Even putting aside the fact that I think ROBLOX's controls are horrific and it has the ugliest avatars and general graphics I've ever seen, 1) my friend keeps trying to make me play this with him and when I say no he consistently goes on a 10 minute monologue about how Actually Good it is including screenshots, 2) my 4 year old nephew kept coming to my house to play it with me so now I associate it with running around doing everything a small child wants you to do, and 3) I keep getting push notifications for recommended Tweets on every single one of my Twitter accounts that's just spam bots talking about free Robux and I cannot for the life of me stop it despite blocking every account.

The combination of these factors has ensured I resent this game so much that even if you found me a game mode I was absolutely guaranteed to enjoy, you would have to drag me crying and wailing into trying it.

GRAPHICS: Very dated and outright ugly in places, but it's not enjoyment-affecting at all IMO. I've played games that aged far worse, and everything does its job. If you're on PC, there are plenty of texture and cosmetic mods to modernise things a little.
CHARACTERS: They don't stick with me as much as the DA2 and some of the Inquisition companions do, but they're varied and interesting nonetheless. Your romance options are Zevran, a seductive elven assassin; Leliana, a pious Chantry sister hiding dark secrets; Morrigan, a gothic and asocial swamp witch; and Alistair, a naive and humorous ex-Templar with royal blood. Additionally, you can recruit companions such as Wynne, an elderly healer who seems to be assisted by some mysterious force; Sten, a soldier from a foreign culture who's entirely new to Ferelden; Oghren, a dwarven berserker who's crude with a love of alcohol; and Loghain, a morally questionable but complex antagonist-turned-ally. The Stone Prisoner DLC will also give you Shale, a stone golem with a previously mortal identity.
DIALOGUE/VOICE ACTING: Voice acting is varied but generally good - Alistair's VA is endearingly awkward, Leliana's sounds stilted in places, and Zevran stands out as suitably suave and perpetually amused. The dialogue options you get as the protagonist are typically pretty extensive and easy to roleplay within; my biggest complaint is that I feel romance/flirt dialogues are not at all obvious enough, and very easily confused with platonically kind gestures, which means you more often than not end up 'stealth' romancing a character.
PLOT: Pretty generic, and overrated in my opinion - it's a cliche fantasy plot, there's an evil force threatening the world, you and your band of companions are the only ones who can stop it, and you have to travel around to individual locations in order to recruit factions for your army.
GAMEPLAY: Clunky, and my least favourite part of the game. The combat is aggravating enough that by the time I've been playing for a few hours I'm usually using mods just to skip most of the non-significant battles.
MULTIPLAYER: None.

Overall, this game didn't connect with me as much as it seems to for most; I think nostalgia (and the "older = better" mindset among gaming elitists) is a huge factor in the favouritism for Origins, and I prefer the sequels in most respects. However, the extensive dialogue options and roleplaying opportunities keep me coming back to Origins regardless.

Favourite Male Character: Zevran
Favourite Female Character: Leliana
First Character I Liked: I actually can't remember that far back - possibly Zevran?
Favourite Character Design: Morrigan
Favourite OST: TBA
Favourite Scene: The final battle, aftermath, and epilogue
Least Favourite Character: A part of me always wants to say Alistair for this because I find him absolutely generic and milquetoast and I resent seeing him absolutely everywhere, but I still like the guy. So: Howe and Vaughan.

I remember seeing a video showing this game off years ago over on Tumblr, and I was blown away by how creative and mind-trippy it all seemed. I completely forgot the name of it, but I always remembered the video, so a few years later I went hunting for what the game title was to play it for myself and found Superliminal.

This was a genuinely super neat concept. I dig games like this, and it didn't overstay its welcome to the point that the puzzles and core mechanics lost their novelty for me.

Might replay it on stream or something when it's been long enough that I've forgotten the solutions. This is the kind of game where seeing people's reactions to it all would be fun.

This is really tricky to rate, because everything is brought down by the inherent predatory nature of EA's microtransactions and pricing tactics.

The base game itself is hollow, soulless, and corporate. Basic content that was always available in earlier games is now parceled out in sectioned DLC and 'kits' that cost extortionate amounts of money and will only give you a piece of each previously-complete category of content - for instance, Sims 3 gave you Pets (which included cats, dogs, horses, foxes, small animals like hamsters, all of the furniture and items for pets, etc). In comparison, Sims 4 gives you Cats & Dogs, then a separate DLC for Horses, THEN a separate Stuff Pack for My First Pets Stuff for furniture and items. They sell a DLC for their fucking DLC.

