16 reviews liked by GlutenFreeGuy


Honestly speaking the cards were stacked against Yakuza even before I started, I don't like cutscene heavy games and I don't like Beat em Ups. So the fact that I came out of this game really liking it speaks to it's strength, the game's story building up to it's climax is incredibly engaging. Giving us reveals in a well paced manner while having some of the incredibly entertaining and well written characters in insane situations.

The combat was also fun I could button mash my way to victory a lot of the time but the heat actions and animations look and sound great and is incredibly fun to pull off.

The subquests are also great , weird and almost always hilarious. Randomly coming across them is always a treat.

I am not really a fan of the minigames though or the Cabaret or Real Estate side stories, they feel kinda tedious and time consuming to do.

The game also stumbles at the ending, with constant cutscenes and enemy encounters that were straight up tedious and unfun, the bosses somewhat made up for it but the fact that I had to go through an Hour long cutscene at the end also soured me on the ending a bit cause I also have some problems with it's story.

Overall though this game is great I put over 60 Hours in it and I had something fun to do throughout it's runtime and the story was engaging from the start.

Really funny dialogue, if you're worried its going to be a "meta" visual novel, don't be. It plays it straight for the most part and just happens to have an anime artstyle despite just being set in an american highschool.

Omori

2020

Stop me if you've heard this one before

We're gonna make an rpg. It's gonna be made in rpg maker. It's gonna be needlessly quirky and random, there's gonna be a jarring about face turn with attempts at drama that fall flat, Non characters will populate the story, and its climax will rip off a much better game that you'd rather be playing

Sound familiar? Welcome to indie rpgs of the last decade

If Dark Souls 2 has a million haters, then I am one of them. If Dark Souls 2 has ten haters, then I am one of them. If Dark Souls 2 has only one hater then that is me. If Dark Souls 2 has no haters, then that means I am no longer on earth. If the world is with Dark Souls 2, then I am against the world.

This game doesn't deserve to be called Baldur's Gate.

It's not a bad game as such, but it comes up short.

There's plenty of positive things to say about this game: The gameplay and combat is pretty good throughout more or less emulating 5e D&D combat with some changes, the game is pretty nice looking and the production values are generally high even if the over-the-top high fantasy aesthetics don't appeal to me personally. There's some good performances in the game as well and it's very impressive that the game is fully voiced (other than your PC in dialogue, which I don't count against the game). Overall the game is impressively ambitious. Some of these things are something of a double edged sword though, more on that later.

So, while most of my negatives will be very much up to taste, it is undeniable that the game is unfinished. The entire game is janky in every aspect of the game, but the further into the game you go, the rougher it gets. Then it almost completely falls apart toward the end. Performance takes a huge hit, weird glitches and bugs start appearing (both visual and gameplay), quests start breaking, dialogue scenes start breaking, enemies see you through walls, people start conversations with you from a mile away. It's really bad.
Your choices end up having very little impact in the end. Especially one persistent, very foreshadowed choice that you choose to do or not do throughout the game, ends up seemingly making no difference at all. Toward the end NPC interactivity drops significantly, wherein almost every NPC becomes an animatronic puppets barking single lines of dialogue, where you cannot interact with them, like you would in any other CRPG. It feels like companions stop participating in the story almost altogether, sans their personal questlines. Some of this is present before the final act as well, but toward the end is where it becomes very jarring. This is part of the aforementioned double edged sword for wanting to voice and animate all dialogue in the game.
It also feels like they cut an entire area out of the final act, an area for which you can see an entrance but can never access. That is fair I suppose, as they didn't manage to populate even what they had with meaningful content, I wouldn't want to see it spread out even further.

But then there's other CRPGs I've loved even though they've had lackluster or unfinished final acts, such as Tyranny. So what are the other problems?

I said that the gameplay is pretty good, but it has its own share of problems. In tabletop D&D 5e, the DM should be careful about making their combat scenarios too large, because the system scales pretty poorly and becomes a slog. Same is true here, and Larian was not careful about scaling their combats. There are many mass combats with way too many participants that end up being such tedious drudgery. It becomes more tedious when the game has its characteristic slowdowns where enemies just stand there for 30 seconds before apparently succumbing to analysis paralysis and skipping their turn. This game is so janky.
Then when it is your turn, you'll have to contend with some very bad user interface and user experience. Targeting your spells becomes maddening when the AoE indicator keeps wiggling and flickering around. Good luck not hitting your allies.
Sometimes the game just kind of freezes for about 5 seconds just to figure out what's going on. Sometimes the game will tell you, you have a 100% chance of hitting... and then you miss 3 times in a row. What?

