Despite how recently it was released, God of War has not only been considered by many as one of the PlayStation 4's best exclusives, but also one of the best video game rebootquels in recent memory and even one of the best games of the 2010s. Since it beat Red Dead Redemption II for Game of the Year back in 2018, I was curious to see what apparently made this game better than one of my very favorite games of all time, and after beating the game, I'm still wondering that, because God of War felt like a complete chore to play. This game did get one thing right, though, and I'll go over it quickly before getting into why I found the overall experience to be so unfun and derivative. Although practically every new AAA release tries to look and feel "cinematic", God of War did just enough in that aspect for it to feel at least a little fresh, as the use of one continuous take meshed really well with the game's lifelike visuals, rugged art direction, and ancient Scandinavian setting.

For every step that the game's atmosphere takes, the writing, gameplay, and heavy dependence on tired mechanics and systems make the game take a thousand steps back before ensuring that it steps on a giant bear trap. Now, I've only been able to play God of War III due to the unavailability of the first two games on eighth generation consoles, but I still thought that this game's combat was a huge step down from the original trilogy, as Kratos felt clunky to control with how slow his attacks, dodges, and parries were to execute. Fighting several enemies at once made me feel like I was about to have an aneurysm, as the issues of attacks from both you and your spongy enemies suddenly deciding when to land and when to miss are suddenly quadrupled when you have to deal with all of these other similarly annoying enemies, along with how the camera is so close to Kratos at all times that you can't even see more than one enemy on screen. What I especially disliked about the game's enemy encounters was how almost every single boss in God of War was a troll with a giant rock, complete with the exact same attacks and death animations that you have to see over and over again.

The unintuitive and awkward combat of God of War ties in with another one of its bigger issues, as this game felt like a mishmash of every single unoriginal trend that is present in so many modern AAA releases, and the use of those tropes is worsened by how halfhearted their executions were. In addition to the repetitive combat, God of War is plagued with a skill tree and a crafting/upgrade system that we've seen a thousand times before, and the former system doesn't work because almost none of the abilities you unlock for your weapons are nearly as effective as just pressing R1 or R2, while the latter system doesn't work because everyone is going to play this game in the exact same way, which makes the idea of locking the resources needed to craft high-level armor pieces behind a treasure trove of predictable and boring side quests even more puzzling than it already is. Speaking of which, God of War can't decide whether it wants to be an open world game or something more linear, so it decides to combine worse versions of each by filling the game with asinine collectibles and tasks that you literally have no reason to go for, with the only ones that were of any real use being Iðunn's Apples and Horns of Blood Mead.

Pretty much all of the clichés that I had just mentioned were entirely related to the gameplay, but they unfortunately made their way to the story. Not only is God of War yet another story about a grizzled old man and a bratty younger sidekick going on a journey together, but it also features the video game storytelling equivalent to bureaucracy in the form of having the plot constantly grind itself to a halt so that you have to grab some item or talk to some person before having to do those exact things again. As bad and uninspired as all of those aspects of this game were, nothing about God of War got on my nerves nearly as much as its aggravating dialogue and unbearable inclusions of humor, and that especially goes for literally everything that came out of Atreus' mouth. Throughout all 20+ hours of this game, this useless little kid never stops running his mouth, which also means that he tells you the answer to every puzzle before you even get the chance to think, comments on every single thing that happens in the game with some variation of "Well, that happened!", and constantly screams phrases like "FIRE, INCOMING!" and "WATCH OUT!" over and over again in his infuriatingly screechy voice during every single enemy encounter. Atreus is definitely the worst offender when it came to keeping me infuriated throughout the game, but he wasn't the only one to do so, as Mímir did the exact same things while also constantly spouting exposition during boat trips, and Sindri's running gag about his aversion to anything gross or dirty started out annoying before getting more and more anger-inducing as the game went on. Pretty much everything about God of War felt so market-tested, risk-free, tedious, and dull that I wondered what it was that so many people even saw in this game, and since God of War Ragnarök looks like more of the same, I really don't want to play that game at all.

