Hypnospace Outlaw is one of the best games I've ever played. I wasn't using the internet in the 90's, but aside from a few specific references, Hypnospace Outlaw isn't a game that rides off of the coattails of 90s Nostalgia; It takes what stuck out about that era and uses it as a blueprint for it's own dense world.

Every word of text, every troll page, every crappy drawing serves to characterize HypnOS and its users in a way that makes exploring its many secrets extremely satisfying. I doubt I'll be bored at all returning to this one; I'd be surprised if I ever found everything Hypnospace Outlaw has in store. It's a game that shows the industry does have somewhere else to go besides up: out. Out into incredible experiences not sold by the size of the map, and but by creators trying to make something unique and beautiful.

Play it.

style is substance

Visualshock! Soundshock! System Shock! Wait... Wait no, that doesn't sound quite right...

I have no idea why I like System Shock. It's so unflatteringly of its time, so oppressively obtuse, so nakedly cruel that I should have been repulsed as soon as I awoke on Citadel Station. Instead, I was hooked from the moment I finished watching the intro sequence, which is quite possibly one of my favorite opening cinematics in gaming. Easily in the top ten.

Before I get too deep into my review, I'm going to suggest you ditch it entirely and instead watch MandaloreGaming's excellent dive into System Shock: Enhanced Edition. I share a lot of the same opinions on the game but couldn't possibly express them as eloquently as he does. One point of his that I keep coming back to is how the original System Shock controls like it's played on a graphing calculator, and I will admit that if I had to navigate the game using whatever weird pully and lever system it had in place, I probably would have bounced off it pretty quickly. Thankfully, the Enhanced Edition lets you play System Shock like a proper video game, and that makes fighting through SHODAN's bowels more manageable, but no less dangerous than it was in 1994. In fact, the Enhanced Edition of the game provides a ton of options to tweak System Shock to your liking. You can shut a ton of pointless HUD elements off if you want, though I couldn't bring myself to do that. Chi Waves don't really mean anything mechanically, but it's dumb and weird and perfectly suits the whole hackerman aesthetic the game embodies. I couldn't bring myself to mutilate the HUD despite compromising on how the game controls, nor could I scale back on the story, or difficulty. This is all to say that I feel I still had a pretty authentic experience with the game despite the more modern control scheme.

When not being aggressively archaic, System Shock is aggressively... aggressive. Citadel Station is an incredibly hostile environment, as it should be since you're essentially running through the physical form of the game's villain, SHODAN. Originally the station's AI, SHODAN had her ethical constraints removed and is now trying to become a God, one who happens to enjoy dabbling in unethical science experiments and who would like to drill a hole in the Earth. She might even get a little help with that if you're not being careful. You pose the only threat to SHODAN and her plans, and in response she's turned all of Citadel Station against you. Its security systems, its mutated inhabitants, even its network... There is no single part of the station that isn't hostile towards you. System Shock can be downright mean, it's almost like the game doesn't want you to beat it, and SHODAN's constant mocking of your efforts really helps sell you on the sense that it's you versus the game. I shouldn't love something so hellbent on making me have a bad time, but the oppressive difficulty of System Shock also comes with a profound sense of gratification when you overcome it, even if many of these victories are minor and far between. Maybe it also helps that I like when SHODAN calls me an insect, but I'm a sad loser and you all knew that about me already.

I also adore the audio logs in this game. The acting is not great, but that makes for a fun contrast with Terri Brosius' performance as SHODAN. There's also a lot of inconsistencies with what is being spoken and what appears in text, which helps create this sense of creeping madness as you can't fully trust what you hear and what you see. Of course it's also (extremely) possible this is just the result of some miscommunication during development, or there being different scripts that went out to programmers and voice talent. It's all part of the charm regardless.

