Like the swiss army knife of videogames. Pack it all in, excellently balanced survival gameplay, never forgetting to pepper it with sufficient action adventure shooting fun.
Ressource and inventory management, cheesy 80s one-liners, cool puzzles and a batsht crazy story, honoring all that Resident Evil stands for.
I was a bit unsure why people love this game so much but the last "water sports" moments hit it home for me.

Liked Village a tiny bit more tho, and now I gotta watch videos to explain all the twisted narrative connections to my dumb ass.

The best Metroidvania I've played that's not either namesake of the genre (I count Bloodstained as a Castlevania) Lost Crown manages to nail pretty much everything about getting the genre down right. The combat flows so well and as someone who usually doesn't like parrying in games the parry window was forgiving enough where I actually enjoyed doing it (Not to mention that you’re not forced to use it to actually beat bosses; this game and how great it is really me reminded me of how much I hated Metroid Dread). The movement and platforming is fast, responsive, and smooth. Moving around the world feels great and there’s enough well-placed warps where backtracking never feels like a problem. Exploration is rewarding with useful upgrades and items to discover and collect. The moves you gain also feel good too and have all that growing power and variety a quality Metroidvania should have. The game also manages to make you feel powerful as you progress through the game but still demands a good engagement with the mechanics on Normal, i.e. bosses are a great mix of requiring you to know how to play but never feeling like a slog. The main antagonist especially, who is clearly Vergil, Judgement Cut and all, is a great example of this. I’m also real glad that the only thing this game cribbed from Dark Souls was the estus flask system because man I am really sick of so many indie Metroidvanias shoehorning in Souls mechanics when they don’t really work all that well with the genre; I liked Hollow Knight in spite of that, but Lost Crown doesn’t have that problem at all. A few of the side-missions are a pain in the ass though so I didn’t bother with them, but overall I did most of them and they were real fun. Ubisoft Montpellier really proving they’re like the only part of Ubi making fantastic passion projects like this instead off AAA slop anymore. Lost Crown definitely going to be one of the must play games of this year and it’s already one of my favorites.

Having Jill pick up boltcutters and go "these could be used to cut the chains on a door..." while looking straight ahead at a bolted door sets the tone early on, but critiquing the game for this would be treading too closely on its father's hallowed ground; almost everything dumb and gung about this RE3 was present in that RE4 too, so let RE who is without sin cast the first stone.

With the bar set low, there's an unsurprising consistency to how every subsequent puzzle operates precisely one rung below what would be considered an entertaingly 'clever' solution. You'll often pick up an item and think "Aha! So if I just take this to...", only to find the game is all but making it unavoidable that you and your Clown Key will see the Clown Door on your way down the only unbarricaded corridor in a dozen-block radius. It's merely an Imagine Babiez simulation of the Resident Evil mansion-crawler, but nonetheless an enjoyable one. To unload 125 bullets into a zombie and still have enough rounds to glibly massacre twelve more feels positively philistinic when coming straight off the train from Resident Evil 2, but I think this is an admirably different experience - especially given they're in the same engine. RE3 is impressive in its own way - I could actually feel the old Mercenaries DNA bubbling up to the surface during the hospital holdout, and that made me really glad I finally gave up a few hours to play through it. Good times.

I remember borrowing a friend's copy of this game midway through 2020, but ultimately decided against inserting the disc. Something instinctive told me that this game would be Too Much during a pandemic, and I'm sad-glad to learn my gut was right. As I alluded to way back when, 2020 was the first and hopefully last time in my life I'll watch a real human body in a plastic bag be dropped into a makeshift grave, and this game was full to the brim with that same image. Just surreal to think about April 2020 again, isn't it? That unpleasant memory mingled with the game's, giving those opening street sections a unique morbidity that zombie movies never used to have for me; something formerly cartoonish is now psychologically horrific, closing the gap between survival horror as it exists in reality and in fiction. Kinda funny that I was thinking about all of it, again, in a computer game where someone shouts "suck on this, bitch!" while unloading a railgun into a giant tentacle monster. But that's exactly what I wanted to do to the killer virus too.

In the early 2000s, somebody thought, "What if we made a Wild West outlaw game, but you fly an airplane the whole time" and it turned out incredible. However, unsatisfied, they then proceeded to wonder, "What if it became a Chicago mafia game, but you fly an airplane the whole time", and it was just as good. But with more yet to give unto the world, they looked the original Xbox right in its single green eye and posed the ultimate question: "What if it ends up being an Indiana Jones game... but you fly an airplane the whole time??"

