This may have been the first RPGMaker horror game I ever played -- I can't remember if it was Ib or Corpse Party I experienced first -- and it's still one of my favourites.

I haven't played it in a good few years, and I plan to play the remake once I get around to it, so this is based entirely on my memory of the original. The atmosphere was amazing -- I'm not sure why 'horror set in an art gallery' isn't more commonly utilised, because Ib shows that it can be perfectly terrifying. The use of art to drive along the horror aspects as well as the emotional beats was great, and certain words in books being illegible if you're playing as Ib because she's too young to understand them vs. being able to read them if you go back as Garry (which can lead to some twists and reveals).

Great characters, and Garry is still a favourite for me years later. Now that I think about it, I turned out uncomfortably like this guy. Maybe this game influenced my brain more than I suspect.

The briefest glance at my profile means you could probably have predicted how this rating was going to go, but I'll get into it anyway.

This game was probably the single most influential childhood game for me, and the amount of nostalgia I have surrounding it (and the series in general) is incredible. I played this countless times as a kid, as a teenager, and now as an adult - I go back to it every few years and love it just the same as I did back then. It's one of those worlds that transports you right back to the mindset you were in when you first experienced it, and it's one of the few games that genuinely has never gotten old for me.

The atmosphere, the setting, the characters, the music, the combat, the morality system, the gameplay... it's all perfect for me. Could have been catered to me specifically. I love the secrets, the dumb little golden breadcrumb trail, my dog companion, the town crier lines. Just recently I played through this again with my fiancee and it made me realise just how much of this game has wound itself into my inside jokes, my consciousness, my memory. Play the first five seconds of any soundtrack and I'll still know what it is; quote any character's lines and I'll still know who said it; name any location and I'll still be able to tell you how to get there. When someone asks me what my favourite game of all-time is, or for a game that encapsulates me as a person, Fable II is always my answer (occasionally listed alongside The Wolf Among Us).

Favourite Male Character: Reaver
Favourite Female Character: Rose
First Character I Liked: Rose
Favourite Character Design: Garth
Favourite Moment: There are so many I could list, but I'll say either finally escaping the Spire or getting the letter from Rose in the Love/Family ending
Favourite OST: Bowerlake, Oakfield
Least Favourite Character: None

This probably isn't the kind of game you expect to have sentimental significance to people, but it does for me, so I'm going to get that out of the way and then focus on the more objective stuff.

So I was in an abusive relationship throughout 2021-2022. I won't get into the details, but it was pretty extreme, and included controlling who I could speak to/the friendships I could have, for how long I could be with them, and so on. I was very trauma-bonded to this person - I could not see how bad it was. I knew I was miserable, I knew it was abusive, but I was making excuses and I couldn't bring myself to leave or even to stand up for myself.

I was finally 'allowed' to have a game night with my best friend for an hour, and on that game night we played Golf With Your Friends. It was the first time we'd played (though we'd both seen YouTubers play it before), and we started off with the Forest map - and it was the hardest I'd laughed since my relationship began. Tears in my eyes, hysterics, non-stop laughing. I later found out that my mother had been outside my bedroom door listening, because she hadn't heard me laugh in so long.

That was one of the first steps in realising I had to get out, and the best friend I played with that night is now my fiancee.

Less heavily, this has been the background game for so many good conversations with my friend groups. It's always so much fun - often people will be reluctant to try it because, well, 'Golf With Your Friends' doesn't sound like a very appealing and exciting game on the surface to most of them, but once we're in it everyone is yelling and laughing and asking me when we can play it again.

The official courses are pretty good and have a decent amount of variety, but once you're done with them the real fun is in the custom/Steam Workshop courses. Sort by popular/most liked, check the comments to make sure there are no glitches that might prevent you from finishing, and go wild. There are some genuinely creative gems in there.

I've played other golf games, and this one has my favourite controls and general graphics. They're pretty smooth and easy to get accustomed to in my experience, and I very rarely, if ever, got frustrated with the game for making me fuck up as a result of a glitch or bad gameplay - any errors I make are entirely my own.

The customisation is cool - loved the cosmetics you can unlock for finishing courses, and my ball is now rolling around with a halo and angel wings. I also enjoy my little swan-boat float.

It's been a year since I played this so this will be a mini-review because I don't remember it all too well, but maybe that says something in itself - I usually need a lot longer than a year to forget this many details about a game.

