Gandheezy22
2022
Cult of the Lamb is likely not exactly what you think it is. While the flashy roguelike action has drawn a lot of comparisons to Hades, it’s not really the crux of the game. At its core, developer Massive Monster’s new ultra-cute cult simulator is just that - a simulation. Players will spend around 75% of its 14 hour runtime playing a masterfully designed city-builder/management sim, with bursts in between of mediocre roguelike action that far out stays its welcome weighed down in poorly paced progression systems.
In Cult of the Lamb, you’ll become a lamb sent to slaughter in the name of a false god. On your way to hell, you’re rescued by a demon called The One Who Waits, who has been shackled between the surface world and inferno. In exchange for sending you back to the world above with its remaining power, it tasks the Lamb with creating a cult in its name, in the name of the Red Crown. There are four bishops, who serve as the bosses, that the Lamb must defeat while managing their cult compound to free The One Who Waits from its demonic chains.
I first want to speak about the thing that draws the most attention in Cult of the Lamb - the art style. It’s beautiful, it’s colorful, it’s easy to distinguish in the heat of combat, and most importantly it’s consistent. Even during the garish occult rituals and demonic summonings, the presentation of Cult of the Lamb never, ever wavers. The artists and animators are 110% dedicated to making this the most adorable Satanic ritual you’ve ever experienced, and do not back down. The contrast of the subject matter and art style is not just something to catch players eyes - it’s an aesthetic decision that was made with purpose.
As I mentioned previously, Cult of the Lamb is a management sim supported by small chunks of roguelike action. You’d be forgiven for thinking the management part is secondary based on the trailers, but really the game is about growing your cult and making them more powerful while the runs through the four procedurally generated biomes serve to help you gather followers and materials for building. Each run is actually quite short, depending on what you run into; I had some that were as quick as 3 minutes, with the longest being about 10.
Cult of the Lamb, like any good management sim, is made up of a dozen interlocking systems, each one both feeding and being dependent on several others. As the game progresses and your cult expands, you’ll be able to automate these processes so you can focus on more high level planning. It very much has the cadence of a city-builder RTS like the Tycoon games, but on a much smaller and more palpable scale for newcomers to the genre.
After inducting your first few cultists (those are freebies), you’ll need to construct your most important structures - a shrine and a temple. The shrine is the beating heart of your cult, and is where your followers will worship you so you can gain power over the course of your journey. The temple is the brain, where you will make the decisions that affect your followers, tell them how to live their lives, dictate their eating, sleeping and working schedules, and more.
From there, you’ll branch out and need to collect rocks, wood, grass, flowers, seeds, food and a variety of other materials so your cult can thrive. There’s three meters you’re trying to maintain - loyalty, hunger, and sickness. If your loyalty depletes, your followers will revolt and declare you a false prophet, leaving the camp. If your hunger depletes, your followers will begin to starve and die. Likewise, if the sickness meter hits 0 disease will begin to spread and followers will be similarly snuffed out.
There are nearly two dozen systems running in the camp by the time it's operational, and it is frankly mind blowing that they all work together so well and never become overwhelming. Like any good management game, it’s all about getting better stuff so you can automate your basic systems, then automate those systems, and so on and so forth. At first you’re scrounging for berry seeds to put together meager meals for your cult, but 6 hours later you’ve got an industrial farm complete with fertilizer and irrigation automation.
You’ll construct housing for your followers, decorations to brighten the place up, and lots of idols to increase the amount of faith you’re collecting each day. All of these systems lead directly into leveling up your Lamb. Each day, you can host one sermon, which feeds skill points into a tree that increases your attack power while increasing loyalty. You can also declare a new doctrine if you have enough tablets, which are gained by doing nice things for your followers. They’ll age and die and you’ll find new ones over time, and restart the cycle.
New doctrines can either be passive buffs for your camp or active rituals that can be cast with a 2 day cooldown. Roughly half these doctrines aid you in leading by way of love, and the other half by way of fear, so you can definitely choose what kind of cult you would like to run. I only picked the love-based doctrines because I am a merciful god Lamb and would bestow my grace upon this flock. But you can go full dictator on it if you wish.
One of the best parts of Cult of the Lamb is that you can name and customize your followers, so, like most everyone, I named them after my real life friends and asked everyone which animal and what color they’d like to be. Everyone had a good time watching their antics as one friend would report another as a traitor, or when two of my friends who barely know each other fell in love, or when one of them showed up at camp covered in blood and just died without explanation. There are certainly other games where you can name characters, but the concept of the social interactions takes the interesting part of Miitopia and Tomodachi Life and puts it into a good game instead.
Now it’s time to talk about the mediocre part of it - the roguelike action stuff. At the beginning of each run, you’re given a weapon and a curse, which is a magic spell. Defeating enemies gains fervor, which is in turn used to cast spells. Simple enough. You’ll unlock tarot cards that give small buffs, like turning your weapons to poison or raising your crit chance, and collect a different assortment on each run. And that’s it. The color palette changes between the four biomes, and there’s a few monsters that are unique to each, but they all effectively do the same thing. As I was spending just a few minutes at a time in combat before heading back to the farm, it didn’t hit me until about 7 or 8 hours in that the combat had not changed. The way that it feels at the beginning is the way it will feel in hour 14, just with new (mostly worse) weapons and upgraded versions of the same spells. The combat is smooth, quick, and certainly eye-catching, but without any additional layers it grows boring after a time.
This leads to my next, much bigger issue: progression. The management sim in this game was not designed with me in mind, who put 20 hours into Factorio over just two days and who builds large scale automated mining operations in Minecraft for fun. As i normally would with a game in this genre, I optimized my followers and automated them, then automated the automations, and so on. I ran a sermon every day, ran as many rituals as possible, upgraded my worship speeds right at the beginning to accrue faster over the life of the game, and talked to every follower to inspire them every single day and extort resources from them. I also mostly ignored the side quests, because mathematically the amount of loyalty you lose for accepting and then not doing them can easily be made up with a single ritual the next day.
There’s a saying that if given a chance, players will optimize the fun out of a game. Well, I did it, and I did it barely halfway through. As I was early on in the third biome, I completed the doctrine tree, the sermon tree, the fishing quests, the mushroom quests, and everything useful in the camp tree. What this resulted in was no progress for the last 5 hours of the game. I had already finished everything the game had to offer, so the next few hours were just maintaining my camp for no reward and outputting resources that would never be used. It slammed to a crashing halt. There is a difficulty modifier for combat, but god I wish there had been a hard mode for the management part of it. I never struggled with collecting enough of anything, and if I didn't have enough resources my automated systems would have it ready for me in just minutes regardless. Perhaps I got too eager, but as a fanatic lover of management games and city builders this was hugely disappointing. Imagine playing Fallout and hitting a level cap halfway through the main story and having to continue without the small reward of simply leveling up.
Another issue that really put a damper on my experience was the requirement to have 20 living followers to fight the final boss. The second biome required me to have 9 to enter, the third required me to have 10, and the fourth required me to have 12. However, to face the final boss I needed to find 8 more. This was such a strange ramp up in requirements I did not expect. In addition, one of the features of the fourth biome is that your followers are summoned and possessed and you must kill them to progress, so right after losing 4 followers in this way I was presented with a gate telling me to find 8 more to proceed.
It’s not actually all that simple - you can buy one follower a day from a spider nearby, but you cannot just fast forward through the days and buy them because your followers will continue to age and die. Rather, I had to basically speedrun 4 more runs hoping that my current elderly followers wouldn’t drop dead any second so i could grind out more cultists. It was not fun in the least. While narratively satisfying, the final boss was also a disappointing fight that lacked a single new combat element.
The first 8 hours of Cult of the Lamb were magical, and if the game had ended somewhere there this review score would be a 10. But it doesn’t, and it goes on and on and gets less and less interesting as it reaches the conclusion. With progression systems that are way too easy to bust and combat that goes stale halfway through, my time with this game did not sustain the high I felt at the beginning. But there are strokes of a masterpiece in here, with excellent music, whimsical characters, starkly themed visuals, just enough narrative push, and management tools that allow for the player to really experience their own story. If you don’t optimize the fun out of Cult of the Lamb, there’s an incredible amount of it to be had.
In Cult of the Lamb, you’ll become a lamb sent to slaughter in the name of a false god. On your way to hell, you’re rescued by a demon called The One Who Waits, who has been shackled between the surface world and inferno. In exchange for sending you back to the world above with its remaining power, it tasks the Lamb with creating a cult in its name, in the name of the Red Crown. There are four bishops, who serve as the bosses, that the Lamb must defeat while managing their cult compound to free The One Who Waits from its demonic chains.
I first want to speak about the thing that draws the most attention in Cult of the Lamb - the art style. It’s beautiful, it’s colorful, it’s easy to distinguish in the heat of combat, and most importantly it’s consistent. Even during the garish occult rituals and demonic summonings, the presentation of Cult of the Lamb never, ever wavers. The artists and animators are 110% dedicated to making this the most adorable Satanic ritual you’ve ever experienced, and do not back down. The contrast of the subject matter and art style is not just something to catch players eyes - it’s an aesthetic decision that was made with purpose.
As I mentioned previously, Cult of the Lamb is a management sim supported by small chunks of roguelike action. You’d be forgiven for thinking the management part is secondary based on the trailers, but really the game is about growing your cult and making them more powerful while the runs through the four procedurally generated biomes serve to help you gather followers and materials for building. Each run is actually quite short, depending on what you run into; I had some that were as quick as 3 minutes, with the longest being about 10.
Cult of the Lamb, like any good management sim, is made up of a dozen interlocking systems, each one both feeding and being dependent on several others. As the game progresses and your cult expands, you’ll be able to automate these processes so you can focus on more high level planning. It very much has the cadence of a city-builder RTS like the Tycoon games, but on a much smaller and more palpable scale for newcomers to the genre.
After inducting your first few cultists (those are freebies), you’ll need to construct your most important structures - a shrine and a temple. The shrine is the beating heart of your cult, and is where your followers will worship you so you can gain power over the course of your journey. The temple is the brain, where you will make the decisions that affect your followers, tell them how to live their lives, dictate their eating, sleeping and working schedules, and more.
From there, you’ll branch out and need to collect rocks, wood, grass, flowers, seeds, food and a variety of other materials so your cult can thrive. There’s three meters you’re trying to maintain - loyalty, hunger, and sickness. If your loyalty depletes, your followers will revolt and declare you a false prophet, leaving the camp. If your hunger depletes, your followers will begin to starve and die. Likewise, if the sickness meter hits 0 disease will begin to spread and followers will be similarly snuffed out.
