A tour de force of a game and one of the best (if not the best) superhero video game.

This game is something truly special to me for a variety of reasons, but there's two alone I want to point out.
1. There's not many games that I've played in my life that I've gone out of my way to not only play but purchase more than once.
2. I have never gone out of my way to 100% a game ever. I usually find it tedious and boring and it's just not something I like to do. I have 100% this game on PC (both in-game and achievements).

I own this game now on 3 different platforms. I played it back when it first came on PS4. I played it when it came out remastered on PS5. Now, here we are with the Remastered version on PC, and what an absolute blast of a game it is. I have revered this game highly since I first played it back in 2018, and even after playing it then, it's almost never left my mind since. It's such a wonderful game dedicated to my favorite superhero.

The story, the acting, the gameplay, the characters, the fact that another game finally got the web-slinging correct and almost perfectly is just sheer bliss.

This is a game that once I start on it, I could not put it down. Even though, as I was playing through this game on the third different console, and I've literally played it twice to completion before this, I'm still heavily involved and I'm still in love with it.

IMO, I think everyone should at least try this game at least once and experience a true Spider-Man game that gives off a vibe and feel of every good Spider-Man film that has existed. This is also I think the first 5/5 game I've rated / played in about 4 years (not since Control), but my god its fucking deserved it.

In music, a band that debuts big then needs to face a phase known as the 'difficult second album syndrome' or perhaps the sophomore slump. Playdead could have outdone themselves on a first go with the incredible LIMBO, it would be risky adding even just one extra layer of colour and perspective depth.
Thankfully it paid off and INSIDE excels with excellent sense of pacing and visual control of narrative. Set in a dystopia not far from that of its predecessor, you play another sneaky boy who attempts to infiltrate a frighteningly fascistic testing facility. The sense of dread is better established very early on as you traverse a forest where you hide from 'officers' in trucks carrying dozens of people. It is almost impossible not shake the many associations with historical human atrocities such as the Holocaust. The imagery and even the gameplay (not to spoil anything) follows a consistent theme of having power and control over others; a government manipulating hordes of the public in a chilling unison. Of course, this is just a sci fi concept in a world far from ours, right?

What more can be said on this emotionally crippling critique on the vicious cycle of violence and revenge.
What's most impressive about Naughty Dog's most recent games, both The Last of Us and Uncharted, is their sense of pacing. TLOU2 is roughly 30 hours of mostly linear gameplay and there's just enough interchanging of survival action, stealth horror and exploration for things to never get truly repetitive - I found this to be one of the only real issues with the first game.
The sound is most incredible with headphones, to the point where you hear creaks and bumps hollowing through distant rooms, subtly foreshadowing and creating dread in anticipation of the next dreadful threat. You can hear just about every clicking crevice of your gun as you take them apart to modify them. The sound and stunning presentation of the world helps to form Naughty Dog's most immersive game.
It's also a truly engaging piece of drama, not only with existing characters but new ones too. The polarizing use of gay and trans characters are justified in their own narratives - this is a game in which violence is brought upon people for simply being the person they are, whether its their sexuality, gender or relation to a political group. As much as TLOU2 is set in a world at the end of an apocalypse, it never feels far from our own, and the kinds of people who inhabit it have certainly not changed.

A very interesting and weird playthrough as someone who has no knowledge of this series outside of "Lara Croft hotted video game woman". The controls obviously took some getting used to, as they were baffling at first for this sort of action-adventure platformer game. But I got used to them much more quickly than I thought, and I actually ended up seeing how this control scheme helps this game in some ways. It requires you to really consider every jump, whether to jump from right the edge of a cliff or do a jump with a running start off of it. You have to carefully climb down walls to not take damage, you have to take time to crouch down before making a leap.

Tomb Raider does a lot in the service or "realism", which I'm usually not into in games but I can't say I wasn't impressed by it here. Stuff like no music in-game, only cold ambient noises, your underwater oxygen meter taking time to refill when you rise up, and the animations for stuff like pushing a block or picking up an item. These elements combined with the form of methodical platforming and puzzle solving made Tomb Raider actually fairly promising to me when I started.

