My favorite thing about Nintendo platformers - or at least the very best ones - is that each level throws a new concept or challenge at you. Super Mario Bros Wonder does such an amazing job of this, constantly introducing new elements and then putting an additional twist on top of them with the wonder flowers. I never quite knew what to expect going into a level.

The whole experience was just so much fun! I know some people might say it’s too easy, but I thought it was just right. I don’t really go to Mario games looking for a tough challenge; I go to them looking to bounce on mushrooms and take in the colors and cheerful music, and Wonder absolutely delivers in those areas.

If I have one complaint it’s that I’m not the biggest Bowser Jr. fan (and I prefer to have more varied bosses) although he works well enough here and the boss fights were all pretty fun. The last couple of bosses were especially great! So yeah I basically have nothing bad to say about this game.

This game rules. It’s all about decoding languages to solve puzzles and climb a tower (based on the Tower of Babel myth). The process of using context clues to identify words and translate phrases is very satisfying, and I can’t imagine how much thought and creativity went into designing the player’s experience. The developers found some really brilliant ways to introduce certain words and concepts, and everything comes together beautifully by the end of the game. The game’s aesthetic - visually and musically - is also very much my kind of thing. I love how each area has its own distinct character and tone. I enjoyed the fixed perspective a lot, and it’s used really well throughout the game.

It’s not a perfect game. While some words are introduced in very creative ways, others could have used some more effort (there are a few times where you’ll just see things like a giant picture of a book with the word for book written next to it). Other times you might need to just use process of elimination to find definitions, which isn’t the most satisfying.

I’m also not sure how I feel about how much the game translates for you once you’ve defined all the words in a language. For example, if you figure out that someone is saying the words “me seek key,” the game translates that to “I’m looking for a key.” I think it’s cool that it gives you a little more context for how the different peoples in the tower talk, and it definitely makes the game feel more user friendly, but sometimes I wished the game would have let me figure out the meanings of translated phrases myself.

My last gripe is that the final section of the game feels kind of unnecessary. It was pretty cool but narratively I don’t really get the point of it, especially since it comes at a time when the story is wrapping up beautifully. Just seemed like a weird choice.

None of these flaws really impacted my enjoyment of the game, so I’m still giving it 5 stars. I’m so impressed by what the developers accomplished here and I desperately want to see more games like this.

It's been a while since I was pleasantly surprised by a AAA game. My expectations were low going into this, but after the first few hours I was completely hooked on this game.

Having played most Bethesda games, I am happy to report Starfield is much closer to The Elder Scrolls in presentation than Fallout. Aside from the dragon-shout like abilities, the amount of customization you have for your character's abilities and gear is reminiscent of Oblivion, where creativity with your kit can make you overpowered in the most fun ways imaginable. The faction sidequests and campaigns are some of the strongest Bethesda has created, with the Crimson Fleet quests a standout amongst them. The main story is also quite strong. While it is, naturally a series of fetch quests (as is most MSQ's in Bethesda games), the story as a whole has good twists that caught me off-guard, and some awesome stand-alone quests that can stand with some of the best Sci-Fi writings and films (the quest "Entagled" might just be my favorite in the game).

Like most AAA games coming out this year, it's not without it's technical problems. The game will (surprisingly) only work if installed on an SSD. With a 100gb+ install size, It's going to be painful on many smaller SSDs, especially on computer. Bugs, a staple of Bethesda games, tend to be less funny and more game-breaking this time around. I've noticed bugs will happen more frequently the longer your play session is, and they can range from your ship landing at funny angles, to straight on soft-locking you out of menus until you relaunch the game (I've only had one crash in my playthrough). The NPCs and creatures are coded and pathed shockingly well, there may be one or two instances of a guard getting the zoomies during a stealth mission, it's nowhere near as much of an issue compared to Bethesda's previous offerings.

