(Day one impressions)
Kind of surreal I'll be honest. Over a decade has passed and so much of the DNA of that made the original DD so unique and anachronistic are being picked up and expanded upon in perfect stride. I'm seeing much of the same enemy types, vocations, locales, brutality in the sheer darkness, quests with hidden steps and branches - shit, the tone of the voice acting, the character animations - all back and taken as far as the little RE Engine can carry it. Too early to give much judgement on the quality of the whole shebang yet, but find it in ur dragonbound heart to forgive me for being blown away by how they didn't fuck it up lol. Probably the most noticeable shift for me is that there's a palpable weightiness to everything now, expounded by the CPU-aggressive focus on physics simulations and incredibly rocky topography. Launch performance has been smooth for me 90% of the time outside of the stop-motion capital city. Pawns are so much like labradors in this it's so funny, they'd jump to their deaths to try and impress you with a shortcut they swear they know about.

It doesn't do a whole lot to really deal with my foundational qualms with Late Souls entries;- where I think the incoming damage is tuned way too fucking high. Necessitating the need to turn off the part of my brain that is capable of enjoying the cool fantasy adventure and instead allocate more power to memorising excruciating enemy movesets, and resisting the urge to fucking kill myself while looking at a blacksmith menu.

What's here is incredibly cool though, there's some serious nerve to calling what is essentially a fanmade standalone Souls game a """demo""" that is currently, playably, almost as content-rich as Demon's Souls. It leaning into the linear Archstone level structure from Demon's is such a salve to me, it's like being given five different adventure novels and being tasked to push your bookmark as far as u can thru them. Each of the worlds call to prior Souls entries to varying levels of explicitness, from a remux of Heide's Tower of Flame to an entirely new desert biome that is abso gorgeous. These locales not needing to necessarily feel beholden to eachother to have that interlinked coherence is just such a buzz of variety I love it.

In complete honesty i didn't play Bloodborne Souls 2 or 3 any more than the once (sorry sory) so my memory of the minutia of their locations and enemies are incredibly hazy. Even then, it's pretty clear at times when the mod runs a boss through something akin to the Pokemon Fusion website, Frankensteining together a funny little Radagon of the Boreal Valley or whatever.

Ultimately I'm just spellbound by the ambition here, what the mod desperately needs is some rebalancing to stop the enemies from being insanely damage spongy. I don't care how gud i need to git as much as I care about wasting my time doing 50 damage per hit on an regular mob enemy that has 10,00000,0000000 hp & will give a pittance of souls on defeat.

Big 'your mileage may vary' thing here but it's free and has a great installer so it's an easy recc. If this project sees fruition I can imagine it'd be special to the point of legal action being considered or something. Saria is a my queen etc.

Had next to no expectations about this one so forgive me but I'm very pleased lol. I was Not expecting Rockstar to have it in them, this has so much arcade racer DNA despite its open-world core. Blisteringly fast & cartoonishly responsive controls, making great use of the open world's hazards and emergent chaos to make every race feel rich w/ needle-threading improv. Most impressed by how hard this is clearly pushing the PS2 graphically, in service of a dreary industrial conkcreet hellscape. With enough tricks of the light 20FPS feels like 9999FPS. Would earnestly recommend playing this in software rendering mode on pcsx2 for it to hit just right. Techstep of all things on the OST and fugly neon car underglow it's good to be back in 2006 again babye. Career mode is kind of threadbare, all of the cutscenes are Xavier Renegade Angel-grade FMVs where the dialogue is just "yo is that a caršŸ¤”ā“ hit the boost ese šŸ—£ļøšŸ”„" and you essentially experience all the game has to offer in the first hour of playing.

Decimate Drive is alright. Going entirely off of the premise, this had the prospective for being one of the most effective horror games I'd be able to play. Growing up amidst a handful of cases where friends and family fell victim to (thankfully minor) vehicular accidents instilled in me a profound fear of cars. They're fucked up things, densely destructive machines, screaming hunks of steel and aluminium that instantly alter the brain chemistry of anyone behind the wheel into callous freaks fully convinced in their own invulnerability. Isn't it fucking crazy that you could be minding your own business, walking on the pavement, doing everything right, and something could just happen? All because of someone having a bad day/off their nut/losing control/insisting on breaking the speed limit to shave a minute off their commute? How am I supposed to be normal about that? I've certainly never been. It's tricky business on the Cu Chulainn Causeway, brothers šŸ˜”.