There are nearly two dozen systems running in the camp by the time it's operational, and it is frankly mind blowing that they all work together so well and never become overwhelming. Like any good management game, it’s all about getting better stuff so you can automate your basic systems, then automate those systems, and so on and so forth. At first you’re scrounging for berry seeds to put together meager meals for your cult, but 6 hours later you’ve got an industrial farm complete with fertilizer and irrigation automation.
You’ll construct housing for your followers, decorations to brighten the place up, and lots of idols to increase the amount of faith you’re collecting each day. All of these systems lead directly into leveling up your Lamb. Each day, you can host one sermon, which feeds skill points into a tree that increases your attack power while increasing loyalty. You can also declare a new doctrine if you have enough tablets, which are gained by doing nice things for your followers. They’ll age and die and you’ll find new ones over time, and restart the cycle.
New doctrines can either be passive buffs for your camp or active rituals that can be cast with a 2 day cooldown. Roughly half these doctrines aid you in leading by way of love, and the other half by way of fear, so you can definitely choose what kind of cult you would like to run. I only picked the love-based doctrines because I am a merciful god Lamb and would bestow my grace upon this flock. But you can go full dictator on it if you wish.
One of the best parts of Cult of the Lamb is that you can name and customize your followers, so, like most everyone, I named them after my real life friends and asked everyone which animal and what color they’d like to be. Everyone had a good time watching their antics as one friend would report another as a traitor, or when two of my friends who barely know each other fell in love, or when one of them showed up at camp covered in blood and just died without explanation. There are certainly other games where you can name characters, but the concept of the social interactions takes the interesting part of Miitopia and Tomodachi Life and puts it into a good game instead.
Now it’s time to talk about the mediocre part of it - the roguelike action stuff. At the beginning of each run, you’re given a weapon and a curse, which is a magic spell. Defeating enemies gains fervor, which is in turn used to cast spells. Simple enough. You’ll unlock tarot cards that give small buffs, like turning your weapons to poison or raising your crit chance, and collect a different assortment on each run. And that’s it. The color palette changes between the four biomes, and there’s a few monsters that are unique to each, but they all effectively do the same thing. As I was spending just a few minutes at a time in combat before heading back to the farm, it didn’t hit me until about 7 or 8 hours in that the combat had not changed. The way that it feels at the beginning is the way it will feel in hour 14, just with new (mostly worse) weapons and upgraded versions of the same spells. The combat is smooth, quick, and certainly eye-catching, but without any additional layers it grows boring after a time.
This leads to my next, much bigger issue: progression. The management sim in this game was not designed with me in mind, who put 20 hours into Factorio over just two days and who builds large scale automated mining operations in Minecraft for fun. As i normally would with a game in this genre, I optimized my followers and automated them, then automated the automations, and so on. I ran a sermon every day, ran as many rituals as possible, upgraded my worship speeds right at the beginning to accrue faster over the life of the game, and talked to every follower to inspire them every single day and extort resources from them. I also mostly ignored the side quests, because mathematically the amount of loyalty you lose for accepting and then not doing them can easily be made up with a single ritual the next day.
There’s a saying that if given a chance, players will optimize the fun out of a game. Well, I did it, and I did it barely halfway through. As I was early on in the third biome, I completed the doctrine tree, the sermon tree, the fishing quests, the mushroom quests, and everything useful in the camp tree. What this resulted in was no progress for the last 5 hours of the game. I had already finished everything the game had to offer, so the next few hours were just maintaining my camp for no reward and outputting resources that would never be used. It slammed to a crashing halt. There is a difficulty modifier for combat, but god I wish there had been a hard mode for the management part of it. I never struggled with collecting enough of anything, and if I didn't have enough resources my automated systems would have it ready for me in just minutes regardless. Perhaps I got too eager, but as a fanatic lover of management games and city builders this was hugely disappointing. Imagine playing Fallout and hitting a level cap halfway through the main story and having to continue without the small reward of simply leveling up.
Another issue that really put a damper on my experience was the requirement to have 20 living followers to fight the final boss. The second biome required me to have 9 to enter, the third required me to have 10, and the fourth required me to have 12. However, to face the final boss I needed to find 8 more. This was such a strange ramp up in requirements I did not expect. In addition, one of the features of the fourth biome is that your followers are summoned and possessed and you must kill them to progress, so right after losing 4 followers in this way I was presented with a gate telling me to find 8 more to proceed.
It’s not actually all that simple - you can buy one follower a day from a spider nearby, but you cannot just fast forward through the days and buy them because your followers will continue to age and die. Rather, I had to basically speedrun 4 more runs hoping that my current elderly followers wouldn’t drop dead any second so i could grind out more cultists. It was not fun in the least. While narratively satisfying, the final boss was also a disappointing fight that lacked a single new combat element.
The first 8 hours of Cult of the Lamb were magical, and if the game had ended somewhere there this review score would be a 10. But it doesn’t, and it goes on and on and gets less and less interesting as it reaches the conclusion. With progression systems that are way too easy to bust and combat that goes stale halfway through, my time with this game did not sustain the high I felt at the beginning. But there are strokes of a masterpiece in here, with excellent music, whimsical characters, starkly themed visuals, just enough narrative push, and management tools that allow for the player to really experience their own story. If you don’t optimize the fun out of Cult of the Lamb, there’s an incredible amount of it to be had.
2024
Full review here: https://gameluster.com/botany-manor-review-a-garden-to-root-for/
There are times when I think Botany Manor asks too much of its players in terms of brainpower, and a few more hints and more easily manageable clues would have made a huge difference. However, I had an amazing time regardless learning about a litany of plants too fantastic to be real, and feeling the ultimate satisfaction of figuring out the solution and then executing it perfectly.
Botany Manor will be on Game Pass day one as well as for purchase, which is a huge get. Fans of escape room-like puzzles, gardening, and especially fans of both will no doubt fall in love with all the manor has to offer. The narrative is satisfying and paced extremely well, and I completed Botany Manor with a genuine smile on my face. And now, it is time to tend to my few real plants, and maybe try and replant those geraniums. After all, won’t it feel nice to help guide new life into this world?
There are times when I think Botany Manor asks too much of its players in terms of brainpower, and a few more hints and more easily manageable clues would have made a huge difference. However, I had an amazing time regardless learning about a litany of plants too fantastic to be real, and feeling the ultimate satisfaction of figuring out the solution and then executing it perfectly.
Botany Manor will be on Game Pass day one as well as for purchase, which is a huge get. Fans of escape room-like puzzles, gardening, and especially fans of both will no doubt fall in love with all the manor has to offer. The narrative is satisfying and paced extremely well, and I completed Botany Manor with a genuine smile on my face. And now, it is time to tend to my few real plants, and maybe try and replant those geraniums. After all, won’t it feel nice to help guide new life into this world?
2023
I would like to score this game higher, but I can't think of a lot of other games that have outstayed their welcome this much. Humanity is a brilliant study of the evolution of humankind from a thought to a society, and it is very impressive in how it ropes together the themes of what makes us human with the designs of the puzzles.
Unfortunately, and I'm not exaggerating, this 15-hour game is 10 hours too long. I get it. You don't have to hammer in the same point 13 times before letting us move on to the next stage of humanity; Just two or three would have sufficed. I am exhausted and tired and wish to never look at this game again. At the same time it was extremely thought-provoking, and the readiness of the hint system is a must for people like me who are very stupid. I would also like to clarify there is no way I would have made it more than 2 or 3 hours into this game without the hints . It feels absolutely impossible at times.
I actually think if this was about a third of the length it is it might be on par with Portal - however I don't know that I fully recommend this game. It is truly genius in its design and the ending had me almost tearing up as humans were finally created, but also more than half the puzzles in this game could have easily been scrapped without changing a single thing about the quality or narrative. So a reluctant hurrah for this one, and let's move on.
Unfortunately, and I'm not exaggerating, this 15-hour game is 10 hours too long. I get it. You don't have to hammer in the same point 13 times before letting us move on to the next stage of humanity; Just two or three would have sufficed. I am exhausted and tired and wish to never look at this game again. At the same time it was extremely thought-provoking, and the readiness of the hint system is a must for people like me who are very stupid. I would also like to clarify there is no way I would have made it more than 2 or 3 hours into this game without the hints . It feels absolutely impossible at times.
I actually think if this was about a third of the length it is it might be on par with Portal - however I don't know that I fully recommend this game. It is truly genius in its design and the ending had me almost tearing up as humans were finally created, but also more than half the puzzles in this game could have easily been scrapped without changing a single thing about the quality or narrative. So a reluctant hurrah for this one, and let's move on.
2019
I got a little bit carried away with myself waiting for this game. I remember when it was revealed at E3, and my first thought was "finally something to fill the void after Prey (2017)." I wasn't too far off with that assessment. This game was honestly great. The combat was fun, the characters were interesting and charismatic (Especially Dr. Darling and Emily Pope), and ever-shifting nature of The Oldest House made exploration more interesting than a lot of open world games. Levitating and throwing stuff with telekinesis is just fun, man. And fun is what games are all about. Enemy designs got a little samey about halfway through, but I really loved when the fungus monsters showed up to mix it up a little.
Control loses major points, however, for not running on base PS4s. When even two enemies appeared on screen the game became a literal slide show. You can look up Youtube captures of the launch version, if you don't believe me. The Ashtray maze at the end was clocking a mighty average of 9 frames per second. This game did not run on PS4 at all for the first two weeks, and even after the patch it barely was able to maintain 20 fps during fights. Do not play this on PS4, you're better off looking at still images of it.
The story wasn't great, in my opinion. It was overly convoluted and tried so hard to be this weird, David Lynch-esque existential quandary that it overshot the mark and veered off into unintelligible. The other big negative is the insane and sporadic difficulty curves. Fair warning: this game has no difficulty settings, its one singular experience. So if you get stuck on some of the way overpowered bosses like Langston or the Anchor or Polaris, you need to hunt down some more skill points and just keep upgrading. Outside of those two points I don't have a lot of bad things to say about it. It isn't game of the year, but I'm not sorry I pre-ordered it. The AWE DLC is bananas and one of the best DLCs of 2020. If you have ray tracing enabled, get it.
Control loses major points, however, for not running on base PS4s. When even two enemies appeared on screen the game became a literal slide show. You can look up Youtube captures of the launch version, if you don't believe me. The Ashtray maze at the end was clocking a mighty average of 9 frames per second. This game did not run on PS4 at all for the first two weeks, and even after the patch it barely was able to maintain 20 fps during fights. Do not play this on PS4, you're better off looking at still images of it.
The story wasn't great, in my opinion. It was overly convoluted and tried so hard to be this weird, David Lynch-esque existential quandary that it overshot the mark and veered off into unintelligible. The other big negative is the insane and sporadic difficulty curves. Fair warning: this game has no difficulty settings, its one singular experience. So if you get stuck on some of the way overpowered bosses like Langston or the Anchor or Polaris, you need to hunt down some more skill points and just keep upgrading. Outside of those two points I don't have a lot of bad things to say about it. It isn't game of the year, but I'm not sorry I pre-ordered it. The AWE DLC is bananas and one of the best DLCs of 2020. If you have ray tracing enabled, get it.
