Very spellbound by Yakuza 7's early game. Broad shifts for the series that nicely complement the themes of the story - about the difficulty of starting over in a new place, and it never being too late to look to the future. Further complemented by the fact that you are ripped out of not only the familiar Kamurocho, but also the genre. The fact that it unflinchingly (albeit clumsily) touches on topics like homelessness in Japan, the sex work industry, and immigration mindfully... It's really fucking incredible. I won't gush, but I love the cast and their themes. I cried a lot.

The shift to turn-based was the stim injection I needed after growing weary of the mashy brawler combat of 0, K1+2. It's incredible that a combat system that has been iterated on for over a decade has been immediately blown out of the water by something that almost feels like a science experiment. A genuinely informed genre shift that means items and equipment finally matter, as well as meaning you can now operate an entire party of characters while completely maintaining the old original pacing. My vote for personal GOTY.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV1lOo-T15I

Invader Zim levels of critique on capitalism.
We're better than the corporations because our social atomisation, dissociation from community doesnt have a Pip Boy mascot. Let's kill "Marauders" (please don't ask who or what they are). Damn is that gun a Gucci? We replaced the politics of New Vegas with a gripping perk system that entirely leans on combat stat boosts. The extent of this game's role-playing capability is deciding whether or not to be a character who presses the bullet time button. Randomly generated loot lends to the sheer artifice of this world, the characters are all jokes and interacting with them is like flicking a bobblehead. This review is as short and unfocused as the game is.

\*WHO ARE YOU ?*

My comfort. Ever since I learned how to emulate, I've returned to this title with semi-regularity just so I can trip through it again.

\*DON'T COME ANY CLOSER !*

Rez is like if Char Davies' 1995 art installation called "Osmose" was a shmup. Experimental explorations through 3D spaces that, while primitive, are teaming with vibes, life, and anthropologic influences. There's such a grit to it all, it's like decoding the earth's DNA, weaving it into strings to pluck, and playing along to the universe's heartbeat. Did you know that all the data on Rez's PS2 disk amounted to 91mb? That's how much a soul weighs.

\*WHY ?*

You could definitely say it peaks early by starting with the best level - its music is incredible, the escalation in instrumentation and aesthetic complexity is unmatched, you can't power up enough to become one of the forms with annoying sound effects. It's worth playing the slightly less spectacular middle levels just to eventually hear Fear is the Mindkiller again. Never dull, always reinventing itself and finding new ways to overwhelm the player, enemies and patterns that never show up across levels - it's a journey.
The Area X level they introduced for the Rez Infinite port is welcome optional content that isn't hurting anything. Many people love it, I'm kinda nonplussed. Empty void of Unreal Engine particles and none of the progressive trance choons that keep my heart bumpin.

\*AREN'T YOU AFRAID ?*

Still about as visually spectacular as games ever got!!! This is up there with Zone of the Enders 2 for Apex Graphics.

\*SAVE ME .....*

Thanks RPCS3. My favourite Souls - Blanketed in sorrow and an intoxicating ambiguity. An artstyle akin to a faded picturebook you've plucked out of an ancient water-logged library. I love so much that all of the environments feel restrained and utilitarian. A soundtrack that is wholly unique, doesn't feel a little inspired by the Hollywood Orchestral Epics nor does it even attempt to hit those notes.
The one title in the franchise that actually feels like a fantastical adventure, with encounters and environments that are more often a challenge of wit and intuition than attack pattern memorisation or a side-flippy shounen damage value race. It reeks!!! But it reeks beauty. I genuinely don't believe FromSoft in their current form have it in them to create a boss battle like King Allant again.

Solid and innovative, continues to be the breath of fresh air now as it was when I first played it in 2009. Nothin like it!!!!

All I'll say on the Bluepoint demake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5z2-hpZB1w

That there was such a focus on thematic art direction and narrative meant I actually cared to see this Roguelite through to the end, multiple times. Shocked and stunned beyond all belief that an entry in this genre can actually look pretty, and not just be a dozen repeating mud tilesets.
For a game about systems compounding into "always-unique" runs, I still found myself rolling my thumb across the face buttons and dashing to victory regardless. Eventually grew weary of having to dungeon run for 20~ minutes before I saw some new dialogue, but it was nice affirming Medusa while it lasted. Such a sprawling and reactive script is obviously very impressive, I certainly hope loamlikes everywhere take the hint.

Dedicated a hundred or so painstaking hours to trying to understand this hulking monolith of MMO Discourse. Nigh impossible to believe a newcomer attuned to the niceties of FFXIV can find any enjoyment in this hamster wheel of hideous, thankless design, and bear asses. Either this is a piece of transgressive art I'm simply too stupid to appreciate, or just a radiant entry in a then budding 3D MMORPG genre with growing pains as noticeable as its ambitions. Thanks for paving the way for other, better games. Maybe in retail WoW they actually remembered to put the story IN the game.

God, Infogrames really did push the envelope, even when it came to their games based on licenced properties. Maurice Noble's classic Looney Tunes background style lends itself INCREDIBLY well to the low-poly necessities of the Playstation 1. These environments do not miss a beat, nor do the character animations - the jagged messes of the models are animated so excellently that they are as bouncy as they are expressive. Full of life in ways few, more capable, games manage to achieve.
Sheep, Dog 'n' Wolf is almost overwhelmingly inventive, from its visuals to its level design, and invites you to be just as creative in solving them. I'm stunned to see how well this holds up, this game is a uniquely effective powerhouse of joyful cartoonish energy.
Slap that OST on NOW https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZISHX6AfNcw

I hoped playing this with my partner would have been the ideal way to experience a co-op title about two lovers exploring the stars, but Haven constantly found ways to wedge inbetween the intimate experience a plethora of elements that drag the journey down to earth.

Haven not only struggles to deliver the adventure it alludes to, it is a co-op game where the other player is only made to feel like a hindrance. The fact that players control a single given character, yet we both have to agree on each other's dialogue options - that only one player gets to direct the actual journey while the other merely collects starbits Mario Galaxy style - the way you each control a single looming third person camera within the house. It constantly finds new ways to feel impersonal, which betrays the intimate and adult love story of Yu and Kay so much. The moment the journey feels like it's finally abound, the momentum is halted by tutorial prompts, redundant battles, and dialogue that could really have been part of traversal.

Haven masquerades as a fun road trip for two, but it's really just a tour boat with Haven at the helm. There's one passenger seat that the players have take turns to sit on, and you're not entirely convinced Haven even knows where he's taking us. Big respect to these devs for taking such a huge departure from Furi, though.

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.

Stare deep enough into the fractal, you'll find yourself staring back. Nothing short of genius - informed by its budgetary limits and creates something truly unique through them. Visuals that go far against horror genre presumptions and instead strives for something calm, meditative, beautiful. The spotless, uncanny opulence of the aging room in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but completely unfathomable in terms of scale and purpose. Possibly my favourite diegetic UI and sound design in games, with the frantic feeling of the encounters being matched completely by their aesthetics going from subtle to sensorially overwhelming. Absolutely beautiful reactive score and weighted feeling lore that is explained through fantastic writing and voice performances.
I don't want to give away the core gimmick of the palace, but suffice to say; Oh My God, play this.