I have some amount of respect for Half-Life. The game's eye for set-pieces, and constant insistence on re-inventing itself, makes for a varied experience that seems ahead of its time in some ways. The game also did a lot for immersive storytelling in games, though this aspect of Half-Life comes across as very clunky nowadays when contrasted against what followed in its footsteps. I will also say that, despite the harsh words that are about to follow, I enjoyed playing through Half-Life quite a bit more than my rating indicates; I played through the game in the company of friends, and everyone gently mocking the game's failings throughout helped make for an enjoyable time.

The problem is, for all it managed to do for the medium Half-Life has sadly aged almost impressively horrendously. The opening couple hours, which play out almost as survival horror, manage to still capture some amount of the tension they likely had a couple decades ago, but almost everything after the point where soldiers start showing ends up being some brand of frustrating with awkward enemy placement, cheap deaths, and myriad moments where I had to look up what I was even meant to do. Following this downward trend in quality to its natural conclusion fighting the final boss was an intensely unpleasant experience, all to get an ending that for me fell flat on its face.

I also deeply disliked the quick-save/quick-load feature and how the game seems very much designed with it in mind. Maybe I just suck at FPSes but there are countless moments in this game that only really make sense in a world where you assume most players are actively using quick-saving. Actually using this feature though leads to what feels like a very disjointed experience, robbing you of any feeling of genuine accomplishment and making every moment of disaster only a button press away from having never happened. Talking to friends I get the impression that a lot of PC games of this era were designed with this style of play in mind, and wow do I not get on with it at all.

Even played 12 years after its release, after I'd already completed Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2, Demon's Souls still somehow manages to carry this creative, experimental energy to it. It feels like the game is constantly trying to push at the edges of what it is capable of being and doing which makes for an experience that is much more strange, unpredictable and even transgressive(??) than what would be seen in later games.

This comes with upsides and downsides. Demon's Souls is still an immensely fascinating and exciting game to explore even after all these games that would go on to refine what it was doing. To a very similar tune, though, Dark Souls really does refine what is going on here in many ways and so for all the moments in Demon's Souls that work there are also a lot that inevitably fall flat also.

The fire-breathing dragon sections are immersion breaking nonsense. World tendency is so overly obscure that you can't meaningfully attempt to do anything with it without looking up exactly how it works online, and has an awful inclination towards harshly punishing people who are struggling at the game. The swamp impeding your rolling outright breaks combat for melee builds in a very unpleasant way. Being able to bulk-buy healing items trivialises any sense of getting worn down over the course of a level. Having to grind upgrade materials ensures that once you're far enough down the upgrade path on your current weapon there will be just too much sunk cost involved in jumping to anything else (weirdly I think this is one of the biggest things Dark Souls managed to refine). The maze at the end of the mines is just miserable. The frame-rate drops in the mines were especially miserable. A fair handful of the bosses ended up being either straightforward and easy or oddly-obtuse (and also easy). The game largely has a negative difficulty curve due to its attempts at non-linearity, with much of the late-game content feeling like a breeze compared to the earlier stuff.

I could go on for a while... Demon's Souls has a lot of moments that just don't really work. It's kind of inevitable when you take this many swings that some of them are going to miss, but thankfully a lot of them hit too, and it's a testament to the game's legacy that despite the misses I still found myself getting so excited by the moments that do work, so eager to see what trick it was going to pull next, and so drawn into the dense, overwhelming atmosphere of this world.

Completing Survivor difficulty on Rain World was one of the hardest experiences I've had with a game. It's not that the game is cruel, or unkind. More that it, and the world it places you within, exhibit a deep indifference towards your survival or success. Predators are everywhere and some will for a long time feel actively unfair, so much of your long-term survival necessitates you experimenting in order to learn and understand but in doing so likely dying in the process, multiple progress-critical mechanics are never explained to you. You need to eat, you need to escape the overwhelming, consuming rainfall, and somehow you need to not let your spirit be broken in the process.

