A fun and quirky multiplayer game.

The gimmick of combining elements to form spells is interesting, but it gets old pretty quickly once you figure out what the extremely OP spells are.

Has a ton of annoying un-skippable dialogue that restarts every time you die

It's also fun to smash your friends with giant boulders in co-op

A pretty fun and unique experience that --like all motion-based games-- it gets old really quickly.

The combat has a bit more depth than you would initially expect, with multiple different arm attachments per character, and a sort of rock-paper-scissors mechanic. The multiple online modes and point shop are nice touches, but at the end of the day it's still kind of just a cooler version of wii sports boxing.

I'm sort of a sucker for games that require specific hardware to play. I still find myself playing it every now and then.

This game is difficult to assign a rating to, since it's hardly a game. The atmosphere, art, dungeon synth soundtrack and minimalist storytelling are all extremely well-executed.

It's a game where you wait for 400 days. In real time. There are areas in the game that you can't get to for at least a month or two after starting.
You can have the shade wander (slowly walk lol) around the subterranean castle, grow plants in real time, find objects to furnish his bedroom with, read the entirety of Moby Dick (for real), and a ton of other things that I don't want to spoil.

My biggest complaint is that there are ways to increase the flow of time, so that the game doesn't literally take 400 days to play. This isn't clearly communicated, so I spent a lot of time thinking my game was glitched, or the timer was wrong.

A fantastic and atmospheric anti-idle non-game

I have a general aversion to open-world games. I don't think this game needed to exist. In my opinion, the dark souls combat system is overplayed, and pretty stale at this point. This game had/has some severe balancing issues, and many of the bosses were simply not designed very well.

All that being said, this game gave me a great sense of exploration. It sometimes felt a little disjointed and clumsily assembled, but by the end of the game, I felt satisfied.

Interestingly, I feel like this is the least replayable of the soulslike games. After seeing all of the side dungeons (none of which are particularly interesting), there's no real reason to return to any of them, other than to collect items for your build. A subsequent run of the game might involve collecting a few key build items, then linearly running through the open world to all of the main bosses. At that point, I'd rather just replay a Dark Souls game, where the game world is thoughtfully and intentionally designed for the player to run through in a semi-linear manner.

All in all, I think this is a pretty great game, but not one that I'll find myself returning to as often as the others.

This game shook up the (stale, even at the time) soulslike theme and mechanics in just the right ways. A more fast-paced, aggressive combat system in an eldritch-gothic setting.

Bloodborne also has some interesting experimental content, such as the chalice system. Not everything works, but it's all worth seeing.

If you liked Dark Souls (or, maybe if you hated it?) this game is worth a try.

I don't generally play games for the writing. I have books/movies if that's what I'm in the mood for. This game is one of the few exceptions. The game feels like a D&D campaign, but a really good one, and with combat that is way less boring and tedious. This is the ONLY game that has ever given me the feeling that my choices have consequences. Even the main questline has several branching paths, each with unique voice-acted dialogue and new content to see.

The world is so immersive that it almost makes me abandon my idiot gamer instinct of DO MAIN QUEST, MAKE NUMBER GO UP, MAKE PROGRESS. I actually find myself sticking around doing all of the mundane side quests, and listening to all of the fantastically voice-acted dialogue.

Oh also, the combat and character building and alllll that other RPG stuff is very well-executed. The multiplayer mode is also fantastic.

I could go on forever about this one. Not just the best CRPG ever, but maybe one of the best games ever

Literally genre-defining;: Another "gold-standard" game.

There have been countless metroidvania games released since Super Metroid -many of them extremely good (I'm looking at you, Hollow Knight, SotN)- but every time I return to this game, I can't help but think it's the best of the lot.

It's so tightly designed, and has a great "show, don't tell" way of directing the player that really shouldn't work as well as it does in such a huge, convoluted maze of a game world.

It's Dark Souls. I don't have any fresh takes on this game.

I'm rating it as 5/5 because of my experience with the game. I was lucky, and I got to play the game on release with no prior knowledge or preconceptions (someone below described it as "THE hipster game" lol). It was the perfect natural continuation of Demon's Souls.

mechanics aside, the game made me feel a mix of wonder, anxiety, hopelessness, and accomplishment that is extremely rare in gaming. The sense of exploration I got from Dark Souls is something I've continued to seek out in new games to this day.

The 3D Mario games just seem to get better and better as they go.

The environments in this game are so densely packed with things to see and do. Each one has its own unique feel, and you can tell that the level design was very intentional. The controls are responsive and fluid (okay the shaking thing is a little annoying).

For me, this is currently the gold-standard for 3D platformers and collectathon games. A must-play for anyone who enjoys this type of game.