Something about this games plot didn't have as much of a grip on me as the first game (it took me almost a week to beat this 6-8 hour game), but it's still great.

It's crazy to me how high-quality these games are, obviously the great animations and use of an art-style that has aged like a fine wine, this game even makes prehrendered backgrounds look good. Not to mention the writing and voice acting that really tie it together. The gameplay I'd basically more of the same but extra points to this game for the wacky moments of changing things up, which are a lot of fun.

I just wish the plot was more compelling and it didn't have as much wierd sex stuff.

’That really hurts. But if you want to kill the mother of god, you'll need a better weapon.'

IMMORTALITY is one of the best games I've ever played, it is truly unique, it is everything I love in both game and film (combining both in an unholy synthesis that goes beyond any other FMV), whilst being a deconstruction of everything wrong with how we culturally treat both film and video games. The gameplay is novel and interesting, and once I realised I didn't have to use my mouse at all, the movieola-style interaction really came into its own, like I was in some alternate version of the movie Blow Out.

Immortality will not be for everyone, some may compare it to point and click games, or 2d puzzle games, or the work of Lynch or Jodorowski, but no comparison can truly prepare you for what this game has to offer, the only thing I can think to really compare it to is Silent Hill 2, and even then only loosely. Again, not everyone will want this, or enjoy it, it doesn't give you a clear objective other than 'find out what happened to Marissa Marcel', and for some that won't be enough, but for others (like myself) this oddity is exactly what I needed. This has energised my passion for both games and film, and has well and truly blown me away in every conceivable way. This is the first time a video game has been posed as 'for adults' and actually felt like something made for mature and fully developed people only, this isn't a gate keeping thing either, compare the likes of GTA and Outlast, posed for adults but also clearly for teenagers who want to feel adult, against this; a surrealist, slow burn character study and esoteric look at corruption in entertainment. It even does something I normally consider a cardinal sin, the presentation of sex as inherently gross or taboo, but considering the religious preoccupation of the narrative and the role sex and sexuality, especially as it relates to gender and the film industry, plays in the narrative, it completely works, even in the more shocking moments. Not only is this a comment on problems the film industry has had for decades, it looks forward to the games industry, comparing the medium of last century to the medium of this century, and asks us to not let the same thing happen in games (looking at you Activision, blizzard, Ubisoft, EA, etc)

However, there are some technical bugs, sometimes inputs can get confused by the game, and there are some sound issues with sounds playing when they shouldn't (and not stoping without a game restart) and the audio track for clips more than sometimes not playing at all unless you hit pause, wait, and then hit play. But these are bugs that won't severely hamper your experience of this phenomenal achievement.

I haven't even scratched the surface of my thoughts about this game, but I'd easily hit the word limit of Backloggd if I attempted to get it all out, I'll be thinking about and digesting this one for a long time.

P.S. I was not expecting this to be a horror game, but this unnerved and genuinely frightened me more than any game in recent memory, it did a lot of things no game in recent memory has done.

This is definitely the first Team Ico game... This is a great game, don't get me wrong, but consistently feels like it stands in the shadow of (no pun intended) it's successors. Team Ico being named after this game fits nicely, their next two games feel very much like evolutions of the two main mechanics of this game.

Shadow of the colossus takes the basic three-hit-combo combat from this game and fleshes it out with traversal to make an entire experience based around that.
The Last Guardian takes the follower mechanic of Yorda from this game and evolves it from just being someone to pull along with you 90% of the time, to being the primary way of solving most puzzles in the game.

But the origins for both of those start here. Does this feel like a good midpoint between the two? I'd say no, with the hindsight of those two games the individual mechanics of this game feel half-baked.
The story of this game is like other TI games, has some lore to it but is pretty empty story-wise (on the surface level), yet despite that it creates a genuine emotional connection over it's run time. Again, this is something that they improve at in later installments.

The thing is, everything I could say about this game I immediately want to counter with 'but this is something they do better in later games', but this isn't a bad game, this is a great game, and definitely doesn't feel like the first game of a studio. The art design, audio ideology, animation and environment quality, story, world and characters already feel so evolved here, this feels like this studio's fifth game, not their first.