The setting of Decimate Drive, being a simple enough premise of going from A to B while under the relentless assault of vehicles in the dead of night is quite literally what I have regular nightmares of, I was interested from the jump. It handles the core pretty well, you're basically just running from checkpoint to checkpoint in the midst of a handful of underlit destruction derbies. Not exactly rich with mechanics or anything, but the game's short runtime and abundance of increasingly fucked vehicle types kept fanning the flames of tension.
There are moments where Decimate Drive hits some incredibly high notes; adept use of lighting and sound design to evoke tension. It doesn't take long for the artifice to set in, however, sharply shifting gear into a game akin to like Clustertruck. Despite the presentation of the game gunning for a sense of realism, the perpetual crashing of vehicles without any visible damage undermines the intensity and unintentionally creates a sense that they aren't putting in enough effort to pose a genuine threat to the player lol.

Ultimately this game pushed me to check in on BEWARE, which I am happy to see is still in active development :)

Issue 13 of the Official UK PS2 Magazine, published November 2001, came with a demo disk containing a handful of levels from the then soon-to-be-released Klonoa 2. Playing this demo tens of times as a wean would be my only exposure to Klonoa 2 for nearly 23 years. Despite Klonoa 1 being a childhood favourite, and a formative cornerstone that had no doubt informed my tastes and passion for videogames; I only managed to get around to Klonoa 2 proper earlier today. Iā€™d have gotten around to it sooner, were it not for the fact that Klonoa 2 was one of a few outlier cases of games that emulated horribly on PCSX2. Fugged to the nines until relatively recent revamps in compatibility were instated. Aptly enough, it was so surreal playing the levels from the demo once again - it all came flooding back like fleeting memories returning to me from a dream fighting to be recalled.

Soberingly, I donā€™t think Iā€™m anywhere near as red hot on this game as I still am with Klonoa 1. Perhaps K2 had spent too long being gassed up, cooking and stirring in my head as an elusive cryptid. On many fundamental levels I think this is absolutely beautiful work. Demonstrating incredible emotional maturity in its final hours of the narrative representative of a slightly aged Klonoa, through heartfelt writing and vocal performances. A soundtrack brimming with disparate ideas and delivering them w/ confidence, grappling a wide array of influences and energies. For such an early PS2 game, these cutscenes are composited so brilliantly, giving characters illustrative frames to act in, staging the environments in striking waysā€¦ we still get things like this wrong!! I particularly love how the camera would move during boss fights, not only tracking the bossā€™ movements but also working to sell their scale and let them act on the stage! Incredible level design too, making great use of unique stage quirks to impose puzzle-like ordeals - the colour changing enemy was an enlightened addition. Klonoa 2 is the proud owner of an amazing final level, too - a true sum of all of itā€™s works with stellar level design, and thoughtful use of music and visuals.

Iā€™m less keen on how weak a handful of the stages in the game are, both visually and in terms of level design. Iā€™m even less keen on the repetition the game will impose on you, itā€™s not enough that theyā€™ll re-use levels at certain points; youā€™d also need to run a few laps around some levels as you collect keys/activate elevators and such. Itā€™s a bit more draining than itā€™s necessarily worth, in my humble, made worse due to the fact that levels in this game are wildly long and can be a bit plain. If I had to be brutally honest, I think Klonoa 1 does a better job at conceptualising its levels around its many disparate worlds, wrapping around and winding between the background geometry in a way that makes it all the more satisfying to explore. It would be nice if Klonoa himself had more of an active role in the story than an optimistic errand boy. It stands in stark contrast to the first Klonoa game where heā€™s incredibly emotionally invested in the proceedings, but Iā€™m sure the plan here was to demonstrate that heā€™s an older and wiser character this time around, more clear on his Unico-like role in life and letting the world speak for itself. Thereā€™s tremendous merit to that and I canā€™t help but feel more of a relation to a Klonoa who isnā€™t thrashing out at the world when playtime is over, but Iā€™m a theatre kid at heart I suppose oh god.

