From Blaviken to Toussaint, I've followed The Witcher through all of his misadventures. These adventures have shaped Geralt over the course of seven books and three games, most of which are fantasy stories that I hold in the highest regard. The Witcher is one of the genre's crown jewels, in my opinion; its distinct brand of ethical dilemmas and its complex character writing drew me in as a teenager, and they continue to captivate my imagination and stir my soul to this day.

These adventures, however, cannot last forever; every story must end. The final expansion for The Witcher 3, Blood and Wine, aims to serve as an epilogue chapter in Geralt's story, and I must admit that it is one of the most fitting and satisfying ways this saga could conclude. Although the beautiful, lush mediaeval countryside and vineyards of Toussaint did not fully capture my heart on a second playthrough eight years later, I would be lying if I said I could think of a more suitable place to end Geralt's adventure in. Toussaint is large—almost shockingly large for what should be the setting of an epilogue chapter, but I believe its size works well in its favour. When compared to the previous expansion, Hearts of Stone, I discovered something interesting. Hearts of Stone demonstrates an impressive degree of restraint in its approach to storytelling, while Blood and Wine takes a hard left turn by expanding the scope massively and letting the chains loose, reminiscent of The Wild Hunt's massively complex narrative. What sets Blood and Wine apart, however, is how it refines and enhances the expansive and nonlinear storytelling approach of The Wild Hunt, which results in what I feel to be a vastly more enjoyable and satisfying narrative experience. 

CD Projekt Red handles everything here with the utmost care, and I can feel the love they put into Blood and Wine. It’s incredibly commendable how much respect they have for the source material and how dedicated they are to honouring The Witcher’s history in this expansion. I would be remiss not to praise this expansion for the immense love and care that went into it. Serving as an epilogue to a multi-year-long epic, Blood and Wine stands as one of the most impressive storytelling feats of the past decade. Everything here is almost perfect, and despite not fully capturing my heart in the way I had hoped it would, I’m still deeply satisfied and moved by Blood and Wine. 

This is truly one of the greatest expansions of all time.

If there’s anything in this world worth keeping alive, it’s love.

In the void that is Revachol, we see the light of love and hope slowly fade away. It is up to us to cultivate and nurture that light so it does not die. Love is not dead! As you read this, you are alive and breathing, and it's up to you to seize what remains and fight for it. We can no longer wait for some great revolution that will fix all of our problems. If you truly desire a revolution, you must create the conditions necessary to birth it!

Disco Elysium isn’t just a game about what political faction you align with or finding out who lynched the man behind Whirling-in-Rags; it’s a story about love and why we must hold onto it, even in the darkest of times. I understand that nowadays, with the current state of affairs, it's hard to believe in love and hope. It's difficult to place our hope in a future that seems to have been stolen away from us, yet that's precisely when we need it the most.

I choose to believe in love. I choose to hold on to the hope that a better future is possible, no matter what, because I believe it is. The people we know, the community we live in, and the world we inhabit are worth fighting for. Disco Elysium taught me that fixing the world and making it a better place isn’t just about picking up a gun and waging some violent revolution; it’s about cultivating community and caring for those in it. That’s where the true beauty of Disco Elysium lies.

I believe the way this game conveys that message is quite powerful. Disco doesn't make some grand showy gesture beating you over the head with its message; instead, it laboriously takes the time to show you that the world you live in is beautiful and worth fighting for. It spends the time showing you the inner lives of those around you and has you helping them, one person at a time.

There is one specific character that I feel best embodies this: Cuno. Cuno, at first, is seen to be an irrational, difficult, vulgar, and poorly-behaved child, which leads you to inevitably hate him. As you learn more about Cuno and his home life, however, you realise there’s something greater at play. He doesn’t act out for the hell of it; he is the way he is because his father is a drunk who’s fallen down on his luck due to becoming a victim of the system giving up on him and his son. He’s left with no choice. The system has abandoned Uuno and his son, leaving them both to fend for themselves and pick up the pieces. Which sadly isn’t uncommon in Revachol and the real world as well. It’s perhaps one of the most striking and poignant stories in the game. I eventually went from despising Cuno to feeling empathy for him, as I did for many others in Revachol when I learned their stories.