Rain World is an incredibly hard sell. So much of its obtuse construction flies in the face of more standardised "good game design". It's almost impossible not to end up deeply frustrated with the game at some point on your first playthrough as you start to feel trapped into some corner of the map, feeling at the mercy of the harsh world around you and its seeming unpredictability. I will say that the only content in the game I really consider bad is the Rain Deers in the Farm Arrays, and that outside of that basically every moment of frustration did bear considerable fruit for me in the end. Try to find the strength to continue even in those darkest of moments.

You see, for all those struggles and frustrations, all the obtuseness, the game managed to achieve some incredible moments for me. The big one is that, dramatically more so than the vast majority of games, you genuinely feel like you're playing out the role of this strange little slugcat. The desperation to find food, the awareness of the ticking clock as the rain beckons, the panic as predators chase you down and there's not time to think or process and you genuinely have to turn to instinct to figure out how to escape. At its best Rain World is so immensely immersive, the rush you feel speaking less to the feeling of wanting to do well in a videogame and more to the feeling of wanting, desperately, to survive.

It's just such a deeply emotional experience to me. All that frustration is worth it for the time where you manage to find a bunker, deep into unknown territory, mere moments before the rain sweeps you away, or the time you escape multiple predators all closing in on you at once against what feels like insurmountable odds, or finally, finally understanding your movement and the nearby enemies and the surrounding landscape well enough, alongside just the right amount of luck, to break through a pathway that has had you stuck for ages. Curling up in your newfound bunker and getting to rest easy, feel safe, if only for a moment.

There's more to the game than this too. The game ends up turning into a very profound, even spiritual, experience in ways I couldn't really see coming even though I knew others have had similar experiences with it, and in ways I'm still processing the day after finishing it and will likely continue processing for a while (update from almost a year later; this aspect of the game has burrowed into my head wholly and completely, my fascination with the game's Buddhist themes grow with time unendingly). In my playthrough both the central couple hours and the final couple hours were remarkable to me and left a huge impression. I don't want to drift into spoilery territory though, so will leave that there.

Rain World is such a very hard game to recommend, and requires a lot of effort from you to meet it on its own terms, but the experience I had with the game is something that will stick with me for a long time.

I entered Astro's Playroom a bit nervous that it would end up feeling like a cynical cash-in on nostalgia, but the experience was surprisingly joyous and those moments of nostalgia actually quite satisfying. It's mostly a glorified tech demo I suppose but a very effective one.

Overall I had a lot of fun throughout, though honestly the only vehicle section that didn't feel like a dip in enjoyment for me was the hamster ball one (which, fortunately, was delightful). The inclusion of a gacha mechanic being tied into the collectathon nature of the game was very frustrating, though the game gives you almost enough coins in a single playthrough to just about get everything anyways so it could be worse (though still sucks).

I played Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart largely to see what the PS5 is capable of visually, and it very much delivered in this regard. The game is gorgeous, at times stunningly so, and is very adept at showing this off via its worldbuilding, various different visual tricks, and a host of exciting, inventive set-pieces. The opening shot as I landed on Blizar Prime was actually just breathtaking, and there are plenty of moments like this throughout; whilst I do have a lot of complaints with the game as a whole I can't deny that I got what I came here for.

A big problem is that for all its flashiness, Rift Apart also feels weirdly cheap in some ways too. Most notably the game was intensely buggy for me; during my playthrough I hit kill planes on level architecture that should have been traversable a handful of times (including dying from touching the edge of a platform you're literally required to jump on), was stuck in the falling animation on top of other characters a few times also (the game only knows how to terminate this by eventually realising what's happening and killing you, though in one instance it just had no idea and I was stuck there falling in place for a couple minutes), clipped through things multiple times (including getting stuck inside another character), had dialog accidentally start repeating in scenarios where it no longer made any sense. And look, I get, QA is really hard and some things are going to slip through, but wow was I left wishing some of the money that had gone into making the game look gorgeous had instead gone into making sure it wasn't constantly breaking its sense of immersion like this.

Beyond all of this, the game was a solid enough experience. The gunplay is good fun with a lot of varied and sweet weapon designs, and though I think the game both overuses the same small handful of enemy designs and leans a bit too hard on "clear every enemy in this room before you can proceed" being the most common progression gate, the frantic chaos of it all is very appealing and remained engaging throughout. The other game modes, notably Clank's possibilities puzzles and Glitch's hacking sections, landed less well for me, both having some cool ideas, but neither being given the space to breathe or develop properly. It's like you spend the whole game being tutorialised in bite-sized chunks on how to play these alternate modes, and then after all of this you're given maybe one good level for each before the game ends.

