So I don't own a PS5, but I'm very much a fan of Silent Hill. Lucky for me, a good friend of mine does own a PS5, and we decided to get a few beers, sitting down for this short little horror game. I wasn't expecting much after what I heard about it. Wow, this was so bad it kinda became hilarious. It's one of the worst walking simulators I have ever played, and the writing was beyond trash. And I know this will not mean anything to English speakers, but as someone who's second language is German, the attempt to set this in Germany was hilariously incompetent. Not only does it not look anything like Germany at all, but every piece of writing in the game was littered with spelling mistakes I would have bullied people in pre school for. PS1 games from the 90s would be ashamed of how bad they fucked up, not even joking. I love drawing in my Skizzezzen Buch and being part of the Neuzugäng.

We probably took way longer than most people to reach the end because we had to pause every 5 minutes to just riff on what we were seeing. When it finally hit me that they called one of the central characters Maya Hindenburg, I actually got up and left the room. My brain couldn't handle it. That's like setting your game in the US and naming someone John Guantánamo, or calling a Japanese character Miyamoto Nagasaki. This must have been created by AI, no way this was approved by a real person in the year 2024. Anyway, if you're not convinced Silent Hill is dead, here's more evidence of its beaten and bloody corpse with Konami squeezing every last penny out with a fucking vice. Man, Silent Hill 2 Remake is going to be hilarious.

BitLife is so hip that I created a character who was an 80-year-old grandmother, formerly a hitman-turned-captain for the Yakuza with a body count in the 50s, and she still found time to watch gaming YouTubers with her friends. At first, this is very funny in a jarring, somewhat dissonant way. But after seeing it just a couple of times, the charm wears off quickly. BitLife feels every bit like the hollow imitation it is. The primary source of woe for me here is that BitLife never, ever escapes its artifice. The emergent gameplay that makes The Sims stand out feels entirely pre-canned here, and the relationship mechanics on display are this stunningly noxious blend of one-dimensional and high-maintenance, so there's no real drama to be found, either. BitLife feels too clean, too manufactured, to stand out as little more than a version of The Sims on your phone with less clunky controls.

This is perfectly fine if you just need to kill time on a train ride, but since the most entertaining thing about it (being able to escape prison within a second by breaking the puzzle sequence with keyboard controls) has been patched out, and most of the mechanics that might threaten to redeem the experience are locked behind a paywall, there really isn't much sustainability past that. I originally wrote that I would have been happy to pay twenty to thirty bucks for this instead of having to deal with those microtransactions, but this, at best, is worth ten dollars.

Persona 5 Tactics is another spin-off game that allows us to control the Phantom Thieves. As the title suggests, it's not a turn-based RPG like Persona 5 and Persona 5 Royal; instead, it's a tactical game similar to XCOM.

I really enjoy tactical games, but I must say that Persona 5 Tactics is the easiest game in this genre. There are almost no consequences for your wrong actions on the field. The main story consists of easy stages, and you only face some challenges when playing the side quests.

Talking about the story is challenging for me. As someone who loves the Persona 5 story, I can say that this spin-off falls far behind in this aspect. However, when compared to other games, it's still interesting. The best part, for sure, is the characters who remain super charismatic. At some point, I felt the game was unnecessarily huge.

To understand the story, you have to play Persona 5 or Persona 5 Royal first. Otherwise, you won't grasp a significant part of the game and won't have the connections with these characters, who are the heart of this franchise.

The art initially made me feel like it took a step back. After a few hours, I started to enjoy it.

Persona 5 Tactics is a game destined for fans of Persona 5 and the Phantom Thieves. I don't recommend it if you've never played the main title before or if you don't want to spend more time with these characters. The gameplay is okay, but there are better tactical games out there.

I was hoping this game would turn out to be a banger, despite the restrictive allegations of it simply being “the incest game”. Well guess what, that title is too restrictive! It’s actually the incest satanist cannibal game with dialogue that sounds like a 12 year old wrote it and gameplay that’s so limited that it's nearly a visual novel! I won’t say the story is bad per say, but the crime that the game does commit - aside from the many, many crimes that the characters commit - is how categorically boooooooring it is despite the chaos.