Going into BioShock Infinite, the only thing I really knew about it was how it was very different from the first two games and also much more polarizing. I had a general attitude of "How bad could it be?" when I first booted this game up, and I had no idea that I was going to play a complete mess of a game that falls flat on its face with almost everything it sets out to accomplish. Before I get into all of that, though, I will give credit where credit is due and talk about how great and detailed the setting is. Not only is Columbia gorgeous to look at, but the floating city's steampunk elements mesh pretty well with the 1912 setting. That was the only thing about BioShock Infinite that I actually liked, though, as I found the rest of the game to be dull in terms of gameplay and frustrating in terms of plot.

In BioShock, the player pretty much had to use weapons and plasmids together in order to stand a chance against Rapture's Splicers and Big Daddies, and this was expanded on in BioShock 2 by placing a greater emphasis on mixing and matching genes in order to let the player experiment to see what worked and what didn't. Pretty much all of that was thrown out here in BioShock Infinite, because even with the occasional puddle of water or oil showing up in some of the game’s levels, the best strategy in every encounter is to just shoot the enemies. The guns do feel slightly better than they did in the other two games, but rendering plasmids (or vigors, as this game calls them) useless through the effectiveness of standing in one place and gunning everyone down made the gameplay loop of BioShock Infinite feel easier and more boring as it went along. The only vigor that I got any use out of was Return to Sender, and that was unlocked at the very end of the game, so you might as well never bother to upgrade or even use your vigors up to that point.

On top of the gameplay feeling much less engaging than the first two BioShock games, BioShock Infinite was a complete disaster from a storytelling perspective. The most egregiously stupid point that this game tries to make would be its attempts at making slavery and segregation seem double-sided, and that concept should be self-explanatory in how ignorant and irresponsible it is. Everything that the story tried to do involving timelines and "tears" just ends up making it feel even more bloated and incompetently told than it already was, and that especially includes the moronic ending that essentially exists to make Ken Levine feel really smart. I had zero fun with BioShock Infinite, and I find it really funny how the only real legacy that this game has would be how its fanmade porn apparently caused breakthroughs in 3D animation.

I downloaded Borderlands 2 back in June of 2019 after it became one of that month's free PSN games, as I always heard that it was fun to play with friends. After noticing that it was in my backlog years later, I asked my friend if he wanted to go back and beat Borderlands 2 with me, but because 2K Games apparently hates it when two people want to play the same game on different consoles by making it a nightmare to set everything up, I decided to beat the game on my own. This process took well over a year, and that is entirely due to just how unfun Borderlands 2 was for me to play.

Before I go ahead with why I hated this game so much, I just want to address the whole sentiment that this game is more fun with multiple players, because you can apply that to pretty much every game ever made. Playing with friends is fun by default, regardless of what game it is, so me playing the game alone doesn't excuse how bad Borderlands 2 is. Anyway, I hated pretty much everything about this game that other people seemed to love, and one of these would be the gameplay loop itself. Wandering around empty areas and shooting endless amounts of bullet sponge enemies that take forever to kill made this game feel like a chore the whole way through, and the enemies themselves aren't placed with any sort of purpose or intricacy whatsoever. One of the main selling points of the Borderlands series is how no two weapons are the same, and while it is interesting to have your loadout constantly change throughout each playthrough, the dependence on RNG made almost every weapon that I earned feel obsolete when compared to what I had already found.

If the game was just unfun to play, then I would've just dismissed Borderlands 2 as a boring looter shooter, but what makes this game a complete disaster for me is its writing. No character in this game ever shuts up, and the game's sense of humor reeks of 2012 internet culture with how loud and obnoxious it is. When I wasn't bored by the gameplay, I was annoyed by the dialogue, and I couldn't stand hearing these characters constantly run their mouths before I had even reached the halfway mark. Not only that, but this constant barrage of annoying nonsense is used to tell a boring story that somehow expects you to care for its one-dimensional characters, which was flat out impossible for me to do because of how aggravating they all were. It doesn't help that this game is coated in an ugly artstyle that looks like a bad mishmash of Mad Max and a comic book that was written and illustrated by a 13 year old. I will admit that the music wasn't that bad, although that isn't to say that it wasn't generic. For me, Borderlands 2 was zero fun to play, and I don't think I ever want to play another game from this series ever again.