I do remember finding Somerville absolutely gorgeous. It had sincerely emotional points, it did an excellent job of creating character motivation and feeling purely through non-verbal cues and visuals, and there are some truly interesting ideas and concepts scattered throughout. I think people are too harsh on this game, but I did find the ending underwhelming, though I liked the lead-up to it - the best way to describe it would be that it felt like you were doing something huge and wonderful and impressive, but then nothing much happened afterwards.

It's a decent game with good moments that wants to be great.

Also, let me pet the dog.

What a weird-ass game. Absolutely riddled with bugs and glitches (I really thought people were exaggerating about that... nuh uh), makes decisions that retroactively fuck with the timeline and events of previous games, they completely dropped the 'animatronics are possessed by murdered children' concept and seemingly went the route of 'animatronics are actual sentient beings' weirdness, and it's just not scary. I mean, FNAF isn't generally scary aside from in the literal jumpscares sense, but this one felt very sanitised and for-kids in a way the others didn't.

The whole Vanessa/Vanny thing was so bizarre and badly explained, especially the whole "Gasp! Vanny... like Vanessa! And Bunny! But gasp! Now there's two of them in this ending!" shebang. The fact that the endings were just a slideshow of half-drawn images was so ridiculously funny to me, like they didn't even bother to finish the climax of the damn game and just left their imageboards from the planning stage in. Did anyone keep a straight face when that popped up for the first time?

As for positives, let's see. I think the general idea had potential - I actually really dug the intro at the beginning with the concert and the sabotage/hack interrupting it. The colours and settings of the game were pretty great - not sure I like them in FNAF, but I like them (the bright lights, the funplex, the minigames, the vibrant face paint) in general.

I'll also admit that Moon section had me tense.

Massive childhood nostalgia game.

In my primary school (that's elementary for you Americans, ages 4-11), there was something called the After School Club where you'd all hang out in this room if your parents were working and couldn't pick you up for a few hours. Had biscuits, juice, gaming consoles, toys, a garden, all that shit. They eventually got a Wii, and Mario Party 8 was the absolute shit. Kids were crowding around to play this together while others watched; we were only allowed to have 20 minute intervals per group so everyone could get a turn, and I remember stretching the games out as much as possible so I could use the excuse of "Just let us finish this game!" and keep on playing.

Upon remembering this game as an adult, I ended up going out and buying a Wii just for this - and it really is as fun as I remember it being. It's janky in the typical Wii motion controls way where I have to be in a very specific spot moving in a very specific way if I want it to pick up my movements properly, but this is absolutely one of my favourite Mario Party installments to this day.

Love what they did with the city/hotel board (I'm terrible with names), best gimmick in here for sure, followed up by the train board where the carriages can all rearrange. Less a fan of the randomised chance element of Boo's mansion, but it's not unenjoyable.

I'll still force any friends who are willing to play this with me.

I can't play VR for long at a time due to the fact that my headset doesn't sit right over my glasses, but once I finally get around to going back to contacts we'll be good. As a result of that, though, Beat Saber is currently the only VR game I have, and honestly it does a pretty good job of making it feel satisfying all by itself.

The vanilla game and tracks are probably a 2/5, so definitely don't pick it up if that's all you're going to have access to, but with custom songs and mods this is a fun game and a genuinely engaging workout in one. The satisfying burn in your arms when you've been playing this for a while is great.

Just try not to hit your furniture and/or roommates while you do it.

My favourite Telltale game behind The Wolf Among Us, and probably objectively better than it. Also absolutely concur with everyone who says this is the best Borderlands game, because by far and away it is.

I have my issues with Episode 5, but they're entirely personal and subjective ones. This game is genuinely funny, full of personality and with a plot that kept me engaged and invested in its characters and outcomes. Rhys is one of my favourite protagonists of all time, and I genuinely love how different he can be as a person depending on your choices (although, and this is one of my aforementioned issues with Ep5, he does end up railroaded into A Good Guy Accepted Into Found Family in the end no matter what because it's clearly the path they Wanted you to go down with him, which sucks, but it is what it is). Generally in Telltale games you have a protagonist who's a set kind of person and you can only lean them a little in other directions (for instance, Lee from The Walking Dead could be angry with people but he was always fundamentally a decent guy who cared about protecting Clementine), whereas here, with Bigby from TWAU as the only other instance that comes to mind, Rhys can genuinely be a sweet, well-meaning dork or an ambitious, backstabbing asshole.

