Pentiment is somewhat of an anomaly of a game; being as educational as it is entertaining, as stylized as it is authentic, and as peculiarly niche as it is polished and high quality.

Animations are a delight, and the game's presentation on the whole is exceptional. Unexpectedly, the painstaking detail in everything from the mixture of 16th century art to each character speaking in different script depending on what societal role or class they represent serve to paint a mural of a world more intriguingly and convincingly than any other piece of entertainment I have experienced, historical or fictional alike.

The writing is also quite enjoyable and poignant, if not entirely even through the game's runtime. Being split into three distinct acts, not every act is as immediately gripping or charming as the rest, and I found the start of each new act to be an uphill battle in retaining my emotional investment. By the end of each of these acts and by the end of the game, a complete and satisfying story is told, though I can't help but feel that some fat could have been trimmed here.

Perhaps this feeling would be alleviated had Pentiment not have been seemingly so front-loaded with its game mechanics. Those expecting more of a proper adventure game or detective RPG may be left for wanting a little bit
more. Dialogue mechanics aren't used enough to feel consistently weighty, though this may be due to the game's text-only* nature that can often make reading the writers' intended tone hard to navigate. (*Even with the game's excellent accessibility features, the text-to-speech can only go so far without real human performances.) By the end of the game, it feels that much of Pentiment could have been written as a highly linear visual novel with how the scope of interactivity beyond dialogue choices narrows so much. While this may very well be a thematic point to the game, such shifts in gameplay expectations are always hard sells, no matter how bold.

The mechanic that I struggled the most with during my time with Pentiment was the game's inconsistent and not very well conveyed use of the passage of time. Working against a time limit serves to give the player a sense of urgency, though on more than one important occasion I had moments where activating certain game events seemed to have broken the sequence of things or would pass far more time than I had anticipated, serving to undercut my agency as a player and ultimately resulting in some unsatisfying outcomes. I'm still unsure if these were bugged out features, or if the game's writing failed to indicate the intended flow and pace for me to play at...

Still, it's difficult to deny the raw talent and intense passion present in Pentiment. I am not overly familiar with Josh Sawyer's work, but my interest in his abilities beyond being a tweeter or a GDC-talk giver are certainly piqued after having played this title.

Quake Champions is a game with a core that feels mostly solid by way of it being Quake, but also one that feels like all parties involved just sort of gave up on halfway through.

Gimmicky champions and guest characters flirt with tapping into the hero shooter trend of the late 2010's, but without offering compelling character design updates to chase that same demographic or a business model that enables each champion to really distinguish themselves in any meaningful way, and stylistic modernizations don't land half as effectively as the rest of id Software's 8th Gen retro-revivals.

No sense of on-boarding mechanically and the lack of an immediately generous character roster makes the attempted modernization of Quake here feel like a disingenuous half-step made out of obligation that doesn't feel particularly charged to appeal to either purists or newcomers; Unless you're a greater Bethesda super-fan or an invested advocate for classic style Arena FPS games on the whole, this is simply a barebones shooter with all the appeal of Cliff Blezinsky's LawBreakers, and I still can barely tell if this thing is in open beta or not.

Over 10 years later, it's practically impossible to have a new take on Dark Souls, or to ignore the colossal reputation it has accumulated over the years, so I will not attempt to do either. Finally, after repeatedly telling myself I'd never touch it, here I am: 58.1 hours of game-time and 100 levels later, staring at the credits. My hesitancy to give this fan favorite has always been rooted in that unescapable element: The fans.
To many it can seem silly to have a "fans ruined it" mentality to just about anything, and I largely agree and personally place a high value on having your own experiences. But with Dark Souls, this is not just an impossible task thanks to the game's notoriety, but because of the very nature of the game itself.