Every single part of System Shock is weird, pointless, clumsy, obtuse, or downright unfair. It probably shouldn't all come together as well as it does, and it definitely shouldn't appeal to me. I'm sure I have a few dozen reviews out there complaining about mechanics or design flaws that are present here, and yet... I kinda love System Shock. I love how it beats me down, how it puts its heel on my neck, calls me a worm, and deafens me with its "music". Maybe I'm just a sucker for abuse, because the only reason this isn't a perfect 5/5 is because it didn't hurt me enough. SHODAN should've bricked my hard drive after sending my browser history to my friends and family, only then would System Shock be considered a true masterpiece, but I still think it's an incredible game regardless. It is also hard for me to recommend playing it, but if you're half the masochist I am, you should definitely stick to the Enhanced Edition or wait for Nightdive's remake to drop, assuming that's still happening.

I cut my RPG teeth on Shining Force and FF4 - relatively forgiving entry points into the genre - but I had older schoolmates and relatives who would regale me with tales of the brutally uncompromising RPGs of their day. Phantasy Star is the quintessential high-friction RPG/dungeon crawling experience and is everything I expected from it for better and worse.

The limited inventory space, low MP totals and labyrinthe levels mean that progress was impossible without drawing my own maps, several 'test runs' through a dungeon, plenty of grinding, and a good deal of luck. This made dungeon crawling an extremely tense experience - fumbling around dark corridors and gradually getting my bearings while not knowing when the next encounter will be and whether I have enough resources to get to the end or need to escape to try another day - it adds a layer of decision making that is generally absent from the more forgiving RPGs of later years. But it's the 'luck' part that kind of gets on my nerves here - the heavily-randomized damage and booby-trapped chests can really screw a run over, and the lack of a way to target specific enemies or a rudimentary front/back row system means that there is very little strategy or tactics that goes into battles either. In other words, luck is maximized, tactics is minimized, and the only skill that the game really tests the player in (besides patience) is judgment on when to press on or retreat.

Engaging with it on its own terms though, there are plenty of merits to Phantasy Star, the strong female lead being the most obvious. The quasi-3D dungeons are mighty impressive, and the large enemy sprites (each with their own attack animation!) made me forget I was playing a Master System game! The fact that it didn't have to contend with Nintendo's infamous censors is obvious: some enemy sprites are delightfully horrifying, and the game pulls no punches about what happens when you run out of HP - you're not knocked out, you can't "fight no longer", you're dead.

From a gameplay perspective, Phantasy Star is great with exploration, giving the player a steady supply of hints of where they could go next, and unlike many other games where all but one option will lead you to getting annihilated by the random encounters, PS actually encourages nonlinear exploration by having several dungeons your party can handle at any time! And while I suspect it's more by coincidence than design, the difficulty curve is so much smoother than Phantasy Star 2's.

Perhaps its greatest achievement is its legacy - Phantasy Star is not only the birthplace of a great tetralogy, but from what I can tell it's also the first console RPG to be released in the West. Its success was arguably instrumental in early installments of FF and DQ getting Western releases, and for that I am grateful.

TL;DR - equal parts archaic relic and venerable classic, this is worth playing if you have any interest in games from that era. I'd recommend an updated port though, unless you have the patience of a saint.

You wouldn't DOWNLOAD a DEMON.

It's hard to overstate the importance of Megaten's PlayStation 2 golden age on the development of the franchise. It was a period of reinvention, one so effective in modernizing the Megaten experience that many of its newly introduced systems remain an indelible part of the franchise's identity. The Press-Turn battle system is still the bedrock upon which every new release builds, often in small, incremental ways. Even Persona owes much of its success due to Persona 3's introduction of time management and social systems.

Like many, I was introduced to Megaten through this era of games. But while Nocturne might be my first Shin Megami Tensei, there were in fact others before it... I mean, you know that. You're on a page for one that came out in 1992, why would I even word the review like this? I'm sorry, it's just that, like, i found out my mom was a demon and it took me to a pretty bad place and i fused the family dog with a pixie and it speaks english now, and i'm just under a lot of stress

CHAOS: I will destroy everything I don't understand.