This review contains spoilers
This is maybe the best narrative adaptation of the Spider-Man comics source material I've ever seen. Spider-Man is also extremely precious to my heart and I kind of tend to overjudge and over criticize some of the narrative stuff but this one blew me away. However I don't feel that it necessarily integrated into the gameplay the right way.
I think the venom enemies everywhere was a dumb mistake and I hated fighting them, because even though the attacks were reskinned they are the same enemies I've been fighting the whole time but it's just a glob instead of a big electric sword. I think some of the boss fights were also way too long, and I'm also unhappy with how some of the bosses I don't believe telegraph their attacks making them unblockable for me. But then some of the boss fights were like I'm going to remember this forever, scream was definitely my favorite. And that dialogue between Peter and MJ during that whole thing was heart-wrenching. I don't like any of the collectible stuff they set up in the city, I tried every single thing and I did one of each thing and never did another thing again. Like who tf can be bothered. I hate the collectibles so much.
I was blown away by how they did venom taking over Harry and integrated that into the plot about him being sick, it makes so much sense, and it was cool to play as venom for a little bit - That took me by complete surprise. I feel like the symbiote taking over everybody in the city makes me care a lot less about what it's doing to Harry though. And I know it's there because they want to give you new monsters to fight.
I liked the venom fight at the end but I also don't feel like they paced it properly and they actually had a cutscene deliver the final blow? I don't know that really dissatisfied me even though the fight itself was great. I know this is something that probably won't matter to most people but I feel like having Miles do the final part of the fight with venom takes a lot of the oomph out of it narratively. Like I know Peter does deliver that final blow in the cutscene like he should but it's been 45 minutes since you've played as him by that time
MJ sections were a lot better than the last game but I still didn't really like them, and when it turned into a third person shooter at the end I was just like what the hell are we doing here. I don't like this and I don't feel like it jives with the rest of the gameplay at all.
I also feel like having first Harry and then MJ fall victim to the symbiote, only after fighting scream you would watch that the entire world is beginning to be covered in the venom vines and would rush to stop him then. I think having all these goons around town doing random crimes as venom minions is kind of garbage to that narrative thread.
Overall better than the first but still basically plagued with every issue every other Sony game suffers from.
I think the venom enemies everywhere was a dumb mistake and I hated fighting them, because even though the attacks were reskinned they are the same enemies I've been fighting the whole time but it's just a glob instead of a big electric sword. I think some of the boss fights were also way too long, and I'm also unhappy with how some of the bosses I don't believe telegraph their attacks making them unblockable for me. But then some of the boss fights were like I'm going to remember this forever, scream was definitely my favorite. And that dialogue between Peter and MJ during that whole thing was heart-wrenching. I don't like any of the collectible stuff they set up in the city, I tried every single thing and I did one of each thing and never did another thing again. Like who tf can be bothered. I hate the collectibles so much.
I was blown away by how they did venom taking over Harry and integrated that into the plot about him being sick, it makes so much sense, and it was cool to play as venom for a little bit - That took me by complete surprise. I feel like the symbiote taking over everybody in the city makes me care a lot less about what it's doing to Harry though. And I know it's there because they want to give you new monsters to fight.
I liked the venom fight at the end but I also don't feel like they paced it properly and they actually had a cutscene deliver the final blow? I don't know that really dissatisfied me even though the fight itself was great. I know this is something that probably won't matter to most people but I feel like having Miles do the final part of the fight with venom takes a lot of the oomph out of it narratively. Like I know Peter does deliver that final blow in the cutscene like he should but it's been 45 minutes since you've played as him by that time
MJ sections were a lot better than the last game but I still didn't really like them, and when it turned into a third person shooter at the end I was just like what the hell are we doing here. I don't like this and I don't feel like it jives with the rest of the gameplay at all.
I also feel like having first Harry and then MJ fall victim to the symbiote, only after fighting scream you would watch that the entire world is beginning to be covered in the venom vines and would rush to stop him then. I think having all these goons around town doing random crimes as venom minions is kind of garbage to that narrative thread.
Overall better than the first but still basically plagued with every issue every other Sony game suffers from.
2020
City builders and management games have always been a bit hit or miss for me. Most of them eventually become repetitive, and I begin to tire of the same atmosphere, environments and mechanics while I try desperately to keep my citizens alive. Airborne Kingdom seeks to throw the entire genre upside by having the player build a flying city while simultaneously exploring the open world and completing quests - and succeeds mightily.
In Airborne Kingdom, we begin our journey with an enormous task - rebuild the legendary flying kingdom of old and secure the alliances of the twelve disconnected kingdoms that lay scattered across the land. These kingdoms were once a whole, and now each struggles to stay alive. Beginning with the last remnants of the ancient civilization's technology, your kingdom sets sail for new horizons with a crew of ten tiny, but determined citizens.
I found many familiar components of city builder games in Airborne Kingdom; food, water, coal to run the motor, wood, clay, iron and glass to build and of course citizen happiness. Just as important as the materials, however, are the physics. The pull of gravity will begin to weight down your town as you build, and only by providing more Lift can your kingdom-in-the-making stay afloat. Beyond that, you'll also need to account for Tilt. It is exactly what it sounds like; as you build, you'll need to keep weight distribution even on all four sides, lest your city tip sideways and your little polygonal citizens tumble into the vast below.
AK2 We've started a community garden to widespread town approval.
Soon you'll have your first row of houses built, and that's when the magic happens. Before you lies a vast open world to explore from the skies, full of resources, wonders, ancient ruins and settlements aplenty. You'll need to keep your citizens happy by providing them with "desires" to plants and streetlights while maintaining the Lift and Tilt of the kingdom. Resources like wood or water are collected from the ground by sending down scouts as you pass overhead, and the rate at which you gather can of course be upgraded through a city-builder staple: a technology tree.
You'll need to be conscious about zoning, too; if you place the industrial district too close to a residential district your citizens will file complaints about the noise and odor. In the most flattering way possible, the entire thing is exceedingly cute. This is as close as a video game will ever get to Studio Ghibli's Castle in the Sky.There's also a robust photo mode you can use to show off your healthily growing kingdom to your friends. Building colors are totally customizable too, and you'll discover new pallets for buildings along the journey that can be applied to building types wholesale to keep a consistency in your town's aesthetic.
Building research centers will allow you to upgrade your town and build new machines to in the pursuit of resources, storage, lift and propulsion, or luxuries. The tech tree is very simple and easy to progress through - research doesn't require any materials, just your time and a few citizens for labor. This means you're always researching, always in pursuit of the next upgrade, and being able to research without any materials got me out of one or two scrapes with total calamity. I was never worried during the six hour campaign about keeping my people alive; I was simply worried about them leading comfortable, fulfilling lives aboard my kingdom.
When flying past ruins, you can send in a scout to collect relics. These relics can then be traded at any one of the twelve kingdoms for different blueprints for new technology. The excitement of rolling up to a new kingdom, relics weighing down your pockets and checking what new technologies they boast is legitimately exhilarating. After you acquire a blueprint, you can research it and its upgrades at any time to begin utilizing it, again, for free. Additionally, each kingdom will trade materials with you based on cost determined by their local resources - if they're near a forest and far from a mine, they'll value any wood you try to trade them less than coal. The map can stay open while you continue flying so you don't waste any time or resources making plans.
Now, the real kicker; this open world adventure game has RPG-like quests to complete. Upon reaching a kingdom and making contact, you'll receive a unique quest to complete in order to gain the kingdom's favor and have them join your empire. Each quest is considerably different, and only a few of them were "go find this and bring it back." You can pop open your quest log with your map at any time and hold as many quests as you'd like at once, and Airborne Kingdom never tells you exactly where to go, only a general direction. The progression loop is smooth, and I never felt I was progressing or growing too slowly. Each expansion to my kingdom felt earned without me ever having to truly struggle for it.
The dialogue is surprisingly well-written and intriguing, and the depth of the descriptions in the flavor text make me feel like there exists somewhere a thousand page lore document for the world of the Airborne Kingdom. Each place I visited was unique and intriguing, and only the first biome kept the Middle Eastern art style that the game seems to be built around. As I traveled into the swamp I found myself in a fantasy version of North Ireland, and out in the mountain crags things began to look a lot like a dwarven kingdom from The Lord of the Rings.
The map is divided into three regions; the desert, the mountain crags, and the marshlands. The map is divided into clearly numbered tiles that were each hand-designed by an artist, so expect them to adhere to a high design standard; however, each tile's placement on the world map is procedurally generated each time you begin a new game. You'll never see the same thing in the same location twice, and new Wonders, biomes and Kingdoms will appear each campaign as well.
When I interviewed the developers, The Wandering Band, earlier this year, they did indeed note the similarities between their map's art style and the infamous Game of Thrones intro about halfway through development and leaned into it. The art style stays consistent around the many different map features and styles of architecture, and the pleasant hum of the Arab-inspired music keeps things relaxed. Which brings me to my next point.
Airborne Kingdom is not a particularly difficult or punishing game. In my experience, city builders and management games are typically about survival. Airborne Kingdom is about happiness. Keeping your kingdom afloat is extremely easy - keeping it balanced to maintain citizen happiness is not. Keeping your citizens fed and watered isn't too hard, but if you do run out of those resources they do not die - they simply leave to go live in the nearest kingdom. Without the extreme stress of survival on the line, exploration is the focus of Airborne Kingdom, and in that it excels greatly. I was never worried during the six hour campaign about keeping my people alive; I was simply worried about them leading comfortable, fulfilling lives aboard my kingdom. The entire thing is just plain cozy.
My only real issue with Airborne Kingdom is that even my high end PC (RTX 2060 Super and Ryzen 5 3600) was barely chugging along by the last hour. While I was able to hold 144 FPS on Ultra graphics for most of the game, eventually there were too many moving parts on screen and my computer was struggling to keep 20 FPS by the end. I hope the developers have an optimization patch incoming - this game is too pretty to play on lower settings.
Airborne Kingdom is hands down the best city builder/management game I've ever played, even topping 2018's excellent offering Frostpunk. The focus on narrative, lore, quests and exploration puts the management aspects in second while still keeping your on your toes. I was thrilled to be working in pursuit of happiness for my citizens instead of just their survival, and by the end my expansive kingdom put anything back down on the ground to shame. Uniting the kingdoms was just as satisfying as promised, and I recommend Airborne Kingdom as a must-play to any fans of management, sim, city builder or just pure exploration games.
