soyka
2019
Hey I noticed you were stalking children at the public park. Is it safe to assume you're a fan of Pathologic 2?
2022
Cute lil game I guess. Kinda plays itself with how the "platforming" is just point and press a button with infinite error margin plus the puzzles and chase sequences being so funneled and lenient you couldve made them cutscenes and not lose much player agency.
Art direction and ost are top tier though, and interacting with the npcs brings a lot of charm to the world. I just wish there was more actual game "meat" to it.
The game has pretty severe issues with its frame time stability considering how short it is, but I assume itll get fixed in a later patch as is increasingly more common nowadays with new releases on pc unfortunately.
Its fine.
Art direction and ost are top tier though, and interacting with the npcs brings a lot of charm to the world. I just wish there was more actual game "meat" to it.
The game has pretty severe issues with its frame time stability considering how short it is, but I assume itll get fixed in a later patch as is increasingly more common nowadays with new releases on pc unfortunately.
Its fine.
2023
Shinji Mikami demonstrates again that he can make a very competent action game. Kamiya should take a course from him on implementing gimmicks seamlessly. Seriously.
I do have some gripes though. The licensed music is 30x better than the filler tracks, having no lock on is painful(especially when trying to grapple) and enemies that can't be touched without first calling in assists are annoying and borderline colorcode design which I hate. I also really wish one of these "rhythm-action" games would let you attack on more variable timings than just quarter and half notes to a 4/4 beat.
But overall... it's a good time. The visual style puts many recent AAA releases to shame while asking a FRACTION of their required computing power. Animations look impressively natural despite the contraints of having to be tied to a certain cadence. While not landing often for me in terms of comedy the character dynamics are quite charming in a way that isn't really seen often nowadays, especially at a higher budget. Also the licensed songs are stellar.
I doubt many releases this year will be able to match the care and SOUL put into Hi-Fi Rush.
Xbox can finally claim they have a game now lol
I do have some gripes though. The licensed music is 30x better than the filler tracks, having no lock on is painful(especially when trying to grapple) and enemies that can't be touched without first calling in assists are annoying and borderline colorcode design which I hate. I also really wish one of these "rhythm-action" games would let you attack on more variable timings than just quarter and half notes to a 4/4 beat.
But overall... it's a good time. The visual style puts many recent AAA releases to shame while asking a FRACTION of their required computing power. Animations look impressively natural despite the contraints of having to be tied to a certain cadence. While not landing often for me in terms of comedy the character dynamics are quite charming in a way that isn't really seen often nowadays, especially at a higher budget. Also the licensed songs are stellar.
I doubt many releases this year will be able to match the care and SOUL put into Hi-Fi Rush.
Xbox can finally claim they have a game now lol
2015
I generally enjoy the vibe of this game. The serious tone of the main story spiced with some goofy characters and substories is generally up my alley... if it was a movie or tv show. The open world and general gameplay(including combat) really didn't impress me.
The sub stories are amusing at times but feel too inconsequential for me. I'd be much more willing to go out and complete all of them if they tied in with the main story or were long enough to span the whole game. Sub stories flowing into each other would also be effective. As it stands though I just did a sub story here and there.
The combat is fine but it can't carry a long open world game like Yakuza.
The many unlockable abilities do very little to change up how you approach combat, and neither do the new enemies. Heat actions also become old quite fast.
I think many people just settle into 1 or 2 favourite styles for both kiryu and majima and dont bother with the rest. The game doesnt do a lot to make you use all your styles, generally you get by perfectly fine if you find a style for crowd control and one for big damage one on one encounters like bosses. What I used for Kiryu and Majima is, respectively, brawler & beast and breaker & slugger. I havent bothered searching out the secret styles since ive heard they're tied to very tedious side content.
Other than that my problems mostly extend to open world design in general, I simply dont enjoy standard open worlds. Traversing huge game spaces is tedious for me, and these games tend to be filled with meaningless stuff to make them look more dense than they really are, most egregious example in Y0 is the random thug encounters.
The sub stories are amusing at times but feel too inconsequential for me. I'd be much more willing to go out and complete all of them if they tied in with the main story or were long enough to span the whole game. Sub stories flowing into each other would also be effective. As it stands though I just did a sub story here and there.
The combat is fine but it can't carry a long open world game like Yakuza.
The many unlockable abilities do very little to change up how you approach combat, and neither do the new enemies. Heat actions also become old quite fast.
I think many people just settle into 1 or 2 favourite styles for both kiryu and majima and dont bother with the rest. The game doesnt do a lot to make you use all your styles, generally you get by perfectly fine if you find a style for crowd control and one for big damage one on one encounters like bosses. What I used for Kiryu and Majima is, respectively, brawler & beast and breaker & slugger. I havent bothered searching out the secret styles since ive heard they're tied to very tedious side content.
