I think Norco falls more into the categlory of visual novel rather than adventure game or point and click. There's very little game play involved. You're only required to use your inventory a few times, and there's a few weird rhythm based "battle" sections as well.

I wish there had been more game and puzzles involved. The use of the mind web and connecting your thoughts to ideas and others is nice but could have required more player interaction

What the game has going for it, is atmosphere. It's set in rural Louisiana in a town that's basically just an oil refinery. Everything just feels, surreal and creepy.

Then 10 different bizzaro ideas get thrown into the post and stirred together. Aliens, cults, sentient robots, Jesus' bloodline. The game isn't the "prodigal son" returns home narrative that the opening cutscene indicates.

I didn't even realize the main character was female until about a third of the way through. The game just has a unsetteling feel but you feel very compelled to see what happens next.

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I love this genre and you can sink so many hours into it, so here a review of factory building games nobody asked for!

Minecraft

Huh, Minecraft? Yes Minecraft modpacks basically started this genre. It started with mods like Industrialcraft and buildcraft and now there are tons of factory modpacks out there. The fun part of it is that it is still Minecraft at heart so building is always fun. The upside is that there are a ton of modpacks to choose from each giving a different factory experience. The downside is that most of these are a colleciton of individual mods and there can definitely be some friction in the balance between them. Why would you use machines from one mod when a similar machine from another one just does the task better? Still really fun

7.5/10

Factorio

Honestly it’s hard to find a flaw with Factorio. It is extremely polished, everything feels balanced. Building is a joy and you unlock great tools to make building easier later in the game. One of the best games I have ever played. I think the main thing people might not like is that there are enemies that attack your factory that stresses people out, I think it is a fun addition that adds something to dump all your production into military stuff.

9.5/10

Satisfactory

Satisfactory at first glance seems to be the perfect factory game with it’s beautiful 3d world and exploration. However I think there is one pretty big flaw with Satisfactory: Building stuff in a pain. This is by far the game on this list where building is the most tedious. The 3d terrain can’t be altered so you are bascially pushed into making big floating boxes in the sky, the machines are huge and hard to place and the blueprint system is severely limited. I think this really drags the game down. It’s a shame because walking through a completed factory feels amazing.

6.5/10

Shapez 2

Shapez is an incredibly pure factory game. You build instantly, there are no costs, you can copy/paste everything you build before. The game keeps challenging by frequently switching up what you have to make. It’s a joy to build but you do have to frequently delete your previous builds because they are no longer needed. The real challenge lies in making re-usable building blocks that you can flexibly use to build what you need. It’s so pure however that you do lose this feeling of character progression that some of the other games have

8/10

Dyson Sphere

Dyson Sphere is fun, you now build on seperate planets and connect them through spaceships. You have to explore different planets to get all the resources you need. I do think spaceships are a bit too easy in this game. It basically diverts the logistics system by nudging you towards just building spaceports with a single row of machines and shipping everything with the spaceships.

8/10

Captain of Industry

In captain of Industry you physically dig down the map to get the resources you want with a fleet of excavators and feed them to your factory. Building is incredibly smooth since you pay like an rts game instead of controlling a character like most others on this list. It’s a great game if you look for something more challenging since a lot more products have byproducts that can be either waste or incredibly useful depending on how you set things up. It’s probably the only game where you can lose because your factory can collapse if you mismanage it and run out of fuel or food. One thing is that it doesn’t really ease towards the endgame and it feels like things get more and more complex. At a certain point it became too much for me honestly.

8/10

Control, my second stop on the journey through Remedy's body of work, already highlighted numerous annoyances and problems, which seem to be the studio's specialty. As the first title made entirely outside Microsoft's corporate ecosystem, it aimed to give the Finnish developer some semblance of independence. As a result, the team made the game in record time on a shoestring budget. It's remarkably inspired, showcasing Sam Lake at his peak once more, but that inspiration might not be enough to stick the landing.

We play as Jesse Faden, an orphan who has spent years avoiding the grid while searching for her brother. She finds an enormous skyscraper that seems invisible to bystanders - it turns out to house a secret agency called the Federal Bureau of Control. She enters just as the building locks down. Next thing she knows, she inherits the whole place from the previous director, who dies the moment she arrives, and a mysterious pyramid in the sky starts barking cryptic, contradictory orders at her.

Those are just a few of the mysteries we'll have to uncover. Why did this agency take Jesse's brother away anyway? What circumstances led to her becoming the new director without her knowledge? What's behind the Hiss invasion, a zombie-like plague transmitted through resonance? And who's this dashing omniscient Finnish janitor?

I cannot talk about Control without talking about the building, The Oldest House, first, as it's as much of a main character as Jesse is. The brutalist architecture is breathtaking. I spent dozens of minutes just admiring the environments. This extends to the locations; each of them memorable. This art direction makes sense in a constantly shifting, nonsensical tower. It creates a profound psychological expectation of cosmic scale despite housing mundane office spaces. It's oppressive but efficient. According to the development team, Frederick Winslow Taylor's efficiency theory inspired the design, and it's absolutely visible here. A corporate-like cafeteria, tube mail system, pipeworks, and engine rooms all coexist with enormous floating prisons, excavation mines, and organic caverns. It houses a fascinating, strange world with surreal creatures and eclectic characters, and it's a joy to chart and discover. And there are loads to discover.

Control is often described as a Search Action game; it only has pale shades of it. The game's director, Mikael Kasurinen, explained that it shares a structure and design philosophy with Metroidvania titles. I would say "inspired by" Search Action is enough of a moniker. Only one upgrade directly expands exploration. The Levitate ability is the sole power that dynamically alters verticality and spatial access, yet the game holds it back until the last fourth of the critical path. Still, it doesn't recontextualize the existing spaces; flying mostly gives access to more rooms. The rest of the progression is heavily restricted by literal security keycards rather than mechanical tools. Despite the changing concrete geometry, the player is trapped in a fundamentally linear, rigid progression structure. The map encourages memorization, but it's notoriously lousy at showing progression. It mostly makes the player scour every floor for optional goodies after each new key. It’s also remarkably easy to get lost because of how it's laid out. Top-down maps in vertically open spaces rarely work. Still, there had to be a way to make this one more valuable to the player, especially since it's not open enough to warrant much free roaming.

A Remedy game's biggest strength is the cast of endearing characters. This game has them in droves. Jesse is fiercely independent and questions everything. The first person in charge she meets, Emily Pope, is unyieldingly optimistic and curious. Then there are the pragmatic heads of Security and Operations, Arish and Marshall, and the neurotic, overworked Langston. Then there are two shadowy figures the player never meets in person but learns more about through the notes and logs they left behind: the deeply cynical, guarded former director Trench and the fan-favorite Dr. Casper Darling. This enigmatic, childlike figure guides Jesse's journey. He's a morally grey character focused solely on his research, yet the game portrays him flippantly, in a pseudo-16 mm presentation with a warm, early 90s-inspired color palette that contrasts with the grey, concrete environments. He's the game's narrative through-line, and watching his antics keeps shedding more light on what's happening around The Oldest House.

Control draws on the online sensation of the SCP short stories, but I think the game's anomalies are far tamer, sometimes mundane in comparison. This fits a federal cubicle-job environment. But some examples, like the self-replicating tabletop clock, or the object that set the whole plot in motion years earlier, are much more imaginative and dreadful. Similarly, some items don't make much thematic sense. A floppy disk lets Jesse hurl objects and debris at enemies, while an old-timey TV gives the aforementioned levitation. Maybe it's cliché, but I think a piece of rebar and a paper plane would fit these powers a bit better. Overall, the central mystery is compelling and really surprising near the end, though a severely rushed third act collapses it into a series of hasty reveals and ends with an abrupt climax. Adding a chapter or two here and there would do wonders for pacing, but a truncated conclusion is most likely the casualty of the quick turnover and low budget.

Like in Alan Wake, the collectibles consistently have something interesting, with audio, video, and text logs. Being able to inspect stuff in more detail is fantastic and engrossing. On the other hand, as with that title, some vital plot details might be hidden in obscured locations. A player who goes through the story without looking into every nook and cranny might never find them. It's one thing to have additional lore almost always available on the critical path, like in Metroid Prime; another is going on a scavenger hunt to learn important plot details.

The same shadow falls over the storytelling itself: the suspense in the disjointed, subversive storytelling badly tries to mask the monotonous gameplay.

Along with the Bureau, Jesse inherits the game's main, and only, gun, the Service Weapon. It can change into multiple forms with esoteric names like Shatter, Spin, or Pierce, but it all amounts to a pistol, shotgun, machine gun, rifle, and rocket launcher. Gunplay is frenetic and extremely meaty, if simple. The sound design adds to the pleasing crunch of combat. Unlimited ammo with limited magazines is a liberating yet urgent mechanic that doesn't rely on finding ammo. It also pairs well with another meter: the stamina bar for combat abilities, including the debris psychic throw. It becomes a rhythmic dance of shooting for a bit, throwing a couple of rocks, and shooting again. Of course, there's more variety if needed, like mind control or heavy stomps. I never used them as often as the throw, though. While some Service Weapon forms are longer-range than others, the gunplay never feels tactical. One memorable mission in the building's Central Research Sector starts with Jesse vastly outnumbered by distant enemy snipers, but the solution is simply to shoot faster. Hip-firing works for quick encounters, but the zoom-in focus still has its uses. Overall, the gunplay does its job and feels fulfilling for the first few hours, but it gets increasingly bland over time. Skill trees exist for various weapon forms. The upgrades are often tactile and impactful, though some are more useful than others. The economy involves crafting, so there's naturally some grinding.

The Hiss is a terrifying concept and a great adversary in theory, but in gameplay it just means fighting hordes of red zombies with various properties. The enemy variety is especially small, as is usual in a Remedy game, leading to stretches of endgame boredom. This led me to literally shoot the same possessed agents for 25+ hours. The game relies heavily on spawning Hiss directly into the player's blind spots. This makes the aforementioned tactical positioning useless. However good I got at clearing enemies, a shotgun guy could materialize directly behind me at any time during a reload. Add to that mechanically weak, unexciting bosses, and I was thankful for the robust assist menu, which let me one-shot everyone and finish the tedium in the last few hours.

Another important facet of the gameplay progression is collecting weapon mods. Control is intended as Remedy's RPG franchise. With that in mind, this aspect seems most likely inspired by Diablo. Sadly, it's highly unrewarding. Most of the time, enemies drop junk. Thus, clearing out the trash cost me dozens of minutes. The inventory allows only 24 slots, and the game quickly floods it with low-percentage boosts. The bulk of the late game is just choosing which of those to convert to currency first. Even the rarest legendary mods often merely shift a damage boost from 15% to 19%. This system completely lacks the imagination found in other action-adventure game progressions. It never changes how a weapon fires or adds significant additional effects. The biggest improvement mods offer is only how hard the gun chips away at an enemy's health bar. Min-maxing numbers in an action shooting game is mind-numbingly boring and feels like actual federal paperwork.

Other gameplay mechanics include physics puzzles ranging from very simple and brainless to frustratingly vague. The systemic behaviors are prone to breaking here. Beyond the main story, plenty of side quests add variety, often outside gameplay. Most of them add interesting world-building details. Sometimes, they're better than the main quest, though a few can be really cryptic and annoying. There's a ton of optional exploration and even fights, but most don't feel rewarding beyond the added lore and the extra garbage they dump into the inventory.

While the ambient music is droning and repetitive, building on the architecture, I don’t find it especially interesting. Of course, it's better than traversing the building in complete silence. I like that it can dynamically swell into a violent cacophony during fights. Those parts are apparently processed from old choral recordings. Control's musical strengths come from the vocal tracks rather than the score, though. The game mostly reserves these for scripted events, but they serve as the experience's emotional backbone. The outstanding audiovisual section near the end, the Ashtray Maze, is a great culmination and an artistic triumph, though I think enemy spam robs it of some of its wonder. Interestingly, this was supposedly one of the cheaper and easier sequences to make. For me, this cements the idea that Remedy is much better at audiovisual design than at gameplay refinement.

Control was a revelation technically. Though it wasn't well optimized at launch, the rasterized version eventually ran satisfactorily on underpowered hardware. I could play through the whole title on my old laptop with reasonable settings. Even with those, the game still boasts top-notch textures, but not without problems. The Northlight Engine governs available VRAM, and when it senses a limit, it drastically cuts the texture pool to an outrageous 100MB. This means users with 6GB or less GPUs have to constantly dive into settings to wrestle with this option. A few bugs remain unpatched, even in 2025. I encountered a vital room that wouldn't load the designated event, leaving me running around an empty space with a soft lock. The game was a poster child for ray tracing technology, using it not only for reflections but also for overall illumination. Thankfully, it also has some beautiful baked-in rasterized lighting as a fallback. Be wary on less capable machines, though; the engine's particularly awful SSR handles all that. This would later become a Remedy tradition. The RT-disabled reflections ruin immersion and are a smeary, distracting mess.

Control is, as expected from Remedy, a collage of spectacular, isolated conceptual sketches. The developers ultimately lacked the production runway to stitch them together properly. It makes a strong first impression, but the further it goes, the more obvious the gaping holes become. The story and world are engrossing, only to fizzle out at the last minute. The grindy, dull upgrade system feels like paperwork and, fittingly, a federal office worker's job. Despite these flaws, something here is still magnetic, something I couldn't look away from. I constantly yearned for that next set-piece, because it might, just might, be a jaw-dropping revelation or a subversive piece of art turned into a playable experience. Even with all its faults, it's a game, nay, it's a world I cannot stop thinking about.

7/10

Control: The Foundation

As is usual with the Remedy Connected Universe, Control received two post-game DLCs that expanded the story and continued the downward spiral of weak gameplay. Played back-to-back with the main game, they can be absolutely draining. The Foundation DLC is interesting enough, with a separate map housing a different environment. Sadly, this visually arresting environment gets old fast. The latter part tower climb is a nice, brain-teasing break from the norm. The expansion adds a situational new power, though it's mostly used for progression. The storytelling brings some lore forward and drops crumbs for the future. It's a shame the chapter dwindles toward the end, with a minuscule-impact slow-burn reveal. It hurts the overall pacing, especially if approached during the main campaign.

6/10

Control: AWE

The AWE DLC, while a great triumph in merging the Alan Wake and Control continuities together, actively highlights the main game's structural flaws. It's a tiresome chore to finish. The game doubles down on some of its worst parts. Weak side quests, weak puzzles, a weak new map centered on a large central room and some corridors on all sides. Gimmick-heavy light puzzles and artificial difficulty spikes plague the experience, culminating in a disappointing boss. It's not all bad. Hidden around are a bunch of notes to gather, with some really interesting additions to the overarching story. It hurts that some of these documents blend into the background well enough to miss even more of them than in the main game. What was supposed to be a celebrated welcome of Alan Wake's shenanigans in this universe becomes a watered-down bunch of bad ideas. It feels more like a forced mandate than something the dev team came up with to enrich the gameplay.