Overall the experience was enjoyable enough, I very much got what I came here for, and I devoured it over the course of a week, but there were enough problems present that it made it a hard game to really love. Beyond this the experience very much made it clear that there's a whole lot more to games than just looking pretty and that making aesthetics priority number one is a dangerous road to go down.

When you read a piece of fanfiction you are not enjoying the piece of work it was based on, however it is both at once pulling from, often relying on, that original work, and also in turn can serve to inform how you relate to the original work furthering your appreciation for what was already there or shining light on interpretations that were not always obvious.

This kind of mindset can be applied to fan-content as a whole; the number of times I've seen fanart that helps bring out the emotions of the original work, emotions that were always there but just needed that new perspective for me to truly feel them, is many, and then you return to that original work and there's now just no other way for you to see it. In this way art and fanart exists in a reciprocal relationship of sorts, the latter only existing because of the former, the former gaining new depth in light of the latter.

Game modding is an instance where this all starts to get very weird. It's not hard to think of game mods as fanart that you engage with in parallel to engaging with the original work. This pushes the reciprocal relationship mentioned earlier to whole new levels, but is also really weird as, beyond a point and with enough mods applied, you start Ship of Theseusing the original work to the point where it's hard to say what it actually is you're enjoying. Is someone who is enjoying Skyrim, loaded up with a hundred different mods, enjoying Skyrim, enjoying exploring fan-content, or enjoying some whole new thing, perhaps a thing that has never actually existed before if this is the first time that exact list of mods has been applied all at once? Is this Ship still the one that Bethesda largely made, or something that lies outside the realm of any kind of clear authorial intent?

Despite enjoying many other kinds of fan-content I don't really engage with mods very much. I like my first playthrough of a game to best match the original author's intent, and I seldom replay games which means I rarely get opportunity to experiment beyond this point. Beat Saber is thus the first game that I've ever heavily messed around with mods for, and why this subject has been so on my mind since first engaging with it.

The base-game of Beat Saber is...fine. A nice spin on the rhythm game genre that takes great advantage of VR but that is really held back by its limited and uninspiring selection of songs and that has a scoring system that I don't really get on with. The moment you start modding it though the game opens up so much, endlessly replayable with the sheer variety of songs, the creativity with what is possible within the beat-maps both being thrilling in and of itself but also giving you a better appreciation of the game and songs that these mods are built upon.

Consider this rating very arbitrary then, some strange mid-point between what I think of the base-game (good-but-not-great) and the amount of joy that modded Beat Saber has given me. I can't say that my experience with whatever it is I've been playing isn't one that I had with Beat Saber exactly, but I can't say it wholly is either. Ship of Beat Saber, or something like that.

I honestly didn't expect any game in the Souls series to surpass Dark Souls for me in large part due to an awareness that the most compelling aspect of that game, its rich, deeply interwoven world that is so well realised that it sears every corner of its map into your memory, is something I wouldn't again find in quite that form in any of the other three Souls games.

Dark Souls III knows it can't really compete on those terms, so instead does something completely different. It accepts a more linear path, much more linear than any of the other three Souls games by a fair margin (though still with a great deal of exploration to engage in within each individual area, never sacrificing the sense of intrigue, mystery and discovery), and engages in this style with intent; Dark Souls III is the most narrative of the Souls games, taking you on various emotional and thematic arcs in your journey across this waning land, arcs that can only exist with as much potency as they do thanks to the game knowing the order everything will be seen in. Rather than trying to be what the other games are, Dark Souls III gets it is best to be something proudly distinct.

The obvious retort here is how can you say Dark Souls III is interested in being something distinct when it has such a deep attachment to the past, bringing back so many places and characters from former games, how can that be consistent with all these references that are littered everywhere. But again, just like with the game's more intense linearity, Dark Souls III ending up this way isn't due to being lazy or cashing in on the success of the Souls series, this is intentional. These references are serving a very particular effect. In its dying days this world is crashing in on itself, colliding with other worlds, time and space becoming unhinged as this age approaches its final moments, and these echoes of former games, so many of them off-putting or bizarrely, indescribably nonsensical, are the most unsettling way to make this felt. There are so many moments where these references put a smile on my face, only to be followed up with the feeling that it doesn't feel quite right, this sense of unease creeping up on me.