In Airborne Kingdom, we begin our journey with an enormous task - rebuild the legendary flying kingdom of old and secure the alliances of the twelve disconnected kingdoms that lay scattered across the land. These kingdoms were once a whole, and now each struggles to stay alive. Beginning with the last remnants of the ancient civilization's technology, your kingdom sets sail for new horizons with a crew of ten tiny, but determined citizens.
I found many familiar components of city builder games in Airborne Kingdom; food, water, coal to run the motor, wood, clay, iron and glass to build and of course citizen happiness. Just as important as the materials, however, are the physics. The pull of gravity will begin to weight down your town as you build, and only by providing more Lift can your kingdom-in-the-making stay afloat. Beyond that, you'll also need to account for Tilt. It is exactly what it sounds like; as you build, you'll need to keep weight distribution even on all four sides, lest your city tip sideways and your little polygonal citizens tumble into the vast below.
AK2 We've started a community garden to widespread town approval.
Soon you'll have your first row of houses built, and that's when the magic happens. Before you lies a vast open world to explore from the skies, full of resources, wonders, ancient ruins and settlements aplenty. You'll need to keep your citizens happy by providing them with "desires" to plants and streetlights while maintaining the Lift and Tilt of the kingdom. Resources like wood or water are collected from the ground by sending down scouts as you pass overhead, and the rate at which you gather can of course be upgraded through a city-builder staple: a technology tree.
You'll need to be conscious about zoning, too; if you place the industrial district too close to a residential district your citizens will file complaints about the noise and odor. In the most flattering way possible, the entire thing is exceedingly cute. This is as close as a video game will ever get to Studio Ghibli's Castle in the Sky.There's also a robust photo mode you can use to show off your healthily growing kingdom to your friends. Building colors are totally customizable too, and you'll discover new pallets for buildings along the journey that can be applied to building types wholesale to keep a consistency in your town's aesthetic.
Building research centers will allow you to upgrade your town and build new machines to in the pursuit of resources, storage, lift and propulsion, or luxuries. The tech tree is very simple and easy to progress through - research doesn't require any materials, just your time and a few citizens for labor. This means you're always researching, always in pursuit of the next upgrade, and being able to research without any materials got me out of one or two scrapes with total calamity. I was never worried during the six hour campaign about keeping my people alive; I was simply worried about them leading comfortable, fulfilling lives aboard my kingdom.
When flying past ruins, you can send in a scout to collect relics. These relics can then be traded at any one of the twelve kingdoms for different blueprints for new technology. The excitement of rolling up to a new kingdom, relics weighing down your pockets and checking what new technologies they boast is legitimately exhilarating. After you acquire a blueprint, you can research it and its upgrades at any time to begin utilizing it, again, for free. Additionally, each kingdom will trade materials with you based on cost determined by their local resources - if they're near a forest and far from a mine, they'll value any wood you try to trade them less than coal. The map can stay open while you continue flying so you don't waste any time or resources making plans.
Now, the real kicker; this open world adventure game has RPG-like quests to complete. Upon reaching a kingdom and making contact, you'll receive a unique quest to complete in order to gain the kingdom's favor and have them join your empire. Each quest is considerably different, and only a few of them were "go find this and bring it back." You can pop open your quest log with your map at any time and hold as many quests as you'd like at once, and Airborne Kingdom never tells you exactly where to go, only a general direction. The progression loop is smooth, and I never felt I was progressing or growing too slowly. Each expansion to my kingdom felt earned without me ever having to truly struggle for it.
The dialogue is surprisingly well-written and intriguing, and the depth of the descriptions in the flavor text make me feel like there exists somewhere a thousand page lore document for the world of the Airborne Kingdom. Each place I visited was unique and intriguing, and only the first biome kept the Middle Eastern art style that the game seems to be built around. As I traveled into the swamp I found myself in a fantasy version of North Ireland, and out in the mountain crags things began to look a lot like a dwarven kingdom from The Lord of the Rings.
The map is divided into three regions; the desert, the mountain crags, and the marshlands. The map is divided into clearly numbered tiles that were each hand-designed by an artist, so expect them to adhere to a high design standard; however, each tile's placement on the world map is procedurally generated each time you begin a new game. You'll never see the same thing in the same location twice, and new Wonders, biomes and Kingdoms will appear each campaign as well.
When I interviewed the developers, The Wandering Band, earlier this year, they did indeed note the similarities between their map's art style and the infamous Game of Thrones intro about halfway through development and leaned into it. The art style stays consistent around the many different map features and styles of architecture, and the pleasant hum of the Arab-inspired music keeps things relaxed. Which brings me to my next point.
Airborne Kingdom is not a particularly difficult or punishing game. In my experience, city builders and management games are typically about survival. Airborne Kingdom is about happiness. Keeping your kingdom afloat is extremely easy - keeping it balanced to maintain citizen happiness is not. Keeping your citizens fed and watered isn't too hard, but if you do run out of those resources they do not die - they simply leave to go live in the nearest kingdom. Without the extreme stress of survival on the line, exploration is the focus of Airborne Kingdom, and in that it excels greatly. I was never worried during the six hour campaign about keeping my people alive; I was simply worried about them leading comfortable, fulfilling lives aboard my kingdom. The entire thing is just plain cozy.
My only real issue with Airborne Kingdom is that even my high end PC (RTX 2060 Super and Ryzen 5 3600) was barely chugging along by the last hour. While I was able to hold 144 FPS on Ultra graphics for most of the game, eventually there were too many moving parts on screen and my computer was struggling to keep 20 FPS by the end. I hope the developers have an optimization patch incoming - this game is too pretty to play on lower settings.
Airborne Kingdom is hands down the best city builder/management game I've ever played, even topping 2018's excellent offering Frostpunk. The focus on narrative, lore, quests and exploration puts the management aspects in second while still keeping your on your toes. I was thrilled to be working in pursuit of happiness for my citizens instead of just their survival, and by the end my expansive kingdom put anything back down on the ground to shame. Uniting the kingdoms was just as satisfying as promised, and I recommend Airborne Kingdom as a must-play to any fans of management, sim, city builder or just pure exploration games.
2018
Celeste is one of the best video games ever made, full stop.
The game is separated into rooms, much like a dungeon crawler would be. Each screen is a “room” for the most part (although there are larger and longer rooms scattered around). When you get to a new room, there are one or two clearly marked exits to progress to the next room. Each room is filled with unique obstacles, and using a combination of jumping, air dashing, climbing, and wall jumping alongside simple puzzles you progress through the room to the other side. Seems simple. And it is, at first. The game does a great job of letting you learn how it works without telling you.
I’ve been holding out on this last mechanic, because it is the most important piece of the game – every single room is a save point. That’s right, every time you progress through a room the game is saved. Some of you are breathing a sigh of relief right now, while others are pursing their lips wondering where the challenge is. The challenge is that you are intended to die, hundreds, even thousands of times during the course of this game. And you will die. This game is brutally difficult. It has found a very special and difficult line to walk, balancing the constant trial-and-error deaths of Dark Souls with the forgiveness of something like a Kirby game. Your death count isn’t a negative though – the developers treat your death count as a badge of honor. If you died 21 times in a given room, all that means is that you came up with 21 different ways to tackle a problem – and that’s a badge you should wear proudly.
image
The impossible task MMG has accomplished here is not making you feel bad when you die, but still making you feel like you genuinely accomplished something when you don’t. I found myself throwing up a fist pump when I finished a particularly hard room, and sometimes even doing a little victory lap in my room. The completion of these rooms requires a healthy mix of mechanical control and intelligence, without leaning too heavily on one. And if you’re not too stoked about “gitting gud” to have to enjoy this title, you’re covered as well. There’s an assist mode where you can specifically set which parts of the game you’d like to be easier, so you can still have a cohesive and fun experience, no stress required. Although I personally request you at least give an honest attempt at the regular game - I beat it, and I can’t get past world 1-4 of Super Mario Bros.
For all you collector nuts out there, don’t worry, you’re covered. There are dozens of secret strawberries hidden in each world, along with a B-Side tape. No matter how thorough you are with your first playthrough, you WILL NOT find them all. But if you’re dead set on hunting down these tasty trophies, they’ll provide you a challenge and add a lot of replayability. I will also throw out a note here, if you can play this on the Switch, do it. It’s worth whatever money you have to pay for it over a cheaper PC version. This game was made to be picked up and put down after 5 minutes. Get through a room, set it down, come back a few hours later and do another room. It’s perfect. Also a quick note about the music – it’s gorgeous. Lena Raine has outdone many a more seasoned composer with this one, and you’ll find yourself humming the main theme while washing the dishes after setting the game down.
So that’s the game. But what about the experience? Celeste is a story of a girl named Madeline trying to climb a mountain. As the story goes on, you’ll find yourself loving the characters (especially Theo) and cheering for Madeline to reach the top, to prove to herself that she can. She is shadowed on her journey by the dark part of herself, representing her anger, her depression, her fears, her failure. You’ll, of course find yourself relating to her struggles, and feel her victories and failures as your own. You’ll understand the dark part of her when it tries to lull her into giving up, because you’ve heard that voice in your own head a thousand times. But the moral of the story, tying in so perfectly with the game mechanics of dying over and over, is this: no matter how many times you fall down the mountain, you can always get back up and climb it again.
image
I won’t say more on the story so as not to spoil it, but the ending is not what you imagine, and the penultimate level was maybe the most moving thing I’ve ever experienced in a game. This game helped me push through some rough events in my life, and I remember every day to keep climbing the mountain. It’s not about getting to the top, it’s about continuing to climb. But I will get to the top one day, and maybe when I do, we’ll all sit down and reminisce about the journey over a hot slice of strawberry pie.
Celeste taught me an invaluable lesson about never stopping the fight. No matter how far you fall, you can get back up and climb twice as high. No one is stopping you but yourself. Not to mention the gameplay is challenging while also very forgiving. This a must play, no matter what platform you’re on, though I recommend the Switch version. Celeste is the best indie game I’ve ever played, and my personal Game of the Year for 2018. Let’s see if Matt Makes Games can top themselves in the coming years – they’re certainly going to try, and that’s the important part.
The game is separated into rooms, much like a dungeon crawler would be. Each screen is a “room” for the most part (although there are larger and longer rooms scattered around). When you get to a new room, there are one or two clearly marked exits to progress to the next room. Each room is filled with unique obstacles, and using a combination of jumping, air dashing, climbing, and wall jumping alongside simple puzzles you progress through the room to the other side. Seems simple. And it is, at first. The game does a great job of letting you learn how it works without telling you.