If you download a ton of custom content, creating Sims is as fun as ever. The graphics are a step up, and it makes it (unfortunately) difficult to return to older Sims games after getting accustomed to this one, but everything else is a huge step back.

Once you've created your Sim, it's pretty much just empty repetition. You have to make your own fun via legacy challenges, mods, etcetera.

So: my rating is not for what the game can be with your own additions and downloaded custom content, because then it's what you make of it. I am rating it as it is vanilla, which is, frankly, barely anything at all.

Pirate it. Genuinely. At this point, pirating EA games is almost less ethically questionable than funding them and allowing their practices to be worth continuing. If they don't get their shit together, I can absolutely see the Sims franchise being run into the ground, which would be a sincere shame.

To get the negatives out of the way, the things that keep me from rating it higher would be:
- The tedious and drawn-out podcast ending; genuinely, who thought that was the way to go?
- The weird and abrupt halt to the Ryan romance plotline, where you can build up a relationship with Dylan or Kaitlyn (especially Dylan) and then suddenly no matter what your choices he says "maybe neither" in favour of having a weird flirtation with Laura, who already has a boyfriend serving as her entire motivation.
- Shooting could be a little janky at times, though it only caused me issues once; almost at the end, in the final confrontation in the cabin, Kaitlyn ended up dying because the game didn't register that I shot the werewolf even though I did. Wasn't a huge deal because I have the Deluxe Edition so I used a rewind, but for someone who doesn't have that available on first playthrough it could be super frustrating.
- Some characters didn't get enough screentime, particularly Nick and Max.
- The werewolves just looked like the wendigo from Until Dawn. No idea if that was a budget/reusing assets thing or what, but there's no way they didn't notice they were essentially using identical models. I want to see actual werewolves, damnit.

That said, I actually really enjoyed this. I connected with the characters much more in this than Until Dawn, where my strongest feelings towards any protagonist were "they're fine" ranging to "vague annoyance". I felt genuinely invested in keeping my favourites alive - hell, I actually had favourites! - and that made it so much more tense and high-stakes. The graphics are gorgeous, the story was fun and campy, and the soundtrack was enjoyable.

Favourite Male Character: Nick, Dylan
Favourite Female Character: Kaitlyn
First Character I Liked: Kaitlyn
Favourite Character Design: Ryan
Favourite OST: TBA
Favourite scene: I thought Dylan and Ryan's campfire kiss was genuinely sweet
Least Favourite Character: Constance

I think Until Dawn is overrated and I personally greatly prefer The Quarry both in terms of characters and gameplay, but it is still massively superior to all of the Dark Pictures Anthology installments.

The characters are shallow and stereotypical, but the game doesn't really pretend they're anything deeper than that - it's a campy B-movie "dumb teens stuck in a cabin" horror, and they all serve their purposes fine. You'll probably enjoy some and dislike others, which adds some nice stakes in who you're trying hardest to keep alive.

I think the "it has so many endings!" note is overblown considering all of those 'endings' are just the same ending with different combinations of characters alive at the end and thus slightly different people having lines to say in the police interview montage at the end. For that reason, I wouldn't really expend too much energy on trying to get multiple endings unless you want to 100% it or you messed up first run and want to try an 'everyone survives' playthrough for the sake of it.

Graphics are nice, and were very impressive at the time, but the facial expressions are janky to the point of unintentional hilarity (characters will smile and have it look more like a pained grimace, with Jess and Emily specifically coming to mind here).

Still, it's fun for what it is. Just don't take it too seriously.

Favourite Male Character: Josh
Favourite Female Character: Beth
First Character I Liked: Beth
Favourite Character Design: Beth (I'm seeing a pattern)
Favourite OST: TBA
Favourite Scene: The cabin explosion at the end with the helicopter flying over the survivors (especially in an 'everyone lives' playthrough)
Least Favourite Character: Ashley

Man, this is one of my favourite horror games. I played it on Safe Mode, and the overwhelming consensus seems to be that that's the superior way to play in order to experience the atmosphere and be able to take in the setting and details, so I concur and would recommend other players do the same. This isn't a jumpscare-y game, per se, especially with Safe Mode enabled, but it's horror in the psychological, pervading, keeps-you-up-at-night-having-an-existential-crisis way, which is my favourite flavour of horror. Even when I was at my absolute wimpiest and couldn't make myself watch five minutes of a horror movie, I loved psychological horror - plot twists, bendy narratives, eerie atmospheres, that feeling of something just under the surface being terribly, terribly wrong but not knowing what yet... SOMA has all of it and more.