I truly do not believe that games need to look any better than Crimson Skies. This is peak sixth-generation aesthetic, and it looks phenomenal upresed on Series X. There's so much style and charm on display here, with a delightfully pulpy performance from Timothy Omundson (!!!GALAVANT REFERENCE!!!) in the lead role. But more than anything, this is the most engaging air combat I've ever experienced, with its dogfights' tension regularly making me clench up and lean into turns while sitting on my couch like the guy in the N64 Tilt Pak ad. The final segment of the penultimate level in particular is one of the most intense, nail-biting sequences in any game I've ever played. I loved all of it!

Now lastly, we have to acknowledge the loss of a reviewing giant. Recently @Elkmane announced his retirement. As a lifelong Elkster, I knew this day was coming, but thought we had more time. While it's not the name he used here, I knew him as Big John. It just so happens that Crimson Skies features an ally character of the same name, and in the final level, King Richard kept shouting his name. I became fond of this game's Big John, but I'll miss the real one far more. So long, pal.

Elksters for life.

Alone in the Dark is the next remake in a long row of remakes that we got over the last few years. But is any good? Yea I mostly enjoyed my my time with the game but a huge disclaimer at the beginning, this "remake" is rarely a remake of the original and more a reimagination because there isn't much left of the original game. Simply there isn’t much left of the original mansion. I just recently played the original game for the first time and I was shocked when I noticed how different this game is. There are many new characters and locations and now you might say that this is a good thing but they also cut a lot of the old rooms of the mansion. So much that I didn't recognize it and I finish the original just 12 days ago. But maybe I'm just suffering from amnesia. What I liked about the game was the cast, it was cool to see David Harbor and Jodie Comer as the main characters. I'm also happy that almost every note is voice acted even with different voices which is great. This contributes to the dense atmosphere and the lore of this game was pretty interesting, you can't say that about the story. It's also more puzzle oriented than survival horror, there are only 4 weapons with no upgrades and the meele attacks also only consist of spamming R1. The game in general is very clunky, I frequently got stuck on objects in the environment and the combat feels clunky too and the hit feedback is bad. There are also only very few types of enemies and one of them are these "facehuggers" things. Fighting them was annonying as hell. They completely ignore bullets and they are the only enemy that has a QTE and you go from QTE to you recover from QTE to camera glitch so you can't see to QTE again until you are dead. Most of the cabinets that you can search loot either don't open very wide so you can't see what's inside and they were empty 90 % of the time anyway which made exploring feel very unsatisfying. The game also only has 2 boss fights, one was very easy and the other one very annyoing. The ending felt rushed and was kinda underwhelming. But the pacing after chapter 3 was overall not the best and it needed more polish. After finishing the game twice, once as Emily and once as Edward I can say that there are a few different dialogues with the side characters and some level segments are slightly different but nothing too major. All in all the main story is still the same. There are also different endings which can be unlocked after collecting various collectables but sadly all of them besides the main ending are glitched and can't be obtained.
Overall I still enjoyed Alone in the Dark, especially due to the great atmosphere and the focus on puzzle rather than action. I also liked the lovecraftian vibe that the lore gave me. You should probably play it on the easiest difficulty because the fights aren't the reason why you should play this game. Emily's story was also more consistent and I would recommend you play her on your first playthrough. Alone in the Dark's focus on puzzles and story instead of action/fights was a nice change but you can notice pretty quickly that this game didn't have the biggest budget.

Games I finished in 2024 ranked

I think it’s very funny how people claim this game killed Alone in the Dark. As if the franchise was thriving before this game threw all its momentum away. As if the franchise had an absolutely stellar reputation before this particular blight did it in. As if Alone in the Dark is even that much of a franchise at all, and not merely a dead IP from the 90s, occasionally defibrillated to cash in on its claim to fame of being ‘the very first survival horror.’ What originally set the stage for its genre — listed as a direct influence for 1996’s Resident Evil — has long since become an amalgamation of whatever trends happen to be most profitable at the time, each game past Alone in the Dark 3 being some sort of attempted reboot released ~8 years after the previous attempted reboot, doing its best to imitate whatever the newest Resident Evil is doing. Even the original trilogy wasn’t necessarily immune to changing up its approach: Alone in the Dark 2 is far more action-oriented than its predecessor ever was, for better or worse, and as a whole both 2 and 3 steer away from active horror, feeling more like Indiana Jones-esque romps which just so happen to have zombie ghosts as enemies. To say that Alone in the Dark: Illumination ‘killed’ or ‘betrayed’ the franchise — as most coverage of the game seems to — to me, is mostly an indication that you don’t know as much about the series as you say you do. This isn’t some sudden sellout. This one’s just… a bit more blatant about it. And a bit easier of a punching bag. Like, yeah, this game is dogshit, who could’ve guessed by the Metacritic score of 19, but unlike, say Alone in the Dark (2008), which is at least audacious in its baffling decisions and incredible dialogue, Illumination doesn’t even feel like it was even trying. And, frankly, that’s what truly damns it.