I’ve been holding out on this last mechanic, because it is the most important piece of the game – every single room is a save point. That’s right, every time you progress through a room the game is saved. Some of you are breathing a sigh of relief right now, while others are pursing their lips wondering where the challenge is. The challenge is that you are intended to die, hundreds, even thousands of times during the course of this game. And you will die. This game is brutally difficult. It has found a very special and difficult line to walk, balancing the constant trial-and-error deaths of Dark Souls with the forgiveness of something like a Kirby game. Your death count isn’t a negative though – the developers treat your death count as a badge of honor. If you died 21 times in a given room, all that means is that you came up with 21 different ways to tackle a problem – and that’s a badge you should wear proudly.
image
The impossible task MMG has accomplished here is not making you feel bad when you die, but still making you feel like you genuinely accomplished something when you don’t. I found myself throwing up a fist pump when I finished a particularly hard room, and sometimes even doing a little victory lap in my room. The completion of these rooms requires a healthy mix of mechanical control and intelligence, without leaning too heavily on one. And if you’re not too stoked about “gitting gud” to have to enjoy this title, you’re covered as well. There’s an assist mode where you can specifically set which parts of the game you’d like to be easier, so you can still have a cohesive and fun experience, no stress required. Although I personally request you at least give an honest attempt at the regular game - I beat it, and I can’t get past world 1-4 of Super Mario Bros.
For all you collector nuts out there, don’t worry, you’re covered. There are dozens of secret strawberries hidden in each world, along with a B-Side tape. No matter how thorough you are with your first playthrough, you WILL NOT find them all. But if you’re dead set on hunting down these tasty trophies, they’ll provide you a challenge and add a lot of replayability. I will also throw out a note here, if you can play this on the Switch, do it. It’s worth whatever money you have to pay for it over a cheaper PC version. This game was made to be picked up and put down after 5 minutes. Get through a room, set it down, come back a few hours later and do another room. It’s perfect. Also a quick note about the music – it’s gorgeous. Lena Raine has outdone many a more seasoned composer with this one, and you’ll find yourself humming the main theme while washing the dishes after setting the game down.
So that’s the game. But what about the experience? Celeste is a story of a girl named Madeline trying to climb a mountain. As the story goes on, you’ll find yourself loving the characters (especially Theo) and cheering for Madeline to reach the top, to prove to herself that she can. She is shadowed on her journey by the dark part of herself, representing her anger, her depression, her fears, her failure. You’ll, of course find yourself relating to her struggles, and feel her victories and failures as your own. You’ll understand the dark part of her when it tries to lull her into giving up, because you’ve heard that voice in your own head a thousand times. But the moral of the story, tying in so perfectly with the game mechanics of dying over and over, is this: no matter how many times you fall down the mountain, you can always get back up and climb it again.
image
I won’t say more on the story so as not to spoil it, but the ending is not what you imagine, and the penultimate level was maybe the most moving thing I’ve ever experienced in a game. This game helped me push through some rough events in my life, and I remember every day to keep climbing the mountain. It’s not about getting to the top, it’s about continuing to climb. But I will get to the top one day, and maybe when I do, we’ll all sit down and reminisce about the journey over a hot slice of strawberry pie.
Celeste taught me an invaluable lesson about never stopping the fight. No matter how far you fall, you can get back up and climb twice as high. No one is stopping you but yourself. Not to mention the gameplay is challenging while also very forgiving. This a must play, no matter what platform you’re on, though I recommend the Switch version. Celeste is the best indie game I’ve ever played, and my personal Game of the Year for 2018. Let’s see if Matt Makes Games can top themselves in the coming years – they’re certainly going to try, and that’s the important part.
2019
I often tell people I love horror, and I do. I certainly subject myself to it enough, whether it’s through Stephen King books or American Horror Story or any horror anime I can get my grubby hands on. But I’ve never been able to quite lay my finger on why I love horror. There is a joy in being frightened, but where does it come from? I believe that the true draw of horror is that the genre is based around discovering things that are unknown. Every horror movie is also a mystery movie, even if it’s a bad one. A lot of times the capital-U Unknown isn’t resolved by the end of the story, and that’s great. That leaves the Unknown as an all powerful entity. If you know something, you can fight it. What is Unknown is unkillable, and that is fascinating. The terror in Resident Evil 2 does not lie in the jump scares or the grotesque monsters, of which there are plenty. It lies in the Unknowable, the unkillable, the unsolvable, the incomprehensible. I cannot make sense of what I have seen over the course of these past 15 hours, despite my tedious detective work. And I couldn’t be happier about that.
Resident Evil 2 is comprised of two somewhat different stories. Choosing your character is essentially splitting the timeline, and you play through both scenarios, one as college student Claire Redfield and the other as young hot rookie cop Leon Kennedy. Their stories intersect with each other in a weird way, but they’re not two sides of the same story. The themes of each story are quite different, too. Leon’s story is a police thriller that features an investigation into a gigantic corporation’s shady activities. Claire’s story is a story of motherhood, and strongly follows the theme of finding your own family. I will not spoil anything from the story past the opening of the game.
RE2 is a puzzle/survival horror game. Resident Evil actually is responsible for popularizing survival horror games back in the 90s, and helped lead to renewed interest in zombies in pop culture that we saw going into the 2000s. I’ll be honest, I was completely unfamiliar with the franchise until now. I never played any of the games or saw the movies, didn’t know who Jill Valentine was, didn’t even know the franchise was about a zombie outbreak. After seeing all the Game of the Year praise a remake got in 2019, I thought to myself “this must be a pretty damn good remake then.” And it is.
I was not sold on this game in its first hour. I kept thinking “where’s the thing that makes this a game of the year contender?” I chose Claire to play as because she seemed confident and cool while Leon looked like the lost 8th member of BTS. Traversing the police station, collecting weird items, finding dead ends and dead friends scattered this way and that. I basically was in a state of being jump scared every 10 seconds by a zombie I thought was dead, always being low on ammo, and busting my brain trying to solve these 1998-ass puzzles.
And then suddenly I found the rhythm. A long string of Aah! moments cascaded forth! If I open the box and use the jewel to open the other box, then use that picture to decipher the statue puzzle and get the scepter, then I’ll have the key that’s printed on the back of it and can use it for the vault lock that’s stopping me from getting the goddess coin! The dopamine rush that comes with feeling yourself to be really intelligent hit hard, and I suddenly got what the game was about: it’s just a scary puzzle game. There’s nothing I’m missing. Put simply, scary puzzle game good.
The enemies are wonderfully grotesque. I have a rather high tolerance for gore but my big weakness in horror is people that have been forcefully mutated into monsters. So you can imagine I had to do a little soul-searching with RE2, a game that is exclusively about people that have been forcefully mutated into monsters. I have no problem with zombies, and quickly became relieved when I saw them. I know zombies, they’re not scary. Shoot them in the head, like every other piece of zombie media for the last hundred years. What I don’t know are the lickers, the ivy, the BOWs. I don’t know what the hell G is. And I haven’t the faintest idea what Mr. X is. Spoilers in the next paragraph, skip ahead if you don’t want to see.
I would like to talk about Mr. X for a moment. Mr. X is a large, broad shouldered, blue faced indestructible dad wearing a trench coat and a fedora. Once he appears in the police station, he continually stalks you for the duration of that area (probably about an hour or so of gameplay). He cannot be hurt, he cannot die. He does not speak, has no emotions, and walks exactly half as fast as you can run, never changing speed. It is absolutely terrifying. I was so scared of what was going to happen when he caught me. Would he break my neck? Eat me? Maybe a fade to black? No, it’s much worse. When Mr. X catches you, he punches you. Hard. I don’t know why it’s worse, but I do NOT want to get punched by the big stone man in the fedora. I just don’t. Do you? No, you don’t. Don’t get punched. He is the best and worst part of this game all at the same time and has been an inspiration to me. I recently featured him in the Dungeons and Dragons game I DM and my players are losing their goddamn minds.
RE2 is one of the best looking games I’ve ever seen, like ever. Beyond the basic stuff like textures and animations, the lighting is so… purposeful. The angle of every light that reaches every room is precisely calculated to maximize your fear. Directional lighting is a much bigger factor than we realize while playing games, but just keep an eye out when you play through this game. The music is not a top 10 of all time or anything, but it is sufficiently scary for sure. Mr. X’s Theme is the real standout. Hearing it as he slams open the door to the next room while you cower under the desk… Jesus Christ. Perfect horror.
There a few characters besides the main two that I won’t spoil the story of, but I really came to love Sherry and hate Ada. Like I mentioned before, Leon’s story is more the story of the Umbrella Corporation, what they did, why they did it, and how it started the apocalypse. Claire’s story is that of family, how people hold together and fall apart when all is lost. You’ll find that each of them feels different to play as, even if it feels like you’re playing the same game again. Claire gets a grenade launcher and Leon gets a shotgun, so they actually handle quite differently. The crafting is simple and as such lends itself to being fun. I find gunpowder, I immediately combine it with my one other gunpowder to make bullets. Easy, fast, and doesn’t kill the momentum of the scares. I played as Claire first and I found her story to be much more interesting than Leon’s, but I’m sure that’s a matter of preference. Remember to either play a 2nd run to get the true ending, or just look it up on Youtube when you finish your first runs. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
Calling Resident Evil 2 a remake is almost disservice to the love, care, and passion that was obviously poured into this project. You will have a hard time finding another game with this amount of polish that doesn’t have Mario in it. It’s not the scariest game I’ve ever played, not by a long shot, but it does deliver the best scares that I’ve experienced. Mr. X, while overall not a huge part of the game, sticks in my mind as one of the most memorable video game villains I’ve ever faced off against, and the other creatures created by the Umbrella Corporation are the stuff of nightmares. The lighting, camera angling, pacing, and sound design come together to push you to the edge of suspense. The unrelenting bombardment of having the Unknown loom over you for 15 hours is something that cannot be replicated through a movie or TV. This is absolutely one of the best games of 2019. If you have the stomach for it, I must insist that you strap on your glock, dive into the sewer, and pray that something can truly deliver us from this evil.
Resident Evil 2 is comprised of two somewhat different stories. Choosing your character is essentially splitting the timeline, and you play through both scenarios, one as college student Claire Redfield and the other as young hot rookie cop Leon Kennedy. Their stories intersect with each other in a weird way, but they’re not two sides of the same story. The themes of each story are quite different, too. Leon’s story is a police thriller that features an investigation into a gigantic corporation’s shady activities. Claire’s story is a story of motherhood, and strongly follows the theme of finding your own family. I will not spoil anything from the story past the opening of the game.
RE2 is a puzzle/survival horror game. Resident Evil actually is responsible for popularizing survival horror games back in the 90s, and helped lead to renewed interest in zombies in pop culture that we saw going into the 2000s. I’ll be honest, I was completely unfamiliar with the franchise until now. I never played any of the games or saw the movies, didn’t know who Jill Valentine was, didn’t even know the franchise was about a zombie outbreak. After seeing all the Game of the Year praise a remake got in 2019, I thought to myself “this must be a pretty damn good remake then.” And it is.
