(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. I’d not be able to sleep at night if I didn’t compliment the chefs on all of this, every monster in every zone is given so much purpose it’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 it’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 I’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 😢

A complicated mess that requires a more complicated assessment than my tiny brain can offer. It is VERY clearly unfinished, you can practically feel the lingering absence of certain mechanics - almost as if the game is riddled with holes from when they were ripped out during the crunch phase. What awful turbulent development did this game go through for it to take 7~8 years to make what is essentially just Rage 2. It's neither a pointed immersive sim or a sprawling interactive open world.

There's stuff to like here, I'm immensely endeared to the sheer level of detail in Night City's design. It's not often an open world lends itself to a sense of verticality with wonderfully designed multi-level roads and walkways that bob and weave haphazardly through the skyline, entirely different styles of colour scheme and architecture when you across districts. Walk from one end of a street to another and be greeted with a new vista. It's genuinely gorgeo. Keanu gives his best performance since Bill & Ted and I'm not even kidding.

I just hate Borderlands DPS-FPS design so much. A litter tray of skill tree perks that make invisible percentile changes and shooting guys just to watch numbers pop out of their heads until they die. It’s never been satisfying, I never win an encounter with a sense of accomplishment, just that I had a gun powerful enough for the task at hand. Why have we done nothing but regress from what FEAR 1 accomplished?

The narrative design is weak overall, each character archetype being funnelled into the same canned timeskip sequence and starting point is about all you need to know you're not freely role playing at all. I love going to undiscovered side gigs with the flavour text "Who knows what you might find?" only for a phone call to completely spell out the entire mission when I enter its proximity. Really keeps any sense of adventure and wonder intact. The only sidequest I didn't complete was the one that I couldn't get working, which it turns out was about a character voiced by Grimes lol. Fuck outta here. What really takes the cake is that every significant-feeling moral choice I've made has absolutely no payoff ingame, and essentially feel like DLC bait. The game aint fucking done.

Is it the best often-delayed and buggily released open world game where you play as a person with a bunch of tricked-out gadgets who is fighting against time to remove a parasitic person in their head who appears as a snarky vision that leans on walls and makes fun of you, but is actually going to end up replacing you and has a bunch of unnecessary driving segments that nobody really likes I've ever played? No, that's Arkham Knight.

Considering the game is riddled with as many craters as the moon, I'm trying to cut some slack and credit the creators for what they ACTUALLY accomplished in spite of soulcrushing crunch. This is the forty-hour sunk cost fallacy sinking in;-

Being worse off financially for taking moral high roads in missions, cops being so ineffective that they pay you to do their work for them (of course the wanted system is shit, they can't chase you if they wanted to). Living ethically is a luxury you don't always have a choice to make. You have to shred your humanity to pieces with body augmentations just to stand a chance. When the game isn't trying to be a visual wonder or a David Jaffe-esque piece of tryhard shit, its systems compound into something a little more meaningful than I think I gave it credit for in the beginning. There's stuff here, it's hard to stomach, but I like that they did it.
Cyberpunk speaks clearly against the way society dehumanises us, it points a condemnatory finger to the corrupt systems that nourish it, and does everything in its power to make you feel chained to your complacency. It tells you again and again that the system doesn't work, it shows the people who idolise it dying senselessly and unceremoniously, it's telling you that we should do better - that the monolith of human achievement in the form of 2077's Night City is a smoke and mirrors act that disguises the same problems plaguing our world today. I'm no genre genius, but if this is "Cyberpunk", then go the fuck off. Some of these questlines struck a nerve, genuinely good pieces of writing, they just didn't need to be in a game that is this fucking bloated.

I bought a Switch back in 2017 to play this game and ended up just emulating it instead. I am God’s most faithful warrior.