As much as it doesn't read like it, so far I've had nothing but good to say about this game, so what don't I like?
Well, besides the combat being way too simple, my main issue is the difficulty. When starting the game there's no difficulty options, and I breezed through the puzzles for the first two thirds (about four hours) of this game, never getting stuck for more than a moment. The combat, likewise, is just a case of hitting a room full of enemies with your one attack until they stop moving, and pulling Yorda out of a hole if she gets caught. It was a shame but never really took away from my enjoyment of the game.

This is the worst Team Ico game, and like most of this review that will sound like a criticism, but I'll be damned if that isn't a pretty high compliment.

On my third playthrough, there's not much to say that hasn't been said before. I'll say that this time around I took special note of how good the score is. But the overall thought still remains that this is just so close to being almost there. It'd be impetuous to go on about the bugs or graphical issues but I think a lot of general gamers don't understand that the issues with this game run so much deeper, the poor optimisation is just the very epidermal level of the issues with this game.

From it's very core there are poor implamentations of many of the sound systems, weapon systems, and character animation systems, to the point where the smallest thing being out of place makes it come apart at the seams.
It feels like a game where there is an absolute straight line in this game that had 100% of the focus, the story missions, and the open world and all of the side content was just... afterthoughts.
This shows most in the art design. In areas in or around the main story content this is one of the most stunning artistic showcases of the generation, but if you turn the corner; and I mean literally just walk down the in-game street, and it's all gone, like turning your head around on a dark ride and seeing the backs of the props. It's really saddening to see.

I do think that if this game is supported well enough and they focus on changing the right things then this could truly be something great, but it's gonna take a lot of work, a lot more work than they seem to have put in so far.

During the development of Silent Hill 2, Keiichiro Toyama, the director of Silent Hill, left the project, unhappy with the direction the game was going. Two years after Silent Hill 2, this game released, and I'd like to think about it as an alternate version of Silent Hill 2.

Where Silent Hill 2 focuses on the character study elements set up in the first game, Siren focuses on the occult and horror elements set up in Silent Hill.
The first thing to say is that the Signtjacking mechanic is absolute genius. Not only does it help the player create a mental map of the stage, enemy placements and objective placements, but being shown the enemy, ready with their weapon, eager to kill you as soon as they see you, is an incredible horror tool, and works perfectly with the greater stealth focus than from the Silent Hill series, This is one of those mechanics that will go up with the Thing mechanic from The Thing game. I really wish we could see a modern take on this mechanic.

This game isn't perfect though, in fact it's very flawed, it can get really frustrating at times and the non-linear 'link-navigator' setup is a good idea, with the player being able to affect gameplay of other characters with secondary objectives at different times, but it doesn't work as well as it could with how little those secondary objectives affect gameplay or story, and how much unrewarded fuss they are to achieve. Perhaps the biggest issue, though, is the story. Whilst interesting it simply isn't told well, not only is it told in a non-linear fashion, but it barely gives you any of the information, even through supplementary material like notes, I had to resort to the wiki to fully understand what was happening.

But bringing it back is the art design, this is one of the best directed games I have maybe ever played in terms of the moment-to-moment gameplay. A really well made camera that frames everything it needs to brilliantly at all times, eerie environments that set the tone for the whole game, and wonderful enemy designs, with unnerving animation and perfectly hitting the uncanny valley with the face scan heads.

I don't know if I'd ever recommend this one to anyone but I had a good time playing it, and might even revisit it one day.

You know what? I fucked with this, my first instinct was RE4 clone but it came out only a couple of months after RE4 so either it was the fastest AAA game development in history or it's just coincidental thinking. It's very derivative of older RE games, other shooters and a few other things, but I can also see places where this could have been surprisingly influential, like RE: Revalations just being this exact same game (but better) and a lot of cutscenes and some plot beats being directly replicated in Dead Space a few years later.

It's not a must-play but I was plesantly surprised, and coming in at about 3-4 hours to play it squeezes a lot into a small package.

The gameplay is 10/10, probably the best I've played this year, I am such a sucker for these quick twitch combat and/or platformer games, and this scratches the itch finishing Ghostrunner left hard (which scratched the itch from cluster truck hard). It's complex in its simplicity, there are only four controls but so many combinations of them and so many ways they're used and it all moves at a million miles an hour, the art design is recognisable yet utilitarian; being simple enough to not be distracting and making it easy to distinguish enemies and items when at high speeds.

So, why 4.5 stars? The story. The dialogue in this game is genuinely awful, the characters are bland and flat, about halfway through the game I couldn't take it anymore and just started skipping the cutscenes.

