Very inconsistent, but very ambitious. Remedy has a story to tell, but the gameplay does not successfully carry it all the way through. Performances manage to mostly-avoid being awkward and the ending leaves a strong impression.

This game should NOT have the Amnesia prefix. It is half the reason it struggles so much. The other half is that the story's a little half-baked anyways. The environments are pretty and the voice performance done for Mandus is surprisingly good, but there is almost no engagement otherwise. The best level is the first one. The ending monologue is pretty entertaining to sit through and kind-of justifies the rest of the game.

YT influences aside, Amnesia is a genuinely frightening game. It distorts into a mad descent as the castle's environments grow more twisted and the inhabitants more threatening. Not even the safe areas feel terribly safe.

It's always nice to see a puzzle game with an identity outside the core loop, even if it isn't enormously impactful. Antichamber is as entertaining for the brain-twisting spatial puzzles as it is for the particular feeling that the world gives off.

As close as BRs get to fun. Still, most of my time spent with it feels kind-of wasted. The addition of 3v3 mode confirmed my suspicion that removing the BR components of the game makes it more fun in every way. For me, at least.

As far as survival games go, I really like how stripped down and straightforward this one is. It can feel shallow, but it deserves credit for how elegantly it teaches things without any text at all, really.

Perfect! Not in the sense that every level is equally good, but in the sense that it demonstrates the vast potential of games in expanding what is possible for media. All puzzle games are fundamentally going through the same motions, and so the noise (be it visual, audible, or literally meta/implied) you generate between the player and the correct order of actions is what defines your game. A common strategy, then, is to take advantage of assumptions we tend to make the moment we encounter a new situation, and create a puzzle that forces you to break away from such methods of thought. Baba is built on this principle - by making a game ABOUT breaking assumed rules, you're constantly fighting your intuition and instinct, so that when you finally lock in a puzzle's solution it feels almost completely because of your own intelligence.

I don't really understand how one would justify a low rating for this game. It sets out to be a mechanical assembly toy and does that task perfectly, then gives you 50+ situations to unleash your creations on. It's really cheap too.

Stupid as shit.

Depressing. A hollow mimic of the Bioshock combat loop wrapped in such a shitsack story that it's almost incomparably bad. Booker's a shit protagonist and Elizabeth's only positive is that she can't die in combat. Aesthetically pleasing but wasted on a middling combat system and a tremendously revolting story.

Extends BB's strengths and provides enough new information to fill out any gaping holes in the game's lore & "narrative". Each stage feels great for very different reasons, but the Fishing Hamlet is the obvious standout both mechanically and narratively.

Extremely varied and very juicy isometric mech combat, with a perfect soundtrack and well-realized identity. Honestly as much of a benchmark indie classic as Hotline Miami or Hollow Knight in my eyes.

Was Call of Duty ever actually good? Yeah. This game had a lot more going for it than expected - the story was actually entertaining, zombies was great, and multiplayer was about as fun as it always is. This and its' sequel are probably the most consistent games in the franchise.

I no longer see the value. Zombies is essentially worthless and the multiplayer is average.

Exchanges story quality to buff up zombies and multiplayer. This is the best zombies ever was in the whole franchise.

I did not spend much time with this game's multiplayer and I barely even touched the story. Zombies is still very tight in this game, with lots of fun new maps getting plenty of mileage out of the more modern specs it runs on.

Does Celeste make zero mistakes? I actually don't know. I love every single screen of this game (even the ones I died on thousands of times). Madeline's controls rival the best Mario iterations with ease, the story is exactly what it needs to be, great music, great visuals, a HUGE amount of content for the price, etc etc... Celeste has the best level design of any commercial platformer ever released.

Control is nearly a great game but it is held back in 3 categories. First, the character writing is really, really bad. Second, the game does not understand the primary influences from which it pulls, so it badly misuses them in most cases. Third, the combat is fun, but not terribly expressive or dynamic, so it grows boring fast even as new abilities are introduced. Control suffers particularly from the fact that it almost certainly takes inspiration from SCP, but doesn't fully understand the source material.

This game is not a spectacular failure. It is an unfortunate example of unchecked ambition and terrible marketing. Night City is a wonderfully articulate cyberpunk setting (given it had to be generic at this scale), a few of the sidequests are brilliant, and the main story generally plays out well. V is a terrible protagonist even by RPG-trousers standards, though.

A commitment to hostile design is dangerous because the general gaming public will cry foul at the most petty nonsense imaginable. The fact that DD is such a success is a great surprise to me. This is a game that designed its mechanics around its themes and feel, which makes it feel tight and cohesive, but everyone's got a limit and eventually the frustration does set in.

Reviewing this game is kind of a sin in-of itself - what more can be said? This game is enormously important to me for a lot of reasons, but it cannot be understated that Dark Souls is more than the sum of its' parts. Awkward missteps exist in many places, but the emergent feeling of sinking into this game, fully consumed by the atmosphere, the repetitions, the idea it represents, is one of few perfect representations of why games are so important to me. It helps that Miyazaki is an insanely-talented worldbuilder. I consider the Souls series' lore to be the best example of fantasy worldbuilding full-stop. Not even Tolkien comes close.

The best Fromsoft DLC pack? It's a tough contest, but Artorias of the Abyss has a lot of highs and not many lows. Each bossfight (Yes, including the Sanctuary Guardian) is great fun, the areas are fairly unique and at least a little different from the main game's architecture, and it adds a good amount to the already spectacular worldbuilding of the base game. Artorias is the sole reference point for all humanoid duel bosses in the franchise, because he's still the best example.