Admittedly I played Klonoa 2 in a bit of a goofy way, where I'd finish a level, and then skim a longplay of the same level from the 2022 remaster for comparison. I can only be honest here, but I think both of them have merit! The remaster fucks up the vibes in key locations with awful colour choices, blown out bloom and weird fullbright lighting. The level in sheer darkness, necessitating you to use a limited light resource to be able to see the geometry is ruined in the remaster because itā€™s already so well lit you donā€™t even need the light spirits! But I think the additions to the geometry and character models made in the remaster are really well considered, fleshing out the world enough for them to feel closer to realisation without diminishing their overt dream-like quality. My annoying brainwyrms are expertly trained to hate the aesthetic haemorrhaging that occurs from changes and concessions these remasters tend to make, but my ideal Klonoa 2 sits somewhere between the two versions..... (I want to know what the remaster changed the weird Full Metal Jacket cypher into)

Back in 2018, Splatoon 2ā€™s Octo Expansion was one of my favourite releases of that year. It turned Splatoonā€™s core singleplayer gameplay and weapon system on its head, in a way the campaigns only vaguely hinted at - providing ingenious puzzle rooms and a surprisingly steep difficulty curve that finally demonstrated that Nintendo understood & could capitalise on the seriesā€™ potential. Leaned into the strengths of Splatoonā€™s setting too, exploring its bizarre underbelly and fugged vibes. One for the fans of the ā€˜Rock Bottomā€™ episode of Spongebob. Seeing Agent 8 in the trailers for this had me a little excited, as Splatoon 3ā€™s campaign was solid but didnā€™t feel as if it pushed the envelope much, Iā€™ve come to see Agent 8 as Splatoonā€™s Harbinger of Difficulty and it turns out I wasnā€™t wrong.

Side Order is cool!! I love the setting (even if itā€™s basically just something of a play on the Copied City). I found it pretty easy to be excited by the prospect of delving into whatever Nintendoā€™s idea of a roguelite would be, and itā€™s a solid foundation but thereā€™s so little variety here I canā€™t help but find the tower loop a little dry. There are only four mission types, FEELS LIKE thereā€™s only enough individual level layouts for you to see every available one in a single run, and the upgrades you collect as you ascend the floors are merely statistical buffs; ā€œ+15% shot speedā€ type beat. Itā€™s very hard, I like the risk:reward option of choosing harder rooms for better upgrades on top of other chaotic modifiers that can shoehorn you into making rough decisions. As with all roguelites with vertical character progression though, itā€™s only hard for a while until you power creep your way over roadblocks with permanent character upgrades and such. Numerically overcoming odds always feels cheap to me and I knew my completing the DLC would only be a matter of time investment. Eventually you get the option to retract your upgrades for a prestige reward boost, but Iā€™ll be one hundred percent with you, I donā€™t like the majority of the weapons in this game and I can not bring myself to be a completionist about this if it means I have to suffer the fucking umbrella. It's all a little undercooked and doesn't have enough to really justify playing over and over for.

Anyway the story is great lol, albeit that there's not a lot of it. The lengths they go to show how much Marina loves Pearl is endlessly cute. She made the currency in her gamedev project ā€œPrlzā€ maan šŸ™šŸ„¹. Recalling who won the FinalFest of Splatoon 2 gave me something of a pop-off moment and Iā€™m dying to see how this DLC would have looked if Order won. Endgame is the strongest finale of all of these games yet and thatā€™s honestly a ridiculously high bar. Remix Ebb & Flow forever I will cry every time. Personal favourite soundtrack in the series, too! I love how heavily it leans into its dark ethereal sleep paralysis ambiance. LOVE how the hub/training areas have little environmental tells for the instrumentation in the bgm.

Demonstrates in perfect stride how this series has never had any clear idea for what they want Haruka to be, in such a way that it almost entirely uproots this whole story for me. My experience was more positive on this entry overall than it was with Yakuza 5, largely because its runtime is less than half of that game's torturously bloated length. This is a series that is at its most effective (to me) when it narrows its scope and focuses on the micro stories of its worldā€™s inhabitants, rather than the endless vortex of clan warfare and revolving door system for cloak & dagger. It was honestly so refreshing that this was as stripped-back as it was. I see a lot of people almost rightfully decry the large swathes of Kamurocho being blocked off for what Iā€™m assuming to be development timeframe reasons. Itā€™s a shame not to see the Champion District in the shiny new Dragon Engine, but Iā€™ll take a few bites out of a world map if it saves me tens of hours of playtime at this point.

Since much of the appeal of these games remains to me in its stunningly realised period piece virtual tourism, Iā€™m always happy when they jumpscare me with an entirely new locale. Hiroshimaā€™s gotta be my favourite in the series Iā€™ve seen yet! Itā€™s such a stunning portside town, coiling up a mountainside. It adds a level of verticality unseen in these games before, offering an incredibly scenic look into sleepy rural life in the Japanese afterglow. Iā€™ll never personally have the funds to justify a trip to the country - so this series is about the best Iā€™ll ever get, and it just doesnā€™t disappoint.

