wario land 3 imprinted on me as one of my first games as a conscious gamer: I read about it myself in nintendo power retro column back in elementary school, got it from a bargain bin shortly after, and played it all the way front-to-back at a time where I finished very few games. while I dimly knew that there had been a fourth one, I never felt driven to play it given the shift in focus between it and its predecessors. the large explorable world of wl3 enthralled me in a way that made wl4 look less appealing, and it sat far down in my backlog until I realized that it's considered one of the best, if the not the best in the series. it won't unseat wario land 3 for me at the end of the day, but wario land 4 tries something fresh with solid results overall.

wl4 takes a much more setpiece-heavy approach to level design versus exploration-based puzzle solving of wl3. while transformations remain, the puzzles that involve them tone back the complexity, and many levels focus on other gimmicks entirely. wl4 thrives on its creativity and variety of concepts thanks to extremely tight pacing between areas. speed takes an increased focus after the leisurely prior entries, as challenges are meant to be sight-read and level layout hews towards linearity. each level now ends with a mad dash towards the beginning of the stage after pressing a frog statue that reopens the entrance vortex, which at the same time begins a few-minute countdown and opens up some new areas. this mechanic works best when the stage post-transition significantly differs than the route to the frog statue, such as in the volcano level that freezes after pressing the statue. a key to unlock the next stage must be collected along with four stone pieces that help open the way to the boss at the end of each area. these generally fall on the path going to or leaving the frog statue without much real exploration needed.

I'm sort of struggling to talk about specifics in terms of game-feel or level design because there's really not a cohesive design paradigm at play here. wario land 2 and 3 focused heavily on transformation-based puzzles and exploring for treasure, and here all the same mechanics exist with little alteration. wario has roughly the same moveset he had in those titles, enemies largely remain the same, and there are virtually no new transformations to speak of. there's still frequent secret paths to diamonds and such, though here the focus is on achieving a high score in a given level rather than the collectible aspect. in a lot of ways, it feels like the unique ideas behind this game are grafted onto the framework of the older games without much integration. stages like the domino level or the spinner level interested me initially but are fleeting joys that never get expanded upon beyond the level they exist in. there's virtually nothing new in terms of the pre-existing transformation puzzles, and thus the moment-to-moment gameplay feels like a rehash of those ideas when there isn't some random new idea to propel the game forward.

still, thanks to that fast pacing, this is a perfect pick-up-and-play game that won't leave you scrambling to remember what you did last like in wl3. the control feels solid and quick with the only exception being holding throwable items: why is it so easy for wario to drop these?? each of the boss succeeds at presenting a nice little puzzle against surreal, grotesque monsters, and the theming overall switches up the vibe constantly. I can't think of many GBA games that look much better than this either, which astonishes me considering this came out in the launch window. there's plenty of little extras and minigames as well, some of which presage this team's next title: the original warioware, which shouldn't surprise anyone who's heard the soundtrack to both games with that distinctive synth bass. there's also a little classic wario land treasure hunting with the hidden record chests, which unlock a given track for use in the sound test and require much more thorough hunting in order to retrieve. even though its a short game, the package is remarkably tight for an early GBA game, and could go toe-to-toe with any other 2d platformer of its era.

wario land 4 reminds me a bit of drill dozer, another GBA game with a lot of great ideas without a good mechanical throughline that ends up just missing greatness. I could easily float this between 7 and 8 on my ranking scale given how I'm feeling on the game and what I played last: its uneven nature both elevates its creativity but detracts from its coherence. no doubt I'll return at some point to get more gold rankings on stages and find more vinyl records, but at the moment I'm just glad to have this game finally out of my backlog.