Ultimately disappointed with this. The game shines brightest when you’re battling or even just thinking about battling - stitching together the most insane plans and just barely clutching engagements out, trying to stay afloat in the seemingly endless torrent of class composition options. It’s riveting, goes from strength to strength, hands down the most electrifying I’ve ever found a turn-based game.
Ryota Kozuka and his wind chimes are the mvps currently at Atlus right now because his soundtracks are unbelievable, so brimming with life and variety, even incidental music is many and memorable. I particularly ADORED how the soundtrack would react according to your current position in a district; sometimes reacting by changing channels in accordance to your footing or altitude or something. When you reach the train yard in the first zone and the wailing guitars kick in oooo mama…

The things that drag the game down for me is frankly just about everything else, Atlus games are so good at just being fucking min-maxed now to the point where I love only a handful of things about them and the rest is wretched. The more I think about the story, the more confused and annoyed I get lol. The game just has nothing to say, it just prattles on in broad, poorly defined strokes, rife with flowery terminology carefully chosen to throw you off the scent that the story isn’t able to give an extra dimension to the typical monotheism vs. polytheism conflict. What the fuck even is “knowledge” what the fuck is the “mandella system” among other concepts introduced at the eleventh hour. The Nahobino thing is a misfire for me too, largely because I see their bizarre fabric as a misstep uncharacteristic of what I know of SMT (only played 3 and DDS). I like to think that the games are able to demonstrate a fair amount of reverence to the mythologies they take copious amounts of inspiration from, and I can take inaccuracies a lot more happily than I can the whole idea of these demons of yore needing Doi-ified sentai OCs to become their “true form” lol it’s just so skeevy. I suppose, more to the point, is that this is the first time I’ve seen SMT feel the need to bend under the “burden” of mythology, and I hate to see it. This would all go down a lot better if it was contextualised any more than the absolute bare minimum - just about the only time you see the themes of the game recapitulated in the contemporary world is in the thin cutscene depicting school bullying. The absence of humanity here made it just so hard for me to care, I lost so much steam come the midpoint of the game. These people aren’t my friends, they’re acquaintances, and having to kill them feels like I’m doing the rote motions because I’m in an SMT game.

Without much of a drive to really pull through the game besides its generally stellar presentation and combat, my face would plummet each and every time I had to traverse the world map. I get it, I see the appeal, it just does my head in. Spending so much of the game running across tediously littered sandy terrain, decorated almost solely with the same handfuls of blown-out ruined buildings. I had my dopamine receptors removed in a tragic taffy pulling accident, I get nothing from collecting korok seeds and opening chests.
Pure projection here but there was a confidence and handcrafted sense of purpose to when the PS2 SMTs would have relatively tight and windy corridors or limited vignettes with stunning baked-in texturing. All you get is a vast and desolate Unreal Engine-scape with (admittedly stunning looking) SMT models dotted around with no attempt for them to inhabit the world in any holistic sense. I’d even rather have random battles back than have the stupid looking pockets of enemies clumsily circling their patrol zones.

I mean, it’s not all bad. The things that “matter” are good, namely the core gameplay loop being a very clean modernised open-world affair with best-in-class tb combat. Cutscene Skippers are probably buzzing abt this game in particular. I just had hoped this would be a leaner, meaner project.

Teh bucket of d00m.

A little disappointed with Ultra Deluxe on the whole. I was The Stanley Parable's biggest fan in 2011 - for being a free mod it was surprisingly cogent as an exploration of the metatext in being a player character in a perceivably linear world. The remake was a nice thing too, brushing up the concepts the mod introduced with some greater production values and more keen attention to detail, rounding off the branching paths it also expanded upon. While I'm nowhere near blown away by its observations (especially now that it's 2022 and the subject matter is rather rote by now), nor does its all-too-smug humour really tickle me in any way... it's undeniably satisfying to play a game that knows what to say and when. All bases covered, all nooks and crannies accounted for, everything you can do and everywhere you go triggers an event flag somewhere in the backrooms for the narrator to guffaw about. There's a toy-like quality to it idk, I'm really just like Stanley hitting buttons and listening to their accompanying sound effects.

Ultra Deluxe is... a few more things, all pretty scant. This almost Invader Zim-grade object comedy fixation on a funny bucket item you carry into old ending routes to modify them in minor ways, and the majority of the dialogue is still "press button to make narrator change subject". No guides or whatever are available at the time of me saying all this, who knows, maybe I've neglected to walk down a specific sequence of doors and missed a new skill tree system. They shifted the engine from Source to Unity, I'm sure it's a console porting decision and it certainly all looks better, but no longer getting banished to The Serious Room for setting sv_cheats to 1 removes the best rugpull from the game!!!!