If modern Megaten is defined by how "difficult" it is, then pre-PS2 Megaten is downright obtuse. This is felt almost immediately in how you interface with the world, which is viewed through a first person perspective. If you've never played a dungeon crawler before, especially one of this era, it can be incredibly overwhelming. Maps are large and labyrinthine, composed of a sparse number of repeating facades and lacking in definable landmarks. You feel like a rat in a maze. A maze which happens to be occupied by other, larger, more mean-spirited rats that want to shake you down for money and call you an idiot. I can't blame anyone for bouncing off of Shin Megami Tensei early, especially if they've never played a dungeon crawler of this era before. In fact, I only made it about an hour in during my initial attempt before getting horribly lost in the starting area and giving up.

Patience and persistence is key, as is unlearning all you understand about these games and opening yourself up to Shin Megami Tensei's idiosyncrasies. You have to learn to rely on your automap, then accept that the automap is useless outside of darkened areas as it doesn't mark teleporters or slippery floors, and then graduate to using graph paper your friend bought for you because she was too sick of hearing you bitch about getting lost in a game from fucking 1992.

Even systems that have carried over into later entries are (understandably) more vague and antiquated. Take the alignment system, which allows you to follow Law, Chaos, or Nautral paths towards one of three different endings. In many of the modern games, your choices and actions during key events influence your standing with each faction. Shin Megami Tensei, on the other hand, gets more microcosmic. Sure, your dialog choices matter, but so does which store you get groceries from. Frequenting establishments with a particular alignment will further associate you with that faction, as does summoning and fusing demons of a particular persuasion. Dismissing, killing, or even conversing with demons can shift your standing ever so slightly before you ultimately hit the alignment lock, so if you want a specific ending you have to be extremely mindful of every action you take, or make efforts to intentionally game the system.

Outside of which ending your alignment earns, you'll open up and potentially block off certain paths in the final dungeon, and come into conflict with the Law or Chaos heroes. Settling on Neutrality will allow you to see the most, however, and is considered the canonical ending. It also happens to be the one I got, because I believe in nothing, I fight for no man.

LAW: Place your faith in the systems and mechanics of the beast.

So you want to make friends with demons, huh? That's great, that's really nice. It's good to have friends. I don't have any because I ran out of Magnitite and they all kicked me in the shins and left me laid out by the Gaia temple. Some might call that a "transactional relationship." You won't be summoning Lucifer through the power of your bonds. No, you pay people to be your friend because you're a sad little loser kid. Not even Jack Frost wants to hang out with you... not unless you got that sweet, sweet Magnitite.

Magnitite has largely been phased out of Megaten, but it plays an important role in the SNES games, acting as a secondary currency used for fusing, summoning, and keeping demons active in your party. Every step you take drains Magnitite proportional to the requirements of your active party, adding a thin layer of resource management. This system sounds great in theory, but in practice it's mostly useless. During the early parts of the game you'll have human companions eating up party slots, reducing the need to have demons summoned. Once your friends start having political opinions and stop talking to you, then you'll need to keep track of Magnitite more, but I found I had so much banked by this point that it was really a non-issue.

Theoretically, managing Magnitite should make the game more tense as a whole given the lack of safe zones and the frequency of random encounters, which some might say is ridiculous. Borderline stupid, actually! Onis are falling out of the walls and from the ceiling and when they get up they're mad as hell and they want to fight, and it's like, dude, I'm just trying to find a cop to report my girlfriend missing, please stop!

The non-stop encounters wouldn't be quite so irritating if Shin Megami Tensei's battle system was more involved, but it's pretty rudimentary and easily gamed. Buffs and debuffs do matter, but weaknesses and defenses are poorly communicated, and you can mostly ignore them anyway and spam Zio since it has a high probability of paralyzing enemies, which is profoundly beneficial. I also believe most enemies are inherently weak to electricity anyway, so there's no reason to not use it constantly. Hey, what do you think a Pryo Jack is weak to? Bufu? No it's Zio. What about Beelzebub? Probably want to hit him with Hama. No! It's Zio!!! FUCK! I JUST TOLD YOU THIS!