Silent Hill 3 finds itself in the deeply unenviable position of being the first Silent Hill game to not really have an identity of its own. When you’re following a game as titanic as Silent Hill 2 I think it would be easy to be destroyed by the question of what the fuck you do next and I’m extremely glad that Team Silent had the good sense to make the answer “not that again.” Conceptually I think there’s something interesting in the idea of returning to a lot of the aesthetics and narrative ideas of the original game, as the unbelievable technical mastery over the PS2 that’s on display here definitely affords them a little bit of victory lapping that warrants such a thing. Still though, I’m glad that this game manages to firmly stake its own atmospheric identity even if I think ultimately it doesn’t all come together quite as well as its predecessors.

A big part of that is the overarching narrative of the game. At first I was kind of put off by the structure. Where previous Silent Hills stuck to the same formula of dropping your character in the titular town and making those foggy streets the hub world of sorts between the “dungeon” locations of municipal buildings and hospitals and stuff, 3 is a very linear game that shuttles you from dungeon to dungeon to dungeon with very little narrative tissue as Heather Mason just tries to go from the mall back to her apartment with very little understanding of what the fuck is happening to her.

And that’s kind of all you get! For a long while! Initially I was fatigued by this gauntlet of what in previous games would be considered set piece dungeon areas back to back to back to back but I came around. Partly this is because all of these areas are just good – Silent Hill 3 really is all killer no filler. Partly, though, it’s because I don’t find the actual narrative of the game particularly interesting. There is a renewed focus on the cult from Silent Hill 1 and they’re back to their old hijinks some seventeen years later. There are seeds of good shit here – conflicts between three emergent factions with differing philosophies about the purpose of their dark god and how best to weaponize it against the world, implications of what the lives of surviving characters from the original game (and at least one who didn’t) looked like in the intervening time – but none of that stuff is really given any time to be developed into anything more than cool seasoning sprinkled over something that feels disappointingly seen-before for this series. I’m conflicted about it though, right, because the REASON this stuff is so underbaked is because almost all of it is squished into the back half of the game to make room for The World’s Most Stressful Walk Home, which is sick! Also, I’m about to get into MORE shit that is very cool in this game, and that stuff persists into that second half as well along with these things that don’t work as well, it just sucks that the thing that was sacrificed here is, ostensibly, the primary narrative of the game haha.

Who even CARES though because the TRUE focus of the game is Heather Mason, perhaps the best video game protagonist of all time? She’s a delight, an absolute pleasure to inhabit and spend time with. She faces a gauntlet of intensely physical and increasingly targeted psychological horror and meets almost every challenge with annoyance and fury. Eye rolls and ughs and a brandished katana rather than fear. Even in her relationship with the game’s one other overtly cool character (something this series has never REALLY had and it’s nice! I really like Douglas – SH1 contrived a lot of situations to keep Cybil and Harry off the same page) who is a fifty-something year old man she is the clear leader, and she never lets any of the villains get in her head. She’s goofy, she’s angry, and always ready to fuck up some asshole cultists who don’t understand who they’re dealing with. A Queen.

And fitting this protagonist who is much more self-assured and much less susceptible to bullshit than the ones we’ve previously seen in the series, the game’s atmospheric dials have been adjusted accordingly. Of course the heavy symbolism and psychologically specific nature of the monsters and locations is still there, but it’s less intense than in either game, and it does seem to roll off Heather’s back a bit, like water off a duck’s. She’s not a scared, traumatized kid and she’s not committed any great sins; she’s not in a place where this stuff is gonna just work on her automatically. To compensate, everything else is dialed up. The fidelity offered by the PS2 is taken full advantage of in a different direction than it was in Silent Hill 2, and only two years later Team Silent is squeezing every polygon out of the machine. It’s a technical marvel, maybe the most photoreal game on the console, and every nasty, gritty detail is dialed to eleven here. Things are grimier, rustier, flakier, bloodier than they’ve ever been, a real sicko grungefest. Monsters are more varied and more aggressive, but Heather is more mobile and has better tools for dealing with them at her disposal than her forebears. The sound design is at a series high, leaning harder than ever into the industrial crunches and whines and pounding clanks. The appearance of any enemy is not just a threat to Heather’s health but now a jarring assault on the senses in a much more visceral way than ever before.

