F.E.A.R. holds up surprisingly well. It's nestled in a comfortable era for FPS games, predating grey angsty Xbox 360 slop, and old enough to avoid the stiff controls of the original Half Life.

The story is simple but serviceable. It's constantly flowing in the background, and mostly serves to give you reasons to go places and shoot people. It never grabbed me, but it didn't need to. F.E.A.R. isn't that kind of game.

Combat is punchy and fast. Enemies take chunks out of your life with every shot, but you can kill most enemies with a few well placed shots in return. The slow-mo and leaning mechanics make you feel really powerful at time, and I genuinely liked the gunfights in this game.

As for the horror aspect...it was rough. It wasn't really scary, and while I like Alma as a villain, none of her segments really did anything for me. In fact, it was more funny than anything. You'd have soldiers get zapped by her mind powers, and they'd collapse like G-Mod skeleton ragdolls.

Overall, I'd say give it a go. It's pretty cheap and easy to come by, and I was able to beat it in just about ten hours. It's nothing spectacular, but it was a fun way to spend a few afternoons.

Having put a good ~40 hours into Balatro so far (and I will be putting more into it in the future), I feel comfortable saying that while it's really good, it's not the be-all end-all of rogue-likes.

What Balatro does well is presentation, style, and simplicity. The game is immediately intuitive if you know poker, the music is calming, the spritework is incredible. You can boot it up, and in an hour, have a solid grasp on all the major mechanics of the game. This isn't Isaac, where the rules of the game are changing with every item you get, nor is it Gungeon, which demands a pretty substantial learning curve. Balatro is accessible, stylish, and fun.*

At lower levels anyway. What I've found is that eventually, you hit a brick wall of a learning curve. When you're halfway up the difficulty ladder and going for harder joker unlocks, the sheen begins to waver a bit. On higher difficulties, I feel completely at the RNG's mercy. Whether I get usable jokers, boss blinds that kill me on the spot, or useful skips isn't something I can affect in any way.

While this isn't out of the ordinary - indeed, you'd be a fool to expect a rogue-like without RNG - Balatro feels especially defeating at this hump. This is still poker. A bad series of draws, an unlucky blind, and you're dead regardless of how well you tried to build your deck. And for some, this won't be an issue at all. But as someone raised on easier roguelikes, these setbacks feel more frustrating than anything.

This isn't to be overly negative, however. Balatro is a wonderful game, and definitely worth your time. It's cheap, and even if you drop off at the 30 hour mark, you'll have more than got your money's worth. It feels fresh, and I'm delighted to have such a prominent, popular, new game on the roguelike block. It's probably the best addition to the genre since Vampire Survivors. Just beware the midgame slump, and don't burn yourself out by playing dead run after dead run for hours.

Danganronpa brings some great ideas to the table, but ultimately fails to do anything meaningful or creative with them. While the graphics and music are really great, and the gameplay passable, the biggest flaw is the writing.

In my opinion, two things are necessary for the death-game format to work well; fun characters and solid mysteries. This game has neither. Nearly every character - out of the initial 15 - feels purposefully written to be as obnoxious and boring as possible. By the end of the game, I'd only connected with three of them, two of which had died early on. And if you're not invested in the cast, it's difficult to care when someone dies.

I also thought the intrigue just...wasn't there. Admittedly, I might be spoiled by the zero escape series, but Danganronpa never felt like it could focus on a secret long enough to build it up. Any time a new, mysterious, paranoia-inducing twist is hinted at, it's inevitably revealed in the next hour. You don't spend hours wondering who a masked participant really is, or find a weird clue that rattles around in your head until its relevant twenty hours later. It's all disappointingly simple.

Danganronpa - putting it bluntly - is baby's first death-game. That's not a bad thing, and indeed, I don't think Danganronpa is a bad game in isolation. You can have fun with it, and I can see why its a cult-classic. But if you're already familiar with the genre before you play it, Danganronpa feels a bit disappointing. All it does is wet your appetite, and make you wish you were playing your personal favorites. And while Danganronpa does pull some good story beats in its final hours, its not enough.

If you've never played a death-game before, and you want a friendlier starting point, I'd say give Danganronpa a try. And if you're a bored teenager who wants to try Danganronpa out because you like the aesthetic, then give it a shot. But if you're not particularly interested in the art or music, and if you've already played similar games before, I'd say Danganronpa is an easy pass.