A lot of Shin Megami Tensei's systems feel rough, and I'm willing to cut it a lot of slack because it's the first game for the SNES and it goes without saying that it's going to lack some serious polish. It is also a game that is so heavily carried by its atmosphere, writing, and visual design that engaging in battle feels like the cost of admission for everything else, and at worst its other systems don't live up to their potential but also don't hinder you.

Random encounter frequency still sucks, though.

COWARDLY CENTERISM (NEUTRALITY): Dumb bitch is named Louis Cypher.

So I've got my complaints, but I don't hate Shin Megami Tensei. Hate is a really strong word. So is love. No, I like a comfortable middle, and that's where this game sits.

Yet again I have out-maneuvered everybody by having a non-opinion. This is the one true path.

However, Shin Megami Tensei does satisfy a very specific mood. It's the kind of game you might find me playing in the middle of a stormy day, when it's cloudy enough to illuminate the room yet keep it blanketed in a dreary grey, the roar of thunder in the distance and the patter of rain against the window completing that gloomy ambience SMT is so well-suited to. This is a dour game, with fits of levity breaking up long stretches of trudging your way through a wasteland you once called home. Even in its most colorful moments - such as trying to appease Alice, a little girl who would really like it if you just died for her - its humor is distinctly dark.

Though Shin Megami Tensei II is comparatively more complex and insistent upon saying something with its narrative, SMT has enough twists and turns to keep you invested, and similar to Nocturne, the atmosphere of its world is enough to keep you moving forward, motivated to see this bombed out version of Tokyo in full. Tsukasa Masuko's brilliant soundtrack plays pitch perfect to the tone of this demon infested hellscape, earning it a spot among my favorite video game scores. To be fair, SMT2 and If... probably edges it out purely on the basis of them featuring many of the same tracks in addition to others, and there are so many ports of Shin Megami Tensei that offer up their own vibe, it's even debatable which specific version of SMT's OST is my favorite. One of those things that changes depending on the day.

PART 4: Oh no-- I wrote how many words about this!?

Shin Megami Tensei is an acquired taste. Unless you're way into dungeon crawlers, then you'll probably only enjoy it if you sit down and repeatedly tell yourself you want to enjoy it. I'm glad that I remained committed, in any case. This is the Megaten equivalent of a religious pilgrimage, and I am better for prostrating my way from Shibuya to Ginza, but that's not for everyone and that's ok, too. Even among the SNES trilogy, Shin Megami Tensei is the most middling entry, with SMT2 improving upon it in virtually every way, and If... finding a zen balance between being terrible and charming.

I'll get to those soon, but in the meantime I'm going to construct my millennium kingdom right here. Thinking it'll be like, a giant pyramid or something. I sure hope I don't get assassinated.

Nintendo drags the Zelda formula kicking and screaming into 2008-era open world design to create something that's mostly okay and mostly empty.

I'll open by saying that I have zero love nor nostalgia for Zelda as a franchise, nor do I hold Nintendo in any high esteem. The general consensus for decades was that Ocarina of Time was the single greatest game ever made; I played it and wasn't especially impressed. Two and half decades later, and history is repeating itself; Breath of the Wild has now been accepted to be the single greatest game ever made, and I'm again not especially impressed. It's not that I can't see what people enjoy in these titles, but more that I don't see how anyone believes any of this to be unique. Everything that's here has been done before and better in games two decades this one's senior, and adding meal prep and pretty graphics doesn't change the fact you could describe this as "Assassin's Creed with Half-Life 2 physics puzzles" and barely even be wrong.