The opening few hours of Inscryption are legitimately fantastic. I always liked a lot of what was going on in Slay the Spire but that game is dragged down so much by its incredibly bland aesthetic that just makes me think back to playing Flash games on Newgrounds as a teenager. Inscryption takes that deckbuilder core, adds a really cool, evocative spin on it with the sacrifice mechanic, but most importantly nestles this within a deeply unsettling, intense aesthetic that really sells the whole experience on its own. There are a couple moments that didn't land perfectly for me in these opening few hours, but overall I was very excited to see where the game would head.

I'm not going to spoil any actual story content from this point, but I will be talking about mid and late-game gameplay mechanics changes. I think there are people who will be suitably put off from the whole experience once they know the direction these mechanical changes head in and may value getting to read about these ahead of time, but if knowing anything about the direction the game's mechanics head in is going to upset you then stop reading now.

At the end of these first few hours of the game Inscryption's gameplay becomes markedly worse. It turns into a trading card game, as opposed to the first section's deck-builder nature, a genre that is just a lot harder to make actually work. A part of the problem is that the sheer elegance of the game's original mechanics is hurled to the wayside as it becomes bogged down under the weight of a bunch of new mechanics, whilst constantly tuning and retuning your deck from a vast pool of cards makes for an unbelievably worse gameplay loop than what came beforehand. Arguably an even bigger part of the problem is that the aesthetic is just so much less compelling in this second part too, and the aesthetic was so much of what sold the first part of the game. Taken outside of the context of existing inside a larger whole this second part of the game is something I would consider at absolute best mediocre, and would be upset to have spent money on had something like this been expanded into a full game.

Another major mechanical shift comes later on, and this third part of the game returns to something closer to where the game was originally at. It lacks much of the earlier tension and magic, and the aesthetic is much worse too, but it acts as a fine enough diversion and has a few genuinely very enjoyable moments.

So there's one outright great section, one just barely passable section, and one third that is decent enough. So why am I not higher on the game, does this first act being so impressive not justify the latter mediocrity? A part of the problem is how disappointing the whole affair ends up being, never fully living up to the promise it shows early on. A bigger part of the problem though is what I gather is very much Daniel Mullins' schtick.

Inscryption has a lot of meta content that takes an increasingly larger presence on the game's stage. I knew this going in, as I'm sure anyone familiar with Mullins' name would be, and was curious to see it all in action. Whilst there are certainly some cute, enjoyable moments to it, especially early on in the game, so much of the meta content in this game is just shocking and weird for the sake of being shocking and weird, rather than having any actual substance to it. The whole experience just felt very hollow to me, and at its very worst the game can feel anywhere from scattered and unfocused to actually just downright childish.

It's just so frustrating because there's something wonderful in that early part of the game, and then it goes and turns into this.

This game was incredibly frustrating to play. From the cast and pedigree of Annapurna Interactive, which I fared well with trusting blindly until this point, I went into this expecting a highly condensed, super polished experience.

This game is not that, it is incredibly janky, stiff and annoying to control. It puts tons of remarkable emphasis on the reactivity achievable in this limited scope - having to keep in mind where someone can hear you talk, where someone is standing at certain times or other minor details - ultimately, though this stuff boils down to a very limited interaction space and even in this limited scope the game can't keep up with the reactivity required to fully immerse the player. Dialogue options persist throughout the game even when the player's and character's knowledge change, reframing the context of the option, which leads to bizarre tonal whiplash and potentially ruins a cycle that required annoying, tedious preperations you have speedran through for the fifth time in a row to try out one minor change.