People rag on Simon for being unintelligent as a protagonist, but I think he's written realistically for someone whose entire arc revolves around the fact that he has brain trauma, as well as the fact that he's very clearly in deep denial about a lot of things right up until the ending of the game.

I also understand why people criticise the ending for adding the post-credits sequence and say it ruins the emotions of the initial ending scene, but I wouldn't change it. The crushing, shocking despair of the first scene, only for that overwhelming relief when you find yourself on the ARK, and the brilliant way they re-incorporated the survey that they'd had you take earlier was great. I ended up with completely different answers to when I'd taken it the first time, and a huge part of that was because of that relief and gratitude I felt in comparison to being down there; I don't think it could've worked so well any other way.

I genuinely enjoy this game. People say the community is toxic - maybe I've just been lucky, but I've never had a bad experience in the in-game chat so far. Honestly, people barely even use the chat minus a rare "GG" thrown out afterwards (but it's more likely that people just quietly leave once the game's over); my one interaction that I can remember beyond that was a time all four of us in-game loaded in as Claudette, I typed "squadette", and one of the others said "holy fuck a squadette of claudettes", so that was all I needed. You will probably run into a bunch of campers, which can ruin the fun a bit when it's four games in a row of the killer hooking you and then just standing there until you die so no one can rescue you and you can't play, but in my personal experience it hasn't been toxic in the sense that anyone's saying anything to you.

The gameplay loop is lowkey addicting - repairing generators is an absolute pain in the ass while you're doing it because of how slooooooowly that bar goes up (though Killers say they repair too fast, so what do I know), but then I'll find myself sitting around thinking Man, I wish I was on DBD doing generators right now.

I personally don't find the game scary at all, including back when I was a massive wimp about horror, so I wouldn't recommend it if that's your main draw to it. It's tense in the way any sort of violent hide and seek would be, with you sneaking around and trying to avoid being seen by a killer, and there might be some yelling if you're playing with friends over mic, but I wouldn't call it scary per se.

The variety of characters is fun and keeps things relatively interesting - I have my favourites, as do most people, but I'll find myself playing most of them at least sometimes. They all come with unique personal perks, but you can always re-spec them once they're levelled enough for their perks to be in the general bloodweb and assign them to other characters if you'd prefer.

My only complaints are the rework they did to the wriggle mechanic when you're picked up by a killer (it used to be the same as normal skill checks, which was still challenging to meet the threshold to escape but doable, whereas now it's its own thing that means you're absolutely not going to ever be able to wriggle out of the killer's hold unless a) the hook is all the way across the map and b) you hit every single one of the checks without fail, and often not even then), and the fact that the cosmetics are so expensive. Loading times also tend to be pretty slow, it's not uncommon at all to be waiting 5 minutes for a lobby.

I'd definitely recommend to play it with friends - even just going into a public lobby with one or two friends can turn it from meh into a fun game with a lot of laughs and scares going on. I'll play it every so often by myself, and it's the only way I've played Killer, but all of the fun is in the group play for me.

I've found while teaching friends new to the game that it can be a little hard to pick up and learn at first - there's no tutorial, so unless you want to jump into a public game and learn as you go, I'd advise getting a friend who plays to get into a custom game with you as a killer and teach you the ropes that way instead.

It has great lore if that's something you're interested in - it's not gone into in much detail in-game beyond the TL;DR backstory pages and the tidpits you can glean from item/cosmetic descriptions, but if you dig into it out-of-game it's pretty interesting to learn about.

Also, Nicolas Cage is in the game as himself, which I have to reluctantly admit is quite funny.

Favourite Male Character: The Trickster
Favourite Female Character: Feng Min
First Character I Liked: Feng Min
Favourite Character Design: Repetitively, The Trickster
Favourite OST: TBA
Least Favourite Character: Ash

God, I fucking love this game. As tired as the concept may be for some, the idea of taking fairytale/fantasy characters and putting them into modern cities and realistic situations has always been something I dug, and it was done wonderfully here. The setting is vivid and easy to immerse yourself in, the characters are varied, likeable, and charming, the mystery is suspenseful and gripping, the choices and consequences are satisfying, and the soundtrack is brilliant.

The ending has one of the cliffhangers that have haunted me most through my time in gaming, and I am both excited for and terrified of the sequel. Hopefully it lives up to the first game's quality and ties up the loose ends it needs to.

