(I only played a handful of hours, so, y'know, grain of salt for all the rest of this)

While I think there's a lot of interesting lore in the background here, the game itself wasn't doing much to actually keep me interested in what was going on. The characters weren't particularly endearing, the factions weren't interesting or fun to be around, and the bit of the setting I saw didn't do much for me either.

I also had this problem where it felt like the game was expecting me to have fully read the in-game encyclopedia. I'd have conversations and things would be referenced in a way that they weren't directly explained but in most games I'd be able to figure out what's going on via context clues but Tyranny didn't seem to do that nearly as often as it should. And while playing a CRPG is agreeing to a certain amount of reading massive blocks of text, making me feel like I needed to read reams of text before I could really do anything felt like too bit an ask.

Also, as far as I got, this game's idea of 'evil' seems very... boring. This game is supposed to be about being evil and yet seemingly every choice the game asked me to make was "will you kill this group of people or enslave them?" and after the twelfth time of making that exact choice it just gets boring. There is such a wide swathe of opportunity for what 'evil' can be, especially in a fantasy setting, and yet this game seems to be very stuck on this one specific idea of being evil.

Nothing I encountered was very compelling and the mechanics of the game didn't seem to be doing anything interesting enough to keep me engaged on that front either. Maybe I'll give this another shot some day but it seems pretty unlikely.

Fallout is a very interesting game but, in the modern day, it is mostly interesting in the way it is remembered (or, rather, mis-remembered).

People talk about how satirical it is but it really isn't. It has occasional comedy to it, mostly in the form of irreverence, but it never quite has anything to say about what it's joking about. It just is what it is.

The other major thing people like to tout is that it's anti-nukes but it really isn't. It doesn't really have anything to say at all. At the very end, there's even an option for you to set off a nuke and it's not even treated as a bad thing, just as a different way to achieve your goal.

With old games like this, I think there's always a question of 'is this worth going back to' and I think that for Fallout 1 it's a firm 'No'. Mechanically it's very rough. Exploring the world feels tedious and the combat is a bit like trudging through mud. While the writing has its moments, it is extremely uneven with most of it landing in the 'mediocre-to-bad' range. And I've never found the general Fallout setting or lore to be particularly intriguing so this game didn't have much to go back to for me, but that's a much more personal thing than the rest of this.

It's a game of the past and I think that it should be left there. While I think there's some valid arguments to be made that it's a historically important game, I'm not sure I'd fully agree with any of that. Other games were more important and influential in just about every way and this game only feels notable because of the Bethesda RPGs that came later in the franchise. If it weren't for those, I think it'd mostly be remembered as this odd little thing that came and went.

A beautiful game about anxiety, trauma, family, loss, and moving on. The art has a lovely if occasionally grotesque style to it that was always exciting to see what the game would show me next. The writing was moving and struck a good balance of leaving things for you to fill in some blanks but also being blatant and telling you what you need to hear when you need to hear it. It never once felt like it was clumsy or being too mysterious and I really appreciate that.

The platforming is pretty simple but I think that serves the game's goals well. The puzzle solving is similarly simple but, once again, I think that's for the best. If either of those aspects were too difficult it would just make the game a slog to get through and no one would want that.

It does drag a bit in the middle but for a game that's only five hours long what that amounts to is a 30-ish minute section in the middle somewhere that should've been 15 or 20 so overall that's a pretty minor complaint.

I love Mo and I want her to be happy.

My favorite moment in A Way Out is when you come across a small playground and, if both players interact with it at the same time, Leo and Vincent will sit down on the swing set together, stare into each others' eyes, and then blame the other for their own odd choice to sit down on a child's plaything. It combines the silly or absurd type of interactions that a video game allows with the game's strong characterization. Both Leo and Vincent are the sort of guy who might randomly sit down on a swing set for a moment but they'd never admit to it.

A Way Out is a game about moments like that. Strange interactions that are full of character depth that is conveyed in only a few seconds. They look at a plant and Vincent thinks it's nice while Leo wonders if it's edible. They see a chicken and Vincent tries to pet it while Leo tosses it in the air to make it "fly". Sure, they're on the run after breaking out of prison but of course they'll take the time to slow down and play darts or horseshoes together. If the entire game had managed to be moments like that interrupted by non-traditional action sequences like taking a boat down some rough rapids then I'd feel much better about this game overall. Unfortunately, the game is interested in playing around with a lot more than what it's actually good at.