I have several game recommendations if you enjoyed your time with Starfield! If you enjoyed the rpg elements of this game, I highly recommend The Elder Scrolls games, my favorite being IV: Oblivion (It's a very janky game in the most endearing way). If you wish there was a bit more depth to the spacefaring elements of this game, I highly recommend The Outer Wilds. If you were someone that spent hours building ships and bases, then Kerbal Space Program is my recommendation to you.

I have a long history with this game. I first played the Game of the Year edition on Xbox, probably close to 20 years ago. At that point I was too young to really understand the game and how it worked, but I was endlessly fascinated by the alien world of Morrowind and it had a lasting impact on my imagination. I knew I would want to return to the game at some point and see more of what it had to offer.

I finally did this in 2015, in my first year of grad school. I have fond memories of ordering Chinese food and sitting at my desk in my mostly undecorated on-campus apartment, completing quests for the Mage’s Guild, exploring swamps and ruins and tombs, and searching for any clues of why the dwarves seemed to have vanished from the world. I got pretty deep into the game then, but between grad school and beginning my first serious relationship my priorities shifted and I had the leave the island of Vvardenfell behind again. But recently I picked the game back up and decided I would do my best to get through the main storyline.

My absolute favorite part of this game is how much care and detail went into creating such a unique, believable world. Vvardenfell is full of strange wildlife, countless political and religious factions, and plenty of mystery. It’s a largely hostile and unforgiving setting, but as you talk to characters and learn more about the society and culture of Morrowind, it starts to make sense how people live there. I loved learning about the history and relationships between the great houses, the more traditional/nomadic Ashlander tribes, and external forces like the empire or the various deities influencing the game’s events. One thing I always appreciated about this game (and Skyrim after it) is that they take place in colonized imperial provinces, and they examine what that means and the different ways people react to being ruled by a foreign power. For some reason I’ve always really enjoyed these themes in fantasy and science fiction stories.

Actually playing the game is not always a pleasant experience, but I wouldn’t say it’s bad or that it aged poorly. In a weird way I think the complexity and opacity of the gameplay systems complements/benefits from from the mysterious tone of the game. It definitely adds to the feeling of being lost and helpless, particularly in the earlier parts of the game. (As a side note, these are always my favorite parts of Bethesda games; when you’re lost and overwhelmed and underpowered and there’s nothing you can do but explore and find ways to survive. Especially in combat, these games tend to lose their balance and some of their charm as you get more powerful, in my opinion.) Combat doesn’t feel intuitive and your normal movement speed is excruciatingly slow, which leads a lot of players to abuse a certain magic item that makes you move a lot faster. You can also use spells and potions to help with travel - by the end of the game I was leaping and levitating around the map and running on water to explore smaller islands.

I enjoyed the story of the main quest once things picked up a little, although the pacing was weird toward the end. There’s a long, drawn out series of quests and then you’re rushed straight into the climax. I’ve read that a lot was cut from the finale, and it’s pretty clear that’s true, which is a shame because the stuff they hinted at would have been very cool (it seemed like they wanted the final area to be similar to Hyrule Castle in Breath of the Wild). Still, I liked the game a lot and it feels great to have finished it! I haven’t checked out the expansions yet, and I’m not sure how deep I’ll go with those, but we’ll see.

Perhaps one of the games I'm most grateful to see on Nintendo's Switch Online service. Don't get me wrong, I hold no particular love for the source material - the most nostalgia I have for it is seeing marquees for it at, like, Suncoast in the mall, or watching Doug Walker tear into it years after the fact. But I have a soft spot for licensed video game tie-ins, since they were most of what I had access to as a kid. Ever since they announced the Virtual Console for what was then known as the Nintendo Revolution, I've wanted to see licensed games recognized by Nintendo, particularly to satisfy my brother's desire to play the NES port of The Lion King in some official capacity. I dunno if that'll ever happen, but we're one big step closer, bro.