The feelings this game engenders are so intentional, and so powerful, and I think thematically it ends up being the richest, most fascinating entry in the series as a result.

Even beyond all of this, beyond all the ways the game's seeming weaknesses somehow act as marked strengths, and beyond the depth of emotion found within all of it, Dark Souls III is also just fun. It is the most refined of the four Souls games, learning a lot of lessons from what came before it. There's still some amount of arcane nonsense that is hard to ever really work out on your own, secrets within secrets, but importantly this stuff doesn't touch the actual mechanics of the game of the game so much anymore. In terms of understanding how to play the game Dark Souls III ends up being the most accessible of all the Souls games and is all the better for it, with a bunch of quality of life features present also that manage to make the game more pleasant to engage with without ever compromising the game's emotionality or sense of fascination.

Dark Souls III has easily the highest floor of the Souls games, with a level of consistency that is wildly unheard of in the series. Meanwhile the high-points for me rank as the very peak of the series partly due to the stellar art direction, partly due to the game taking Dark Souls' macro-world design and trying to apply it on a more micro-level to fit within this linear approach (everything about the design of the Cathedral's map is just a work of art), and partly because Dark Souls III's increased sense of narrative spreads to boss fights also making so many of the best fights into actual stories packed with emotion, awe and fascination, with the mechanics of these fights complimenting the stories being told so beautifully.

It's genuinely amazing to me how Dark Souls III manages to all at once iterate and develop on what came before it in a way that fully understands it could never exist without these earlier entries, whilst also keenly charging forth as something so different from these earlier entries, boldly and unapologetically.

There is something deeply ridiculous about Gamers™ complaining endlessly about games that are not action-orientated ("walking simulators" etc etc), whilst a game like this gets away with pushing all the most exciting and intense moments of action into cutscenes whilst the fighting you get to actually engage in is largely the repetitive, in between grunt-work. The game thinks having a bunch of quick-time events included will make up for this but being forced to constantly be alert for button symbols appearing on the screen rather than getting to enjoy the show is somehow even less immersive.

This kind of style-over-substance approach echoes throughout the whole game. The myriad climbing sequences feel oddly emblematic for this; nothing can actually go wrong in them meaning that despite the perilous context for them (clinging to the side of mountains and buildings by just your hands, leaping great distances from one to the next) there's never any reason to feel any actual tension or danger, it's just meant to look flashy and plays out closer to an interactive cutscene than actual gameplay. The single-shot gimmick is another great example, there's no narrative or thematic reason for it, it leads to the camera feeling needlessly claustrophobic a large amount of the time, but it looks impressive and that's apparently all that matters.

The combat is largely tedious. The occasional moments of excitement from the first few hours largely dissipated as the game made me fight the same collection of enemies, and the same troll and ogre mini-bosses, over and over right up until the end of the game. This overuse of the same enemy designs starts to feel even more grating considering the game's habit of cramming in additional fights wherever it possibly can, even when it doesn't make narrative or tonal sense, out of fear that if you go more than five minutes without attacking something you might get bored. The two modes for most of your fighting, beyond special attacks that leave you invulnerable or near-invulnerable for their duration thus draining tension from what's happening, are either keeping your distance and using projectiles whilst your son Atreus keeps the enemies distracted (which is both painfully slow at times, whilst also just feeling bizarre because Atreus is with seldom exceptions actually invulnerable to damage in combat), or getting in close and mindlessly button mashing until the enemies roll over and die (which is just boring). There are lots of fancy additional close-combat moves you can use but the game never really gives you the motivation to learn them, so it largely ends up being just this for the entire playthrough, as you fight the exact same enemies fifteen hours deep that you were fighting at the start of the game.