This time, the Alone in the Dark series has been re-imagined as a co-op zombie shooter, a la Left 4 Dead or Resident Evil 6. You get in a game with up to three of your friends, you each play different characters with different skillsets, and you barrel through legions of eldritch forces, solving…… ““puzzles”” to clear a path to the end of the campaign. What distinguishes this game most from its influences, however, is the genre crossover at play: not only is it a co-op zombie shooter, but it’s also a Unity Store asset flip. You know those random Steam Greenlight-looking games that look like shit, look like they play like shit, and always seem to top some publication or YouTuber’s year-end worst list because they’re easy enough targets not to make anybody actually mad they were called the worst game of the year? Yeah, Atari looked at those and decided they were gonna make one of their own.

And god, did they succeed.

Imagine Left 4 Dead except it sucks. Zombies (or, well, “The Creatures of Darkness”) spawn in wherever they feel like, often appearing right next to you without you even realizing it because there are no noises or feedback or anything that’ll let you know where they are aside from physically being able to see them. The core mechanic is that you light up things around the level to drastically reduce enemy defences, and, like, that mechanic is functional, I guess, but when you’re not in the light it’s impossible to tell if I’m even doing anything. Like, I can empty a full SMG clip into their face and they’ll be still standing and I have no idea whether I did damage or not because enemy health is high and there’s no feedback on anything you do to them. Several points where I was fighting this game’s equivalent of a tank, with an upgrade that let me circumvent the ‘enemies need to be in light to take full damage’ and I just had no idea whether they still needed to be in the light for me to hurt them because I was running out of ammo and they didn’t seem any more damaged than they were at the start.

It’s not just the combat that sucks, either: running is tied to this awful stamina system that runs out so quickly and then takes forever to come back, resulting in this loop where you’re stopping and starting, desperately trying to get to wherever you need to go yet at the same time constantly slowing to a total crawl. There’s virtually no diversity in objectives, it’s either fight through a stupid maze or collect [x key item] or go collect [x key item] in a stupid maze. The game is inconsistent about enemy density: a lot of the time it’ll flood you with dudes from the get-go, kill nearly your whole party, and then you’ll go the entire level barely encountering anything else. It also spawns roughly the same amount of enemies no matter how many people are playing, so unless you pick the easiest difficulties it’s almost impossible to do anything doing the game singleplayer. And this presumes that the game chooses to work: that everything goes as intended, that some objective doesn’t break, that the platform you need to jump onto has a visible model, that the explosive you just armed actually bothers to explode, that the game doesn’t suddenly change up how you pick up items for one level, causing you and your party to think the game has bugged out and left you unable to pick up a thing you need to progress. Getting through this game is partially about changing variables until you find a combination that doesn’t softlock you.

I’m going to use the very second level as an example here: me and my friends start the level, we go down an elevator only for it to break, our first objective being to fix it. We’re made to get three batteries. The level only spawns in two. We play for a bit before we proceed to realize the level isn’t actually winnable in this state, so we switch to easy difficulty. The good news: the level actually spawns in all the things we need to pass it. The bad news: sometimes when you put a battery into the machine the game just eats it, taking it from your inventory but then not proceeding to actually advance the objective. We think it’s a problem where we’re placing a battery where there already is a battery, but no, the game’s just broken. We brute force it, and no matter what we always get one battery eaten, and we can’t pass the section. I then switch to doing it singleplayer… and it works fine. I get the batteries with no problem, and after several more sections of having to find [x collectable] in a maze (including one where I have to find a battery that’s just… plopped on the ground right in front of me, right by the thing I need to put it into) I clear the level. I save the run. Me and my friends can go through the rest of the campaign, for better or worse.

Again, that was only the second level. And that’s a glitch, obvious from the outset, that makes progressing through the game impossible without a workaround. Of the game's three main campaigns, only one is possible to clear all the way through in the game’s multiplayer mode. You can tell they really put their care into this game.

