It's hard to objectively review this as the original game is among my all-time favorite games. When I played that game and what it meant as a budding horror fan is irreplaceable. Navigating the Ishimura was one of the most terrifying and exhilarating experiences I've had. Motive's remake adds a lot of gamechanging QoL features as well as an interesting re-interpretation of Visceral's level design and story, as well as creature design. I enjoy the small things like adding the Zero-G movement and Kinesis offensive abilities from Dead Space 2. Some things I like less, such as the less brutal stomp and overall less aggressive ways in which characters are dispatched. There's also a more defined loneliness and isolation in the original game which comes with Isaac's silence. I didn't mind him speaking and showing emotion in this reinterpretation but it is a different experience. This all of course leads to the elephant in the room...

The sabotage of Visceral is among the worst of EA's crimes. A passionate studio making cutting edge, adult-oriented games before being thrown to the wolves with Dead Space 3 and finally put down with Battlefield: Hardline. The success of this remake entirely hinges upon the work Visceral did with what I believe to be a timeless game. Outside that game being unavailable on new platforms, specifically Playstation consoles, I must say it's still the definitive and nastier game.

"Dragon Kick your ass into the Milky Way!"

Pure action, physicality, and hand-to-hand obliteration. The feeling you get when you perfectly line up your tailor-made combo, juggling an enemy into the air only to hit them with a high kick and send them flying is pure elation. By the end of the game on my 10th attempt at the final boss I was expertly avoiding moves and getting jabs in to perfectly execute Double Shaolin, moving into God Hand mode right into pummel. It's honestly everything you could ask from a game and more. Absolutely brilliant.

I only have a couple complaints for what is otherwise, in my mind, a perfect game. It has me aching for more like it, games where I really get to play a detective. I think the magic pocket watch is such a brilliant idea, allowing you to witness the moment of someone's death, because otherwise a game like this can't exist. It's always giving you just enough to keep your mind running. Total cohesion of narrative and gameplay. The way this thing unfolds is just brilliant, filling in the gaps with your imagination while the game consistently destroys your expectations.

My minor complaints are that I think you should be able to access someone's moment of death from the book. It gets a little tedious having to remember where someone's body is so you can re-live that death again to catch another clue. The other is that some of the fates are straight up a guessing game, but I think that's kind of realistic. There are few of these so you don't have to do much guessing. I just wanted to be able to know exactly what happened to someone if I could help it.

Don't want to give anything away, this was just an absolute treat. I loved every second of it and hope I get to have another experience like it again.

Teyon has once again crafted the best piece of media of a beloved classic in decades, even since the original film. This is a densely crafted, brutal first person shooter that puts you into the role of the big man himself in a way that feels earned. You feel like an unstoppable force, but are always on the edge of survival as you mow down dozens of creeps at a time.

The gameplay is a miracle, distilling the essence of the visual tactility and density of the first film. It feels very akin to FEAR which is the biggest compliment I could give it. Every piece of the environment explodes with each shot, melons pop and viscera splatters across every inch of space. You grab dudes off of motorcycles as they pass you then throw their ragdoll body 50 feet, then pick up the bike itself and chuck it at the next goon, creating beautifully emergent moments enveloped in flame. I finished the game in what felt like a very brief 15 hours and I loved pretty much every second.

My main gripes come from enemy variety, some frustrating boss fights, and same-y environments and level design. That aside this is one of the best games of the year and I can't wait to see what Teyon does next.

A mind-bending metatextual noir and folk horror pulp novel wrapped up into a pseudo-survival horror package. Fantastic, the presentation is second to none. I've gotten a bit tired of style focused on realism, but Remedy are always making it necessary. The textural detail is livened greatly by the best HDR and raytracing implementation I've seen.

I think the narrative could use some tightening, pulling the game together more cohesively, but it is a fascinating story. It lets you be lost a bit, grasping at threads, and never really fully ties it up cleanly. Saga is a very welcomed addition, it allows the game to breathe between two worlds and helps to make each new section feel more fresh. The way the story wrestles with the suffering of characters created by a fiction out of their control, one they are forced into, is tense and raw. I've seen Silent Hill 2 named a few times in reference to what this has brought to the medium and while I disagree, I still think this is an extraordinary entry in horror and the medium. Remedy, blending narrative, live-action, liminal thresholds, and meta-fiction continue to bring one-of-a-kind experiences.