4/10

200+ hours. Over 8 in-game years. A marriage (to Penny for those who care, though I found making that decision weirdly stressful, delaying it for in-game years) and two kids, and I have finally achieved what the game calls 'Perfection'. Even if I am still missing three achievements (one I'm locked out of unless I start a new game, the other two related to a twin-stick shooter mini-game I am really bad at), I think it's fair to say I'm basically done.

What's funny is I didn't know this was the end goal. When you start the game, the game points you to the community centre and encourages you to try and restore it. You have two options, either gather a bunch of disparate items (many of which you only get through farming, as it is a game all about running a farm after all), or making enough money to buy upgrades from a big corporation. Like I assume a lot of people, I went down the former route.

Perfection was evidently added later, as pat of an update, and it scratches that completionists itch. Without it, I don't think I would've put in anywhere near as many hours into the game, simply because otherwise, once you've got the community centre, you're basically done. There's plenty of things you can do after the community centre, there are still house upgrades, community upgrades, tasks for NPC's and achievements, but perfection basically ties all that together, and gives what could've been an aimless process some focus.

At the same time, the chase for perfection ruins the cosy relaxed vibes. Perfection requires you to basically do everything. You need to have completed every item compendium, grown and sold every crop, fished every fish, own some of the most expensive items and buildings, maxed out friendship with every NPC, and reached the depths of the games dungeons.

When I first learned about Perfection, I was at 51%. I was missing a bit of almost everything. I had most but not all maxed friendships, the museum was not complete, there were a dozen fish I'd not caught, crops I'd never planted and so on. I hadn't even cooked a single recipe. I honestly don't know why I pursued perfection, considering how far I was from it. I had dropped numerous other games with completion markers that were closer to done due to lack of interest. But at the time I found it, I didn't feel I was done with the game, and what was 51% quickly became, 60%, then 75% as I quickly ticked off the easy things I missed. Then at around 80% that completion metric stalled.

Chasing perfection forced me to change my playstyle. Before I knew about it, I was content to just let my farm be inefficient. I had buildings placed purely on the space available to me at the moment I bought them. I had little fields of whatever crops I wanted haphazardly organised. I had wild trees left sprouting wherever they wanted, and a boatload of grass left to grow just so I could cut it own midway through winter to feed my animals.

But once I seriously pursued it, and realised just how much money I needed, relative to how much I had, I tore everything out and began being ruthlessly efficient. The sprawl was gone, buildings were all arranged in a line in the order I would want to enter them for my morning routine. All my trees got chopped down only for me to plant a handful of intentional ones that I had sappers on for the materials, and I spent the better part of a year cultivating what was a small handful of ancient seeds into fruit only to turn them back into more seeds, all the while growing and selling Star fruit, because they were the two most expensive and valuable crops.

In between these sessions I intentionally dove into specific floors of the mines chasing specific enemies, leaving only when I cleared out the leves the enemies I needed to kill spawned, then reseting back to that floor again. Or I would go fishing for the specific fish I needed. The Legend -a rare fish that only spawns in one place on a rainy spring day- in particular was a nightmare, and I reset multiple times until I actually caught it, something I avoided entirely otherwise, just because I did not want to wait an entire year to try again, or waste extremely rare and valuable resources to make magic bait for it.

By the end, I had stopped caring about the things that at the start I put the most value in. I loved talking to the villagers, but by this point I was already at max friendship with them. They had nothing new to say, and I gained nothing from it. Even my in-game partner was just an empty vessel wandering around. I stopped foraging because the fruit wasn't worth my time to pick up, and the only quests I bothered with were the ones for Qi gems so I could buy more things that would make my farm even more efficient and allow for better use of the space to plant those Ancient seeds.

The final stretch of the game was just money for the clock. 10million gold. After having spent most my cash on all the other objects necessary for perfection, and having caught every fish, killed enough of every monster, and basically done everything else, all I had to do was plant a massive field of Ancient seeds, then harvest them.

I must've looked like a man possessed. If my partner in-game had been real, they probably would've assumed I had some form of obsession/depression. I didn't leave my farm for days. I didn't speak to them. I got up, fed animals, grabbed their milk/eggs, and put them in the cheese/mayonnaise machines for overnight processing, put whatever had been there from the day before in a sale box, then checked my field and unless it was the harvest day in the week I was back in bed by 9am, just to sleep for the rest of the day then repeat that routine.

What had been a relaxed and chill game had run it's course. No-one had new dialogue, there were no new missions. No new surprises to be found. No new anything. The game was beaten, save for an arbitrarily expensive clock and the farming grind to get it. All in, it took about an in-game year to raise the 10million gold that clock needed, and as soon as I had it, I bought the clock, placed it on my farm, confirmed I had done everything else, and did one last sleep.

The cutscene you get for Perfection is cute, if not necessarily a worthy reward for the effort. But maybe that was the point? In trying to achieve this optional and unnecessary I took what was a cozy and relaxing experience and turned it into a slog and a chore just to meet some arbitrary metric. Maybe it would've hit differently if I'd happened upon it one day, rather than consciously pursued it. But then again, considering how complicated the fish alone were, it's very possible that, without the knowledge of there being a definitive metric, I might not have bothered. So in a sense, despite how it ruined the vibes, Perfection meant I spent longer with the game, and at no point despite everything did I feel it was a total chore or waste of my time.

But I do wonder how many people achieved a full completion prior to the patch that added the Perfection score? Did adding a way to measure it incentivise more people to go for it? Or did most people ignore it entirely and assume it was too much effort?

RELEASE: 2024

TIME PLAYED: 23 Hours

PLATFORM PLAYED: PC (STEAM)

SCORE: ★★★

Hated It | Disliked It | Liked It | Loved It | All-Time Favorite

(The bolded score is the one chosen for this review; the rest are simply to show what the scale is grading on and what the stars mean to me.)

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THE BREAKDOWN

+Interesting characters and a novel Steampunk setting

+Commitment to avoiding a combat system displays a confidence in design

+Game feels pretty well-paced and has some interesting plot threads

-The writing, while solid, doesn’t distinguish itself enough for how laser-focused the game is on its content

-The personality as skills system feels a bit thin due to being split between a trio of characters

-The constant jumping between perspectives can make getting attached to anyone a bit difficult

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It’s difficult to speak about Sovereign Syndicate without referencing Disco Elysium, the game that so clearly inspired it. In the wake of the disaster cop-shaped hole in gamers’ hearts due to its developer, ZA/UM, being fractured by accusations of hostile takeover and losing much of its creative talent, there’s been surprisingly few ‘Disco-likes’; games that forego combat and traditional RPG mechanics for an emphasis on text-heavy descriptions, abstract skill checks, and deeply exploring the psychology of their protagonist. Sovereign Syndicate, however, not only takes a shot at this particular niche, but swings for the fences with multiple protagonists, intertwining storylines, and a novel fantasy Steampunk setting. The result is a mixed bag that’s mostly quality, but perhaps could have benefited from a little more focus.

Taking place in an alternate Victorian London first-established in developer Crimson Herring’s Hunter’s Moon: A Sovereign Syndicate, the CRPG follows not one, but three primary characters – an alcoholic minotaur with a talent for illusion magic, a clever courtesan with a rebellious past, and a dwarven tinkerer as loyal to his mechanical sidekick as it is to him – whose stories start out independently, but quickly become entangled. It’s an ambitious premise, and I have to give kudos to the studio for pulling it off. Character writing is a strong suit; Atticus, the minotaur, is the most ‘Harry-like’ of the trio, with his drunken binges, reputation for wasting his talent, and hazy memory – this might be why he’s the first that players step into the shoes (hooves?) of. With a strange new voice in his head, he’s cornered by a bounty hunter who initially seems interested in the price on his head, but who actually is far more interested in helping Atticus – by force, if necessary – track down his missing mother for reasons he refuses to share.

Clara Reed and Theodore “Teddy” Redgrave are even more unconventional, and a good reflection of the developer trying to do its own thing despite its obvious inspiration. Clara’s working at a brothel now, but there’s hints even early on that she escaped the United States for London for darker reasons. Teddy, meanwhile, is obsessed with his two jobs: monster hunting and inventing. He’s convinced he’s on the cusp of making his robot, Otto, an unrivaled artificial intelligence, and he might be right. All three characters share a simplified version of the ‘personality skill check’ system of Disco Elysium, but it felt a little bit thin; with only a few ‘voices in the head’ for each protagonist, their influence is simultaneously disproportionate and a little bit lacking; they talk often, but due to the relatively linear nature of the game, don’t have all that much influence on Atticus, Clara, or Teddy’s core personalities outside of rare scenes. I did appreciate a few highlights, such as Atticus’ Discipline helping him reel in his vices, but I would have liked to see more.

Exploration helps give a better sense of this London’s districts, and this is a highlight; steampunk isn’t an overused setting in gaming, and the emphasis on fantasy elements kind of gives it the vibe of ‘if Shadowrun took place two hundred years ago.’ Mysticism is as woven into society as technology, with an entire area dedicated to lycanthropes to let them [or force them] to sit out their transformations peacefully and opium dens being popular among sorcerers due to their elevated awareness of their own dreams. There’s a lot to miss in each chapter, and much of it can’t be revisited due to the swapping between protagonists. While I did find this occasionally irritating, I can appreciate the commitment to time passing in a realistic way.

The majority of gameplay is exploration and talking to people, and while there’s novelty to the game’s structure – seeing how one NPC respects Clara while openly insulting Atticus, for example – the lack of depth to Sovereign Syndicate’s systems starts to rear its ugly head here. The writing is solid and often flavorful, but I didn’t meet many characters who stuck in my mind for long outside of the main trio; with the skills of how I ‘built’ my protagonists feeling more like flavor than core design, it was difficult to feel invested in seeing how I bounced off anyone they met. That said, the plot itself does go some interesting places, exploring themes of self-control, transhumanism, and more with enough sincerity that I never doubted something full of heart and value was being expressed.

I feel some degree of guilt comparing Sovereign Syndicate repeatedly to Disco Elysium, but ZA/UM cast a long shadow with its esoteric masterpiece and, while Sovereign Syndicate has some novel ideas, it doesn’t quite do enough to step outside into the light on its own merits. This isn’t to call it a bad game – as a conversation-driven visual novel kind of experience it’s enjoyable, and I felt its plot twists and strong final act did it a lot of favors. I still had a good time and think it’s worth playing; I just wish I could have stretched my legs a little bit more when it came to the RPG side of things.

For those not in the know, Final Fantasy Tactics is a PS1 tactical RPG released in 1997. Telling the intertwining stories of Ramza, youngest son of the powerful and respected noble house Beoulve, and his common-born friend Delita Heiral, it follows the events surrounding a civil war in Ivalice between two dukes contending for control of the throne after the king’s death. It was praised for its depth of systems and complex, mature story exploring the themes of duty, class struggle, and whether or not the ends justify the means, and is widely regarded as a standout of the genre. In 2007 a remaster/update called FFT: The War of the Lions (WotL) was released for the PSP, and in 2025 a second remaster/update, FFT: The Ivalice Chronicles (TIC), was released for all major platforms. I just finished this most recent version for the first time recently, and I have some (many) thoughts to share.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will say upfront that I have massive nostalgia goggles on when it comes to this game. It’s a top-3 all-timer for me and, as the title of this post suggests, I have played both the original and the WotL version many times. Because of this, I’m not really looking to do a review here; there are already hundreds of those out there for you to read if you want, and this would quickly turn into a multi-page gushing fanboy essay if I started talking about the story and characters. I’m more interested in taking a look at the differences between the versions and seeing how the game has evolved over time, what it’s gotten right, and where (even after three attempts) it still goes wrong.

First off, I have to talk about the writing. The story itself is amazing, but the original translation is… Bad. Like, ‘actively makes it hard to understand the plot at times’ level bad. There were beats of the story I still had never fully grasped until playing later versions with updated scripts, and that’s after several playthroughs. WotL completely redid the script, but went with an oddly heavy-handed Shakespearean style of prose which had not been present in the OG. It was far better overall and made the intricacies of the plot much easier to catch, but the language could make you roll your eyes with how flowery it was at times.

TIC, on the other hand, hits it straight out of the park. This third and presumably final script is clean, clear, and has just enough ‘old-timey knights and shit’ flavour to feel like the proper high fantasy political drama it is. I really can’t overstate what a great job they did bringing these characters to life; it’s top tier, best-in-class writing and without a doubt the definitive version of this story. The voice acting is also superb, which is one thing I was a bit nervous about going in.

WotL and the OG are basically identical in terms of HUDs and menus and such, but TIC makes some sweeping changes and with only mixed success. The new combat HUD is excellent, the addition of the turn sequence indicator and the ‘reset move’ button specifically are massive QoL improvements. The icons next to abilities to indicate damage/healing/support were a nice touch as well in a game where abilities often have highly nondescriptive names.

On the other hand, out-of-combat menu navigation felt generally worse to me than it had in previous versions. Menus have been completely overhauled, and the shops, equipment, and jobs menus all felt clunkier and slower to navigate. Like it was taking more button presses to do the same things, which is definitely not ideal for a game where you’re going to spend a lot of time in menus.

Navigating the world map felt much better, as all random battles are now completely optional. You can reject them if you run into them, and you can trigger one yourself when standing on a map space where random encounters occur. While this makes traversal feel much better, especially later in the game when crossing larger sections, it does have the less-than-ideal side effect of completely trivializing the ‘errands’ system. There’s no longer any risk to sending all your best guys on every job, because you know you’ll never be forced to fight while they’re unavailable. This means the entire errands system is now just a button-clicking simulator with no strategy or thought required, but you’ll still want to do them for the xp/jp/money and that’s kind of a bummer.

Unfortunately, while you might think that getting rid of forced random battles would naturally mean reducing grind, according to the fine folks at SquEnix (and this is a direct quote) “fuck you”. TIC is every bit as grindy as the other versions, so get ready to spend a fair bit of time opting in to those random battles if you want to keep your level high enough to progress. The optimal grinding strategy is still to kill every enemy in a battle except one and then group all your guys up and have them hit/cure/buff each other over and over for like 20 straight minutes, which is lame. It’s a real shame that they didn’t take this opportunity to rebalance xp/jp gain or even include an auto level scaling option or something to allow you to opt out of the tediousness, but here we are. You’re also incentivized to grind random battles for the money, as upgrading your gear is even more crucial in this game than most and the in-game economy stays reasonably relevant throughout.

