"Alan Wake 2 is a game that shows what videogames are capable of"

Well, I imagine that a large number of people, when reading this highlighted phrase, will imagine a game that demonstrates cutting-edge technology, photo-realistic visuals, or even surprising performance. But definitely not the case where I wanted to refer to that kind of thing.

Alan Wake 2 tries to push the limits of what is possible to present and (only) achieve through a game. Using different multimedia formats to convey a plot, whether through meta commentary, live action cinematic cutscenes, different forms of interaction in the environment and fourth wall breaks, may not be a new thing. But it is certainly the game that comes closest to what was idealized by Sam Lake throughout his career, by playing with these elements in a coherent way, and delivering an experience that is unlike ANY other game I have seen playing videogames for more than 20 years.

And speaking of which, I believe that the most important thing in a game is the experience it gives you, and without a doubt, Alan Wake 2 is a game that cannot be explained. I could say that it is one of the best survival horror titles of recent decades, going head to head with classics like Silent Hill 2 or the original Resident Evil, or I could even say that it has one of the best and most ingenious plots and ways of tell a story that you can find in any medium. But it doesn't make sense, nothing I can say could do him justice.

Alan Wake 2 is a game that needs to be experienced above all else, and I hope everyone can give it a chance someday.

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Not quite as punchy (the irony) as Not a Hero, instead focusing on a stealthier approach to its gameplay segments— which aren’t all that exciting. The alligators are one of the more annoying enemies in the game, as you have to either sneak past them or use a spear to kill them, and you’ll end up doing the former most of the time because you can’t possibly craft 15+ spears in a single playthrough. This is made even worse on Joe Must Die, as you’ll come across less materials with increased enemy health, making those entire segments a drag to get through.

As with the base game, the difficulty scaling is absurd; if not for the achievements, I wouldn’t be able to withstand it. Locations are rigged with explosives, traps, and more enemies, making it more of a trial-and-error based thing than something you can naturally progress through. It completely sucks the fun out of everything, and makes something that could be done in 40 minutes— take hours.

The boss fights with Jack on this difficulty, and even on normal are repetitive. You’ll fight him three separate times, each being slightly different but not enough to make them distinctive and enjoyable on each occasion— slowly getting more and more tiresome on every subsequent one; even though the spectacle of boxing Jack’s new mutated form for the first time is pretty hilarious. It’s even funnier how little bitch Ethan had to use an entire arsenal of weapons to keep Jack down, and even then he couldn’t… it now makes two characters that have completely humiliated that loser! and I’m here for it. As a matter of fact, Joe Baker is insanely fucking cool, and makes Ethan look like that much more of a scared, spineless, annoyance. We have Joe Baker out here boxing these molded to death, and Ethan has to use a shotgun, a flamethrower, and a whole ass grenade launcher to do less than he can… it’s pitiful honestly. Chris also makes an appearance at the very end, further humiliating Ethan with his mere presence, all my homies hate Ethan Winters…

Aaaaand I’m finally done! What an incredibly mixed bag this game was, but at least this DLC managed to have a good conclusion to the RE7 storyline. I’m probably going to play RE2: Remake next, but not before I’ve had a long break from survival horror, because this was an exhausting experience.

DLC's - Ranked
2017 - Ranked

Kratos' tragedy is that of dehumanizing discipline to achieve the vain glory of ultimate conquest, of fruitless strength.

I wouldn't consider God of War's drama to be particularly lucid, as it largely exists to rationalize the player's advancement in the scenarios (as is the case of so many other triple A games, to dichotomize "story" and "gameplay" in the relationship between cinematics and "the actual game", as if gameplay wasn't inherently narrative in the actions we partake in when interpreting a character) and gets too stuck for much of it in the voyage for the McGuffin that is Pandora's Box. However, I can't deny that there's something intriguing in its contradiction.

A game about the pleasure of ultra-violence and the dominance over all beings that questions our involvement in how all the expulsion of id results trivial. Merits without satisfaction, as the demonic phantasms of the past persevere. A mortal accepting the throne of a God, yet he is still condemned to be haunted by his actions; what has been done can't be borrowed, no matter how hard one fights against the divine. Kratos "wins", yet what is his worth? A solitary palace to rejoice on his emptiness? A revenge bringing no more than dissatisfaction in ostentatious dresses?

Its immediate sequels (II & III) would miss this appeal, either from the ridicule reaching an excess that it no longer can have any human grounding (this entry is absurd though, let that be clear), or from the epic centering even more scarcely in the psychological complex, making its delving to such unearned. Yet this one still holds weight in the progression of the flashbacks, each taking us closer to the painful truth, and its understanding of the Greek tragedy being personalized to the protagonist's vices; the tale functioning in pedagogical terms due to how the punishments of the Gods feature a cautionary lesson; the inevitability of the conclusion as all has been precedingly rigged (and how the flashbacks here play a role in realizing this dynamic).