Alongside the Dragon Engine came some shifts to the gameplay I found very welcome (autosave šŸ¤ÆšŸ¤ÆšŸ¤ÆšŸ¤ÆšŸ¤Æ). Iā€™m surprisingly keen on the revamped eatery system, better encouraging exploration and dining wherever possible for stat gains and tourism points. They fixed the rhythm game so the tracks arenā€™t bizarrely varying speeds. Also kind of hilarious to me how busted the dropkick is. Yaku 6 will throw so many mobs at you that itā€™ll almost feel like a musou game at points, and that attack felt like a Lu Bu finisher or something. The ragdolls are insanely fun too.

But yeah, the story was a miss for me. Broadly speaking, Iā€™ve come to learn that youā€™re best off taking everything the Yakuza series says at absolute face value without an inch of scrutiny, because its platitudes about honour and family and determination tend to fall apart under even a non-prescription lens. It is so insane to me how Haruka spends 95% of this game in a vegetative state when sheā€™s played such a pivotal role in setting the stage. As I mentioned, this series is terrified of scratching the surface of Harukaā€™s autonomy and growth into adulthood, god forbid she leaves the ā€œPure & Perfect Daughterā€ box sheā€™s been bolted into. God forbid we see the romantic relationship between her and her partner blossom, her demonstrate her independence and stop being a mom for five minutes. It felt as though she learned next to nothing from her experiences in Yakuza 5 outside of the events in its final hour, once again sabotaging any attempt the game makes into having her stand up for herself and stop doing exactly as told. Sheā€™s stern but in the same way a Weeble is. And while Kiryuā€™s final letter demonstrated a touching degree of self-awareness w/rt his effect on the people around him, where he stands on family, etc, it was addressed to Daigo while Haruka was in the room lol.

I think a lot of people (mid-range cope) dream of a robust, visually gorgeous, user-friendly, scrimblo wardrobe simulator. A thingamabob that you can build OCs with, and let you choose from a wide range of clothes to drip them out in and pose and rotate to your heartā€™s content. Anybody whoā€™s spent ungodly amount of time in /gpose knows this, the people who use Koikatsu also know this but wonā€™t readily admit it.

My experience with fashion games - namely Love Nikki and Style Savvy kind of highlights that the entire concept of gamifying the subjectivity of fashion is something of a mugā€™s game. They all crumble in the exact same way, by the fact that challenges posed by the game i.e. ā€œmake an outfit with X themeā€ always falls to using the ingame search function and highlighting the exact tags itā€™s asking for, then selecting the best article of clothing in each category. What else are you going to do, actually plot out an outfit that bangs? This dumb bitch algorithm doesnā€™t know what colour schemes are, mismatching, wrong sizing for the body type, etc. The outfit you submit will receive a score and it will Never make sense. Your character will look like a biblically accurate secondhand rug store but youā€™ll Perfect the mission and youā€™ll learn to like it - because youā€™re Powergaming - it's all a means to an end: to see ur OC in a new story mission reward jacket that will tie everything together.

Itā€™s not great!! The fact that this is a mobile game gives Life Makeover carte blanche to take the absolute piss. Your progress isnā€™t gated by your style savviness and outfit co-ordination, but entirely by you not having high enough arbitrarily-graded clothes. This is where the gatcha stuff comes in and I donā€™t even need to tell you that itā€™s stingy as fuck because youā€™d already have guessed. Why do I need to grind so much to dye the clothes too jesus christ show some mercy. Iā€™d honestly recommend playing a hacked .apk of the game if I knew those existed.

Iā€™ve played Life Makeover back at release on mobile briefly, and again now that itā€™s gotten a fully-fledged PC port. Man I think this game is so pretty. I love how detailed every article of clothing is, I love how the physics makes the multi-layered dresses and hair flow. This being a game developed in China thereā€™s a pretty strong lean towards incredibly well-rendered opulent traditional hanfu clothing, which is inexplicably the most 'overpowered' clothing in any situation, itā€™s pretty funny but I respect it. Love the wildly undercooked Sims-lite homebuilding thing it has going on too. Love the awful murder mystery storyline with a first-pass translation that the voice actors were clearly not allowed to stray from. Given enough time & patience and hopefully none of your money, you rack up a surprisingly varied array of clothes and then you can finally play the game, which is to just make nice fits. Is it WORTH all of that effort? No, but