I'm of the mind that game controllers are rife with untapped potential to an almost comical degree; even our two-analogue + two-shoulder-triggers (etc.) standard exemplified across every major system for the past couple of decades has plenty of wriggle room to prove themselves as fructuous user interfaces, as platforms for expression and experimentation. How often are games elevated by you using an input and receiving a response you didn't quite expect, when a title is brave enough to break out of muscle-memory-worn tradition? Why are we always using the right analogue stick for the camera when God Hand demonstrated that it could be used as an omnidirectional dodge? Bumpers piss me off too, it always feels like the part games fall back on when they run out of face buttons.

Aperture Desk Job is a hardware showcase for the Steam Deck, placing the player behind a desk filled with buttons and knobs that represent an abstracted control pad, more specifically the Steam Deck button layout. but I'm honestly not sure what it's so proud of, what it's even flaunting. When all comes down to it, the game seems satisfied to give you another simulation where the left stick "moves" the player, you ready a reticle with the left trigger, and shoot with the right. It even demonstrates with a quippy section that deviations from this, let's face it, trite format are nothing more than "overengineered" amalgams begging for failure. I honestly am a little disappointed in Valve for this. While I definitely think the Steam Deck is one of the best pieces of handheld gaming hardware on the market, it doesn't do anything for interactivity the Switch doesn't do - the WiiU gamepad didn't do. Hell, the fucking Nvidia Shield.

Which, I wanna stress, is fine. I love the Steam Deck lol, it's a relatively uncomplicated means to play my Steam library "on the go" (bed), I love the freedom and the ergonomics of the pad itself are wildly comfortable. It serves its purpose just fine - it's just why I'm a little confused by... this? It does nothing, and despite reprising a fan-favourite role, it also says nothing. I wasn't even necessarily expecting Valve's take on Astro's Playroom, I simply had hoped that their generally forward-thinking design ethos would unravel a hidden truth or two, especially since they had the confidence to release this on regular PCs as well.
Oh well, it's nice to hear little motifs from the Portal 2 soundtrack again, gave me the tingles.

Cleansed by the surf, a body washes ashore on a deserted beach. Nameless, this soul awakens, eyes gleaming with the will to live, and for all things worth living for.

This was my first full playthrough of the game since maybe 2013, and the first time I’ve tackled the expansion content added to the Dark Arisen release. Game still rocks my world. Something of a Capcom dream team coming together to create a moving Frazetta artwork. Hideaki Itsuno’s combat direction acumen and some Monhun crew in the wings to reign the madness into a more grounded dark fantasy action game with a keen eye for resource management & an iconique soundtrack. An excitable exploration of pure western fantasy through the Japanese lens akin to Record of Lodoss War.

I really do just think it’s special. Every excursion through the world or a dungeon is speckled with emergent Moments that can only come around because the systems the game is built on offer a wealth of synergies and expressive means of interactivity. The regularity with which Dragon’s Dogma punctuates an excursion with sick as hell moments that steal your breath, as well as pure slapstick comedy, it almost rivals a particularly haphazard TTRPG campaign. It pays to take note of enemy AI behaviors and exploits, because your pawns will learn as you do and take actions that repeatedly surprise - when I started picking throwing loose enemies into the wider horde in order to more easily deal AoE damage, I noticed my pawn starting to do it for me and I felt like a proud dad.

The world of Gransys is almost my platonic ideal open-world RPG setting. With transportation options limited, the relatively small scale of the map itself is made to feel gargantuan, aided by the density to which it is decorated with places of interest and rewards for clambering up suspicious nooks. Questing requires planning so careful that even a journey down a road must be approached with trepidation. All with thanks to the game’s downright brutal day-night cycle with realistic lighting, you enter a pitch black forest with only your lantern and the reflection of the starving beastly eyes peering at you through the shrubbery. It was impressive in 2012, and remains so to this very day imo!!! I’ll never ever in my life forget the way I shot out of my chair because I turned on my lantern in the pitch black, to reveal the face of a gargantuan chimera winding up a punch.

Dark Arisen offers a locale with something of a megadungeon populated by new enemies and threats. Some of the most fun I’ve ever had with the game occurred within those dingy stone walls. It feels almost like a Bloody Palace mode so you can unleash your classbuilding prowess on the increasingly monstrous beasties thrown your way. End boss was some pure “ah, so this is why games exist” affirmation, too.