There’s also the introduction of a lot more General Horror stuff in a way that I think really works for the game. Each Silent Hill game has progressively flirted more and more with the idea that the town and the otherworld are just kind of Normal Haunted, by, like, ghosts and shit, and 3 takes this and runs with it, leaning into Haunted House Bullshit in a way that I could never get enough of. Be it a ghost pushing me onto the train tracks, getting scary messages in the hospital, or the literal haunted house sequence you run through in the amusement park late in the game, it was ALWAYS scary and ALWAYS fun. The game’s sense of humor is a lot more overtly goofy than Silent Hill 1’s but it works completely, never kills the vibe, and always contributes to a scare even as it’s making me smile. It’s a hard thing to balance but Silent Hill 3 makes it look easy.

I feel like this review has bounced around a lot, like I’m describing a lot of disparate things that maybe sound weird on paper and that’s because Silent Hill 3 feels like that, a bit. A mish mash of a lot of really different elements that I wouldn’t have expected to work as well together as they did, and in fact it did take a couple hours to start winning me over. But despite what I personally found to be a somewhat unsatisfying main plot (that is, admittedly, buoyed by its focus on a character who has quickly become one of my personal favorites in any game), everything here just kind of clicks. It’s just fun. A Silent Hill game that’s not as focused and cohesive is, it turns out, still a game made by a team of master craftsmen at the absolute top of their game, at least at this point in time. It really seems like they can’t go wrong!

In many ways this game is a warm bath of cozy gameplay. From its cute and detailed pixel art style and its soothing music, thats a great start but to have a game tell so much story with barely any dialogue to carry it is great. In this game you unpack a series of boxes, putting items away in relevant places and sorting out each move the main character makes from place to place.

As you go along, there's certain items that carry along with wear, tear and repair, certain items that hint and later outright weave a tale about the main characters hobbies, career, love life and more. You get the feeling of a whole live lived and as each move arrives, you wonder what's been added, what's changed and why and it feels incredibly rewarding. Its a charm.

The game isn't without its pitfalls though. One is item recognition. Sometimes the game can be incredibly picky in where it wants certain items. Sometimes this is fine as its story related (like a certain awkward photo...). Other times it feels arbitrary and you can occasionally be one item off moving along with little clue as to why. Its also difficult to sometimes get what an item is supposed to be. I wish the game had a little way to just quickly say what items are as that would solve some of the item location confusion.

Finally I have to mention the price. I get this is a controversial topic but the content here is 'just' not quite enough and while its a lovely experience, its not quite a £20 experience. I get that feels a bit on the mean side but I can probably say if I did buy on full price vs getting it on games pass, im not sure I would feel quite as charitable towards it as I do. £12-14? I would consider that a more reasonable pricepoint for whats offered here. £20? Pushing it a little over the line.

That said, if pricing isnt an issue for you and you just want the gaming equivalent of a nice hot scented bubble bath then this is perfect.

This dopey trout has three pairs of underwear and five hundred journals. What are you writing about? Swamp ass?

What's fairly interesting to me about this game is the ambient storytelling explored as you progress through the acts. What the faceless and wordless protagonist chooses to bring with her and return to as she travels through time, and the wear & tear they each experience as they cling to their passions through young adulthood. A fresh new undecorated house offering you free reign to personalise as if you've just bought a new Habbo Hotel apartment would often be preceded by a move with roommates, where the living space is shared and belongings need to be negotiated and respected. Unpacking really can be surprisingly stressful for a game that purports itself to be a zen little experience.

What ultimately holds the game back for me is the bizarre rules you're made to follow before a level counts as clear. As the last box is unfurled, red highlights activate throughout the house and they rarely ever seem to be for good reason - you can't even leave mugs on coasters.