I've heard from a few people with positive opinions on this that the main draw and appeal is the exploration, and that wandering around in search of new things is fun. In this, I disagree. The game is incredibly open in the literal, physical sense; there are a lot of big, green, empty fields with literally nothing in them. You can sprint for two straight minutes down a dirt path and see nothing, find nothing. I intentionally went off the beaten path several times in my twenty-hour playthrough, and I only ever found three Korok seeds. I never even met the broccoli man who lets you cash them in for inventory upgrades. Why bother trekking around when there's so little to actually see, and so little to do? A tiny tile with a ruined building on it every three miles doesn't make for an interesting overworld. It's so sparse, seemingly in service of just being capital-B Big. The world is so Big! The map is so Big! You can climb up a hill and then go back down again, what fun! Your reward for exploring this empty world is that you get to be in the empty world for longer. I imagine the people who love wandering through the map are actually enjoying the Shadow of the Colossus movement and climbing mechanics more than anything pertaining to the actual map that's here. Moving Link around feels good and smooth, but I think people who are in love with the traversal would be just as happy running through gm_Flatgrass as they are with the entire Kingdom of Hyrule. Hell, the greater density of the former might even be better.

If you're lucky, you might stumble into a Moblin camp every couple of minutes, but these act as annoyances more than anything else. Whatever items you'll get from defeating them are almost always strictly worse than whatever you walked up to them with, and the gear durability system means that you'll walk out worse for wear than if you hadn't bothered. I really don't mind the weapons breaking anywhere near as much as most of the detractors seem to, but that's because the game is so ridiculously easy that I was never in danger of running out of equipment. My weapons were always overflowing, I always had shields, I always had bows and arrows, I always had two pages of cooked meals that would heal me to full and stuff me with bonus yellow hearts. Thunderblight Ganon was the only thing that ever posed even the slightest challenge, and that's because he was capable of blasting through one-shot protection and his ragdoll kept flying out of the boss arena whenever I downed him. Bosses are the only forms of combat that you can't just walk around, which means that the optimal strategy is to ignore every camp or roaming enemy you see and save up your best weapons to wail on the Ganon forms. When the best play is to run past everything, ignore repairs/upgrades, and sprint to the bosses who die way too quickly to high-tier gear, you have created a world that is not fun to explore; you've created a world where there's a lot of fucking empty space between the glowing marker where the boss is and the indicator of where you are currently.

So much of this feels like a complete and utter waste of time. You can't cook food in bulk, meaning that in the early game when you're making nothing but three-apple meals, you have to do them one at a time. You can carry hundreds of resources at once, and something like eighty cooked meals, so it's going to take a lot of time to stock up on your functionally infinite healing for no good reason. Selling and buying items from shops is just as slow, traversing over flat plains with nothing to do is boring, and tons of the shrines have timed puzzles with sliding platforms and rolling balls that move at a glacial pace to ensure that players on the clunky-ass gamepad have more than enough time to react. What broke me was the fact that you're gated from pulling the Master Sword until you have an arbitrary number of hearts; after clearing out all four of the Divine Beasts and about 30 shrines, the game told me that I needed to go do at least another 24 shrines and dump all of my Spirit Orbs into HP if I wanted the sword. I decided that I had spent way too much time getting here to be turned away and told to grind for a single weapon, so I went straight to Hyrule Castle to end the game. Some friends of mine who were watching me play admonished me for "rushing" through it, which is a sentiment that I imagine many who disagree with this review are going to share. "Only" twenty hours, "only" thirty shrines, "only" three Korok seeds. The irony of a game that's celebrated for allowing you to play however you want apparently having a correct way to play it shouldn't be lost on you.