I was not sold on this game in its first hour. I kept thinking “where’s the thing that makes this a game of the year contender?” I chose Claire to play as because she seemed confident and cool while Leon looked like the lost 8th member of BTS. Traversing the police station, collecting weird items, finding dead ends and dead friends scattered this way and that. I basically was in a state of being jump scared every 10 seconds by a zombie I thought was dead, always being low on ammo, and busting my brain trying to solve these 1998-ass puzzles.
And then suddenly I found the rhythm. A long string of Aah! moments cascaded forth! If I open the box and use the jewel to open the other box, then use that picture to decipher the statue puzzle and get the scepter, then I’ll have the key that’s printed on the back of it and can use it for the vault lock that’s stopping me from getting the goddess coin! The dopamine rush that comes with feeling yourself to be really intelligent hit hard, and I suddenly got what the game was about: it’s just a scary puzzle game. There’s nothing I’m missing. Put simply, scary puzzle game good.
The enemies are wonderfully grotesque. I have a rather high tolerance for gore but my big weakness in horror is people that have been forcefully mutated into monsters. So you can imagine I had to do a little soul-searching with RE2, a game that is exclusively about people that have been forcefully mutated into monsters. I have no problem with zombies, and quickly became relieved when I saw them. I know zombies, they’re not scary. Shoot them in the head, like every other piece of zombie media for the last hundred years. What I don’t know are the lickers, the ivy, the BOWs. I don’t know what the hell G is. And I haven’t the faintest idea what Mr. X is. Spoilers in the next paragraph, skip ahead if you don’t want to see.
I would like to talk about Mr. X for a moment. Mr. X is a large, broad shouldered, blue faced indestructible dad wearing a trench coat and a fedora. Once he appears in the police station, he continually stalks you for the duration of that area (probably about an hour or so of gameplay). He cannot be hurt, he cannot die. He does not speak, has no emotions, and walks exactly half as fast as you can run, never changing speed. It is absolutely terrifying. I was so scared of what was going to happen when he caught me. Would he break my neck? Eat me? Maybe a fade to black? No, it’s much worse. When Mr. X catches you, he punches you. Hard. I don’t know why it’s worse, but I do NOT want to get punched by the big stone man in the fedora. I just don’t. Do you? No, you don’t. Don’t get punched. He is the best and worst part of this game all at the same time and has been an inspiration to me. I recently featured him in the Dungeons and Dragons game I DM and my players are losing their goddamn minds.
RE2 is one of the best looking games I’ve ever seen, like ever. Beyond the basic stuff like textures and animations, the lighting is so… purposeful. The angle of every light that reaches every room is precisely calculated to maximize your fear. Directional lighting is a much bigger factor than we realize while playing games, but just keep an eye out when you play through this game. The music is not a top 10 of all time or anything, but it is sufficiently scary for sure. Mr. X’s Theme is the real standout. Hearing it as he slams open the door to the next room while you cower under the desk… Jesus Christ. Perfect horror.
There a few characters besides the main two that I won’t spoil the story of, but I really came to love Sherry and hate Ada. Like I mentioned before, Leon’s story is more the story of the Umbrella Corporation, what they did, why they did it, and how it started the apocalypse. Claire’s story is that of family, how people hold together and fall apart when all is lost. You’ll find that each of them feels different to play as, even if it feels like you’re playing the same game again. Claire gets a grenade launcher and Leon gets a shotgun, so they actually handle quite differently. The crafting is simple and as such lends itself to being fun. I find gunpowder, I immediately combine it with my one other gunpowder to make bullets. Easy, fast, and doesn’t kill the momentum of the scares. I played as Claire first and I found her story to be much more interesting than Leon’s, but I’m sure that’s a matter of preference. Remember to either play a 2nd run to get the true ending, or just look it up on Youtube when you finish your first runs. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
Calling Resident Evil 2 a remake is almost disservice to the love, care, and passion that was obviously poured into this project. You will have a hard time finding another game with this amount of polish that doesn’t have Mario in it. It’s not the scariest game I’ve ever played, not by a long shot, but it does deliver the best scares that I’ve experienced. Mr. X, while overall not a huge part of the game, sticks in my mind as one of the most memorable video game villains I’ve ever faced off against, and the other creatures created by the Umbrella Corporation are the stuff of nightmares. The lighting, camera angling, pacing, and sound design come together to push you to the edge of suspense. The unrelenting bombardment of having the Unknown loom over you for 15 hours is something that cannot be replicated through a movie or TV. This is absolutely one of the best games of 2019. If you have the stomach for it, I must insist that you strap on your glock, dive into the sewer, and pray that something can truly deliver us from this evil.
2013
This is one of those rare comedic games that doesn't ever fall flat. The entire game experience is probably about an hour and a half to two hours, and I suggest you play it with a group of friends in the room. It's fun having everybody argue about which door to take and what direction to go. The game is clever all the way from start to finish and I applaud the Developers for creating what is essentially one sustained a joke for 2 hours that doesn't ever feel old. In addition to being funny, it also provides a weird sort of existential dread that will have you questioning why you keep going back to work at your office in your cubicle everyday. Overall it's a great experience and I'd recommend it for whatever price you can find it at.
2017
Steamworld Dig 2, perhaps more than any other game in history, is the shining example of what a sequel can and should be. Every single aspect of this game is improved up on from its predecessor. Gameplay mechanics, upgrade systems, characters, dialogue, economy, music, art, substance, emotional impact. This game is a perfect sequel. SD2 does directly follow the events of Steamworld Dig, but no knowledge of the previous game is required to understand the story or engage with the world. I do highly recommend that you play the first game though, I’d absolutely list it in my indie must-plays.
In SD2, you take control of Dot, a robot visiting the charming sci-fi western town of El Machino. The inhabitants of the the town are friendly, colorful, and memorable. The music is calming and yet exciting. The plot begins! You are searching for your uncle, Rusty, your voiceless protagoist from the first game, who disappeared at the end of Steamworld Dig. You team up with Fen, fire spirit/best boy, and together set off to the underground to dig, dig, dig.
In this metroidvania, you’ll dig down into the earth to find caverns, enemies, puzzles, challenges, and some pretty crazy boss fights as you progress towards the bottom. The great part about the game is that each tool you acquire and each skill you gain (by spending money back in town) serves a very specific purpose: to help you keep digging. Whether its an upgrade for more water (water is basically mana and makes all your gadgets work), a mobility tool like the hookshot, or an upgrade like the drill to bore through rock faster, each of these tools makes you just good enough, just fast enough to make it to the next checkpoint and unlock its mysteries.
Like many metroidvanias, there’s a hub world (the town) with a pipe that lets you fast travel to any of the checkpoints you’ve unlocked. You have a limited amount of light every time you travel to the underground, and must find places to recharge it for extended stays or else be lost in the darkness. Trips to the surface become less frequent as you progress farther underground and gain powerups and tools that help you keep the lights on longer. There’s plenty of collectibles too! Find all the cogs if you can. You’ll collect gems to sell for cash and use the cash to buy upgrades so you can dig for more gems. Feedback loop!
There aren’t a huge variety of enemies, but the fact is they’re not really there for you to fight, they’re mostly there to try and impede you from digging. Dig around them, fight them, whatever. Bossfights can get tough, I got stuck on the Prophet for a good while. It never gets overly challenging though, you can easily play on your switch while watching TV.
This game may not look like it has very much of a story, and it doesn’t, but what is there hits very hard. Dot and Fen have a great relationship, and the characters you meet around town and elsewhere all have something interesting going on. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the last scene of the game hit me so hard I teared up. You need to finish it.
Steamworld Dig 2 takes every aspect of the previous game and doubles, if not triples, its quality. The upgrade system is perfectly balanced so I was never over or under powered. The characters are fun, goofy, and memorable. The gameplay is smooth and satisfying, and use of mobility tools like the grappling hook feels like a natural addition to the formula. This is a perfect game to escape to while watching TV or listening to a podcast. Make sure you’re paying attention at the end tho — the last scene is well worth working to reach.
In SD2, you take control of Dot, a robot visiting the charming sci-fi western town of El Machino. The inhabitants of the the town are friendly, colorful, and memorable. The music is calming and yet exciting. The plot begins! You are searching for your uncle, Rusty, your voiceless protagoist from the first game, who disappeared at the end of Steamworld Dig. You team up with Fen, fire spirit/best boy, and together set off to the underground to dig, dig, dig.
In this metroidvania, you’ll dig down into the earth to find caverns, enemies, puzzles, challenges, and some pretty crazy boss fights as you progress towards the bottom. The great part about the game is that each tool you acquire and each skill you gain (by spending money back in town) serves a very specific purpose: to help you keep digging. Whether its an upgrade for more water (water is basically mana and makes all your gadgets work), a mobility tool like the hookshot, or an upgrade like the drill to bore through rock faster, each of these tools makes you just good enough, just fast enough to make it to the next checkpoint and unlock its mysteries.
Like many metroidvanias, there’s a hub world (the town) with a pipe that lets you fast travel to any of the checkpoints you’ve unlocked. You have a limited amount of light every time you travel to the underground, and must find places to recharge it for extended stays or else be lost in the darkness. Trips to the surface become less frequent as you progress farther underground and gain powerups and tools that help you keep the lights on longer. There’s plenty of collectibles too! Find all the cogs if you can. You’ll collect gems to sell for cash and use the cash to buy upgrades so you can dig for more gems. Feedback loop!
There aren’t a huge variety of enemies, but the fact is they’re not really there for you to fight, they’re mostly there to try and impede you from digging. Dig around them, fight them, whatever. Bossfights can get tough, I got stuck on the Prophet for a good while. It never gets overly challenging though, you can easily play on your switch while watching TV.
This game may not look like it has very much of a story, and it doesn’t, but what is there hits very hard. Dot and Fen have a great relationship, and the characters you meet around town and elsewhere all have something interesting going on. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the last scene of the game hit me so hard I teared up. You need to finish it.
Steamworld Dig 2 takes every aspect of the previous game and doubles, if not triples, its quality. The upgrade system is perfectly balanced so I was never over or under powered. The characters are fun, goofy, and memorable. The gameplay is smooth and satisfying, and use of mobility tools like the grappling hook feels like a natural addition to the formula. This is a perfect game to escape to while watching TV or listening to a podcast. Make sure you’re paying attention at the end tho — the last scene is well worth working to reach.
2022
I think this is a must play for fans of the genre but man this left a sour taste in my mouth with a cliffhanger sequel tease ending. Loved the art though, it grew on me, and the story is super well written.