I wholeheartedly encourage people to try the Trust Jack path - I genuinely think that it's more interesting, engaging, and funny than the Trust Fiona/hostile to Jack alternative, and opens up more interesting choices.

I played this before I ever played the main-line Borderlands games, and didn't go into it with a lot of knowledge about series lore. I think it did pretty well keeping things clear and giving me the necessary context, and I didn't struggle to follow along at all, so you can definitely get into this without playing the FPS games first if they're not your kind of thing. The only thing you'll really miss out on are full appreciation of some character cameos and in-jokes.

Ultimately, this is Telltale at their absolute peak, and it's genuinely sad that more people haven't played this and given it a chance.

Favourite Male Character: Rhys
Favourite Female Character: Yvette
First Character I Liked: Handsome Jack
Favourite Character Design: Present day Rhys (the black and gold outfit! The hair! The gold eyes!)
Favourite Soundtrack: To the Top
Least Favourite Character: None

God, I love this game. I LOVE THIS GAME.

Okay, so the 5 star rating is biased of me. It does have flaws, which everyone else has already covered extensively - the repeating environments and the waves of enemies jumping out of the sky are the two that stuck out to me. We're not going to talk about how terrible everyone's hands look.

But that can't even nudge this out of its place as a firm favourite game of all time. I love the characters. I love the fact that rather than a generic Chosen One world-saving plot, it's centered around this small-scale storyline of one scrappy refugee and their friend group in one shitty little city. I love that the companions feel like an actual tight-knit group rather than co-workers forced together - they feel like they're there because they care about Hawke, even when it's inconvenient for them, not because they have some goal that aligns with yours and so they need to be.

I love the soundtrack, I love the combat (and if you know me you'll know how rare it is for me to say that about games), I love the atmosphere. I love the political machinations of it all, the way your companions have their own stories and motivations that may conflict with and throw off yours, the fact that the game spans ten years so you watch things change and improve and deteriorate and fall apart and be put back together again over time.

I love Hawke! I love that the game actually works the personality-type you lean towards more often into their characterisation, so that the deeper into the game you get, the more your typical approach to situations - diplomacy, humour, aggression - will show in their idle lines and what they do even without your input.

I love the friendship-rivalry system; it's so incredibly interesting, it adds replay value, and it shows you such different sides of each character, both in terms of a platonic connection with them and a romantic relationship.

I love that the story is framed through a narrative of Varric telling the story to Cassandra in the present-day, with her pulling him back at the beginning and end of arcs (and sometimes in the middle of them) to call him out on lies or evasions or comment on your actions, and how utterly Varric slots into the trope of unreliable narrator - not just because he wants to, or because it services the story, but because he's doing all he can to protect the friend he loves.

I love the quests, especially the companion quests. I even happily do the side quests every replay! And that's saying something, because I can't even count how many times I've replayed Dragon Age 2.

I've played it over and over, and I will continue to play it over and over. This game has such a special place in my heart. I don't care about the fact that every cave looks like different angles of the same location - DA2 is almost my perfect experience.

Favourite Male Character: Anders (I know!)
Favourite Female Character: Merrill (I know!!)
First Character I Liked: Fenris
Favourite Character Design: Isabela
Favourite Moment: The Chantry incident
Favourite OST: Love Scene, Fenris Theme, Rogue Heart
Least Favourite Character: Aveline

Gets old very, very fast - once you've played it for a week or so, you've pretty much exhausted all there is to do and seen all of the unique content. The gameplay is pretty basic and mostly consists of you watching your Miis exist like an ominous god until they deem it time to give you a short, repetitive little minigame.

That said, it's a fun, basic little simulator game that's very random in a very wacky, dreamlike kind of way, and making your friends and family can create some genuinely hilarious scenarios you'll want to tell them about.

I have fun coming back to this once every couple of years, making everyone all over again, playing around with it for a few days, and then abandoning it again, but I can't imagine playing it more in-depth than that. I certainly wouldn't pay more than £10-15 for it.

Also, no gay relationships. That's dumb. If you want to make your gay friends, you have to either deal with the uncomfortable experience of them falling randomly into straight romances or you have to make them a gender they aren't and just pretend real hard.

The sequel is definitely better than this one, but it's an alright lead-up to it. I'm not much of a fan of the graphics change Telltale went with here - the models look kind of plastic-y and Lego-like to me, oddly shiny and artificial in comparison to their natural cell-shading in games like The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us - but I get used to it after a while of playing every time.