For as much as the developer foresight of allowing you to solve puzzles unconventionally gets celebrated, there were far too many instances where it felt like I was outsmarting the game and it couldn't keep up. I prepped for Fireblight Ganon by coming in with an ice rod, and it just didn't work on him in the fight because the game hadn't accounted for it; ice arrows still worked just fine, so it's not like this was intentional. Metal weapons and shields will get struck by lightning, but you can't pile them up onto a conductive switch to complete a circuit; switches that need to be weighed down can be weighed down with any random garbage in your inventory, so I don't know why this wasn't accounted for also. One puzzle in the Goron Divine Beast required me to block off jets of fire with a physics object, so I used a ball and crouched under the fire; it wasn't the correct physics object, so the game pushed me back against gravity and walled me off even though there was more than enough space to get through. The Zora Divine Beast that requires the Zora armor to get to features a sequence where you need to get to the tip of its trunk, and the trunk is spraying water down onto you; for some reason, this doesn't count as a waterfall. In any other game, this would all be fine, but Breath of the Wild's proudly-touted unconventionality is in actuality only limited to a scant few shrines where the solutions are so simple that there's hardly any urgency to break them. I feel the exact same way that I did when I played Ocarina and fire arrows couldn't burn down walls but Din's Fire could, except this came out two decades later and has no excuse.

I'm left without much to like. The combat is serviceable, but mashy and easily broken; the difficulty in the puzzles and the combat doesn't really exist because this is a game intended to be beaten by children; there's little intrinsic reason to explore, and I didn't get enough enjoyment out of the process to do it for its own sake; all of your abilities are unlocked in the first couple hours, leaving virtually no feeling of progression outside of numbers arbitrarily going up or down depending on the random loot you find; the story is the exact same that it's always been, which is to say completely mediocre and nothing more. It's a very pretty game, with a very pretty soundscape. Conceptually, I like the idea of delivering on Todd Howard's promises of being able to climb any mountain that you can see. I can see the appeal, but I can't think of a reason why anyone would consider this to be the greatest thing ever made — barring the idea that they simply don't play many games, nor have they really experienced a lot of media. This is all very unique for Nintendo, so if you only play what they put out, you're probably going to be blown away. If you've seen much of anything else, you'll probably only manage to be slightly more impressed than I am.

With the fact that what was hailed on release as being a breath of fresh air for the Zelda franchise has now been confirmed to be the model that the series will follow going forward, I'm left to wonder how long it's going to take people to get as sick of it as I already am. Tears of the Kingdom seems to be going as strong as this did at its peak, but I can't imagine that the momentum is going to last until the time Nintendo drops the third entry six years from now.

i really wish i enjoyed this game as much as everyone else does (or people said i would).

for a game described to me as "metroidvania with precision platforming meets Dark Souls," it really comes out feeling like less than a sum of those parts. in terms of the world design and exploration, the game is great at matching the joy of breaking into every tiny crevasse to find secrets and lore that Dark Souls does. the characters and lightly revealed lore that's steeped in mystery is great. the platforming is serviceable, but whenever the game decides to flip the switch to try and turn into Super Meat Boy (sometimes quite literally with buzzsaws) it feels very disjointed and out of place.

the combat (mainly by way of the bosses) by comparison feels like a chore. even by the end of the game when i had gotten a lot better at maneuvering in fights, most of the boss fights were not engaging or challenging beyond "hope you get the good pattern that allows you to heal". in addition to this, why not be more generous with benches in regards to boss placements?

it's small decisions like this that continued to baffle me as time went on. you get more movement options as the game unfolds, but trekking between areas connected by stags still feels arduous enough to dissuade me from wanting to explore more. i enjoy the lore of the stags, but would fast travelling between benches break the game so much to prevent it from being included?

it's things like this that makes me feel like the game is bloated. this may be a problem of playing the game now that there's 4 extra content patches (give players a way to play the launch version pleaseeeee), but there's just so much in the game that feels like Content For Content's Sake. the game like a love letter to the old metroidvanias the developers loved that has been weighed down by AAA games' addiction to More. i can see the mechanics (literally) taken 1-to-1 from Super Metroid, but i don't see the tightly crafted world, simplicity, or elegance of it. i see a checklist of things to waste time doing rather than a curated experience.