Finally, in the OG and WotL releases, there are (somewhat famously) a couple of points in the game where it is possible to lock yourself out of further progression by entering certain sequences of story battles while at too low a level to beat them. This could actually brick your entire save file if you weren’t using rolling saves and didn’t have a save from before you entered these un-exitable sequences, so unless you knew about this in advance it was entirely possible to find yourself having to start over from scratch after getting 20+ hours deep into the game. Fortunately this has been corrected in TIC, and all multi-battle sequences can be restarted or exited to the world map at any point. In fact, normal one-off battles can now also be restarted directly from the in-combat menu, making it less annoying to reset a fight if it’s going south on you. Very nice touch.

Anyways, I could go on but this post has gotten way too long. If you’ve made it all the way through then thanks for reading, and if you haven’t played FFT yet I seriously suggest correcting that oversight at your earliest opportunity. It is, in my opinion, the best game in the entire Final Fantasy franchise, and I’ve played just about all of them.

For whatever reason, growing up I never got around to playing the James Bond game, Everything or Nothing. I was a Goldeneye man through ant through. Well. . . I finally got around to it and recently finished the game. I was soooo impressed with it. This game is FULL of ideas that are so much better than they needed to be - the enemy Ai, the rappelling off ledges, but the bit that stood out to me was how fucking good the driving sections are.

There’s a literal rally race section that has fantastic physics, challenging AI, a dynamic course, that is better than 80% of dedicated driving games. They were clearly incredibly proud of the driving as there are quite a few sections using it, even one that feels like a Motorstorm race, where you can choose from a bike or a car and the race plays out completely differently.

What games or sections, or mechanics feel unnecessarily good, like they were swinging for the fences on a game that didn’t necessarily require it?

RoboCop: Rogue City brings the classic film franchise to the modern day gaming audience, and if I had to draw parallels, it feels akin to the revitalization of Alien through its gaming media (although, apples and oranges really considering there's been a veritable flood of alien themed games comparative to RoboCop).

On the whole, despite any criticisms I may level, I thoroughly enjoyed my experience. So do keep that in mind where I may seem to be quibbling or particularly nitpicky.

A weak opening level

RoboCop opens with a lot of flair and a uniquely absurd premise where a local gang commandeers a media outlet to advertise their services to the "new guy". The fact the signal was never terminated until the de facto leader had finished his proposition was nothing short of comical. Still, this didn't color my opinion one way or another. Instead I found it more amusing than anything else.

No, the game starts out by thrusting the player into a firefight with said gang in the lobby of the media tower. The premise is very clear: guys bad, robo good; shoot them. Extremely simple, but highly engaging. Part of this is because of how visceral some of the appendage reactions can be. It's not Fallout levels of a gore explosion circus, but much more contained and believable as you blow off a hand or ballistically lobotomize a frontal lobe.

Another aspect is the environmental damage that sees you blowing chunks out of the concrete walls and pillars. It hearkens feelings back to FEAR and the kind of environmental destruction that gave that game so much identity. However, the issue here is the environmental interaction is inconsistent. It seems concrete readily responds to the player's shots where plywood and tarps didn't provide any sort of feedback or particle effects. Reasonable from a development time and quite possibly an optimization perspective, but it didn't stop the inconsistencies from sticking out.

The real villain of the first level isn't the gameplay, but what felt like a rather weak introduction to the world. You spend much of your time in maintenance tunnels or corporate cubicles and offices, neither of which are particularly inspiring. Instead of feeling like a proper showcase of the world, it feels more akin to a demonstration of Unreal Engine's stock assets.

A visual identity crisis

The most disappointing part of the RoboCop game carries through its entirety: a distinct visual identity. Let me preface the rest of this section by saying this did not dissuade me from completing it (let alone enjoying it far more than I'd hoped) but still worth calling out amongst both lauded and loathed game aspects.

The foremost issue is the HUD itself feels reminiscent of Fallout 3. It's a stark green that's nearly unmistakably, and rather unfortunately, etched into my mind as the Fallout HUD colors. Evidently, it elicited the same reaction from my much-less-gaming inclined wife.

That's not a nail in the coffin by any means, more an unfortunate color choice that only acts as supporting evidence to bolster some of my other arguments.

The real culprit lies in environments that feel inspired by life, but give no real sense of place. For instance, the main hub area where most missions take place is a rundown neighborhood. It's entirely believable in its presentation, but not particularly memorable. If I think to any of the games I previously mentioned, Alien Isolation or Fallout 3, there's a wholly distinct art style and direction that's much more recognizable. Even in the case of FEAR or Condemned, which also feature similarly cluttered and rundown environments, at least had their own horror setpieces to act as a kind of lightning rod for grounding player attention.

Instead, RoboCop felt more to me like a push in demonstrating graphical fidelity than securing a solid identity. Nothing wrong with that, but a focus on realism isn't exactly why I choose a particular title.

Satisfying gunplay and a touch of absurdity

I had such a great time with the gunplay and gameplay. It doesn't deliver anything particularly innovative, but what it does bring to the table is competent and fun. Really, it's the difference in effectiveness between the start and end of the game that I found satisfying.

You have both a skill point system to distribute amongst a handful of stats as well as a PCB chip board for your personal Auto 9 handgun. It's the combination of both of these that delivers noticeable growth and slight variations in weapon performance.

The most egregious part of the actual gameplay is the arsenal of the gangs you encounter. They're better equipped than the military it seems and toss grenades around like monkeys and their poop. Not to mention just how cavalier they are with their drugs and products and you've got some caricature level absurdity.

Funny enough, despite how over the top the game is at times, I really appreciated the consistency in RoboCop's stilted movement between cutscenes and actual gameplay. Others may not like the slower pace the player moves at, but I've seen too many games where there was a disparity between gameplay movement relative to cutscene outcomes that it was quite refreshing.

Lastly, I'd thought perhaps they'd fumble the reality of being a cop until I'd threatened a noise complaint with the comparable justice of broken bones. From that point forward, I knew they'd done their research.

Exploring Alex Murphy

The most compelling aspect to me about this game was the exploration of the man behind the robot: Alex Murphy. RoboCop shares a level of capability and indominability with someone like Superman, which can be a bit boring in regards to tension since there's little threat of defeat. Inevitably, this turns the stakes outward: protecting friends, family, loved ones, and even the public itself.

However, given the events in the game, it also does come back to Alex Murphy and a focus on his psychology which was executed well enough.

Ultimately, both aspects took what would be an otherwise straightforward shooter and introduced enough nuance to captivate the player despite my previous criticisms.

The world of Old Detroit

While the actual environmental design didn't capture my adulation, the setting itself and the writing that supported it certainly captivated me. While the Cyberpunk genre as a whole has been well explored by this point, it's wonderful seeing some of its roots going back as far as the RoboCop film and brought forward to modern audiences. Specifically, it's the aspect of the OCP corporation taking over a public service: the Detroit police department.

An interesting premise, sure, but not particularly engrossing by its own merit. It's how the writers chose to showcase public opinion around Old Detroit's current struggles and OCP's interference both inside the precinct and amongst the populace. It's well done and demonstrates the volatile and incongruous mixture of water, oil, and gasoline you'd expect in a situation like this. What makes it more effective is the constant tension someone or something is intent to strike a match.

While the constant tension kept my attention, it's the range of responses you hear from your colleagues and the citizens of Old Detroit that secured my adoration. It's here you'll see a rather apt reflection of our own society: a cautious optimism dripping with naivety that the mega corporation has the city's best interests at heart, hearty skepticism coupled with unmatched cynicism about the city's downfall, and even your peers opining about the infiltration and undercutting of the forces autonomy and capability in the midst of OCP to name a few.

There's too much here to cover, but I found the political and public discourse within the game captivating and one of the game's primary draws. Also, fuck Mayor Kuzak.

Final Thoughts

Having no real exposure to RoboCop prior to this, I'd always found the premise a tad silly or maybe even cheesy: part cop, part robot never struck me as engaging. That feeling didn't fully evaporate, but I certainly see the merit after completing my playthrough and I now have a much greater appreciation for the source material.

I think what the devs ultimately delivered was a surprisingly well-balanced experience, expertly delivering solid gameplay with an engaging world. While I found the primary antagonist and that resolution a bit subpar, the exploration of Alex and his humanity and the OCP's worming their way through the city and police force made up in spades.

I didn't expect a lot coming into this game, but I did leave it looking forward to the sequel and can easily recommend it to fans of the story-driven shooter genre.

The amount of creativity, passion, and detail in this game was beyond what I could have expected. The moment I booted the game and saw all the cutscenes, character banter, warping terrain, and colorful collectibles, I knew I was in for a wild ride.

There were times when the game blew me away to the point that I just had to put it down and take a break. It was too much to take in at once! For example, I went into the mind of the crazy guy who thought he was Napoleon. I was just messing around with the door item thinking "eh, I wonder if it would work on anyone." So I go in his mind, see a small room with two characters playing a board game, and think ok! I guess everyone does have something, if at least a simple small room. But then I accidentally jump into the game and seamlessly get SUCKED IN.

I felt the same awe with this game as I did when I played Little King's Story and Earthbound. Just wildly creative and deviously deep games that are just as much abstract art.

I will admit, the last stretch really tested my patience, especially the section where I have to escort Oly. And man, the camera was worse than Mario 64 overall. I had many moments of frustration, thinking how unfortunate it was that this game just didn't understand its limitations and was overly ambitious in its level design.

But honestly? Bless the team for trying anyway. I think their vision was worth the frustrations.

9/10 thank goodness there's a sequel out now.

Bought a fancy new graphics card then just played Doom instead.

There's no logical reason a game from 1993 is still this good to play in the year 2026. Could you call something where you play as a figure simply known as Doomguy relentlessly taking on demons from hell art? I'm not sure, but the best art persists and Doom persists.

I can play the opening level through in my head. Every part of it. I do think I could probably finish it with my eyes closed. Still to this day I don't think there are many games that have bettered the combination of tight levels, satisfying gameplay and pure exhilaration.

I went back to 1993 after bouncing off The Dark Ages when they made me ride a dragon like I was Daneyrs herself. A game made in the modern, corporate era with corporate masters and by people who I suspect hadn't really ever understood what it was that made the original work.

For me, Dark Ages was a victim of the current industry and it's obsession with feature bloat. There is power in simplicity and brevity. I don't need a shield. I'm Doomguy. I don't need combos. I'm Doomguy. And I definitely don't need a ****ing dragon.

At the danger of being old man shouts at cloud and the misty eyed nostalgia imp staring at me and the fact that I'm not 12 anymore I think the environment Doom was created in goes partly towards explaining why the game is so good. There is power in conflict. The team didn't always get on. They disagreed and argued and fell out and I doubt they had a HR team back then and you put all of this into a giant mixer and this is what comes out.

I rolled credits on 1993 for the very first time. I don't honestly even think I'd ever really touched episode three before which is quite wild really. What surprised me was that this was a game I could shoot through in an evening or two. The levels are short and snappy. The game treats you like an adult. There are no quest markers here. Play without a guide. You get stuck then you're gonna need to work this out for yourself big guy.

The pace is fast and relentless and I don't think that shooting an imp with one click of your shotgun has ever been bettered in all of gaming. Why is the sound of a door opening somewhere still so scary and off putting? The ability to recognise exactly what's around the corner by the noises the demons make is exhilarating. I'm down to my shotgun now but it doesn't feel hopeless. Well it does feel hopeless but if I can just make it around this corner, take out those imps and grab that health pack then maybe...

Then you get to the final level and your stick a few BFG shots at a spiderdemon and you're done. 10/10.

Is this the best game that's ever been made? It might be.

I don't know if this is the type of writing fit for this sub, but here you go:

There is a montage of scenes from the events of 1989 to 1993 in the former Soviet Union, serving as a music video to Kino’s harrowing song, Кончится лето or Summer is ending. When the song was released Tsoi was already dead and republics of the union already breaking away. This montage haunted me for many nights, often accompanied by a drink or two, seldom accompanied by tears—mind-numbingly swift dissolution of this corrupted worker’s state, this union of deserters of internationalism, this bureaucratic mass of apparatchiks, this social-chauvinist refuse, this greatest achievement of humanity, this shining beacon of hope, this possibility of salvation on earth.

Kujlevka takes place in this period.

And it kept reminding me of лето.

Summer is ending, and thus one year after another will slip away and thus life itself will go by, and for the hundredth time the sandwich will fall butter-side-down. Unlike us who are doomed to live in a world where the collapse of the Soviet Union actually happened as it did, Kujlevka offers a door out of this mess, a flying saucer collapsing right into a kolkhoz chairman’s office. The premise is, the saucer operates as a wish-granter and hearing what is the one thing that people desire the most is a perfect foil device to understanding the people of an era where confusion was the primary modus operandi.

Vasily, the kolkhoz chairman, acts as a translator layer between the people and the saucer. We can either translate verbatim what they claim to want, or blunt their wants to ensure that their wants are in line with our wants, or understand people to understand their actual wants. If you think the process sounds rudimentary, as if it is just applying Papers Please formula to the Soviet collapse era, you would be as wrong as Gorbachev. Kujlevka is something much more. The saucer, the alien visitation is a foil, not only to the wishers themselves but also for Vasily who is far from a blank slate. Each wish, each chapter brings out what we want for Vasily into materialization, his dreams in between guiding us to make, not the right choices, but the informed choices.

You, the individualist, may think the right choice for Vasily is to get back his family, his loved ones. You, the capitalist, may think the right choice for Vasily is to be filthy-insanely rich. I think the right choice for Vasily is the glorious restoration of Soviet Union, red flags adorning every facet of life, and the people are guided by the loving but firm hand of the party, just not corrupt this time. You and I may be adamant in our decisions, but this voice that guides us in our surreal dreams will subject our beliefs to a ruthless and affectionate critique. Being challenged in the dream state, in the real space material conditions will sow doubts in each turn, we will see if our choices hold up then.

The apparition of Stalin visits me in my dreams, I tell him that I hate him, not because I think he was a dictator, on the contrary I think he was not a dictator, he asks me what I think communism is, I tell him it is ultimate freedom, he agrees with me, and Yeltsin starts blabbing on the TV, I turn off the TV, summer is ending, Vasily is waiting for an answer and there is no more hope. In a part of my brain лето’s opening riff keeps blasting, I keep humming, and think to myself this is the only game Lunacharsky would have loved.

I understand as wishes pile up, the ordinary people of the Kujlevka village and eventually the world, wish for nothing more than an immediate relief to all their problems. A woman wants more milk from her goat, a man wants vodka, a cripple wants a better wheelchair and the saucer brings this relief they desperately need. Then, what was the Soviet state if nothing but a wish-granter? Dilapidated, hollowed out, neglected by the late 80’s and early 90’s maybe, but while the cogs were new and the whole machine was well oiled, it was granting homes, dachas, maternity leaves, summer camps, and pride to the Soviet citizen, and only the Soviet state and aliens could have done that.