But let's not mince words here, Quest for Camelot GBC is not a very good game. It's easy to see why it's on the service, it trying to be another Link's Awakening-type game (and I guess Ninty owns the rights? Weird). But it fails in a lot of ways that highlight how consistently well-made Zelda tends to be. Case in point, the grid system. 2D Zelda always obeys a loose grid system, where even though Link and other characters can freely move around, all actions they perform are constrained to this grid. If Link makes a jump, he'll always land within the parameters of a tile. If he digs, that will conform to a given tile. So on and so forth. It's a subtle thing that you take for granted, but I found myself thinking about it here trying to jump and dig as Kayley. That jump segment across the scalding lake is particularly dastardly. Kayley jumps just a bit further than two tiles' length, so you're constantly having to orient your sub-position within a tile in order to keep from jumping directly into the boiling water. To say nothing of how inconsistent the game is about where you're able to dig. I wasted a bunch of time in Chapter 2 trying to find the big "turnip" for that ornery horse, enough so that I dug every diggable tile in the village area, and man, did the map not look like I'd dug every tile.

I also have to mention the sword techniques for having one of the weirdest control interactions I've yet run into in a video game. So it's a pretty ambitious idea, having both an RPG leveling system and an expansive moveset with the sword, all on an 8-bit handheld. In most cases, the extra moves aren't worth the trouble, and I found myself leaning into the standard slash and that dash attack (since it's stronger and faster). But that input on the dash attack is deceptively weird! So you have to double tap a direction, then hit the sword button to pull it off - seems straightforward. Only, you don't have to do all that at once. It turns out any time you press the same directional button twice, you "chamber" the input for a dash attack, which gets executed when you hit the sword button. So, for example, if you're trying to chase down a boss and happen to hit right, pause for a moment, then hit right again - it doesn't matter how long it takes for you to hit that sword button, it WILL be a dash attack, even if you hit other directional buttons beforehand! I even tested it out by waiting a good couple seconds between directional inputs, and it still does that! I've never ever run into that! Naturally this means you end up doing the dash attack when you want to do the slash attack, which is an issue because the dash attack doesn't have much knockback. Not a big issue on NSO since you're able to rewind the emulator, but I'm glad I didn't play on original hardware.

Just to touch on bosses really quickly, they all kinda suck. They tend to follow the same pattern of wandering around aimlessly, occasionally throwing out an attack to spice things up. If the arena allows for it, it's pretty easy to cheese their AI. This was particularly funny with the final Ruder fight, where I trapped him in a corner and just eroded two(!) health meters by slapping him with my sword like I was some irritated cat.

So I'm giving this game the same rating I gave Conker's Pocket Tales, but I'll confess I feel way more fondly about this game overall. Quest for Camelot isn't very good, but it's very charming and has a surprising amount of ideas for such a modest release. It experiments a lot with its game design, making each chapter feel very different. Even if these experiments don't always work out (that "Key Dilemma" gauntlet is just mean of the game), that the game's willing to try is honestly pretty cool.

Mirror's Edge: Catalyst feels like it never gets talked about except for through lamentations of it being open world instead of level based like the original Mirror's Edge was, or people complaining about how it has a couple movement abilities locked behind a skill tree, or people talking about how EA doesnt make original games anymore. And I get that position on paper, since Mirror's Edge: Catalyst came out right in the middle of the ps4 generation when open worlds were everywhere in AAA and every game seemed to have an obligatory skill tree regardless of whether it added anything of value. I can't blame people seeing a sequel to a really tight, linear, level based game going open world and throwing up their hands about Trends and Bandwagons.

But here's the thing. This game is barely an open world in the Ubisoft sense or the GTA sense. Rather, I think it has a lot more in common with the Metroidvania genre.

