam-it finale of World 4, and the underwhelming-phantom-duel finale of World 5 are at best trivial and at worst banal experiences, supplemented by interesting lore to a degree but ultimately lacking in any kind of dynamic gameplay (or in the case of the Dragon God, with such broken AI that what could be a cool experience is initially a series of practically unavoidable one-shots if you're a new player).
Spoiler Zone Ends
I mentioned the lore - and it is good lore. Demon's Souls seems to have some of the most accessible and intricate lore of any of these games, and it's one of the easiest to follow and piece together. The way the various worlds have their own stories linked by the overhanging narrative of Boletaria and King Allant is also nicely done, and it's mostly a joy to discover new information that lets you piece together the characters of the world and the events that led to its downfall. The finale of the game, which I won't spoil, is really well-done too.
There are more aspects of Demon's Souls I could get into; the abundance of different types of upgrade materials for different weapons (a thing I like), the comparatively OP nature of sorceries relative to melee (a thing I dislike), the design and function of the Nexus as a hub (a thing I'm more mixed on vis a vis immersion, but I think Bloodborne does better), how utterly fucking stupid the Maneaters fight is, but overall Demon's Souls is a good game I have a decent amount of fondness for, and I enjoyed my time with it. It's just hard to look past the ways it does fall short of the excellence FromSoft would go on to establish, and for me personally, maybe impossible to examine in a vacuum.
If you're interested in playing through all of FromSoft's Soulsborne games and getting the full Souls experience, make no mistake: I would heartily recommend starting with Demon's Souls. It is an indispensible part of that progression and it will set you up to appreciate the many ways subsequent games build on its systems. However, if you don't have a PS5 and aren't feeling the investment for what is the smallest of these games in multiple senses, don't let it hold you back. Demon's Souls is a good game worth playing, but the bizarre duel nature of its existence as a largely forgotten PS3 gem and a ridiculously overpriced PS5 token exclusive puts it in a precarious place, perhaps destined to fall by the wayside as action RPGs move further and further from the initial template it built.
Inscryption
2021
What begins as an addictive deckbuilder with roguelike elements and mysterious puzzles around the margins slowly becomes a transformative postmodern commentary on gaming media, the search for meaning in art, and the relationship between players and the ruthless economy of video game conglomerates - all of this while never losing that satisfying gameplay loop and finding ways to iterate on it and keep things fresh. The enrapturing atmosphere of the game's first act is admittedly missed once its first big twist is revealed, but the way the narrative evolves around the gameplay as the player progresses does a good job of keeping things balanced and intriguing.
I knew this was a classic, going in, but what I hadn't anticipated was just how elemental and minimalistic it would be. It was a pleasant surprise and welcome subversion to discover a game that I had known only to be an innovative open world adventure was in fact set in a barren desert, melancholic from its opening cinematic, and centred around a gameplay loop so simplistic that the weight of its repetitions acquire a purposefully suffocating heft, even as the colossi designs and environmental attention required to topple them remain for the most part fresh throughout the experience.
Shadow of the Colossus is a deeply lonely game. Though accompanied by a reliable steed, the experience of wandering through this world only to devastate it makes you feel more and more like a harbinger of death itself, barely receptive to the emotions and realities of the creatures you kill, just charging forward as a naive emissary, directed by a force you never dare to question.
The gameplay itself is slightly clunky; handling your horse takes some time to master, clambering up surfaces can occasionally feel glitchy if you are being thrown around, and there is a sense that the environment itself has a general antipathy towards you - some surfaces that look like they should be climbable simply aren't, and there is no fast-travel system. All of these may read as flaws but it is to the game's credit that its atmosphere, narrative, and general emotional tone render them as assets rather than liabilities. These things should not be easy. There should be no shortcuts. The world should resist you, because there is still life in it, and you are, ultimately, a threat.
This does mean that sometimes the colossi can feel a little tedious. It is, if not a necessary cost, then perhaps an understandable one, as a product of the game's philosophy. Sometimes you have to wait, sometimes the puzzles can be obtuse, and sometimes you will just feel stupid. Sometimes a jump will feel needlessly finnicky, or a gimmick poorly communicated. But only rarely did that actually take me out of the experience, and ultimately those instances were forgivable for the grandeur and scale on which the game operates, the smallness that you feel, the conflict at the heart of your purpose.
