It's very impressive how Chapter 1 of Deltarune manages to simultaneously embrace the love people have for Undertale's characters and the emotions that game made its fans feel whilst also being something very unique and different that doesn't want to just live in Undertale's shadow. How it manages to subvert Undertale's subversions and play with your expectations in delightful and meaningful ways. How it stands on its own as a genuinely affecting self-contained story, whilst hinting at the larger themes and story-beats just enough to entice you and yet not so much as to really give you a clear idea of what to expect next.

There's a lot of heart here, especially in regards to Susie's character arc which is very well-realised and almost brought me to tears. As a result of being one chapter of a longer tale some of the more gamey elements don't quite have enough time to realise their full potential (Jevil rules, however), and it's possible that once the later chapters are out I'll revise my score upwards especially as it's hard not to believe that the full picture won't make some aspects of this Chapter come into clearer focus, but this was lovely and I'm very excited to play Chapter 2 soon.

Katamari Damacy's controls are such a wonderful example of frictional game design. From a certain vantage-point controlling the katamari, a giant not-really-spherical mass of assorted objects, is almost undeniably clunky, awkward and a little bit of a struggle. Most of the time it will never do quite what you want it to, and on occasion things will even just go outright badly as you accidentally careen down a slope or manage to tightly lodge yourself in a not-quite-large-enough gap that you'll have to desperately wiggle out of.

I'm honestly surprised I don't see more people getting frustrated with this aspect of the game, and I have to confess that when I was starting to dive back into videogames a couple years ago I found how this game controls quite off-putting, enough so to be pretty ambivalent towards my experience with it. I was starting to explore the medium again, but from the perspective of a late-20s adult rather than the teenager I once was, and I simply hadn't had enough experiences with videogames at that point in time to really know how to cope with a one actively resisting your attempts to control it, that wouldn't just let you input what you wanted to have happen on a one-to-one basis, and for me at least that manifested in frustration. The fact that I return here two years later and find myself having so much love for this game is a great example about how our relationship with any individual artform is always evolving over time as we learn more and have a wider variety of experiences to draw from; that exact sense of friction and push-back that the game has that was so off-putting for me before now just seems crucial to the fun that can be found here.

The Prince, who finds himself rolling around these katamaris, is a rather small fellow, and remains largely a pretty similar size even as the katamaris grow wildly out of control across the course of the game; eventually he finds himself pushing something thousands of times larger than him. The most immediate upside of the frictional controls here, that sense of resistance, is how much it heightens the immersion of putting you in his shoes; you're not just pushing a ball around in a game, but you're very specifically playing as a small little guy who is going to struggle to keep this gigantic mass of stuff under control. The lack of control here just adds to the sense of weight and size and scale, and the movement growing ever-clumsier as the katamari amasses makes the game-feel translate to you how ridiculous what you're doing here is. The friction in the controls add a sense of serendipity too, the katamari is not a perfect sphere but a mass of random objects some of which jut out in weird ways making the collision so strange. Sometimes this works against you in often-funny ways, whilst other times a piece of debris you've collected will jut out against the ground just right to lift you up somewhere you shouldn't really be able to reach; either way serves to make the experience less routine and more memorable than if the katamari was just some easily-predictable-orb.

The best part of all of this is that once you're willing to make the leap to the notion that it's okay to not have perfect control over what's happening then the decisions you're faced with when you're playing become all the more engaging. Turning is slow, and even lining yourself up doesn't guarantee you'll actually go in a straight line, so sometimes you'll just want to jam the breaks on and start going in reverse; you won't be able to see where you're going as easily but you'll grab those objects behind you a lot faster provided you do hit them. Or do you want to take the time to stop, turn round, line yourself up, trading precious seconds for a bit more confidence that you'll actually grab the objects you're after? There's a middle point on this equation too, attempting to make these turns whilst on the move, but it's sufficiently finnicky to perform that this isn't just a free option; you get a nice mix of speed and accuracy here, but only if you can stop the katamari from slipping off in the wrong direction whilst you're doing this.

