A completely unremarkable stew of half-baked ideas and half-hearted implementation.

That's-a nice-a game!
Beautiful in its simplicity, ingenious in its foundation, extremely addictive loop.

Well. It's. Y'know. The flashlight recharged faster, and that was nice.
It's just short and repetitive and not super interesting. The people telling you to play this before AW2 are wrong. Just read a wiki or watch an LP.

I dug it! Solid. Fun story. Some of the combat not so much, but that's Remedy for you. Probably rating higher due to anticipation for Alan Wake 2.

2019

Wouldn't you know it, the first couple levels of DOOM still own on Switch.

It's still great and I'm still nostalgic for it, but I don't think I'll ever really stick with it past a certain point. That point tends to be "my house is done and now I'd like to go find a lot of iron," and/or "it's time to find diamonds."
The right mood really needs to strike.

Probably the best Mario game next to SMW, but the multiplayer is surprisingly unforgiving, which I get because how can you really make the flow and skill of Mario fun with another person without literally melding your minds but it's hard to play with another person without having to slow yourself down or the other person just having a kind of mediocre time.

2021

A pretty good Megaman X-like with solid controls and lovely art that is unfortunately let down by everything else around it. Boring and repetitive. Certain facets of its loop are never explained. And the UI just looks unfinished.

It's gorgeous, I'll give it that.
Looking past the visuals, it's a series of quick-time-events for which you have no context or direction until you fail them multiple times.
That's not to say the game can't produce moments of genuine joy, but the misses outnumber the hits, and each section slowly becomes frustrating and tedious.
Yet, I find it hard to fault AW in light of its elegance and intuitive nature. Sure, my first reaction to nearly every situation I was put into was, "Huh?" But there are only so many actions available to the player, so they'll probably get it eventually.
Unfortunately, "they'll probably get it eventually" isn't quite good enough for me. I get what AW is doing, and I even like a lot of it in practice, and the whole of it in theory.
I suspect this is a game that feels better its second time through. The player's role as "guy learning the script" has never been felt more acutely than when playing AW, so it stands to reason that once you know the script, the performance is more enjoyable.
For now, though, it just made me groan too god damn much.

TL;DR: It's nice to look at, but you sure as shit can't play it.

This is, for me, a much better take on Vampire Survivors. Fell off instantly because the depth of upgrades and unlocks is overwhelming to me, and ultimately I don't think I love sticking with these games for a long time. Really good for what it is, though. Love the art style.

Does what it says on the tin. Love that they did this. Also actually making me want to play all of the Zachtronics games that I haven't played even more.

The grown-up "After Dark Games" I didn't know I needed. A loving homage to The Good Old Days. A last chance, swing for the fences, out with a bang, goodbye love letter from a developer that knew what it liked and what it was good at.

A nice, quiet place to play some games. A refuge.

The video game of all time. Does a great job of acclimating you to its verbs and controls. Movement feels fantastic (played on KB). Guns feel great.

Level design really falls off after E1 (Romero's levels). E2 was still mostly a good time, but E3 really lost me. Have yet to play E4.

Played on a 60% KB, so couldn't properly circle strafe without rebinding some keys, but that's really only necessary for the Cyberdemon fight on E2M8.

All of the weapons are fun and feel good and have their place, and finding newer, bigger guns that you don't have was such enjoyable progression, BUT.

I truly believe that somewhere up in heaven there is a perfect version of this game where you only use the shotgun.