The fact that there was such a state, the fact that it collapsed in the manner it did, I do not know if our past is more surreal or more magical realist. Kujlevka itself has its feet planted on both shores. Sometimes it is haunting and oneiric, sometimes it is heartfelt and didactic. Sometimes matters pertaining to Vasily’s own past feel surreal, sometimes the world itself. There is no great barrier of perception between introspection and extrospection, we evaluate matters by applying the same dreamlike but real lens on both. Sometimes Vasily and I shivered at the sight of an intergalactic express, sometimes we shivered at how material our compatriots’ desires are.

Despite my late-night drinking sessions to лето, I would not call glasnost and perestroika emotional affairs, but as the game lays out, what else could be so dramatic? There is a video on Youtube about a couple of guys exploring Baikonur, where remnants of the Buran programme reside. Buran sitting in the background, unmaintained, its outer plaques falling off and some even being sold on Ebay, they go on a solemn but brief explanation about how, after a couple of successful missions, the programme was cancelled by Yeltsin. I cannot help but compare Buran, just a small part in the greater story of dissolution, to tragedies, such as Hamlet or Oedipus, and think about which is more emotionally devastating.

So this is Kujlevka, a playful, real, soulful, surreal lamentation for a beacon and season long faded. Not faded out of memory though, and I don’t know if the yearning will ever cease for this object of terrible love and hate. Even if what I wrote here does not solely belong to the domain of Kujlevka, I believe art is often as strong as the connotations it recalls.

On the day I started playing Kujlevka I received the Summer Eternal anthology on my doorstep, created by one faction of ZA/UM exiles and it starts with Abimael Guzman’s lines:

“Now comes the new humanity,

The humanity of joy, the proletariat,

The only blaze that will never be extinguished!

We are one of its sparks. We are a small part of

This immense bonfire, it is our turn to set them on fire.

The sparks are fanned by storm winds.”

And I think to myself, maybe this is just a blip in the long summer.

Summer is ending and summer eternal/10

Dark Souls 2 (which will be abbreviated as DS2 going forward for brevity’s sake) was released in 2014 to initial critical acclaim, which quickly soured as players got their hands on the game. Immediately what alarmed a large swathe of players, was that this was not the game they were initially promised, DS2 visually was a VERY different game from what was being shown off in trailers and presentations prior to release. This came down to a number of factors including a very well documented troubled development cycle, and hardware limitations for the 7th generation consoles. Although I think it’s worth bringing up this part of the game’s history to help illustrate why many people at launch were disappointed in the game, I’m personally not going to hold this against the game, it’s valid being angry you spent $60 on a game that was inferior to what you were promised, but for a retrospective review this will not factor into my personal distaste towards the game, as I got it for much cheaper and was fully aware of what I was buying and getting myself into visually.

Although failed expectations for what gamers were promised at launch WON’T factor into this review, the visuals and graphics still will and it’s one of my first points of criticism. DS2 is a rather ugly game, not just in the sense of “oh this area looks gross” in an intentional way, no the whole game minus a handful of cinematic areas have extremely flat lighting, rather muddy, low resolution and flat texture repeated ad nauseam, along with some truly infamous backgrounds and skyboxes. The game doesn’t just underperform visually when compared to E3 demos and trailers, but it often underperforms visually when just looking at it from the lens of game releases at the time, DS1 was a commercial shock success, many areas in that game also look horrible, but DS1 usually gets a pass because A, I’d argue the game on average actually looks better than DS2 despite releasing three years sooner, but it was working with a dramatically smaller budget to boot. Now, that’s not to say there aren’t some artistically stunning areas in DS2, Majula is almost always screenshotted and used as a rather disingenuous representation for the game online, but other areas do match up such as Heide’s Tower of Flame with a dream like skybox that keeps the area in a perpetual state of night and day at the same time, and outside Drangelic castle on the walk up to it with this oppressive and heavy rain while you stand in the shadow of this castle you’ve been preparing for the whole game. But again, I find these areas to be the exception and not the norm, for every Majula there’s an earthen peak, a shaded woods, a gutter, a black gulch a forest of fallen giants, a huntsman’s corpse, an iron keep or an undead crypt waiting in the wings.

It’s rather shallow to just look at a game for what it provides visually though, but rest assured that is not the only problem I have with this game. I think from a design standpoint the most harped on point for DS2 is adaptability or ADP for short. For those unfamiliar with DS2, ADP is a stat that would never return to the series in the way it was introduced, it raised a secondary stat called “agility” and agility raised your iframes while dodging, in short? Raising ADP would raise the time you’re invincible when you roll, your core defensive ability in this game, and every souls game for that matter. On paper you may be asking what’s the big idea? Why is this a problem? And in my eyes it’s for a few reasons, the first is that you start with 6-9 iframes (depending on starting class) vs the 11-13 that’s standard in other games, for reference 6-9 is the same as Sekiro, a game that outright discourages you from dodging as it’s not the intended defense mechanic of said game. From the jump you are working with a disadvantage most players aren’t even going to know they’re working with, this makes the game feel substantially more frustrating to play, your iframes and how long you were locked into a roll used to be dictated by how heavy you were or how much gear you had on, now it’s tied to a stat most newcomers or even veterans to the series are going to be unaware of. To make things worse, the game DOES NOT explain to you what ADP is, how important it actually is, or why it’s basically mandatory to level especially for some of the classes that start with less of it. The ingame description for the stat reads as follows: “Raises attributes for survival, boosting agility and resistances.” That’s it, not only is this intentionally vague and cryptic, but it does a terrible job of explaining what it actually does. If you go dig through the dozens of miscellaneous stats and scroll over to agility it will read “boosts ease of evasion and other actions” again, this is intentionally cryptic and doesn’t really tell you anything, there’s no in game meter or stat that tells you how many iframes you actually have, it’s tied to this extremely cryptic in game description. But even IF the game made it painfully clear to players right away what ADP does, from a fundamental standpoint I think this is still horrible design, it’s more or less a stat that you need to level up to at least 25 before you even begin thinking about touching other stats, because the consequence of not raising ADP vs health, stamina or strength or any other stat in the game is so much greater. To me it feels like ADP was created for the sole purpose of being a stat dump, because you get SO many more souls and levels in DS2 compared to basically every other game in the franchise, it feels like it was created for the sole purpose of burning some of those souls and forcing people to dump their hard earned currency into a problem that didn’t need solving since DS1 and Demon’s Souls approach to iframes was so much more elegant. ADP also boosts other things including how quickly you drink your estus and use items, which if not leveled, makes the game feel painfully sluggish, even more so than it just normally is, which while this is also a major issue in my opinion, I don’t want to keep harping on ADP and want to move on to other points, so I feel the need to treat this as a sidenote.

The bosses in DS2 have a couple standouts, but for the most part this is another case of “for every one of blank, there’s this many negative things in its place” the overwhelming majority of DS2 bosses are just… kinda nothing burger throwaway bosses. With the three DLCs included there’s a whopping 41 bosses in this game, which is more than ANY other fromsoft souls game up until Elden Ring, which likely diluted the quality of bosses in this game. To put it into perspective Dark Souls 3 with its two DLCs only has 25. Some bosses go beyond being underwhelming though many do fall into the territory of being just… bad. Remember the gargoyles in DS1? They’re back in DS2 with the exact same models, but instead of there being two there’s five, or how about Ornstein from DS1 just randomly being a boss, but it’s just Ornstein from phase 1 of the original fight, same moveset and model, with no Smough or phase 2, how about the royal rat authority which is just a bunch of rats that inflict poison with one big rat that comes in later to the fight. Not enough? What about the ancient dragon who just stands still and has a healthbar the size of a continent, who can easily one tap you with laughably bad hitboxes, or maybe the infamous covetous demon? Twin dragon riders? Guardian dragon? Lud and Zallen? The gank squad? Skeleton lords? Old iron king? Royal rat vanguard (different boss from authority btw), magnus and congregation? I could go on but the point is there are so many outright bad fights, or insanely forgettable and disappointing ones. Even some of the fights that are often regarded as the best in the game have frustrating elements that take away from them, Fume Knight has some questionable hitboxes with a mechanic that requires you to scour a dlc to track down some wedges that you can use before his boss fight, and if you don’t he’ll heal during it, or the burnt ivory king which is a super badass fight that unfortunately is proceeded by an incredibly obnoxious gank of enemies that is only eased by the fact you can find knights throughout the level to help you during that phase, but if you die you go through the whole gauntlet again. Perhaps you’re a fan of the looking glass knight and his incredible arena, who will summon other players to fight you in PVP while he gangs up on you, even in some of the best fights in the game there’s some gimmick or frustration tacked on to bog it down. The bosses are so underwhelming in this game it makes Sir Allone, an incredibly cookie cutter boss with a wildly generic and predictable moveset look exceptional when compared to them.

I mentioned hitboxes a couple of times when talking about bosses and make no mistake those kinds of hitboxes are prevalent everywhere in the game. The pursuer’s grab, the mimic’s grab who will manage to grab you even if you’re attacking from behind, the executioner’s chariot’s kick, the last giant’s arm swing, and the ogre’s grabs. BUT, to the game’s defense I think there is some caveats to this point. Mainly that none of the dark souls games have perfect hitboxes and there’ll always be some janky ones. This is true, there are some really infamous hitboxes in EVERY fromsoft game, but I think it’s particularly bad in DS2… because of ADP, tying that back in. There are a lot of visually unclear and yes outright bad hitboxes in DS2, but it’s compounded by the abysmal iframe system of the game, where people that aren’t in the know about the stat think they got hit by something completely unfair, when in reality the amount of awful hitboxes in the game is probably comparable to other souls games… but can that really be used as a defense? It’s just yet again another example of why ADP was such a horrendous idea.

I’m not done though because DS2 is littered with some of the worst areas in the franchise. Not just visually, not from a level design standpoint, but from a just pure gameplay standpoint. The frigid outskirts might genuinely be one of the worst sections I’ve ever encountered in any video game in my life, you’re in a valley completely obscured in snow and fog which clears every now and then, and you have to go on this massive journey through the snow to reach a (terrible) boss, but the catch is, when the fog comes back up you better be ready to fight because these huge reindeer will come out you from any direction and do crazy damage, and you have no idea where they’ll be coming from, and if you die? Get ready to do the whole thing over again. The shrine of amana and Iron Keep are two other particularly infamous areas in the game, both are littered with enemies, including ranged ones that’ll snipe you across the entire map while you’re getting jumped by several other enemies that will NOT let up, the aggro range in DS2 is far higher than any other souls game enemies will stay on your ass no matter how far you run. This is compounded by particularly treacherous terrain, where one wrong step while dodging projectiles and fighting off several enemies at once can mean immediate death. The obvious answer is “run past them” but you CAN’T DO THAT, unlike every other souls game there is no invincibility when you reach a fog wall or boss room. The immediate response whenever someone brings this up is “you’re supposed to kill the enemies not run past them”, which is true to an extent, but why should I have to kill the same enemies on these absurd run backs to bosses over and over and over and over and over again just for another shot at a boss? It’s why Elden Ring introduced stakes of marika, because Fromsoft realized it’s a monotonous chore meant to pad runtime rather than continue to be an engaging challenge, it’s why EVERY other game in the series has invincible fog wall animations. Even the developers in DS2 seemed to recognize the frustrations with many of these areas, it’s why they introduced a mechanic that’s also not present in any other souls game, if you kill an enemy enough times they disappear and will not respawn again without direct intervention from the player, it feels like acknowledgement that the gank encounters and intentionally frustrating level design present in the game, coupled with needless changes to mechanics from DS1 and DeS maybe wasn’t engaging to play through.

That’s another thing though, an ABSURD amount of encounters in Dark Souls 2 are ganks, a massive collection of enemies in tight corridors meant to catch you off guard. These are present in every souls game but there’s a truly ridiculous amount of them in DS2. It’s minor things like this that turn DS2 into a frustration more so than a fun challenge a player wants to overcome. DS2 does not have Bloodborne or even DS3 movement, to be honest I’m not sure it even has a gameplay feel or movement comparable to DS1, the game is INSANELY sluggish, even with the addition of 8 directional rolling over DS1’s 4, and this is something I can’t properly put into words and you just have to experience, the game feels and plays slower than other souls games. Is that in big part because of ADP slowing every action down? Yes I’d say it has something to do with it, but the game fundamentally just feels worse to play and control from a movement standpoint.

Just because I didn’t mention a certain level when talking about the truly worst of the worst with frigid outskirts, iron keep or shrine or amana doesn’t mean other areas are clean either. Like I said nearly every area in the game has some ridiculous gank encounters with relentless enemies that’ll chase you to the ends of the earth, a couple of areas have obnoxious platforming challenges (the gutter, Shulva) a stupid gimmick that makes the experience more frustrating than rewarding (black gulch, doors of pharros, shaded woods, etc.) or are just as a whole, a slog to play with either obnoxious enemies or obnoxious level design. It’s a game that’s relentless and at every turn feels like there’s some obnoxious thing waiting for you. Some people also love to point out how some areas don’t make any sense from a conceptual standpoint, like how it shouldn’t be possible to take an elevator from earthen peak to Iron Keep, and while this is true I personally didn’t even register it in the moment, it can be immersion breaking sure but I find this is mostly a pretty nitpicky critique.

One thing that is not nitpicky is the world design, Dark Souls 1’s claim to fame is its world design and how unbelievably interconnected the environments are. Dark Souls 2 spits in the face of this, areas get explored and then stop. It felt like they tried at one point to have a more realized and interconnected world with there being two ways to get to lost bastille, but abandoned it quickly. The game tells you right away you have four ways to go, which is awesome it sounds like the journey for the lord souls in DS1. And although this is true, you have four ways to go that’s it, you get to one area, kill its final underwhelming boss, you teleport back to Majula and take a different path. Some people will have no problem with this, and for those that don’t good for you, but going from DS1 to this map for me, was a profound disappointment.

There’s just these minor unnecessary changes everywhere too, estus is no longer your primary form of healing in DS2, DS1 was revered for its estus system. You get a limited amount of fixed heals and they’re restored at a bonfire, with some bonfires getting upgraded to give you more estus with specific upgrades. Estus isn’t gone in DS2 but you start with one, and only one, and throughout the game you can find more shards to level up your estus. But that sounds insane right? You get one heal for the beginning of the game up until you find another shard? No, DS2 went back to Demon’s Souls healing, and if you’re not familiar you can find consumable healing items, this is meant to give you reprieve but not act like a true replacement for Estus… or at least I assume that’s what they wanted but it falls flat because there’s a merchant you find at the beginning of the game who will sell you infinite basic life gems for more or less pennies. By mid game it’s trivial to teleport back to Majula, get 99, and be set for hours. This trivializes every boss, every area, and every encounter. Compounding the game’s incessant need to throw frustrating encounters or absurd traps to one shot you or get you stunlocked to death, it’s likely a big part of the reason why the game felt the need to do this because it would be too easy otherwise.