Then there's the jank of party control, or more accurately lack of control. It's fine most of the time, except when you present me with areas with traps and hazards which are triggered by characters stepping on them, and then have my party step on everything without my say-so. Not to speak of when a party member just decides to stop following you for some reason. Where's Shadowheart again? Oh, she's on the other side of the map standing in front of a chest high wall every other companion jumped on top of no problem. This game is SO janky.
In general the quality of life and usability features of this game are very lacking. Inventory management and looting especially is a bane for the entire game.

I really don't like the camping system. You're just whisked away into a pocket dimension in an instant, a place that is always safe regardless if your camp is in the middle of a dangerous dungeon. No watches, no wandering encounters, no meaningful consideration for resources or safety. This may not be a big deal to many, for me this hurts the immersion of feeling like this is an adventure. For reference, if you want to see this kind of system done right, play Kingmaker. In fact, my general advice is to play Kingmaker instead of this regardless.

Then there's the writing, which is what I think truly makes this game unworthy of having the name "Baldur's Gate". It manages to be kind of entertainingly cartoony at best, and pretty bad at worst. The companions are a very mixed bag with middling highs and steep lows. So many of them have a kind of a "coolest guy ever" syndrome going on, where they have these incredibly over-the-top grandiose backstories. We're level 1 or 2, and my companions are formerly paramours of gods, right hands of an archdevil and the most notorious warlock-batman of the whole region. It's ridiculous, and so lame. There's a couple exceptions, though. Astarion and Shadowheart turned out to be ok as characters.
Oh and everyone wants to have sex with you, for some reason? I think Larian imagines that the end goal of any positive human relationship is to have sex. It gets even worse when all sorts of otherwordly being start wanting to bonk you as well. It's embarrassing, and juvenile.
The story and writing generally runs the gamut from tropey and shallow, to childishly melodramatic. Plenty of ironic detachment, Marvel-style smug quips, squeecore, and scenes where it feels like you're a receptacle for exposition rather than a character. If you're looking for something with depth, maturity, interesting character dynamics, or complexity you won't find it here. I think pretty early on there was a villain who wanted to kill a kid without a good reason other than she was just that bad? You won't find a character like Jon Irenicus in this game, I'm afraid.
Oh and the humor. I was afraid of seeing Larian -style wacky humor, and Larian provided. Comedy is probably more subjective than most other types of writing, but man the sort of 2010s style random internet humor stuff doesn't work for me at all
I'm not pretending that BG 1 or 2 were perfectly written. Both had their quirks and clichés, but it was much more nuanced and complex than this, especially for its time.
What the other Baldur's Gate games did much better as well, was portray a world and place with a reasonable degree of verisimilitude. You felt like a character inhabiting a place in the world. BG3 feels more like walking around a high-fantasy theme park. It seems like Larian really favors having big open maps where everything in the current section in the world is present seamlessly, but it makes plot points like "None of our scouts can find this place that's next door 5 minute walk away from here" feel really ridiculous.

I feel like this property was given to the wrong hands, or maybe shouldn't have been given to anyone at all. The game is fun, and impressive in many ways. However, Baldur's Gate deserved better than a 'just okay' CRPG with a big budget, low artistic ambitions, and all-encompassing jank.

This review contains spoilers

Ah, Alien Isolation I wanted to love you but you wouldn’t let me.


Being hunted by a predator, through the width of an unknown and hostile space station, where the only way to progress is to come out and enter the very area it stalks makes for one hell of a horror game sell. Especially since I have heard for years how intelligent the Alien in this game was.

I was one of the rare existence who played the game before watching the movie(s) , but I didn’t finish it back then, I didn’t even make it past the first quarter of the game at that time, I didn’t drop it for any particular reason, just got distracted by something else.

But this time I was ready, watched Alien and Aliens to prepare, (Alien is pretty great) and now with enough context and excitement I headed in again.