Someone had to be the first person to play Dark Souls. Being a successor to the PS3's Demon's Souls, this was never 100% uncharted territory, but the unrelentingly obfuscated and fiercely punishing game world had to be discovered for the first time by its players. Duh, this is how brand new games work. But even in those first few virgin playthroughs in 2011, it's hard to imagine whatever the player-base looked like back then not collaborating at every corner, both within the game itself, and outside of it. Whether its players communicating through the in-game messages to aid or deceive fellow players, or literally being summoned into their game world to help them with a boss, or ruin their day with the questionably balanced Invasion PvP aspect of its multiplayer. This emphasis on collaboration and subterfuge combined with unfunny memes or difficulty slider discourse ad nauseam makes jumping into Dark Souls a deceptively herculean task for someone who can't be bothered to go out of their way to, uh, be bothered by other people. You could deal with the army of people that make this game their personality when you have any sort of question, comment, or criticism, or you can just avoid it altogether and touch grass instead.

The only way to win Dark Souls, is to not play Dark Souls!

Maybe this reputation is unfair, maybe it's alluring and part of the Secret Sauce. I don't care, you decide. Whatever makes you happy please do not leave comments on my post blahblahblahblahblah

Casting my mind back to ~2011-2012: I was in middle school and all the dorks I knew were into gaming, of course. I always avoided the Dark Souls kids for reasons that may be more correlation than causation, but I had stayed close enough to be able to get a surface level understanding of what their takes were. Buzzwords and phrases like "This game's combat is so much more realistic than Skyrim!" "This game is super hard like how video games used to be!" and "It's basically like Skyrim but harder." embedded themselves into my skull as the pop cultural consensus on Dark Souls. Astonishingly, these takes are all pretty much wrong for a number of reasons. I guess Skyrim was pretty new so that became the point of comparison for every middle schooler who had played maybe 2 RPGs before in their lifetime. But these dumb kids as it turned out, were simply parroting the never-ending waterfall of takes that have not once ceased to permeate online spaces. The most enduring of these is the point on Dark Soul's difficulty level.

If nothing else, Dark Soul's is a game known for being incredibly difficult. You could use all sorts of other descriptors for the same general idea, too. Frustrating. Punishing. Bullshit.
I'll put a little bit of my own weight behind each of these columns; I've definitely felt that those descriptors were apt at some point during my playthrough. But ultimately, none of these options are my word of choice.

Dark Souls is involved.

Especially when comparing the game's combat to other titles like Skyrim, Assassin's Creed, or Arkham Asylum, It's easy to see this particular game as a shock to the system offering something different, something harder. The game asks quite a bit of you when it comes to learning mechanics and the attack patterns of enemies without much in the way of tutorials or easing you into it. Layer the actual Souls mechanic that often will pump the breaks on your progression onto it, and the Dark Souls identity quickly emerges when it forces you to explore this mysterious and dangerous world without the greatest sense of what it is you're actually meant to be doing. Dark Souls greatest asset is its core combat and exploration loop. Because of how involved combat is, you always have to be engaged with the enemy on some point, until you become overpowered to a point where it becomes comical and satisfying to transition from feeling like a rat stuck in a maze to the protagonist of a Dynasty Warriors title; But because of the many secrets and traps littered throughout the environment, you can never quite rest on your laurels even-so. Repeating this cycle in the early game is when all the joys and frustrations of the difficulty of Dark Souls peaks. I have my favorite zones and my least favorite zones, but I can sort of pinpoint exactly when the game somehow makes a fundamental change, without really changing all that much. Post-Anor Londo, which sounds like a nonsense Star Wars phrase, the game begins to quite rapidly un-click with me.

Dark Souls is hard, until it isn't.

By the nature of being an RPG, it's maybe inevitable that despite being a skill-centric action game, Number Go Up trumps all. Overlevelling for a particular zone absolutely can happen, making quick work of would-be gauntlets, but to my surprise, this was not the Number Go Up that really mattered. The real Number Go Up that changed everything was how many Souls it takes to level up. As is common in just about every video game ever, Dark Souls' level up system is structured so that you need more souls to level up every time you do it, in order to dictate the pace of progress so that you don't break the balance of the game, or at least so you don't break the balance so easily. On paper, this is sensible. But the effect that you have with this system coupled with the idea that you can permanently lose this progress in-between gaining levels or spending it on items funnels the player into an inherently risk-averse playstyle. This is super intentional and forces the player to think, or plan ahead, or hone their skills as much as they can before being reckless. This would not be so bad to me, if the rest of the game facilitated this. Thanks to just how tight-lipped the game is about explaining pretty much any mechanic outside of your basic movelist is, oftentimes there's no real way to even know what to plan ahead for, or what skills to hone. The in-game message system works very basically on a micro-moment level, but is practically useless for any long-term or important strategy.