…But, it’s undeniably as half-baked as the rest of the game itself. Dragon’s Dogma feels about as unfinished as I’d dejectedly expect anything that comes across as a double-A passion project to be. Brimming with brave creative flourishes, but lacking in a certain star power to really let it raise the bar. I don’t want to beat the dead horse and lament the concepts on the cutting room floor, but it’s fairly noticeable that the game suffers from an enemy and location variety deficit. The implementation of the Pawn system is downright amazing, but so peculiar with miniscule blink-and-you’ll-miss-it details that they don’t have much of a cohesive bigger picture place in the game, and come across as a patchwork solution to a botched multiplayer mode. The quests are fairly rote in and of themselves, and the characters - while I love their antiquated Tolkienist dialogue style, are all flat and unmemorable. Even the classes themselves, which I’d still say are near-enough goated as far as fantasy action games are concerned, could do with a little more in the way of skill diversity. Bitterblack Isle itself feels like at most five unique rooms repeated a handful of times.

Still, don’t wanna be a downer. Dragon’s Dogma is amazing, scratches such a specific itch that I can only thank The Maker that it even exists in the way it does at all. Didn't mention the story at all, not sure how I'd tackle it honestly - thematically rich and insanely well executed. Grigori gets me weak at the knees, man. How the fuck is this game getting a sequel, nothing I like is ever allowed to do that.

Following a particularly stressful, turbulent few weeks, I picked up Old School Runescape, hoping that a smattering of nostalgia and what I believed to be mindless grind would center myself a little. This is a game I hold near and dear with some sense of cloying ironic detachment (I have a framed picture of Tutorial Island in my room. My FFXIV character is named “Runescape”.), yet hadn’t actually played since highschool. Back then, I never once had the opportunity to be a paid member because my parents, wisely, were against the idea of telling the evil computer my name, let alone bank card details. I’ve spent the past week finally delving into the Member's content that Child Me couldn’t, longingly looking at the closed-off swathes of the world map and gated sections of the skills guide like a hungry orphan and dreaming of adventures out of reach. I must say, this game is pretty great.

To my surprise, there’s a certain magic to the way Old School Runescape approaches quest design. In a genre infamous for repetitive “get 30 bear asses” drudgery, OSRS instead decides to make quests something akin to a Sierra or LucasArts point and click adventure. A wide array of common world items and enough context clues in the witty dialogue for you to know what to do with them. It helps that the aesthetics are charmingly simple, but it still demands a surprisingly salient level of environmental awareness as even mundane decorations cannot be ignored for the potential solutions they could be.

There’s even something funny about this being a complete MMO with all the “combine x and y item” and “use x on y” trimmings, so often I’d be exploring the world and run in to another player busying themselves with God Knows What - the world feels alive in moments like these, games struggle to give players meaningful interactions with the world aside from Kill, and even the MMOs I like tend to flounder at this. Where I’d normally see people running rings around an enemy spawn zone killing everything in one hit like a combine harvester of content (and people can still do that in OSRS)... here, I find myself taking the time to watch the world go by, as another player character does some fucked up shit on a weird contraption I have no context or understanding about. In moments like these, I understand the appeal of open worlds lol.

The more subtle thing I realise OSRS gets right is its micro and macro scalability. If you were to set yourself a long-term goal, there is an almost dizzying amount of potential player expression here that will allow you to approach it. The game has at its disposal an absolute ton of in-depth quests and side activities that give meaningful rewards by way of transportation and helpful niche equipment. The game even boasts an Ironman mode that heavily restricts the amount you can trade or receive support from other players, and while that’s definitely not for me, it all feels totally viable. Suffice to say, it’s exactly what I need right now - a world to lose myself in for a while, and never feel like my time is being wasted because I keep finding new motivators around every corner and skills that collide satisfyingly into one another. Even if you just want to be the little adventurer on the wind, the game will make you feel perfectly cared for. I mean christ I just unlocked fairy leylines and I feel like the world is my oyster right now. Genuinely accomplished and fully-realised tabletop RPG chic. Let's kill a green dragon and visit some wizards in a tower.

