Some things you can never forgive, and such charity will never be given to the taste makers that absolutely failed Rain World at release, so called professionals of the medium who were unable to engage with its singular vision and holistic design, to put it mildly. Time however has vindicated Rain World, now a work of cult following and ever increasing recognition and prestige within the most fervent supporters of emergent gameplay, transcending its pilgrims through one of the most affecting and affirming experiences of uncompromised talent and understanding of what videogames can and should be.

6 years later, Rain World's simulation of nature's beautiful cruelty remains an untouchable feat of game design that threads its hidden mechanics and systems with the erratic and unpredictable ecosystem of alien yet animalistic critters that instigate the player to subconsciously participate on a food chain of cause and effect, so seamlessly permeated through Slugcat's learning process of overcoming the odds and discovering where their limits lies.

Downpour represents purely an assertion of the undeniable qualities of the base game, filling it with abundant content that dares not touch the core tenets of Rain World but instead just adding on top new toys and rules with which to navigate its sandbox. Be it Gourmand and its insatiable gluttony or Artificer and its pyrotechnic killing spree, the careful balance of Rain World is never tarnished or dilluted in favor of an experience that runs contrary to the cat and mouse art it excels at.

I will save the remaining Slugcats for a later time. Rain World is a once in a lifetime deal that I wish to forget for a while until the day I once again need to be reminded of its beautifully realized environment of industrial decay and out of control flora and fauna that puts to shame much of Metroid's milestones and whose crushing Rain instils in me a humble reverance for its deafening cleansing brutality, listening to it from the safety of a newly found shelter in the nick of time in the same manner I would listen to the rain outside my room from the comfort of my cozy bed.

Bar none the greatest strength of the Myst series was always its ability to convey the human mind's fascination with deciphering the unknown and making sense out of the alien and illogical. Myst's cold, empty and artifical island filled with misplaced familiarity beckoning you to interact with its clunky buttons and mechanical contraptions was all about finding meaning in its dreamlike language, which while a fruitful and inspiring endeavor as the series first step, was something that its sequel Riven managed to slightly iterate and expand upon to deliver something much more profoundly alluring.

Masterfully intertwining its worldbuilding with its puzzles, Riven presents a cohesive and tangible world filled with enigmas within enigmas, where understanding the solution means understanding the people, culture, rules and symbols that govern its world, and preceeding titles like The Witness or Fez, it offers a singular idea to the player that progresssively and beautifully flourishes into revelation with each new discovery of its meaning, exposing its crucial purpose and importance to every facet of Riven's existence.

A meticulously designed gameworld that perfectly parallels the antagonist's obssessive imperialistic dreams of divinity and supremacy over the world of Riven, and whose vision is ultimately and inevitably undone by the same reverence he bestows upon the devices and symbols he created in his tyranny. And just as his unsustainable dream crumbles apart, so too does the player's, as figuring out Riven means the destruction of its mystique, leaving nothing but a virtual space of beautiful static pre rendered backgrounds, and while the awe of enlightenment is something that I will never be able to experience ever again in Riven, the joyful smile I get while looking at my notebook filled with scribbles and doodles of its world is proof that I was truly there.

Refrain from resorting to a guide, click anything and everything, close and open every door, observe closely, and take a sip each time you have to endure a grueling slow animation, and I promise it will be worthwhile.

Booting up Myst 27 years later after it's release, it's still impressive how much mystique and allure it has.
It's age immediately shows, but once you get past it's early cd-rom origins, you will find yourself in its now emblematic otherwordly, alien and mysterious island.

The static nature of its gameplay, combined with the lack of living beings on the island ( besides the presence of live action clips of the previous inhabitants and their belongings and writing) and sparse ambient soundscape creates a very unique and zen like atmosphere that's hardly replicated on other games of it's genre, something that probably helped it standout so much at the time. The obtuse and illogical mechanisms, buttons and contraptions scattered across the world of Myst invite the player like a moth to fire, speaking to a inner part of human nature that wants to solve and make sense of things.

The brilliance of it's design is in how it has every solution and path available to you from the start, you just dont have the information and clues required to know that those solutions and paths are already in front of you. In a stroke of genius, the game even has the final solution in plain sight at the start of the game. Some of the puzzles are duds, and some of the puzzles are a bit too obtuse to be taken seriously. The story is barebones, and only there to serve as some form of goal. There is sometimes the sense that you are playing a tech demo for the almight CD-ROM.

But Myst is still a classic, and if you never have, you should visit it's island and see for yourself the power of human curiosity and stubborness, and how that alone is enough to create a world worth falling into.

