Cocoon is a gorgeously presented nothing-burger of a game that utilizes fairly intricate sequencing and light puzzling to manifest a rather milquetoast experience.

I'm not a fan of puzzle games in general, so take this shortform review with whatever grain salt you wish, but I grew bored pretty quick and the allure of the world's mystery fell flat as I continued through each zone. I can't overstate how beautiful Cocoon is, and how well the sci-fi adjacent soundtrack pairs with the actions and intrigue of the landscapes you are walking, jumping, and teleporting through, but that is effectively the only thing I enjoyed about it.

When I find myself growing tired with a game, I ask myself "why?" Why am I continuing with it, why am I pushing forward? I didn't really have an answer with Cocoon other than that it was a lazy Sunday with nothing to do and no plans made, so I pushed through. The monotony wore and wore as I went on and regretfully was too much for me to find really any enjoyment out of it. Though the environments were lush and there was clearly love put into it, I felt Cocoon was overall a drab experience.

The Forgotten City gets off to a slightly rocky start imo, with the explanation of the time-loop premise feeling like one of those ridiculous Danganronpa-esque scenarios where the characters painfully overexplain what are clearly just a bunch of gameplay contrivances that wouldn't need to be explained in excruciating detail if the game didn't go to such great lengths to draw attention to them, but once the story finds its footing and the mystery draws you in, everything clicks. I have no real complaints except that I was more impressed by the clever construction of the plot than I was attached to the characters, so the attempts to tug on the heartstrings in the true ending left me a little cold. Still very much worth a play if you like narrative games with lots of conversation and some puzzle-solving.

Mario Bros Wonder is unfortunately an extremely lethargic game that feels like no one working on it was having any fun. It does the bare minimum and then leaves it at that, which for a series that has been bereft of creativity and fun for years does certainly seem like a breath of fresh air, but it needed to be so much more than that. I was genuinely shocked at how unfun this game is.

It sort of says a lot about your series when you feel the need to make up an excuse for you to be creative. Genuinely, a ton of my problems with how this game feels would be alleviated if the dumb flowers didn't exist. The entire point of the game is to be wacky and creative and fun but a lot of that is diminished when you section all of it off. How much more fun would it have been if for one level you're just suddenly controlling a goomba or turned into a ball instead of having to play through the same cookie-cutter levels this series has been churning out for decades before getting to have fun. A lot of spontaneity is lost through only letting the unique stuff happen as a consequence of touching the wonder flowers, and that sort of saps the fun out of it all. I want to be shocked and surprised by the strange ideas in this game but every time it's about to happen I get a big colorful warning.

And the wackiness itself is very underwhelming. The level designs are so often just more Mario Bros junk that it'll feel indistinguishable from playing any other game in this series like 70% of the time. It doesn't help that the abilities given to the player are insanely underwhelming. Your four power-ups are very poorly designed. I don't get what the point of the bubble flower is. There's like 15 badges that let you jump higher and farther more consistently and easily than the bubbles and their other function is killing enemies, which the fire flower already does. Speaking of, that thing has no right being in this game. it feels very vestigial, and doesn't serve much of a function in any level. It doesn't help how similar the bubble flower is to it, but also like, why have it at all? This game is meant to give us something fresh, but its afraid to buck the least consequential tradition? I guarantee you that if they left the fire flower out no one would have cared. The drill mushroom was fun and levels were actually designed around it, although not every level is, and some of them can be cheesed with it pretty easily. But yet again it doesn't really get much to do, you never have to use it in inventive ways and it isn't tactilely fun to use. The Elephant Form is ok I guess. It would be a very middling to forgettable power-up in a better game, but the fact it makes you large it unique enough to make it stand out in this game. But none of these power-ups are ever developed. They don't have a skill set you need to learn or are used creatively in puzzles, there's next to no point in them.

