Death Stranding is possibly the best video game ever made. It certainly has impressed, exhilarated, and stayed with me more than any other game before or since.

Death Stranding has completely reinvented social interaction in games. Although Death Stranding is a single-player campaign, it necessitates a connection to the internet. It is here that Kojima's purpose begins to take shape; the theme of "we are stronger when connected" bleeds into every aspect of gameplay. As Sam reconnects the chiral network and puts America back online, portions of the map connect to the grid. This means that the player can build structures like generators, rain shelters, player homes, zip lines, bridges, roads, etc using a PCC kit to 3D print structures out in the world. Once another player connects that same area to the grid in their own game, there's a chance that your structure will appear in their world, and vice versa.

You can also collect lost cargo from other people's games and request deliveries from other players. Once, I desperately needed a floating carrier but didn't have the resources. I estimated I'd arrive at the Distro Center West of Lake Knot City in about 30 minutes, so I requested that someone deliver a floating carrier. Lo and behold, it was waiting for me when I arrived! I felt loved at that moment; some stranger had put aside what they were doing and spent 30 minutes of their time bringing me this carrier for no reward or recognition.

Each structure has the name of the player floating above it, and you can "Like" other players' structures if they helped you. I cannot begin to count the number of times other players' structures saved my life. BTs are chasing me - I come upon a shelter. BB is crying, and my exoskeleton is sputtering out - there's a generator. My boots have worn out, and the MULEs are charging at me - but someone has left a motorcycle at the edge of the road for me. A ladder to cross a chasm, a belaying hook to scale a cliff, all left by strangers for strangers.

I felt truly connected to everyone else playing Death Stranding because everything I did had real-world implications. These were real people out there, with real goals and real aspirations. This infinite loop of everyone in the world delivering packages to each other, Liking each other's structures, and positively affirming each other was beautiful. If we all give, no one is left wanting.

there's often too much emphasis placed on the value of narrative that is intrinsically gamey - stories that 'can only be told within the parameters and constructs of a game'. the idea here is simple: one wants to demonstrate the value their medium can bring to the table, so naturally any stories that can 'only' exist as a game and would face extreme adaptational hurdles presents the most appealing case for games as art.

i think this line of thought is suffocating, though. leaving aside the fact that this thwarts and diminishes the potential and creativity of other mediums in adaptation, the kinds of narratives that are lauded for best-in-class video game storytelling are often entirely subservient to structure or gimmick, or engage in reflexive and banal meta exercises. what's more, i'd posit that most (maybe even all) video game narratives are only feasible within the context of video games. taking play seriously means looking for the syntax linking the abstraction of mechanics to traditional forms of storytelling and presentation and the bearing that the coalescence of the two has on emotion and thought.

all this is to say that 13 sentinels represents another homecoming for the 'stories that are beholden to complex ADV structure' genre, and that it distinguishes itself from the usual suspects with nothing but endearing and unrelenting passion for its subject matter while considering some surprisingly insightful meditations on japans relationship to the media environment its fostered since the post-war era. character interactions are really fun and they're easy to get attached to, its breezy and freeform format makes for some incredibly comfortable gaming, and yes - it takes a lot of skill to hold a narrative this ridiculously convoluted together. 13 sentinels is practically bursting at the seams, but it's pretty sharp in how it chooses to disseminate its key narrative points. i also found it refreshing in that its far more shoujo than it is shonen.

this is really more of a pulpy 3.5 than a 4 - it's pretty scuffed mechanically and even structurally. it loses a significant amount of steam in the last quarter of the game (having exhausted a lot of its appeal and doing itself no favours when the emotional resonance the final battle should have fails to land), its RTS component can be exhilirating but fails to integrate itself as essential within the ADV structure and is often unbalanced to its own detriment, and certain characters get relegated to expository mouthpieces with only the occasional bursts of charm buoying their place within the game (gouto being the primary offender here).

still, how can i argue with a game in which ultimately, the brash and youthful human spirit triumphs over the petty squabbles and needlessly labyrinthine overcomplications of adults?