Mirror's Edge is about parkour, or free running, in a dystopian future. Everything about the gameplay and theming is centered on these two ideas. What this means for its "open world" design is that you have several decently sized but not huge sections of city, largely rooftops, interiors of buildings, some infrastructural installations, and a construction site, that is all there to facilitate free, expressive movement, often while escaping from The Cops. No matter what route you take, you are always pushed to engage with the detailed and active parkour mechanics. This isn't like the other big Parkour game, Assassin's Creed, where you just hold a button and occasionally another button while moving and your guy does it all automatically (not a knock tho, I love AC). Its stick-shift platforming and it's a ton of fun. The mechanics have been slightly refined from the original game and provide more ways to enter a state of rapid, flowing movement, or recover it if you fuck up. Every route you take becomes a chain of vaults, slides, jumps, wall-runs, impact rolls, and swings off pipes and flagpoles. New to this game is a shift move that works both as a dodge and a way to build, rebuild, or maintain momentum, that I found myself using in a way that almost simulated the rhythmic, controlled breathing of distance running. Tying it all together is the absolutely unparalleled design of full-body presence in its first person viewpoint, where it not only shows your body when you look down but actually makes it feel like you're inhabiting and moving in it, with the weight and momentum and grace of an athlete in motion, instead of just a floating camera with arms like so many other first person games. There are honestly very few AAA games that care about detailed, flavorful movement mechanics to this degree.

The combat is vastly improved from the first game, where clunky fighting or shooting segments often brought the game's beautiful momentum to a screeching halt. In this one, you can no longer use guns, thank god, so its all punching(light attacks) and kicking(heavy attacks). The new shift-dodge means you can more easily avoid damage, and also get behind them to do extra damage or kick them off ledges. But the key to combat is traversal attacks, which is when you attack while doing parkour. Light ones do less damage but preserve your momentum, so they're good for getting enemies out of your way while escaping, or for setting them up for a knockout from a stronger heavy traversal attack. These attacks are snappy and well-animated, and the combat is actually quite satisfying once you get the hang of incorporating parkour into it. There are several enemy types that all require slightly different tactics, so it keeps things from getting stale. The combat is also very frequently optional; you can often simply bowl them over and get the heck out of there instead.

The game does contain a skill tree, but it is honestly quite unobtrusive. It has 3 parts: movement, combat, and gear, and 80% of the movement tree is unlocked already at the start of the game, with the majority of the rest of the actual parkour mechanics easily unlocked in an hour or two of play. The rest of it is all combat skills, damage or defense upgrades, and new gadgets. The gadgets you actually just get from story progression, and they give you new movement abilities that open up new paths and new areas as the story progresses. Its not quite as free-form in its exploration as traditional Metroidvanias, and there's no sequence breaking due to the mission-based story, but it still has that feeling of the world gradually unfolding as your abilities grow. The map contains some of the typical open-world collectables and busywork missions, which are usually time trials, timed deliveries, or small combat challenges followed by escapes. They're fun enough to do, but can be safely ignored without consequence if you aren't interested or just want a more tightly paced game. The story missions themselves, and the character-given major sidequests, are all very solid and bring you to a variety of more linear, contained levels scattered around the city. This stuff is classic Mirror's Edge, and where the game shines brightest. I especially liked the Art Museum level and the under-construction skyscraper you have to sabotage for the mafia.

Like the original game, Mirror's Edge Catalyst is a real looker. It paints its world in splashes of vivid color against stark, sterile white and polished glass. The use of color is a bit more restrained here compared to the first game, but its still very effective. Sometimes you slam open a door from the blindingly white rooftops and are blasted with the most incredible shade of green you've ever seen in a game as you sprint through an office corridor to the closest exit. Huge video billboards or displays cover buildings, with constantly shifting advertisements or news reports lighting up the night. It feels lightly futuristic and dystopian in a way that balances mundane believablility with stylized hyper-reality really well. There are some really lovingly crafted service corridors, corporate office buildings, and infrastructural facilities; mundane places transformed and made stranger by the context of how you move through them and why, which is something I always love to see in games (see also: INFRA, for the ultimate perfection of this aesthetic in games). The sound design is quite immersive, and makes you feel the speed and physical exertion involved in everything you do. The music on the other hand is only OK, as it serves the atmosphere and action well, but isn't especially memorable. They commissioned a pretty solid CHVRCHES song but bafflingly, don't even use it at all other than in a jukebox in the hideout. It doesn't even play over the credits! Why even commission it then!!