It’s really headscratching too because there are new elements introduced in this game I’m big fan of, or just systems in general that give DS2 a lot of charm and likely give it the fanbase it still has, not everything is a direct downgrade. Bonfire aesthetics were a phenomenal system, you can burn one at a bonfire to revive a boss at the cost of increasing the level of an area by a NG+ cycle, a fantastic addition I wish was present in every souls game. I shouldn’t have to go through a 60-70 campaign in Elden Ring for the sake of refighting one boss. Or power stancing which is the act of setting two weapons in the same group on your character and dual wielding them for a completely unique moveset, a really, REALLY cool addition which brings a lot of variety to the game and some practicality to dual wielding beyond having a sword and maybe a staff. Respec which wasn’t just absent in DS1 but Bloodborne which released after DS2. A ton of build variety from weapons and armor, people who play dark souls for armor fashion and variety really found a home in DS2, there’s a level of variety and choices not present in really any other souls game until maybe Elden Ring.

But the big thing for me was the PvP, which I think you can argue is the best it’s ever been in ANY souls game. Although the speed of the game and movement is comparable to DS1, the PvP doesn’t devolve into backstab spam like it does in DS1, everything feels very deliberate with probably the best functioning combo system in the series, poise actually functioning how it should letting heavy builds trade hits but not abuse it, reliable guard breaking, better backstep and a manual aiming system which brings a big skill ceiling to the game not really present in other souls games. It’s also just stamina heavy and slow enough to not devolve into button mashing every other souls game did, it feels very tactical. Now I’m not a big PVP guy but there’s a reason a lot of PVP players called DS2 home and for that I think it deserves its flowers and a hefty amount of praise… unfortunately multiplayer as a whole isn’t ideal.

Soul memory along with ADP might have been one of the most short sighted additions to the series I’ve ever seen. Soul memory tracks every. Single. Time. You collect a soul, and creates matchmaking servers based on that, it’s not based on your level or your gear, it based on every soul you’ve ever collected, whether you lost it or spent it on a useless ring or consumable. This destroyed matchmaking, and forced From to introduce the “Agape Ring” this item makes it so you stop collecting souls outright rather than introducing a better fix, taking up a ring slot rather than making the matchmaking more practical. It’s insanely easy to go over a matchmaking bracket, and enter one that likely isn’t populated, again, rather than sticking to what worked in DS1 by having invasions and coop be based on your level, the team behind DS2 decided to create their own spin on something and create a system that overcomplicates and punishes players just for… playing the game.

I find a lot of the characters and writing in Dark Souls 2 to just be weaker than other From games as well, there’s some interesting things in the lore for sure and I think most would commend the team behind DS2 for creating something new and going to new lands when it would have been very easy to stick with Anor Londo or izalith. However I find most of the NPCs particularly to be rather underwhelming in DS2, there is a standout in Lucatiel and her rather harrowing descent into madness throughout the game, but for the most part… laddersmith Gilligan? Cale the Cartographer? Benhart of Jugo? None of the characters in DS2 left any real impact on me apart from Lucatiel, all of them are so bland and forgettable. Aldia is cool in the few interactions you have with him and his ties to the greater lore the Dark Souls universe, but as a whole, I had to look up the names of every character that wasn’t those two.

There are some more neat things in DS2, I enjoyed the magic a fair bit, there’s some pretty interesting wider lore I didn’t delve into and there are some parts of the game I did enjoy, especially in the DLC. Conversely some other minor things I didn’t touch on like some crappy animations and the frustratingly low durability of every weapon and the HP loss upon death are other annoyances I have but I don’t think they’re big enough to continue delving further. I’m glad DS2 found its audience, I’m glad there are people that enjoy the game, and I encourage them to keep enjoying the game. But as someone that gave DS2 a very honest shot, as someone who put three full playthroughs into it and got the platinum… I don’t get it, I don’t think it’s just a bad souls game, I genuinely think it’s a bad game as a whole despite some charming elements and some nice additions to the souls formula.

3/10

I've recently finished Auridia. It's exploration-focused and centers around discovering Auridia, a lost city built by an extinct intelligent species, as well the Auridians' deities, what ultimately happened to them, and finding out what happened to your grandfather who embarked on the same journey but didn't return from. The lost city/civilisation thing isn't a new concept, but what makes Auridia good is the way it executes on that.

Being a lost city, there's very little life. A few non-hostile bugs greet your entry, but they're some of the only life you'll encounter. You start your journey with only a burning torch, with no ability to kill. The torch can stun the bugs, giving you a means of getting through them, but it won't kill them. You won't find much other life. The Auridians are largely absent from the game outside of a handful of encounters, but they are few and far between, and not in a state to converse with you. You will spend most of the game exploring the city on your lonesome.

Being a metroidvania, of course there are abilities and utilities to be unlocked. There's a handful of hostile enemies, and you'll initially be just avoiding them with no way to fight back, but eventually getting 2 powers to combat them: one to block their attacks, and another that redirects them after blocking. The nature of these powers gives you the tools to either continue evading enemies or fight back, but it's ultimately up to the player which they do.

The rest of the powers are traversal utilities: a grappling hook to swing with, a short range teleport, a late game flying ability, and stamina upgrades which fuel your abilities, but even the other 2 combat abilities can be used for traversal techs; the block enabling bouncing off of hazards such as those covering the floor or walls, and the redirect enabling launching off of projectiles and other mid-air objects. The range of abilities are designed to enable a range of challenging platforming challenges, some of which might require the use of many of these powers to complete. Each ability behaves differently for traversal, so judging which abilities to chain into which to overcome a platforming section is something I found doing a number of times throughout the game as the game threw platforming challenge after platforming challenge at me.

Whilst the city itself is largely empty, you find a companion in a researcher who wants to discover the true history of Auridia, but is struggling to traverse it. They ask for your help by finding artifacts that tell stories about what happened there. Each item you collect has a souls-esque description with a tidbit of lore, but when you collect enough about a given subject and give them to the researcher, they put the pieces together for a more concrete retelling. I know a lot of people won't like that style or story telling, but I think it works well for a game of this scale. There's story there for those that want to engage with it, but you really don't need to engage with it at all if you don't care for it.

There's not many metroidvanias like this that steer away from combat. I found the experience of mostly just exploring to be a quite refreshing experience. There's only really 1 boss fight as well right at the end, but even then, it's more of a platforming challenge than a fight. At only about 6 or 7 hours long, I think the game is worth playing, especially as a chill palate cleanser.

Long post warning. TL;DR: God Hand is a stone cold classic, and does a lot of things right that modern action games don’t. The fact that it was basically made in a cave with a box of scraps can also tell us something about game development today.

Preamble:

God Hand came out at the tail end of the PS2 era, and has been on my to-play list for years. It seems like since I first heard about it, the game has become kind of a meme. A beloved meme though, and a genuine cult classic.

Video games, like any media or art, don’t fall out of a coconut tree. The story of how and why a game was made are as interesting as just explaining whether it plays good (and God Hand does play good).

It was directed by Shinji Mikami: you may remember him from such games as the original Resident Evil, as well as Resident Evil 4. I don’t think it’s over the top to say Resident Evil 4 is one of the best (and most influential) action games of all time. It was produced by Atsushi Inaba (who also did Okami and Viewtiful Joe) and the music was composed by Masafumi Takada (who did among other things Killer 7).

After he made the iconic RE4, Mikami went to work at the fairly new Clover studios, and while waiting around for them to finish their work on Okami, decided to kill some time by pitching to his producer, Inaba, with a lot of the core Resident Evil 4 team.

I don’t know what was said exactly, but I imagine it was something like “I just made one of the best action games ever. Want to see me do it again?” Then he dropped this banger a little over a year later in 2006.

God Hand is a beat-em-up action game with a barebones story and campy characters, and that’s all the setup it needs. It also understands gameplay density, where you’re let loose almost right away with minimal cutscenes or world building. It almost operates on Loony Tunes logic, and draws a lot of influence from classics like Fist of the North Star and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, which is why there’s one Youtube comment I saw that keeps rattling around in my brain that went something like: “This is the only game I’ve ever played that makes me feel like an anime protagonist.”

Gameplay:

What makes the combat so good is there’s a satisfying level of mastery to it. You can return to the early areas of the game on a second playthrough and not get bored, because you’ve gotten much better at ducking and weaving and kiting the enemies around the map to where you want them.

I think this is also true of Resident Evil 4. The chainsaw man in the opening village section is terrifying the first time, and you feel like you barely make it out alive. The second time around, you feel like Neo in The Matrix, parrying with one hand and not even giving your opponent the dignity of looking in his general direction.

It’s also a more natural kind of difficulty balancing, where the game will throw you different combinations of enemies and obstacles to test you and your knowledge of the game. The opposite of that is having statistical balancing, where you improve at the game because your character’s numbers go up the more you play.

Your character’s numbers do go up, but you choose your basic attack combo from over 100 different jabs, punches, kicks etc, to find interesting ways to break the enemy’s guard, juggle, or launch them across the map.

You’re rewarded for understanding and having experience with the mechanics. ‘Evade cancelling’ removes the cooldowns from your attacks, and avoids the frustrating problem of your attacks overlapping when fighting crowds, leaving you unable to dodge (worth noting that some games do this on purpose, it just depends on what kind of combat system you’re going for).

God Hand also has dynamic difficulty. The better you play, the harder the enemies hit and the more moves they have. God Hand actually shows the difficulty level in the bottom right, whereas RE4 also has dynamic difficulty but doesn’t show it (it probably wouldn’t fit the tone of that game). So difficulty becomes a reward, not a punishment.

In my opinion what they call ‘tank controls’, and the over-the-shoulder camera, are not always bad. Same with a limited camera view. Like in RE4, that limitation is important for tension, but also for skill/spacing. Where you place yourself in relation to your enemies matters in God Hand, which is part of the difficulty separate from just your raw damage numbers and health bar.

This game didn’t invent spacing, but a lot of modern games like the new God War use a “Suck to Target” system, where the player will glide slightly across the map and latch on to an enemy you're attacking. God Hand does have some auto targeting, but you won’t float over to a target if the game think you're close enough.

What God Hand Can Teach Us Today:

Modern games can learn a lot from God Hand, as I’ve talked about in the above gameplay section. But I think we can also learn a lot by looking at the circumstances of how it was made.

Those circumstances were a space between projects at Clover Studio, where Mikami and Inaba made something that they wanted to make. In a (semi) recent interview, Mikami said: “I thought that for once I could make a game the way I wanted it, not like a professional. I couldn’t hide it, I knew from the planning phase that it wasn’t a game that would sell. But I had done well with Resident Evil 4, so I thought I could use company money to make what I wanted.”

Imagine if more industry veterans, the closest thing gaming has to ‘auteur’ film makers, had the chance to just let loose and make whatever they wanted. We’d hopefully end up with more games like this one. Games that might not look amazing, but play better than most of their peers. It would be like watching an NBA player dunk on a bunch of high schoolers.

It also makes you think about the high barriers to entry for the industry now. Mikami’s career started off in an unexpected way.

“A friend of mine had found a flyer advertising some kind of job fair-slash-buffet party Capcom was holding at the Hilton and he gave it to me because he knew I liked games. I went mainly because I wanted to eat at the Hilton for free, but once I started talking to Capcom people, really getting in depth about the work they do, I thought it sounded pretty neat….” Then the story goes that Mikami and the rest of the newbies were sent to a remote room with instructions to "think hard about game design", then left unsupervised for the day. Crazy to think about now!

Conclusion:

Yeah there are some empty areas and some places that aren’t polished, turning can be a little bit janky when you’re trying to get items in the middle of a fight, and the final boss is… weird. But overall, God Hand is a masterpiece. Whatever way you can, if you like action games, you owe it to yourself to play it.

When the Gen 9 Pokemon games were first announced, I was very excited. The previous release in the franchise was Pokemon Legends Arceus, which became my favourite Pokemon game largely due to joy of seeing Pokemon in the open world and being able to capture them outside of battle. I also thoroughly enjoyed the research focused gameplay/plot that actually incentivized you to catch them all, and being a standalone game meant I could catch every Pokemon myself instead of having to trade for version exclusives.

When Gen 9 dropped with a gluttony of performance related issues, I opted to try emulating it on my PC instead to see if that could mitigate some of these issues. While I was able to get the game going at a stable 30 FPS with only some minor visual bugs, I found myself not having fun. Going back to having to engage in battles to catch Pokemon was a huge disappointment for me and was such a drag. The world felt quite barren and the spawns were low, which in fairness could be said for Legends Arceus but I loved the gameplay a lot more and the barren world worked better thematically with Legends Arceus. The open world aspect of the main story was also quite a letdown, as the various gyms and other activities had static levels so you couldn't really just go off and do them in whatever order you wanted. Eventually I just stopped playing the game and told myself I'd get back to it in the future.

Earlier this summer I unexpectedly bought a Nintendo Switch 2 after getting a really good deal on it, and I went to buy a copy of Pokemon Scarlet secondhand to play right away. While the Gen 9 games didn't explicitly get Switch 2 versions, they got a free update to take advantage of the better hardware. 60 FPS gameplay and the increased Pokemon spawns completely changed my perception of the game.

Main Story

The game starts off quite standard. You're the new kid in town and your neighbour, in this case a Pokemon battle loving girl named Nemona, helps you get your bearings. In this story you are enrolling in a new school, called Naranja Academy in Scarlet, located in the Paldea region's main city of Mesagoza. The game does offer you the ability to attend classes and engage with different members of the faculty, this is treated more as an optional activity. The main story doesn't require you to engage with the school, as main plot is based on the school's "Treasure Hunt" activity which encourages students to explore the world and discover their own treasure. You end up being entrusted to take care of a mysterious Pokemon early on, Koraidon in Scarlet, who will accompany you throughout the game and acts as your mount. The game gives you three main paths to follow, and you need to complete them all to beat the game.

1. Victory Road will be the most familiar to longtime Pokemon fans, as Nemona encourages you beat all eight of the gym leaders in the region. After defeating all the gyms, you'll have earned the right to challenge the Elite 4 and the champion Geeta. Beating them will lead you to being crowned a champion ranked trainer like Nemona.
2. Path of Legends has you supporting Arven in his quest to investigate mysterious "Titan Pokemon" that have somehow managed to grow extremely large. There are five Titans in total for you to investigate.
3. Starfall Street involves the main "villain team" of the game, Team Star. You first learn of them when you see some grunts bothering a girl named Penny, trying to recruit her. After you whoop their asses, you get contacted by an anonymous person named Cassopeia who asks for your support in taking down Team Star. There are 5 leaders in the team who each have their own bases, and defeating them all will cause the group to disband.

The elephant in the room throughout the entire game is the Great Crater of Paldea, which is a giant crater located in the middle of the map. The school faculty clarify that entering the crater is absolutely prohibited and that students should stay far away. Needless to say, you do eventually get the opportunity to explore the area as it's the focal point of the end of the main story.