This lays out my varied experiences with the control scheme, and why I've turned around on the game so much, but of course there's a tremendous amount of joy in Katamari Damacy too which was clear to me even back when I wasn't as big a fan of the game but that lands more resoundingly now. I love how the game lets you continue playing a level even after the objective is completed, and how this means the reward for completing a level faster is that you get even more time to mess around in these spaces before the timer runs out. I love how the nature of the growth of the katamari, constantly needing increasingly bigger objects to meaningfully feed it, puts the emphasis on keeping moving rather than backtracking for any individual object you accidentally rolled past. I love the iterative level design of the main storyline, where later levels directly echo the earlier ones such that you already have some amount of familiarity with them from the get-go and a good idea of where the shortcuts are going to be. I love the bonus levels based around picking up the largest version of an animal you can find, and the pain that surges through you when you realise that yes that carton of milk counts as a cow, your run is now over, sorry-not-sorry. I love the affection that is shown here for people, all our oddities, our bizarre societal rituals, our cultures and passions and humble existences, and how even in the game's quiet critique of consumerism it never lets go of this affection for us. I love just how gentle all of this is, even as your katamari goes about tearing down whole civilisations, and how even amidst the chaos on display the game manages to be relaxing and comforting.

Legends: Arceus is incredibly fortunate that it's a Pokémon game, as there's a lot here that would be nearly unforgivable in any other context.

The story has some nice moments, and a handful of enjoyable characters, but is achingly plodding, tedious in its repetitions, and ultimately overstays its welcome. The core gameplay loop often feels like it amounts to little more than making numbers go up and ticking boxes. The boss fights were actually pretty enjoyable to me just because they broke up the core gameplay loop, but they do amount to an E-Grade Souls rip-off with some pretty bad game-feel. In general I think game-feel is something Legends: Arceus really struggles with, especially when this aspect collides headlong into some of the ways where the game feels unfinished (attempting to traverse hills and edges of terrain makes this really obvious).

The game also feels like it is suffering a bit of an identity crisis at times; a common occurrence for the first half of the runtime is that you'll end up in a battle with some story character, you'll have six monsters to their one or two meaning you can never really lose no matter what happens, and then as soon as you win your party is healed for you. It's like they didn't want the trainer battles to define the game, but were too scared to move away from them to a more dramatic extent in case the lack of them might disappoint long-time fans.

Easily the most damning problem though, and the one I really can't shake, is the world design. These environments are just so lifeless, so lacking in intrigue. Big, bland, bumpy, and ultimately distractingly ugly, expanses that exist solely to plonk down critters upon. If you removed the Pokémon themselves from the equation it's hard to imagine people actually wanting to exist in these spaces, or having any real desire to explore them.

Legends Arceus has a lot wrong with it, and yet despite this it is still a Pokémon game and this does some serious heavy lifting in its favour. Despite all my many complaints, sometimes you just see the most perfect, adorable little critter wandering around in the wild, you crouch down in the grass to try and sneak up on it, and in that moment it's hard to harbour any ill-will against what's going on here. Pokémon has always been a franchise that carries with it an incredible amount of charm and the best moments in Legends Arceus are the ones where that charm shines through, and for all the game's faults I was left smiling more than this review might suggest just because it's hard to feel too bad when you get to spend your time vibing around all these lovely monster-friends.

the ultimate smooth brain game mixed with the ultimate galaxy brain game

Tunic starts out with a simple premise: it's like an old Zelda, but ~different~. it's purposefully more cryptic, its combat and design more like dark souls, and its whimsy is more whimsical than its influences. this charm pulls you in, but the idea that there's something more to the world keeps you going through the more "where do i even go/what do i even do" parts.

the chests and walls hidden by the isometric camera are fun, a repurposing of old classics. the language of the game is genius, a joy to solve. the deeper secrets are the same, another delicious treat to stumble upon in your own way. even as i finished the game, i KNEW that there were still more bigger mysteries to solve, but i had my fun with Tunic and i knew it was time to break the cycle.

an absolute joy

beyond incredible

still refreshingly playable, but also STILL ahead of its time. so much nuance baked into each facial expression and quip, an ocean of complexity buried in thousands of branching trees that you will only ever see a small portion of.