The narrative is fine. It's not like poorly executed, but its nothing new either. Kinda feels like a middling TV show from that time period. It provides a solid enough framework for a bunch of cool levels, so I guess it did its job. It is at least, better than the absolutely atrocious storytelling from the original game with its e-surance cutscenes and barely sketched characters. The characters here feel like people with a history in this world, and the presentation is solid, it just lacks a certain extra spark. Even so, it's well-paced and doesn't overstay its welcome by any means.

Mirror's Edge: Catalyst is a seriously underrated game. It doesn't quite hit the transcendent highs the original does, but it also comes nowhere near that game's very low low points either. It is simply a good time, and it really deserved better than the low sales and critical dismissal it seems to have gotten when it came out. If you like deep first person movement I highly recommend it.

I’ve been trying for years to get into this game, but kept bouncing off it for various reasons. Mostly because it seemed impossibly hard, the systems and stats were confusing, and I was always worried that I was somehow playing it wrong. I came back to it a few weeks ago (inspired by the release of Baldur’s Gate 3) and decided I would do my best to push through to the end. And I did it!

Baldur’s Gate is a really cool experience, and even though it’s old as dirt it still holds up really well overall (I assume part of this is thanks to updates in the 2012 Enhanced Edition). I wasn’t wrong in my initial thoughts though. The gameplay systems are still pretty vague and confusing to me, but now that I have more experience with DND rules they made enough sense for me to get by. And the game is extremely challenging at times, especially early on and in some of the later boss fights. I had two realizations that made it possible for me to overcome that challenge: the first was that there are a ton of ways to approach any combat situation , and the second was that I could make extremely liberal use of the quicksave feature. Constantly loading quicksaves felt a little like cheating at first, but so much of the game is based on luck and dice rolls that it feels pretty much necessary a lot of the time.

Once I got into the flow of things it felt very exciting to use different spells and abilities and potions to overcome new challenges. I was developing new tactics right up until the end of the game. Even though some encounters kinda felt like unfair bullshit, they never felt truly impossible. I’m sure there are tons of ways to optimize your party and character builds, and I definitely missed out on some side quests so maybe my party was underleveled at times. But I actually enjoyed just going with the flow, taking whichever party members appealed to me and not pushing myself to fully explore every zone in the game. Playing it that way really worked for me, and I appreciate how the developers designed the game in a way that assumes the player won’t see everything in one play through.

Overall I enjoyed my time with Baldur’s Gate, and I’m very interested in seeing how they built on it in the following games.

Assassin's Creed Unity is a real mess of a game. The first half of it makes you start to think maybe its underappreciated and doesn't deserve its reputation as a bad, buggy, unfinished game. Then the second half throws nearly all of that away.

First of all its ridiculously good looking coming from ACIV Black Flag, like just a staggering jump in visual detail. The density of the environment, the gorgeously naturalistic lighting, the teeming crowds of truly huge numbers of citizens, and especially the interiors of buildings, of which there are many. Some of those interiors, especially in the important buildings like the palaces and chateaus and the like, are so finely crafted and detailed they're still kind of jaw dropping 9 years later. The character models mostly look excellent too and are really well animated. The city is dense with paths over roofs, through chaotic streets, and into and back out of buildings, and its genuinely very fun to move through most of the time. There are also a couple animus sequences set in Paris in other time periods as well that make for pretty cool setpieces. The visual presentation and design of the city of Paris itself is the only thing that I don't really have any major issue with, and it's what kept me going through the game as it gradually collapsed around me.