I believe this approach to storytelling and character writing is incredibly effective, and the best part about Disco Elysium is that these kinds of stories are all over the game. This goes to show how much love and care was put into humanising the inhabitants of Revachol, which helps make the world feel alive. Because of how well the game fleshed out its world and characters Disco Elysium was successful at conveying the message that this world is worth fighting for. Not only was I captivated by this world, but as the game drew to a close, I found myself deeply invested in the wellbeing of these characters and the city.

As I learned about these stories, Revachol’s history, and the many political factions vying for power, I realised that this game was never about solving a murder or finding which faction is "correct." It was about learning to love those around us and working together to create a better world, one step at a time. Creating a better world was never an unattainable goal conjured up in the minds of idealistic and "ignorant" kids. It is a possible reality, but it demands the working toiling masses of the world unite and work hand in hand in creating this future. It is on us to seize the future and lift eachother up when we need it most.

Never give up on fighting for this future. It is only dead when you allow yourself to be convinced that it is.

Faust meets Witcher in one of the most deeply tragic and moving love stories of all time. Hearts of Stone is more than just a love story; it is also an interrogation of love, seeking to both affirm love and understand its proclivity for destruction when left unchecked. It retells an age-old story, but it does so in a way that excellently demonstrates The Witcher's almost supernatural ability to transform simple story concepts into some of the most intricate and riveting studies of the human condition ever seen. 

My journey across The Planes has taken me to places that most men believe exist only in the realm of thought. These places I travelled to, the people I met, and the conversations I had fundamentally changed me as a person. I don’t fully know how, but regardless, I know some sort of change occurred. Perhaps writing about my experience with Planescape will help me better understand these changes and the person I am today.

When I was 14, I discovered Planescape: Torment, and while I thought the game was awesome, I could never really engage with the questions the game posed to me. I mean, how could I? What would the question “What can change the nature of a man?” mean to a 14-year-old who was only beginning to grapple with the concept of its own being? Looking back, it meant nothing to me. Now that I am an adult, however, the question means much more to me. Part of me is ashamed to admit I haven’t always been a ‘good’ person. Learning to be kind, understanding, mature, and responsible took me many years of struggling and hardship to achieve. Even today, I still struggle with this, but through that struggle, I came to learn more about myself and my nature. I can’t fully codify into words what my “nature” or “self” are because they are concepts that exist beyond language. Language can at times be limiting, so I look to art to help me look inward and better conceptualise these thoughts and feelings. I feel as though Planescape stirred the part of my soul that sought these answers, and despite it not giving me concrete answers, I feel satisfied with the new questions it posed to me. To me, good art never seeks to speak for the reader but instead provides them with the tools necessary to create subjective meaning from the experience they have with it. I believe Planescape does this quite well; I’d even go so far as to argue that it fully agrees with me here. When The Nameless One is posed the question, “What can change the nature of a man?” the game does not have him provide a concrete answer to the player. Instead, we are left with the game giving us the tools necessary to begin constructing our own answer to that question as the credits roll. Currently, I don't have an answer to that question, and I'm not sure if I will even have one a decade from now, but I'm okay with that. Part of growing up meant that I had to learn to be content with not always having an answer for everything; perhaps not every question needed an answer.

There’s more I could write, but perhaps it’s best that some things remain unwritten. I would love to endlessly navel-gaze, but that wouldn’t do me or you, the reader, any good. I apologise to anyone here who expected a formal review and was met instead by my self-indulgent introspection. There's really not much I can say about Planescape that hasn't already been said; it's an awesome ass game, and it deserves the reputation it has made for itself, enough said.

Anyways, I’d like to end this short write-up by saying that if you haven’t already played Planescape: Torment, you owe it to yourself to take that journey across The Planes. Sigil is known as the ‘City of Doors’, after all, so why don’t you look inside and see where one of them takes you?