EDIT: thanks so much for all the support everyone, means a lot. after a LOT of thinking, i've decided that i'll still be writing reviews, just shorter, as to not exhaust myself. thanks again.

anyone who knows me knows that i love all the classic sonic games. they’re my comfort games and i’ve been playing them for probably a decade by now. a friend of mine recommended me to play this one again today so i decided to revisit it. this isn’t an unbiased review that’s trying to see if this game “still holds up” or “is as good as i thought it was when i was a kid.” far from it. i love this game lol. my rating is my general critique mixed with my biases and nostalgia i have towards it. sonic 1 is a game that i can pop in anytime and get enjoyment out of it.

green hill is my goat. marble is tolerable. spring yard is cool. labyrinth is ass. star light is awesome. scrap brain is mid. that’s it. that’s the whole review.

console wars, genesis vs super nintendo, america, who gives a fuck. you’ve heard it all before and it doesn’t impact the game’s quality very much at all. sonic defined a generation partly because of sega’s great marketing and shit or whatever, but if the game was no good then it wouldn’t have lasted. sonic 1 is a good game, always was. it didn’t age, it didn’t change. it’s sonic T. hedgehog on the Sega. for years little kids everywhere rushed to their shiny wrapped boxes under that prickly tree to find the Sega they wanted bundled with the sonic edgehog they wanted too. kids aren’t stupid, they knew sonic was our goat. it’s a great time with some dull moments that don’t hinder the overall package all that much. does it suffer from first game syndrome? certainly, but this only further proves that what was laid down here was great enough to allow the construction of the fantastic sequels…
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i’m burnt out man, what do i write next. critical analysis my ass, it’s 10:41 PM on a weekday and i should be sleeping, but guess what? i’m not. sonic the hedgehog sega genesis baby, it does wild shit. to get real for a second i genuinely wrote like a page of some critiques and shit i have with this game. scrapped. i’ve been slowly feeling like my reviews have been becoming really forced and this was it. this was the one that made me genuinely angry. i want to write more reviews but it is really hard. shits becoming stale for me and i feel like there’s nothing i can do. i’m trying to break away from this boxed up structure i see some of my reviews share. the same words and phrases again and again. Backloggd.com. maybe it’s time for me to play a video game and not write a review about it. maybe i should play games and genuinely let them penetrate my soul and allow me to soak in their great, mid, or even terrible juices without having the need to pull out iOS Notes to jot down thoughts or justify how i feel to a seemingly invisible opposing party. maybe it’s time to say goodbye to backloggd.com, just for a little while. to those who follow me and like my stuff i’ll always be thankful to you guys. it means a lot to me that my little ramblings and shit about video games actually interest people. never in my life did i think i’d gain a following on this site. to everyone who reads this mess of a review, thanks.

Sonic the Hedgehog is a platform video game developed by Sonic Team and published by Sega for the Sega Genesis home video game console. The first game in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, it was released in North America in June 1991 and in PAL regions and Japan the following month.

No, I didn’t proofread this, nor do I intend to.

Elden Ring is a very entertaining videogame.

The movement and combat is the most polished of any Souls style game developed by From Software to date (besides Bloodborne perhaps), there's a bunch of cool abilities and spells which the game does a good job at encouraging you to try out and experiment with even when playing non-magic builds, riding around on a horse is fun and feels surprisingly intuitive to Souls style gameplay, and you can enjoy all of this is in a truly massive and often times beautiful open world with Hundreds of Hours of Content™. This is "junk food gaming" at its absolute finest.

Elden Ring could have also been so, so much better.

When I first saw the announcement trailer for Elden Ring and subsequently heard that it was going to be a Souls style game, but with an open world, I was hoping for, if not outright anticipating a truly special take on the formula, which blends the weird and wonderful aspects of Souls style level design with open world progression.

I was imagining vast, non-euclidian labyrinths, dense fog-filled forests which warp the player's sense of perspective and scale, giant Shadow of the Colossus style bosses which traverse the world, some as passive wanderers and others as active pursuers. A game where the world itself is another enemy to defeat and puzzle to solve, but can also lend a helping hand to more observant players through a wealth of environmental interactions.

All of this in a setting which takes unique inspiration from traditional depictions of fairy tales alongside a helping of Celtic and Norse folklore to distinguish itself from Dark Souls, like how Bloodborne used the unique inspiration of Lovecraftian fiction to effectively distinguish itself from Dark Souls whilst having similar game mechanics.

What we ended up with is a bunch of generic swamps and fields dotted with ubisoft-style enemy camps and the occasional scripted encounter against a dragon or yet another big guy in armour wielding a large weapon. The lore of Elden Ring, while interesting and presented just as well as any other modern From Soft game, doesn't really do anything to make itself distinctive from Dark Souls.

I like to believe that the version of Elden Ring that is actually an industry-shaking masterpiece is out there somewhere, if even just in the heads of certain developers and fans, but the Elden Ring we're playing is a literal world of missed potential. Now I understand I am probably sounding contrarian, maybe even melodramatic here, and I admit that I'm not exactly the biggest fan of open world game design even at the best of times so I may be biased, as such I'll take some time to elaborate on my issues with Elden Ring's gameplay and setting:

It's no exaggeration to say that the open world is the main draw of Elden Ring, as evidenced by the fact that most of the game's content is in the huge world that is The Lands Between, and various standard Souls mechanics have been changed slightly to account for open world progression. To give credit where its due, the world in Elden Ring is massive and beautiful, at the same time it is capable of showing a restraint that feels refreshing compared to many other AAA games, with its comfortably minimalist UI and lack of annoying checklist side quest markers. Unfortunately, this is where my praises of Elden Ring's open world end.