But if you ignore the story and cutscenes this could be one of the best games of the year, even in the afformentioned Ghostrunner and Cluster Truck, or similar games like Hotline Miami, I never bothered to get the high scores on every level, but in this game I refused to go to the next stage before getting the gold on every. Single. Level. It's fun, addictive and perfectly fair and balanced.

Instant recommendation, must play.

This is surprisingly really good!! Which is a good thing because it was a bitch to get working on a Windows 10 PC, and even then I had issues.

Anyway, as soon as I heard there was a Blair Witch survival horror game I NEEDED to play it, but the first thing to note is that half of the time this game just isn't Blair Witch. Half the time you're running around using spectrometers to find and mow down supernatural monsters as part of a secret organisation called the 'spookhouse' (I found out when doing research after beating the game that this is actually a sequel to the studio's previous game 'Nocturne'), and the other half you're walking around burkittsville, questioning the locals and exploring the locales. It's a little jarring to say the least, but it's always genuinely atmospheric and very well realised both visually and narratively.
The gameplay is pretty standard Survival Horror fare, with a lot more conversation-having than your Resident Evil or Silent Hill. There's a lot of lore and notes to dig through here, and they are the place that shows the desparity between the two sides of this game the best. Some notes will be about the killer mentioned in the movie, with scary child's drawings, and then you'll turn the page to a detailed official government document about how to kill guys that look like Hell Knights from Doom.

At the end of the day, whilst I was taken aback by the setup at first, being a big purist for why the orignal movie was effective to begin with, I was sold eventually, and I think this pulls off what it's trying to do pretty decently.

This has definitely impressed me, and I'll probably get around to playing the two sequels... at some point, I just hope they aren't as repetative as this became at some points.

Or perhaps I'll just play the Bloober game again, which is, like this, surprisingly very good.

I can't believe I got the collector's edition of this game, day one, what was I thinking? At least the statue is nice...
Supposedly money that was given to this was siphoned off to go to the production of borderlands 2, and it SHOWS.

The story goes against everything in the alien franchise (Phased plasma rifles?? And I guess Hadley's Hope can survive a nuclear blast? That's one strong facility! And look at all these alien types, spitters, exploders, where have these come from? Fallout from the nuke?)

It's hard to tell some stuff with this game, because of it's age and because of nostalgia for the original property. For instance, is some of the art design, such as the environments, nice, or is it just Aliens? Are the aliens AI terrible or were they slightly less terrible at the time? It's hard to tell, and when I first played this I was still new to gaming, so it completely went over my head.

I do remember, though, getting this game day one, sitting down with it, and playing it through in one sitting (as I have today), and the credits rolled, and even fifteen year old me, with no knowledge of gaming, felt empty, felt unfulfilled. Little did I know that my brain had taken in the boring combat, atrocious level design, bugged out (no pun intended) enemies and complete lack of any characters or interesting story, and I was none the wiser.

The long-story-short is; You've done it again Randy, you've fucked me over.

It's only three hours or so long but this really blew me away. At first I was like 'oh cool, just a little challenge-based photography game', but as time went on I found myself so impressed by not only the aesthetic, but how fantastic it is at worldbuilding and creating a palpable and lived-in atmosphere. The look of this game is incredible and it always feels chill whilst still managing to be engaging. Yes this is still just a photography game, but it's one that really goes above and beyond with giving you something to photograph, a world full of stories and places that feel genuine whilst never leaving the amazing style of the game.

I really can't describe what it is about this game that works so well, but at some point during the second level I became hooked and played through the whole thing in one sitting.

I had to stop playing this because I realised I just wanted to get to the end, and couldn't justify continuing.

This is definitely a huge improvement on the last one, the story is more engaging and the characters are more interesting, but only because they're taken directly from BOTW, and are on the exact same level as them, which isn't exactly indicative of a writing powerhouse. In a way that's impressive seeing as this game has about a million hours of cutscenes. You'd think purely through sunk cost they'd end up accidentally adding character depth, but no, not in any meaningful way.

The combat is at least flashier in better ways than the previous hyrule warriors game, the characters feel like they do have meaningful, if minor differences in how they play. However it's still boring and lame and after a point turns from mind numbing to frustratingly tedious. That's a holdover from the previous game, I don't know if you can tell I haven't played any other warriors games, and I don't see why it matters, but I thought it could be worth mentioning.

Nothing else to say, I've had my fun, I won't be coming back.