I’m overwhelmingly glad that I stuck with this game through to the end, because I very nearly didn’t. True to what other people have said - Eastward is glacial; largely disinterested with stringing the player along with explosive story beats, overarching goals and villains. While the game shares many similarities to Zelda: Minish Cap and Mother 3 in its aesthetics, dungeon schema and quirky ensemble cast, it feels closer in spirit to Moon: Remix RPG. Eastward is primarily a story of a journey, a potpourri of emotions and vignettes, and it expects you to inhabit the communities of the microworlds you visit on your trip. I wish I had known this going in, and I’d like to start my review by stating as such as a primer for anyone reading because when I clocked what Eastward’s intentions were and met it halfway, I finally found myself sinking in.

Eastward is an adventure RPG revolving around the story of John, a stoic, taciturn miner and his mysterious wide-eyed adoptive daughter named Sam - each born into an isolated town deep beneath the surface. The narrative is ostensibly a one-way ticket on a train powered by Sam’s positive energy and curiosity as she yearns to see the sun for the first time with a thoroughly convincing and endearing childlike wonderment. Upon reaching the surface, I was right there with her.

The world is presented through the dichotomy of John and Sam’s polar opposite personalities. Sam is contagiously cheerful and childishly chatty, but she often fails to perceive the more adult dramas and contradictions. Despite John being ghoulishly silent throughout the game, he exhibits warmth and intelligence at points that the player can fill in themselves. This is particularly noticeable in moments like when Sam and John encounter incubators for artificial human beings hidden deep within ruins for the first time. For Sam, those seem almost like hyper-technological playgrounds, while for John, and consequently also for the player, their mysterious and threatening nature is very evident. It’s all surprisingly effective as far as Game Dad character interactions go.

Eastward is a post-apocalyptic setting fraught with danger, but dotted along the tracks are pockets of humanity small and large, towns and cities with cultures cultivated over time in isolation. Each is inhabited by characters that are of course quirky, but surprisingly fleshed out and genuinely memorable. It’s been a very long time since a game world has felt so alive and well-told down to its minute details, helped in no small part to the stellar pixel work in the meticulously realised characters and environments. Some of the best pixel art I have ever seen. Honestly, it left me genuinely inspired - to take in every inch of the world, but also to create for myself.

I often found myself thinking back to the steps on the path I had already walked, about the characters I could no longer return to, and wondering what they were doing while I was not there to watch. Personally speaking, I can ask nothing more of a game. Eastward acted as a beacon of positive vibrations and inspiration to me. As someone who has never grown out of pinning himself to a train window and imagining the lives of the people in the towns I zoom by, the experience of this game was incisive to something I hold dear. Favourite game of 2021 by far.

Content Warning for Attempted Suicide, Terminal Illness, Death, and Chronic Illness

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It’s September 2011 and I’m seventeen years old when I try to kill myself. There are two ponds near my parent’s house. It’s like 4 AM. I like to be out this early. Nobody else is awake, and they won’t be for a while. It’s like the whole world belongs to me. I wander around between the neighborhoods, along the roads, and in the fields. In ten years these will be fresh real estate properties but today they’re still farmland. This hour and a half is the only time the anxiety quells. The real world never knows peace. There’s a dread that accompanies every action and every moment; living in that house, going to school, hanging out with my friends (are they my friends? They are but I won’t be able to understand that until I’m healthier). I’ll always have to go back home. I’ll never be able to articulate what’s happening to me. The pressure is too intense. I don’t plan it, but, the pond is right there, and it’s deep enough, and early enough that no one will hear me. Not having a plan is what saves my life. Turns out impromptu self-drownings are difficult to pull off when the water is still and not THAT deep. So, it doesn’t work, and I’m soaked, and grateful to get home and hide the evidence before my parents wake up, but I don’t feel BETTER. I feel despair, still. There’s no way out. I wish I could just climb up the stairwell, out of this. I wish I had the clarity to understand what was wrong with me.