But unfortunately as the game went on its flaws overshadowed what I liked about it. For one, combat in this game is never anything more than a nuisance or completely trivial. It mostly involves holding the action button while backflipping away from enemies, but if they get close enough the camera flips out so much that it becomes a mess trying to get in a position to start shooting again. By the last third of the game, I had so many healing items that combat basically became a health-losing race, especially against "bosses". It's strange because they occasionally have these rooms with lots of pillars for cover in order to set up these dramatic fights with other characters, but all I do is stand in front of them and unload my shotgun a couple times.

The slow, "realistic" nature of the controls also became a detriment. Way too often I ran into the issue of Lara taking 2 or 3 more steps than I intended, falling to my death, or the walk button taking too long to actually stop my current pace, or just the tedium of having to wait for Lara to push a block by one square. Also, way too often I ran into the issue of walking right past the next point in the level because of how everything tends to blend in with the each other.

The puzzle solving aspect of things, while occasionally interesting, can be frustrating by the fact that it feels like the game sends enemies after you after every step of a puzzle. Like, I pull one switch and four apes just show up, and then I get to the next part of the puzzle and four more apes show up. This process got so repetitive and frustrating, especially with how annoying combat is.

This game also loves cheap deaths. Things like putting an enemy right around a corner you weren't expecting, or a fall leading to spiked you wouldn't be able to avoid the first time, and just countless things that seems to only exist to encourage save scumming, which I did freely. I understand its the nature of an ancient tomb to have countless traps, but I could tell when one obstacle was clever and required engaging problem solving and when another was something I had not chance of avoiding, like entering a small room and having a gorilla spawn the exact moment I walk in.

The story might as well not be here, and honestly I kind of wish it wasn't. The way the game just puts you in a locations that is continuous across several levels, sometimes going back to certain locations from different levels to emphasize the fact that their all continuous, with no cutscenes or narration or music in between, it's a really strong first impression. But when voice acting all of a sudden starts and you're watching a cutscene, its jarring and overall uninteresting. I get that the cutscenes function as transitions between locations, but basically every aspect of the story did not stick at all.

With all these negative points, it would make sense to give this game a more negative score, but I honestly did find playing through it fascinating. It makes a lot of bold decisions that I honestly think work really well when it does. I played this less because I thought it was gonna be a good game and more as a curiosity, a piece of gaming history I'm not familiar with, and in that front it provided a very interesting and educational experience. I could also see the sequels to this game being much better, but I'm probably not playing those for a while.

The only thing I knew about Jak and Daxter going in was that it was developed by Naughty Dog, a team who has become famous for their story-focused games, so I was expecting it to be the narrative practice that turned the Crash Bandicoot team into the people who would make The Last of Us. As it turns out, the grim atmosphere and violence I was picturing when I thought of Jak and Daxter started with the second game, and this one is exclusively a lighthearted fantasy platformer. It shocked me just how simple this game is, following the most basic template of 3D platforming. Your goal is to collect power cells, which are scattered around the world or earned by completing simple objectives. You need to get a certain amount before progressing to the next set of levels, where you’re presented with a new number to get, and your search starts over again. If this sounds like Mario 64, it’s because that’s what it is in everything but name. You don’t collect power stars, you collect power cells. You don’t collect 100 coins for a star, you collect 90 orbs for a cell. You don’t collect 8 red coins, you collect 7 scout flies. You don’t need 70 power macguffins to beat the game, you need 72. The quest hubs are also the default set (grassland/desert/ocean/jungle/ice/fire/boss) with only a couple exceptions. This all sounds pretty dismissive, so I want to emphasize that Jak and Daxter isn’t a bad 3D platformer, it’s simply an unambitious one. If you played this game without the context of Naughty Dog’s legacy and how the series went on to greater ambitions, you would probably dismiss it as a run of the mill attempt to capitalize on the genre’s popularity. Having no load times between zones may have been enough to differentiate it back in 2001, but there isn’t enough to make it stand out today.