Some gets lost in translation due to how troubling is to pull off its contradiction, of being satisfying while enjoying a sense of banality and transmitting it in terms of interaction with systems. Nonetheless, it remains interesting and surprisingly well designed to evade monotony in our player disposition. It takes some time to get truly engaging with the challenges, yet everything involving, for example, the three stages of the finale I found immensely gratifying in how it forces genuine attention for the enemy patterns and a pragmatic usage of our special abilities. Definitely better than the sordidness of God of War III.

The Case of the Golden Idol: A fun crime-solving adventure. Prepare to be engulfed in a uniquely ugly world while your cases get more and more complicated yet never manage to feel daunting.

This game is entirely its puzzles with the added challenge of keeping things organized in your bar of environmentally-scanned information. You'll peer through all the items and persons of a crime scene before having to fill in a chart that's similar to an absurd and deadly Mad Libs prompt.
The comparisons to Return of the Obra Dinn are rampant, so I may as well join in on the fun: I never finished Obra Dinn, I found it sort of overwhelming to have the entire ship and its crew right there, so many questions waiting for answers all at once. I think Golden Idol does a better job with its pacing, breaking everything up into the progressively-intricate scenes, it's a more bite-sized approach. What's interesting is both games go for a very distinct, acerbic art style, but I was not too fond of Obra Dinn's. I prefer Golden Idol's bizarre, hideous joggling to Obra Dinn's starkness; I found the former to be enjoyably enfolding rather quickly.

Golden Idol doesn't just give you what you need to fill in prompts. If you think you know what happened, you'll need to find the appropriate verb and noun somewhere in the scene. This is a pretty smart way to make the player take in all of their surroundings before getting into the nitty-gritty, and there's a counter on your information bar to let you know how many things you're still looking for. You likely won't use all of them, some are there as red herrings or obstructing clutter.

Every scene is its own story and there's a plot connecting all of them. Almost every scene (in the base game) plays the same except for one, the tribunal, and I think that was the worst one of the bunch. I liked solving murders, which up until the penultimate mission is what you're doing, when all of a sudden you're trying to find out how many merit points each category of infraction costs. It was the only level I eventually turned to a guide for help, I just didn't like trying to figure out the four virtues, their subcategories, and what each one was worth. Once you've got that, then the game has you doing math. It's not comically long division or anything, but still, talk about a speed bump in pacing; I'm here for the double-frame jobs, not homework.
Once you're through the missions, there's an epilogue as a final challenge, basically there to ask, “Do you know what happened?” I enjoyed going through that, it was a great way to cap things off.
There's a DLC chapter of three scenes, and I really only enjoyed the first one. It was more murder solving with a new added twist, exactly what I wanted to see there. The other two DLC scenes didn't really do it for me so I don't think the price is justified.

Overall, this is a pretty tight package. I don't know why I initially downloaded its demo, nothing about the Steam screenshots is too enthralling, but I'm really glad the demo was offered and that I partook. You get to feel like Sherlock Holmes without doing any real work, who doesn't love that?

I recommend this game, especially if you also share the baseless delusion that you'd make a great detective.

A rough gem that could have truly shined if it wasn’t stymied by its grindy filler sandbox design, Mafia 3 is still the best game in the series in my opinion and a game that is woefully underappreciated.

The narrative is genuinely one of the finest I’ve seen in an open world crime game; Lincoln is a great protagonist and the supporting cast are all strong, most notably Father James, who adds so much to the documentary style framing device which made it feel genuinely inspired. The atmosphere is also wonderful too with a great sense of place with its setting in 60’s Not-New Orleans. The soundtrack is fantastic with so many great licensed 60’s songs picks and how well utilized they are when they pop up from time to time in the main story missions, Sympathy for the Devil especially. Thematically it’s also a neat exploration of how broken the American system is through the lens of the 1960’s. America was founded on white supremacy, genocide, and slavery and that won’t go away no matter how much American exceptionalism you try to paper over with it. The rot is in the foundations.

The combat itself is solid, the gunplay is fun and so is the stealth even though its super easy because enemies are easily lured away one by one by just whistling so you can easily stealth kill them. The turf system is a neat idea too and how you have to balance the favor of Lincoln’s lieutenants, it just really needed to cut out the grind because you need to dive into it to progress through the story so it does get rather tedious having to dredge your way through them to get to the great story missions. The game should have been like half its length.