Love that you can play Batman as a bit of an immoral asshole, love that you can lean into the Bruce as an elitist playboy thing. Troy Baker is, as per usual, pretty good in his role as the protagonist.

I wasn't sure how to feel about the treatment of the Joker when I first played this, and I think if it had been this game alone it would've felt hamfisted and out of place, but it's a build up to his bigger role in the second game where he turned out to be a fantastic character with a fantastic dynamic with Bruce, so with that in mind it's more than forgivable.

The major issue I have with this game is just that... I don't want to fuck Catwoman. And the game really, really wants me to fuck Catwoman. A lot of Telltale games have this kind of canon romance that you're nudged towards with varying degrees of force - Lee and Carley in The Walking Dead, Bigby and Snow in The Wolf Among Us, Rhys and Sasha in Tales from the Borderlands - but this is up there with the worst ones in terms of making me feel like I was required to put active, constant effort into not tripping and falling into a relationship with the character they wanted me to.

Still, fun enough game overall. Play it for the sequel, if nothing else.

(Sidenote I include with all Telltale reviews: Telltale's games often get a bad rap for having your choices not influence the story, but to me this misses the point of what they do. Variant endings are a nice bonus in games, and I enjoy them when they do pop up in Telltale's stories, but for the most part your choices aren't here to change where you go. They're there to change how you get there, who you are when you get there, and often who you get there with. They influence and change your relationships with the characters around you. The joy of replaying these games is to experience the different dialogue, the different reactions to you, the different routes you can take on the way, the different bonds you can evolve with people - not to have a wildly different ending. I think this aspect is overhated and sadly misunderstood by a lot of players, so if huge, game-changing differences are what you're looking for, I'd temper your expectations.)

Favourite Male Character: Alfred
Favourite Female Character: Vicki
First Character I Liked: Oswald
Favourite Character Design: Oswald
Favourite Moment: Being injected with the serum and the subsequent villain reveal
Least Favourite Character: Not gonna lie boys Harvey bored the shit outta me after a while

This is another one where I don't fully get the "this is the scariest game ever!" perspective. I think it's spooky, it has a great atmosphere, but I wasn't particularly scared during it, perhaps because I went into it knowing that it was only a demo and that everything was very scripted moment-to-moment rather than depending on my actions or errors?

Aside from that, though, it's a shame this was cancelled. A Kojima and Junji Ito collab is something I've been talking about wanting for a long time, and I think the full version of this could have drawn me in lore/plot-wise pretty well too, judging by the hints we got of it here. I enjoy some of the "P.T.-likes" we ended up getting with other games, but I'll always wonder what P.T. itself would have been.

Man, nostalgia makes this so hard to objectively rate for people. I remember telling my friends to "meet me on Club Penguin after school", giving them a specific time and location so we could find each other. I remember spending ages on the pizza minigame, sledding, doing the PSA/EPF missions, the colour-your-adventure books upstairs in the Ski Lodge, ice fishing...

Then again, when I really think about it, there wasn't much... substance there? Every time I tried to go back to it as a teenager or an adult I couldn't find anything fun to do anymore. It was definitely one of those childhood "you had to be there" kind of games.

The Card-Jitsu game still fucks, though. I'd absolutely play that again.

This game consumed my teenage years. The first time I experienced it, I was around 11-12, sleeping over at a friend's house, and she had this game up on her computer. We stayed awake until the early hours of the morning just taking turns making Sims. I don't remember if we ever even progressed into the actual game part of it; I was just having the time of my life creating little people.

I went home the next day set on getting this game for myself so I would be able to play it more in-depth than waiting my turn to make a Sim, but all I remembered was that "it was a game with diamonds on the cover, and all of the diamonds had people in them". My sister, godsend that she is, tracked it down and found it for me, and I did NOT look back.

Sure, the loading times were so slow that I still remember the wait for them years later, but - cars! Interesting and engaging and varied career tracks (the criminal career!) Expansion packs that gave you actual value for money - cats and dogs and horses and foxes and rodents all coming with Pets, and vampires, werewolves, witches, and fairies all coming with Supernatural! More than 3 traits per Sim!

It pains me that it's difficult to go back to graphically now, because compared to Sims 3, Sims 4 is just so soulless and hollow. Maybe I'll give this another try with some immense modding and CC-ing and see if I can bring the Sims' appearance a little up to modern standards. If I can manage that, I doubt I'll ever open Sims 4 again.