2019
Astral Chain is something special. However, the story falls completely flat just a few hours in . Characters are also fine, passable to good. Get that stuff out of the way. This is an action game, and the action is impeccable, but I want to touch on the stuff supporting it first. The story and the fact that it had no greater implications was a little disappointing since Platinum’s last game, Nier: Automata, was super story heavy and is one of my favorite games ever. But N:A is about story, and this is about innovative action.
You pick to play as either the brother or sister who are both asked to join an elite task force and guard the world against the terrors of the astral plane. You begin by customizing the skin color, eye color, and haircut/hair color. It’s actually not too bad of a character creator, but no face sliders. Let me get my other big negative out of the way as well - the nonspeaking protagonist, while it works in Fallout and Skyrim, does not work here. I wish my character had some personality, but your sibling, Akira, kind of ends up speaking and carrying conversations for you. I’m a little sick of this trend RPGs have of silent protagonists so you can “immerse” yourself.
The world of Astral Chain really sells this way more than the writing quality for the characters or story. It is SO INTERESTING. Everything about this cyberpunk future is attention grabbing in the most subtle ways. The way the police are structured, the attitude of civilians toward you, the fact that so many NPC’s have something to say. Seeing Tokyo in 2065 is awesome on its own but it really looks like it would. Other than the police uniforms and actual legions, the actual cyberpunk aesthetic is subtle and closer to realistic. The game places you in small open world areas for each mission that you explore. Turning on your scanner on any NPC will give you a quick list of facts about them, including Name, Age, Sex, and Blood Type among others. It’s a neat little feature that makes the people feel real if for a moment and makes the world feel alive. For instance, i walked by a woman named Ikumi Dabrowski and thought “oh that woman is clearly half Japanese, but it’s the year 2065 so of course we’re more integrated.” I started looking around and noticed a TON of half-Japanese people, which was a neat little thing. Just an example.
The general structure is that for each mission there is a crime involving the astral plane somewhere in the city. You essentially have a detective phase and then a combat phase. During the detective phase you’re in a small explorable area with 5-6 side quests. The detective work is better done than any other action game. The Witcher 3 and Assassin’s Creed have light detective elements which consist of just turning on your scanner, walking up to the yellow object and pressing A. In Astral Chain, you have to question eye witnesses all over the crime scene area as well as collect hard evidence, and store each clue as a keyword. Then you report to your field officer who quizzes you on what happened, and you answer using the correct keywords. The coolest thing here is that you can’t trust eyewitness reports - not because they’re liars, but because like in real life they are unreliable. They will miss small details sometimes and you have to fact check witnesses against hard evidence.This is awesome and to my knowledge isn’t done often in games.
So, the action. This is what you come for. This is a brilliant design for action and I’m not sure that anything like it has ever existed before. You individually control yourself as well as your legion, an otherworldly entity bound to you by the titular astral chain. This is NOT a combo based game like Bayonetta, which I appreciate (I’m very bad at combos). Combat does involve a lot of mashing the Y button, sure, but the real fun of it is utilizing the chain between your two entities. Wrapping up an enemy in a chain by running around them in circles traps them momentarily. If an enemy rushes you, you can catch it in your chain and slingshot it across the arena. The main mechanic is rushing your Legion into the enemy and then either calling it to slide kick back to you or slide kicking towards it. Combat is 100% based on your positioning in relation to the enemy , and then added onto with new abilities and attacks you can unlock for your 5 different legions. It’s hard to describe. It takes a few minutes to pick up (I recommend going through the training stuff) but it feels amazing. It looks like you’re button mashing to an observer but as a player you can see yourself individually controlling two characters on the screen and the results of their interactions. So satisfying. I can’t speak enough praise for the combat.
Aside from that, music is A+ (I’d venture to say it’s the best score this year as well) and the cell shaded artwork looks beautiful even in handheld. Runs at a consistent 30 FPS, and since it’s got cartoon-like graphics its barely distinguishable from 60 FPS. 8 hours in and not one single frame rate drop even in handheld - That’s impressive. Plus, tsundere vending machine.
Astral Chain has perhaps the most innovative combat of the decade. In an awesomely constructed but mostly colorless cyberpunk world with a passable story and forgettable characters, 90% of the burden to carry this game falls on the action - and the action delivers. The combat’s dependence on movement and positioning rather than remembering combo strings sets it apart from the rest of its genre. This is one part Bayonetta, 2 parts Nier: Automata, and 1 part Psycho-Pass. Even though the story falls flat at the end, the time investment is an easy trade for the amount of fun you’ll have chaining, wrapping, dodge kicking, and blasting your way across the astral plane.
You pick to play as either the brother or sister who are both asked to join an elite task force and guard the world against the terrors of the astral plane. You begin by customizing the skin color, eye color, and haircut/hair color. It’s actually not too bad of a character creator, but no face sliders. Let me get my other big negative out of the way as well - the nonspeaking protagonist, while it works in Fallout and Skyrim, does not work here. I wish my character had some personality, but your sibling, Akira, kind of ends up speaking and carrying conversations for you. I’m a little sick of this trend RPGs have of silent protagonists so you can “immerse” yourself.
The world of Astral Chain really sells this way more than the writing quality for the characters or story. It is SO INTERESTING. Everything about this cyberpunk future is attention grabbing in the most subtle ways. The way the police are structured, the attitude of civilians toward you, the fact that so many NPC’s have something to say. Seeing Tokyo in 2065 is awesome on its own but it really looks like it would. Other than the police uniforms and actual legions, the actual cyberpunk aesthetic is subtle and closer to realistic. The game places you in small open world areas for each mission that you explore. Turning on your scanner on any NPC will give you a quick list of facts about them, including Name, Age, Sex, and Blood Type among others. It’s a neat little feature that makes the people feel real if for a moment and makes the world feel alive. For instance, i walked by a woman named Ikumi Dabrowski and thought “oh that woman is clearly half Japanese, but it’s the year 2065 so of course we’re more integrated.” I started looking around and noticed a TON of half-Japanese people, which was a neat little thing. Just an example.
The general structure is that for each mission there is a crime involving the astral plane somewhere in the city. You essentially have a detective phase and then a combat phase. During the detective phase you’re in a small explorable area with 5-6 side quests. The detective work is better done than any other action game. The Witcher 3 and Assassin’s Creed have light detective elements which consist of just turning on your scanner, walking up to the yellow object and pressing A. In Astral Chain, you have to question eye witnesses all over the crime scene area as well as collect hard evidence, and store each clue as a keyword. Then you report to your field officer who quizzes you on what happened, and you answer using the correct keywords. The coolest thing here is that you can’t trust eyewitness reports - not because they’re liars, but because like in real life they are unreliable. They will miss small details sometimes and you have to fact check witnesses against hard evidence.This is awesome and to my knowledge isn’t done often in games.
So, the action. This is what you come for. This is a brilliant design for action and I’m not sure that anything like it has ever existed before. You individually control yourself as well as your legion, an otherworldly entity bound to you by the titular astral chain. This is NOT a combo based game like Bayonetta, which I appreciate (I’m very bad at combos). Combat does involve a lot of mashing the Y button, sure, but the real fun of it is utilizing the chain between your two entities. Wrapping up an enemy in a chain by running around them in circles traps them momentarily. If an enemy rushes you, you can catch it in your chain and slingshot it across the arena. The main mechanic is rushing your Legion into the enemy and then either calling it to slide kick back to you or slide kicking towards it. Combat is 100% based on your positioning in relation to the enemy , and then added onto with new abilities and attacks you can unlock for your 5 different legions. It’s hard to describe. It takes a few minutes to pick up (I recommend going through the training stuff) but it feels amazing. It looks like you’re button mashing to an observer but as a player you can see yourself individually controlling two characters on the screen and the results of their interactions. So satisfying. I can’t speak enough praise for the combat.
Aside from that, music is A+ (I’d venture to say it’s the best score this year as well) and the cell shaded artwork looks beautiful even in handheld. Runs at a consistent 30 FPS, and since it’s got cartoon-like graphics its barely distinguishable from 60 FPS. 8 hours in and not one single frame rate drop even in handheld - That’s impressive. Plus, tsundere vending machine.
Astral Chain has perhaps the most innovative combat of the decade. In an awesomely constructed but mostly colorless cyberpunk world with a passable story and forgettable characters, 90% of the burden to carry this game falls on the action - and the action delivers. The combat’s dependence on movement and positioning rather than remembering combo strings sets it apart from the rest of its genre. This is one part Bayonetta, 2 parts Nier: Automata, and 1 part Psycho-Pass. Even though the story falls flat at the end, the time investment is an easy trade for the amount of fun you’ll have chaining, wrapping, dodge kicking, and blasting your way across the astral plane.
2007
I'm sure you don't need me to sell you on this game, but it's an actual masterpiece. Everything about it comes together so fluidly. It's exactly the right length, just challenging enough, and has a story you'll actually want to pay attention to. Plus, it's just funny. Almost every joke lands. I honestly prefer this to Portal 2, so I highly suggest you start on this one. Plus, being an FPS without an enemies, this is the PERFECT game to learn how to shoot on M+KB. Or if you have a friend who's learning how to move in a 3D space for the first time in a game, this is the one to give them. They can take their time, figure out what does what, and learn to shoot all without the threat of enemies or combat but still with enough challenge they'll feel good about conquering obstacles. This game is like $2 on Steam right now. What are you waiting for? Go buy it!
2021
I reviewed the Medium with a key provided by the publisher.
The Medium is Bloober Team's best outing yet, and with more refinement I think their next title could be truly great. It suffers from many shortcomings, namely technical bugs and meandering plot lines. Despite this, it handily excels at controlling atmosphere and directing the player's experience while presenting a compelling protagonist to follow. The Medium is not one the best horror games I've ever played, but it is one of the most unique and ambitious ones. The Medium boasts some features, like the dual reality puzzle solving, that I would like to see iterated on in the future of the genre. And with it coming to Game Pass on day one, I advise all horror fans to dip their toes in to the spirit world and see what's on the other side of the mirror.
Read the full review here: https://techraptor.net/gaming/reviews/medium-review
The Medium is Bloober Team's best outing yet, and with more refinement I think their next title could be truly great. It suffers from many shortcomings, namely technical bugs and meandering plot lines. Despite this, it handily excels at controlling atmosphere and directing the player's experience while presenting a compelling protagonist to follow. The Medium is not one the best horror games I've ever played, but it is one of the most unique and ambitious ones. The Medium boasts some features, like the dual reality puzzle solving, that I would like to see iterated on in the future of the genre. And with it coming to Game Pass on day one, I advise all horror fans to dip their toes in to the spirit world and see what's on the other side of the mirror.