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What do you even say about Silent Hill 2? To say that it’s one of the best video games ever made feels simultaneously obvious and like I’m underselling it, right? Fuckin, uhhhh, Resident Evil 2 is one of the best video games ever made. Ace Attorney 3 is one of the best games ever made. Come on! When we see people talk about old games that they like they’ll so often say stuff like “it holds up really well for its age” or some similar comment that implies that progress is the same as quality. This is, of course, nonsense. I wouldn’t say video games are better as a medium in 2021 than they were in 2001; on the whole and in the mainstream I would say they’re demonstrably worse in almost every way – how they look, how they sound, how they feel. Silent Hill 2 was a AAA game. What do we get now instead? Far Cry 6? The fuckin, THE MEDIUM? We’ve lost everything in pursuit of bad lighting and looking like a mediocre episode of whatever was popular on HBO three years ago. Silent Hill 2 looks great and sounds great and fuck you it plays great too it feels good and even the puzzles are MOSTLY FINE. MOSTLY. Listen I’m saying this is the all time best video game I’m not saying it fuckin ended world hunger.

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It’s October 2012, I’m nineteen and I’m sitting in a business communications class when I get the text confirmation that Sam’s brain tumor is back, again. It’s not the first time, and I know that there’s nothing left to do, he’s going to die. It’s fast, untreated. He’s one of my best friends, and the only person I know from home who went to the same college as me, but we live really far apart on a big urban campus and I haven’t seen him as much as I’d have liked to. Now he’s gonna spend the rest of his time with his family back home. When I see him next it’s at a hometown charity event for his family in December. He’s unrecognizable physically, and he can’t speak. The event is at our old catholic elementary school, in the gym, where in the years since we graduated they’ve painted a giant tiger on the wall. It’s the school mascot. I feel incredibly awkward around him and spend most of the time away with our other friends. I only speak to him briefly, and when I do it’s a stupid joke about the tiger mural. These will be my last words to him. I do know this will be the case, I think. Later that month I’ll be one of his pallbearers. I spend a lot of time angry and ashamed of myself for not being better to him, not knowing how to act or what to say. I’m about to drop out of school for reasons financial and related to my mental health.

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So what DO you say about Silent Hill 2? That it’s a masterpiece? That it’s the most well-conceived and executed video game ever made? That every detail of it dovetails into every other in a legitimately perfect cocktail story, presentation, and play? That the performances, cinematography, soundscape, all of it are untouchably top of their class? That when Mary reads the letter at the end I WEEP because it’s one of the best pieces of acting I’ve ever heard? That if I ever meet Troy Baker it’s ON SIGHT? These things are all true. We all know it. Everybody knows this. It’s Silent Hill 2.

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It’s August 2019, I’m twenty-five and I’ve just managed to graduate college in time to move to a new city with my partner as she enters her third year of medical school. That’s the year they kick you out of the classroom and you start going to the hospitals to do your real hands-on training month to month. I’m job hunting unsuccessfully and we’re living exclusively off her loans, when what seems at first like a pulled lower back muscle becomes a fruitless early morning ER trip (five hours, no results, not seen by a doctor) becomes an inability to get out of bed becomes a forced leave of absence. Without a diagnosis she can’t get disability accommodations. While on a leave of absence we can’t have her loans, and in fact we have to pay them back. We’re getting desperate, thousands of dollars in debt, and I take the first soul sucking job I can find. It takes almost a full year of visits to increasingly specialized physicians but eventually my partner is diagnosed with non radiographic axial spondyloarthritis, an extremely rare condition that culminates in the fusion of the spinal column. We can treat the pain, sort of, but it’s only a matter of time until it’s likely to evolve into a more serious condition, she’ll never have the strength or stamina she had before, and the treatment options are expensive and difficult. Her diagnosis doesn’t even officially exist as a recognized condition that people can have until September 2020.

