its a humbling feeling to find a game that feels bigger than you

i dont even know where to start describing it. at its core, its a game about not understanding. the gameplay revolves around trying in vain to learn about your surroundings - to piece it all together and find a solution to a problem - only to die not because of a lack of trying, but because we just dont have the time.

the beauty of Outer Wilds lies right there. its galaxy is small, yet feels huge and only gets bigger the more you dig. by all means it should feel like a hopeless venture to continue exploring, but its too engaging not to. there is no end goal, and it makes no promises other than the fact you will die.

and the magic is that we did anyway. even if i didnt know what for, i kept exploring its planets to find its secrets. i felt giddiness meeting every character and hearing their stories. i pat myself on the back after solving puzzles once i asked the guy at the starting campfire how to.

Outer Wilds - despite playing as an alien - is a deeply human game. a journey about facing adversity through sheer willpower despite not having all the answers, and knowing youre not alone in that.

i cant do this game a service with my $5 speak and someone else could do a much better job, and thats ok. because like i said, this game - like its setting - is big. theres so much to talk about, yet its message is so precise. its mysteries are so complex, yet so simple in retrospect. games like these remind me how special this industry is, and what kind of art it can produce. Outer Wilds is a profound experience i likely wont forget for a very long time.

When I first played Outer Wilds in 2019, I found it to be a game of high highs and low lows. The first few hours were filled with an unparalleled sense of wonder and discovery as I journeyed through space uncovering the secrets of an ancient civilization. The game fits together perfectly like a five-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, every piece shedding new light on everything you already know no matter which order you encounter them in. It's the only game I've ever played that feels in the tradition of Riven, the best puzzle game ever made.

But as time went on, I started to approach the point where I could no longer go in any direction and find something new and magical within minutes. My path lay deeper into the depths of places I'd already visited, and inevitably these paths were fraught with danger, requiring careful movement and precise timing to avoid death. And every death restarted the loop and required minutes on end of navigating back to the same location, often waiting for one precise time in the cycle, and then often as not simply dying again.

It was too much. I simply gave up. I consider myself fairly technically proficient in the art of the controller, but it wasn't enough. I was spending hours throwing myself against the same nitty platforming challenge and coming away from it no more skilled for my efforts. I rated the game 3.5 stars—some magical moments but too frustrating to bear—and moved on.

Two years later, my friend Cera came over for only the second time after both of us were vaccinated against COVID-19. Cera loves this game and the thought that I hadn't seen the ending dismayed her so much she offered to simply do the hard parts for me. And she was right! The last few hours of Outer Wilds were thoughtful and heartbreaking, evoking pathos and catharsis every bit as effectively as the first few hours evoked wonder.

My opinion on the middle section of this game hasn't softened: I still think it's a major flaw to require such high dexterity in a game that also requires between two and twenty minutes of downtime between each attempt. But the quality of the ending and the way it complements the best parts of the beginning is worth even that. Play Outer Wilds.

Horizon Zero Dawn not only proved that Guerrilla Games could make an open-world action role-playing game but also showed it could make a great one, too. The post-post-apocalyptic green wastelands were a far cry from Killzone‘s fascist dystopia and better for it. While sequels can often fail to hit with the same impact as their surprising predecessor, Horizon Forbidden West improves upon that debut in nearly every way, cementing Guerrilla’s strength in this genre in the process.

Read the full review here:
https://www.comingsoon.net/games/reviews/1210106-horizon-forbidden-west-review-ps5-ps4

Enredo muito bonitinho e curto, mas suficiente, definitivamente cumprindo sua premissa.

O gameplay é relativamente criativo, visto que o jogo te força a piscar (ou não) para seguir o ritmo da história, o que me fez chorar.

Recomendo!

Before Your Eyes was an intensely emotional experience for me on many levels. I teared up at a few different points, and the ending caused me to weep. The game is only an hour and a half long, the passage of time in the game is controlled by your real-life blinking, and it goes on to explore a lot of challenging and engrossing themes that were paid off very effectively in ways I wasn't expecting even partway through; if this sounds appealing then I advise you learn nothing more about the game before playing it, even though I am someone who isn't particularly spoiler averse this is absolutely one of those rare examples of a game that is best played with as little foreknowledge as possible. If you're not convinced you want to play this game, hopefully me touching on its strengths in this review can help in some way though be warned I will talk a fair amount about the emotional impact of the mechanics and I lightly hint at the themes of the game's narrative.

Two things really stand out to me thinking back on this Before Your Eyes. The first is the game's exploration of memory and transience, which just on a textual level is already fascinating and moving to me, but the blinking mechanic breathes life into this discussion so beautifully. The are moments where you're caught in a moment so warm and safe you want to linger there forever, and you try and hold your eyes open so you can, but then you come to this acceptance that time has to move on, everything will pass eventually, and you give in and finally learn to let go of that moment, that precious memory of the past, and move on to what waits for you in the future; you give in and blink.