They called this shit Penta Tentacles in Europe lol. Out of all of these Art Style games, I honestly think this one is my fav!
Rotozoa shares some similarities with Thatgamecompany's flOw, surprisingly (to me) enough, but with far more of a puzzle game-y spin on the formula of wading across the primordial ooze eating plankton and amoebas. What is essentially just a colour matching challenge can become pretty engrossing with some smart engagement design that stacks wonderfully as you're tasked with an increasing amount of plates to spin. All 35 stages have their own unique bgm, upon which layers are added and excited depending on how much you've grown and how much you're wrecking shop, it's pretty charming!
It's a shame Skip didn't stay active for very long after the release of Rotozoa - you could tell this studio was bustling with ideas. Skip's Art Style / Bit Generation titles very rarely feel as though they've had enough backing to push them past the concept phase, which can certainly be a bit of a charm point, as I genuinely believe that their projects still present themselves incredibly uniquely. Their titles have this confusing, stripped-back air of something that'd appear on your DSi one morning to confuse and scare the piss out of you as if you've just been airdropped some alien spyware. From what I've played or achieved, Rotozoa is the only one of their titles that lives so long it has its own credits sequence.

Now this is Puregaming.
Only learned of ThruSpace while haplessly browsing the now-threadbare wii dot com website out of sheer curiosity. A little official relic of late 00's web design, true to Nintendo's branding and visual language during the Wii era - Latestage Frutiger Aero, Hospital-core, perfectly scaled to suit for your 1024x768 XGA monitor. It's nice, I still love it! Anyway, I looked through the WiiWare page on the still-functioning Japanese wing of the website and the featured titles look great. I was aware of the Bit Generations' gorgeous minimalist games being on the GBA, but they also have WiiWare ports??? I gotta get into somethn!!!!

ThruSpace is dictionary definition neat. A snug 10 mb game w/ no fat. You get your cubes and you get a corridor and you will learn to love them. Not a whole lot to really wax poetic about, it's a simple shape rotation game where you position your tetromino as best you can to maximise your score, with extra feats to strive for in speed, accuracy, and painting the whole gap in if u dare. Looks absolute minty phresh, easy 2 learn hard 2 master. Ultimately I think this is great but find myself losing my grip on the shape's orientation very easily because of how few focal points you're given, I spent a lot of my time panic spinning.
Here's some gameplay from someone only a fraction as good as I am: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1yao_PBRnQ

(Logged as a shoe-in for both the base Monster Hunter: World game, and the Iceborne expansion.)
Lavish & deathly exciting at practically all times - varied and expressive social MMO tissue connecting its numerous multi-layered terrariums of gorgeous arenas and silly monsties.

I do have some background with the series, with much history on Freedom Unite, and far less with the fantranslation of Portable 3rd + 3Ultimate at various points through highschool, and hit the credits of Rise. Freedom Unite came packed with FMV cutscenes that demonstrate how the monsters lived in their downtime - characterising the monsters to assure the player that they weren't merely thoughtless models with movesets to memorise, but individual links in the food chain with roles that keep the world biodiverse & strong.
It was always my favourite part of the game, and what felt like the series' missing hook to really sell me on the core conceit was in how this aspect is somewhat downplayed or unexplored.

By God's grace this was the kind of ecological focus MH:W absolutely relishes in. An interlinking tapestry of ecosystems ticking away, living & interacting in countless ways to make the New World feel so gd raw. And it's not just pageantry either, it plays into behaviours and environment interactions from traps to turf wars. So so so good to head out for a simple hunt to watch it blossom into a scrappy mess of tooth & claw, so so so good to go on aimless expedition to a zone and notice a new handful of behaviours from their endemic life. Iā€™d not be able to sleep at night if I didnā€™t compliment the chefs on all of this, every monster in every zone is given so much purpose itā€™s inspiring.

One thing this series has always been great at is its environment design - the world of Monster Hunter is a land of plenty, and everything is blown out of proportion to match. You're eating sirloin steaks the size of your head, oyster side dishes that can feed an army. The tooth you built your hammer out of can sink a ship. Zones and skyboxes that coil across different unique biomes rich in visual stimuli, adding heaps of context for the world and how things are as they are. Pan the camera up at any point and you can assuredly see a spire of choral, ice or crystal towering over you from what appears to be a mile away. Hoarfrost Reach is gorgeous I need to live there NOW.