Elden Ring's world feels like less of an actual, breathing world and more like a painting. It's pretty for sure, but it's next to completely static and falls into the tedious open world loop of move to new place, clear enemy camps, maybe fight a boss or two, pick up loot, rinse and repeat.

I've seen plenty of people compare Elden Ring's open world to Breath of the Wild, or even saying that Elden Ring surpasses BotW, but I just never saw this at any moment in my 55 hour playthrough. For all of BotW's many flaws, BotW excelled at making you feel like a guest of Hyrule. The world was rich with many different environmental interactions and you needed to respect the game's environment to survive. More skilled/knowledgeable players could take advantage of the interactions to perform tricks that allow them to traverse the world faster and more efficiently.

In comparison, Elden Ring feels like something more akin to Far Cry 3, where you can't do a whole lot besides move around and kill enemies. Hell, even Genshin fucking Impact has considerably more environmental interaction and variety in its open world compared to Elden Ring, since at least that game has scripted elemental reactions and environmental puzzles to solve. The only things that could even constitute as environmental interaction I found in my playthrough of Elden Ring were that non-threatening storms could appear in certain areas at night and very few special enemy types and bosses would appear only at night. There's also a surprising amount of invisible walls that railroad progression and in the worst cases, punish players for jumping across a gap to what they would reasonably think is a secret area. For the so-called "greatest open world of all time", this feels pathetic.

Others on this website have already talked plenty about the reuse of discoveries/boss fights in Elden Ring, so I won't elaborate much on that here, but it really can't be understated how much this further makes Elden Ring feel static. The aforementioned restraint goes out of the window when you keep seeing the giant walking cathedrals and erdtree avatars in each new area you get to. This feels like the most "AAA" FromSoft title to date, and you can tell that a lot of magic and soul has been sacrificed to the great altar of Content.

While exploring the world of Elden Ring, it's inevitable that you will come across dungeons pretty regularly which serve as both a break and distinction from the open world. These come in two main varieties: optional underground dungeons, and what the community has come to call Legacy Dungeons (some of which are also optional).

To avoid dancing around the issue, the underground dungeons are bad. They take the form of either mines, caverns or crypts, and most of the dungeons in these three archetypes repeat the same ideas and enemy types constantly even in Limgrave - the game's first region. At the end you get a boss that typically represents the bottom tier of Elden Ring's many boss fights. There's not much else to say other than that these dungeons are trash and I stopped bothering with them after the first 10 or so hours of my playthrough. Some of them are so badly designed that I refuse to believe that they weren't procedurally generated in some way.

The Legacy Dungeons can be described as areas in the style of previous modern FromSoft titles scattered across the open world of Elden Ring. Each of these dungeons are an oasis in the proverbial desert of the static open world. Once I was in the middle of Stormveil Castle, I had already decided to myself that the legacy dungeons were my favourite areas in Elden Ring and this impression lasted all the way to the end of my first playthrough.

At the same time however, these Legacy Dungeons aren't anything amazing. While they are as well designed as Dark Souls 3's areas, they also suffer from the same issue as Dark Souls 3's areas that they feel iterative at this point. Exploring a large castle with cleverly-placed shortcuts that loop around in satisfying ways is still fun, but it also evokes feelings of "been there, done that". It also doesn't help that most of the Legacy Dungeons in Elden Ring are castles of some kind.

The only Legacy Dungeons that felt like something new were the locations in the underground section of the world (not to be confused with the aforementioned crappy underground dungeons), and it's a good thing that best girl Ranni's side quest has you exploring most of these areas.

This game has a ton of boss fights to find and overcome. I glanced on the wiki that including repeated battles, there are at least 120 (!!) boss fights in Elden Ring. This is a massive step up from previous FromSoft titles (and most other games in existence). Players who are just looking for a completionist challenge will have a field day here.

However, you can tell that quantity over quality was the focus with the boss design in Elden Ring, and in a general sense the bosses in Elden Ring feel like the strongest culmination yet of the misguided design priorities at FromSoft ever since Dark Souls 2.

Gone are the interesting, puzzling encounters of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1, all bosses must be homogenised into being flashy, fast, high execution skill tests, with an increasing presence of annoying tricks such as attack animations that are delayed to the point of being unintuitive and unfun to dodge that are only there to keep veterans from getting too complacent.