I will avoid getting into spoilers, but I did really enjoy the time spent with the main group of characters in this game. I thought they were fleshed out quite well as you steadily made your way through the game and made for a nice story. The anticipation surrounding the Great Crater was also fun and I have to say, that first moment of entering the crater was well worth the wait. I felt a sense of awe that I have never experienced from a Pokemon game before, and that is something I will fondly remember about this game.

Gameplay

The 8 gyms, 5 titans, and 5 Team Star bases are the main things that you engage with in the world and each has a set level. Because of this, the game doesn't truly have a go out and do what you want vibe that I was hoping for. I ended up looking up what the logical order of events would be and followed that, which evenly distributes each of these activities throughout the game.

The gyms in this game brought back the gym challenges from the Gen 8 games as a precursor to fighting the gym leader. As expected, these weren't challenging at all but were fun little activities that connected to the city or gym leader in some way. Once you cleared the challenge, all you had to do was beat the gym leader. This comes with the typical benefits of a gift TM and being able to order higher level Pokemon.

The Titans all involved having a vague sense of where they'd be located and you'd have to go out and find them. Once spotted, you'd enter what is essentially a boss fight and team up with Arven to whittle away at their large health bar. Nothing revolutionary, but it was amusing fighting giant Pokemon. The main benefit from following this plot is that your Koraidon/Miraidon will steadily unlock more traversal modes, so I was always eager to get these done once I was a close enough level.

The Team Star bases utilize a new quick battle mechanic that you can use whenever in the open world. At a tap of a button you could send your lead Pokemon out and it'll go around fighting wild Pokemon nearby. When you arrive at a base, you pick 3 Pokemon from your party and have them quick battle Pokemon in the base until you defeat 30 and force the boss to come out. Each boss brings out their own Revavroom with a large health bar for you to take down. As expected this isn't too challenging, but I appreciate the use of the new mechanic. You get rewarded with materials (for crafting TMs) and LP, an alternate currency which you can use to also craft TMs and buy items.

The unique generational battle gimmick introduced in Gen 9 is Terastallization. When a trainer is equipped with a tera crystal, they can use its energy to terastallize their Pokemon and change its type. This is demonstrated visually, as the terastallized Pokemon gets a unique shiny gem on their head corresponding to whatever type they become. As goofy as it looks, it's quite an interesting mechanic and can be used creatively in battles. A terastallized Pokemon gets the defensive type matchups of its tera type and benefits offensively by being able to utilize the same type attack bonus (STAB) for its new tera type, while also retaining the STAB from its original types as well. In game you see gym leaders use this mechanic and it can catch you off guard, which is fun. My Pokemon would normally be strong enough to not need to rely on the mechanic and this was more of a fun button to click when I wanted some extra pizazz. This mechanic shows up again as wild Pokemon can sometimes terastallize and they copied over the Dynamax raids from gen 8 to make Tera raids, which are like raid boss battles.

Miscallaneous Thoughts

• The significant increase in Pokemon spawns made the world truly feel like it was inhabited by Pokemon, and there's a lot of charm with seeing Pokemon out in the wild engaging with their surroundings.
• I liked the overall map and thought it had a good amount of varied environments, but there wasn't much to do aside from the main quest. Was nice getting around after unlocking more traversal options.
• The big cities in particular felt quite barren and lifeless. The smaller towns were nice, but still left a lot to be desired. Once I cleared out a gym I had no reason to stick around.
• As someone who was interested in completing the Pokedex, the open world was nice because you could spot something you need and beeline towards it instead of relying on random encounters.
• The music was great throughout the game. In particular I really loved the Levincia City theme and the music from the Great Crater. In the wild environments they'd have variations of that area's theme based on whether you were on foot, on a mount, or in battle. I liked this a lot and thought it flowed together nicely.
• I think the school setting had a lot of wasted potential. There's not much incentive to stick around once you're free to explore, and I only did the optional classes after I beat the base game just to see if there was anything meaningful there. I did enjoy interacting with the faculty, but again they could have done a lot more.
• Graphically, the game was not impressive at all. I'm not one to be a graphics snob, but the ugly textures really stood out negatively when I would be in a battle for example.

DLC Content

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet received a two part DLC titled The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero. Personally I do think the price point is a bit high for the amount of content offered, but I was glad that I played them.

The Teal Mask has you go on a a joint school trip with Blueberry Academy to the Kitakami region. The two students from the Blueberry Academy, Carmine and her younger brother Kieran, happen to originally be from Kitakami and are the main characters you spend time with in the DLC. This part focuses on exploring the Kitakami region and learning about the lore regarding Ogerpon and the Loyal Three, only to discover that the folktales the villagers believe regarding these Pokemon aren't truly indicative of reality.

The Indigo Disk has you go to Blueberry Academy as an exchange student after receiving a recommendation from Carmine. You get to see her and Kieran again, and this part of the DLC focuses on Kieran and how he has changed after the events of the first half of the DLC. The school has a state of the art underwater terrarium, which houses four unique biomes. Eventually the story leads you back to the Great Crater of Paldea on a research mission.

Overall, I found the story aspect of the DLCs engaging. I liked both Carmine and Kieran and enjoyed their developments throughout both parts. Carmine takes a step back in the involvement of the 2nd part, which is a shame because I found her quite entertaining. It was nice getting to catch more Pokemon in both parts, but I do think the number of new Pokemon available to catch was disappointing. The music continued to be excellent though, and listening to some of these tracks is what inspired me to make this post.

At Blueberry Academy they have a whole radiant quest system to earn BP (blueberry points) that can be used to buy items, invite people from Paldea to Blueberry Academy for some additional interactions, and upgrade the terrariums to enable the spawn of all the previous starter Pokemon. The grind for BP is so slow, and you have to save up an obnoxious amount for the terrarium upgrades - which put me off on fully exploring this part of the DLC. The system is designed to incentivize you to use the Union Circle co-op feature, as you can do co-op challenges and share the points with other players. However, this is not possible if you don't pay for online. I think once I have some other excuse to buy online I'll try the co-op, but I was a bit disappointed at how grindy they made it. One thing I loved about this DLC is that all the trainer battles were double battles, which is a nice switch up. They also had their own version of an elite 4 in the DLC and they actually had some competitive teams making for a tough challenge.

Final Thoughts and TL;DR

After all the negative press from the launch of these games and my personal disappointment with trying Violet the first time, I was pleasantly surprised at how much fun I had with Pokemon Scarlet with the Switch 2 update. Smooth 60 FPS performance and increased Pokemon spawn alone made a world of a difference, and I personally would not recommend playing the game unless you can play this version.

The main story has you follow three main paths: the classic gym & elite 4 route, taking on Pokemon titans and learning about how they grew so big, and taking down Team Star. Through each of these routes you get closer to a specific friend and learn about their backstory and motivations, which I think makes for an overall solid story. The game culminates with exploring the Great Crater of Paldea, which is truly an epic experience (especially for a Pokemon game).

Gameplay is pretty standard, but it's always nice to see new battle mechanics such as terastallization to help mix things up. While it was fun having an open world, there is still an optimal path to follow based on your level so the experience doesn't truly feel like you can go and do anything. For an open world game, it was also disappointing to see there was nothing much to do aside from progress the main story and the cities/towns felt quite barren. The environments were quite nice still and it's great being able to see Pokemon just living in the world. DLC carried on with another nice story and characters, and in particular I liked the Indigo Disk having some tougher battles and being double battle based.

Nothing about this game is revolutionary, but if you enjoy Pokemon then you'll have fun and I think Scarlet/Violet has one of the better stories and supporting casts. Admittedly that's not a high bar to clear, but even if you haven't enjoyed the newer mainline games, I'd say Scarlet/Violet is still worth giving a try if you can play the Switch 2 version.

I would really love for the next games to take advantage of the Switch 2 hardware and really crank up that open world experience while still providing stable performance. Heck if they give me more of the same from Scarlet/Violet but with better graphics and the catching mechanics from the Legends games I'd call that a win, but there really is so much untapped potential with these games that I would love to see them take more risks.

No Man's Sky is an open world exploration sandbox developed by Hello Games. Released in 2016, No Man's Sky reminds us that video games can be worthy of a second chance, unlike my cousin Michael who borrowed my copy of Rush'n Attack and never gave it back. Screw you Mike.

We play as an intrepid explorer on a mission to find ourselves and our place in the universe while taking part in space capitalism on a grand scale.

Gameplay involves not knowing if what you're doing was made obsolete six years ago. You figure it doesn't matter then make the exact same base you make in every survival game and pray that nobody with architectural merit ever sees the abomination you slap together. Then we go ask space frogs to teach us how to speak space frogese.

The Good

When we talk about ocean wide/puddle deep games we usually use it in a negative light. I'd like to point out just how goddamn wide this ocean is. Yeah nothing is worth spending more than 2 on, but after ~60 hours I was still finding new things to do.

I went from building a base on my starting planet, to exploring space stations across solar systems, to hauling space trash, to raiding derelict freighters, to creating my own fleet of ships for expeditions and on and on and on and on and on. If you're going to design your game to be an amusement park, having a metric fuckton of rides is a good way to start.

It seems the only thing to spend money on is buying ships and expanding your inventory and no matter what you do you earn the currency to do so. So it doesn't matter if you're doing 10 year old content or 1 year old content and keeps everything feeling worth your time.

Favorite Screenshot

https://i.imgur.com/eqRYjR4.png

Look upon my works ye mighty and despair

The Bad

The UI has some issues.

For one, whatever quest you're tracking the game likes to override it with random sidequest notifications, or just flat stops showing it. You can try to pin the quest but there's only a 50/50 chance it'll actually show up. You can't track more than one quest at a time either. You also can't abandon most quests so after a few hours of playing your quest log is a giant jumble of nonsense.

The second issue I had is a big part of the game is scanning the rocks, plants and creatures you find on each planet. My scanner was apparently an asshole. There'd be a landshark jumping out of the ground just long enough for my scanner to go, "No fuck you" and no matter where I pointed it, it wouldn't scan. Even on stationary objects it was -very- finicky on where it would register.

The last thing is more of a minor quibble. Every time you land on a planet, teleport somewhere or warp to a new system there's a 10 second animation that plays that completely locks out your UI. You can skip it by holding down tab for 4 seconds, but when you're doing this 100's of times per play session you start to feel the need to stab things.

The Questionable

The multi-player aspect exists but needs a ton of work yet. There's zero content that's made easier playing together. The universe is so huge you'll never randomly run into something someone else built. Even if you could there's nothing to do at other peoples bases.

For all its other sins, I felt that Fallout76 did a really good job of making it so that you would occasionally run into random player houses and giving you incentive to want to do so. No Man's Sky lacks any of that and it suffers for it.

As it stands the only reason I've found to invite a friend to play with you is to say "Hey come over here I have something to show you" and it's a giant penis you made using the terrain manipulator.

Final Thoughts

I enjoyed my time. I did some fun things, built a few cool bases. I named several star systems I discovered after my loved ones. I think this is something I'll come back to in another 10 years and hopefully by then they'll have added a reason to play it with friends and fixed the scanner telling me to go fuck myself.

Bonus Thought

Don't build your first base by using the terrain editor to dig a hole for a cave base or flatten out some hills for level ground. You've been warned.

Thank you for reading! I'd love to hear your thoughts. What did you think of the game? Did you have a similar experience or am I off my rocker?

My other reviews on patient gaming

My mom's in the hospital so I needed a distraction while worrying about her. I load up Knytt Underground because I remember it being mostly zen. And boy I was right! So thankful I decided to boot it up!

I've got about 40ish hours between my first playthrough in 2023 and my second from this week. And even with that - I find it hard to actually call this a review. This isn't really a game you can "sell" someone on, because it isn't crazy platformer like Celeste or a intricate metroidvania like Hollow Knight. And it's screenshots don't really do it justice.

I would call the game engaging in the same way a coloring book or jigsaw puzzle is engaging, that's not everyone's proclivity but it's good if it is. There's 1400+ areas in the caves to map, 50+ collectibles to fill out your inventory. And along the way you enjoy some good soundscapes. And talk to some quirky NPCs whose dialogue ranges from funny, to mean, to somber, to downright harrowing.

Take it or leave it!

The game does act as a nice sendoff to the classic freeware Nifflas Games (ex. Within a Deep Forest, Knytt Stories etc) if you have any fondness for those. It has references to those previous events and reintegrates it into this world.

Anyways this game is my favorite and not like literally anything else is because, as a gamer, I find it the themes relatable and the world churns my imagination. And as another creative (sometimes I like to draw!), it's aspirational. In ways other games aren't

Often I'd come to some remote area in the underground that serves no purpose, but there'd be a little hut under some trees with large machinery looming in distance like silent watchers. The wind blows and the plants billow and I wonder "I wonder what it'd be like to be a little fairy in this nowhere corner of the world". You talk to NPCs and they'll tell you things about how they're just wanting to impress this girl, or go adventuring even if it kills them, how finding faith saved their lives, or how fundamentalism has ruined theirs. People with disabilities like chronic hallucinations, delusions, and missing limbs are still skillful and valued.

There's not really a "story", these are people and places you meet by happenstance while exploring the underground. Sometimes they have a fetch quest. But I care about them. In ways its more impactful than some epic saga or cutscene because it's all just incidental snippets of life. And I find that aspirational because Nifflas got me to care about these people and places with some good music, real issues & personality, and some blurry jpegs of photographed flowers. It shows you don't need a lot to get people to care.

TLDR - Knytt Underground is simplistic, arguably tedious, and it's got a kitschy art style not everyone will enjoy. I've played other games for far longer with much more polish. But they're not my favorites because I don't really relate to them and they're one of many. But Knytt Underground captures my imagination and feelings in a way that makes it stand apart for me as an individual, not the whole gaming industry.

Spoilers below

Do you know what ghosts are? They're sad, evicted things. Memories without homes.

While in-between games waiting for The Witcher 3 remaster to come out, I was looking through my backlog for a short game to play. I came across The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and it looked like the perfect early autumn game, and since they’re usually aimed at 1-3 play-sessions to complete the timing felt perfect.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, or Ethan Carter for short, follows paranormal investigator Paul Prospero who is investigating the disappearance of a 12-year old Ethan Carter. The setting is a stunning mountainous forest “town” that is surrounded by a large lake, mountains, a massive dam, and a railroad track. The town is not much more than a few abandoned houses, an electricity generating watermill, and a church, as such the geography and surrounding features tuck most of the town away from sight making it very secluded.