(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: Grendel, Flycatcher
Favourite Female Character: Holly
First Character I Liked: Bigby
Favourite Character Design: Jersey Devil's true form
Favourite OST: TBA
Favourite Scene: Bigby's full transformation and fight with Bloody Mary as a wolf
Least Favourite Character: The Tweedles

This was my first Final Fantasy as a kid, so maybe I'm biased, but you know what? Fuck it, I love this game, and I'll die on that hill despite everyone else hating it. I remember crying at the ending when I first finished it, so that says something.

I fully accept that a lot of the criticism for Final Fantasy XIII is valid and understandable, but I maintain that a lot of it isn't - it became 'cool' to hate on XIII because everyone did back then, it was something you ragged on for Reddit upvotes, and the more it happened the less anyone was inclined to even give it a fair chance. They'll point to characters being insufferable with a complete lack of empathy - I remember the absolute brigade of loathing for Hope, a grieving child who just watched his mother die in front of him, and people calling him immature and annoying like the entire point of his arc wasn't to show him growing and healing past that. If I'd seen my mother violently killed in front of me at 14 years old, I highly doubt I'd have been as collected and capable as Hope is. I also remember everyone dragging Vanille's Australian accent and calling it fake, despite her VA being Australian.

The graphics are gorgeous, the character designs are excellent (which includes the background NPCs - have you seen Yuj?), the soundtrack is beautiful. I don't find the story convoluted or hard to follow at all, and honestly I don't fully understand where that criticism comes from; I actively enjoyed going through all the datalog entries and seeing how they changed and updated as I progressed the plot, but I didn't feel that I needed to read them in order to follow the basic events happening in front of me. As for the linearity, sure, it's linear - but linear doesn't mean bad, and it's no more linear than Final Fantasy X was. The only difference is that FFXIII doesn't disguise it. If you're the average FF fan who worships FFX as the "last great mainline title" but dismisses FFXIII as a "hallway simulator"... well, I don't know where I was going with that sentence, but I disagree with you.

The characters are perfectly likeable to me. My personal favourites were Sazh (I could talk for hours about how genuine and funny and paternal he is, and how much I love where his story goes throughout the game - that one scene with Vanille was chilling, even as I rationally knew he couldn't have done it), Snow (yes, I found his heroic bluster endearing), and Vanille (I think she's sweet and surprisingly complex). Another shoutout to Yuj, too - it may mostly be his character design that caught my eye, but I always enjoyed him popping up through the story. I love Serah, too, but that's mostly based on sequels, so I'll leave my thoughts on her for when I get to reviewing those.

My only real criticisms of the game are the lack of hub towns and the inability to choose your own party members for the first portion of the story (I forget how many chapters it takes to unlock).

As minor side notes, I love how the Crystarium level up screens look, and the sound design is great - I love the way your footsteps sound as you run across the crystal surface of Lake Bresha.

Favourite Female Character(s): Vanille
Favourite Male Character(s): Sazh, Snow
First Character I Liked: Sazh
Favourite Character Design: Yuj, Jihl
Favourite OST: The Promise, Somnus
Favourite Scene: The return to Cocoon / crashing the Grand Prix
Least Favourite Character: Would Barthandelus be a cop-out answer?

Fascinating concept, gorgeous visuals and atmosphere, mind-blowing twists. The combat is a little clunky sometimes, but no more than a lot of other FPS games I've played, especially older ones. I do maintain that the game would have been much stronger had it ended with the Atlas twist and Ryan confrontation - it built up and up to this well sketched-out, shocking climax, and then it just... kept going afterwards when the moment was ripe for rolling credits and leaving you with those emotions. It just kind of makes things peter out and lose that high.

The game also loses a lot of its shine once you realise it was less intentionally intelligent and political and more an accidental stumble into profoundity by a guy who had no clue what he was implying.

That said, I thought the good ending was appropriately emotional and sweet. I feel no particular incentive to continue with the other Bioshock games, though I'm sure I'll get to them someday, but I enjoyed this and the lore surrounding it.

GRAPHICS: They're fine. It was a low-budget 2014 video game, so it's nothing mind-blowing, but they're not bad at all IMO. I actually really like how the animatronics look; they give off a fitting air of being aged and a little gross, and their texture is good.
CHARACTERS: Seeing as the lore hasn't quite kicked in in this game yet, the characters are pretty much a non-entity aside from the handful of animatronics coming to get you, and they don't really have personalities to speak of. Not much to say here.
GAMEPLAY: I personally find the gameplay of FNAF 1 pretty tedious and repetitive, but that's probably down to the fact that I don't personally find it scary -- I'm more a fan of this series for the lore and connections between games than I am the gameplay loop itself. It's a decent challenge to keep everything out without running out of power if you like that sort of thing.
MULTIPLAYER: None.