The game goes so far into being extremely risk-averse that it constricts player expression in a game world that is largely trial-and-error and obfuscated by mechanics it never tells you about. It pretty much never not makes sense to retreat to go level up or upgrade a piece of gear when you're in front of a boss door and you have a high number of souls. It pretty much never not makes sense to just look up a guide or a wiki on an area with some otherwise restricting gimmick like being in pitch-black darkness, or having enemies that are untouchable by normal weapons when the game doesn't offer up that information in its own interesting way. It pretty much never not makes sense to spend some time grinding away at high-souls/low-effort enemies in the forest every time the game has a boss that cheats you out of souls.

The game at its half-way point transitions from testing your patience on the micro-scale through its involved combat systems, and becomes more about testing how much patience you have with the medium of video games as a whole, and the numerous and asinine sins that Dark Souls specifically commits, but somehow gets a pass for in online discussion. It's maddening, and my brain becomes mush as I rapidly bounce from Lord Soul to Lord Soul, now having the power of fast travel and hindsight. Each new zone in the second half feels less interesting, and frankly less finished than the last, all while upping the goofiness in its approach to difficulty and losing the spark of real peril. I start to get sloppy with my moveset, as I've been using the same Halberd from the first act of the game, seldom finding any reason to swap out weapons or adjust my playstyle outside of accommodating gimmicky zones. The magic of the involved combat and the return on investment of exploration have plummeted, and are nowhere to be seen. I defeat the final boss to a nice piano track, but am ultimately left unfulfilled.

As the credits roll, the impact of Dark Soul's greatest flaws begin to click with me.

The Soul of Dark Souls is strictly in other players. Sure, Dark Souls is a massive RPG experience that not only can be played beginning-to-end offline and in singleplayer, but actively makes online Co-Op a complete chore to undertake. And yet, this often tumultuous, janky, and frustrating online element is what makes the whole damn thing tick for me. I have some nitty gritty nitpicks, such as how Invasions seem an utterly pointless balancing countermeasure with way too much variability in character power, online connection, and overall game knowledge to feel good half the time. But I've enjoyed the multiplayer mechanics of this game far more than I ever could have imagined. As I cast my mind back to my opening hours with the game and the first half of my Dark Souls journey, the mortifying realization that the game's co-op mode is what makes it worth playing at all hits me, and I've just spent a depressing number of hours forgoing these modes because the game was so oppressively funneling me into being risk-averse that the idea of dying to yet another janky invader that shows up at the worst possible time in the worst possible area, especially through the second half of the game, sounds like hell not worth spending the Humanity on. Ironically, I was left feeling utterly and completely hollow.

I do not find the boss fights of Dark Souls to be very exciting nor rewarding to fight. That's the crux of this whole game, isn't it? The reward that you earn for overcoming this difficult challenge. Maybe that's an in-game item, a high number of souls, or just the self-satisfaction of "I did it!". But just about every boss that I completed while solo, I felt none of this. I didn't feel the satisfaction of learning a difficult fight and mastering it, nor did I even really feel the satisfaction of breaking the game and cheesing any of the fights. I did not record any video of my boss fights very intentionally, save for the final 30 seconds of the final boss fight. In the clip, I'm sometimes just straight tanking damage while I brainlessly spam my attacks and eventually get the W. No parrying, no frantic rolling, nothing. Each fight with a black knight on the way to this boss room was more immediately dangerous. Maybe I was over-levelled and over-geared for the fight, but honestly, I was relieved after winning, and I don't think I would've been any happier if the fight was any more difficult. I didn't want a harder fight, I just wanted the fight, and frankly the rest of the game to be over.