There are many ways to make the combat not get quite so tedious by the end, but the simplest one is to just have the game be more compact and streamlined, yet all throughout the game instead pushes to be larger, more expansive, with as many features as it can fit in. People like rpg systems, so why not cram in gear crafting and upgrading and all sorts of different enchantment systems? Never mind that it never makes the combat feel like it plays any differently, or that the best approach to these needless sprawling menus is to just use the things that have the biggest numbers. People like open world games, so why not do that too? But God of War's notion of exploration is mostly just wandering around the lake in a circle, ticking off locations one by one. The game also just features countless collectables, all kept track of in the map screen, as if you can't include anything within a game without it making some resultant number go up.

God of War had a surprising amount of narrative focus, and there's some genuinely cool moments. I enjoyed a bunch of the early-game content surrounding Freya, Baldur is compelling right until the game just forgets he exists for the vast majority of its story, and there's some potentially really interesting stuff in here about familial trauma, abuse and neglect that the game doesn't come close to having anything impactful or coherent to say about in the end. This is its whole own problem as hinting at Kratos's abuse and neglect towards his son (and never even confronting that in any sort of meaningful fashion) clashes pretty harshly with framing him as someone whose every punch should be thrilling to us, in the same way that his talk towards the end of the game of stopping the cycles of violence clashes with the fact that all game long the finishing moves zoom in on every gorey detail, trying its best to make the tearing of flesh and sinew seem salacious. Even the framing for the story is off here, and downright enraging; every single time you're sent to one corner of the world to see a character who can supposedly help you on your quest you can bet they'll be ready to retort that sure they can help you but first you need some obscure item from some other corner of the world. The story is never allowed to flow, always nestled between countless fetch quests, and sometimes fetch quests within fetch quests.

By the half-way point I was extremely ready for this game to be over, but I kept persevering due to some combination of sunk-cost fallacy, a curiosity to see where the story would head, and irritation that the game seems near universally acclaimed. God of War is certainly very pretty, but there's so little of worth here beyond that.

In basically every conceivable sense the worldbuilding of Outer Wilds is remarkable. Each planet has a memorable, creative, strikingly unique identity that is fleshed out and toyed with in multiple different directions, the rich history of the Nomai is fascinating, emotionally and thematically resonant, and interweaves with the history of these planets in compelling ways, and then on top of that all of this interconnects like some celestial jigsaw puzzle both in regards to the events in the distant past that led to this point in time and in regards to how the cycle you find yourself caught in interacts with itself. The number of "aha!" moments in the game is impressive in and of itself, but the fact you can make these discoveries in so many completely different orders and still piece together what's going on in a satisfying way is just wonderful and a testament to how compelling this game's exploration can be at its very best.

Outer Wilds is also quietly thematically very dense. If you want to just enjoy the joy of exploration and the fear of the unknown you can do that, but under the surface there's so much to enjoy within here about human nature and what pulls us into this need to discover and learn even in the face of danger, that human urge to develop and grow and quite literally reach for the skies, science and religion and belief and all the tension and questions and confusion and peace these things can represent, death and endings and decay and how we both resist these things but also can learn to accept them as something natural and inevitable. Community, and love, and home. Underneath the solemn unearthing of words long past, places in decay, on your own amongst the silence of space, there is a deep emotionality running through the veins of this game that somehow both interweaves with and yet also runs counter to that calm.

I've heard a lot of people say they wish they could play Outer Wilds for the first time again, or that it's a game you can only really play once, and I can't really relate to that sentiment. I had some pretty marked frustrations with my playthrough, some of the puzzles felt obtuse enough to seriously impede my progress and kick me out of the vibes the game was giving, and the controls are very awkward and took as much as several hours for me to become comfortable with (there's a lot of slow, awkward wiggling around early on in the game). These frustrations feel like they'd distract far less from the game's beauty, wonder and ideas on a second playthrough, and whilst the sense of discovery may not be there in quite the same way I'm still so curious to revisit these records of the Nomai, scattered throughout the solar system, with a more full context of what they all mean. Somehow, despite the game's reputation of being a one-time deal, I'm left both excited to return and hopeful I will fall in love when I do.

Update; heard the Outer Wilds music out of context, immediately burst into tears, decided to come back and add half a star to this review :p This game has grown in my mind considerably after I finished playing it.

