Just rolled credits. I usually like to yap a lot with my reviews but I really don't want to spoil anything so I have to keep it a bit vague and short-ish.

This game is just a constant stream of mind-blowing discoveries. Every little nook and cranny that I stumbled upon is just so satisfying. And the same goes for every calculated thought/plan that worked.

The level design overall is absolutely impeccable, I never felt so enthralled in exploring every orifice of the game's world. And it's not just because of the highly varied and consistently top notch puzzles, even the moment-to-moment platforming sections just felt great. Not to mention the mysterious atmosphere that the game's beautiful art style bolsters. Easily one of the, if not the, best pixel art style I've ever seen.

And I have to gush a bit about all the tools you get along the way. Everytime I get a new one I always thought "oh my god this is game changing!", and I'm immediately thinking of areas where it would be useful. That's a good tell of how in sync the item designs are with the level design.

What Animal Well has done is not exactly unique, but the way it approaches its concepts feels so fresh, and it creates this sense of grandeur by condensing it all into an absurdly tight and dense package. The game never misses. It is easily the best game of its ilk, and my favorite game this gen so far.

I still have a ton of secrets to figure out, so I'll do just that. Who knows, it could be a 20 outta 10 game by the time I get the plat.

P.S. Rolled credits for the 2nd time and got the plat, doubled my play time from when I wrote this review first haha (12 hours to 26 hours). Collecting all the eggs was incredibly fun. Very interesting and inventive puzzle designs overall. But I have tasted a bit of the so called "3rd layer puzzles" and they're quite unhinged, haha. This game just keeps on giving. Shout out to the folks at the official AW discord for helping with everything after the 15 hour mark, my brain power wasn't enough to keep up. Also, the last 12-13 hours were in one sitting, and considering I get so easily tired these days, that just speaks to how good the game is. Haven't been enjoying a game to this level since 2020.

Adding to the list of quality Metroidvanias lately, Animal Well is a largely vague game about a blob creature (?) that explores an atmospheric labyrinth with many secrets to find. There’s no combat save for avoiding occasional enemies and mainly focused on figuring out how to progress using the items you find throughout. The level design and platforming puzzles were well done and made clever use of all the mechanics, though were still straightforward enough that I wasn’t stuck on much for very long. The pixel art is really great too

Reaching credits took about 8 hours for me, but this also appears to be a game with a lot of hidden depth to it going off reviews and how much unexplained stuff I can still find (similar to Tunic it seems). Curious to see how much more you can get out of its postgame, but for the main content alone it’s well worth it

George Stobbart, the only likeable American tourist that has ever set foot in Europe.

If you do not love this game, you do not love life. I have nothing more to say. Truly the bedrock of why I still to this day adore adventure games.

Note* It is an abomination that the 1996 release is not available under its title in most countries 'Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars'.

I really, really wanted to enjoy Harold Halibut more than I did. Harold, our protagonist, is a fish out of water: an autistic-coded janitor slash jack-of-all-trades, whose daily grind involves doing various tasks for the mostly warm but slightly stuck up crew of scientists and venture capitalists aboard the marooned spaceship, The Fedora. The game is underwater, so there's the expected Bioshock-esque critique of capitalism run riot, presented with a more dry, wry sense of humor. The game makes a strong first impression, with several mysteries piling up alongside the slow reveal of this artful, beautiful world. I particularly loved how you get around on The Fedora via a salmon cannon that shoots the people from hub to hub (for a nominal fee).

And, c'mon, the art! I know it's not the most technical game running under the hood, but this game is a sight to behold. Each interior is handcrafted and rich with detail, but then digitalized and animated so that the puppetry has no strings. Even though the gameplay is light, I found myself mashing the trigger on the controller to zoom into each interior and soak in as much of the ambiance as I could. The soundtrack, too, is subtle but evocative, fading in and out when the player enters certain locations. Tremendous stuff.

During its introductory moments, I thought this game might be another Night in the Woods-esque narrative game, one that took a story and set it across many days so that you could build relationships and be rewarded for meandering from the main task routes at every turn. And, for a while, it was. I would get invited to dinner by the former pilot, or pore over love letters from decades past with the postman. And each character, lovingly designed and voice acted, always had something to say about life's meaning, or the dulling effect of daily jobs (and the threat of debtor's prison) in an alien, water-logged world.

But my return visits to the various wings of The Fedora yielded less and less surprise, or even change, as the days went on. By midgame, Harold had stumbled upon a seemingly huge reveal, with widespread implications for him, his shipmates--maybe even the human race--yet our daily tasks consisted of slow runs to the pharmacy with almost no diversity of content. It felt like we were being forced to play out an extended montage, a pain that only sharpened once the weeklong scenario ended with a literal montage.

