Holy shit that was so fucking good!

I bought Sekiro on release almost 5 years ago, and tried to play it; keyword here being 'tried', because I fucking sucked. I genuinely did not understand how the game works or what exactly it expected me to do. I tried playing it countless times and each time I got stuck at either Lady Butterfly or Gyoubu. I thought the game was just too hard for me, and that my skill level simply was not adequate for this game. Then, I decided to give it another try a couple of weeks ago, and for some reason the combat finally 'clicked' for me, probably because this time I went in not caring much whether or not I manage to finish it this time, which made me play without panicking or worrying much. That was the key. Once I understood the combat and stopped panicking -and got rid of the muscle memory I had carried over from other FromSoftware games- every encounter became a breeze. Some bosses were very difficult initially but again once you understand how a certain boss works you can pretty much just finish it hitless.

That's really the beauty of Sekiro. At the core of its combat is an intricate dance, and once you learn the choreography of that dance, it becomes one of the most cathartic gameplay experiences you could possibly have. No game has done combat like this, and no game has done sword fighting like this.

If it wasn't for the Dragon Rot being an extremely underwhelming mechanic, and the game trying to push crowd control with a combat system that is simply not designed for it, I would not have hesitated to rate it at a perfect 10.

There is no game like Sekiro, and if you are stuck with frustration like I was, do yourself a favor and just keep trying. It is really worth it once you get the hang of things.

Hesitation is defeat.

not sure if crpg fatigue has just set in for the moment, but as much as i appreciate seeing how this is an evolution in presentation and interface from baldur's gate, neverwinter nights, and kotor, i am finding myself bored to tears by its writing. more hampered by the limitations of its switch to full 3d than it is empowered, there has (as of several hours deep) been nothing approaching the wonderful depth and complexity of exploring athkatla in bg2 and i just feel like i'm being pushed from place to unremarkable place by a bog-standard fantasy campaign... and, uh, i'm sure that i'll enjoy that plenty some other time. perhaps i'll revisit later in the year. for now, moving on.

Actually dealing with most monsters in this game is painful, there's no gettiing around that. The team largely dropped the ball in terms of the enemies.

With that said... there is one level in the middle of the game that manages to be absolutely amazing. Quite possibly the best horror game level that I have ever played.

Most importantly though, and why I have to give this a full score... the game has one of the strongest, smartest narratives that I have ever experienced across all media. As such, I kind of have to acknowledge its value. It raises a lot of hard, complicated philosophical questions that you don't even necessarily notice as you play. Yet then you start to think about it a little. Then a little more. You realise that some things that you thought of as completely obvious might be really complex!

The writing puts the existential horror into the subtext and it works extremely well.

I absolutely love this game, despite its massive flaw.

I was having a bit of a game block recently and I wanted a palate cleanser, nothing seemed more fit than Marvel’s Spider-Man, I just watched ATSV before starting this game and considering that its now both on PC and remastered I felt that it was the right game to revisit, and with games I revisit I tend to have completionist tendencies.
As a lot might expect it was indeed a chore but that’s on me (and insomniac too but mainly me for pushing through even though it is WIDELY known that Spiderman is literally fast food gaming).
What caught me by surprise is how the story took a 180 degree shift in my mind, what seemed to be a decent spiderman story is now an plot full of highs such as a really unique spiderman ending, some interesting conflicts especially with Oscorp and Sable and a cool new take on MJ which all happen in the second half and also a plot full of lows that makes the first half appear as test scenarios to try out how to make a spiderman game, I also don’t really know why they made spiderman that friendly with the police, I get that he doesn’t have to hate them but it feels like he’s uncharacteristically not witty.
The game pulls off the grounded spiderman feel very well even when it goes into MCU territory when it mentions tech and gadgets, it’s a good balance obviously made to help the IP become more video game friendly, the story starts becoming interesting in the last 4 hours or so in which it demonstrates a good take on the whole Oscorp shtick which makes a genuinely decent baby’s first political thriller.

