Getting a bias check out of the way: I've personally met and am friends with one of the creators, and my name is featured in the game as an egg. Try to find me!

This is, to my knowledge, the first ROM hack of a Spyro game. As a result, it's inherently limited by how little we know about manipulating the game. The level geometry is all the same - only textures could be changed - and the creation of new things like eggs, songs, or enemies was extremely limited (generally things had to just be moved from other places, or replaced in the files.

Considering these limitations, 3.5 went well beyond what you would expect before playing. The goals in each level are fundamentally different than in the base game, and no matter how many times you've played the original you will truly have no clue what to expect in this one. It's not just "Spyro but hard", and it's not just a wacky twist, it is genuinely worthy of being considered its own experience and continues to iterate on itself in new and interesting ways. In other words, the gameplay loop is that of an actual release, not of a fan mod.

One of my worries, in being a game created by speedrunners for speedrunners, was the barrier to entry. Everything leading up to the release of the game indicated to me that it would be a celebration of the tech explored over years by people like us, and as exciting as that was I worried about the inherent limitations of such a tight scope. I knew I would be able to beat it, because I'm the target audience, but creating a full game for the sake of something like 100 people feels like a waste, and so if your average person was excluded then I would be upset.

As I played, I found that the game does a surprisingly good job of teaching the player exactly what needs to be done. In playing Spyro 3.5, you'll become a good Spyro 3 runner. I would be shocked if anyone quit the game due to its difficulty, despite being much harder than the original, because you are taught extremely effectively by the NPCs, or even better, you're shown what to do and will instinctively do it, only to find that you just learned a speedrunning trick that you can then go back to Spyro 3 and try out.

This isn't to say it's just a speedrun thing, either, to be clear. If you've watched a speedrun of this game, you'll definitely find references, and the fastest way to do something may in some bases become the required way. But far more often, you'll have to do something entirely unrelated. Even more often, you'll have to do something that isn't even possible in the original game. Either way, don't expect this to be a rehash of something you've already seen no matter who you are or how experienced you are with Spyro 3.

I'm trying really hard not to mention some of my favorite moments here, because the last thing I want to do is take away from the jaw-dropping experience of seeing them for the first time. I really do mean it when I say you can't predict what's in this until you play it. If you have the slightest bit of nostalgia for the original Spyro games, give this a shot.

Watch my full playthrough here: https://www.twitch.tv/collections/6GsT_xL-cBeREA

This game is so difficult to rank, because it's so many things at once. It's one of the worst examples of microtransactions in gaming, and an embarrassment to Tecmo. It's one of the best fighting games on Steam, and yet also one of the worst in its series. It directly opposes everything its fans wanted in a desperate attempt at mass appeal and esports contention, both of which it failed miserably at. Despite all of this, I love it. I can't help it! Maybe I have bad taste! But the gameplay flows so well, the new systems feel like they should've been there all along, the free-to-play model is one of the best in gaming and allows you to figure out exactly what you want from it and spend as little as possible to get there (I played the single player with a few characters, found my main, and bought her for $4 so I could use her online, then never spent another penny). This game is such a mess, and truly did deserve to flop, but it's also one of the most enjoyable experiences in fighting games. I don't know how, and I'll never truly be able to put it into words.

I've done so many playthroughs of this game I've lost track, none of which have actually completed the main storyline, and yet I feel like I've beat it so many times because there's so much to do. I've finished pretty much every other questline there is, because every time I play I genuinely feel like being a different person.

It's so interesting to me that I've never once cared about being the Dragonborn. The game completely fails to establish its stakes, making you feel less like a hero obligated to save the world and more like some guy. To be honest, this is to the game's benefit. Rather than railroading you into what it wants, a story that may not actually interest you, it opens up extremely early. As soon as you're told to head to Whiterun, you're let loose. If you're the type of person to blindly follow direction, you'll do it, and the main questline begins. If you're like me, you'll never hear about it again.

This is the sort of game that only gets worse as time goes on and you age out of it. I used to think it was a 5/5, by now I think it's a 4, one day I might even consider it a 3. The pessimism comes from an era where Bethesda has been exposed as a company that refuses to evolve and can't stop making more games like this. All of the flaws of Skyrim continue to get worse and worse in future releases, and all it does it hurt the reputation of their past catalog. It doesn't ruin Skyrim, but it makes it extremely difficult to justify the "masterpiece" title it used to carry uncontested.

A lot of the good will I have for this game is its association with Castle Crashers. The humor lands exactly as well (which is to say, only because you remember when you found it funny and the nostalgia hits), the artstyle is just as charming. But the game isn't as good. That's not to say it's not good! The puzzles are clever, and the rules are just tight enough that the pressure is always on without feeling unwieldy. But every time I play this, I just can't help but think about its older brother.

The biggest disappointment of 2022. I was so excited for this game, and every moment that actually let you play a video game was some of the most fun I've had in a long time. Which is exactly why it pains me so much to give it 1.5 stars. This is a game that actively does not want you to play it, and that stops at every opportunity it can to not be a game about playing as a cat. If you're enjoying the platforming, don't get used to it, because you have about 3 minutes until you get stopped by a robot who spouts exposition at you and tells you to go fetch a bottle of soap or whatever in a city with nothing interesting. A half hour later, you leave and you're playing through some of the best platforming of the decade, but whoops! It's been 4 minutes, and now you're in another city, and it's time to listen to a conversation you don't care about so you can be told to go do nothing somewhere else. I cannot believe this game received so much praise; do people solely remember the peaks and forget the painful, painful valleys?

Someone PLEASE make a game exactly like this but with just the platforming-as-a-cat parts. It would be the game of the decade.

See my full playthrough here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1547848602

I do think this game gets a lot more praise than it deserves, but I try not to let that cloud my judgment of what is a very good game. You care way more than I expected about characters that you see for no more than 5 minutes. The stakes feel real and continue to rise as time goes on. You want to win, not because it's a game but because you want to help people and to live another day. It usually takes so much longer for a game to build that relationship with the player, but here I already felt that way about a half hour in.

I was shocked at how well the solutions came together. The concept of the game immediately worried me as the type that would fall prey to feeling like you have a correct solution that isn't working because the game wasn't smart enough. This never once happened to me. Every time the game told me something didn't work, it made sense, and every time I reached a good solution it rewarded me. If anything, my only complaint is that it went by a little too quickly. Very few levels actually stumped me, which if anything speaks to how well-made the puzzles were, because it's not like they were overly simple. I do think it should've been much longer, even for the price tag, but what's here is solid.