stevenz
2021
I expected shallowness, saccharine indie gaming. You know. But it's too well written. The art is too well-made to be a gimmick.
The tutorial area sucks, and the game is buggy, but - the crystal farmers are these non-human kinda guys who are very otherized and strange. You go to them and you just... chill. Kind of interface with their otherness, recognize it, and appreciate it. Exchange some curt words of awkward connection. Deeply good.
The tutorial area sucks, and the game is buggy, but - the crystal farmers are these non-human kinda guys who are very otherized and strange. You go to them and you just... chill. Kind of interface with their otherness, recognize it, and appreciate it. Exchange some curt words of awkward connection. Deeply good.
2022
Great ideas, some not-quite-disco writing. Some good rural american humor. I need to get back to it.
2022
Orientalist and uncreative
2020
Delightful as ever, but disappointing. Hate platforming.
2019
Saccharine, full of twitter-speak. Did make me misty at the end.
2018
Systemic but clunky. Some man made this. He has some weird ideas and a vision. Could not play more than a few hours.
2016
Feels contractually obligated, but frenzied about it. They hate having to make it, and they love it too. A surreal mess of dark fantasy architecture and entities bent together and cranked up to 11.
2014
Full of great ideas but not very good. Haven't been able to play more than an hour since 2014.
2011
I bought this at a gamestop a few months after it came out and never really stopped playing it. Extremely formative, irreplacably special. I do it fast sometimes, and casually completionist other times. I wrote a physical diary on a 10y anniversary playthrough where I role-played and read every item description again and I cried at the ending all over. This is my favorite game.
A few notes: It is more colorful than any of their other games. The textures are dense and expressive in a way they haven't reached again (via photo sourcing?) (Who puts purple and green in an asylum wall? Amazing). The slowness is ideal. The shape of the layered world and its intersections is unrivaled. The whole thing is very good and very dear to me.
A few notes: It is more colorful than any of their other games. The textures are dense and expressive in a way they haven't reached again (via photo sourcing?) (Who puts purple and green in an asylum wall? Amazing). The slowness is ideal. The shape of the layered world and its intersections is unrivaled. The whole thing is very good and very dear to me.
2022
The game opens up with a powerful, atavistic scene: screaming in the frigid dark. Nothing that simple or emotive ever happens again. It's over-explanatory, rigid, mechanically excessive, and extremely unable to dramatize. Hopelessly over-designed.
2022
A world-wonder curiosity-object. I can't click with it, but I like feeling it in my hands, trying to understand it. I will surely pick it up again some day, study it, and put it down until the next time.
2022
A year and a half later, I might say that I still think From has taken too combat-heavy of an approach to their games, but. It's the most expansive and rendered and well-designed adventure dungeon-crawler ever made. Surprisingly thoughtful narrative refuses any easy answers has many representations and feelings about rotten power.
I wrote thousands of words about this on my blog: https://stevenzwahl.com/2022/08/26/ecology-review-elden-ring/
I wrote thousands of words about this on my blog: https://stevenzwahl.com/2022/08/26/ecology-review-elden-ring/
2021
Self-serious. Pretty enough to earn that, but structurally disappointing. The tutorial is very long and the exploration is very rigid and vibeless.
2022
I think it's a great idea but ultimately sorta boring. I love weird experiments, and it's by a teenager, but yeah. Didn't work for me.
2022
Quite liked this little scavenger hunt, but the sentimentality totally missed for me.
Unreal use of non-pbr techniques, really pushes boundaries of mixing light and flat/gradiented color.
Overpolished in an Twitter Indie way but that's a very personal and stupid bugbear. The text is just too bouncy to read!!
Unreal use of non-pbr techniques, really pushes boundaries of mixing light and flat/gradiented color.
Overpolished in an Twitter Indie way but that's a very personal and stupid bugbear. The text is just too bouncy to read!!