Thinking about it, pretty much none of my favorite boss fights were particularly elegant or cinematic in nature; They were just as bumbling and uninteresting. But all of my favorite bosses are ones that I finished with the help of a player summon. In fact, all of my favorite moments were whenever I was partied up with at least one friend and one stranger. I can't remember the names of these anonymous online heroes nearly as well as the in-game bosses, and yet I can recall the unique one-time interactions way more than the boss fights that took multiple tries to pass. It's true that the moments of Dark Souls that were the most frustrating to me were related to player Invasions, and as upsetting as those moments are, those feel the most satisfying to move past, even if I die to the invaders and don't get a second chance to fight them. I'm not even advocating for this specific mechanic all that much, but the triumphs and defeats, the epic highs and lows of the online component on the whole offer so many more emotionally charged moments that are so much more intensely potent than anything the game's world itself can offer, that it frustrates me to no end how much it seems like the game doesn't even want you to play in this way, given the limited-by-design implementation.

I wanted to write a super brief splash-page review for Dark Souls, but to its credit, Dark Souls is an experience that demands a little bit more. Is it a good game? I don't know. Having played a supposedly remastered version of it, I would have honestly no idea if you told me I was playing the 2011 release so that itself is maybe not great. For a lot of people, the boss fights will click and each difficult encounter will have that sense of reward. I can see what makes it tick for those people. I can see all the pieces just ready to be put into their place. They didn't for me.

All I know is that, the real Dark Souls was the friends we made along the way. And I'm so bummed it took me until the end credits to get that.

Not every level is a hit, but the ones that are offer a substantial and impressive upgrade over even the best from the previous title. The scale is upped only in the areas where it matters most, and each level is meticulously designed and packed with satisfyingly goofy stories while allowing even more sandbox opportunities. Killing rich people has never felt so good.

Forget not offering a single interesting idea done better than other mid-2000's FPS contemporaries like Half-Life 2, Halo 2, or even this title's own cousin in Doom 3; Quake 4 in a vacuum has no soul, no atmosphere, and not a single thing in its favor beyond being technically competent.

The phrase "This looks like a fake video game" is perhaps overused, but never have I felt so strongly that this was the case as I have with Quake 4. It's an A.I.'s idea of what a video game is, so much so that it might not even have enough flavor to be slotted into a 4 second shot in an episode of CSI. It's a 7 hour slog of what is essentially a child playing with the dullest set action figures as possible. It's like fast-forwarding past all of the fun satire and charming production design of Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers film so you can watch the last 20 minutes of overly bloated alien shooting at 0.5x speed.

Quake 4 is all of these things, and ultimately somehow is a complete Nothing video game. The setting and plot are less inspired than Brute Force and it fails to follow up on any of Doom 3's ideas or technology to such a degree that in hindsight I'm tempted to think I was too harsh on that game.

Sure, it doesn't brick my hard drive, the guns do damage and make sound, and playing Quake 4 doesn't kill my cat, but I'm convinced the only thing notable about this game and the only reason anyone gives it any thought is the fact that it says "Quake" on the box and that Raven Software and id Software are otherwise known for video games that actually engage on some level and have sparked joy and innovation.

I'd like to say something witty like "more like Quake 4 out of 10." but astonishingly, it does not even reach those heights.
Quake 4 is a video game for people without tastebuds.

2022

Scorn is frustrating, because it's almost quite good.
With how striking the whole of the game's atmosphere is in the audio and visuals, it's very apparent this was the bulk of the game's focus. There's a pleasant restraint with the puzzles in that they do not feel so overly clever nor very explicitly explained - Though they could be more involved, and there's a handful of instances of tedious map scraping to make sure you've explored every possible solution, (Especially if you're playing on the extremely poorly supported Ultrawide mode which crops your view) generally the pace is kept going so that Scorn can immerse you in its upsetting environments and tell it's completely non-verbal story.

...Until that pace is often brought to a screeching halt by the game's combat sections. Scorn's combat itself isn't the worst, but even for a survival horror approach, feels unbalanced thanks to clunky item swapping, poor communication on how items function, and unsanctionable checkpointing system. - I appreciate the game's commitment to feeling alien and otherworldly with its lack of dialogue, semi-internal penises, and strictly foreign UI and iconography, but I would have hoped the encounter design would at least subtley-but-not-too-subtley explain how it wants you to play. Despite the slog, there are some very excellent stretches here; Enough to give you hope, but not enough to completely turn things around.

