2017 game that would have been revolutionary in 2007.

The entire art team deserves some awards for their achievement on this, the game is still beautiful and a lot of effort went into tiny flourishing details.

The rest of the teams who worked on this just made a by the book gamey game for gamers.

You climb on yellow stuff, you talk in worthless dialogue trees, you unlock basic gameplay through skill trees, you craft shit, you buy gear with colorful rarity, you slowly farm nonsense off of the ground, you go on dumb side quests. You do it all in a giant open world filled with icons. It's a game and all those things are there because that's what you do in games like these, and I'm so tired of it.

I think I would've appreciated a straight forward, linear, 10-20 hours experience a lot more, maybe I just want to play Enslaved again.

There's really no other way to put it. This game (and possibly franchise) is morally and creatively bankrupt. Between the shallow depictions of mental health whether there's dramatic zooms of the protagonist self harming or even going as far to have chapters end with you jumping off a building and the following interludes flash a suicide hotline message until the level loads or the awkward anime dub tier voice acting berate you with insults or commentary on your surroundings because Konami needs to remind you this is in a fact a serious game and they're afraid of leaving things to interpretation, I fail to see how the 2 hours I spent with this tech demo can leave me anticipation of the upcoming Silent Hill 2 remake or "missing the point".

This whole experience ends up feeling like a parody of the thing it's trying to comment and I don't think that's the takeaway someone with diagnosed BPD should be feeling.

Life is Strange 1 entered the stage at a time where decision based videogames were dominated by Telltale, whose games aren't really faithful to the appeal of the genre. If you've never played a Telltale game, all you have to know is that the decisions you make in them are not relevant long-term. The Walking Dead series, their most well known work, is filled with characters who you can save only for them to die or be taken out of the story regardless and more choices that only shape the story superficially. Life is Strange 1, regardless of its actual quality, broke the mold bygiving you a tool to interact with the decisions as a whole: time travel. The ability to not only be able to take back decisions you make but also be able to gage if the consequent action matched its description (which was a problem in the genre).

Inversely, True Colors feels much more caged in the conventions of the decision-based genre. Sporting the power of super empathy, you control Alex Chen in her new life in a small town while dredging through the inhabitants interpersonal drama and solving a mystery. Considering that very superficial synopsis I just gave, it really blows hard how much the game focuses on the mystery rather than the drama, specially in later chapters. As much as the town is presented as a community, the townspeople's problems are very disconnected from eachother and are given very little time and space to properly have any sort of impact on the main plot (aside one, albeit significant, part of the final chapter) or the town as a whole unless you really love to read their faux facebook.
The main plot, which is given much more attention, also is a huge letdown. It's very rushed, there is barely any motivation to learn the true story behind the accident aside from the need to have an overarching plot, and it's also a bad fit for the gimmick of empathy. It's an uninteresting, hack script that in its conclusion trips itself up by only being able to humanize a murder by personal association (it's a game about empathy!! hello??).

Empathy really gets the short end of the stick here, man. It only functions as a pseudo telepathy more than anything and the rules around it are wildly inconsistent. It's need of a character focused plot gets sidelined by the main plot in ways that leave it unimpactful and a wasted gimmick. Like they really had no clue what to do with this shit than having you read minds, c'mon dog.

Where I really feel its trapped by the genre are the really forced moral dilemmas. The foundation for a lot of them is so bad that I took the decisions almost instantly, there's barely any reason for them to exist in the first place. I lost my shit when the game went "you can stay here and live a wonderful life" (that's me summarizing a long ass monologue) OR "you can use soundcloud". It really feels like the game HAD to have choices to justify itself but they couldn't come up with anything so they just had to come up with the most stupid shit.
Speaking of choices, God I hated when the game REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAALLY wanted me to get it on with the love interests. They both sucked. I still got in a relationship with one of them for some reason, which I have no idea why.

The game as a whole lacks a lot of thought behind it. I really wish the game just focused more on Alex. I do like her as a protagonist, but her spotlight is relegated to the last chapter and I'm not sure where I seat on its execution. I do like her journey of finding a home and her experience with mental institutions but the game doesn't really focus much on it. She's stuck in a game that scattershots its premises while barely bothering to connect them in a way that makes the experience feel cohesive or fulfilling

LA Noire is a game that I really hoped would be more interesting than it ended up being. It is entertaining enough, it has that typical Rockstar charm (and Rockstar's tendency to burn money on the screen for the most minute things) but it really feels like a missed opportunity.

The game takes place immediately after WW2, which is a great setting, but it feels like the devs were so enamoured with it that they forgot to put any substance in any part of the game.

The gameplay itself is so simplistic and scripted that it may as well not even be there, the investigation segments are really basic and the interrogations are sort of interesting but really badly handled (and it never matters how well you do in any of them). Same can be said for the open world, which was a complete waste of money and time to even have, it looks great but it serves so little purpose that I ended up just skipping the car rides every time.

So all we're really left with is the story, but I felt like it was paced all wrong. The game introduces its characters in the first hour, then everything stops for a solid 10 hours, and at the very last couple hours a story starts to materialize. And even then you're not given much to care for considering that by then the game is scrambling to get some kind of structure back, but it all feels very hollow, especially the very anti-climactic ending.

What I will say about the game though is that the creators really cared for what they were making, and it shows on every aspect of it. Too bad that it didn't really translate to a compelling experience.

It almost feels silly to call anything else an RPG now that this exists. It's a perfect culmination of the idea of injecting stats and rolls and modifiers into a game that actually lets you play a role, to define who this amnesiac man is and how he relates to the world he inhabits.

And what a world: broken and tragicomic, Revachol comes off at first glance as a bitter satire written by a disillusioned leftist. But the deeper you dive, the more it opens up into something haunting and beautiful in its own right, with even a faint glimmer of hope hidden among the ruins. No people is truly broken, argues Disco Elysium, while they still have hearts to care for one another and arms to link against their oppressors.