Suddenly I am a caretaker and everything is different now. Obviously our mood is stressed from the financial dangers, but she’s in pain, terrible pain, constantly for months. She can’t sleep, she can’t eat. There’s nothing I can do. It’s exhausting to live like that. She’s depressed. On good days we try to walk outside but good days are few and far between, and grow fewer over time, and her body makes her pay for the walks. She’s on drugs, a lot of them. Do they help? It’s unclear. They don’t make her feel BETTER. Nobody knows what’s wrong with her. Her school thinks she’s faking, they’re trying to concoct ways to get her kicked out. She wants to die. It breaks my heart. She’s everything to me, all that there is. She has literally saved my life. And I can’t help her. But it’s exhausting for me too. I don’t want to admit this, not even privately, to myself. It is hard to be the person who is leaned on, especially when the person you love can’t give anything back. I’m tired. I’m not angry, and I don’t think I’m resentful. But I’m tired. I feel shame for thinking about it, for acknowledging it. I know it’s silly to feel the shame but it’s there. I do find a job eventually, thankfully, but it’s still a long time before we get a diagnosis, much less an effective treatment. Even after things settle somewhat, it’s a hard year. And there are hard times to come.

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Ever since I first played it as a teen, Silent Hill 2 is a game that has haunted me through life, like a memory. It struck a deep chord with me when I was too young for that to be fair, too young to identify why I could relate to these people and their ghosts. I used to think this was a special relationship that I had with the game, the way you kind of want to think you have these when you’re younger, but the older I get the more I recognize this as part of growing up. Silent Hill 2 doesn’t resonate with me because I’ve encountered situations in life that closely mirror that of the protagonist. I mean, Angela’s story resonates deeply with me despite little overlap in the specifics of our family traumas. Silent Hill 2 touches me – and most of us – so deeply, because it has such a keen understanding of what it feels like to be Going Through It. It is a game that knows what it is to grieve, to despair, to soak in the fog, and also, maybe, to feel a catharsis, if you’re lucky, and you do the work.

I’ve been Angela, parts of her. I’ve been Laura too. I’ve had more James in me than I would prefer. I suspect all of us have these people, these feelings in us, to some degree or another. We collect them as we get older. That’s just part of it. Silent Hill 2 isn’t a happy game, but it’s one that Gets It, and lets us explore those spaces in a safe and cathartic way. It does this about as well as any piece of media I’ve encountered, on top of being so excellent at all the cinematic and video game stuff. But that’s really what makes it what it is. The empathy, and the honesty. I think it’s beautiful.

Addictive despite, or maybe due to, the repetitiveness of the gameplay.

Honestly after the first level I stopped noticing the frame problems. But the camera issues when fighting close to a wall, and accidently jumping off the wall when trying to dodge persisted across the entire game.

Even though large amounts of the game are the same basic thing, or even just "quests" that ask you to provide materials, the constant progress and unlocks kept activating the "feel-good" part of my brain, so I enjoyed myself.

thought this was gonna be pure old psx jank and was surprised to find it isn't: it's a simple but well-made dogfighting game. without much fuss the game drops you into a easy-to-control plane with generous lock-on and plenty of missiles and lets you run wild. the missions consist of destroying targets 99% of the time, with a few curveballs thrown here and there. there's not really a variety, but for a game this short it doesn't wear out its welcome. ground targets don't take much strategy to take out leaving enemy fighter jets as your main obstacle, and these guys get reasonably smart by the end game. dogfights with terrorists in more maneuverable aircraft require you to trail them closely for any hope of catching them with a missile or your machine gun. thankfully you get a bounty of ammo, so mistakes aren't punished too harshly. shooting down extra planes and SAM turrets gives you money that you can sink into new jets unlocked via mission progression as well as wingmen to watch your six when in flight. when you fail a mission the jet that you're in is destroyed and must be rebought, which as a financial setback reminds me a bit of armored core, where damage from failed missions is taken out of your paycheck, and running out of resources is game over. another more unfortunate similarity is the fact that the save system allows you to negate the consequences of failure, which begs the question why you aren't allowed to just retry missions after failing them instead of reloading a save.

if anything, the main thing holding the game back is how early this game in the playstation's life, and in the 32-bit era in general. the sparse environments are mainly flat and roughly textured with obvious seams between objects. thankfully each mission (out of the ones I played) has an unique area it takes place in, often with a subtle difference from other maps that gives the missions a bit of spice. it's also lacking in analog controls, which is handled very well on the d-pad regardless but still feels a bit stiff. it's easy to be sympathetic about these issues considering how much later games flesh out the graphics, the mission design, and the plot. this is at the very least a solid foundation for a highly respected series, and a great launch title for the 32-bit era.