The beginning of the game is simultaneously a boring slog with very little freedom to explore or play around and also a rushed series of events to get the characters out of prison. It leans heavily into the player's suspension of disbelief to connect one dot to the next. Don't ask too many questions about how they figured any of this plan out or why any of this works the way it does. Just nod your head and go along with it. Then, at the end of the game, it turns into, at best, and extremely mediocre cover shooter. The things the game is good at are completely stripped away in order to have climactic action to finish off the story.

But that middle part? When you've escaped prison and are working your way towards the climactic end? That's that good shit. Play a banjo. Pet a cow. Help a woman find her cheating husband. Watch the moon landing. Play an arcade game. The game fills an area with life and detail in a way not many other games do and does a great job of having these two knuckleheads poke and prod at the world in ways that are both the player doing video game nonsense but also believable for who these guys are.

But everything that's good has to come to an end. It's truly unfortunate that it comes to end via a bad shooting section followed by two chase sequences and then a second, worse, shooting section. What makes it even worse is how the game ends. One option is a pretty disappointing ending and the other is less disappointing and more satisfying but still not great. I'm not sure there was a really good or interesting way to finish off what this game was doing since it had been an extremely tropey and predictable 70's crime thriller up to this point but I wish it had gone for just about anything else than what it did.

The game desperately wants to be taken seriously but its schlocky pulp action that really should only be taken seriously enough to follow the story and laugh at the silliness of it all. Trying to be more serious than that is to the story's detriment and only leads to disappointment.

I did, however, have more fun with this game than I could ever possibly have watching the Oscars. So fair play to Josef Fares: fuck the Oscars.

Very fun little game. Striking visuals, great soundtrack, and fun puzzles. It never got too difficult but never felt too easy, which can be a very tricky thing to balance with puzzle games. One note though, is that it recommends playing on a controller and I'd strongly second that. Keyboard controls are serviceable but controller feels significantly better.

The New Game + playthrough is an interesting thing for a puzzle game to have but because most of the puzzle elements of the game are seeing an spot and trying to figure out how to get there, they're able to move the orbs around and make sort-of remixes of the puzzles without having to alter level geometry at all. I think some of the orbs have been moved to silly positions (like hiding them in a bush so you can't see it at all) but for the most part it's a fun addition if you want to play the game for another hour or so.

I really liked what I was able to play of Epistory - it's practically my platonic ideal for what a typing game should be. But I have one problem with it that ends up being a pretty big, game-breaking, issue. This game has an egregious amount of screenshake. Everytime you type a letter, everytime you finish a word, just about everything you do causes screenshake and there's no way to disable it. I don't usually get motion sickness from games but this is one of the few examples that made me dizzy to the point of not being able to play it.

There are plenty of things I really like about this game: the art and character design is adorable, it's fun to talk to and text all the different characters, the side quests are very charming, the setting is interesting and intriguing, and the writing in general is pretty solid.

But oh my god the match-3 combat is atrocious. It saps all the fun out of the game. It's not fun to do and there's kind of a lot of it, considering how short the game is. You get caught up on enemies, trying to move sigils around fizzles way too often, if you're too close to the end of a tile is the same as not being on the tile at all, it occasionally won't use all the sigils in a combo for no discernible reason. It's extremely frustrating to deal with. Luckily, there is an option in the menu to turn on invincibility; despite how much I love the other parts of the game I nearly quit playing over how un-fun the combat is.

Good god, am I glad this game got remade.

I don't really have much new or interesting to say about it: the story is great, Kiryu is a treasure, Haruka is an angel, the combat is rough, the English dub is endearing but not necessarily good.

It ends up being a pretty fascinating game to look at after you've played the other games and see how different certain aspects of it are. Maybe the most interesting thing was the localization and dub and how much that can change the tone of the whole game to where it occasionally feels like a parody of a Yakuza game.

More than anything, this game made me appreciate the Kiwami remake so much more. I already really liked that game but now I like it even more. It adds several scenes that are critically important to adding depth to characters that are relatively flat or poorly characterized in this original version. Go play Kiwami.

If you've never played a Yakuza before, do yourself a favor and play Kiwami instead. But if you've played them all and are desperate for a little bit more then this game is a fun thing to check out.