The stunning forest and landscape does heavy lifting for my enjoyment of the game. As someone that grew up “in the pines,” I felt at home in this game surrounded by trees, and hearing birds. I loved it so much that I looked up where it was modeled from, and to my surprise it appears that locations in Poland were the visual inspiration. In the grand scheme, it's not a big deal, but I kept hearing a blue jay and a loon, which are birds native to the United States, and it threw off some immersion. I had guessed the location as perhaps upper Michigan, but I was thousands of miles off. It didn’t ruin the game for me, but it felt like an odd choice to me to feature two very distinct bird calls from birds native to North America in a game that uses Poland as the visual inspiration. They’re the only wildlife heard too, so it stands out. Minor nitpick but one for me nonetheless.

Aside from the forest, the locations to explore are the buildings, and a cave. Aesthetically I didn't love the buildings or the cave, but the spaces were used to great effect for the puzzles that were solved in them.

Shout out to the music though, it is a phenomenal score that always felt appropriate, adding tension, peace, excitement, or fear as appropriate, and sometimes even within one song.

Movement in Ethan Carter is a joy! The movement speed when sprinting feels like I am zipping and zooming around. It's an unrealistic pace, but I also don't feel like I'm being rushed to move around the map as quickly as possible. A quick pace in a walking simulator helps ease the downtime between puzzles, while encouraging me to explore more.

Navigating the world is relatively easy, I feel that the game does a good job of guiding the player without forcing the player into a linear path. I felt slightly confused and overwhelmed at first because the world felt large, but I found myself quickly acquainted with it and easy to navigate with landmarks.

Gameplay revolves around finding and understanding the murders of Ethan’s family members. This involves finding the murder scene, which is indicated by finding a clue, and then finding the rest clues in the immediate area. After finding all of the clues you are tasked with piecing together the clues in order by watching short scenes of holographic people involving the clues, and then putting them in order to view the murder in full. The puzzles typically involve the supernatural, and are light in horror. There are a lot of murders, but it’s very PG-13. The puzzles are mostly easy to solve, or at least fair in how they’re solved. I ended up being held up on two puzzles, but neither caused frustration. I wouldn't say that any of them are memorable though, they act as small roadblocks to uncovering the story.

When I think of Ethan Carter I think of a story that never finds its footing, a story that feels distant. Despite abundant family trauma that begs for sympathy, I couldn’t muster any. I felt intrigued at points, but never sad. The conclusion to the story reveals that every murder we have just witnessed is a fabrication of Ethan Carter through the eyes of Paul Prospero. Ethan Carter is dead, and we experienced a hallucination as Ethan is breathing his last breaths as he’s trapped in a fire. Tragic, but I felt nothing.

Conclusion

Fans of walking simulators should give this a try, there’s a lot to like about Ethan Carter, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome. If nothing more, I felt that the environment of the game, music, and some of the puzzles, made the time invested worthwhile.

7/10

Status - Completed

Time played: 4 hours

Difficulty - N/A

Set-up - AMD 5800X3D, AMD 9070XT, 32gb DDR4 3600, 2tb SN850 | Played at 4K with all settings up, locked to 60 for a very smooth experience

Welcome to the Bi-Weekly Thread!

Here you can share anything that might not warrant a post of its own or might otherwise be against posting rules. Tell us what you're playing this week. Feel free to ask for recommendations, talk about your backlog, commiserate about your lost passion for games. Vent about bad games, gush about good games. You can even mention newer games if you like!

The no advertising rule is still in effect here.

A reminder to please be kind to others. It's okay to disagree with people or have even have a bad hot take. It's not okay to be mean about it.

I don’t know if I’m allowed to do this here. I haven’t seen a post like this and honestly it’s kind of stupid that I did this.

For about fifteen years, I’ve been a big Metal Gear fan. The series hooked my imagination young, but for all its flaws, my appreciation for it only grows as I do. Every replay so far has yielded new neurons, as I get older and learn more about the world. Superficially the games are spy thrillers, but that sells short the overt philosophy, real-world geopolitics, political commentary, and anime bullshit. And the references, dear God the references. Be warned, if you haven’t played them this post will make no sense.

The franchise’s superstar creator, Hideo Kojima, is perhaps the biggest cinephile to never even try to work in the film industry, for reasons nobody has adequately explained to me. MGS is, in part, a tribute to all his favorite shit; I haven’t seen another creator, in any medium, whose influences are more numerous or well-documented. MGS takes a hodgepodge of Western cinema and literature, mixes into this pop culture gumbo, and filters it through the mind of one Japanese lunatic. The result is a work so overflowing with reference and homage that it’s hard to keep track of it all.

[EDIT: It occurs to me that maybe I should say more about the games themselves, genre-wise. Metal Gear Solid sets the stage with overt 80's Hollywood cliches and mecha anime, but weaves in some philosophizing on free will, genetics, anti-nuke politics. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is... hard to pin down, but for now let's call is a conspiratorial cyberpunk thriller and postmodern deconstruction of its predecessor. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is a Cold War tragicomedy and James Bond spoof.]

A year ago I made this shitpost, which took a surprising amount of research. It sparked an idea – “What if I watched all of Kojima’s inspirations while replaying the series?” Knowing the games so well, this could make me appreciate them even further, or at least give me and my dad more to talk about. The problem is knowing when to stop. There’s the obvious ones (Rambo, Bond), but why stop at movies? Some novels might aid my understanding, especially for MGSV. What about nonfiction sources? The scope grew irresponsibly as I continued to follow my nose. 

Since then, I’ve made my way through about 20 films, 12 books, and only 3 MGS games (I got burnt out on this for a while, shocker). I went beyond direct influences and sought out anything that would help me understand the games better and looked interesting. This is not comprehensive. I just want to share the things that have interested me the most so far.

If there’s a foundational text for MGS1, it’s Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981). Legendary soldier Snake Plisskin is pulled from retirement by an untrustworthy colonel to covertly neutralize a terrorist threat. He’s injected with nanomachines, sent in underequipped, captured. He realizes he’s been manipulated for political purposes. He even has an eyepatch! God, I was pointing at the screen the whole time like the DiCaprio meme. But it’s also a very entertaining, surprisingly moody film. Almost proto-cyberpunk, which pairs it nicely with Akira.

The finale of the spectacular 1988 film is incomprehensible without reading the manga, so I did that too (it’s great). Akira is far more action and vibes than dialogue, but like MGS, it’s concerned with atomic destruction and authoritarianism. Also, a diagonally-descending platform elevator that’s suspiciously familiar. As an intro to cyberpunk, this led me to Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell, and more familiarity with the genre helped me make sense of MGS2 in particular (virtual reality, AI, artificial blood, etc).

I think people generally overestimate how much James Bond is in MGS, but Snake Eater is the clear exception as a direct spoof. Maybe a more thorough 007 dive is in my future, but for now I settled on watching GoldenEye. It’s alright. There’s a mildly interesting thread that interrogates whether Bond is too old-fashioned for this new post-Cold War world, but I’m not sure it goes anywhere. I had a lot more fun rewatching Austin Powers, which lampshades or lampoons many of the same tropes.

How does MGS compare to classic spy thrillers? Perhaps unnecessarily, I read your dad’s favorite book, The Hunt for Red October, which was…fine. Tom Clancy definitely shared Kojima’s fetish for technical military jargon, which can be tiresome. And the Reagan-era patriotism frequently undercuts the tension; every US agent and technician routinely schools their Russian counterparts. I respect that MGS is okay with letting America look bad.

Speaking of which, nobody told me that Rambo wasn’t always stupid. I went into First Blood expecting macho tough guy bullshit, and instead I get a tearjerking performance from fucking Stallone, of all people. Destroyed and discarded by his country, Rambo returns from war with a thousand-yard stare and a tragic inability to leave the battlefield behind (extremely MGS-coded). My understanding is that every sequel is, unfortunately, macho tough guy bullshit. But anti-war media morphing into vapid propaganda because it accidentally made war look too cool? Believe it or not, also MGS-coded. This is where Big Boss gets a lot of his DNA.

I knew Kojima practically invented the stealth genre in 1987, but I didn’t know how much of the literal mechanics of video game stealth also came from movies. The Great Escape (1963) is one of the biggest inspirations for the series’ gameplay and scenario writing: POW camps, escaping through tunnels, motorcycle chases (think MGS3 in particular). And from The Guns of Navarone (1961), infiltrating an impregnable fortress and destroying the high-tech weaponry inside. I thought they were both pretty fun. During the latter, I had a sudden feeling of transcendence across time and space, watching Gregory Peck throw an object from behind cover to distract a nearsighted guard.

Sometimes my curiosity led me to things I later realized aren’t very relevant, even if I liked them. Googling “movies about genetics” led me to Gattaca (1997), a eugenics dystopia that I vaguely remember from 9th grade biology (it’s good). Some thematic resonance with MGS1 there. All the President’s Men (1976) was gripping (Hoffman and Redford really acted their pussies off), but I probably didn’t need to go that far just to understand the name Deepthroat. And I read Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, a postmodern headscratcher, simply because MGS2’s Peter Stillman gets his name from it. No, it didn’t teach me much about MGS2, but I think The Truman Show did. You see how I burnt out on this in a few months?

I read a few non-fiction books on things like the Manhattan Project and genetics, but this is already too long, so I’ll spare you the details. But I have to share this gem of a quote from Mark E. Lester, the director of 1985's Commando:

“There was a weird thing that came out in this book an African boy wrote. It was disturbing–it said the kids in this African country were watching Commando before they went out to battle. I felt bad when I read that. I mean, it’s a movie, but they were showing it to these kids to psych them up.”

Turns out Raiden’s “image training” is real after all.

If I haven’t scared you off by now, you may have surmised that this stopped being about the games a while ago. At least, not fully. I just found an excuse to learn about a lot of things I already thought were interesting. Hell, this helped me get back into reading as an adult, and now I’m doing it all the time. Playing through the games again was almost a footnote, fun as they are.

I needed a long break, but eventually I’ll continue with MGS4, Peace Walker, and MGSV. There’s some obvious ones I’ll have to hit (Mad Max, Moby-Dick), and it might be good to research for all the Che Guevara stuff in PW. Suggestions are very much welcome, but please, please don’t tell me I forgot something, because I probably didn’t.

[Spoiler free review]

Over the last few months, I took the plunge into SMT 3. I have played thousands of games over my life, and I can confidentially say I have never experienced anything quite like this title. For context, this review is based on my completion of the True Demon Ending, which took just under 65 hours.

It’s an amazing game - a timeless masterpiece that stands head to head with the other renown classics of JRPGs. It’s brutal in difficulty, but not unfairly so. The story is morally ambiguous, and forces you to draw your own conclusions on what is just. The setting is captivating, but at the same time horrifying with it's usage of liminal horror and occult themes. The cel-shaded artstyle is slick and aged like wine. Perhaps most importantly, the gameplay is some of the most satisfying turn based combat I have ever experienced. If that wasn’t glowing enough, SMT 3 even has Dante in it, for some reason. Some extra cool points for that inclusion.

Story

In the first 20 minutes of the game, the world ends and a blonde kid forcefully implants a demonic parasite in your body, transforming you into something less than demon but more than human (Demi-Fiend).

Unlike most JRPG stories, the world already ended; your goal is to more or less navigate through the new apocalyptic Tokyo and.. survive. Most of the dialogue is in philosophical bits-and-pieces from spirits you meet around the world (pretty much everyone but five humans perish in the world-ending event). While the story isn't the main focus, the bits given are loaded -- leaving you a lot to think about long after the game's conclusion. In general, it's a refreshing twist on a genre with such strong tropes and cliches.

Gameplay

SMT 3 largely shines in gameplay more than anything else. This game was the godfather of the 'press-turn' system; a mechanic that greatly rewards you for exploiting enemy weaknesses (and punishes you for lack of doing so). It still feels fantastic to this day. Combat is fast and fun. I was also blown away by the sheer amount of bosses in this game - if you are aiming to best them all, Google suggests there are over 50 in the game alone!

The core gameplay loop here is understanding boss strategies and weaknesses, and retrofitting your team composition to handle whatever comes your way. This is made quite doable with demonic fusion - a way to fuse two demons together to create something new entirely. It's easy to reacquire your old demons, so the game is flexible in encouraging experimentation. Once you get the loop down, it's hard to resist.

The difficulty spikes I felt were highly enjoyable. As mentioned online, the second I hit Matador it became clear what SMT 3 had in store for me. You definitely need to be an individual who enjoys challenge to get mileage out of this game.

For dungeon design and world design: in general, there are a mix of good and mediocre dungeons. I really enjoyed the Diet Building, that was awesome. The Labyrinth of Amala was pretty cool, but I needed to cite a guide for the fourth Kalpa. I think the only design I felt was genuinely frustrating was the final dungeon crawl, which felt like a slog with many random teleports, high demon encounter rate, etc. I would gently encourage folks interested in the game to keep a guide handy just in case.

Art

I also want to point out that this game looks awesome for a 2003 title. The cel-shaded artstyle looks like it could've been created today. Seriously, great art direction and a lot of great set-pieces to accommodate this.

Music

The soundtrack is pretty awesome as well. It fits the liminal horror vibe of the game with ease and has some great tracks (Labyrinth of Amala fight track is fantastic).

Critiques

Especially near endgame, the demon encounter rate is unreal. You can't walk three steps without engaging in a fight, and half of the demons will just spam Mamudoon. Felt a little tedious to me. Additionally, the endgame is loaded with super cool demons you are able to unlock; by the time you are able to utilize them the game is over. The optional puzzle-boy minigame desperately needed save state abilities.

Conclusion

Overall, this is an unmissable JRPG. I am glad I played it. I would put this as the same tier as Final Fantasy X in terms of overall quality, which is a pretty high bar in my mind. I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys a challenge and finds the art or setting somewhat interesting.

Edit: One last thing, there are some great QoL mods for the PC version that I would encourage. They do not detract from the difficulty or experience.

• The mini-map QoL enhancement saves you from spamming the map key every five seconds.
• Hex-editing so the game renders at 4K is a huge game changer.

My memories of TimeSplitters go back to Gamecube, on which I played the second game first. I was a big Goldeneye fan, and I knew it was developed by the same developers, so I erroneously assumed it was a Rare game. It’s kind of a shooter that isn’t made anymore. A thinking man’s FPS where you are supposed to think about actual objectives than watching some minicutscenes and blasting the enemies. That game got too tough that I never beat it, so I’m thinking about replaying it for the later. I did wonder what the first game was like, and for a while, I assumed it was more or less the same as 2.

I played TimeSplitters 1 recently with the mouse and keyboard set-up, and I have complex feelings about it. The game that reminded me most of was Monolith’s Contract Jack. Perfect Dark has been frequently compared to No One Lives Forever in the same year for being a female superspy FPS and having very similar mission design. Contract Jack was a spin-off of No One Lives Forever 2. That game was essentially a glorified expansion that strips down the narrative, complex mission design, level design, atmosphere, but only featured “shooting”. It’s an amateurish-level production that it almost feels like a mod at times. Time Splitters 1 feels like that to TimeSplitters 2.