Moment to moment combat is of course good as hell. I love that itā€™s slow and weighty enough to separate it from a more typical Capcom character action affair. Even with the amassing layers of QoL the series has glazed itself with, World still focuses on hefty player move commitment and punishment. Every weapon here feels great and each individually recontextualises your approach to any fight, but I found a home with the Dual Blades Iā€™m afraid. I love these stupid ale blades man!!! Basically adored the progression right up until the Furious Rajang, where the game takes a very steep swerve into grind and Raid-like Design territory I find catatonic & diagnostic. The Fatalis fight is so much fun I wish I could solo it šŸ˜¢

Yo what's up MTV, it's Lieutenant Commander Beach and I'd like to welcome you into my crib

There's nothing here to really sweep me off my feet, but I'm definitely taken by certain aspects of this game's presentation. Seeing a rudimentary 3d simulation from select viewpoints inside of your curated little 2d sprite cockpit is sick beyond actual belief in my humble. I would love to see the vignette captured in a new game with the incredible things we can now do with shaders on sprites.

DAMN šŸ’¢šŸ’¢ THOSE ALIEN BASTARDS ARE GONNA PAY FOR DOWNLOADING MY RIDE ā€¼ļø ā€¼ļø ā€¼ļø
There are certainly better games where you hold RT until you reach the end of the track, but few that accomplish this much in so little runtime. Excellent-feeling controls that are a perfect match for the blisteringly fast, topsy-turvy obstacle-courses this'll digitize your way. It could be a bit of a sticking point that the main story isn't particularly difficult, but it's adherence to atmosphere and unbroken speed is more thrilling than the game devolving into Happy Wheels imho. Adore the sound design and the slicing mechanic!!!

https://i.imgur.com/AbGZYCb.png
Game's heavier than a honey baked ham!!!
For every moment in Yakuza 5 that lead me into thinking I was playing an untamed vortex of passion and uncompromised vision, there were two-to-five other uncomplimentary moments that felt like spinning plates and taking the meandering narrative for walkies. Spreads its roots far & wide across so many ideas and gameplay concepts that, on paper, scans as a maximalist daydream I'd love to lose myself in, but all of it feels so perfunctory and checklisty. Fifty different minigames to micromanage and level up in individually to access Harder Levels of said minigames - - - Vidcon Gospel since time immemoria but my patience has limits :(

Haruka's chapter was probably my personal standout, if only with thanks to how vastly different her story played to any character to come before. The rhythm battles were so fun albeit with the game's slim tracklist, and her substories took on a refreshing dynamic too. The combat in these games has never impressed me but I'd much rather play an unimpressive rhythm game than a brawler I've lost heart in. From a narrative perspective, it is infuriatingly complacent with the practices Japanese idol industry in a way I find legitimately toothless in a series that tends to dedicate fisticuffs to rooting out corruption and it makes Haruka's characterisation weaker as a result.
When came the Shinada chapter I was desperately hoping the end credits would finally begin to roll, which is a shame because he and Koichi's dynamic is probably my favourite spark of character chemistry in the entire series.

I in complete honesty couldn't tell you a single thing that happened in the final hours. This was a game I had started months ago and it rather hilariously demanded for me to recall with perfect clarity a cloak and dagger conspiracy that happened in the initial chapters. The overarching story was a wash for me but I much preferred when the leading cast were locked in their own little bubbles, & exploring their own vignettes about dreams lost & worth aspiring 4. Truly believe that in another world, this would have been a younger me's One Playstation 3 Game For The Month and I'd have completely melted into it - but sadly, I had to play this in incredibly granular sessions that largely felt like clocking in for community service.

Pretty fun seeing and agreeing with this tweet yesterday & blindly starting From Dust only to realise it was exactly the same thing.
I think being an observer of the press cycle and online blowback in 2011 for this game coloured my expectations a little - those were my halcyon Born Different, Born Innocent days - I expected shit from a butt I'll be perfectly honest with you. Thoughts and prayers for the unfortunates who purchased this game at release, full price, expecting a fully-fledged God Game by the then on-top-of-the-world Ubisoft. People were pretty scathing as a result of their expectations being sidestepped, to the extent that I was successfully scared away from even trying the game all the way until now, over a decade later.

Anyway I thought this was fine lol. A fun little puzzle game where you worm around a map, scooping up elements and plopping them where they'd hopefully aid and protect your villagers from natural disasters. Hits some surprisingly high notes at points with thanks to some surprisingly good fluid physics and overall level of presentation - making tsunamis, terrain-warping earthquakes and volcano eruptions a truu thrill. Routinely Ā£2 on Steam, which I'd say is apt, but you're honestly better off pirating the thing. The version of uPlay From Dust is packaged with is about ten layers deep into being fucked beyond repair, and the port in general feels like it's peddling to power its own iron lung.