At first you're struck by how strange it is: A grade-school mobile of a solar system literalized; a hollowed-out planet collapsing into a miniature black hole; a moon that disappears when you're not looking. The logs, clues, and glyphs are initially mystifying, even frustrating.

But you start to make connections. You hypothesize and test. You find yourself standing in the right place at the right time, discovering another facet of this clockwork world.

And then you're hooked.

Whether you take solace or discomfort in its somewhat fatalistic ending, you'll have a wonderful mystery ride regardless.

I'm in the minority in actually preferring the original Ori game, even if only very slightly. On some level it's a weird conclusion to come to as Ori and the Will of the Wisps is just straight up better in a lot of ways; the movement pool is expanded, reintroduces the old abilities in swift fashion and many of the new abilities are enjoyable too, the chase sequences are much less frustrating due to being quite a bit easier to sight-read than in the first game, the game embraces being a Metroidvania rather than doing the awkward straddling of genres that Ori 1 did, the awful save system from the first game has been scrapped, the combat has been dramatically improved (which is to say it's now pretty good now, rather than so bad you just run past every enemy you can), and the uninspiring skill tree from the first game has been replaced with a badge system seemingly pulled almost directly from Hollow Knight.

And yet, despite the moment-to-moment gameplay just being a more enjoyable, engaging and well-designed experience, Ori 2 sometimes left me with a bit of a hollow feeling whilst playing it. A part of this is the story beats, with the same absence of emotional subtlety that Ori 1 had also, feel a lot more explicitly manipulative in something that often feels like a repeat of the first game's story; it was hard at points for me to take Ori 1's story sincerely, but here it feels just impossible. A part of this too is that I don't think being Bigger is actually necessarily Better in this case; this game has races, side-quests (including an arduous trading side-quest which is made hard to keep track of by all the Moki blending together) and multiple different ways to regrow a town, and while some of this adds to the game at some points an awful lot of the time completing the side content just felt like I was ticking off boxes. Maybe a full-on Metroidvania wasn't what I wanted all along, certainly I feel like the strongest parts of Ori tended to be the more linear, focused sections, or maybe a Metroidvania with all this Content can only really come together for me if the game has as much personality as Hollow Knight does in order to make that content more memorable rather than just going through the motions.

The sequel to Ori was just as beautiful and engaging… at first.

However there was a specific moment during playing when I realized that things didn’t feel as special to me as they did with the first game. I think the main reason I dropped this game was the difficulty and there are some interesting reasons as to why that is. The first games difficulty I would liken more to Getting Over It. All the pieces are laid out for the player to get familiar with the move set and then master it to become quicker and more accurate but the sequel tries to do the same thing while also bringing in a lot more Metroidvania traits. This causes the game to feel much more confusing and complex then the first which is good from a content perspective but becomes frustrating when you simply want to progress and don’t have the resources to do so. Everything is essentially the same as the first game just more but they forgot to make certain aspects more streamlined to fit a more open game. The Will of the Wisps has a much denser and harder to navigate world compared to the first and I ended up dropping the game entirely because I simply could not figure out how to progress. Perhaps it was simply my own ineptitude but even with the help of the internet I was unable to move forward. So I gave up. I didn’t want to because I was for the most part just as engaged as I was with the first game but I wasn’t going to restart so oh well. It still had all the elements that made me love the first game but I’d much rather return to that game then this one unfortunately. Still great game I’m sure and I’m sorry I never saw how the story concluded.

Apparently the devs are scummy too so looks like we are never getting a third game…

Oh yah and by the way I did like the combat better in this game it felt more natural and heavy hitting. The side quests and character additions were welcome too.

Ok bye bye!

Items marked on the map, quests being logged for you in Bethesda-esque fashion, and the direction that you're "supposed to go" always being clear. Making a sequel much less exploration and discovery focused than its predecessor isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the game really needed some other element to fill in those gaps. At first it seems like it sets up action to be that solution, but the game's combat falls painfully short once you realize there's absolutely zero consequence for any mistake you might make, and on top of that the customizable equipment hardly adds any complexity and instead pretty much only increases your stats in varying ways. What's left at this point is a sequel that's inferior to the original, but admittedly different enough so that they're both worth playing.

It's not all bad though. The visuals, music, and movement mechanics are still excellent as expected, albeit less impactful the second time around. The locations are much more interesting than they were in the first game, and there are some great little moments that are more present here than in The Blind Forest. For me, it was speaking to Kwolok for the first time, seeing the sun peek through the mountains in the background when arriving in Baur's Reach, and of course, everything that had to do with the Wellspring Glades.