Games dont really need to look better than this

The game started and I was hooked, the Nostromo-like ship I was in at the start I just loved looking around it. It was the ship I just saw in the movie, the game does a fantastic job of translating the movie’s feel into the game itself. Even after landing on the Sevastopol Station , the game did a great job of expanding on the already fantastic aesthetics of the movie. CRT’s everywhere and all the tech has a solid, cube like look to it, with blinking lights everywhere, 80s vision of the future. They had access to the original art for the movie and made something amazing out of it, the art direction is both unique and having such a strong backbone for the graphics and being technically one of the best looking if not the best looking game of its time means this game has aged phenomenally well visuals wise. The station feels like it's active and has been active, the smoke coming out of the pipes, something in the station is always in motion, no part of the station lacks detail, even in the lockers to hide in, there’s variety in what you find stuck inside the locker wall. The lighting that moves between clinical looking hospital like and the yellow hue of the star. The effects are another part of the game that stands out to me, the thick smoke, the fire, and even the dust particles moving around inside this station is what completes Alien Isolation’s visuals. Moving through the numerous dark corridors and hallways of the stations as the light of my flamethrower turns the environment, a shade of orange I thought “ Do games really need to look better than this ?” . I mean the game does use some tricks, turning off all the post processing can show the game’s age a bit, it uses both film grain and chromatic aberration heavily, but why would you when it’s so tastefully implemented. The game uses a lot of fog everywhere dunno if it's a thing to hide rendering or just a choice on the designer’s part and its Anti Aliasing is kinda awful and these 2 are the only technical complaints I have about it.

The real shortcomings in this department are 2 things, the human characters aren’t that well done, not bad for their time but definitely not on par with the rest, there is a stiffness with the character animation, poor lip syncing and animations.

But that’s not my main problem with the visuals, that would be the lack of variety, after a point the environments of the game started to blend together for me, they didn’t really switch it up with different styles to different floors, I mean it does have variety but that comes too late in the game, when you have already backtracked through the station once.

Sevastapol is never quiet

But the sound design, that’s one thing that never got old, the station is always filled with sounds of machinery and the systems running, every area is filled with hum and buzz. And when there are weird noises around you it's hard to tell if it’s because the Alien’s nearby or because this station is falling apart. Everything has a nice tactile feel to it, the machines work loudly which makes the interactions both satisfying and nerve wracking as you know the alien will hear the sound and come to investigate. The sound effects are layered and immersive and the music reminds me of the movie in bits and builds up tension in other parts but never overtakes ambience. It can get scary enough in the right conditions that I hid even when there was no actual threat present in the area.

The enemies both the Alien and the Androids, always kept me on edge, and a lot of it was due to the sounds they made. The Androids also look creepy as fuck.

The station was already fucked, the Alien was still the worst thing that could happen to it

The overall atmosphere is enhanced by everything surrounding the presentation, Sevstapol and Seegson are no Weyland Yutani, with constant cost management and corner cuttings, they are much less the inhumane evil of Weyland Yutani, but when shit goes fucky there’s a more mundane reason to it all, it's clear humans are working on this ship, greedy humans always looking to one up one another but humans nonetheless. But this has caused the ship which was already in an awful condition before the arrival of the Alien to become hostile even without its presence, the humans have formed groups attacking and warning anyone they see, everyone is on edge. The androids which have some awful programming due to the mentioned cost cutting are quick to attack humans due to just about anything, a problem known much before the alien threat materialized. Things were so bad the whole station was decommissioned days before we arrive.

Too long, Too one note

But I will stop my praise there. By the time I was done with the game I was exhausted, annoyed and bored with the game. This game is too frustratingly linear progression wise and lacking in depth gameplay wise to carry a game for this long. For exactly half of the game I kept thinking “I should be near the end now”, let's get the Alien praise out of the way, the AI of the Alien is great for a large part of the game I was always on edge thinking where the Alien could be, its erratic way of moving around the areas, its patience in sniffing out it’s Prey, and the way it tries to fool the player into thinking its leaving before jumping back down, all of its activities , its heightened senses and its ability to learn makes this a game of nerves and outwitting the opponent.

There’s basically nothing to interact with in the environment that won't progress the story, yes there are vents and and some panels controlling minor parts of the environment. But that’s it you can't turn off lights, you can’t hack anything the environment to work differently, pick up and throw items, move anything in the levels, or even fucking jump. Sneaking around in locations already decided for you, for over two dozen hours got boring in less than half that time, also the Alien being that hard of an opponent while being great at the start slowly got annoying. While hiding in a locker you can't do anything, if I could check the map, listen to voices or anything that would have made parts of the game significantly less dull. As the game went on I got more and more frustrated with this awful shallow stealth system and as my frustration grew I got caught by the Alien more and more and I wasn't scared of the Alien any longer, only annoyed at losing a few minutes of progress and then the game went on for several hours more. And when this game loses its ability to scare it loses its gameplay hook.