Other than that my problems mostly extend to open world design in general, I simply dont enjoy standard open worlds. Traversing huge game spaces is tedious for me, and these games tend to be filled with meaningless stuff to make them look more dense than they really are, most egregious example in Y0 is the random thug encounters.
2022
How people can go from praising Stray to high heavens to mercilessly shitting on Scorn not even half a year later is beyond me.
2022
A step back in every single aspect of fromsoftware's previous output, feeling downright lazy and derivative. This still resulted in a game i would rather play over 99% of AAA open world vomit, and that speaks volumes about the genre.
Peak AC, it's not even funny how much better this is than ac5
2016
You get 6 inventory slots, of which a bunch get occupied with weapons and healing items. You have no item box and the game has an arbitrary limit on how many items you can place in a given room. Played like 2 hours and all the puzzles have been a variation of "put this thing in this thing" or some really forced team based "let billy hold a handle while rebecca passes a gate" type thing. Not wasting my time any further.
Couldve been a good experience with a more focused story, tighter flight controls and a combat system that isn't just tacked on for the sake of it.
its just not worth it dudes, maybe try emulating the game cause the pc version is unplayable. Aside from huge amounts fiddling to even get past the opening cinematic and fix the resolution and fps, in order to avoid instant crashes on chapter 9 you have to go into compatibility mode which results in memory leak for some reason. I was giving the game way too many passes already, chapter 9 was the last drop in the bucket.
Here's my main advice: If you want more twin peaks, just rewatch the show.
Here's my main advice: If you want more twin peaks, just rewatch the show.
2021
This conversion is in first person and it lets me run and gun, so it's infinitely better than the original as far as im concerned. I originally intended to finish the pc hd project mod first but that felt like trash to play so I naturally bounced off. Finished this one in pretty much 2 sittings, motion sickness is a foreign concept to me.
1997
Ost goes hard
2023
I appreciate some things that this game does, otherwise I would've dropped it like every other Remedy game I tried. I finished it thinking that in the end I would've rather watched an Alan Wake tv series.
When you make a narrative that strives to be very out there and meta, you should ensure that the gameplay matches the weirdness or you end up with a disconnect. That's exactly what I felt whenever the shift happens from story to gameplay.
There's nothing interesting about Remedy's approach to survival horror, in fact they watered it down in many aspects. The levels are mostly designed around linear progression, puzzles are rehashed more often than not, enemy variety is very lacking and the resource gathering is made boring by the amount of powerups that are utterly useless and the dynamic drops. There's just no flavour to the design here, nothing about the gameplay makes me recommend Alan Wake II alongside genre staples like RE or Silent Hill.
It's quite a shame, since when it comes to the storytelling I really fuck with their inspirations and I won't deny their great taste in music and visual direction. I wish I could just watch a film or series that is just an expanded version of whatever that finnish fever dream movie was in the cinema level.
Maybe one day Remedy will be brave enough to not only make their narrative weird and meta, but also the gameplay.
When you make a narrative that strives to be very out there and meta, you should ensure that the gameplay matches the weirdness or you end up with a disconnect. That's exactly what I felt whenever the shift happens from story to gameplay.
There's nothing interesting about Remedy's approach to survival horror, in fact they watered it down in many aspects. The levels are mostly designed around linear progression, puzzles are rehashed more often than not, enemy variety is very lacking and the resource gathering is made boring by the amount of powerups that are utterly useless and the dynamic drops. There's just no flavour to the design here, nothing about the gameplay makes me recommend Alan Wake II alongside genre staples like RE or Silent Hill.
It's quite a shame, since when it comes to the storytelling I really fuck with their inspirations and I won't deny their great taste in music and visual direction. I wish I could just watch a film or series that is just an expanded version of whatever that finnish fever dream movie was in the cinema level.
Maybe one day Remedy will be brave enough to not only make their narrative weird and meta, but also the gameplay.
2014
Unlike RE0 this one actually doesnt suck. Enjoyable, scratches that puzzle exploration itch. Only issue I have really is the doors in the mansion, it asks too much memorization work to remember what kind of key each door requires since theyre visually identical. You end up wasting a lot of time trying out every door whenever you get a new key.
It also felt bizarre to me just how few enemies the game threw at me by the last third even though I was loaded with guns and ammo. I played Jill on normal mode though, maybe it's a different story on hard but im not interested in finding out.
If I had to choose a survival horror I'd probably still play silent hill over this, even if resident evil 1 admittedly has better level design than any SH. I just dont find managing a super small inventory all that fun, even 8 slots on Jill feels suffocating.
It also felt bizarre to me just how few enemies the game threw at me by the last third even though I was loaded with guns and ammo. I played Jill on normal mode though, maybe it's a different story on hard but im not interested in finding out.
If I had to choose a survival horror I'd probably still play silent hill over this, even if resident evil 1 admittedly has better level design than any SH. I just dont find managing a super small inventory all that fun, even 8 slots on Jill feels suffocating.
Everything after the mansion sucks so hard it completely invalidates the first half being a pretty decent classic re game.