Like most of my experiences with the Zelda franchise, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time took me way longer to complete than I thought it would, as I've been playing this game on-&-off for almost two years now. Maybe it's the game's immeasurable influence on both the Zelda franchise and video games as a whole, or the impossibly high standard that the game has been held to by people online over the years, but for whatever reason, I rarely found myself committing to Ocarina of Time and would play other games instead, even if I did have fun pretty much every time I sat down to play this game. Because of this, I guess it must have been a good thing for me to get so sick of Tears of the Kingdom (which, by the way, I'll get to writing my thoughts on once I've beaten it), as that was what motivated me to finally wrap up my playthrough with this landmark title.

Unlike what a lot of people have asserted for the past 25 years, I don't see this game as a perfect one, but if there's one thing that Ocarina of Time knows how to do exceptionally well, it's creating a distinct and wholly engrossing atmosphere. Every village, dungeon, and temple feels distinct from the last, and the eccentric characters and charming, yet occasionally macabre art direction gave places like the Hyrule Castle marketplace and Kakariko village a ton of life and personality. Koji Kondo's score was especially effective in establishing the mood of each area, with the themes for the Great Deku Tree and the Forest Temple being some of my favorite pieces of video game music ever thanks to just how evocative and hypnotic they are. The temples themselves were already a lot of fun thanks to their solid puzzles, bosses, and utilization of the items that you unlock throughout your adventure, but their unique atmospheres were what really held my attention. Aside from the titular ocarina, one of the main mechanics that Ocarina of Time brought to the table was that of time travel, and while it's slightly annoying to have to go to the Temple of Time whenever you need to go from being an adult to a child or vice versa, I still thought that the concept was well-implemented, as the contrast between the cheery innocence of Hyrule during childhood and the decrepit nightmare that it became seven years later made me want to explore the entire map just to see what was different about each area.

Ocarina of Time is one of those games whose reputation feels impossible to live up to, but even then, I felt that my gripes with the game were big enough to affect my overall experience with it. One of my biggest hurdles with this game would definitely be its control scheme (although this issue can be seen in a majority of the N64's library due to its bizarre anomaly of a controller), as the clunky Z-targeting and stiff aiming made combat encounters not feel entirely responsive or reliable. I also found Navi to be irritating with her useless advice and constant utterances of "Hey! Listen!", although her presence never pushed me to the point of frustration. Talking about this next criticism is a bit of a dead horse by this point, but I still felt that the Water Temple hurt the overall pace of the game, because while I wouldn't consider it to be outright bad, the amount of times that I had to keep equipping and unequipping the same iron boots made it feel tedious and sluggish. Despite its open area, Ocarina of Time is actually quite linear in its progression for both the main story and the side content, and while that isn't a problem by itself, it made me wonder what the point of the empty hub world connecting the actually interesting areas was. Even after unlocking Epona, traversing Hyrule Field was just sort of dull, and unlike something like the open seas of The Wind Waker HD, I was never really compelled to explore this area and instead headed straight for the next temple, side quest, or minigame that I had lined up for me. Ocarina of Time was both highly influential from a design perspective and a fun game in its own right, and while I don't see it as the best Zelda game or even the best game of 1998, let alone of all time, it still managed to stick the landing for me 25 years after its release.

As someone who liked The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild quite a lot, but didn't see it as the masterpiece that everyone else did, I went into The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom with somewhat positive expectations, as the only thing I really asked of it was for the gripes that I had with the first game to be remedied. At first, I partially didn't want to pick this game up too soon before playing through some other Zelda games first (which is kind of why I powered through Ocarina of Time over the past week or so), but once the FOMO kicked in, I finally went out of my way to buy the game around five weeks ago and have been playing it since then. Even if I wasn't on board the massive hype train that had been chugging across the internet for six years, Tears of the Kingdom still managed to have me feeling let down and burned out by the time my 55-ish hour playthrough was over, and while it's definitely a good game, a lot of that didn't feel like it came from the new ideas that Nintendo brought to the table this time around. Despite the game's sleek presentation, six year wait, and $70 price tag, Tears of the Kingdom felt less like an actual sequel to Breath of the Wild and more like a standalone expansion or DLC, as it simply adds stuff on top of the previous game rather than truly refining or revamping the formula. Rather than fixing the same-y shrines, level scaling, repetitive Korok challenges, forgettable sidequests with pitiful rewards, flat-out bad voice acting, or even the Z-targeting which they somehow haven't figured out how to switch targets for since 1998, Nintendo decided to add a new set of powers and two new areas, and all three of these managed to feel flawed in their own ways.