Repetition in videogames is part of the act, of course. It can be gameplay, the ritualistic dance of combat that break up FPS campaigns, or the return trips of roguelites that build repetitiveness into their DNA as a means of player progression. But Harold Halibut seems to say: God, isn't capitalist bureaucracy boring and awful?" Yes, it is. And it's especially boring and awful when it's hammered home in a world as lush and gorgeous as Harold Halibut.

There is a payoff, and the narrative eventually does get going. But the jarring pace and tonal shifts never really go away.

I'm glad this game exists. And it's clear that there's a huge amount of work that's gone into this game and realizing its vision. Unfortunately, Harold Halibut isn't able to successfully navigate the choppy waters separating sincerity and comedy, and ends up splitting the two in a way that challenged me to go on.

In the end, Harold Halibut is way more niche than you might expect. Its messages on capitalism, and humanity's tendency toward resource drain even in the face of calamity, are all vital and integrated well into the story. I just wish the game, like its main character, was a little more self-assured.

This game is full of SOUL.

+ Stellar art direction
+ Stellar vibes
+ Stellar combat
+ Stellar Bosses
+ Stellar Soundtrack
+ Stellar presentation
+ Stellar performance and optimization
+ Fun dress up game tbh
+ Puzzle Variety
+ Rule of Cool the whole way through

- Fairly mediocre storytelling and characters, but the actual world and story is still cool in concept.
- One of the final boss options is pretty lame compared to the other, its also the only boss in the game that felt slightly buggy. Kinda weird. The other boss is SUUUUPER rad though.

This is like Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, if Jeanne met Cthulhu at the end.

For how amusing the concept is, no amount of metacommentary about housewife drudgery and repetition can cancel the fact they made an agonizingly repetitive game, even when just half an hour long, and the broken physics and Unreal Engine 4 control glitches do not help. Just one more house chore in the rotation (like laundry) would have done the variety a world of good, while still maintaining the themes unaltered.

Still worth playing for what it is.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is truly a marvelous achievement, as is the ambitious project it belongs to. The already great cast feels better than ever before and the enormous world is full of unique and fun activities. The story is excellent with many high points, and while the finale is inconclusive, it gives a lot of food for thought regarding the next game. I believe that despite some minor faults, this is the pinnacle of an open-world, character-driven JRPG, and a truly enjoyable game, with a great OST to boot. Even if someone wasn’t a fan of FFVII Remake, I think this game does a very good job addressing some of its issues. It took me around 130 hours to finish the first playthrough and complete its side content. Highly recommended to fans of an action-packed game or an epic story and to those who love mini-games.

The full review can be read here!

This is a complicated review to write at the ass-end of a binge of every Remedy game I could lay my hands on. Alan Wake II would have been better as an introduction to the Remedy-verse rather than a finale (ewwww, 'Remedy Connected Universe'. Makes me gag just to type it). You go through a fun-house enough times and you know what to expect, even if it is shinier and newer each time the carnival comes to town.

Quantum Break is when this studio showed their hand and admitted that they would probably rather make TV shows than video games. They likely took a few lessons from that experience and got less literal about it in subsequent work, but Control and Alan Wake II still adopt most from that medium and it's clear that the rhythms and paces of the last decade of 'Peak TV' are what inspire and motivate Sam Lake and Co. the most.

I guess that's what I find kind of tasty about the Twin Peaks and True Detective influences: This game takes a lot from those worlds in terms of setting, style, and tropes. But where those shows, especially The Return, defiantly ravaged audience expectations of what TV could/should deliver, Wake instead wallows in the worst tendencies of a Netflix sci-fi show: meta-textual gobbledegook, cut-to-commercial pacing without the commercials, 'world building' as a means to keep the show going on and on, into syndication, forever and ever. And of course, the worst: scenes and set-pieces seemingly lab-grown as chum for the social media waters. This is probably best exemplified by the meme-able musical theater number that launched a thousand Polygon articles.

That's not to say that it's poorly executed, quite the opposite; this could be in the running for the best art direction ever in video gaming. So when faced with the choice of playing more Wake vs. watching one of the second-rate seasons of True Detective it mostly resembles, I'd probably still pick the game! The FMV-fronted effects they do here and in Control never get old, and I think this is one of the few games whose fidelity and beauty made me feel like I'm not a complete piece of shit for buying an Xbox Series X. Survival horror gameplay was also a killer call for this setting, though it was bold to basically copy/paste what Capcom has been doing with RE of late.

I think Remedy has the talent and capabilities to make the bat-shit, weird, audience and shareholder-unfriendly AAA game of my dreams, but their ongoing success, and the fact that, well, the AAA industry exists as it does, means that such a game can only ever exist in my Mind Place.