The biggest stand-out of Psychonauts are its immensely creative level concepts, one moment you'll be journeying through someone's war-torn psyche, the next you're the star in a Godzilla movie, then a board game is turned into your playground, and this is to say nothing about The Milkman Conspiracy (for good reason the most famous part of the game). It's genuinely wonderful how many ideas Psychonauts can find within the framework of setting you loose platforming among people's minds, internal worlds brought to life from their trauma and struggles via striking visual design, and you can never really know what awaits in whichever subconscious is coming next.

The rest of the game is more of a mixed bag for me. People praise the writing, and there really are some lovely moments to it with its mix of delightful wit and off-kilter wackiness, plus how well the writing plays alongside the creative level designs (again, The Milkman Conspiracy is just impeccable in this regard), but there are also some distinct low-points to it for me also; particularly when the game descends into a bunch of characters incessantly shrieking at each other in annoying voices (notable personal grievances here including the actors in Gloria's Theater, and any scene featuring Dr Loboto). I think the positives outweigh the negatives here, and the writing is generally enjoyable, just not without its moments of annoyance.

On a similar note the gameplay is generally enjoyable in large part because exploring these worlds is so engaging, and the levitation ball is such a fun way of getting around that I literally never unequipped it from its item slot, but again there are annoyances; I had a handful of glitches and one incident of an awfully placed kill-plane throughout my playthrough, the controls never feel quite precise enough for some of the things you're asked to do, I can't think of any bosses in the game that I'd call good, and the early-game scraping together of arrowheads was a huge drag. Most of this is ultimately fine and easy enough to ignore as these levels really are enticing, but it all came crashing down with the game's conclusion for me; Meat Circus, and the parade of mediocre-at-best boss fights that surround it, is just a bad experience, and left a really sour taste in my mouth as the game's final note.

I can definitely see why this game is so beloved, it's incredibly creative and at its best very charming, but I also found it far from perfect in ways I struggle to ignore.

The opening few hours of Inscryption are legitimately fantastic. I always liked a lot of what was going on in Slay the Spire but that game is dragged down so much by its incredibly bland aesthetic that just makes me think back to playing Flash games on Newgrounds as a teenager. Inscryption takes that deckbuilder core, adds a really cool, evocative spin on it with the sacrifice mechanic, but most importantly nestles this within a deeply unsettling, intense aesthetic that really sells the whole experience on its own. There are a couple moments that didn't land perfectly for me in these opening few hours, but overall I was very excited to see where the game would head.

I'm not going to spoil any actual story content from this point, but I will be talking about mid and late-game gameplay mechanics changes. I think there are people who will be suitably put off from the whole experience once they know the direction these mechanical changes head in and may value getting to read about these ahead of time, but if knowing anything about the direction the game's mechanics head in is going to upset you then stop reading now.

At the end of these first few hours of the game Inscryption's gameplay becomes markedly worse. It turns into a trading card game, as opposed to the first section's deck-builder nature, a genre that is just a lot harder to make actually work. A part of the problem is that the sheer elegance of the game's original mechanics is hurled to the wayside as it becomes bogged down under the weight of a bunch of new mechanics, whilst constantly tuning and retuning your deck from a vast pool of cards makes for an unbelievably worse gameplay loop than what came beforehand. Arguably an even bigger part of the problem is that the aesthetic is just so much less compelling in this second part too, and the aesthetic was so much of what sold the first part of the game. Taken outside of the context of existing inside a larger whole this second part of the game is something I would consider at absolute best mediocre, and would be upset to have spent money on had something like this been expanded into a full game.

Another major mechanical shift comes later on, and this third part of the game returns to something closer to where the game was originally at. It lacks much of the earlier tension and magic, and the aesthetic is much worse too, but it acts as a fine enough diversion and has a few genuinely very enjoyable moments.

So there's one outright great section, one just barely passable section, and one third that is decent enough. So why am I not higher on the game, does this first act being so impressive not justify the latter mediocrity? A part of the problem is how disappointing the whole affair ends up being, never fully living up to the promise it shows early on. A bigger part of the problem though is what I gather is very much Daniel Mullins' schtick.

Inscryption has a lot of meta content that takes an increasingly larger presence on the game's stage. I knew this going in, as I'm sure anyone familiar with Mullins' name would be, and was curious to see it all in action. Whilst there are certainly some cute, enjoyable moments to it, especially early on in the game, so much of the meta content in this game is just shocking and weird for the sake of being shocking and weird, rather than having any actual substance to it. The whole experience just felt very hollow to me, and at its very worst the game can feel anywhere from scattered and unfocused to actually just downright childish.