Certainly neither as bad as the naysayers claim nor as good as the desperate fanboys want it to be. DaSII has a huge amount of content well above the industry standard for quality, but it cannot match the outstanding strengths of any other FromSoft game. The deepest flaws lie in the audiovisual representation - weapons feel less weighty and everything looks washed out and fake. Beyond that, enemy placement could use some work (even after the first attempt) and the difficulty is clearly not balanced towards fun encounters, but rather a misguided representation of the Souls series as notoriously difficult.

Probably my least favorite of the Souls II dlc trilogy, but still fun regardless. This is the most washed out of the snowy Souls areas, but navigating the town is decently fun, the tiger fight is great (the first time) and the final boss is a huge spectacle that, while not terribly difficult, caps the experience off nicely. The Frigid Outskirts are the kind of "cool idea" that shouldn't have made it past the planning phase.

Not quite my favorite of the DLC, but a strong piece of content nonetheless. The tower is pretty fun to work your way through, the enemies are a good set of standard mobs, and the Fume Knight and Sir Alonne are both top notch bosses (probably the best DaSII has to offer). As for missteps - the corpse run to Sir Alonne is not fun at all, nor is the one to the Blue Smelter Demon (who is literally a reskin boss). Like the others, the pacing of this area is still a little wonky to me - not quite to the standard the other two games hit.

For some reason this DLC ends up as my favorite every time I try to rank them. It's probably just the setting, which is by far the most unique of the 3 packs. The progression through the city with the lifting platforms, into the cryptlike sanctum with the ghost soldiers, all the way down to the flooded base with those wack-ass legmouths is a satisfying journey and in my opinion the best DLC route. Elana is a cool boss and I kind of like immediately following her up with Sinh, a pretty fun spectacle dragon boss. Of course, the ganksquad nightmare after the claustrophobic shitwipe cave kinda taints the experience.

All of the Souls games exchange flaws and strengths. The third entry still fails to live up to the mad architecture of the first, but it has a far more consistent roster of bosses and the luxury of being made with better graphical tools. It certainly struggles to escape the franchise's shadow, and it's clear that Miyazaki was very much done wit h the franchise at this stage. Ironically, I think this game would be lauded as an absolute masterpiece if only it was the first in the series. I don't really mesh with the argument that this game "steals" from the rest of the series because the Souls style of storytelling is fundamentally designed for that kind of borrowing. While some bits are a tad much, blow-for-blow I find that 3 makes its nods to earlier points in the franchise with plenty of tact.

I really hesitate to undervalue any FromSoft DLC pack because they're so far above and beyond literally any other developer's work, but Ashes is weak in a lot of ways. The setting is awesome (though it's hard to discern if using another painted realm is a tired retread or an attempt at establishing a facet of the world's structure) and there is a decent helping of neat new enemies (the big crow knights in particular), but I found the enemy placements to be a bit uninspired. This DLC would be much better if there was one more good boss, but the gravetender is just neither interesting nor challenging. Friede and Ariandel are worth 2 bosses at least, but they're basically the only climax in the whole DLC. When compared to the Ringed City, which had at least 3 high points, that just doesn't meet the standard it should.

Makes up for the misfire that was Ashes pretty handily. While I wish we got a more thorough map of the Ringed City, this pack has more than enough content to justify the price. Keeping up with 3's pace, every boss in this pack is brilliant (save the weird Old Monk throwback, but that's a standin for a pretty cool mechanic so I'll give it a pass), the level layouts are solid and it actually manages to conclude the entire Souls franchise in a way that feels genuinely satisfying. Gael is the perfect final boss in every way imaginable. A desolate, lonely series like Souls deserves a desolate, lonely end. As the world burns itself to nothing but ash, we're left with a pointless battle between two slaves to two broken systems, fighting over the last shred of the old world - because once it's gone, there's nothing left at all. Paint it into a new one, try again - but who's to say that's not exactly what led us here in the first place?

Horror is obviously meant for games above all other forms of media, so why have so few successfully capitalized on it? Because being genuinely scary is really hard! Darkwood picks what is in my opinion the best angle - focus on unease rather than fear, and just never let that feeling go for any longer than necessary. Darkwood's safest moments never feel safe, and it's always willing to crank the dial a little closer to panic. This game drains me to play for longer than a few hours, and that's the highest praise a horror game can earn.

This game does not work. It deserves no credit for the facilitation of RP, because people have been doing that far better and for free through GMOD for like over a decade.

A very strange, mostly-successful genre hybrid with a kind-of hypnotic artstyle. Combat is generally satisfying (if a little muted in terms of feedback) and it's no slacker on challenge. Great background art and a well-considered difficulty curve make this worth a buy for most people who enjoy roguelites.

There's a lot of innovative design here. The UI deserves all the credit it gets - it's simple, cool and functional. The weapons are all fun to use and the necromorphs are freakishly novel for a first run-through. The run-down Ishimura is a great setting and it lays the groundwork for a very odd story that may not entirely pay off in subsequent games, but is interesting at the very least.

I got this when it came out and was obsessed with some of the new Necromorph designs added. The setting is broader than DS1 which allows for way more environment variety and situations, but this is where the story starts to grow a little too outlandish to stay scary.

The funniest thing about Death Stranding is that it only provides value as a mechanical experiment, despite Kojimas clear desperation for narrative relevance. The story in this game is hilariously, abysmally bad. The moment-to-moment gameplay is uneven (as expected for something this different) but it is valuable as an argument for mechanical experimentation, and for pushing the game industry away from homogenization and further towards interesting design practices, I must applaud it at least a little bit.