As for the actual game I decided to play it on Spectacular, and while they nailed the game feel it is an extremely exploitable combat. Sure, I like the idea that I have an option to web someone if he’s close to a wall instead of beating them down, but I don’t think it’s really that balanced because you can do it on every single enemy. I also really wish they implemented a combat system that doesn’t feel so 1v1-ish like the Arkhams. There’s a lot of gameplay flaws that most people (including me) would not really care about because you play as spiderman.
Overall it’s a really average game that ventures into amateurism occasionally only saved by the fact that this is Spiderman despite of it all.

The Last of Us 2 is a game that tries to deliver a message about violence and the vicious cycle of revenge, and a game that tries to be a slow but tense and grounded experience. It is also a game that fails spectacularly at both aspects. To get to the bottom of how and why that happened, I need to talk about Part 1.

I love The Last of Us Part 1, and always have. It was one of the very first games I played that managed to make me genuinely care about it's character and their fates. It is also one of the very few works of fiction that I can describe with confidence as having a perfect ending. It's gameplay was never that great. It is basic and slow and sometimes even boring, but through Naughty Dog's usual and frankly impressive ability to craft well-paced and entertaining adventures, some of the best characters in video game history, and an exceptionally well-written story, The Last of Us Part 1 becomes much more than the sum of its parts.

With that being said, The Last of Us Part 2 loses all of that magic, because it lacks the great characters of its predecessor, it lacks the well-written story, and it is painfully unaware of its own shortcomings. The characters are bland. The writing is clichéd when it's not cheap, and cheap when it's not contrived. The frankly basic gameplay loop that Part 1 managed to keep fresh through keeping it short and to the point loses all of its appeal by the halfway point. While the game does improve on almost every core mechanic, that improvement is still minimal, and coupled with the game's length, which is too long for the basic loop, and its atrocious pacing, it makes for an unsatisfying gameplay experience.

To make matters worse, the small interactions and witty entertaining dialogue that made the long and slow exploration segments of the first games tolerable and even fun are either gone or massively worse than their Part 1 counterparts, and that should not come as a surprise, considering how underdeveloped and/or unlikeable most of the new characters are. This goes beyond bad writing and becomes frankly an insult when the game tries to force an emotional reaction out of the player by killing off one of these characters, that you, likely, never even gave a fuck about.

Credit where credit is due, the game's presentation is almost flawless. This is, hands down, one of the most graphically impressive game I've ever played, but otherwise, the game feels empty. Style over substance.

The Last of Us Part 2 is a game that has something to say, but it says it in the most blunt and forced way possible, and its gameplay is too bland to soften the blow of that atrocious story. It is a misguided attempt at artistic expression through the medium of video games, and it is kind of sad to watch it fail that miserably.

The first time that I had heard of the Deus Ex series was through the middling reviews of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided that were being written around the time that game first came out, and while I had no interest in playing that game (or most of the games in the series, for that matter), the amount of praise that went towards the very first game in the series made me curious about eventually giving it a shot. As my tastes in games began to form with age and my love for Western RPGs began to blossom, Deus Ex ended up being one of those games that I wanted to play as soon as I possibly could, and because playing video games on a Mac is an absolute nightmare, it ended up being easier for me to emulate the PS2 port of this game than it was to actually play the original release due to the former option having significantly less hoops I'd need to go through just to get the game to work. Despite me playing it on a technically worse version of the game than around 99% of the population, Deus Ex was able to blow me away in every aspect, and I knew that this deserved its status as one of the best games ever made long before I was finished with it.

One problem that a lot of WRPGs face is that the gameplay ends up being a lot less interesting than the story or characters, but that thankfully isn't the case here at all. Deus Ex is an absolute blast to play thanks to how much freedom of choice the game gives you right from the very beginning, and your options only increase as the game goes on. The sheer amount of vents to crawl through, systems to hack into, and people to talk to in each of the game's 13 missions end up making Deus Ex feel like it's constantly rewarding your curiosity, and having all of the game's interactable elements work alongside each other (i.e. helping a character out so that they can give you useful information or avoiding confrontation by climbing through some vents that you reached by building a stack of boxes) makes exploration feel natural. The dystopian cyberpunk setting was another aspect of why each level was so engaging to traverse, as seeing the grimy, moody, and hellish depictions of New York, Hong Kong, and Paris (as well as the amazing and eclectic music that they were paired with) not only made me want to see what these areas had in store for me, but also what was going on behind the scenes. Deus Ex is a stealth game at its heart (and an immensely fun one at that), but it gives you the tools to really carve out your build and play any way you want, as the limited nano-augmentations, weapon modifications, and skill points always made me careful about choosing what to upgrade and how to take advantage of my new abilities with my current roster of weapons.