TokiMemo perfectly captures the constant worry of high school, in a constant environment of crazy-making conversations where you overthink every possible interaction in every way that it could go. you become the emergent gameplay, even when your character's words/actions betray how you actually feel.

the pain of being on a date with the girl you like and saying something to upset her is a spine-chilling dagger running through you, knowing that you COULD reload and have to relive the same few weeks to try again or you could let your initial choice lie and have to deal with the consequences. do you fulfill a promise you made earlier to your childhood friend you have a crush on who is CLEARLY emotionally struggling lately, or do you choose to spend time with the girl who loving is easy and carefree, who clearly likes you more, who is honest about her feelings toward you? you can only choose one, and the other will be upset. when the bombs start rolling in, you only have yourself to blame.

to play perfectly, you must become a pervert freak like Yoshio. to seek the Perfect Love, you must (in some small way) become a manipulator. to find the love you actually want, all you have to do is wait and consider how they want to feel, how to make them feel supported best, but also offer them new experiences that they might not have had without you.

this is only after my FIRST PLAYTHROUGH also!!!! Mio, i'm coming back for you....

One of my favourite traits of Fromsoft's work on their assorted Souls games is their ability to make worlds feel larger than they actually are. The way these games will have you be able to visually see in the distance places you will reach over ten hours in the future, or looking back and seeing where you journeyed from and feeling so small compared to this world around you. How the very existence of illusory walls makes it feel like there could be a secret hiding basically anywhere. Huge chunks of content being hidden in compelling, obtuse or even outright bizarre ways, with no concern for the notion of players missing out on literal entire regions or multiple major boss fights as a result, leading both to excitement and surprise when you manage to stumble upon these secrets or figure them out on your own, and to those amazing moments where you get to share discoveries with others or learn from them, the game repeatedly opening up to be even bigger and more mysterious somehow. I typically don't love the npc quests in these games but even those, with their habit of careening off-course as if some player's unfortunate choices unknowingly ruined their dungeon master's plans, make the world feel somehow larger than you and beyond your strict control.

This is also why I think lore videos for these games have ended up coming awfully close to just being their own miniature industry. You're always playing as someone showing up long after the main event has already concluded, with the history of these worlds and characters being something spoken of in riddles and hidden in item descriptions of the relics you find, etched into the environment around you. You have to piece together what happened to get the world to this state from incomplete information, often with the gaps leaving things up to player interpretation. Yet again this all leads to you feeling very small, and the world around you feeling incomprehensibly large with a history so rich that someone as inconsequential as some random undead/hunter/unkindled can't possibly hope to fully grasp all it.

A lot of this would be considered by many to go against a lot of principles of Industry Standard Good Game Design™, but the sum total of it is game worlds that become just endlessly fascinating and evocative to the people they connect with; it turns out designing games is a lot more than just fulfilling a bunch of heuristics on how games and narratives should look, and FromSoft's holistic approach to how the design and lore of these worlds interact with their mechanics is such a great example of this.

This is the environment into which Elden Ring is born. On the one hand an open world game feels almost inevitable in some sense; FromSoft has spent so much time designing game worlds that have their first priority set as making you feel miniscule contrasted with your environment, the player often feeling like a footnote in a long and storied history, and so going ahead and making these feelings come a bit less from smoke and mirrors and a bit more from something literal feels like, at the very least, something they must have been curious to experiment with ever since the original Dark Souls' deeply interlinked, almost Metroidvania-esque map design. On the other hand, isn't it a bit redundant? If they're already instilling these emotions in people what is there to gain from actual, physical vastness, and wildly excessive runtimes, and aren't there just too many costs involved in pushing your game to be this large? This forms the central conflict at the heart of Elden Ring's existence, and whilst I do largely have a lot of fondness for this game, laying out the conflict in this manner makes it very easy both to see why some people are so besotted with Elden Ring, and also to see why others feel like FromSoft jumped the shark here compared to their previous work. Towering, spectacular, intoxicating ambition meets the awkward reality of trying to make that sense of scale be something rendered so literally in a world where realising that takes unfathomable hours of labour.

If you had asked me what I thought of Elden Ring 30 hours into my playthrough I would have said it felt like one of the best games I'd ever played, and that I was anticipating the possible reality where it ends up becoming my favourite FromSoft game. This opening act for me was frankly magical, and really shows what FromSoft can bring to open world games as they apply many of the principles that they approached their previous Souls games with but on a grander scale. I'm going to avoid explicit spoilers here and make oblique references instead, but the manner in which I first discovered Caelid and Leyndell, how you are shown Siofra, and interacting with The Four Belfries for the first time, all rank as some of my favourite moments in gaming as multiple different tricks are taken advantage of, that follow through on FromSoft's usual strategies but writ unthinkably large, to impart a sense of scale, wonder, curiosity and awe on the player. Combine these tricks with how rich these environments are to explore, the handcrafted element that even the various catacombs or caves had to them, and the ways in which, in stark contrast with other open world games, ticking off lists and markers is heavily de-emphasised in favour of advocating for intrinsic motivation and player agency being much greater focal points of your journey, and I found exploring the Lands Between simply enchanting.