The gameplay loop is simple and the only thing separating it from being a chore is the fear of the Alien lurking (and the tactile feel of working the machinery do be kinda satisfying), explore, hide, do minigames and qte’s for 25 Hours while nothing happens to shake up the gameplay vast majority of the time, like new more fun things are there in later parts, combat and more enemies different environments but its too little too late.

The robots are creepy for a bit but they are even less engaging than the Alien, and even when they felt like a breath of fresh air after so many Alien encounters, but even this section went on for too long.

This might be the single worst paced game I have completed, it's almost twice as long as it needs to be and there’s multiple sections of this game that I thought the game would be better off just getting rid of.

And the story itself takes all the way to the last parts of the game to get going fully which is a shame cause I actually like it a lot, I feel like MArlow the game’s antagonist is a really well written character, the whole thing is well written but stretched too thin.

There’s a good well paced game in here somewhere, that game is not this, it's always disappointing to see a game that has so much going for it just completely fail at parts to the point of getting in the way of what is clearly good about it. Its a marvel that Alien Isolation exists, I will never give this game the time of day ever again.



A masterpiece of action roguelikes, for the simple reason that the moment to moment gameplay loop is so fast paced, satisfying, and engaging that I can endlessly replay it and have fun far past when I would be bored by any other I've played. It's a blood pumping continuous fight of using just two weapons, an active ability, and a build of passive bonuses of your choosing to blast your way through crowds of enemies that have their own threats and unique ways you need to approach them. You can die in half a second ending your run from a single mistake, a momentary lapse in concentration, but that threat only makes it more rewarding when you weave, aim, and use your abilities to their fullest to squeeze through deadly encounter after deadly encounter by the skin of your teeth. The random elements are relatively minimal for a roguelike, keeping some run variety, but everything is secondary to your reflexes and quick wits. I'm far from a very skilled player at these kinds of games, but the difficulty curve naturally built me up to being able to regularly feel exhilarated and in awe of my own abilities.

A challenge can be anything that’s difficult to achieve, but to be challenged, in the sense of being called to action, carries a much more complicated set of implications. The most distinct is a sense of inescapability, that there are no alternatives but to rise and give your best within a certain set of limitations. The difference between the two is core to what I found lacking in Elden Ring, but it’s also what I think lies at the center of the game’s unprecedented appeal. In a game like Dark Souls, you could find yourself at the bottom of Blighttown with no way to easily boost your weapons, no way to upgrade your flask, no way to try a different weapon, nothing, you had to either press onwards, or do what no player wants to do, climb back out and redo the whole thing when more prepared. For lack of a better term, it was a challenge in both the intransitive and transitive senses; it was difficult, and it also confronted players with that sense of inescapability. Elden Ring’s wide open world with unimpeded access to weapon upgrades, weapon arts, summons, physick flasks, alternative progression paths, and so much more means that the only time the game presents an active challenge is an hour from the end, in the final couple bosses. The rest of the game is a wide open space where you can always go where you’re prepared, and snowball without pressure. The Souls games always let players do this to some extent, but the ease with which this can be achieved in Elden Ring is its unique selling point, and thus why I think it’s so appealing to newcomers. An open space dotted with intransitive challenges allows players of all skill levels to enjoy themselves in the way they want to, and never hit any brick walls. For me though, the most memorable parts of the series were the times like Blighttown and the drop into Anor Londo, when I knew that my only real choice was to press onwards against all odds. Elden Ring is clearly an artistically ambitious game, and I can applaud and respect it for that, but now that I’ve finished it, I’m left without any similar moments to remember. I’ll certainly recall playing it, but that's a lot different from an experience hoping “to be remembered”.

you've heard of peak fiction now get ready for nadir fiction

Nocticula: gaslights, gatekeeps, girlboss
My Azata Protag: haha slay queen!
Ember: nonono, don't gaslight and gatekeep, only girlboss
Protag: hmmmm, maybe she's right.
Nocticula: hahaha, get out of here you stupid child
Ember and Protag leave
Nocticula: hmmmm, maybe she's right.