The parkour is always a huge part of AC, and in Unity it at first seems like a big improvement, as does the combat and stealth. Its all incredibly well animated, and the parkour now has 3 modes: neutral, ascending, and descending. This, in theory, should give you a lot more control over movement across the more complex cityscape of paris, and sometimes, it does. Descending in particular is a great addition and feels really cool. When it works. Unfortunately you get stuck on objects or climb on ones you didn't mean to far more in Unity than in any AC game since the first one.You can be in the middle of the coolest looking and feeling chase or escape in the series yet, and then some tiny piece of furniture, or roof gutter, or whatever will just bring it all to a screeching halt. It's so close to being great, but it has just enough jank that it ends up falling way short of the parkour in AC3 and 4

The combat and stealth also seem really solid at first, but they have a major problem: they fall apart completely as the difficulty ramps up. Early on, when its easy, the combat feels weighty and satisfyingly lethal, but still responsive, and the stealth is more detailed than before, with an increased emphasis on crowds and verticality. But they seemingly could not figure out, or did not have time to figure out, how to make those mechanics work for more challenging content. High level enemies parry almost every attack, while their off-screen buddies shoot you to death with bullets that instakill you if you are at all wounded, as you get locked into slow recovery animations. Somehow they regressed to the worst aspects of AC2's combat, and then made it even worse. The stealth on the other hand sometimes stops functioning in later levels because they just put 1000 guards everywhere facing in every direction, many of which dont ever patrol or turn around. The cover system is busted as hell and 50% of the time will cause you to clip into the wall or just get stuck in between animations for 20+ seconds at a time when you try to use it. Many of your tools barely work to manipulate guards. So often in later levels your options become either find the exact specific path they want you to take past all the guards (not well telegraphed, if it even exists in a given mission), or just forget stealth and brute force your way through with the extremely tedious combat. Its a vicious cycle of frustrating tedium.

The story too, is a pathetic parade of squandered potential, missed opportunity, baffling choices, and incoherent and utterly inert plotting. They made an assassins creed game set in the french revolution where the assassins, the secret organization dedicated to changing the world through murder, decide to be radical centrists and not get involved in politics. Except when inevitably the characters, seemingly begrudgingly on the writers' part, do get involved, they are weirdly favorable to the fucking king and other nobles rather than the revolutionaries. The story itself otherwise has nearly nothing to do with the actual revolution, instead being a personal melodrama in which French store brand ezio auditore and his osananajimi (who is a templar, something they manage to wring nearly no tension or intrigue or conflict out of) who he's in love with must find her father's killer. The revolution is constantly "happening" in the background, with plenty of protesting crowds and other details like that, but that's basically all that it is: set dressing. Many of the major events happen offscreen, and the major figures of the revolution are barely present except to be plot devices for the largely unrelated story sequences. Especially after the honestly surprisingly sharp political viewpoint that AC3 had of the American revolution, it's truly baffling how much they managed to fumble such an overflowing cornucopia of storytelling potential. It's like going to a fancy French bakery and being served wonderbread instead of the nice buttery croissant with chocolate and almonds in it that you thought you were going to get.

The most baffling decision of all though, is that if you play with the English voice acting, all of these French people, in Paris, France, during the French Revolution, in a game made by France's largest game development company, speak with EXTREMELY BRITISH ACCENTS. It is so painful to hear all these cockney fucking voices speaking about robespierre and the Notre Dame and other things of an extremely French nature. It comes off like they were ashamed of their own Frenchness, too embarrassed about it to show the world, too afraid an American who watched too much TV during the bush administration might make a cringey surrender joke at them or something. In the AC2 games Ezio and co had goofy Italian accents! In AC3 Connor and his people spoke the actual Kanien'kéha language!! They had a variety of the usual pirate accents all over ACIV: Black Flag!!! But here, on their own home turf they wimped out and went with the generic British-as-foreigner voices you always see in Hollywood movies. Maybe they did deserve those surrender jokes from ol' Joe Sixpack after all.... they must be serving freedom fries over in the cafeteria at Ubisoft HQ. To combat this grotesque transgression against my ears and against the French people, I ended up changing the language of the voices to French, with English subtitles. This was a massive improvement to the presentation but it also meant that whatever dialogue didn't get subtitled, like nearly all incidental dialogue, or any time the subtitles conflicted with another UI element and didn't show up, I had no clue what they were saying. The funniest example of this was the final lines in the base game, which are said by the present day characters (who are barely there, this game, disappointingly, is the first one to barely include any present day segments) as the credits roll. But they apparently forgot to allow subtitles during the credits so literally for the last lines in the story, the concluding statement of the whole mess, I had no clue what they were saying. What an appropriate ending to a very foolish game.