If you had asked me what I thought of Elden Ring 60 hours into my playthrough I would have said it was a really great game, but one that is not without sizable flaws. This is the point at which the cracks start to show as the sad reality of trying to make any open world game is you're going to need to re-use a lot of content to make that achievable. The Erdtree Avatar fight that I'd really enjoyed several hours into my playthrough had been repeated to the point where it had become mundane, the wriggly Tree Spirit I'd found in Stormveil Castle that really wasn't very fun to fight but was still interesting because it was a fairly unique encounter was, apparently, nowhere even close to being a unique encounter, and almost any boss that I found in a catacomb or cave would end up being dredged up again, sometimes multiple times, sometimes even as a normal mob enemy. Even some of the wonderful early-game surprises become diluted a bit as they're repeated, the recurrence of the walking mausoleum being the saddest example to me. The crafting system, that I touched only a handful of times in my entire playthrough, is very much a symptom of the open world format too; you need something you can scatter around the world for players to pick up, some reason for them to jump to that hard to reach ledge, but you can only put so many runes and swords and hats in the game so crafting materials start to seem like a necessity and yet it's hard to say that they really add anything to the game except more menus and a slight pang of disappointment when you finally fight your way to that shiny purple item and it turns out it's just another Arteria Leaf.

Despite this I understand that these design decisions are largely just a necessity in a game this large, and outside of them the game was a really great time for me at this point in my playthrough. Exploring was still lots of fun and whilst the exciting moments of discovery had become a bit less frequent they were still there, often delightful, and the quieter, emptier moments found in areas like the Altus Plateau made for a sense of palpable loneliness that served the game well. Build variety felt the best it ever has to the point where I was toying with the idea of a second playthrough later this year. Ranni's and Fia's questlines were very compelling to me, emotionally, narratively and in terms of the physical journeys they involve, and are among the highlights of the game. The bosses felt like a clear step down in quality from Dark Souls 3, but there were a handful of fights that were still really enjoyable to me in different ways, and the game has a great sense of spectacle that sold even some of its overwise more uneven fights.

By far the most impressive portion of the game at this point were its legacy dungeons though. Even the weakest ones among these are still largely fantastic, and the level design in the two highlights, Stormveil Castle and Leyndell, is among the finest work FromSoft has ever done; packed with secrets to an almost ludicrous extent, constantly looping back in on themselves in really cool ways, and with great encounter design throughout. I adored these portions of the game, but I could never fully shake the notion from my head that if the very best portions of this game are the bits that are contained to a single zone then why exactly is it open world?

Sadly, this is where things start to really drop off for me. My playthrough landed at a little over 90 hours and I'm honestly a little exhausted? Leyndell was the highlight of the game for me, and after this area was complete I was very satisfied with my experience and honestly pretty ready for the game to end soon but it just kept going.

A part of the problem here is that I'm not convinced a game like this was ever meant to be this long; the various Souls design tropes that are very entertaining in a shorter game start to wear thin when you're seeing an enemy with their back to you mournfully looking at an item on the ground for the 25th time. A part of this too is that reused content was starting to rear its head to an absurd extent; a beloved enemy type that I was thrilled to see be brought back and placed in a tonally appropriate area earlier in the game would go on to reappear a few more times in areas much less fitting to it, earlier enemies in general just get brought back far too much (the hands are a great example of this; I adored their first appearance and how well suited they were to that locale, and every appearance since felt like the game was just struggling to know what to fill the environments with), Erdtree Avatars, dragons and Tree Spirits showing up yet again would just start prompting eyerolls from me, even a storyline boss from earlier in the game could be found roaming out in the wild in multiple different places. In possibly the most insulting example a secret boss from earlier in the game, that felt very important from a lore perspective and which was very visually unique and impressive, ends up reappearing as the final boss of an otherwise inconsequential cave. This is the sad reality of trying to make a game this literally vast instead of simply instilling a sense of vastness.