This is a true story.

I was about 7-years-old when Donkey Kong Country came out. It looked insane, and more than any other game for the system, it was the one that left me the most jealous of SNES kids. I needed to play it, but the only one I knew who had a copy was a boy on my block who I didn't get along with. I tried to suck up to him, but he knew I had a Genesis. He saw through my deception.

One day while riding my bike, I saw him run out of his garage to go over to a friend's house. With the garage door still open, I saw a golden opportunity... And so I snuck into his home and made my way to his bedroom, popped in Donkey Kong Country, and started playing. From the hallway, I could hear his mother approach, asking him a question that I cannot recall, clearly assuming her kid decided to stay indoors. As she turned the corner and peered into his room, she saw me on his bed playing the Super Nintendo. I'll never forget how loud she screamed as she chased me around his house and out into the street.

Just me doin' a little B&E because I love Donkey Kong Country so much.

Hollow Knight thrives off of a combat system that ties pretty seamlessly into the exploration. Just by hitting a wall, you'll find yourself in a new area with several bosses/minibosses and usually they are all pretty solid. That's unfortunately about where my praise ends however, because although I respect its ambition, I feel it suffers from several choices that hinder both the combat and exploration elements that should naturally tie together.

Exploration-focused games usually go for relatively guided level design. Even if the world design itself is non-linear and lets you go anywhere, rooms will maintain a guided format because it allows the designer to add interesting trails to fall down. Going down into a new area off of a winding trail as the visuals slowly change and you have to interact with new mechanics is practically formula at this point for these types of games. Hollow Knight instead applies this philosophy to the entire map at large; where areas are effectively trails to other areas and that serves as their purpose. Ambitious in theory but troubling in execution; you will find that most areas effectively play out like big open boxes with a few mazes of blocks and samey rooms inside. Gimmicks are often relegated to extremely simple changes to the formula that don't compensate for the sheer amount of aimless wandering through repetitive, unfocused level design. If it's not an area you find in a wall, it's a generic item that isn't an actual upgrade and has very little gameplay purpose.

The progression of Hollow Knight is very weak overall to me; whereas Metroid-likes usually like to give you items for every milestone that would lead you being able to go back and open up a new area, Hollow Knight oft abandons the notion of backtracking because so much of it is open from the get-go. Abilities are spread out across hours of play and usually most of the most engaging parts of the game (the bosses) don't give you them and instead are just there to add clutter to the world. Now, in defense of the game, the boss fights are above average for sure. Snappy, fast combat that doesn't over-rely on tired tropes in action-platformers is satisfying to pull off and there's decent variety, but they don't feel meaningful. The fact is you'll probably in the end get more mileage out of random enemies rather than half of the optional bosses in this game since your most effective and active progression you'll be having is collecting Geo; the currency of Hallownest. The best way to collect Geo, is to farm respawning enemies. And there-in lies the issue with Hollow Knight. For a game with such scope and ambition, nothing feeds into another. You get currency to get trivial upgrades while sitting around to get the big cool abilities and fight optional bosses which more often than not give you absolutely nothing. I'm not opposed to a game being fundamentally unrewarding, but I'm opposed to it when all I have are blue mazes to explore. There's another game about blue mazes that released four decades ago, but at least that one has space dinosaurs.

This was just okay, but videos and such talking about it led me to expect something better. The first 15 minutes are pretty damn fun, but it's kind of just the same thing for the whole runtime. It gets absurdly hard and unfair very quickly too, with enemies frequently swarming you in a way that only provides nearly frame perfect escapes.

The controls are a bit weird, probably worked better on the arcade version, but rather than aiming with the d-pad you have each button correspond to a direction to shoot in, with diagonals working by pressing two at the same time. It's kind of wonky using a keyboard, but I don't think it seems much better with a controller (at least not the diagonals). Not that I'll play it again to find out. It may be actually pretty close to a decent game, but man it is really exhausting.