These games are action RPGs, so of course there's nothing wrong with boss fights including an element of testing mechanical skill, but the simple matter of fact is that while Souls style games are certainly challenging, the combat systems themselves lack depth. As such, there's not really any mechanical skills that can be tested in these fights outside of dodge roll timings and capitalising on punish windows. There are still some bosses that I greatly enjoyed in Elden Ring, such as Radahn (who is closest to what I was hoping boss fights in this game would be like), Rennala and the second phase of Maleketh, but the idea of going through over 120 fights that ultimately boil down to testing the same couple of skills is one that will inevitably become a tedious slog towards the end.

There are plenty of other, more nitpicky issues I have with Elden Ring that I could talk about, including but not limited to not being able to talk to NPCs while on horseback, the lock-on system still failing to focus on the enemy that's closest to you when there's many enemies charging at you from different distances, and FromSoft's previous title: Sekiro, actually having better QoL than Elden Ring in various ways, but this review is already long enough.

Elden Ring is a good timesink while it lasts, and part of me respects it for just how ambitious FromSoft were with the scope of this game, but at the same time, it misses the mark in so many ways and tries to hide these ways with the smoke and mirrors that are the size and beauty of its game world. Once you look past that, Elden Ring feels like an iterative game, which has a lot of good ideas but fails to fully commit to any of them out of a desire to be as "AAA" as possible.

I know my more critical take on Elden Ring probably feels contrarian as of the time of writing this review, but once the hype fully wears off a year or two from now, I'm confident that the community consensus regarding this game will be much closer to my outlook.

Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart is currently the best looking next-gen title and also one of the only games that uses the PS5 hardware as a whole with its fast SSD, the dual sense features and offers high graphical fidelity. If you own a PS5 then this will be the best tech demonstration you can get for your system right now. The question is just, how remarkable will this game be in a few years?

If you put the visuals aside, rift apart ends up being a very bland experience. I pretty much have the same criticism here as with Insomniacs previously released titles. While they definitely nail the controls of their games, everything else from level structure to enemy types remains very repetitive throughout the entire game. Aside from one single enemy type with a shield, which pushes the player to get a bit creative, everything else is just “use everything you currently have freely”. The game doesn’t want you to push into a playstyle, but if the game doesn’t push the player into any challenge whatsoever, the game just feels forgettable and mindless. All boss fights in the game are sharing similar mechanics, mostly there is a laser beam you need to dodge with a side-jump or something similar. It doesn’t matter if you are fighting against a robot with laser beams or a dinosaur which throughs rocks at you, both are sharing the same mechanics gameplay-wise. Even the final boss of the game is doing nothing new.

Level design is also pretty bad, especially in the second world, where a lot of paths are getting blocked by invisible walls. The game also doesn’t implement further obtained upgrades into its level design. There is an upgrade in the game which lets you ramp up a lot of speed to traverse faster through the map and jump further. The upgrade is only really used in the level the upgrade itself gets introduced, afterwards its just an optional thing for combat. There was a lot of situations where I reached a place with the mentioned upgrade and then I realized afterwards, that this was not the intentional way I should get here.

The overall platforming was also reduced by a lot. There is not a single challenging platforming passage in the whole game and even the optional levels, which should offer a bit more of a challenge are offering laughable easy platforming. I wouldn’t even call Ratchet&Clank a platformer anymore if I’m being honest.

Sure, there are cool set pieces, the visuals are amazing and the gunplay satisfying, but the combat is mindless even on the highest difficulty setting, the story serviceable & the level design mediocre at its best.

Pretty much the same experience as Horizon 4 - if you liked that, you've got more waypoints to hold RT to & from. I sadly get nothing out of this, and its desperate cloying attempts to wrangle a drop of dopamine from me all fail too. People give rpgs a bad rep for the whole "number go up" thing, but this could not feel more like time wasted while being hypnotised by a laserlightshow of exp bars and increasing integers that progress towards nothing. Far too many player retention systems draped over a racing game that is overly saccharine in tone and too scared to thrill. The challenges just aren't interesting and the cars don't even feel that good, what am I missing here? This is what all the dialogue sounds like https://i.imgur.com/i1TOMt2.png
Sick beyond belief of open worlds where I have no idea whether the tasks are procedurally or community generated. A barren expanse of a world map dotted with prefab roads and obstacles that the course designer has to fruitlessly negotiate with for any texture. Maybe I'm just down on this franchise for whatever weird or petty reason, it just gives me the same joy as being toured around a Toyota dealership. Psychotic UI, too; why do we want our system navigation to look like a moodboard. Perfectly competent, very pretty, but I don't have 122gb to spare for a game that is only adequate lol.