I think it's a sign of the times for this game's release that so many reviews of it cited the drift mechanics as a selling point: they're so stiff. it feels a bit like a minigame that you play when meet the conditions for entering one (cranking the wheel while feeding the car gas out of a turning brake/no acceleration) where you have to center the nose of the car in a balancing act with the d-pad. what makes it feel stiff is the abrupt transition between it and the regular physics, where entering a drift suddenly makes you feel like you aren't controlling the car proper anymore, and where leaving it causes your car to suddenly jerk out in the direction you were facing (sometimes) without necessarily matching the speed you were in during the drift. I also couldn't really get the drifts to work just by downshifting, which I'm pretty sure is doable from looking at arcade footage but may not convert correctly to playstation. there are other random issues with it... like the car accidentally drifting in the wrong direction on occasion, or clipping through the geometry inconsistently. for all of the slack I can give it for being so early, it's hard to look favorably upon its drifting and physics when daytona usa did it so much better within a year's time.

besides that, the package is decent and fun to mess around with. there's a single track with a beginner lo-speed mode, an advanced mode that dials up the vehicle speeds, and then an expert course with a challenging construction site addition to the track. the game runs at a smooth 30 fps with little pop-in; this is probably the big factor that pushed rr and the psx over daytona's poor draw distance at 20 fps on saturn. the selection of songs is namco sound team genius, ranging from more poppy dance music to hardcore techno verging on gabber. there's multiple different cars too, and reverse versions of each track... all in all a tidy little package. I don't think it holds up amazingly as a racing game, but it's definitely cool to see the playstation hardware in its infancy.

It's been almost three decades since Myst's release and its world is somehow still just captivating. The bizarre mechanisms, aged artifacts and writings of those now gone both serve to create this sense of connection with another time, another place and the former inhabitants, whilst also emphasising how alone you are right now as you wander these abandoned and oftentimes silent lands, proceeding as an archaeologist of once magically conjured worlds.

As alluring as this sounds Myst is certainly far from perfect. The caves section was a wholly miserable low-point for me, sufficiently awful that I looked up a guide to save myself some pain, the 'good ending' I found fell flat on its face for me, and just generally a fair chunk of the puzzle-solving in Myst has been out-performed by time and those that would follow in its footsteps. Really Myst has aged substantially more than my rating for it necessarily indicates and that makes it hard for me to recommend as such, but the whole thing is just so fascinating to me, and whilst its age has led to some frustration in parts it also adds an almost meta element to playing it for the first time nowadays like the archaeological pursuits your character is engaging with in these mystical worlds are also being reflected in turn by you unearthing this old, time-worn game and trying to figure out what makes it tick.

In theory, Chain of Memories has a smart way of Metroid-ing our main characters in preparation for Kingdom Hearts II. A way in which this gradual loss of memories and abilities is thematicallly relevant to the overall story. This is effective, and I can't stress this enough, ONLY in theory.

In practice, Chain of Memories is almost unbearable if not for the interesting and complex story developments that take place within it. The gameplay attempts to combine the hack-and-slash combat of the original with an obtuse, unorthodox card system that just does not do it for me at all. Although I can appreciate some balances, interesting mechanics and the great menu navigation, this game feels like a Frankenstein's monstrosity of two gameplay styles that do not mesh together, whatsoever.

Characters like Naminé, Axel and Larxene are enjoyable, with great moments that are only truly present in cutscenes. The story takes a dive for the intricate and complex, which may be incomprehensible to people who are not fully committed to it. Other than that, Chain of Memories is a slog I have absolutely no intention of going back to. I can't recommend this to anyone, despite the fact I did enjoy the story and some details in the design.