Clock Town represents some of the very best of what Zelda games have to offer. It's where your first three-day cycle will take place, the music becoming manic by the final day as the Moon closes in before the sombre, haunting turn it takes in those final few hours. It's where most of your filling in of the Bombers' Notebook takes place, meeting a wonderful array of characters, finding out how they all interlink, and seeing how each responds to the notion of their world coming to an end so soon. It's where you grapple with the notion that no matter how much you help these people with their problems, the moment you turn back the clock to save yourself all that aid will be undone. There's a hopelessness to this that is very striking.

Managing your time here is also just immensely fun in the early game cycles. It's easy to find yourself juggling four or five different things over the course of a cycle, trying to be efficient with your time whilst not letting any of these plates you have spinning crash to the ground, and this multitasking was very exciting and rewarding to me. I think this quality largely disappears by the end of the game once your checklist of things to do has reduced to the two or three things you've left hanging which made the earlier stages of side-questing much more engaging than what followed, and there are some problems here beyond that with some frustrations over having to repeat content (I had to play through the Kafei/Anju storyline four times for various reasons) and a few questlines being very easy to miss if you're not in the right time at the right place by accident, but you'd be hard-pressed not to form an attachment with Clock Town and its residents.

Things outside of Clock Town fell a bit more flat for me. I was willing to forgive Woodfall Temple for being fairly simple because hey, it's the intro dungeon, but the problem is none of the remaining dungeons after that point are good either. Snowhead Temple is rife with backtracking and I found it hard to appreciate exactly the effect I was having when interacting with its central gimmick mechanic, Great Bay Temple has some frustratingly obtuse puzzles, and performing the Elegy of Emptiness for the Stone Tower Temple is the biggest pain which in turn leads to me being hesitant to interact with its central gimmick mechanic any more than is strictly necessary. The drop in quality between the better dungeons in Ocarina of Time and the dungeons in Majora's Mask is honestly startling. The bosses and minibosses are also just incredibly rough here at times, too. Gyorg was easily the nadir of the game for me and I can't imagine how miserable that fight is without access to save states, but I don't really enjoy any of the bosses and almost in an effort to spite me for that there's even content locked behind fighting these things multiple times.

Outside of the dungeons themselves, I found a lot of the content in the locations the dungeons are situated within to be very inconsistent. There's some solid moments here and each of the areas is very enjoyable to discover and initially explore, but on the other hand there's stuff like the Gibdo trading quest maze that just act as brutal, mediocre pace killers.

So, the highs are very high, and the lows are disappointingly so. I was so taken by Clock Town in the early part of Majora's Mask that I half wondered if this might end up being my favourite Zelda game, but alas it ultimately fell short for me and, whilst Majora's Mask is a remarkably ambitious and bold game, I think I might actually prefer Ocarina of Time to it even.

Echoes of the Eye is all the best and worst parts of Outer Wilds, amplified. The sometimes obtuse reasoning behind some of the puzzles, and the sense that you risk wasting large amounts of time (due to the nature of the loops) if you want to experiment with a solution is even more pronounced. Some sections in the dlc (that I highly recommend you turn on the Reduced Frights mode for to make the gameplay more tolerable) honestly just suck to play, a lot of wandering around blindly in the dark and hoping. Even the nature of the loops finally started to get to me upon the twentieth time in a row of having those exact same opening couple minutes.

But there are so many moments that are just breath-taking or outright mind-blowing; in particular the opening hour is up there with the very best parts of the base-game. The planet it is set on is remarkable in many ways, and potentially overtakes Brittle Hollow as my favourite world of all of those in this solar system. The tale this expansion tells is so enjoyable for all the reasons it contrasts with and deviates from the base game, and ultimately hit more emotional notes for me personally than the base game did too.

So, it's the base game but more. I was much more frustrated at points here than I was with the base-game, but also somehow more rewarded also.

I came here for the extremely anime and ludicrous plot. That aspect of Ace Combat 7 was honestly disappointing in some ways, the storytelling has some wonderfully over-the-top moments but is also just kind of a mess. This isn't helped by key story details being littered seemingly everywhere, showing up within the mission briefings, the cut-scenes that are told from multiple different perspectives (one of the most important perspectives disappearing for several missions in the middle of the game?), and during in-mission over-the-radio conversations. It's so easy to be laser-focused in on the gameplay, which is often so intense that it needs your undivided attention, only to miss out on some plot detail that's said over the radio as a result and be left confused as to what exactly is happening. By the time I finished the game there were multiple core pieces of the plot and surrounding worldbuilding that I could just absolutely not even begin to try explaining to someone.