Scorn could be greatly improved with a single patch that addresses some of the game's balance and features like Ultrawide support or an FoV slider. As far as I can tell, this is Ebb Software's debut title and though it's uneven throughout, it is nonetheless impressive. Looking back at my screenshots and video clips, it looks even better than I remembered while in-game, and performance was excellent without as much as a single technical mishap. Scenes are consistently framed with an extreme amount of consideration and detail, you could sell me a photobook of just in-game screenshots, and It's not a game I think I will be mentally offloading wholesale any time soon.

All of Scorn's seams really lie with a small handful of very important design decisions that should have gone the other way. I'm eagerly looking forward to whatever this development team has in store next, and I'm not even sure I need it to have either puzzles or combat.


A neat NuDOOM tribute cleverly combined with a rhythm game - A match so natural you don't really think twice about it. Its brevity serves it well and is just engaging enough for its runtime, even if it's bloated and unstimulating motion graphics cutscenes feel like week-long each.

I suspect your enjoyment level will depend on your taste in music; The vast majority of it was definitely serviceable, but I've already forgotten all of it. Unfortunately for being a rhythm game, it fairly quickly becomes static feeling without any exciting or unexpected rhythms. This consistency is probably for the best given you still need to focus on blasting, and yet I find myself disappointed anyway. Each song, and therefore each level ends up feeling more or less the same, which is then compounded by the lack of varied boss fights.

The most surprising thing about this was hearing the System of a Down dude. Worth a download and a session or two in which you'll probably finish the game, but not much else.

Immersive-Sim, Search-Action, or Metroidvania - All are probably apt-enough descriptions for game like this, especially since the studio behind it has so much of their past Dishonored and even Prey DNA blaringly present throughout many of it's avenues - And yet, unexpectedly I find myself being most emotionally recalled to playing and replaying endless Super Mario World levels as I stocked up on extra lives, Yoshis, and powerups, or trying to perfect a run through the robot masters in any given Mega Man title when I play Arkane Lyon's "DEATHLOOP".

(Henceforth) Deathloop is a clever and stylish shooter packed to the rim with gimmicks that may have been better served with brevity. The premise of "Groundhog's Day With Guns" as a video game is certainly tantalizing, and one or both of Arkane's studios are clear picks for the task even prior to Deathloop's actualization. There are moments where the game shines and lives up to this premise, though I'm not sure they quite stuck the landing.

First, the positives - Deathloop's production design from the art direction to the music is intentful, impactful, and fun. The game only really has one song that I can recall outside of the Bond-esque credit sequence, but the dynamic implementation of it and its different contexts makes it exciting and memorable. Weapons are weird, probably nonsensical in mechanical design, and fit right in with the highly accessorized 1960's plastic fashion aesthetic that permeates Blackreef Isle. The between-levels UI pulls from some of the worst offenders in the AAA space as far as functionality goes but stylistically its all cohesive and blends the game's 3D world with the fun 2D animatics after each main objective. Take a drink for every time I draw comparison to another Arkane game, but if the drab smog and dust of the Dishonored franchise tired you out as much as it did me, Deathloop is a breath of fresh air.

What becomes a little more stale a bit too quickly is much of the core gameplay; Despite the game's own insistence that you "Play Your Own Way", I was surprised at how much more restrictive Deathloop's sandbox really is in practice. Each level has alternate routes and secrets like you would expect, and much of the game can be played "out of order", like the aforementioned Mega Man robot masters, but the initial promise of a timeloop puzzle where you manage daylight and have to manipulate your assassination targets is pretty much immediately reduced to there being only a single path forward that the game is not in the slightest shy to tell you about.