A part of me died on the inside when I found out there’s still more Coffin of Andy and Leyley to come.

(9-year-old's review, typed by his dad)

It's fun but hard. I like "bwomping", and most people call the square a cube even though it's not 3D! I like the game because it has a lot of customability, and you can do funny things. And my favorite part is playing the level Blast Processing (the bwomp level) because it has the best song in the game. My favorite custom song is called Endgame by Waterflame, and Waterflame makes good songs. And when will 2.2 come out? Robtop please. Please give us 2.2. Bye!

bathed in extreme nihilism, notch states that life is meaningless and you live, struggle, die, and are then forgotten. besides the fact that I disagree with this point of view, this says nothing new beyond the "deep" observations you heard in middle school when other kids were putting on a facade of worldliness.

the only thing this has going for it is that the presentation is novel, at least for the first minute or so. I wouldn't be surprised if I played any twine games in the future that did this but better

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'd literally rather play Sticker Star. Does this really constitute as a game? 'Cause if it does, we've bridged the argument gap about what a game can and can't be. Visual Novels are not games? Nah, you haven't played Drowning in Problems yet (not that I thought VN's weren't games, they certainly are). You think a certain game is bad? Compare it to this, does the game in question do literally anything more than this game does? If it does, then congratulations, that game is now better all thanks to Drowning in Problems. The only problem I'm drowning in is this being classified as a "game".

There is literally no gameplay outside of clicking, no music, nothing,. Just text that is so arbitrary and trying to convey some semblance of a narrative, or reflection of humanity, or even attempt a self-reflection unto oneself is laughable at best, and an outright insult at worst. What offends me most is how the game wastes your time so brazenly, it doesn't even try to hide it, as if to reinforce whatever this "game" is trying to say. It becomes hilarious then that by doing so, the message is lost on me, and I felt like I lost valuable time of my life I could be doing something else I enjoy. If that's the point of the game, at least make it interesting or endearing in some fashion, this is just pure laziness and utterly soulless, nothing of value to be gained, everything to be lost.

You might make the argument that some games like point and click adventures, as well as visual novels I mentioned earlier, or something like cookie clicker could fall under the same category as this game. With no "real" gameplay as I described it. The main difference to me is that those games have other contributing factors to make the gameplay significant in some manner, such as visual novels allowing you to make choices. Point and click adventure games also have this, player agency, consequences, rewards, branching paths, and branching story. Even Cookie Clicker for just being a "clicking" game has a lot more going on than you expect compared to Drowning in Problems. I want to make my perspective crystal clear when I make a statement like "this shouldn't be considered a game". Because I genuinely believe that, but I'd be more than happy to delve deeper into the topic should someone ask me. Regardless, I do not consider this to be a game.

Thank you all for reading! Next review, something of far more substance and positivity! Until next time.

The cool thing about being an adult is that you can look at a game with a ton of Discourse surrounding it, and just play it for yourself because you know that fiction is allowed to include Dark topics, and what matters is how its handled

The Coffin of Andy and Leyley is........fine. Almost unremarkable if you remove the Discourse. The gameplay is peak bog standard RPG Maker walk and talking, where you press space on an object and maybe pick it up to bring it somewhere else. The kind that's perfectly servicable but occasionally slows the pacing down if you can't figure out what to interactive with, and therefore just start trying everything. If you take a break from the game and come back, you might stumble trying to remember where you left off

The writing is unabashedly edgy, and I think it would still be very polarizing without all the dialogue about Ashley wanting to fuck her brother. I actually found myself reminded a lot of Jhonen Vasquez's work, which I will admit I haven't read since I was 15 so maybe my memory is off, where they share that same slightly immature and incredibly cynical strain of humour that occasionally falls into the territory of trying too hard. There's a scene where you're in a public park and if you interact with a tree, the game is like "you picked up: used condom - you decide not to bring it with you". There's an billboard advert that says "are you tired of being alive? ask your doctor about euthanasia today!". Maybe RPG Maker is slightly to blame for this but a part of me is surprised Andy & Leyley came out in 2023, because it really feels like something that would've been made while I was in High School, and that someone like me would've loved back then