The flipside to this is that the sheer nonsense the game indulges itself in lends itself to some incredible and thrilling set-pieces; there are so many moments that are legitimately breath-taking, and even in its final mission Ace Combat 7 manages to just completely one-up itself yet again. Honestly the gameplay here is just generally excellent with plenty of pulse-pounding moments every play session I had, and a superb variety of missions that very rarely repeat the same beats and that recontextualises those beats when they are repeated. I had no idea I would enjoy an airplane dogfighting game, but AC7 manages to make it so much fun. On top of this the game looks gorgeous, especially the weather effects, and the music is fittingly perfectly over-dramatic. Really, with the exception of a couple missions that missed the mark or were a bit too frustrating, everything about this game was super impressive...apart from that tangled up mess of a story.

Revision (16th November 2021); reading kingbancho's excellent review of AC7 (linked below) has helped cement some concerns I'd had previously about the game regarding its xenophobia and how problematic some of the framing in the game is. I think this can be easy to miss both due to how much of a mess the storytelling is and due to how exciting and absorbing the gameplay often is too, but hearing it all laid out as clearly it is in kingbancho's review just...makes it hard not to think a lot less about this game as a result, and certainly makes it much harder to recommend the game to anyone.

https://www.backloggd.com/u/kingbancho/review/253306

It's been almost three decades since Myst's release and its world is somehow still just captivating. The bizarre mechanisms, aged artifacts and writings of those now gone both serve to create this sense of connection with another time, another place and the former inhabitants, whilst also emphasising how alone you are right now as you wander these abandoned and oftentimes silent lands, proceeding as an archaeologist of once magically conjured worlds.

As alluring as this sounds Myst is certainly far from perfect. The caves section was a wholly miserable low-point for me, sufficiently awful that I looked up a guide to save myself some pain, the 'good ending' I found fell flat on its face for me, and just generally a fair chunk of the puzzle-solving in Myst has been out-performed by time and those that would follow in its footsteps. Really Myst has aged substantially more than my rating for it necessarily indicates and that makes it hard for me to recommend as such, but the whole thing is just so fascinating to me, and whilst its age has led to some frustration in parts it also adds an almost meta element to playing it for the first time nowadays like the archaeological pursuits your character is engaging with in these mystical worlds are also being reflected in turn by you unearthing this old, time-worn game and trying to figure out what makes it tick.

Gosh this was such a frustrating and disappointing experience. Castlevania has one of the best aesthetics I've seen from the NES, especially the music which remains immensely catchy all these years later. The opening levels are generally pretty enjoyable; challenging but largely fair, and learning the layout and finally managing to clear your way through these early levels feels genuinely rewarding. The controls initially feel clunky, but I was quickly sold on them. Having to commit to an attack or a jump arc in quite this manner lends much of the early-game a similar feeling to what would much, much later be captured in the Souls games as you try to carefully plan out your moves in advance and try not to panic. The only things that really bothered me early on were the fact that your whip gets massively downgraded every time you die which can feel like it punishes you for doing badly by making the screen you died on even harder for you, and the way that flying enemies can knock you back into bottomless pits which never ceases to feel cheap, but for the most part I was having a lot of fun!

Then I reached the second half of the game and this all just fell apart... Look, I get it, NES games are hard, but there's a lot of moments in the late-game that feel actively unfair. Rooms like the one where gorgon heads fly at you whilst you have to deal with the axe-throwers simply don't feel like they're actually built with Simon's slow, intentional movement in mind. This is to say nothing of the late-game bosses. Frankenstein and Death both felt intensely rng-based to me, at least without using any sort of cheesing-strategy on them. Both felt extremely unsatisfying to beat because it felt like I'd just gotten lucky with how things lined up rather than because of learning patterns or understanding what to do. The Dracula fight is similarly immensely frustrating, and I'm confident I would have never beaten this game if not for starting to use save states increasingly aggressively in the final two levels.