In Prey or Dishonored, one conceivably could not play and see all the game had the offer on a single playthrough - There were just too many options that were mutually exclusive. This is vital to that Immersive-Sim experience, and what lends the sheer amount of player agency and emergent moments that practically define the sub-genre. Deathloop's primary gimmick is an interesting experiment in that sense, as it brings that meta-game aspect into the primary experience. For better or for worse, this feels like a move not to ensure that the average player will get to see everything the developers worked on - Though that's probably a nice bonus - but rather a move to force players to feel confident enough to experiment around, while also enabling more players to enjoy this type of game in the "correct way". These goals are admirable, however I think it speaks for itself as to why that doesn't work out as much in practice. At least, not for myself, who was elated by Prey 2017's open-ness and environment of fear and uncertainty, and the much greater amount of pay-off that solving problems in that title brought. For the type of player who is maybe new to the sub-genre or is only interested in watching the credits roll a single time, no matter the game, this probably works out just fine.

One aspect that motivates the loop mechanic and is ultimately counterintuitive to what its goals may be is the game's punishment for failure. In previous titles, the onus is on the player to save and reload how they

I suspect that Arkane Lyon actually achieved more or less 100% what they set out to do. Given the context of not just Arkane, but Bethesda and Zenimax as a whole, I can't help but wonder how many of these decisions were made with the influence of financial pressure. Prior to Deathloop, the first Dishonored game seems to have been the only big hit in Arkane's library, with Prey notably underperforming. Combined with a shift to the ever present GaaS model and hyper aggressive monetization schemes, Zenimax's willingness to shop out timed exclusivity deals for Sony's new console before being bought out by Microsoft shows that they may not have had the cushiest of cash piles. Integrated tech demos for the DualSense gimmicks aside, I don't believe or feel that Arkane's vision was compromised by Sony or higher up Zenimax, but it does feel markedly different in approach.

On a technical level, Deathloop Ideally looks fantastic in motion, but maybe the game's most fatal flaw is the horrendous PC version performance. Even on a contemporary high-end machine, most if not all settings had to be knocked down a few notches to maintain a solid 60 frames per second, but most grievous is the seemingly common issue of stuttering and freezing found, regardless of what your video settings are at. This effect usually subsides after you've spent a minute or two in a newly loaded map, but will often rear its ugly head when transitioning between indoor and outdoor areas.

The TL:DR - Deathloop is a fun, but ultimately shallow ride that gives the player all the answers, never really lets the player screw up and snowball into interesting scenarios, and somehow paradoxically forces you to “Play Your Way” instead of just… Letting you play? Probably a whole lot more approachable, but not nearly as satisfying or replayable as the rest of the studio's games.

my original review was just a beta, so i've decided to take it down

i have no respect for anyone with the assassin's creed skin, destroying them will always bring me joy

How much you enjoy Master Duel will probably enjoy how much you enjoy honest to god modern day YGO, for better or for worse.

The aesthetic leaning into the more Hearthstone/Magic Arena realm and away from the sleek futuristic cyber nonsense of Duel Links is understandable, but also disappointing; Yes, the anime and card games are related, but wholly enjoyable on their own individual merits. Still, it feels like Master Duel is almost afraid of YGO's own branding and legacy at times, gimmicky pets and the usual card pool aside.

Master Duel's usability is also not as great as any of Hearthstone's, Magic Arena's, or even Duel Links'. Navigating menus is clunky and slow, as is passing through the different turn phases, and features such as highlighted ability triggers on a chain (Like Magic Arena) are sorely missed.

Again, this is all mostly bearable depending on how much you like modern day YGO. I find the base ruleset to be perfectly good and fine, but the lack of different matchmaking options (Rank vs Unranked) or different formats - Things like Modern, Oldschool, Draft, or even Speed Duels - makes playing online with strangers an absolute chore once you reach a high enough rank when your opponents are ones with access to any number of archetypes that have boatloads of protection, removal, negation, and special summons that drag a single turn out into 5 minutes of sequence playing solitaire.

[As an aside from Master Duel in specific and more on the game of Yu-Gi-Oh itself, I have often heard some longtime YGO prolifics talk about how fast the speed of the game is. It probably is true in terms of per-match time or total turn count that YGO games are shorter than other games in the genre, but I found while playing Master Duel that in half of my games each of those turns takes so much longer and is very much less interactive than in any other card game I've played. When this happens and it's not your turn, a match that's literally half the length of a bout in [Other Card Game] feels twice as long.]