From a gameplay standpoint, Deus Ex was already an absolute knockout that was designed in such a way where no two people's playthroughs are the same, but this game also features some of the most enthralling, fascinating, and thought-provoking writing I have ever experienced in a video game. Before the game even starts laying its twists and turns on you, Deus Ex gives you a sense of how bad the world's gotten through the propagandistic newspapers and terminals that are scattered around the levels, and even with the answers that the characters and various organizations give you throughout your playthrough, the atmosphere of mystery and secrecy still manages to linger all the way to the end. The game strikes an excellent balance between riveting gameplay and philosophical food for thought, and it ends up posing a lot of interesting questions regarding morality, politics, capitalism, and human nature whose answers are still being debated by fans to this day. By the time the credits of Deus Ex rolled, I had a giant smile on my face, because while I was admittedly a bit let down that I wasn't able to play the original PC version of the game, I'm still glad that I got to experience what is easily one of the very best games of all time.

It is not often that I'll play a game that captivates me this much, to the point where it makes me consciously give up on sleep just so that I can get more of it, and it is not often that I'll play a game that I'm genuinely sad to have finished, because I'll never get to experience it blindly ever again.

Everything in this game from the soundtrack to the art style to the RPG elements to the narrative design and themes work together to an impressively cohesive degree, delivering a story that is entertaining, enthralling, funny, and tragic, all at the same time.

Pentiment is visually striking, beautiful, captivating, and extremely well-written and well-designed. If it wasn't for the third act dragging a little bit, it would've been a perfect 10.

drunk thoughts:
- our spectacle is entirely metatextual

-The game is a fail at the beginning. the drama adopts the triads as an aesthetic element rather than as a real device for conflict. Any protocol or issue related to the triads is taken more from the collective imagination, more from and closer to the mafias of Europe than to those of Asia.
Of course, in the end, the bad guy was the Occidental.

-Less vulgar (vulgar images and spaces are good) than it appears and more organized (poorly) than it should. Any moment is approached from the same common ground as all modern action games with open-world structures: (efficient) fights and (horrible) shootouts here, chases there, on foot or in vehicles. Follow the line on the minimap, don't get lost.
and bro, nothing really matters when no set-piece takes advantage of the architecture. Why Hong Kong? I play because I'm supposed to be Hong Kong, but until I raise the camera slightly I can't tell these digital streets apart from others I've already seen. The camera does not emphasize anything or let me take a look on my own, it is hermetic and protocol business.
And how can it be? There is pampering here. Yes there is architectural mime (I guess)

-the True -True Crime Hong Kong: the city is a zombie set where the little life of space begins and ends with its references to the cinema. God, what a pain to see PTU reduced to a couple of fights and encryption minigames
Anyone who has seen Johnnie To knows that the monster, the titan and the biggest character in HK cinema is the city itself.
but here is just a wallpaper.

Feels more prideful than celebratory.
I don’t like being rude to fangames, especially for a game like BM in which it’s one of the more polished and scaled ones.
I get that people disliked Xen, here it’s definitely more polished..just in a very traditional sense.
Xen feels now like a cop out for game design bros, as it feels more designed and thought out. What I implied by traditional is how Valve-esque it feels, plug in a cable, move something etc. etc., but now you have to play through a section as long as 60% of pre-Xen, as much as delightful as it looks, it’s still exhausting and tiring and a big pace breaker for the remake.
OST was pretty unremarkable throughout the game except when I’ve reached Xen where I’ve heard a soundtrack that with proper budget could be featured in a big high profile release. Art direction doesn’t look weird since this is still Source and really works for the game’s calmer brooding horror tone, but I still prefer how the original looked in comparison.
Overall its a fine game, but still a demonstration of why going bigger in scale doesn’t match the brilliance of the subtler design decision.