There are four main characters you can choose between — and, by extension, four classes you can pick, defined by the weapons and special skills each given to them. The Hunter’s unique mechanic is that he’s limited by ammo constraints. The game intends for him to be The Guns Guy, yet it’s him who must scrounge for ammo while The Engineer and The Priest just get… infinite ammo on their weapons? For the Engineer, that infinite ammo gun is meant to be secondary to their ability to scavenge resources to put mines on the ground… but even if you actually get an enemy to step on them they do jack shit. At the very least, they have an infinite ammo sidearm that’s considerably more useful… but then, as what happened to my friend, sometimes the game just glitches out and doesn’t let you use said gun, forcing you into laying endless mines, all next to each other, in hopes that maybe they’ll actually do something. Priest… man I don’t even know what Priest even does. They have an infinite ammo sidearm just like Engineer but then also sometimes they erupt in a bright flash of light which doesn’t seem to do anything to enemies but sure does make it so that nobody on the team can fucking see anything for the next few seconds. The Witch… oh man. In lieu of traditional weapons, the Witch can instead enchant a light source to do DoT to any enemies in it (useless) or fire a lightning bolt at enemies to fry them. This is limited by both cast time and mana: if you run out of mana, no more spells unless you happen to find a crystal ball to get it all back instantly, or wait for the manual recharge of one mana every five seconds.

It takes ten mana to cast a lightning bolt.

What usually happens to the Witch is this: once the initial volley floods you with enemies, you immediately use up all your mana only for that to merely be a dent in the horde. With nothing else to protect you, you’re near-completely defenseless as the horde proceeds to mob you to death. Theoretically, levelling up will increase your mana recharge/improve your quality of life, but beyond the rather small gains levelling up gives you, you often die so early without party intervention (and the other party members usually have their own drama to deal with) that you don’t gain nearly enough EXP to level up. And even should you survive that opening volley it’s not like you’re not a liability: I was Hunter, my friend was Witch during… this game’s equivalent of a campaign finale, and literally I had to run around, scrounge for ammo, kill the enemies who dropped the items I needed to then be able to damage the boss… while all my Witch buddy could do was superficially shoot lightning bolts and hope that maybe those did damage. Playing Witch is a catch-22 at its core: you start without anything that’ll truly help you contribute to the team and survive the campaign without gaining a couple of levels first, but then because EXP is based on killing enemies/surviving the campaign you don’t actually get the stuff that’ll help you contribute to the team. All the classes (bar Priest) are to some degree pretty borked, pretty counterintuitive, pretty not amazing to play, but man, the design ethos behind playing the Witch is truly something special.

The online, as expected, does not quite work wonders. Admittedly I could be the problem here: I’m Australian, and was primarily playing with Americans/a Norwegian, but even then this is more a “these are funny things that happened” footnote than something I’m honestly gonna fault the game for. The netcode is rough: fatal errors abound, sometimes from being dead too long, sometimes because the game’s just being a Gemini. While my Norwegian friend managed to stick around for most of the first campaign, from the second campaign on it honestly became a bit of a race to see how long we could last before the game eventually took him from us, like a leaf on the wind. One of my other friends pretty consistently got stuck on things and had to wriggle himself out. On one of my other other friends ends I went through some real shit: at one point one of the not!Tanks knocked me down, but on said friend’s end I never got back up, and I was picking up batteries and shooting enemies while sliding across the floor. After a certain point in the campaign I’d randomly inherit the Engineer’s ability to see the auras of light sources all the way across the map upon their death. One time, after they died, they randomly got to free-roam the map and went so high into the skybox they saw God and crashed the game for everybody Another time I guess I just jumped weirdly and after that point was stuck in the falling animation, this expression perpetually stuck on my face. That wasn’t just a thing on my friend’s end, either, oftentimes people would jump weirdly and then just start floating off the ground, nyooming around at the speed of slow. As a whole, when the game wasn’t softlocking or denying progress or doing the things that otherwise made playing it rather intolerable, it was at least rather funny to see the trashfire in motion.