The main selling point of Tears of the Kingdom seems to be the Ultrahand with how it lets you build vehicles and structures using Zonai devices, but I got sick of it very quickly. In Breath of the Wild, the physics engine wasn't really that much of an issue, but since this new game draws so much attention to it with its emphasis on building stuff, I ended up having to spend minutes at a time just attaching and reattaching parts and devices at the right angle due to how finicky the whole system was just for the build to not even work when I turned it on. The implementation of Autobuild felt like their way of fixing this by having you instantly reconstruct builds that you've already made, but this just felt like Nintendo solving a problem that they created in the first place rather than just avoiding it entirely. When I wasn't rebuilding the same flying devices or combat devices, I'd often just glide or climb my way to get to where I wanted to go just so that I wouldn't have to deal with the hassle that came with trying to play with Nintendo's new box of LEGOs, and even then, the ability itself wasn't substantial enough to the point where it made me go "Wow, these guys really broke new ground". The other three powers were decent enough additions, but they all just sort of felt shallow and one-note, as Fuse was less about experimenting with different weapon and material combinations and more about just picking the material that did the most damage, Ascend only really let you phase through the smooth, flat surfaces that the developers wanted you to phase through, and Recall just became a case of either "throw the projectile back at the enemy" or "grab the material that Tulin blew off of a cliff because you were trying to pick it up and both of these actions are mapped to the same button".

Along with the middling new selection of powers, Tears of the Kingdom decided to add a whole two new area types, and neither of them felt all that compelling. A lot of the game's marketing tried to make the new Sky area seem like a big part of the game, but its implementation is comically insignificant. Although the initial tutorial area in the sky is huge, all of the game's other sky islands are incredibly small, and the slightly bigger ones house little more than Zonai dispensers, shrines that make you bring a crystal to a specified location over and over again, and a copypasted miniboss made of blocks. Even if the sky felt lackluster, it doesn't compare to just how lame the Depths were to me, as all you do there is mine more Zoanite for your builds and light up lightroots so that you can light up more lightroots. Even if you try to explore the Depths to find items like new armor pieces, each of the Depths' sections is literally walled off, so you have to constantly go in and out of the Depths through different craters just to keep exploring an already dull area. Going into this game, I was expecting it to feel similar, but I was genuinely surprised to see how little of the main overworld changed when compared to the first game. Granted, the main towns and the areas where you meet the sages have been affected by the in-game Upheaval, but other than that, the world of Tears of the Kingdom looks and feels exactly the same with its world layout, regions, and backwards sense of progression, and the sense that I was just playing more Breath of the Wild was what made get really fatigued with this game really quickly. Even the supposedly new temples felt pretty much the same as the Divine Beasts from the previous game, although they came packaged in with laughably easy boss fights, puzzles that could be beaten in a good two seconds, and the literal exact same cutscene after each temple that feels duller and duller each time it comes up.

To me, one of the elements that made Breath of the Wild feel so refreshing was how little the game tried to steer you in the supposed "right" direction, but I felt that Tears of the Kingdom sort of fumbled this by placing a greater emphasis on its story. Instead of opening the world to you right from the get go like the previous game, Tears of the Kingdom makes you sit through a lengthy, handholding opening sequence and a lengthy, handholding tutorial, and even quite a few of the shrines that you find in the world were straight up tutorials for the game's mechanics and physics rather than actual challenges. The actual story is decent enough, but a lot of it got held back by the choice to include a lot of it through the collectible Dragon Tear cutscenes. Not only did the cutscenes themselves largely consist of stiff characters spouting exposition, but the narrative of the main quests doesn't totally mesh with that of the Dragon Tears, as the game acts as if you're unaware of the reveals and details that it already showed you. I understand that this review is largely negative, but I want to clarify that I did enjoy my time with Tears of the Kingdom. The core gameplay from Breath of the Wild is already fun on its own, and my Switch battery went from fully charged to 0% practically every time I picked the game up, but since those ideas felt a lot fresher back in that first game than it does now, simply repeating it while including a few new additions wasn't enough to make me go head over heels for this game. Tears of the Kingdom is definitely a solid game, but it's also one of the most disappointing games I've played in a long time, and even with its flaws that I consider to be glaring, it will still manage to win Game of the Year because people seem to eat this sort of thing up.