Five Nights at Umbrella Corps

Crow Country is a really neat Resident-Evil styled survival horror that takes place in a theme park somewhere in the Atlanta metro. Being that I'm a huge fan of RE and the survival horror genre at large, when I saw this near the top of the highest rated Backloggd games for 2024 my interest jumped. This was everything I was looking for in a game while I await Shadow of the Erdtree. It's remarkably short (less than five hours, however I was afk for some of this,) fairly easy, has an awesome CRT aesthetic, an RE1 camera, and the lore was interesting enough and told well to keep me interested in its short run time. Plotwise it’s nothing extraordinary: You play as Mara, a girl investigating this dilapidated land of attraction. The more time you spend investigating the nooks and crannies of Crow Country, you meet more people and become further enveloped in the spooky mystery behind disappearances and fatalities alike. Zombies known as "guests" inhabit the park in various shapes and sizes. Some of these guests are large and tower over the area you're in, some nimble and move quick, others literal blobs on the map... they're remedied all the same by a few shots from whatever weapon you're using. I used the basic pistol, in RE style, for the majority of the game until the final boss and got along just well. There are several optional bosses as well, all of which went down with a few grenade tosses and a shot or two. I liked this a lot about Crow Country, its short and doesn't control all too well (I mean really, what tank control game ever did) and making combat as simple as it is just making the runtime feel better.

Now I am generally pretty positive in regard to this game, especially because it respects the players runtime, but I felt like a lot of the puzzling and item usage felt a little... random to me. This made the game for much of its latter runtime feel more like a metroidvania than an RE style survival horror than I believe was intended. Items required you to run from one end of the map to the other and sometimes puzzles felt a little obscure in their solutions. Overall I think it could take a hint from the RE2/3/4makes and be more intuitive than it was.

In all if you're a fan of survival horror, especially from indie studios, Crow Country is a must play for 2024. It's short, sweet, and wears its inspiration on its sleeves in the right way.

Dark Souls Peak

Far and away the best of the trilogy, Dark Souls III seems like a complete F-U to the two games before it. A polished experience from start to finish, the third entry into the series feels like the best moments of Elden Ring at times with some of the annoying trepidation of the previous two entries.

The first thing that I have to salute DS3 about and it's almost a little sad that I am, is the fact that it ran at a glorious 60 FPS with a nice graphic sheen to it that reminded me of last year's GOTY: Elden Ring. The visual fidelity didn't just do the environments of this title justice, but made movement and boss fights much more manageable and approachable throughout the ~30 hour experience. From the moment I loaded in to completion of the game I was in awe at how fluid it was, and there were many times that I felt like I was in the world of Elden Ring.

Gameplay took a tremendous leap between the previous title and this one, dropping silly things like I-Frames that are tied to a stat and accelerated weapon degradation against bosses in favor of a smoother and more enjoyable experience. I went with my Fromsoft staple oonga boonga melee build, swapping great club and a giant axe until I found Dragon's Tooth (my Dark Souls 1 go to) later on. There were moments where I felt I was a little cheated, but it was never at a point where I thought it was overbearing or simply bad game design as it was in DS1 & DS2. Upgrading weapons felt vindicating as you could fully tune them to your playstyle, and were giving ample resources to do so. Gear didn't have to be upgraded as it was in DS2 either, making for a playthrough where you could worry moreso about the actual "game" of Dark Souls rather than material management.

Bosses were a tremendous leap between the titles too, clearly taking a page from the improvements Fromsoft made with Bloodborne the year prior. From the moment you fight Iudex Gundyr all the way until the final boss of the DLC, you are matched against bosses who will not just test your raw stats but also your ability to improvise, adapt, and overcome. That was my favorite part of playing all of Dark Souls III, the fact that bosses weren't gimmicks to be understood and passed by, but actually difficult opponents that could be beaten by learning their patterns and how to react appropriately. Again, very Bloodborne and a clear pattern they would replicate with Elden Ring many moons later. I don't want to give spoilers because the lore and sequencing is rightfully important to many players, but there were some bosses later on I would jump up after beating and say "I hated that, it was one of the best boss fights I've ever done." My favorite part of Bloodborne was how each match against each boss felt like a dance to the death because of how fluid and integral constant movement was to that game. Now, Dark Souls III is notably slower but you still feel like you're in an honest duel with these bosses, in which pure skill will reign supreme.

Like I touched on with comments on visual fidelity above, the game is absolutely gorgeous and filled with those "Fromsoft Moments" where you enter a new area atop a cliffside and pause just to gaze at the incredible vistas in front of you. Beauty is abound throughout the entire game, however I found myself most in awe when I played the ultimate "Ringed City" DLC. Such rich use of colour and scale is utilized to craft a believable environment of dilapidated buildings and past socieities.