Ultimately… I think, perhaps, talking this much about what makes Alone in the Dark: Illumination rather awful is a bit of a needless endeavour — I feel like the virgin wojak going on for paragraphs and paragraphs while the chad just goes ‘this shit sucks.’ But frankly, I’m just amazed at what’s on display here. I really got the brainworms just playing through it, and honestly just trying to gather my thoughts and write up on everything I wanted to talk about was a ton of fun. This might just be a cash-grab asset flip — or maybe even some attempt to hold onto the IP; like how they kept making Hellraiser sequels just so Clive Barker wouldn’t get the rights back — and it might be a dogshit Left 4 Dead clone, but there’s a difference between knowing something is bad and knowing just how it falls short. And honestly, this was bad in much more interesting ways than I was led to believe going in. From the borked, buggy gameplay and netcode, from how I legitimately had to fight the game just so I and my party could progress, from how none of the characters you can play work the way they’re supposed to, from how the game honest-to-god has a “A Winner Is You!”-type ending in fucking 2015, Alone in the Dark: Illumination is a gem. So much so we have to throw it back down the mineshaft. 1/10.

My parents shipped me off to a vocational school when I was 16, at their wits end with my hooliganism. I suppose they thought learning how to weld would sort me out or something. This school was a "last stop" for a lot of kids whose parents ran out of rope to give, or who were otherwise court ordered to attend short of ending up in juvie. A considerable amount of the student body had a rougher background than mine and came from homes more fractured or communities that were deeply disenfranchised.

And everyone there loved Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 3 (also, Gauntlet Legends, but we're not talking about that today.)

Actually, it may be more accurate to say they just loved Dragon Ball. Budokai 3 was the newest game at the time and so it got the most play, but it was just as common to find kids huddled around a CRT watching Dragon Ball GT. The guy who had that GT set was also had a copy of Big Money Rustlas and I'm sorry to report that I've been conditioned through overexposure to adore both. Many flavors of Faygo touched my lips during this era.

The thing about Dragon Ball is that it had penetrated so many social barriers by 2004 that it had attained total cultural saturation. Playing these games, Budokai 3 in particular, and simply sharing a love for the series helped me expand my social bubble and connect with others during a particularly low point in my life. I also mained Kid Buu, so everyone knew I was a motherfucker. My Dragon Ball GT loving, Juggalo, furry friend taught me to never hide who you are, and who I am is a little pink goblin that can't be touched and will send his fist through the ground to punch you in the groin.

Though I'm typically bad at fighting games, there was a period where I was so practiced at Budokai 3 that nailing precision dodges and teleport chains was purely reflexive. Sure, this is partly due to being confined to a facility where the only other things to do was play billiards or hang out at a rundown single-screen theater that mostly ran crap like The Ladykillers, but you know, some of that was pure talent! Revisiting it now for the first time since leaving that school felt like slipping into a warm bath. Familiar, cozy, and-- whoa wait shit why is Cell spamming his ultimate like that HELP!!

Budokai 3 plays a lot better than the previous two games but is still compromised in several areas. Characters control largely the same as each other with little in the way of unique playstyles, but the capsule system feels more robust and better allows you to create a build unique to you, for example. Techniques look flashy and do well to capture key moments from the show and manga, but the rush attack and accompanying button guessing minigame wears thin and becomes a pace breaker fast. There's a lot of give and take here, but you can unlock Kid Goku so I'm afraid it's just the best Budokai game there is. I'm sorry. I don't make the rules.

The story mode is limited to 11 of the roster's 32 characters, and most of its replayability comes in the form of alternate routes, hidden fights, and secrets. There's a good amount to do, but the jog through DBZ's main four arcs is severely truncated and at times plays fast and loose with its canon (Goku survives the Raditz fight in Piccolo's story, for example, but the game doesn't explore this fully.) Dialog is rife with spelling errors, kerning issues, and there's a number of portraits that are off-model. Characters who existed mostly on the periphery like Tien or Yamcha or even those who were present in the story but largely inactive during long stretches are represented here, but much of their story modes involve bouncing between disperate points on a map to get maybe two or three lines of dialog... Many of the Dragon Ball games of this era just assume you're deeply familiar with the story and don't make much of an effort, so it's not surprising that Budokai 3 offloads a considerable amount of its narrative to your imagination.

And I'm fine with that. Budokai 3 isn't perfect by any means, but like the very boring man that I am, I'm perfectly capable of recognizing its faults and enjoying it regardless. That's only possible with the maturity laying bricks for two years builds... I think, I don't know.

I had planned on replaying this much further down the road (maybe around September), but as Akira Toriyama's untimely passing affected fans all over the world, it made me reflect on my time with Budokai 3 and appreciate something I understood back in 2004: Dragon Ball suffers no barriers.