The same could easily be said about the badges. My god. There isn't a single badge that changes up your playstyle enough for it to matter. They're supposed to be picking up the slack of the power-ups but they themselves are so wholly uninteresting that nearly all of them are just straight copied from older Mario games. And worst of all, none of them are fun. I messed around with all of them and never found one that elevated my enjoyment of the levels. Partially because this game's levels are just so boring and aren't really built to accommodate them, but also because none of the badges are that fun to begin with. The rope one was promising but only being able to aim in front of you, especially when the right stick is right there, completely unused, was a real let down. You can play through every level with every badge equipped and your experience every time will be the exact same. Why even have them, honestly? They don't add anything to the experience. They aren't fun, and by god that final badge is so lame and not worth getting. There's just not enough to the badges.

There isn't much to this game as a whole, honestly. Which was pretty surprising for me when I realized it. It's pretty short and all its levels are short as well, which isn't a bad thing, and in fact I hope the Mario series going forward learns from Wonder and doesn't unnecessarily bloat itself with too many levels or collectables, which has been a problem for the series in the past. But, like, it's ending was weird, right? Like it's "final world" is only five mediocre levels without even another Bowser Jr. rematch. More importantly, by the halfway mark I began telling myself "I will still like this game if after I'm done collecting all the Royal Seeds Bowser still gets to make his giant wonder happen". It's threatened constantly and it was the only justifier I could thing of for why all the levels thus far have been pretty mundane and uninteresting. They were saving everything for the final world, or would do something even cooler with the idea of giving Bowser power over all of reality, like having to go through the worlds again but with everything crazy and insane, or having to go through wacky messed up levels to find wonder flowers that would make them normal again. My mind was going rampant, which mostly just goes to show how uninterested I was with the game at that point. What it amounted to, by the way, was a boring final level that used a bunch of the previously done wonder gimmicks and a boss fight that would be a fun world 3-8 boss but is very anticlimactic for a final boss. It just feels unfinished, like there's a bunch missing from the game and ESPECIALLY its ending.

Continuing from the lack of any big moment or gimmick for its climax, this game's roaster sucks. This series has eighty billion characters and you're telling me that the best they could do for playable characters is yellow toad? The prevalence of recolors when there's more than enough Mario characters to fill its roaster is just another sign to me that this game is either unfinished or nobody cared at all while making it. Poor Birdo doesn't get raised out of the Mario Kart void that Daisy's been suck in for decades, but red yoshi gets to be playable? You went to all the trouble to make like 20 badges that suck and nobody will ever use, but you didn't feel like making even someone like Toadsworth or Captain Toad playable? Like if they really were strapped for resources and time then they could have at least made each yoshi its own distinct character. Add a tuft of hair on one of them and call it the Yoshi from ttyd, it really wouldn't take that much effort. Also I refuse to let Nintendo pretend that yellow toad is a real character that people actually care about on the same level as Luigi or Daisy. Stop putting him in things.

I thought this game was going to be the shot in the arm Mario needed to be fun again, but all it really is is New Super Mario Bros but it looks pretty. And, make no mistake, this game's really nice to look at, although I must say that its soundtrack is really bad. Not a single song from this game is going on my phone's folder of mp3s that I use a 3rd party app to listen to. It's all super simple and boring. Like very uncomplex songs with not a lot going on, which for a series that spent the last decade solidifying grandpa jazz as its musically identity is pretty odd. Especially since I'd think they'd want to go really grand for this game since its supposed to be the next era of Mario. Although the hollow music does pair nicely with the empty game design.

Ultimately, Mario Wonder is lucky it exists in a franchise so lacking in creativity and fun that even the imitation of it is worth celebrating.

Played this since it won GOTY. Something I haven't seen in the public conversation at all about BG3 is how incredibly badly engineered it is.

I've had multiple quests bug out on me entirely (sazza the goblin, the emerald grove quest, and the inn defense battle), one of which resulted in me permanently losing a character.

Combat is incredibly bugged. There is a roughly 10-15 percent chance on a melee attack that the attacking character will stand there for upwards of 10 seconds, and no animation will play at all. Combat can start, and you won't be able to end your turn, or use any action, or even save or load the game. The enemy AI is so laggy, and as the game throws more and more at you, you can wait upwards of 3 IRL minutes for you to take a single turn (happened to me when fighting gortash).