Goes without saying, but what great music. These harpsichord and trumpet midi soundfonts are absolutely foundational. The game is so charming, man. I love that you can Right Click > Examine everything for a nugget of flavour text, I love the tone of the writing being filled with comfy eye-rolly UK boomer shit, I’m pretty sure I saw a Rising Damp reference. Hyooge world map gushing with mindful detail and cultures upon subcultures.

I wholeheartedly recommend giving this game a shot, whether you're a long-time returner or a first-timer, OSRS remains very unique. I'd push for you to use the Runelite client, a free open-source container for the game filled with options and mods to allow you to set your experience how you'd like. I'm using a graphical plugin called "117 HD", but there are a number of other ones that can come in handy, like a quest helper and timers.

"Death is in the fading scream borne on the wind. Death is in the bubbles from the deep, as dying lungs gasp their last. Death is in the soil, as the deceased become one with nature. Death is in a chair downstairs." - Gnome Child

[PROTECT THE WORLD, EVEN IF THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD IS UNCERTAIN.]

[THE POWER OF ESP. ONE WHO HAS THE POWER IS DESTINED FOR TRAGEDY.]

[DESPERATE CRIES ECHO. THE SCREAM OF ANGER SHAKES THE EARTH, AND YOU DISCOVER THAT IT CAME FROM YOUR SOUL.]

Extremely sick, and very easy to pretend that this is a Mob Psycho shmup. Love how much character is built from the five-second long introductions for the cast, and the rollercoaster of psy spectacle keeps ramping up until the final moment.

It's always so nice to be pleasantly surprised by playing one of these undisputed classiques for the first time, and not have to grapple with the caveat of "you had to be there at the time, aged 9". Quake instantly became my favourite first person shooter from a pure kinetic standpoint, it just feels so good to skate around at mach speed - bouncing grenades around corners and rockets at the feet of goonies.

Amazed by how little I learned about this game through like, osmosis. Every enemy and sleight of hand trick of the levels was completely fresh new n excitin. Had to Google how to beat the final boss after beating my head against the wall for like ten minutes and it's a psychotic method I respect a lot.

Too stupid to get the soundtrack working, so all I had was pure ambient noise & sound effects. The spirit of Trent still manages to resonate within these rusty iron corridors, amazing sound effects that are as toothy and fulfilling as crunching in2 a protein bar.

Completely captures the feeling of a fantranslated PS2 adaptation of a forgotten 90's shoujo manga. Almost dizzyingly textured & artisanal in its devotion to presenting this kind of rose-thorny traditional German folktale. Feels so genuine, inspired, fully realised in a way I desperately needed as a palate cleanser.

For me to become completely convinced of its gameplay and narrative goals, I’d have to replay it with alternate routes in mind, which I’m not quite able to facilitate with my current limited free time - and Little Goody Two Shoes doesn’t exactly make going down these forks in the story particularly breezy. I don’t tackle games with completionism in mind these days but I find myself a little bummed about how much work I’d need to put into this if I wanted to see the stories I’ve missed. Nothing a timeline/"skip seen dialogue" update somewhere down the line can’t fix, please don’t make me watch a Youtube video.

My god, what a success. I've never played a franchise revival that gets so much right. Toys For Bob have proven that they understand much of the original Crash trilogy's appeal and that the series still has plenty of wriggle room for growth that the subsequent Crash outings weren't inspired enough to capitalise on.

Linear corridor-pushing platforming is back to Crash again with a base moveset as shrunken down as it was in 2 more specifically. What ensues are levels that are meticulously and appropriately balanced towards tight and challenging platforming around your more limited toolset. The devs have said "When we think about hazards and enemies and how they’re distributed, they stream across in almost a rhythmic way, so we’ve been really focused on how do we maximize that and use that differentiation to really push Crash gameplay", and that much is demonstrated in how the game retains the core trilogy tenets while also being more momentum-based than before.

For variance, new masks are thrown into the mix with controlled segments that require you to make use of their unique abilities - as well as entire characters that control very differently from the heroes. This is about as welcome as this kind of shakeup could be, these levels being immediately more cognisantly put together than the more extraneous-feeling vehicle segments in Crash 3. It's so nice that they're rarely ever necessary for completion, too, if the player doesn't happen to be keen on the way any given side character's levels play out.