What dreadful melancholy. It's rare I play a game that makes me feel this morose. Maybe not since Silent Hill 2 has a game just made me feel like stomped shit. What begins as "Can I escape this planet?" slowly, and even agonizingly, becomes "Can I escape myself?" I don't want to get into spoilers, but this is simply not what it seems on the surface and is one of the most thematically rending games I've ever played. There's a method to this looping madness.

To gameplay itself: just excellent. I was worried about playing this on PS5 with a controller rather than PC where my skills are much better with a keyboard and mouse, but Housemarque perfectly tuned the style to controller. The dualsense feels perfect, the use of the adaptive trigger to switch to alt-fire is just brilliant really and the best I've seen any developer use the tech. Sometimes you get absolutely stomped, pelted by a million bullets. But other times you rip and tear these levels to pieces with your sword and weaponry. It feels intensely satisfying to stomp those early levels that gave you trouble.

I don't really have criticisms outside the clear positive feedback loop that comes from most roguelites. It's hard to knock the endless loop as "playing the same thing over and over" because of how in-tune this is thematically with the game. What a breath of fresh air, what a pleasant surprise, what a god damn nightmare.

I should start by saying I have never played Quake II before and have no ties to that original release, so unfortunately much of the improvements or lack thereof are likely lost on me with this shiny new remaster from Nightdive.

I played and adored the remaster of Quake in 2021. A distinctly 90s package that managed to feel refreshing over 20 years later, offering an approach long abandoned by first person shooters. Now, 2 years later, Nightdive releases their overhaul of Quake II and it is magnificent. A more fast-paced, objective based run-and-gun that feels less scaffolded off it's predecessor and more like a new vision of Quake.

Gone are the dull-grey castle structures, knights in armor, Shamblers, and dark ambient tracks of NIN. There are minor 3D cutscenes and a narrative through-line as you blast your way across Strogg territory. It is up to you and you alone to strike at the heart of the alien enemy. The levels are more varied and larger, going between maps often to complete objectives. The levels transition between interiors and exteriors, always elegant and logical. I especially enjoyed the many skyboxes of the exterior environments. You will meet the sorry souls captured by the Strogg, watch them be decompressed or liquified by their machines. They cry with madness and pain until you either run past them or put them out of their misery. The narrative is simple and doesn't get in the way, but it makes you feel like you're fighting for something and that you've accomplished an important misson when reaching the finale.

The combat itself isn't all that different from Quake. You are given 8 different weapons ranging from your projectile-based pistol, to the BFG, and of course the super shotgun. The enemies are deadly, you can't stop moving or you're done for. I used the super shotty most of the time naturally, turning much of the enemies into bloody gibs every 1 to 3 shots. Some of the bigger bads can take up to 8 missiles. You'll do a lot of enemy managing, taking out the smaller targets first. Occasionally the enemies will friendly fire and they will turn on each other, giving you a temporary ally or distraction.

A fantastic game that looks incredible and has punchy, quick combat. The enemy designs are varied and nasty. All of the Strogg look like they need to be put in the dirt, miserable messes of flesh and steel. The Flyers in particular are an insane design. I can't wait to play all the other campaigns included, especially MachineGames inclusion CALL OF THE MACHINE. I loved their inclusion on the Quake remaster. They really push the engine into new and interesting territories, often appearing much more impressive than anything in the base game.

Hacker. Pawn. God. Insect.

The defining immersive sim re-tooled, rebuilt, revitalized, and streamlined. I should preface with the fact that I have not played the original game, nor have I played Night Dive's previous remastered enhanced edition of it, and thus went into this remake with only the knowledge of System Shock's prolific influence, I have played plenty of games it influenced. Night Dive's remake is the best looking, sounding, and feeling game I have played this year.