The fallen leaves tell the story of an arborescent world order decaying from the inside out. The Land Between is slowly cracking away at the seams as its twilight draws ever closer.

This is the world that FromSoftware shows the player, a world in which we are left to pick up fragments of a bygone past piece by piece as we fight against the forces that seek to uphold the ways of old.

This world we are shown is a not-so-subtle metaphor for our own world, a world that so desperately clings onto the ideas of old (capitalism) in the hopes their old world order won’t buckle to the pressure of history and the forces of progress itself, that force being you, the Tarnished.

Elden Ring is a game of stagnation, a game that challenges the very essence of the series it originates from, a game that seeks to take the Soulsborne formula to its logical end point and burn it all down in order to start anew. In some ways it succeeds at doing this, in other ways it doesn’t, and I think the ways it succeeds at this overshadow even its most glaring failures.

The gameplay here is refined to the best it can be; it feels as though every weapon was meticulously crafted to allow for some of the most varied and unique build variety I’ve seen in a Souls game. The open-world especially lends well to enhancing the variety of Elden Ring due to its non-linear nature, which allows for some of the most freedom in exploration and gameplay I’ve seen in a modern AAA title. I sometimes feel that the gameplay, however, was so streamlined and improved to such a degree it can sometimes feel sterile in a sense. I miss the roughness and edge to the older Souls games which I feel isn't present in From's newer games. There’s times, however, where this freedom can become overwhelming and lead to parts of the world feeling either bloated with meaningless content (excess copy-and-paste bosses and dungeons) or completely barren, a problem that could have been easily remedied if the map itself was slightly reworked to be a tad bit smaller. I feel as though a rework of the map that makes it more compact and tight would have greatly benefited Elden Ring and led to the game feeling less unbalanced in the way it presented its content. Even in spite of all that, there’s a genuine understated beauty to the world of Elden Ring that I cannot deny. This world is beautiful at times, and even in its rotting and decaying state, there are still shreds of beauty left that are worth holding on to.

Moving on from the gameplay, I feel that Elden Ring truly shines narratively and thematically the most. One may be quick to write Elden Ring off as a rehash of Souls, which to an extent is a take that isn’t without its merit. I, however, believe that it’s continuity with and rupture away from Soulsborne narrative similarities that this game truly gets interesting; it feels like a meta-self-examination and final nail in the coffin for these ideas. Elden Ring has many similarities to Dark Souls; often times, the main narrative similarity people point to is the concept of a dying world held in stasis that we are forced to decide the fate of, but what Elden Ring does with this concept is far more brilliant than people give it credit for.

Elden Ring is not just taking Souls narrative and gameplay concepts to their logical end points; it’s also burning them down. Elden Ring is Miyazaki’s pivotal turning point, where he realises that this formula is not going to be sustainable forever and that it’s necessary to accelerate these ideas to their end points and then burn it all down (symbolically done through the burning of the Erdtree).

To further understand the significance of the Erdtree, I must draw upon the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

In their follow-up book to Anti-Œdipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guatarri describe two forms of organisation: rhizomatic (non-hierarchical) and arborescent (hierarchical). These two forms of organisation are obviously references to plants, with arborescence referring to trees with a central root system and trunk and rhizomes referring to potatoes and their decentralised, free-flowing root system, to put it simply. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze uses these plant metaphors as a way to explain and illuminate the flaws of certain organisational structures and forms, with arborescent structures having one key flaw: their dependency on each other. If one part of the structure dies, rots, breaks, etc., the rest will follow suit, as they are dependent on each other.

Now, with this understanding of arborescence, we can tie it to the Erdtree and its functionality within the narrative of Elden Ring. In Elden Ring, the Erdtree serves as a monument that represents and upholds the old world; it maintains order and allows the world to continue as it is, but if this order is threatened or destroyed, the very same old world order it once upheld will crumble soon thereafter. It is through the actions of The Tarnished that we are able to light this arborescent structure ablaze and accelerate history forward (I would use this as a jumping-off point to explain Mark Fisher’s idea of accelerationism (not to be confused with Landian accelerationism)and how it ties into the story of Elden Ring, but this review is already too long as is).

