Zapper block/pull/dash are so fucked. Dash completely outclasses hero punch. Pull and dash give the exact same reward as block with non of the risk. Every enemy apart from bosses is vulnerable to pull and dash, so it dominates combat to the point that doing anything else feels like deliberately making mistakes for fun.

The environments and graphics and such definitely give the impression that they're meant to "wow" but they just weren't for me. The busy-ness and "fidelity" of all the models and textures crossed with the stiff and somehow paradoxically slippery animation gives it the visual tone of a high budget asset flip.

I skipped every cutscene I could, and of those I couldn't skip I can recall only one. Rentier (our hero) struggling at the controls of an elevator trying to make it move, when his tech-y companion, Verge, says "Good thing you've got a friend like me around to fix this stuff up for you!" he then walks into the elevator, hovers his hand over a single giant lever, pulls it, and the elevator immediately works.

Yet another argument in favour of skippable cutscenes.

Hades has gameplay that straddles the line between mediocre and solid, and sits firmly on repetitive, but is massively, MASSIVELY elevated by a constant deluge of excellent characters and writing, showcasing possibly the most consistently charming ensemble I've seen in a game. I want to write about how rare it is for a game to have you happy to see characters that go so far across the spectrum, ranging from bashful fangirls to our rebellious demon protagonist, or even to his douchey uncles, but every time I start to write it down I struggle to think of way to say it without literally describing the things I like about every single character. Hopefully it will suffice to say that if this game's story has a problem it is not in being short on anything.

Its narrative's one (and only, in my opinion) problem is that it's so long. It took me less than 20 hours to get to the main ending, but having such a great time I decided I'd go on and complete the epilogue, after more than 20 more hours I still haven't gotten to it, which is a shame considering as the game is getting taken off gamepass (or maybe already has? I didn't check) I doubt I'll manage to get a satisfying conclusion. I guess I would have if I chose to just stop playing at the main ending, but I won't fault the game for what is ultimately the fault of gamepass. What was I talking about? Oh yeah, it's too long! The most obvious justification for this is that with such a huge amount of dialogue, there is no way to let the player digest each storyline without spreading them across a really long game, and considering the stories visual novel style structure I actually think a roguelite is an incredible fit, given how neatly it paces the story. Talk to Zag's close family between runs, talk to Zag's distant family on a run. If one adored these characters more than I loved them I could easily see them shocked at the suggestion of reducing the games length.

Just a real treat.

A superficial description of SS13 would say that it is an online role playing game played in rounds that last around an hour (sometimes a little less or a lot more depending on the gametype.) where you play as a crew member on a quirky and chaotic spacestation. Your job could range from a doctor to a security officer or even a clown, and each of these jobs is given enough depth to feel like it could be a game all on its own, but what really set it apart for me back when I played it as a kid was the dynamic nature afforded to its mechanics by its community.

If you rolled playing as the captain, you could steer the round into any flavor you wanted, deciding to rule with an iron fist and focus on delivering harsh sentences to undesirable troublemakers didn't always result in a full brig and a peaceful station but it did always result in exciting multifaceted conflicts. Traitors planting bombs to serve as diversions from their true objectives would turn into complex rebuilding efforts with random no authority cooks and barkeepers being conscripted as emergency paramedics and engineers. Potentially uneventful shifts as a janitor could turn into a desperate struggle for survival hiding from aliens and trying to not run out of oxygen all while dragging the naked corpse of an assistant to the cloning bay. Every round felt different from the last, and this ceaseless variety is something that I think has more or less been preserved to this day, but I can’t help but feel that my best times with the game are long behind me.

I still come back to it every now and then, but I’ve never been able to recapture that feeling of playing a game where the world so often felt not only dynamic, but truly alive. On youtube you can find a dozen videos with hundreds of thousands of views showing the game off, but back when I first heard of it that wasn’t the case. You had to find it for yourself, and that made it a lot easier to sacrifice a bit of my round if it meant everyone else that found the game got to have a little bit more fun, and I may be making shit up, but I think this went the same way for a lot of the people I played with too. It’s a bit harder to take having my head lopped off with an esword in stride when there’s now a high chance that the person who did it may have learned to play it not because of their own interest in it, but because they were told about it by a youtuber who constantly regurgitates memes from /pol/