I'd be remiss not to mention how gorgeous the game is. Toys For Bob seemed like the right choice for Crash after their art team's stellar work on the Spyro Reignited trilogy - proving that they are essentially the masters of stage and character design, adding details and changes to the base work that make the world feel effervescent.
I LOVE what they've done with the character redesigns here, taking their old shapes and making them as stylised and expressive as the GPU can handle. Coco's new style is a particular standout; she's never looked this good. Cortex's taller design is quite enlightened too. It suits his character so perfectly for him to try and look as big as he thinks he is, only for him to be a wee rodent when anyone else in the cast enters the frame.

It feels almost cruel and unfair to compare 4 to the remake trilogy that came out just a few years prior, but it's worth noting how incredibly dated that game already looks. A remake mired in bizarre visual choices that, while all minor in the grand scheme of things, illustrates a full image of a team that doesn't know what to do with the paints provided. I wish I could embed images for comparison's sake, but please believe me when you can pinpoint any minute detail from 4 (the water, fire effects, character shadows, foliage, animation, the list goes on) to their direct counterpart in the remake to see it almost completely botched. It all sounds like nitpicking, and it is, but art is an art babye.
https://twitter.com/BeachEpisode/status/1382872345321291785

Where things get particularly interesting with Crash 4 is sadly also where my problems begin. If you were to go into 4 with the same completionist ethos as you would in the OG trilogy, you'd get chewed up and spat out by some senselessly cruel design choices that are actually quite baffling. Crash 4 should act as a case study for how much goodwill can be diminished by level after level of "fuck you", bosshi-like cruelty. Where 100%'ing a given Crash game used to simply add about five or so hours onto the total playtime as you aim for optional collectables, 4 is quite literally padded front and back, forcing you to play through each given level (twice), with an "N.verted" visual filter. Doubling the level count in the laziest way conceivable. This wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that the levels in Crash 4 are considerably longer and more densely packed with crates than ever before. I have to specify; it's not so much the difficulty being the problem; the content surrounding the difficulty is so disproportionately bloated. Racking up tens of minutes in a single level as you try to break every crate you can as you scan every nook and cranny with a fine-tooth comb, only for you to come to the end of a level, one crate short, it's enough to knock a star off a total score (and it did).

One of Crash 4's best elements is how unpredictable it is from a pacing standpoint. There are numerous points where you think you're in the final runup to the end only for the trapdoor beneath you to fall out, revealing a whole new slew of levels. This would normally be quite exciting, if not for how easily you could get burnt out at any point by the game's padded nature, making it hard to savour how much of a rambling journey the game takes you on. Sure, you could ignore these side things and sprint to the ending. You'd definitely finish the game with a more positive take away than me! But I am a simple man who wants those unlockable skins.

While I'm effortposting far too much about this orange marsupial game, I might as well add that I love the interdimensional story this game is trying to tell. Its sense of humour gets me to a tee and is filled with very subtle winks to even the prior games that are now rendered "not canon". Cutscenes with incredible squash n stretch tex avery loony tunes esque animation that conveys character better than any game I've ever played. I love it to death.

Crash 4 is a fleshed out, wonderfully well-studied sequel. Built with a uniquely high grade of technical skill that is often diminished by design choices that can feel a little misguided. This is one of the most concrete building blocks I have ever played, and is one iteration away from complete perfection to my eyes. (Like... just make it so the checkpoint boxes tell you how many crates you missed. That would help SO MUCH). I'm hoping Toys For Bob continue pumping out wall to wall bangers now that Skylanders seems to have bitten the dust; they're more qualified than most to make gorgeous, satisfying and engaging platformers that are absolutely drenched in personality.

Surprisingly smart little game! Uses Link's Awakening's skeletal structure as a somewhat perfunctory platform to host Tunic's core puzzle-solving strengths, which come from the way it delicately divulges new information to the player for them to intuit and patch together. The in-game manual conceit really is an enlightened touch, what a wonderful way to avoid tutorialisation by lightly suggesting mechanics and prompts in a freeform way. A new star in my eye forms every time a game nudges me into realising a shortcut or mechanic has ALWAYS been there, I just wasn't aware yet. The combat serves as an occasional hurdle against progress in a way I just found detracting to the experience. For as rough as it is, it neither needs to be as present nor as bafflingly demanding lol.