The game opens with a simple but effective drone shot through an unnamed cyberpunk city in the year 2072 that immediately steeps you in the game's atmosphere. It is a game about atmosphere more than anything. You play as an unnamed hacker hired by Edward Diego of the TriOptimum Corporation after you're caught stealing files on the corp's Citadel Station, specifically a military grade implant. In return for your services removing the onboard A.I.'s ethical restraints all charges will be dropped and you'll receive the fancy implant you discovered. You hack into SHODAN, removing her ethical restraints as per Diego's request and you're knocked out. The fancy implant is installed and you go into a deep coma to heal up. You awaken 6 months later and the station has gone to total hell under SHODAN. Here the game really begins and you've got all the handholding you'll receive for the rest of the game.

Moment to moment gameplay is like being a rat in a maze, which you'll later find was one of many experiments TriOptimum conducted on its unknowing employees, a series of hostile hallways that constantly keeps them, and now you, on their toes. You won't receive a map showing a whole level's structure, instead creating the map as you explore. The game hands you nothing. Finding a weapon isn't an event, if you missed one earlier there's sure to be another one ahead, but you could possibly miss every iteration of a weapon. Enemies don't drop them, only broken ones you can shove into a recycler to make some coin from. If you're like me you'll end up filling your relatively small gridded inventory with all manner of trash just so you can haul it to the recycler. You'll only receive two minor upgrades to your inventory, so you'll have to pick and choose what you carry. There's a small stash box, but it can fit two weapons maximum and there are about 8 different weapons on Citadel Station.

Aside from exploration, the two other sections of gameplay are combat and puzzles. Combat is tense, with quick battles either defining you the victor or finding yourself being rebuilt by one of the station's cyborg units. If you haven't found a cyborg unit then you're greeted with a harrowing game over screen where your barely breathing body is picked up by one of SHODAN's Cortex Reavers and your body is repurposed for her army. These encounters always have you thinking on your feet and while mostly serviceable as far as combat goes is still satisfying, the sound design doing wonders. All the weapons have tangible feedback and splitting a cyborg in two with a well-aimed, high powered sparqbeam shot never gets old. You have an energy meter that is constantly pulled between use on your shields, energy weapons, or speed boots. You are constantly managing this system, but luckily each level has at least one electrical pylon to fully restore your power. Using weapons such as the laser rapier or the early game sparqbeam, with 3 power settings, drains power. There are also portable batteries you can use to replenish this. Other weapons are kinetic. Magnum, assault rifle, or even a railgun. These help balance the energy system so that you're never left without weapons to fight with. If you'd like you can keep the opening game pipe and never worry about management at all, although I'd recommend at least finding the hidden wrench.

To fully navigate each level you'll find yourself at terminals that open up doors or force fields throughout the game. These are small logic puzzles that are a lot of fun and never get old. You'll also likely find a few logic probes that can bypass them entirely if you don't want to engage with them. The two main puzzles are an energy bar where you have to set the right paths of power to a precise energy read. Honestly, I was really bad at this one and started logic probing them in the back half. They're interesting and get you thinking, but it was too easy to bypass after the last enemy I killed dropped a probe. The second and one I did every time is an end to end connection where you have a grid of turnable pipes that you'd line up to connect two points. Its incredibly gratifying to see that light travel from point to point and get hit with the green light and closure of the terminal. Lastly is the revamped cyberspace sequences. Not a lot to write about here, but it's a notable upgrade and also visually dazzling. These sections are short and it's just neat to give you some visualization of a digital space within a digital space.

System Shock has my favorite kind of video game narrative which is when it stays out of your way unless you seek it. It mostly circumvents the musings on A.I. and poses SHODAN just as a straight up all-powerful cyber entity fueled solely by human hubris. It is an artistic embellishment of the lengths corporations will go for profit, proving that the issues we face today are the same ones faced upon the original game's release in 1994. Its story is mostly told through its environment and the many audio logs and data sticks. These two items are actually vital to progression. The game does not tell you where to go or what to do, you must seek out your own path given context clues. Someone in an audio log will mention a sector or a room where you can find an item, some give parts of codes, and some more importantly detail the process for preventing annihilation. You will find yourself with a pen and paper at least once during your play, which I think is beautiful. You always have a clear understanding of progression, a literal map of levels as you ascend to each one, but the game expects you to check on your own progression.

