I honestly liked this a lot more than I thought I would! A short but sweet first person Silent Hill tale that is clearly HEAVILY inspired by Hideo Kojima's PT. It tries to recapture that magic with very high fidelity visuals and a surprise free shadow drop during the PlayStation State of Play. While nowhere near the cultural firecracker that was PT, this short experience still has a lot of charm. It tries to use Silent Hill theming and setting to tackle a rather modern (for the series at least) story about bullying, the effect of social media on the youth, and how suicide impacts an entire community. Tackling such contemporary issues is always a challenge as the script needs to be tight and believable or it runs the risk of appearing cheesy or insincere. It doesn't help that the devs also have to get over the language barrier as well for western audiences. While some bits could be a bit trite, all in all I feel they accomplished what they set out to in terms of the themes and story delivered. The strangest bit about the delivery has got to be the over dubbing of the VAs. The game is set in Germany, but all the characters are young Asian women clearly speaking Japanese. This is then overdubbed in English with no option for an original audio with subtitles. A very odd choice that will no doubt suck a lot of people out of the immersion the gameplay provides. The gameplay is about 80% slow exploration of a detailed environment and 20% tense maze-like escape sequences. The exploration is extremely barebones with only one (YES 1) very simple puzzle and no sort of inventory or item interactions. It's essentially only picking up notes that deliver exposition while creeping through dilapidated hallways and rooms. While there are a ton of issues, ultimately I'm just glad we get to see a Silent Hill try something genuinely new for the series. The IP still has so much potential if given to the proper teams with an actual creative vision. If it takes some quirky little experiments like The Short Message to get there, I welcome each and every one with open arms.

What a nice surprise! A 2.5d metroidvania take on Prince of Persia that for the most part hits the mark. Featuring great abilities, fun and smooth traversal, a beautiful map, and some of the best combat the genre has seen since hollow knight. The art style is absolutely gorgeous, actually utilizing it's 2.5d nature in cool and innovative ways at times. Has a feature known as "memory fragments" that let you essentially take a screenshot of wherever you are and pin it to it's location on the map, letting you see exactly what was blocking progression without having to make the trek back or create an elaborate and esoteric labelling system. Such a genius and simple innovation that I really hope we see more of going forward in the genre! The story was very well done considering the genre. The end of game cleanup for 100% was also very painless, taking only a couple of hours. This was very welcome as the cleanup can be some of the worst part of metroidvanias. Only two major gripes that prevent me from ranking higher. 1.) There were a surprising amount of bugs/glitches for a game with Ubisoft budget. Nothing that ruined the experience but multiple to the point where it was noticeable, including two resets. 2.) Staying vague as to not spoil, there is a major character in this that is so blatantly cut from the second half of the game it's honestly jarring. Honestly, it's MGSV levels of very very obviously cut content, genuinely shocked she's still in the game at all. Other than that it's an EASY recommend for fans of the IP or genre, and I hope we get to see at least one more Prince of Persia in this style. A great start to the year.

Man I'm so torn on this one. There is sooooo much to love but so much to dislike as well. The writing is a noticeable step down from base FF7. It's borderline odd and baffling at times. A resonant emotional scene can still be found here and there but some just outright fell flat for me, and I consider myself the target audience for a game like this. It often feels like Zack is an actual character trapped in some weird Nomura anime-verse, to the point of it being comical at times. The gameplay leaves me just as torn as the narrative. The moment-to-moment combat system is honestly great! You can definitely draw an obvious line from this gameplay all the way to FF7 Remake. The mission structure is probably my biggest gripe. It doesn't gel well and feels often disjointed or overflowing with mind numbingly repetitive missions. The interesting thing is I genuinely feel like this issue is exacerbated by playing it on modern at-home console hardware. The original game was on PSP and this mission structure would fit absolutely perfectly ok that platform. A shame it didn't translate over well. All in all, I'm glad I played it. It is definitely required reading for the entire FF7 story, blemishes and all.