Despite all of this I think I would still have mostly been onboard with the late-game stretch, or would have at least been more forgiving towards it, if all the bosses after you leave Leyndell didn't just...kind of suck? There are far too many ridiculous AoE attacks with some bosses having a few different variations of these, shockwave attacks that hit on multiple different frames and so feel very janky and unintuitive to dodge, ridiculous combo attack strings that would appear a couple times per game previously become the norm now instead, every boss had multiple attacks with ridiculous wind-ups (again, a thing that was used but sparingly so in previous games) to the point that fights feel weirdly disjointed and impossible to sight read, multiple bosses are placed in the same arena without any real concern for how these are going to interact with one another, windows to get in attacks are narrowed to the bare minimum especially for anyone who wants to play the game purely melee, and there are a handful of bosses that are gigantic to the point where you can only see their feet as you slash at them oblivious to whatever is actually happening. In two different cases with these oversized bosses I felt like I spent as much time charging across the arena to reach them whenever they ran away as I did actually engaging in combat.

Many of these late-game bosses are just not fun, poorly designed, and beating them for me felt less like I learnt the fight and played it well and more like I just got lucky and rng landed correctly. Even that exciting feeling of how much build variety the game had started to slip away at this point; the late-game requires that your build be incredibly powerful and severely limits what things are viable as a result. Maybe this is just a case of FromSoft just misbalancing things or having an off-day, a bunch of the bosses in Dark Souls 2 are very disappointing too so it's not like this is a first, but I think this is actually the final, and most frustrating, manifestation of the downsides of open world games. It's so hard to keep one-upping yourself over the course of a 90 hour playtime, in a game with a colossal number of boss fights, that the only way you can guarantee the bosses become even more spectacular is to start pushing them in the direction where they also start to feel unfair too, and with how big the game is leading to there being so much game to test it's easy to believe that maybe these bosses just weren't given as much playtesting as they should have as a result.

I see everyone talking about how Elden Ring refined open world games and is going to change them for years to come and whilst I do think there are a bunch of elements of Elden Ring's approach to the quasi-genre that make for a more satisfying, rewarding, and less cloying experience than what you'd find elsewhere, I think ultimately it made me feel like the best thing this game could do for open world games is convince more developers to just make tighter, more refined experiences instead.

I wouldn't blame someone for being just completely turned off of Elden Ring by these problems that crop up in this final stretch. It left a really sour taste in my mouth at points, even in between moments of still genuinely enchanting imagery and art direction. Ultimately though I really loved so much of my experience with Elden Ring in its earlier hours, and there are many moments from this game that will stick with me for a long time, so despite its fairly severe flaws I can't help but find a lot of love in my heart for it regardless. Elden Ring is a display both of the reasons I love FromSoft's approach to game development, and of why I hope they never make another open world game again.

A game covered from head to foot in rough edges. This isn't necessarily entirely a bad thing; playing Demon's Souls earlier this year did a lot for me in terms of demonstrating how rough edges sometimes simply act as enduring evidence of quite how daring and experimental a game actually was (the fact that I learnt this from Demon's Souls is amusing considering quite how much both it and Dark Souls seem to owe the Castlevania franchise just generally). Sure later metroidvania-style Castlevania entries would polish this formula substantially, but even over two decades after its initial release you can still feel the mad creative energy and wild ambition at play here and a big part of the reason that feeling endures is precisely because Symphony of the Night isn't polished by contrast with its descendants.

The game is awfully balanced such that whilst the first couple hours are minorly challenging, your stats quickly out-scale the enemies to the point that much of what follows becomes a cakewalk; there were even multiple late-game bosses that were only dealing one damage per hit to me. Some squares of your map stubbornly refuse being filled in until you've traversed every pixel of them thrice over. Between spells, fighting-game combo moves, weapon special abilities, weapon synergies, transformations, the game has a pile of systems much of which you'll likely hardly interact with, especially considering the aforementioned difficulty issues provide little reason to when everything just dies to you spamming your basic attack. Your weapons all feel broadly very similar to use, each just lashing out directly in front of you a short distance, whilst your side-weapons get horribly out-scaled such that by the second half of the game they (and all the heart pick-ups you'll keep receiving for them) might as well not exist. Meanwhile that second half of the game just feels like busywork, much of the excitement of discovery replaced with painstakingly re-combing every corner of the map.