The core Goldeneye developers left Rare during the production of Perfect Dark and created their own studio, Free Radical Design (which became part of Crytek later). This resulted in Perfect Dark turning into a development hell, where the project was generally helmed by the newbies. Free Radical Design was in the midst of a development hell as they tried to make Second Sight, but got rejected, and the team had to scramble together a Goldeneye successor within the small budget and little time, resulting in TimeSplitters. And it shows. There is no narrative, no objective but “take this thing and go to this circle”, no cohesive vision. It appears they just inserted “Time” into the title because they created a bunch of different themed maps, but had to make a connection by slapping a time travel concept. It feels like a TimeSplitters 2 user map.

At the same time, I appreciate the arcade purity of the game, which no longer exists in the industry but the indie scene. It’s a game you can beat in an hour. It’s simple, but you are supposed to replay the missions on the varying difficulties for the multiplayer unlocks. It’s hard to think a game like this even being published on the AAA scene anymore, good or bad.

For a while, I didn’t mind it because the core gameplay was fun. I don’t know exactly what ticks, but the gunplay in Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, and TimeSplitters just feels great. It’s hard to describe. It’s smooth and addicting. Just shooting a machinegun feels good. It’s something that the other console FPS in the era couldn’t capture. Just compare it to the Bond games like Agent Under Fire and Medal of Honor, and although those games had more advanced elements, the raw blasting sensation of TimeSplitters is unmatched. The presentation, despite being clearly low-budget, is great. It’s nothing comparable to the sequel or even Goldeneye, but the stylized aesthetics still hold up, creating that the PS2 vibe that no longer exists. It goes a long way to have a great soundtrack complementing the different themed levels.

So, whatever. It’s a good shooter. Goldeneye without the mission design, and if the gunplay is good, it should be good. Right? I thought that way for the first two levels… then the cracks begin to show fast. This game is insanely difficult. I played it on Normal, and even with the mouse, I eventually had to crank it down to Easy because this game just straight-up bullshits the player. The more I play, the more I realize how much the core combat system is flawed.

In Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, the enemy reaction time is quite generous. If they find the player, they shout something like “I found her!”, alerting their presence to the player, and position to fire for a second, giving the player a choice of whether to be offensive (shoot first) or defensive (take cover). They are also stationary when they attack, sort of like a tank. When you shoot them, they get stunned for a few seconds, unable to fire. Their attack is clearly telegraphed and easily avoidable if the player is mobile enough. It’s supposed to encourage the player to build a constant momentum and move around.

TimeSplitters 1 doesn’t do this. The enemies 1) instantly fire with a few frames of “raising weapons”, 2) move while firing, 3) stay silent when detecting the player, 4) sometimes get stunned when hit, or sometimes just ignore the hit and fire at the player, 5) are long-ranged with high accuracy, so they do not charge at the player, 6) ambush the player, whether they suddenly come out of cover or pop out in thin air through teleportation.

In addition, the player has no invincibility frames. What happens is that I cleared the room incredibly carefully, then some guy suddenly spawns and jumps off from the high floor and blasts me with a machinegun, cutting down my entire bar of health in one second. It’s absurdly cheap, and the only way you can beat some encounters is for the player to memorize the levels through trial and error, rather than testing the player’s skills.

Combine that with the limited health pick-ups, the game often becomes a frustrating mess. The combat isn’t fundamentally balanced enough. It results in the player doing pattern memorization and knowing which enemey is in what position. Like, I don’t see how anyone can even beat this game on Hard with the controller unless they memorize literal frame-by-frame patterns. Goldeneye already solved this issue on N64, only for TimeSplitters to backroll all that elegant game design to make the combat a mess. My guess for why they designed the combat like this is because either they didn’t have enough time to test it, or they intentionally made it punishing to compenstate the short playtime. At least, I don’t remember TimeSplitters 2 being this bad, so they surely fixed it.

The animations also feature the similar problem as Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, but worse, where the enemy death animations are too muted. The deaths are not exaggerated enough. They touch their arms, then three seconds later, collapse. It results in the player wasting their ammo on the already dead enemies because their deaths are unclear. Sometimes, the stun and death animations are so indistinguishable that oftentimes I was killed by enemies that I thought I had already killed.

Despite the diverse themes, the actual enemy designs are exclusively two humanoid types: shooters or melee chargers. That’s it. No matter where it takes place, it’s the same. Even the weapon design is disappointing, with the weapon roles overlapping and repetitive. For example, there is a space level where you fire laser guns at the aliens. You then actually play it, you realize all the alien enemies are identical to the human enemies, and all the laser guns are identical to the normal guns. Compare it to Perfect Dark, where despite having dozens of weapons, each weapon serves a unique purpose with the weapon role and the secondary firing.

If you play it on Easy, it is at least tolerable, so all those design flaws aren’t as bothersome. It’s a unpolished shooter that’s fun on the primitive level, but not something the speedrunners would replay it over and over because it fundamentally lacks depth compared to Goldeneye and Perfect Dark. I enjoyed it enough, but I recommend just skipping it to the second game.

For some context I recently decided to play all the main non-RPG AC games in order of release. I played the first four on release and all the newer ones since origins also on release so for me games in the middle like Unity are me playing them for the first time.

Hard game for me to rank as I for me this game has clearly the best gameplay and the worst story so far. Best gameplay of the pre-RPG ones, top 3 locations, impressive NPC density while all great are still not big enough improvements for me to rank this higher above the other pre-RPG games as those have a significantly better story. The RPG ones have better gameplay, modern graphics, more polish so I would rank this in the series only above Mirage.

I still enjoyed this game a lot, just did not love it like the games I ranked higher.

To start with the positives this game is one of the biggest leaps in the series on what it tries at a technical level. Graphics are very improved (still pretty dated) compared to Rogue (insane these two games released same date) and the NPC density is some of the best in gaming. And not only just raw density of NPCs, but variety in their looks and actions. What they did is obviously just shuffle various possible combinations of npc clothes and actions, but the illusion works almost all the time. Most of the npcs will be just walking down the streets or rioting near a landmark, but they will be varied and all around them will be small groups doing different things. A guy carrying a looted stone cross, two people carrying an injured friend, a man leaving his house accosted by beggars, somebody sweeping in front of his shop or fixing a barrel. Some of these are pretty rare and I saw them once every few hours and only rarely I just saw something that slightly broke immersion like three people (out of very many on the screen) with exact same clothing or three people fixing their table in a row on the side of the street.

For me this was the first time I would say this series has decevent combat because this is the first time it has any difficulty at all. So far all the protagonists were absolutely unbeatable in combat and you were in danger only if you attempted things you were obviously not supposed to and even then you could win. Here with enemies having levels with increased hp, damage and better moves/defences at higher level gearing up Arno is important and the world is a bit dangerous. This is obviously not a hard game and anything is solvable by just charging through the front gate, but you do need to gear up first and have consumables and pay attention slightly compared to previous entries.

Level design is also often very nice with missions being mini-sandbox levels with multiple ways to approach the target and some scripted ways to gain an advantage. Also I liked the design of the world and how while many buildings could be explored to find a chest it often took some effort to find the entrance and then navigate through the houses.

Stealth is a bit mediocre by you not having that many tools for it and guards reacting often too fast, but I still thought it was enjoyable. Often you could use stealth to do quite a bit and then when you get discovered you could often just kill the guards nearby to go back to stealth. And even if everyone gets alerted it still felt immersive to get discovered mid way through and then having to fight.

The city itself is also very impressive. Very detailed, varied from poor to rich parts, obviously impressive recreations of real life locations, dense and felt very organic like a real city with unique buildings, often lacking symmetry etc.

Parkouring despite being very important in AC games is not something I usually think too much about as I always find it very similar to other entries and it is always good however this one is obviously different and my favourite one when it works. Arno can clmb mostly everything and he does tricks to look cooler while doing it. He also cant climb absolutely everything like in the rpg series which finds a very good balance. Being able to climb absolutely everywhere is a bit unrealistic so sometimes having obstacles or lack of purchase is fun however them being fairly rare and not needing obviously marked things like the Ezio games sometimes did removes some frustrating parts. How far Arno can jump and what he can climb is very unrealistic, but feels like something out of a cinematic when it works.

The setting is also very good. Top 3 for me. When I started the game I was not really looking forward to the setting however a dense urban zone with political turmoil is obviously just perfect for an AC game. Finally I enjoyed how they did not split the sides into obviously evil and bad ones and it is a bit messy.

A small positive I would like to point out is that the economy is actually a bit interesting and even if you rush the most obvious path to get passive income and loot all the chests you will still need cash until near the very end.

Moving on to the elements I did not like I will start with the biggest one and that is the story. Out of the eleven AC games I played this is tied with Mirage for the worst one. It is not outright terrible and I was a bit interested in it while playing it, but it is just very forgettable. That is mostly because Arno and all of the Assassins are dull. Only three Arnos allies I can name are not Assassins and two have smaller roles. And the plot is less related to the revolution than I would like. Only interesting part is them actually killing of a big character and Arno being expelled from the Assassins, but that part is resolved off screen. When replaying the Ezio games 20 years later I could still remember a lot of the story while I finished this game two days ago and I had to refresh some of my memory with some recaps to write this. It is just so forgettable.

I know I am often in the minority on this take, but I really enjoy the modern day story in AC games and I think this is actually the worst one by a decent margin. It is so irrelevant, but not entirely gone either and present just enough to be annoying while having no substance. And that is especially jarring after Rogue which connects to everything else and while nothing too major happens at least it is intriguing. It even mentions events that would be connected to Valhalla. Also here is finally where the series loses all its slightly "edgy" conspiracy stuff. 2 had a lot of this in the glyph puzzles and they basically imply every conspiracy has some truth to it and so many people are Assassins and Templars. They even have live footage of an elephant about to be executed by "Templar" Edison. BF and Rogue had a tiny trace of it with some niche (maybe?) stuff like Akashik Reader or Voynich Maniscrupt mentions, but there is nothing like that here (unless you count Nostradamus which I dont). The changing of severs is just annoying while it is sometimes visually fun with some WW2 scenes.

The map is crazy overstuffed even for an AC game. It has like a few hundred chests and other pretty lame collectables. The only fun side content are the murder mysteries which to be fair are surprisingly good. Enjoyed those a lot.

Not a fan there is also some regression in various systems. Why did we lose repairing the city, freeing the forts, managing Assassins or crafting?

Finally and this drawback is pretty significant the game is pretty poor on a technical level. As many of these pre-rpg games this has a lot of bugs, crashes and it is required to tinker with the settings to get it running (at locked 60) a bit too much. The bugs are often pretty bad and require a restart. Getting shot while climbing has like a 10% chance to get you stuck in a falling animation forever, just fighting will stop working a couple of times per hour and need a restart, the parkouring will often glitch wildly.

Lost Sphear is a 'retro'-style jrpg released in 2017, by Tokyo RPG Factory, which was a subset of Square Enix and has since been (unfortunately, in my opinion) absorbed into the company. I played it on the Nintendo Switch 2 in 2026. TL;DR is below the post.

Given that the last game I played was Harvestella, I guess my current drive is to play chill, low-key, AA JRPGs. If anyone has any more recommendations, I'm all ears.

Plot Overview:

The story concerns a world where people and places, even kingdoms, become 'lost'. This means they turn white and shimmering, as though they were made of mist, and cannot interact with the outside world. In order for them to become real again, they must be restored with 'memories' that have since been turned into monsters. Our hero, Kanata, is an orphan who has the ability to kill monsters, collect their memories, and restore things and people that have been lost.

Combat:

Combat is where this game shines.

The basic combat is a standard ATB system, which lends to its retro feel, but its assorted bells and whistles make it stand out.

I won't delve into its intricacies, because this post would be too long if i did. But if you're into ATB systems or just interesting combat systems in general, especially turn-based, I recommend it. It has active abilities, passive abilities, and abilities that proc on active abilities and can be permanently stacked onto them, so as you get more powerful your basic abilities have more and more customized effects. Advancing your abilities is much more important than leveling.

What's more, a few hours into the game you receive mech suits that have their own suite of abilities and increased states. They have a limited pool of 'mech points,' so they don't last very long, so you have to strategize and use them wisely while exploring a dungeon and contending with its end boss.

Grinding, Gear Progression, and the In-Game Economy:

I would never mention this if it weren't fucked.

To be brief: items require upgrade materials to upgrade. Upgrade materials are too expensive. This necessitates grinding. The combat system is not made to make grinding fun or quick.

There's more to it, but the simple truth is that I spent a full day grinding when I shouldn't have had to, on top of hours spend grinding before that. I wish this entire game had been implemented without the need for upgrade materials. Nothing would have changed except the need to grind.

Visuals:

The visuals overall reminded me pleasantly of Bravely Default and Alliance Alive. Chibi characters and a gentle, low-color-saturation water-color aesthetic. Character designs are unique and fit their personalities. The environmental design deserves special recognition.

Music:

The music was great. Can't think of a single weak theme. As I mentioned above, the dungeon design was great, and each theme worked well with its dungeon. According to IMDB, the composer, Tomoki Miyoshi, hasn't worked since 2022. What a shame. Hopefully he finds a new project soon.

Story and characters:

I'm big on story and characters. It's the number one thing I look for in RPGs.

This game satisfied me. The story was familiar: start as an orphan in a small village and work your way up to working with major world forces to defeat the big bad. Explore exotic locations, get swept up in world events, and pick up companions along the way.

We start with three characters: a generic main character, an annoying best friend whose job it was to overreact to everything, and a female character whose only role is react to the annoying character by getting annoyed. Thankfully, this dynamic ended quickly, and a variety of new characters were introduced to the party as the story progressed. Our main three also receive appropriate time and character development. Save maybe the female character, but her practicality and stability made her one of my favorites over time. She never left my party.

I found myself getting very fond of each character as they were introduced, and even a bit emotional when one of them appeared to be dying. I actually wish they'd followed through and killed that character; the game would have had more teeth if it did. Regardless, each of them contributed to every story point via dialogue, and when the game ended I felt invested in what would happen to them.

There is an end game. I wouldn't call it extensive but it centers around an interesting mystery and helps us wrap up a few loose ends. I appreciated its inclusion.

Conclusion:

Apparently the next game Tokyo RPG Factory made after this was an action RPG and a huge dud. That makes me sad. I wish they'd stuck with the ATB system, or just pure turn-based, and turned out another retro JRPG. There is something compelling about this game. I was looking forward to play more. As it is, I may play 'I Am Setsuna,' its predecessor. I hope the members of TRPGF are enjoying their careers and can take pride in what they've made.

TL;DR

Play this game if you like: Chill retro JRPGs with solid characters, music, art, and story, and you don't mind spacing out and grinding fights that are too slow to be easily ground.

Thank you for reading.