As for the incest stuff, I do think it's a bit disingenous to say "oh it's just a bad ending" when Ashley makes repeated comments that boil down to "I would like to fuck my brother". You don't need to justify your enjoyment of the game with "actually, it's a commentary on toxic relationships", because sure it is, but the game never really commits to it and that's fine! you're allowed to like this because it's a bit edgy and fucked up, that is okay. Alternatively, there's nothing wrong with saying "I'm not a prude but the gameplay is boring and the writing tries too hard"

I do think the game struggles a little bit with knowing what it wants to be, and because of that, it tends to go in circles sometimes. I did find myself getting surprisingly invested in the world and the characters, but kept wanting more since each episode length is pretty short so far. I wanna see more consequences for the fucked up things these characters do and feel, but maybe that'll be in the later chapters. I will say, the artstyle is very nice - every character is very expressive with their portraits. You can tell you're in a world of RPG Maker tiles but I think they make the most of it and the artstyle is there too

It's genuinely funny to me that so much discussion around hype these days is surrounded by the mantra of "I hope this isn't the next Cyberpunk!" because, while I get that, more games could seriously use the level of attention to detail that Cyberpunk put toward immersing you in its world, and I'm hardly being facetious with that statement. Case in point: You can only see your feet in Starfield if you're in third-person mode. It's such a minor detail that really shouldn't matter. But it's as close of a clue as you'll get to what the overall Starfield experience is within the first five minutes or so.

What you're going to hear a lot about Starfield, and what you've likely heard already, is that, yeah, it's a Bethesda game. It's buggy and kinda janky; its main story has interesting ideas but lacks enough of a personal touch to really engross you in the potential of its overall premise. It's predicated on the belief that exploration is BALLIN', and it would be if the overly mechanical interactions you have with the world here were more sparing. The stealth system is still laughably dated, utilizing duck-and-cover methods for combat that make it more a test of patience and your reliability to quicksave at the right times than most games with tacked-on Stealth systems do. And the absolutely bonkers scale here is really just an excuse to fast travel everywhere. I shit you not; you could move in the same direction for ten minutes and not be an inch closer to your destination from where you started. It is actually just egregious. If all of these are deal-breakers for you, then Starfield is best experienced as a bonus for subscribing to Game Pass and little else. But if you're a sucker for building characters and side-questing, Starfield has you more than covered. The icing on the cake here is that the combat is pretty solid. Shotguns in this game feel like shotguns, and the typical RPG thing of enemies being spongier until you put the right amount of points into your proficiency skills doesn't do much to hinder this. Put it this way: I'm twelve hours in, and I'm still having fun using the starter pistol. I'll be damned: the First-Person Shooter part of this First-Person Shooter ain't half bad! The quality of the side content occasionally suffers, but there are still some serious winners in here. It is right to call Starfield a Bethesda game because, like most of their output, it will have you hooked if you let it.

I really wish there was more to say about this than that. I'm sure that, when I inevitably interact with systems like base building and ship customization, I will either love or loathe my time with Starfield. My impression after twelve hours so far is that this is the quintessential 7/10 game: there are enough holes in this for me to understand and relate to both opinions regarding it without resentment or reservations. Before that riles anyone up: a 7/10 is a good score, and you're missing out if you automatically assume that means a game's bad or not worth your time in any meaningful capacity.

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Edit: Lowered my score for this by a half-star because Cyberpunk absolutely shits all over this, and it's not even funny. I hate to play the fanboy card, but revisiting that game has made me completely reevaluate how I scored this.

Lol no

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I stopped playing after those twelve hours and have had no incentive to return to it since. While my previous comment was less of a response and more an interaction with the bitter public reception this was garnering in the light of Cyberpunk's magnificent Phantom Liberty expansion, this one comes from the heart:

Starfield is 100 GBs and, outside of its shooting, is just kind of boring.

6/10.