Symphony of the Night is wildly imperfect, to an extent that might make even this four-star review seem overeager. The thing is, though, that it's also a deeply ambitious game; the scale of the castle, each area drenched in its own compelling vibe, and how the game then re-contextualises all of it in the bold mid-game twist, how the game tries to allow you a great sense of freedom in your traversal of the castle never leaving you with the sense of being railroaded down one particular path and always leaving you wondering whether you're actually even doing things in the intended order, the interweaving of countless different rpg mechanics into action-platformer gameplay, the sense of mystery to the whole thing, strange secrets hidden in increasingly bizarre, arcane ways that should really annoy me but instead just serve to make the game feel so much more sprawling and enigmatic. There's this feeling to the whole affair of constantly throwing new ideas at you whenever it possibly can, refusing to let itself be boxed in by audience expectations, and whilst the rough edges here can certainly be frustrating, confounding, or even just an outright drag, they also serve to keep Symphony of the Night's relentless creative energy feeling fresh even after all the imitation and iteration that has come in its wake.

I played through this on Hard difficulty, runtime about 70 hrs. The world-traversal is a revelation, and the combat is complex and engaging. I spent the better part of that 70 hours enthralled, but by the time I approached the third act, it became apparent that the thin plotting and uneven characterization was going to be amended in the final moments of the game, and even then only barely. I had some assumption that the complaints of "no plot" online were being made by SMT IV-heads, clamoring for that game's incessant interruptions and didacticism, but no. This game is VERY thinly plotted and it does not wear it well. Despite Persona-heads' protestations, Shin Megami Tensei, by which I mean Nocturne, is not a terribly sparse game. There are plot beats that fill the time and the games progress as you'd expect any JRPG to. But it's very clear SMTV's open-ended world traversal and more freeform structure posed a problem for the team in terms of narrative pacing, and they chose the lighter touch there. Maybe more plot asides would grate as they do in 4! I don't know! But there is woefully little to hang on in these characters or their beliefs, particularly the Chaos faction, and the game feels less complete as a result.

I look forward to playing this game again in the future without the weight of expectation bearing down because it is one of the very best JRPGs I have ever played. The problem is, it's a sequel to the very best JRPG I have ever played.

an open-world exploration game that has both more "breath" and more "wild" than Breath of the Wild

Sable wears its BotW inspiration on its sleeve, but the game is much more than that. BotW's combat is servicable at best (the bows are okay), but Sable imagines an open-world experience without that. what if you focused less on conquering and looting a space and more on luxuriating in it and learning more about it. the world feels alive, skittering like the wind across the dunes. the people don't feel placed in random locations, they feel nestled into their own communities where it's you're job to figure out where you fit in with them.

for a coming-of-age narrative, Sable goes a lot more beyond that. it has its Lore Dumps, sure, but the story does a lot by piecing out the flavor of the world through incredible dialogue. i have a folder full of screenshots of my favorite lines, and i STILL missed a lot that i wish i would have captured at the time. the writing centers the player not as a Grand Important Hero that the land needs to survive, but instead as a friend to many. the different groups of "jobs" that you get badges for both asks you what Sable wants to do and what You like doing. for a game about deciding what you want to do with your life, it encourages you to taste all of its flavors.

i love the score by Japanese Breakfast. i got tears when the title theme first appeared in the story. so often i would warp to a specific area when night would fall just so i could hear the area's night theme while driving aimlessly across the desert or climbing to sit atop the dunes or a perch somewhere

it is with this that Sable's love is felt. not when you are running from place to place trying to burn through a game as fast as you can just so you can say you beat it, but when you sit and become part of the world around you. it's this ludonarrative synergy that kept me coming back. the game embodies the feeling of being on a road trip, stopping somewhere cool to get food and the locals there are really nice to you, continuing to drive in the dark, looking at the houses that pass by and wondering who lives there.

in this, Sable reminds us that the joy of games is not in the checking of boxes off of a list of activities, it is in the running and jumping, the exploring, the learning.