"Shadow of the Colossus is one of the great game experiences everyone should have" is the wisdom I've seen frequently extolled, and for all of my assumptions that this would reflect on innovative gameplay, world building, and narrative impact, ultimately the greatest asset of my experience was the isolation at the core of its protagonist, Wander's, world. For as noble and altruistic his motivations - the desire to save an anonymous companion - the world is resistant, and antagonistic, and content without you. And it is only in accepting that, in embracing that, that you can fully commune with it, and what seems like a chaos coalesces into a harmony. The light that draws you to a single point is not a target, it's a call. It's too late for Wander, but it's not too late for us.
Shadow of the Colossus is a deeply lonely game. Though accompanied by a reliable steed, the experience of wandering through this world only to devastate it makes you feel more and more like a harbinger of death itself, barely receptive to the emotions and realities of the creatures you kill, just charging forward as a naive emissary, directed by a force you never dare to question.
The gameplay itself is slightly clunky; handling your horse takes some time to master, clambering up surfaces can occasionally feel glitchy if you are being thrown around, and there is a sense that the environment itself has a general antipathy towards you - some surfaces that look like they should be climbable simply aren't, and there is no fast-travel system. All of these may read as flaws but it is to the game's credit that its atmosphere, narrative, and general emotional tone render them as assets rather than liabilities. These things should not be easy. There should be no shortcuts. The world should resist you, because there is still life in it, and you are, ultimately, a threat.
This does mean that sometimes the colossi can feel a little tedious. It is, if not a necessary cost, then perhaps an understandable one, as a product of the game's philosophy. Sometimes you have to wait, sometimes the puzzles can be obtuse, and sometimes you will just feel stupid. Sometimes a jump will feel needlessly finnicky, or a gimmick poorly communicated. But only rarely did that actually take me out of the experience, and ultimately those instances were forgivable for the grandeur and scale on which the game operates, the smallness that you feel, the conflict at the heart of your purpose.
"Shadow of the Colossus is one of the great game experiences everyone should have" is the wisdom I've seen frequently extolled, and for all of my assumptions that this would reflect on innovative gameplay, world building, and narrative impact, ultimately the greatest asset of my experience was the isolation at the core of its protagonist, Wander's, world. For as noble and altruistic his motivations - the desire to save an anonymous companion - the world is resistant, and antagonistic, and content without you. And it is only in accepting that, in embracing that, that you can fully commune with it, and what seems like a chaos coalesces into a harmony. The light that draws you to a single point is not a target, it's a call. It's too late for Wander, but it's not too late for us.
Elden Ring
2022
Simultaneously the culmination of every game in FromSoftware's modern "Soulsborne" series and a complete resetting of the format into an open world space, Elden Ring is utterly triumphant in its marriage of the standard dungeon procedural with rewarding, motivating, and multi-faceted open world gameplay. Sure, there is inevitably filler content, but it seldom feels boring and there are enough riffs on the format of the game's most copypasted assets (the catacomb and cave mini-dungeons) for them to feel refreshing enough as a break from the frankly overwhelming exploration.
All of this is coupled with practically all of the familiar mechanics from From's beloved trilogy (the level design within the major dungeons is uniformly brilliant, with Leyndell being the most impressive level they have ever crafted in the games I have played, at least). I was particularly struck with the masterful build versatility on display here - the game goes to great pains to make all build options viable, each of its classes uniquely valuable, and all such builds loaded with an incredible diversity of weapons and a complex but somehow still intuitive upgrade system, as well as a dazzling array of unlockable summons to provide assistance for those who struggle with the game's difficulty curve(s).
And on the note of difficulty: as anyone racing into the game's "first" (though entirely skippable) legacy dungeon will quickly realize, the story bosses in this game are no joke, and will absolutely flatten unseasoned or underleveled players, serving as a clever bit of extrinsic motivation to engage with the open world and explore all corners. The game is also littered with personable and idiosyncratic NPCs (another FromSoft staple), and while following many questlines to their conclusion may inadvertantly lock you out of others, they are more forgiving than I anticipated and the rewards are bountiful (the only piece of backseating I will proffer here is to see Ranni's quest through to its conclusion - or don't, as you wish, but hers I found to be the most rewarding for reasons I won't dare spoil).
For all the talk of its incredible length, vast quantities of Elden Ring's content is either entirely missable or freely skippable (or both), so the game is really as long as you are interested in it - or as it takes for you to be sufficiently levelled for its late game bosses, the difficulty of which has become infamous (though I think I was overlevelled as I didn't find them exceptionally unfair).