Elden Ring is a story of stagnation and rebirth.

I ultimately see Elden Ring and, more specifically, its Frenzied Flame ending as a rejection and rupture away from the ideas of the old and an embrace of more radical new forms and ideas, while also staying in continuity with the general style of Soulsborne. For all of its flaws, of which this game has many, I firmly believe it’s a bold new step in the right direction. I believe that Elden Ring is not only the end of an era, but a new beginning and continuation into a new, radical, and free era of expression and creativity from Miyazaki and his team.

In a lot of circles, Trails to Azure has garnered itself a monolithic reputation as a legendary title within the genre. Suffice to say, I had some really big expectations for this game. As someone who absolutely loved both Sky SC and Zero, I was just about ready to join the choir and sing this game's unending praises.

That being said, did Azure manage to meet said expectations and fully deliver? Well, it's a complicated answer. Because while it did end up becoming my favorite game in the series, the flaws Azure and it's predecessors possess have been made more evident than ever before.

For all intents and purposes, I think Azure is a fantastic game. It's an incredibly refined experience with some of the best scenario writing and most bombastic storytelling the genre has to offer. The stakes are incredibly high and the fact that this game was even able to deliver on most of its ambitions is an absolute marvel to me.

That being said, I think Falcom can be a bit... overzealous with their storytelling in regards to this series. They're always trying to shake and subvert the foundation that the narrative rests upon. This isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but in retrospect I think they could have exercised a lot more restraint in the process.

Here's a few spoiler free examples of what I'm talking about in the context of this game alone:

Certain half baked conflicts are introduced late into the game, and swept back under the rug just as quickly as they're introduced.

Certain events are played up very heavily, but are lacking in proper consequences which fails to sell their impact.

Certain characters have their entire backstories hidden behind optional scenes that of which you can only see one of per playthrough.

There's a certain plot twist during the finale (If you've played the game you definitely know what I'm talking about) so pointless and diminishing that I've seen it flat out just kill the game for some people.

I say the word "certain" a lot here, because I don't want to sell Azure's completely off the wall writing choices as a ubiquitously bad thing. For every dubious scene or questionably unnecessary plot twist in this game, there's about five more that are completely astonishing and perfectly executed. If Azure commits to anything, it's the proposition of a narrative not content with sitting still and letting things slow down. From the Trade Conference onwards, I was on the edge of my seat for the entire game and never once was I bored.

I can't promise you'll find a perfectly written masterpiece within this game, it's got too many cuts and bruises for me to say that with good conscience. However, what it offers in spite of that is so utterly captivating and unforgettable that I can't help but completely cherish it all the same.

No matter where we come from we’re all headed to the same place.

The eternal oblivion is an inevitability every human must grapple with, the concept of death is terrifying and for much of our lives we will spend many years pondering the idea and coming to terms with the inevitability of such a fate. It’s our choice whether or not we will waste those moments or if we will face down death and live our lives to the fullest despite our eventual fate. Cyberpunk is a game about life and death, how we grapple with our mortality and what will use our remaining time on this planet doing. Will we push away the ones we love to avoid hurting them or will we spend our final weeks making the most of that time with our loved ones?

The dilemma of the ticking death clock on V is what truly makes this game special, we’re faced with the inevitability of death and it forces the player and V to make the most of their time, there is no guarantee that V will survive and find a way out so we work under the assumption that we must make the most of our time on this Earth before we die. That limited time is what makes this game special to me, we’re forced to live life to the fullest and in spite of all of that V keeps fighting, not only for themself, but for their friends, the ones they lost, and for a better future, even if it’s a future that they won’t live to see.

Cyberpunk for all of its flaws is still a beautiful game and one I will never forget, it’s a powerful experience that will sit with me for many years to come. The bonds I formed in this game, the time I spent in Night City and the Badlands, the story I experienced, it’s all truly unforgettable.

Arguably the greatest open-world RPG I have played, it sits among greats like Morrowind, New Vegas, and Daggerfall.

“V, never stop fighting.”
-Johnny Silverhand