(the game has bugs but whatever lol. i'm always willing to look past jank/unintended things when the core experience is good enough)

Seems to be considered FromSoft's masterpiece by many. Certainly Bloodborne has the most impressive art direction of the Soulsborne games, which is saying something considering this is one of the strongest aspects of the series as a whole; the realm of Victorian England, nightmares and lycanthropy, eldritch at its most icky and slimy and wet, leads to some stunning and haunting imagery throughout. The level design here is similarly superb, both visually and in regards to how FromSoft manage to take the principles of Dark Soul's wider world design and apply it within individual areas.

I appreciate the more kinetic, fast-pace of the combat here, and the rally mechanic is a lot of fun and offers a very different flavour to the other games in the series, whilst the trick weapons are incredibly cool to use and visually stylish. I also think that stripping back the rpg mechanics a little bit helps Bloodborne craft itself a reasonably unique identity compared to the other Souls games; the weapons you start with remain feasible options all through the game, you can dress your character however you want without having to worry too much about stats (and there are some incredible pieces of fashion here), and even the stats system has been noticeably streamlined to encourage towards focusing on the hunt.

Despite all of this, Bloodborne does fall short for me compared to my favourite FromSoft games, even though I did enjoy it immensely. There are a scattering of smaller issues that contribute to this. Much has been said about the blood vial system, and whilst I can appreciate the thematic way that grinding for blood vials represents you literally being bloodthirsty, desperately searching for sustenance, as hunters are prone to being, the reality is that having to stop attempting the exciting boss fight you keep dying to in order to go grind together some vials is a painful pace breaker; this didn't affect me too many times as this was the final game I played from the Soulsborne games but I can only imagine how frustrating this must be to someone less experienced with these when contrasted with the estus system where you get to keep making attempts and learning.

Chalice dungeons suck. Whilst Bloodborne does have have more enjoyable combat than the games that came before it, the reality is that the big draw to these games is their atmosphere, worldbuilding and level design, and chalice dungeons strip away so much of this in an effort to be a roguelite-esque jamming together of the same ten rooms over and over instead. I tried playing these for about three hours or so, they never meaningfully improved outside of a couple cool boss fights and I swore to not touch them again. The worst thing about chalice dungeons is it's not like you can even totally ignore them because they actively effect the main game too; there were many times where beating a boss or getting to a hard to reach treasure chest in the main game would give me an item whose only use was for a chalice ritual, content that I was never going to engage with, which would feel disappointing every time.

I also found Bloodborne's collection of bosses honestly very uneven? Early phases of human bosses are very prone to getting stun-locked which both feels weird and also makes having to repeat those early phases boring, and I found wrestling the camera against the game's various different giant, savage, relentless, constantly-screaming beasts to be frustrating (the fight against Ebrietas was ruined by this for me). As with everything in the game, the visual design of these bosses are so good that it's hard for me to be too upset about any of this, or even call any of the bosses bad; even fights like Rom, Micolash, The One Reborn and Celestial Emissary are all very memorable in their own ways even if the gameplay itself wasn't great. Still, the number of bosses I'm actually enthusiastic about here was not terribly high and that makes me a little sad.

Probably the biggest problem for me is that the lore and storytelling in Bloodborne didn't connect with me as potently as it does in the Souls games. I wish I had been given a clearer motivation for what I'm doing at the start of the game, rather than just being told some stuff about locating paleblood (which meant so little to me due to a lack of context) and Gerhman hand-waving the very notion of me worrying about why I'm doing what I'm doing; compared to the Souls games I found myself feeling weirdly purposeless here, like I was just going through the motions on some level. On top of this a lot of the game's thematic content fell flat for me; I loved its look at madness, dreams and nightmares and found a lot of the material surrounding this very compelling in large part because of the places the game gets to go aesthetically as a result, but its look at the evils of the church felt very old hat, and I couldn't find much more to grasp onto here beyond all of that. It's perhaps harsh of me to be contrasting this against the excellent thematic content in the Dark Souls games and their look at entropy, decay, patriarchy, cycles of life and death, and maintaining determination in the face of adversity, especially as Bloodborne is certainly ahead of a lot of games in this regard, but I find myself reminded of another review I read earlier this year that commented about how Bloodborne's storytelling ends up feeling too elusive to connect with, yet also too specific to function as a mood-piece.

It feels like I'm ragging on the game needlessly harshly here; Bloodborne is great, I loved my time with it, it just happened to fall a little short for me in some regards and it takes a lot of words to justify why that is the case when a lot of what FromSoft is doing here is so impeccable and exciting.