Still, I enjoyed this a lot. The closest comparison I can think of on a whim would be Fez, another game filled with micro and macro puzzles that near-wordlessly demand intuition and perception on the part of the player. Lifeformed is on the 1s and 2s for this soundtrack btw! Mostly just ambiance without the Dustforce killer, but I missed that guy.

“Whatever he’s planning, it’s going to happen, and I don’t want to be here when it does. If there’s one thing I’m sure of; everything’s about to fall apart”.

A couple days ago, I was calmly and cooly lamenting the way Half Life 1’s cinematic setpieces still remain somewhat unique through to today. There’s something I find incredibly cathartic about cataclysmic things happening to a gigantic facility while the player Mr Bean’s their way through falling platforms and rubble, all the while gormlessly operating critically important, high-powered machinery you have no qualifications for. Everyone wants their FPS to have a shotgun with lots of recoil or something, but I want an elevator shaft sequence with massive casualties.

INFRA is a rough-around-the-edges little anomaly of a game - if it isn’t outsider art, it skirts dangerously close. It’s just so rare for a title to lean so far into its own neuroses alongside such genuinely impressive production values.

Tasked, as a structural analyst, to do a routine survey of the crumbling water treatment facilities on the outskirts of the fictional city of Stalburg, there is little more for the player to do mechanically than take photographs of OSHA violations and flick switches. Even still, the average first playtime of INFRA is 22 hours long. An oftentimes painful linear first-person adventure where the common roadblock is the odd wildly cruel puzzle and level design. It truly begs belief, the shit they make you do in this to earn a crumb of progress.

I really do love the good majority of what this game accomplishes - there’s an engrossing sense of scale on the journeys between the puzzles. Though the game is linear, there is a lot of wriggle room for alternating paths and solutions to key events, all the while the set designers filled every nook and cranny with surprisingly mindful details and assets that make the city feel lived-in and rewarding to poke around. It’s even replete with intense large-scale destructive setpieces that remind me of something like Disaster Report, and the player character's dialogue has that tired in-over-his-head everyman energy that I luvv. Navigation requires careful deliberation as you have to scan the environment for the most subtle nudges in the right direction; finding keys, notes containing passwords, manuals explaining how to operate machinery. Dizzyingly many things here are purely optional and only affect your playthrough way down the line, if at all.

Where INFRA loses me is in how rotely demanding it can be. The kinds of puzzles here are these legitimately tricky logic tests that tend to be sprawled out over a large playable area - often obscured by too much detail and not-enough lighting - meaning that to even test out a hypothesis, the player has to do a not-insignificant amount of travel between inputs. The developers have this undeniable keen interest in civil engineering, the way these facilities and utilities are connected to one another in a grand network of city planning and infrastructure…… but it’s the sole thing that extends the playtime, and it fucking wore me down. There’s a grand conspiracy element to the game’s overarching story and I could hardly pay it any mind because I just wanted the water on the floor to stop electrocuting me. It wasn’t until the game entered its closing act where I finally felt as though I had clocked to the designer’s puzzle logic. I wanted INFRA to kill its darlings, cull extraneous sections and give me more simple problems to solve - but the game’s more interesting with the sheer friction it poses. Imagine you turned the difficulty of Half Life 1 to the max, only for it remove all of the enemies and guns, & make Black Mesa more annoying instead.

While the game routinely lost its balance on the knife’s edge between demanding and frustrating, I found myself completely enamoured by the way Loiste Interactive hyperfocuses on the spectacle, genuine lived-in immersion, of the decaying infrastructure of the fictional city of Stalburg. Allegedly inspired by watching a documentary on the crumbling network of civil engineering that the USA relies heavily on, INFRA is a game about corruption and decay. It’s a crude image, one of vainglorious despots causing corporate neglect to eat away at the infrastructure we rely on, cataloguing the rebar and cabling that protrudes the crumbling concrete like scabs, but it’s truuu.

INFRA ain’t a game for everyone, but there’s a lot here for folk with saintly patience to appreciate. If you do give it a miss, please at the very least say “tyvm :3” to the overpass you drive under for being kind enough not to fall directly on top of you. It’s very tempted, I’d be too.