Read the full review here: https://techraptor.net/gaming/reviews/medium-review
2016
A 16-year old Japanese schoolboy sees a woman being assaulted on the street one night. He intervenes and defends her from the assailant, but when the police arrive it’s the young man who’s thrown in jail. The attacker in the alley was a very powerful, very important man, and his friends in the police department have kicked this boy hard to make sure he stays down. Injustice. For a 16 year-old to experience injustice of this magnitude is sobering, perhaps even disgusting. Is there such a thing as justice in a world where the rich eat the poor and spit them back out, where the strong tread on the weak, where the sadistic take from the noble?
And there it is, right from the start. There is no justice in the world unless we make it. The young man is sent to Tokyo to live with a family friend and begins attending a new school. On the very first day, you and a classmate wander into an alternate shadow world overlaid on our own called the Metaverse, and find yourselves in a medieval castle full of demons and ruled by a particularly shitty teacher at the school. Accompanied by a talking cat with a sword, you’ll sneak, battle, and style your way through this massive dungeon to figure out what the hell is going on. I’ll leave it at that for the plot. No spoilers!
Persona 5 is the only game ever made that lets players truly live out the super-hero fantasy. You’re thinking of Arkham, Spider-Man, Infamous — these games allow the fantasy of being a super-hero, yes, but they end there. In Persona 5, the hero work isn’t even half the fun.
By day you’ll attend school, do homework, hang out with friends, do the laundry, work a part time job, clean the house, etc. You will have to manage your time wisely, making sure you have time to study because you’ve got a big test on Friday. But you also need to hang out with Ann on Tuesday night because she specifically asked, and Wednesday you were supposed to work out with Ryuji at the gym. Weren’t you supposed to do the dishes?
By night, you and your friends will don the masks of the Phantom Thieves, a superhero team that dives into the metaverse to steal hearts and bring justice back to the world. No one at school knows who you are, and no one in the world knows the identity of the Phantom Thieves. This is the true super-hero fantasy. There is no Spider-Man game where you are looking forward to playing as Peter Parker. It’s unprecedented, and it’s what made me fall in love with it just hours in.
The super-hero parts of the game involve exploring giant palaces in the metaverse, manifestations of the hatred in the hearts of people. The Phantom Thieves track down targets who are rich, powerful and evil and break into these dungeons to steal the hearts of these targets, causing them to have a “change of heart” and confess to their crimes. One person at a time, the Phantom Thieves bring justice when all hope has been lost. There are no murder teens here, no sir. In fact, the characters are quite conscious about not killing anyone because, well, they’re teenagers.
Each dungeon contains different Personas, spirits that you collect by battling and then succeeding in dialogue trees with. The Personas are not your slaves; they are partners you’ve formed a contract with. They can be anything from tiny imps to forest sprites to ancient deities. The turn based combat and collectible monster angle often bares comparisons to Pokemon, and I’ll grant to a degree that’s true. Even as a Pokemon aficionado myself, however, I have to admit the combat system doesn’t hold a candle to Persona 5.
The gameplay never felt repetitive to me, except inside the much too long final dungeon. Historically I have not enjoyed turn-based combat, but the structure is so quick, flashy, and colorful that it feels just as exciting as live combat, if not more. The aesthetics and colors of the game are over the top, and they never slow down. Every single motion you make as the Phantom Thieves screams flamboyant and flashy, and it all contributes to making the player feel like a super-hero. Persona 5 is also the proud owner of one of the best soundtracks in gaming history. The sound design is worth mentioning too, punctuating moments with the exact right upbeat, jazzy, funky tracks you won’t be able to forget. You will feel stylish playing this game, whether you like it or not.
The RPG mechanics of Persona 5 run deep. Equipment, accessories, armor, weapons, guns, etc. need to be customized and upgraded along with items, potions and persona attacks to optimize your characters. I found myself hand-drawing diagrams to coordinate my persona’s movesets to create a perfect team, but Persona 5 also allows players to not care about these details very much at all. If players are searching for levels of detail rivaling old CRPGs, look no further. Managing your time during the day to optimize your stat levels feels better than it does in real life. I don’t get experience points in real life for making coffee, so why am I even doing it?
The characters… oh the characters. I legitimately fell in love with each and every one of the Phantom Thieves. Over 100 hours with them sounded daunting at first, but now I wish there was more. Even the characters I disliked at first I now love, and can’t imagine the squad without them. How did we ever get by? Morgana, even being a cutesy anime mascot, never gets annoying. He’s a core member of the Phantom Thieves, and his B-Plot to discover his origins is worked into the main story marvelously. Ryuji, Futaba, Ann, Makoto, Haru, Yusuke. I miss these kids, and I am going to miss them forever. You may have heard there’s a lot of romance options in this game; it can be gratingly difficult to pick one. The ending you receive with you romantic partner feels earned, however, after putting 100 hours into making that relationship blossom.
Why is this not a 10? I have a major issue with how homophobic this game is, and makes jokes at the expense of gay people and even paints them in a violent light. It's a classic case of a Japanese developer's ignorance towards the LGBT community. In addition, this game glorifies pedophilia by featuring a romance between your 17 year old player character and a 30 year old teacher. It's not okay. It's frankly pretty sickening.
The flashy colors, beautiful visuals, god tier soundtrack and amazing characters round out the host of reasons you need to play this game. Aside from the last dungeon being twice as long as it should have been, I have found no faults with this game. The entire time I was playing this, I could not shake the feeling that this was one of the best games I would ever play. If I was unsure before Persona 5, I now truly believe that there is no justice in the world unless we make it. We are all responsible for creating justice wherever we go. These themes permeate throughout every aspect of the game and are never forgotten or thrown to the wayside. There is a spirit of rebellion in all of us, and working a 9 to 5 office job every day, I think I had forgotten that. This game helped me remember the fiery passion for justice that I had in my younger years. It’s still inside me. It’s still inside you.
And there it is, right from the start. There is no justice in the world unless we make it. The young man is sent to Tokyo to live with a family friend and begins attending a new school. On the very first day, you and a classmate wander into an alternate shadow world overlaid on our own called the Metaverse, and find yourselves in a medieval castle full of demons and ruled by a particularly shitty teacher at the school. Accompanied by a talking cat with a sword, you’ll sneak, battle, and style your way through this massive dungeon to figure out what the hell is going on. I’ll leave it at that for the plot. No spoilers!
Persona 5 is the only game ever made that lets players truly live out the super-hero fantasy. You’re thinking of Arkham, Spider-Man, Infamous — these games allow the fantasy of being a super-hero, yes, but they end there. In Persona 5, the hero work isn’t even half the fun.
By day you’ll attend school, do homework, hang out with friends, do the laundry, work a part time job, clean the house, etc. You will have to manage your time wisely, making sure you have time to study because you’ve got a big test on Friday. But you also need to hang out with Ann on Tuesday night because she specifically asked, and Wednesday you were supposed to work out with Ryuji at the gym. Weren’t you supposed to do the dishes?
By night, you and your friends will don the masks of the Phantom Thieves, a superhero team that dives into the metaverse to steal hearts and bring justice back to the world. No one at school knows who you are, and no one in the world knows the identity of the Phantom Thieves. This is the true super-hero fantasy. There is no Spider-Man game where you are looking forward to playing as Peter Parker. It’s unprecedented, and it’s what made me fall in love with it just hours in.
The super-hero parts of the game involve exploring giant palaces in the metaverse, manifestations of the hatred in the hearts of people. The Phantom Thieves track down targets who are rich, powerful and evil and break into these dungeons to steal the hearts of these targets, causing them to have a “change of heart” and confess to their crimes. One person at a time, the Phantom Thieves bring justice when all hope has been lost. There are no murder teens here, no sir. In fact, the characters are quite conscious about not killing anyone because, well, they’re teenagers.
Each dungeon contains different Personas, spirits that you collect by battling and then succeeding in dialogue trees with. The Personas are not your slaves; they are partners you’ve formed a contract with. They can be anything from tiny imps to forest sprites to ancient deities. The turn based combat and collectible monster angle often bares comparisons to Pokemon, and I’ll grant to a degree that’s true. Even as a Pokemon aficionado myself, however, I have to admit the combat system doesn’t hold a candle to Persona 5.
The gameplay never felt repetitive to me, except inside the much too long final dungeon. Historically I have not enjoyed turn-based combat, but the structure is so quick, flashy, and colorful that it feels just as exciting as live combat, if not more. The aesthetics and colors of the game are over the top, and they never slow down. Every single motion you make as the Phantom Thieves screams flamboyant and flashy, and it all contributes to making the player feel like a super-hero. Persona 5 is also the proud owner of one of the best soundtracks in gaming history. The sound design is worth mentioning too, punctuating moments with the exact right upbeat, jazzy, funky tracks you won’t be able to forget. You will feel stylish playing this game, whether you like it or not.
The RPG mechanics of Persona 5 run deep. Equipment, accessories, armor, weapons, guns, etc. need to be customized and upgraded along with items, potions and persona attacks to optimize your characters. I found myself hand-drawing diagrams to coordinate my persona’s movesets to create a perfect team, but Persona 5 also allows players to not care about these details very much at all. If players are searching for levels of detail rivaling old CRPGs, look no further. Managing your time during the day to optimize your stat levels feels better than it does in real life. I don’t get experience points in real life for making coffee, so why am I even doing it?
The characters… oh the characters. I legitimately fell in love with each and every one of the Phantom Thieves. Over 100 hours with them sounded daunting at first, but now I wish there was more. Even the characters I disliked at first I now love, and can’t imagine the squad without them. How did we ever get by? Morgana, even being a cutesy anime mascot, never gets annoying. He’s a core member of the Phantom Thieves, and his B-Plot to discover his origins is worked into the main story marvelously. Ryuji, Futaba, Ann, Makoto, Haru, Yusuke. I miss these kids, and I am going to miss them forever. You may have heard there’s a lot of romance options in this game; it can be gratingly difficult to pick one. The ending you receive with you romantic partner feels earned, however, after putting 100 hours into making that relationship blossom.
Why is this not a 10? I have a major issue with how homophobic this game is, and makes jokes at the expense of gay people and even paints them in a violent light. It's a classic case of a Japanese developer's ignorance towards the LGBT community. In addition, this game glorifies pedophilia by featuring a romance between your 17 year old player character and a 30 year old teacher. It's not okay. It's frankly pretty sickening.
The flashy colors, beautiful visuals, god tier soundtrack and amazing characters round out the host of reasons you need to play this game. Aside from the last dungeon being twice as long as it should have been, I have found no faults with this game. The entire time I was playing this, I could not shake the feeling that this was one of the best games I would ever play. If I was unsure before Persona 5, I now truly believe that there is no justice in the world unless we make it. We are all responsible for creating justice wherever we go. These themes permeate throughout every aspect of the game and are never forgotten or thrown to the wayside. There is a spirit of rebellion in all of us, and working a 9 to 5 office job every day, I think I had forgotten that. This game helped me remember the fiery passion for justice that I had in my younger years. It’s still inside me. It’s still inside you.