The mystery and ultimate narrative package as a whole is what kept from dropping the score lower, because having seen it through, the threads it lays throughout the experience are well crafted to keep you entertained for the duration of the game and while the execution wasn't perfect or even great most of the time, it came together in the end in a way I did not see coming, leaving well crafted room for interpretations.

some spoilers below, which im not tagging because i don't care about them and neither should you, but if having the game spoiled will turn you away from playing it, then i have done you a favor, and you're very welcome.

here's the positive stuff: willem dafoe does a pretty good job here, and the other actors are overall decent. their talents are utterly wasted here, and there are many line reads that land awkwardly, but overall it's fine. that's the absolute best thing i have to say about this mess.

playing this game is a slog. there are a lot of frustrating moments where you know what you need to do, you've uncovered the information, but it turns out you needed to click on an item three more times for your character to piece it together properly (literally), and then go use the info elsewhere.

i could forgive some of that frustration if the story was interesting, but aside from going "ah, that's fucked up" when you figure out the main twist, the rest of it falls flat, and it only goes downhill afterwards. and no, i wouldn't call it ambitious. it's cliche-ridden, masturbatory, and derivative.

none of it is given any sense of metaphorical gravity, and the story told is pretty heinous, not because the unnecessary trauma porn simply exists, but because the trauma porn serves no purpose that justifies its presence, nor is the quality of writing enough to redeem the experience in general.

drugging your pregnant sister/wife repeatedly is a critical path requirement. watching her get killed while you hide in a closet is a critical path requirement. torturing a man is a critical path requirement. gruesomely murdering your pregnant sister/wife with a kitchen knife is optional, but available if you feel like doing that for no reason (and you might be likely to try it if you don't yield to a walkthrough and go into "use everything on everything else" mode).

all of this could be used effectively by a more skilled writer. i'm not the kind of person to say story beats are inherently off-limits in art. but if you're gonna come packing, you better be able to justify going there. this clearly isn't a shock value trolling game, they're trying to make film major/psych minor bullshit, but you don't get a pass just because you threw a Kubrick reference on the carpet. you know why we still watch Kubrick films even knowing he was a huge piece of shit? because they're good movies. you gotta earn it. oh, the fucking paintings change over time? ooooh, does that get used anywhere? no? fuck off.

the gameplay and design are bad, the story and writing are bad, this is just a failure on all fronts.

i bought it on steam, but i know its also on gamepass, if you have that. that said, i'd skip this mess entirely, even if you can play it for free. if you want compelling and profound art from a small team in which you know a man is coming to kill you, go play adios instead. if you want a time loop game where the time loop is a worthwhile mechanic, go play outer wilds or majora's mask instead. all three of those games are masterpieces, especially compared to this garbage.

Unlike my other reviews, I don't have any story to tell about how I found out about Shadow of the Colossus, aside from just generally knowing that it is a game that is known for great boss battles and terrible controls. That's all I was expecting when I first booted up the game, but what I got was so much more than that.

Right off the bat, one of the most notable things about Shadow of the Colossus is its one-of-a-kind atmosphere. The gorgeous visuals and music make playing the game and traversing the decaying landscapes feel melancholic and beautiful, along with a sense of scale that simultaneously feels small and grandiose. That sense of melancholic beauty is also carried over to the terrific boss battles, as their unique design (Both visually speaking and mechanically speaking) makes fighting them feel fun while also making you feel sorry for killing off the only life that is left in this world. I was surprised with just how well Shadow of the Colossus managed to tell its story, as it threw a lot of great emotional punches while never feeling stagnant or losing its steam.

A lot of people have mentioned how terrible the controls are, and while they are undeniably janky and occasionally frustrating, it didn't detract from my experience with the game very much. If anything, it added to the satisfaction of beating the colossi and having a sense of mastery over the controls by the end of the game, at least for me. Overall, Shadow of the Colossus was a phenomenal and wholly unique game, and I'm now even more excited to eventually play Ico thanks to it.

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