Boy I haven't been this disappointed in a game in a while. No one to blame but myself, I guess, but I really assumed there would be <i>something</i> else going on here. I assumed that this was like, a puzzle game or something and that all the (iconic) narrative shenanigans were layered on top of that base, a la Portal. But no, no, there's not really a game here at all. It's <i>just</i> the narrative shenanigans, which are pretty neat for a few minutes but I imagine would have been way more cool if the entire concept of the game wasn't already sort of out there in the public consciousness.

Instead, it's just a bunch of short stories built upon branching narrative paths but when there are so many of them, it just gets kind of tedious to replay the opening stages of them again and again. I'm sort of shocked that there's not an option to just skip to the branch.

As a modern Persona (meaning "3-5" basically), I think this one sits squarely in the middle of the pack. I'm not especially twisted about the lack of FeMC or Aigis's post-game content, so that's not factoring in to any of this.

Any of those modern Personas come down to a combination of three things: the story, the characters, and the dungeon crawl. And I've got to say, Tartarus basically sucks. As a location it completely lacks identity--it's just kind of "big tower reaching up to the sky," and even though they mix up the aesthetic every few sections, it just feels bland. You know the combat's nothing to write home about, so it would be better to do it in a place that's worth spending time in, but some of these blocks are just so whatever.

But that's alright because honestly the rest of the game makes up for it. The characters are pretty strong overall, both the main party and the extended cast of social links. There are a few complete duds (looking at you, Gourmet King) but they're outweighed by social links that actually kept me interested in seeing how they'd play out (hi Maya! Hi, dying man in the park! Hi Bunkichi!). The story likewise moves pretty well forward, it's sort of generic but at least it's paced well and makes a sort of local sense as it progresses from full moon to full moon (unlike say Persona 5, which is miserably paced).

It's a fun core that makes any given run really interesting, but I found the jokers were not really distinct enough to give each run its own unique vibe. After a while, it feels like I'm playing the same run over and over with the most minor of variations ("Ah, spades instead of hearts this time! Oooh, I need to max out tarot cards instead of planet cards!"), and the excitement wears off. It just didn't have that classic roguelike staying power that the best examples have (like Hades or Gungeon) where any given run feels like it could go in an infinite number of unknown directions.

Liked it! It's an enjoyable SoulsBorne game that doesn't really do anything to set it self apart from the genre... in a good way? Like, you can take a look at some screenshots from the game and be told "It's a SoulsBorne" and that basically lets you know exactly what to expect for the entire game.

The story is maybe a little cleaner than other games in the genre, even as it is pretty stupid (let us never forget the Pinocchio of it all). To its detriment, it was sort of easy--I am not exactly a seasoned FromSoft player and even I waltzed through most of the bosses in 2-3 tries. The one exception was the very final one, which represents a really conspicuous difficulty spike.

I basically enjoyed it, and I can already tell that I'm gonna back to this at some point. You start playing and it's pretty neat, and you're excited to get a whole wide universe to explore.

And then phase two is realizing that, hey man, there's SO MUCH universe here that, counter-intuitively, there's nothing to do. The planets are huge but there's not much on them, so you end up walking for miles only to arrive at something that's not really worth having arrived at. I would have loved to see, simply, MORE stuff to interact with on any given planet--the cities are perfectly fine!

And then the third phase, weirdly, is playing enough to start finding the interesting stuff that has been hidden around the universe. You'll randomly land on a planet for no real reason, and then there will be a fascinating quest that was hand-crafted and is very good! And then you'll head back into the world and do nothing for a few hours before you, once again, find something very fun to do through (essentially) brute force experiencing every planet.

Call me when Bethesda develops a few DLCs that flesh out the worlds with cool stuff to do between the cool stuff, and I'll be back to buy another copy for whatever console we've gotten to.

Immaculate vibes. That's ultimately the summary of Dredge. I started playing this and got <i>quickly</i> sucked into its whole aesthetic. It's so inviting and so perfectly spooky and off-kilter in a way that I immediately loved. It wasn't until I finished the second... level?? that I realized I was playing a game, with game mechanics and whatnot. And even after that moment where the spell was broken, the energy of the game remained perfect right through the end.