While it wasn't perfect (it was too short!) Dark Souls 3 is a jaw dropping experience that engages the player from their first moments all the way into its conclusion. A massive improvement from Dark Souls 1 & 2, it improves on just about everything to make it clear how great of a job Fromsoft has done in gameplay innovation and creativity. I would absolutely recommend Dark Souls III.

Slaps the roof of the Persona Franchise

"Ah yeah, this can fit so much peak in it."

Because I played Portable not all that long ago, I won't speak in as much detail as I usually do about new titles. My P3P review can be found here, what I do have to add is below:

Persona 3 Reload rectified an incredible amount of issues I had with P3P, a game which I played last year as it hit PC for the first time, jumping my Persona 3 experience from a 2.5 star to a 4.5 star rating. What did the Persona Team do in this recreation of a fan favorite? Viewable character models!!! Though that is a tremendous boon to my enjoyment of this title, it was just the tip of the "wow this is pretty damn good" iceberg that is Reload. Improvements made to the OST, design, and combat all turned this experience from a simple rehashing of a game I found decent at best to my smash hit of 2024.

"Persona Vibes" have been a joke in my friendgroup for some time... that silly stupid smile you get from simply existing in the Persona world going to school at whatever institution MC-Kun attends with the whatever group of misalined teammates that you call your friends with some of the best soundtracking to grace the medium of videogames... but damnit if it isn't really a thing and doesn't hit as hard as it does. The jump from Portable to Reload for me was a massive reward in this regard, just being able to run around Tatsumi Port Island with a high-definition display and consistently present hip-hop music creates an amazing vibe you can only get from Atlus' marquee franchise. I felt a noticable lack of buy-in to the world and characters at hand in Portable when I was mousing over and clicking on still profiles, it means so much more being able to physically approach and interact with the richly variable (yet still not deep) cast in terms of creating immersion. While I still don't find myself as into the cast of P3, nor the location (since its so small in comparison to P4 and P5,) it's still Persona at its roots. Maybe if I'd played FES or the original release, my approach to P3R would be a little more tempered, however I can't stress enough how nice it was to actually experience the world. I didn't forsee this being as much of a difference maker in my enjoyment of P3 (because I still have my issues with the game) as it was, but it did rectify the absence of Persona DNA and feel that existed in Portable.

As I've touched on a couple of times now, Lotus Juice and company did a fantastic job modernizing the work they and Shoji Meguro did in Persona 3's original OST. The instrumentation and mixing sounds far superior than in the original P3 suite, with the modern renditions of songs like Changing Seasons and the Dorm Theme (oh my gosh, they really did fix the dorm theme from the horrendous HEY HEY HEY version) as examples. It's more crisp, goes along with the redone and colorful locale, and lends itself to a more seamless Persona-experience. What I had originally imagined would be just a simple re-use of the already pretty strong P3 OST ended up as my front runner for Soundtrack of the Year. Normally I wouldn't count remaster/remakes/ports in this category but the lifting job in Reload to take an already great work of music into the stratosphere is as commendable as you can get.

I applaud the improvements made to integrating your party more into seeming like actual members of your crew through linked episodes which feed directly into the combat boons that are Theurgy's. Having a sort of ultimate attack/limit break in Persona is much needed for some of the longer weakness-lacking boss encounters, which are a plenty in P3R. You fight a lot of rather tough and long winded enemies in this game and it's nice to have a way to blast through that a little quicker while still having to retain a sound strategy and mind.

The negatives that existed within my P3P review that still remain in P3R include: horrible social link optics in many arcana's (Maiko, Maya, Kenji to name a few) which unfortunately were not re-written/fixed, abysmally slow pacing in the early sections of the game, and tartarus being the worst in-game mandatory dungeon in gaming (that I've experienced.) While these negatives still remain, the good in P3R was pretty damn good and enough to offset any and almost all sour feelings I had with my experience in P3P.

While it's not flawless, Persona 3 Reload rectifies Persona 3's biggest issues and breathes elysian life into a game that had the ingredients for a fantastic dish. I'd recommend Persona 3 Reload to fans of Persona and JRPG's alike, it's one of the best experiences I've had in a GOOD WHILE in games and has left a Persona sized hole in my heart once again. I mean with no announcement for Persona 6 what do I even do? Are there otherr games out there?

Wow this game is a hot mess, but I kinda like it....I can fix her....

Dark Souls 2 was my first Fromsoftware game, and to be honest for a while it was at the top of my list. However, after playing some of the other games the developers have made, I can't really in good faith write a great review of the game when Smelter Demon exists. Jokes aside, this game has fantastic world building, and I really digged most of the lore associated with this game. However I cannot deny the facts. The ADP stat is just plain stupid, and while there are some really good bosses in here, most of them are real stinkers. I've heard great things about the PvP in this game, but I have never been into PvP in these games. Overall, I enjoy it and think that it is a better game than the first, but not nearly as much as I did before, and it certainly has many faults. The DLC's are all fire though.