Conversely there are moments where you're in the middle of listening to what your mum, your dad, your best friend, has to say and then you reflexively blink without intending to and that moment disappears; memories, and time, slipping away from you like sand through your fingers. There were moments where this happened and I was okay with continuing onwards, but also multiple occasions where time escaping me like that, where this relentless march of time leading to sentences being cut off in your memory, half-formed, felt like an emotional gut-punch, leaving me longing to be able to turn back the clock even for a moment.

The blinking mechanic is, sadly, not perfect. It worked well enough for the game to absorb me into its world like it did, and led to some incredibly emotional moments as I detailed above, but there were definitely a handful of moments where I blinked and it didn't register (though thankfully the alternative, registering blinks that didn't happen, didn't occur which is good as this would have been much more dire I feel). These imperfections are the main thing stopping me from giving the game a perfect score, though they aren't so notable as to stop me from loving the game and all it has to say and show.

The other thing that stands out to me about the Before Your Eyes is the themes it explores via its narrative. Partway through the game I actually had a few different things I wasn't entirely onboard with about this narrative, and yet by the end every single one of these concerns had been directly addressed and often subverted in ways that paid off the fact that I wasn't entirely onboard with them earlier. I don't want to go into the themes here too explicitly since I don't want to ruin the ways in which they come together so beautifully, but I will say that the game's final notes are remarkably mature having something to say that we dearly need to hear in this time of rampant capitalism. The way this messaging was delivered was deeply affecting, incredibly healthy for me, and left me feeling very well-nourished.

I thought this game was decent enough, but it felt like it never quite grew into the blockbuster that I was expecting. I thought the combat mechanics worked well and were enjoyable once you got a grasp of them, but the enemies and flow of combat don’t evolve much over the course of the game. Combat encounters at the start of the game are more or less the same as those at the end of the game. There are new combat moves that can be unlocked as Peter gains levels, but these don’t generally make a radical difference. In some cases, the player is offered the ability to stealthily pick off enemies from a group before they become aware of Spider-Man’s presence, and this can be fun, but like the core combat itself, the game never really evolves it forward. Also, for a character with such an interesting and varied rogues’ gallery as Spider-Man, I was expecting more out of the boss fights. There are one, maybe two, that I would consider actually interesting, but most are just composed of a basic pattern of Spider-Man having to dodge incoming attacks until he can hit back with enough webshots/thrown objects to get the boss stunned, at which point he jumps in and just wails on them with basic punches and kicks.

The story is also nothing really amazing. If you’ve ever enjoyed any sort of Spider-Man fiction, you’ll find that this follows a pretty well-worn path: Norman Osborne is up to something shady, Dr. Octavius is suddenly acting unhinged, Peter and MJ’s relationship is on the ropes, and Miles enters the picture as a totally normal kid who we can safely assume will never experience any tragic or strange life altering events. You know where all of these people’s stories are going with very few actual surprises happening along the way. That said, I did like the characters and enjoyed watching them take their personal journeys even if they were incredibly predictable.

I want to say, though, that in the end, I did like this game. The gameplay and story need more depth and originality for it to really push it beyond just a fun time toward a more memorable experience.

When I first played Bloodborne, I appreciated it for what it was (an eldritch entanglement of orgasmic despair) while also quietly thinking that this was not a game I was likely to replay. I'd seen the sights and fought the fights, and while there were a few great bosses there were many more hulking beasts whose battles I didn't particularly care for.

My first playthrough was hot off Dark Souls 3 and still chasing the high of Sekiro the year before. All I wanted were those rhythm-game deflects, memorizing movesets and executing perfect counters, a clockwork dance of nerve and sword. With a few exceptions that wasn't what Bloodborne was about, and while I made my peace with that I couldn't bring myself to love it.

Flash forward a year and a half. By this point, I'd played my way backwards through the Soulslike oeuvre and beaten Sekiro two more times. As I watched over a friend's virtual shoulder during his first Bloodborne playthrough, and I felt the bloodlust rise within me. I wanted to sink my teeth in once again. And more than that, I wanted to do it differently: eschewing the parry-and-blade build I'd made a tradition of playing across all these games for my first go at a real heavy weapon.

So began my NG+ playthrough, not with a bang but with the buzz of my Whirligig Saw. It turned out that the beast bosses I'd dismissed in 2020 were a delight in 2022 with a deeper understanding of the form and the devil-may-care attitude of a player whose beaten them before and knows she will again. And as the sun rose for a third time over Yharnam, it was all I could do to keep myself from diving straight back in to NG++.