The moment-to-moment gameplay was nice. The fishing is simple enough but it's a satisfying loop to go out, fish and check boxes, and then sell the fish for money to upgrade so you can go back out and fish. All very good and pleasant. The only real downside comes with how that plays out over time. I don't know if I was moving at a pace the game wasn't expecting, but I wasn't even close to being fully upgraded by the time I wrapped up. I found that at the end of the game, I was in this weird space where I was sort of striving for upgrades that were increasingly out of my league, and in the process of getting them, I ended up just finishing the game. I could, theoretically, go back now and try to finish getting those, but like... why bother? (Similarly, there's a very nice encyclopedia mechanic in here that I came absolutely nowhere near completing in full.) I know there are gamers out there who have the intrinsic motivation to finish those things themselves... but I am not one of them, and I sort of wish the game offered me some reason to keep doing things after I wrapped up the main content.

Loved it. I loved Team Ninja's two earlier forays into the Soulslike genre--Nioh 1 and 2--and I equally loved this, their... Sekiro-like? The deflection is a welcome mechanic here. It adds a layer of complexity to the combat (a third option beyond "dodge" and "attack"), and it's a layer that makes combat somehow feel even more satisfying than ever. It takes boss fights that threaten to become a war of attrition, and lends them a series of climaxes that reward excellent timing.

Not to compare this to Souls <i>too</i> much, but I have long joked about how silly it is to listen to Souls fans rave about "lore" and "storytelling" in a game where the 'story' amounts to little more than the "Zanzibart... Forgive Me" meme. Team Ninja's takes on the genre err in completely the opposite direction, but somehow have the same effect. The story to this game is massive, unfolding through cutscenes--sometimes 2 or three lengthy cutscenes set back-to-back-to-back--that, inevitably, just get skipped. I watched some of them, to make sure I wasn't missing the XBSS's equivalent of <i>War and Peace</i> (I wasn't). I'm glad the story is there, because I like having it around, but it is truly a non-factor in a game like this.

I will also say, I liked Wo Long so much that I thought about platting it. So I finished the game, and then I got a couple side trophies. And then I had to go back and replay the game to achieve one sort of collectible... and then when I got done with that, I realized that I had to go back and replay all the stages <i>a third time</i> to get them? Which I did not do, because I don't have forever! And that isn't necessarily a mark against the game, but was a bit of a sour way to end my time with it.

Mostly quite good. Really vibed with the game's vaporwave aesthetic, which is something I'm not typically into. I feel like the world really grew on me--initially I thought it was needlessly full of a bunch of whatever. (And, to be fair, I never really became satisfied with the endless walking around through the world. There is a fast travel system, but the blood crystals are such a scarce resource for a while that it never feels great to use them too much for that, and by the time you get to the late game and have a bunch of them, there's so much to catch up on around the island that it feels unnecessary, because a trip from A to E just means an opportunity to check off a bunch of things at once.) But by the time I got done, I really appreciated the sprawl of it all, especially the densely-packed residential zone.

I think my biggest complaint might actually have been baked directly into the format of the game (and maybe the genre?). The fun of the game is in unraveling the mystery in preparation for the trial. I didn't start the trial until I became confident about what was happening, and had a clear picture of the events that transpired, because I wanted to succeed at the trial. But as a result, the trial itself--the climactic moment of the game--amounted to little more than a recapping of all of the information I had already collected. It wasn't really a thrilling high point, it was just a sort of formality.

Sort of a fizzler there, but until then quite good. Yuri can eat shit tho.

Pretty good, overall. I found the combat more approachable than I have ever found a CPRG, and the world was... I mean, it was Fantasy Land but I liked it anyway! I don't think there's much that's special about it, but it's done well at least.

The Stronghold mechanic was great, lot of fun. Got to taste the flavor of a basebuilding game without having to do much about it, and I liked how the beef with Lord Gothbin was a fun way to keep it tied into the rest of the game world.

The story was sort of... IDK, flat? I was surprised when I hit the end of it. My first reaction was just, "That was it?" and that impression has never really left me. In total, it amounts to seeing some guy in passing, following him to a city, and then following him to another town and fighting him. There isn't much more to it, and it never really feels like there's much by way of stakes.

Fantastic. I'm not a huge cyberpunk fan, but this honestly barely felt like it (IMO I guess). It was just a sort of grounded, gritty sci-fi--or, not gritty necessarily, but granular. But the dice-based mechanic provides a really wrinkle in terms of how it forces you to make decisions about how you'll spend your days, and writing is phenomenal. Every quest was beautifully assembled and managed to paint a vivid picture of a living, breathing society in space. I don't think it <i>actually</i> had the sort of urgency that some of those quests implied (goodbye, Merwyn--we hardly knew ye), but it implied it so well that it made half the quests feel like I had to navigate a looming clock.

It's not a terribly long game, but it is tight and focused and a delight.