It's just so frustrating because there's something wonderful in that early part of the game, and then it goes and turns into this.

It's hard to fully appreciate what the Oracle games are doing until you've played both of them in a linked game. Whilst each exists as its own entity in many ways with very different focal points in terms of level design, they are also simultaneously separate halves of a larger whole. I played Oracle of Ages second meaning this was the game where I finally met and rescued Zelda after having only heard her name in Oracle of Seasons, this was the game that both continued the story and got an actual climax associated with it, and a ton of characters would refer back to happenings in the previous game also. It's not a perfect system, the notion of having to note down a code, boot up the previous game and go exploring to reap the rewards of the interlinked nature of these seemed laborious enough to me that I just couldn't really be bothered, but it is both very cute and oddly ambitious in its own way, both the final swan song for the Game Boy Color and a dramatic evolution upon what Pokémon Red and Blue had been attempting five years earlier.

I will say that playing through a second game of this made me realise how much a lot of the secondary systems and such in this duology just don't really click with me. Gasha seeds get planted in suitably obscure locations that it's easy to forget to ever go check on them, I had little motivation to ever really experiment with rings, and the aforementioned code entry system whilst very cool in context of when this game existed is sadly archaic enough that I never actually used it outside of the initial linking of Oracle of Ages to my completed Oracle of Seasons playthrough.

This is definitely a part of where Ages stumbles for me more so than Seasons, as whilst Seasons had a very clear focus on streamlined, fun dungeon-based gameplay, Ages makes you spend an awful lot more time doing everything else in-between them and that content, whilst charming, would often fall flat. The low-points in that regard for me were the Crescent Island, which lands halfway between a trading quest and a scavenger hunt, and the Goron minigame village which locks the next dungeon behind not only a fully fledged trading quest but also the worst minigame in either Seasons game, a deeply frustrating rhythm game that costs heaps of rupees to attempt and repeatedly fail.

That all said, Oracle of Ages is very much more of the same and a pretty good time overall. The dungeon design is largely really engaging and fun, the item set is a touch worse than Seasons but the Switch Hook is still among the better Zelda items out there (though the Mermaid Tail is among the all-time worst Zelda items for making your movement feel actively worse from the moment you get it), and honestly the bosses might actually be better here than in Seasons as the increased focus on puzzles in Oracle of Ages allows for some really creative boss designs (but, just like with Oracle of Seasons, the final boss here felt excessively challenging compared to the rest of the game). Not the best Zelda game, but a perfectly solid entry.

By far the biggest draw to Webbed is how precious the various critters in it are. Adorable lil' things, bursting into wiggly little dances if you ever dance near them. The music is chirpy and happy, and the vibe is largely just extremely chill, airy and charming.

Playing the game can be more of a mixed bag. I love flying through the sky one web at a time, or sliding along strands I left behind previously, but the various physics puzzles you're asked to engage with and objects you're asked to move feel at best finnicky and awkward (and can even have the feeling of the kind of bugginess that the game wasn't going for).

This is all culminates in a finale that was a miss on multiple different levels for me, and that really didn't play to the game's strengths. I also don't appreciate the game's habit of using collectables scattered everywhere as its method of encouraging you to explore the otherwise occasionally-empty-feeling world.

So Webbed is charming, light, frothy fun, and can even act as a nice palate-cleanser in its own way if you've played too many dark or more serious games of late, but is far from flawless and not really something I could imagine ever wanting to return to.

I enjoy everything about this game apart from actually having to play it. I've devoured SCP Foundation content at a couple different points in my life, and whilst Control's slightly more confined possibility space is less compelling to me I could still read the various information logs in this game for hours upon hours. The world of the Oldest House and the Bureau, the assorted AWEs and OoPs, and the story of Jesse and Dylan and how it all ties into this is just fascinating, and whilst the need to confine all of this within the realm of a triple-A game limits how far this can really all be pushed even then the game still goes to some exciting places especially so in the burst of confidence found in the final couple hours. Finding out more about this universe, and the cinematic flair the game is able to bring this to you with, is just a delight.