The whole game in general has that feeling of being sloppy and unfinished. There are visual bugs and glitches, janky NPC behaviors, constant aggressive LoD pop-in visible on screen at nearly all times. You can get stuck on or inside of objects at a moments notice. The cloth physics are super busted and need a mod to restore them. Sometimes when you go to pick a lock it takes 10 seconds to start the minigame. UI elements are constantly overlapping each other rendering important info unreadable while you wait for them to fade. Many common events and actions have no sound effects to go along with them. The story is a fucking embarrassment. Its really a shame. And this is apparently after a campaign of extensive patching and bugfixes! Turns out releasing a AAA game series on a yearly schedule is unsustainable!!! Not even Nostradamus himself could have foreseen this turn of events!!!

There is the Dead Kings DLC though, which serves as a sort of epilogue to the main story. Dead Kings is pretty good! It takes place in a small self-contained mini-open world and has a slightly spookier feel. Unlike the main game it actually feels polished and complete, with a consistent tone and an OK story arc (still barely related to the revolution though lol). The gameplay additions and changes work really well and actually mitigate some of the problems in the base game. It actually makes some pretty cool use of the catacombs, which the base game had but did nearly nothing with! The sidequests in it are actually kind of worth doing! So it was nice to play that and have it kind of wash the bad taste of the last like 1/3rd of the base game out of my mouth, but at the same time the fact that it presented a vision of how good the base game could have been if they had actually finished it and had been able to pull together any level of coherency to the proceedings, actually kind of bummed me out too, it just makes the base game look even worse in comparison.

AC Unity is like watching a parkour master from inner-city Paris pound a monster energy, trip over their own untied shoelaces while going for a sick leap onto a flying buttress of a 1000 year old cathedral, and fall 68 feet to the cobblestones below, breaking 203 of their 206 bones on impact. And then as the ambulance is carting them away, still somehow alive, they muster the last of their strength to whisper, in a cockney accent: "Louis XVI was actually a really nice and dignified guy and it was honestly really mean of the brutally impoverished starving peasants he was oppressing to break into his house and guillotine his head off. I bet you never considered that!"

This is a real two steps forward, one step back kind of game. It improves on Pikmin 1's mechanics in almost every way, especially with the Pikmin's AI and pathfinding (though its still not perfect), it looks and sounds excellent, and the level design of the surface areas is great. The issues come in when you enter the dungeons.

On paper the idea of a pikmin dungeon crawler with a big emphasis on endurance through smart strategy and resources management is a pretty interesting idea, but the execution is really uneven. The lack of a timer means that the pressure of there being consequences from inefficient play, or for getting careless and losing pikmin, exists almost entirely just in the dungeons. The easier ones are a little too easy, and the difficult ones can feel a bit cheap and unfair. Their semi-procedurally generated nature means the level design can be very iffy in terms of encounter design placement of treasure, and the later ones tend to pull a lot of "Surprise! Something randomly fell from the sky and will instantly kill dozens of your pikmin if you're unlucky or weren't expecting it" type of tricks. There are a lot of pointless gates with nothing but blank walls behind them. The fact that you can only get white and purple pikmin in dungeons is also pretty annoying, because if you lose a bunch it can be really tedious to get more of them. Purples especially can only be reliably gained through egregious amounts of grinding in very specific dungeons. It all feels a bit underbaked. The dungeons arent all bad, and most of them have a couple more hand-designed floors that stand out, plus there's the Submerged Castle with its highly terrifying gimmick. But the dungeon issues are enough to drag the game down a bit.

Having 2 captains is a good idea, but it ultimately doesn't actually do much with this mechanic since there's no way to tell them to go somewhere on their own other than having them lie down so pikmin bring them back to the ship. Occasionally you have to position them to relay-throw pikmin up a series of ledges, or weight-activated platforms, but it again, feels a bit underbaked.