In the journey to discover my appreciation for Kingdom Hearts, this has definitely been a speed bump that I can only hope is aliviated with the next game in the series.

A breath of fresh air in an era where deathmatch shooters feel all but dead. Splitgate is a very simple pitch of "Halo + Portal", and it delivers on that concept well. For me at least it was a bit of a slow start. I played this a year or two back in beta and it didn't stick with me. Now it's released? Maybe? Still sort of feels like a beta in some ways but that's getting into semantics, it's very playable currently and is being actively developed.

I didn't have a moment where I clicked with this game, and wasn't in love with it from the start. If you go in expecting Halo, and the game seems to really want you to feel that way, everything feels slightly off. The weapons handle just a bit differently, time to kill is faster, getting around the maps feels weird until you get used to using portals properly. None of this is bad though, and is more just a learning curve to get past. I kept playing just because it was easy to pick up for a short session, and now that I've been playing daily for a few weeks I really like it.

The map selection is one of my only real complaints, it's not terribly small but it could definitely use more variety, and some of the maps currently aren't great. The most successful ones are the ones basically ripped from Halo with minor adjustments, honestly though I just want more of those. As unoriginal as they are, they're just the most fun. This is a problem I believe will get better with time at least.

This is a really fun game overall right now, but I feel like its longevity depends a lot on the updates it gets down the road, it seems on a good path though. I'll likely keep playing this over any of the big AAA shooters this year. I don't think I've been this into a free-to-play shooter since Blacklight Retribution, hopefully it has a better future than that did.

If you check out the game because of this use my referral code and we both get cool stuff :)
KGBESY

This kind of feels like you’re playing a secret unlicensed knockoff Mario game by a really talented third party developer. Everything is technically here but it just doesn’t have quite the right vibes? The jump feels good but it’s not a MARIO jump. The music is top of the pop but it’s not MARIO music. The enemy designs are sick but they’re not MARIO enemies, or when they are they’re like fucked up weirdo Mario enemies, like turtle shells turning into timed explosives instead of projectiles. There’s a distinct sense of actual geography to the level progression in this game as you track through obvious recreations of real life Africa and Asia. Worlds end in rail shooter levels, and this is the final boss as well?

And all of this stuff fucking slaps this game was made by some of the all time great Nintendo legends and it shows but it’s interesting to compare its unique vibe to that of its sequel, which is a slavish recreation of the look and feel of Super Mario World, or as close as you could match that on a Gameboy.

My dad’s side of the family has an annual reunion on Christmas Eve and I occupy a weird position in the family timeline as the youngest son of the youngest son where I’m a generation younger than my next-oldest brother and cousins but a generation older than my next-youngest, so as a kid I often spent these parties in a corner somewhere on a Gameboy, and I very distinctly remember the year that I finally beat this game for the first time, and upon realizing that the game was extremely short and the only one I had brought that evening, just played it over and over and over (we would be at my aunt’s house from like 5 to 11 PM) until I was beating it in what I have today realized was times rivalling modern world record speedruns. I did not do that today but I did have a blast running through it. My fingers remembered exactly what to do, all the little nooks and crannies you can force Mario into, the secret blocks.

Feels good to revisit, but even if it was my first time I’m pretty sure I would still think this game was sick.

As a stupid fan of the original 3 seasons of the show, I went in with some stupid high expectations, and on this very rare occasion it meet every single hope I'd had.

Storywise it's the same as the show just with a little less focuses on the story and more on the gameplay, which is fine since we still have the show.
Now the gameplay that's the reallllll shit.

In order to get out of the hotel you'll need to collect souls from each one of the guests. You'll do this by keeping track of their daily routine by creeping and stalking them until you'll eventually be able to find a point in the day to take it from them. While stalking them you'll learn more about said guest and in turn more about Gregory House and its fucked up owners.

I think the day has finally come where I can say I played a video game based on an Anime and it didn't suck shit. Man that feels really good to say.