For the investment required, and for the cost, Elden Ring is more than a bargain, and absolutely worth your time. I played it in five weeks and it felt like it completely consumed my life. As lush and rich as its early areas are, the more dungeon-focused back half was where the game truly blew my mind, as its structure smartly narrows to an intense and visceral climax. As someone who has fallen head over heels for FromSoft in recent months, I think the biggest endorsement of Elden Ring I can give is that it somehow outpaced and exceeded all expectations.
All of this is coupled with practically all of the familiar mechanics from From's beloved trilogy (the level design within the major dungeons is uniformly brilliant, with Leyndell being the most impressive level they have ever crafted in the games I have played, at least). I was particularly struck with the masterful build versatility on display here - the game goes to great pains to make all build options viable, each of its classes uniquely valuable, and all such builds loaded with an incredible diversity of weapons and a complex but somehow still intuitive upgrade system, as well as a dazzling array of unlockable summons to provide assistance for those who struggle with the game's difficulty curve(s).
And on the note of difficulty: as anyone racing into the game's "first" (though entirely skippable) legacy dungeon will quickly realize, the story bosses in this game are no joke, and will absolutely flatten unseasoned or underleveled players, serving as a clever bit of extrinsic motivation to engage with the open world and explore all corners. The game is also littered with personable and idiosyncratic NPCs (another FromSoft staple), and while following many questlines to their conclusion may inadvertantly lock you out of others, they are more forgiving than I anticipated and the rewards are bountiful (the only piece of backseating I will proffer here is to see Ranni's quest through to its conclusion - or don't, as you wish, but hers I found to be the most rewarding for reasons I won't dare spoil).
For all the talk of its incredible length, vast quantities of Elden Ring's content is either entirely missable or freely skippable (or both), so the game is really as long as you are interested in it - or as it takes for you to be sufficiently levelled for its late game bosses, the difficulty of which has become infamous (though I think I was overlevelled as I didn't find them exceptionally unfair).
For the investment required, and for the cost, Elden Ring is more than a bargain, and absolutely worth your time. I played it in five weeks and it felt like it completely consumed my life. As lush and rich as its early areas are, the more dungeon-focused back half was where the game truly blew my mind, as its structure smartly narrows to an intense and visceral climax. As someone who has fallen head over heels for FromSoft in recent months, I think the biggest endorsement of Elden Ring I can give is that it somehow outpaced and exceeded all expectations.
Dark Souls III
2016
A fitting and satisfying conclusion to the trilogy that collapses places, figures, and lore from the previous games (particularly the first) into a Sisyphean lamentation. Which in itself is what the previous games were about also, but this has a greater feeling of weight and the burden of legacy to it. In terms of gameplay, where it lacks the magical feel and intricate vertical design of the first game, it makes up for it with the series best collection of bosses and most refined, sophisticated boss design ever. This doesn't really become apparent until about a third of the way into the game, but the fights escalate in intensity and awe-inspiring magnitude to an incredible climax. As ever, the DLCs contain some of the best content, particularly The Ringed City, which features my favourite fight in the entire trilogy and the series' best dragon (dragons are something the series is very inconsistent in doing well, to the point that there's even a gimmick dragon in the base game here that functions almost as a meta-joke about the difficulties of designing dragon fights - that they were able to make that concession and then still pull out their best dragon fight ever later on is an immense power move). The infamously brutal Sister Friede fight is another highlight, undeniably one of the most sensational, gruelling, but stunning setpieces FromSoft have ever pulled off. It's hard not to feel a sense of wistfulness, even bittersweetness, now that I have finished this series, and I already want to go back and start a second playthrough of the first game. While the (meaningful) retreading of old ground that Dark Souls 3 does means it doesn't quite have the spark of intrigue and addictiveness that Dark Souls and Bloodborne have, it's still a great game worth playing.
Bloodborne
2015
Somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Base game is probably 3-3.5 stars, but DLCs are 4-4.5, for whatever that's worth - honestly the DLCs are so surprising and satisfying that it's almost jarring compared to the base game's plain linearity and inconsistent design (both in terms of bosses and levels, but especially bosses - the base game bosses are largely dull and forgettable). That all said, while there's a lot I don't love about this game, I never stopped wanting to play it.
Outer Wilds
2019
The greatest game I have played to date - a diverse, fully-realized and immaculately rendered solar system that can be explored to solve a non-linear mystery that involves mastering time management and manipulating the physics of your environment. Beautiful design and moving meta-story with an ending that conveys better than most works of art I've ever encountered the importance of understanding that some things cannot be saved, and more potently, that doesn't have to be tragic. Whatever you do, play this game, and don't read a single thing about it. You will not regret it.