And then there's actually having to play the game which I don't looove... The first few times the game throws you into its third-person shooter sections it is actually pretty fun! It controls nicely, is reasonably flashy and the various telekinesis abilities are very sweet. The problem is so many of these sections play near identically, the same cycling between shooting an enemy and hurling items with telekinesis whilst you wait for one or the other ability to recharge, occasionally having to dash out the way or towards health pick-ups if you're running low. Even the telekinesis quickly grows dull once you realise you seldom have to find a thing to lift up nor have to put effort into locating the target it'll be fired at; the game just does all of this for you. No matter how much the game tries to throw new enemy types at you it seldom makes the combat encounters feel that meaningfully different and so these sections descend into such unremarkable, textureless mush. I started to actively dread that the game would throw another combat scenario at me whenever I would run across the map to the next quest location marker, and in doing so would delay my progress through this cool world to have to mindlessly cycle through the same two attacks over and over again. Anytime the game would start to get exciting narratively it would then throw another wave of enemies at me, what feels at the time like the worst pace-killer imaginable, and I just...

The cynic in me wonders if this isn't just inevitable on some level? Control is ultimately a big budget, triple-A game so like of course it needs enough of a focus on action-orientated gameplay to bring in a mass audience, of course it always needs to be pointing you exactly in the direction of where you're headed next even though you're in a place that feels like it should inherently have mysterious geometry on some level, of course it should have the wretched, unnecessary, tacked-up on upgrade systems that so many triple-A games do nowadays (with a gacha-esque system thrown in too, even!). Despite all of this maybe I should still be happy that the game rebels against these confines as much as it can, that there is some genuinely bold, exciting stuff in here stylistically, but then I just remember having to fight my fiftieth wave of lookalike glowy-red zombies and I can't help but sigh.

I think, at the time of its release, Oracle of Seasons had the most enjoyable moment-to-moment gameplay of any Zelda game that had been made. Considering it was the most new Zelda game at the time this isn't that absurd a notion, but still impressive to me considering this game was made for the then-nearly-obsolete Game Boy Color. The selection of items available is inventive and joyful (the magnet glove ranks among the smile-inducing Zelda items ever for me), by the end of the game the movement options feel way more empowering than those of a top-down GBC game have any right to be, the game oozes frankly ridiculous amounts of charm, the season mechanic has just enough depth to add flavour and identity to the game without bogging it down, and apart from the customary couple moments of obtuse progression the whole game just flies by at a really nice pace always ready to throw its next neat idea at you.

The excessive amount of menu-ing to swap items around (much like in Link's Awakening only having two item buttons necessitates this) is really the only meaningful flaw in terms of the actual gameplay here, making Oracle of Seasons more refined than any of the earlier entries in the series in that department. I do wish that Seasons had stuck the landing a bit better however, the final mini-dungeon and associated boss are by a wide distance the game's nadir only for the game to then say that you need to go play another game to get anything really resembling resolution or catharsis.

Despite how smooth the gameplay is here, and how much the game just breezed by, I do think I like Oracle of Seasons a touch less than both Ocarina of Time and Link's Awakening. I think this would already likely be the case due to Season's disappointing ending, but there's something else going on here too. Awakening, Ocarina and Majora's Mask all did a great job at managing to add an emotional core to the Zelda series that elevates those games above their moment-to-moment gameplay and helps them linger with you long after they're done. In contrast Oracle of Seasons is a ton of fun, but easily forgotten when you're finally done.

It would be easy to get the impression that I enjoy games being challenging considering my adoration for games like Dark Souls, Celeste or Rain World. My actual stance on the matter is that there is nothing inherently good about a game being difficult, but instead that a game's difficulty should be designed purposefully in a way that compliments all the other elements of that game. If a game is going to be difficult (or indeed easy), it should be so for a reason.

The reason the US release of Castlevania III was made so nightmarishly challenging was one of business. Nintendo didn't want people to be able to beat Castlevania III in the course of a weekend because then they could just rent it instead of buying it, so when the game was brought across to the West its difficulty was ratcheted up a huge amount from what was seen in the original Japanese version. The end result is something that, in its later levels, starts to feel actively malicious, that genuinely doesn't want you to ever actually complete it.

It's so sad too because the game is contextually a minor technological marvel, it feels like Castlevania III is visually pushing the NES to breaking point and just generally aesthetically the game is one of a very small handful of NES games that actually holds up nowadays. It's also just an incredibly creative game, and whilst some of its gimmicks and experimentation really don't stick the landing (the falling block tower...) it's still just so exciting to see all the ideas Castlevania III wants to bring to the table. And yet the difficulty feels so arbitrarily egregious, tainted by business cutting out checkpoints and pushing all the numbers it can against you in the pursuit of more money, and the end result is something that is on some level quite literally trying to waste your time.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.