Night Dive's System Shock remake is more than a stunning coat of paint on a classic. It's main focus is not to create an entirely different game based on a possibly poorly aged one, but to bring 1990's game design to the present which I can see as a point of contention, but it's something that started as endearment and became profound joy in my time with the game. I feel often that contemporary video games are so afraid the player will become confused for even a moment that they'll practically play themselves. System Shock is a completely hands-off experience that respects player intelligence. As I was minutes from reaching the Bridge and final showdown, I found myself wishing this game would never end. It's my favorite new game I've played in years, and is one I will be playing many times over. Looking forward to Night Dive's remaster of System Shock 2.

What begins as insurmountable odds, fighting against the controls and difficulty with sparse saves, eventually gives way to a satisfying and almost addictive metroidvania adventure. The island feels massive at first, you wonder how you will ever survive it, but then you find a slightly better sword, maybe pick up a piece of magic, and then the rest of the game snowballs until you are bowling over every enemy.

The only things that really hold it back from being great for me are the too-similar environments and a frankly near-impossible penultimate boss fight that I can really only see defeating by cheesing. The whole game has a claustrophobic and elegiac look that seeps in over time, and when you do find yourself outside under the stars it feels like a real fresh breath of air. You will run into other people here and there who feel so trapped in this world, it can be haunting just how hopeless it feels. The score does a lot of lifting and perfectly matches the visuals and style. A pretty fantastic game overall and is the kind that I'd really like to see a fresh perspective on if From were to ever return to this series. A remake could do wonders.

As a huge fan of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter and even Turok 2: Seeds of Evil, I came into Shadow of Oblivion knowing it likely wouldn't quite live up to those games and I was mostly right but I think it still has a couple surprises. I had never played this on N64 like the first two entries. I'd considered emulating it a few times but it just never happened. Nightdive did incredible work bringing them to modern hardware and I'd hoped they'd finally do this so I could play it, and they did!

First thing is that the game is insanely short. It released 2 years after Half Life, and its influence is all over this game. The first two are relatively loose games structurally, especially the first which is almost all full on run-and-gun. This has more in common with 2, with more structured levels/sections but rather than giving you the area with a couple objectives it is a more linear narrative experience that you simply go end-to-end in. I prefer that structure to 2's, but 2 has a much stronger presence in its settings and its atmosphere and weaponry is unrivaled.

The biggest surprise, which is both good and bad, is the length. My first fully fresh playthrough took about 3 hours on the dot. It is a very brisk game, each section taking about 30-45 minutes. It keeps the game fresh, but all the sudden you realize you're at the end. I don't care at all about the narrative and it's pretty non-existent outside cutscenes anyway. Narrative cutscenes in a Turok game is odd. I like when a game doesn't waste my time, but I was hoping I'd get to see a bit more and this game doesn't show you much more than you've seen from the series before outside its opening section. You straight up revisit the opening level of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter.

I played Danielle for my first playthrough. She has a more hard-hitting loadout and I had a good time using the rocket launcher, flame shotgun, and grapple. Since it only took me 3 hours in a sitting...I immediately started over as Joseph on Hard difficulty. I think Hard should be the default way to play this game, it's very forgiving. Also, just going as fast as you can. This playthrough took 2 hours and I had a lot more fun this go round. The sniper rifle, possession bore, and napalm launcher are just a lot of fun. The night vision is a gimmick but the effect looks really cool. I think the auto-lock feature is a bit strange, but I know Night Dive typically prefers to keep the game just as you remember it and that feature was certainly needed on N64 but not here anymore.

I waited this long to play what I thought would likely be the last good Turok game I ever play, and I'm glad I mostly enjoyed it even if I'm a bit disappointed it doesn't touch the first two games and if it's so short that it left me hoping for more. The gunplay is just as fantastic, as are the creatures and gore. The bosses are very lackluster though. Very glad they got this one up to 120fps, the first two remasters cap at 60.

Edit: Played through 3 more times and as they added two secret playthroughs after Danielle and Joseph: Joshua and Raptor. Joshua is the ideal way to play, can just have total freedom with all the arsenal. Raptor is a fun gimmick playthrough, although the bosses are not at all made to be fought with melee. That said you move super fast and that playthrough clocked in at just over an hour. Mastered the game, 15 hours total logged. Fun game!