If that's your thing, then, cool. The YGO card game fanbase is a big one, and it's almost a wonder why it took so long for something like Master Duel to come along. The biggest piece of admiration I can have for this online iteration of the card game is the sheer breadth of cards available from the getgo, either in packs or by way of the game's card crafting system; Only about one card I searched for in the deck editor didn't show up. Even being older than 20 years old, the effort to implement this library of game pieces is appreciated, and something more games could stand to do. Being able to look up your favorite card from when you were younger and play with it has a great satisfaction to it. But I don't see myself seriously returning and investing more hours until more formats/playlists are available unless I'm playing with friends.

On its surface, Master Duel is a gateway for new players to enter the world of Real Ass Yu-Gi-Oh!, much like Hearthstone and Magic Arena were able to make complex card games accessible to the masses in the past. It technically serves that function, especially with it being free-to-play and on just about everything, but I have a hard time having a lot of faith or enthusiasm in it as an effective onboarding experience for anyone without a previous interest in the property.

The Delicious Last Course dials up the creativity, challenge, and artistry in a game that was already filled to the brim with these qualities. Its climax is not as explosive or rewarding, but the new parry challenges and map puzzles give the new DLC Island its own pleasant identity and pace compared to the base game.

The biggest additions from The Delicious Last Course are the ones that permeate the rest of the game: New weapons, new charms, a brand new playable character, and a new (If not as good) title screen theme add plenty of variety and breath new strategies to the base game's previously established levels.

For such a low buy-in, Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course can easily be called essential for anyone with enthusiasm for the original.

2022

The unique visuals and pleasant audio are surefire wins, but I was surprised at how Tunic's gameplay loop was able to sink its hooks into me; Though I usually dislike games that are purposefully secretive about their mechanics, the implementation of Tunic's Secrets is among the most satisfying I have ever experienced in a video game - You can somehow feel like a genius for discovering something that was in front of you the whole time, even if it took you in excess of an hour to do so.

An obvious loveletter to the likes of Zelda and Dark Souls - It's almost a mystery as to why it connected with me as well as it did, considering I have no love nor experience with those titles.

On the surface, it seems as though a lot of time was put into Andromeda's various systems on an individual level, but very little effort is present in the way of making them flow into one another to create something resembling a fun gameplay loop worth spending time in.

The graphical fidelity and audio design is a welcome leap from the trilogy, but lack of interesting presentation or varied combat squanders any goodwill they might instill. Combat is more open ended and expressive on paper, but the chunky nature of navigating menus, managing your loadout, basic AI, and over-long animations prevent it from being as liberating as it ought to be.

Dialogue and performances from the supporting cast are mostly fine, but just about everything that comes out of Ryder's mouth happens at unnatural pacing and feels bizarrely divorced from anything resembling a real conversation. More unforgivable is the lack of any intrigue or memorable characters, with just about every story element being a discounted echo of something from the original trilogy, and even spilling over into feeling like a generic Destiny/Halo type story at times.

Underneath all of Andromeda's flaws, something resembling a good game is almost there, but it's buried under 20 tons of fat and loading screens. One could almost take a look at the horrendously bloated open world hubs filled with repetitive encounters and barebones production value in the story department, and wonder: Why was Mass Effect Andromeda's blank slate stepping-stone for the franchise developed by the team behind Mass Effect 3's multiplayer component not EA's attempt at a Destiny-clone, instead of the ill-fated Anthem?

I'm sympathetic towards many of the game's shortcomings and development issues under EA - But a lot of the problems here seem self-inflicted. At the end of the day, had Mass Effect Andromeda landed every shot it took, it would still be a poster-child for tired and overly long open world bloat that just about every other AAA game at the time was afflicted with. No one aspect of it is so offensively bad it tanks the experience as a whole; It's all just so mind-numbingly boring.

This game is navigating menus for 25 minutes until they let you fly an X-Wing