One of my favorite parts of Pikmin 2 though is the creature design, and the piklopedia. The descriptions of all the creatures and items from Olimar and the ship's AI add a ton of flavor to the world. The creatures themselves are much more varied than the first game, with plenty of new ones and some variants of old ones. Some are only seen once or twice, and the illusion of a larger ecosystem is very well crafted. Their animation and sound design is fantastic and strikes a perfect balance of cute, weird, and upsetting. Shoutout to what a horrifying concept bulbmin are.

When i was a kid, I liked this sequel more than Pikmin 1, because it felt like a vast world full of hidden secrets and dangers. And it does still evoke some of that feeling even now! But I think in trying to go bigger they created a lush, alive world to explore but spread themselves too thin and lost a lot of the first game's tension and the magic it created.

I really enjoyed this game for what it is: a fun, funky puzzle game about opening doors. The "plot" was buck-wild and didn't make much sense to me -- we never did find out what boating accident happened -- but the puzzles weren't particularly difficult, and satisfying when completed. It's a great "brain-not-all-the-way-off" game and I recommend it if you like casual puzzles with fun themes.
It did glitch out several times on some puzzles but I was eventually able to return to those levels and 100%'d the game.

I Finally beat this game after several years of playing it on and off. This may be the most 7/10 game I have ever played, which I mean mostly as a compliment, but also slightly derogatorily. It has a million ideas and it really goes for all of them, and in many ways it actually does succeed! But it can also feel sloppy and unfair nearly as often.

The combat system, where you can target specific limbs and chop them off after doing enough damage to acquire those gear parts from enemies, is legitimately very cool. Once you get the hang of it, the combat feels pretty good and has an interesting pace and rhythm and set of tactical considerations to it. When you are fighting humans. They put so much work into making this system feel good with humans, the most common enemy type, that fighting anything else can feel very janky and vague. The limb targeting still works on robots and such but only kind of, and their designs can make reading and reacting to their animations very difficult. And of course non-human enemies tend to be the ones that do the most damage and can often kill you in one or two hits. Many of the deaths in this game did not feel like they were my fault, and were instead due to jank, vague animations, weird hitboxes, and things that do way more damage than they look like they should.

The level design is also highly mixed. On the one hand the environment art and attention to detail is fantastic, and I respect how ambitious and complex they can be. On the other hand, they are often incredibly labyrinthine, far more so than anything Fromsoft ever made, and because they are primarily indoors there is a lack of landmarks to aid navigation. Many times I unlocked a shortcut and was extremely confused about if it had actually helped cause I could not for the life of me tell where the fuck i even was in relation to the OPS room. I did eventually learn my way around, sort of, but there was a lot of me wandering around going huh??? and I would say that I am pretty good at navigating and internalizing complex 3D environments.

So the game is a mixed bag, but where it excels, other than the combat against humans, is in its setting, presentation, and worldbuilding. The whole industrial dungeon + techbro horror vibe is super well done and the constant PR interviews and marketing bits playing on screens throughout the CREO facility are pitch perfect. The writing was sharper than I was expecting too. This game has a pretty clear viewpoint on silicon valley, climate change, the exploitation of workers, and it ties it all into the setting and level design pretty well. The NPCs are some dark souls ass NPCs to be sure, but that style of writing transplanted into this sort of setting is surprisingly novel, and they do a good job making them feel distinct. The sad, vaguely inspirational country song that plays in the OPS rooms is also an absolutely inspired choice, its exactly the kind of thing a corporation like CREO would pipe in to breakrooms to try and connect with and motivate its workers. And like, it literally works! I'm humming it to myself right now! I felt relieved every time i heard that song! You are so right The Surge, I was always as free as I wanted to be, always as free, as a bird.... It is true that you cannot miss what you have never seen before. And weren't we all born in a prison? The prison of this modern tech obsessed society???

I think what is the true mark of this game as a 7/10 game (complimentary) though is that I am still thinking about it a week after finishing it. Its a genuinely weird and ambitious little game that truly does go for it in all respects. Its got gumption and you know what I gotta respect that.