Really enjoyed my time with this one. Wonderful soundtrack. Really great puzzles involving collecting manual pages for a gameboy game. The puzzles really reminded me of Fez, though I felt like I had to look up more stuff than I did with Fez. Overall a super enjoyable game. I will probably buy it on PS5 and get the Plat.

Fun game but with some really frustrating moments. So many main quests boiled down to "Go here, lol nvm come back to where you started". Or the incredible "you gotta sneak in here" and the second you do the guy is like "Hi Kyle, I was expecting you". Such a waste of time. So many missions were about going to the sewers or coming back up from the sewers. On the plus side, the music to this game was really good. It has a track that plays in the second map you go to that sounds a lot like Cold Earth by Boards of Canada. I really enjoyed that part of the game. The combat is really fun and the parkour adds an interesting wrinkle to the gameplay. But it does boil down to a pretty generic open world zombie game at the end of the day. I spent 0 time interacting with the night mechanics because it seemed overly punishing for no real reward. I didn't feel incentivized at all to explore or do the sidequests. We moved from one objective to the next, and I think that's part of why I feel the way I do about pacing. I'm sure most gamers did not just burn through the main quest quite like I did. I didn't really start having fun with this game until the final third, where I felt like I had enough strong weapons to really dig into the combat.

The first game I played on my Xbox Series X. I was surprised by the music choices in the early game. Having boss fights choreographed to Nine Inch Nails, The Flaming Lips and Number Girl was something I wasn't expecting. The combat in this game is set to the tempo of the song and this made a lot of the game pretty trivial. Definitely the easiest game to learn how to parry. The only thing that dragged this game down for me was the extended sections of platforming. It really killed the momentum of the game and made my playthrough take a little bit longer than it otherwise would, just because I found myself getting a little bored and impatient with how long the levels were. The characters were lovable and the animation and artwork in this game is absolutely insane. Peppermint and 808 are both super cute. The story was pretty basic but I think that's exactly what it needed to be for a game like this. Overall, I can see why people were so hyped about this game. It's a simple and well-worn premise done extremely well with an interesting coat of paint.

Loved the vibe of this game. The news anchor decaying away before my eyes lives with me.

Played this Co-Op with the Discord boys. I liked the shooting in this game, but the story was indecipherable, and the fact that they expected you to scour every inch of the game world for secrets was a turn off. I don't want to have to replay sections of a game a few times just to hope a certain boss spawns or I might get a certain instance of a map. Otherwise, I really enjoyed this game. A solid challenge and pretty fun to play with friends.

Played through this game with Sevvy. I was initially skeptical of this game. The remake for SH2 had a combat trailer in the same State of Play and it looks pretty awful. All of the new SH stuff they have announced has been absolute garbage. I wasn't expecting much when they surprise released this game. My first impression was that they are trying to capture some of the PT magic by releasing something that is a little cryptic for free on PS5. I think this contributed to my skepticism. I was actually pleasantly surprised by The Short Message. I think the game looked pretty and had a great soundtrack. I later found out that Akira Yamaoka and Masahiro Ito worked on this game as Composer and Monster/Level Designer respectively, so that makes sense. The story touched on themes that I thought were interesting, but they definitely could have been explored better. Every story beat in this game is a little clumsy and heavy-handed, but for some reason I feel inclined to forgive it. Maybe it's because the subject matter about suicidal ideation and dealing with feeling inadequate in a creative space are topics that interest me. The girl who played Maya was super cute as well. Sakura Head was definitely the star of this game. The maze chases with it are genuinely pretty spooky and it felt quite challenging to complete these segments.