The DLC campaigns were also a neat explorations of different genres for Lincoln and his supporting cast to find themselves in, ranging from Lincoln teaming up with the not-Black Panthers to go all Dukes of Hazzard on a white supremacist rural sheriff and his Klan buddies, a Vietnam War era spy story, and a cult horror story. It all really left me wishing we had some more adventures with Lincoln in a similar vein.

Mafia 3 has some deep flaws, but if you can stomach the grind you’re in for a genuinely great game otherwise.

I have spent many years trying to find an Ip Man simulator. I don't want a game where you go on the offensive. I want the game where trouble comes to me. I am going to sit there, one hundred dudes will do their best to punch me, they will fail, and I will make them all look silly in the process. I don't want some two-button auto-fighting combat system, I want to feel like I'm doing something.

Sifu mostly delivers! I played Absolver, I played the Arkham games, I played Sleeping Dogs, I played Overgrowth, I played Yakuza. Sifu's probably the closest it comes to being Donnie Yen. So it probably makes sense that at any point during Sifu, I probably would tell you that I'm having a fucking blast in that moment. But! I want a little more. I want more game, of course, but what I really mean is that I feel like a lot of Sifu is either undercooked or underutilized.

There are some cool scenes! If you've heard anything about the game, you've heard about the Oldboy hallway. The museum is probably my favorite area in the game between the big ink pendulum thing and the way it plays with your vision on the way to the boss. But the environment mostly feels like it's there because they need something that doesn't look like you're running through a level blockout. When they want you to play with the environments it's some of the most fun you'll have with the game - the museum exhibits, all the clutter in the high-rise level, the parts of the nightclub where you're allowed to interact with objects. The game really wants you to only use weapons when they deem fit though, judging by the barren combat corridors that exist all throughout the game. Some of these encounters would be a little more interesting if I could be more inventive with how I use my environment outside of a couple rooms.

Weapons are a little weird and I wish they found a better balance with them? They can be fun when the enemies pose a threat and you're actually forced to use them wisely, but I only really feel like these are used to full effect against bosses - catching kunai that a boss is throwing at you and airmailing it back to its original sender is as satisfying as an entire fight all on its own, but more often you are either given one or zero weapons when fighting a boss. Sure, that's fine, design decision, that's cool. But it's weird that it comes immediately after a level where I had a bat in my hand the entire time because almost every enemy in the level had a bat or knife, and I could replace my weapon 4 times over before the first one would've broken.

I also feel like the upgrades are missing something. I probably only used 30% of the upgrades in the game intentionally, and that includes both the statue upgrades and the skill... totem pole? It feels like the developers want to extend a hand to you and offer you the chance to make incremental, permanent progress, but these upgrades feel mostly meaningless. There are a couple moves/combos you can use to cheese your way through a boss but there's no real reason to do so if you want Sifu's combat to retain its charm.

Bosses are Sifu's biggest strength. They feel like this is what the game was meant to be about, which is why it's so weird that there's only five of them. The lead-up to each boss plays with the environment, and four of the five encounters are actual, real skill checks. Each of them will slap the soul out of you if you don't understand the skill they're testing. It's effective teaching, and each boss makes you better at the game overall when you need to go back to previous levels and beat them at a younger age. I do think the game would benefit from having more difficulty options, because the bosses seem to assume that you've played the way I did and only do the bare minimum until the game tests you on a skill - button mashing until the game demands you actually defend, blocking until the game insists that you learn how to dodge, etc. People who mastered these early (or learn quickly) are going to cruise through the game much faster. It really leaves me wishing that there were more bosses that tested you on multiple things at once, or forced you to adapt a bit more. No boss tests your positioning against multiple enemies, none have any real mixups. If any Sifu DLC ever gets released, I hope that it includes some endgame bosses that really, truly test the player who's able to make it to the end.

Lastly, I don't want to undersell the fights against standard, non-boss enemies. The fights against crowds are mostly a joke to begin with - it's what allows that Oldboy reference to actually resemble the movie - but they become a genuine thrill as special enemies are mixed in. Unlike the Arkham games, where special enemies are more of a nuisance than anything ("spam dodge until you get a chance to press The One Button That Kills This Kind of Guy"), special enemies in Sifu feel like a welcome challenge. They apply additional - but not overwhelming - pressure to the player, forcing you to change the way you defend to create new opportunities to attack while still keeping up with the rest of the mob. I enjoy doing the entire museum level all over again (despite having the shortcut) just so I can do the last chunk before the boss where they confine you to a small area while mixing in a bunch of dancers and grapplers.

There's a lot to like here, but I wish the environments and enemies were more alive OR more varied. Its gameplay scratches an itch for me that Absolver never did, being a little bit faster with a lower skill floor (while still making progress towards the skill ceiling feel meaningful and exciting). I really hope Sloclap decides to do more with this system, no matter what form it takes.