The game is a hundred hours long, but I would wager 30 percent of that is literally just waiting in combat. Any competently made strategy game would allow you to fast forward enemy turns, or skip them entirely. If a set of enemies are in a contiguous action block, just have them execute their move actions all at once.

This is /after/ Larian has patched the game and applied multiple thousands (!) of bugfixes -- I can't imagine how bad it must have been for someone playing a few months ago.

===DISREGARDING ALL OF THESE INCREDIBLE TECHNICAL ISSUES ===

There is a massive pacing/content distribution issue in the game. Act 1 is okay, but in the roughly 30-40 hours of Act 2, I levelled up maybe 4 (!!) times. There are extremely few NPCs, and you are mostly walking from one middling encounter to the next. Content wise, Act 3 is much better than act 2, but it's incomplete and so buggy and broken so as to be borderline unplayable. Also you hit level cap at basically the very start of it, so for the next 30 hours your characters go nowhere. This is an inexcusable miscalculation.

The encumberment system is also inexcusable. You can already teleport stuff to camp or to another party member (even during combat!) so weight capacity feels like this vestigial organ that no longer has any reason to exist apart to annoy you. If you're a wizard with low strength like I was, it's even worse. Why do I have to stop every 5 minutes to manage the individual inventories of 4 party members? There is ZERO enforced gameplay reason for characters having individualized inventories at all. Just throw it all in a single group inventory and be done with it.

The positive public response to the party characters is largely the result of good VA/mocap, and clearly money was spent in that arena. But at the same time they feel pretty flat to me -- characters don't really DO stuff so much as REACT to stuff.

Take Astarion as a character: his entire being could be summarized and the wiki would be 1/8th the size of any party member's plot in FF7. There's just a lot less going on, and its not very substantive.

As a matter of fact, i went to the BG3 wiki on fextralife or w/e and the article is literally 50 percent by volume a guide on how to fuck him, and the other 50 percent is just a list of how he reacts to stuff.

I really want to watch other people's letsplays of this game, because in earnest I have no idea how this was even in the conversation for GOTY.

I am kind of a hater. My bitter soul shivers with icy excitement at the opportunity to nitpick that which is well-loved. BG3 offers a lot of nits to pick, especially if you are a story-motivated player. The overall story is, imo, surprisingly not good for a game that has received so much praise in that department. The strain of trying to weave together so many plot threads really shows. There are a lot of names thrown around that are probably supposed to be important, and goofy fantasy words that are probably supposed to mean something, and like twelve magical MacGuffins, and it all feels a bit like an AI was fed a long list of D&D tropes and tasked with fitting them in the same game. Also, whenever the story flirts with horror, it feels a bit like a bad FromSoft pastiche?

That said, there are quite a few scenes and character bits that work well in isolation. What probably happened is the developers were afraid of the game feeling too meandering and directionless, so they tried to superimpose a structure onto all these scattered backstory and sidequest ideas they had. Although I understand the impulse, the main plot is easily the dumbest and most boring part of the game, unfortunately. I think I would have preferred if the party was only traveling together because they all wanted to go to Baldur’s Gate for personal reasons–no big looming threat necessary.

Nevertheless, even my miserable shriveled little heart was warmed one or two paltry degrees by my time (roughly ten bazillion hours) with Baldur’s Gate 3. At the end of the day, it’s D&D in video game form with lots of fun and hot party members who want to bone you. It’s kind of a hard formula to mess up? Which is silly to say considering it’s also a very hard formula to, like, do, at all, given the bonkers amount of content, so I applaud them for trying. But what I mean is that the game is solid enough that bad writing is not a deal-breaker, and the moments when the writing does work are kind of nice little treats–a bit like eating Lucky Charms with not enough marshmallow pieces in it. Yes, of course, it would be nice if there were more marshmallows, but you’re still going to eat too many bowls like a big dork because hell yes the vampire twink is dtfff