I keep seeing this game show up on "best games of all time" lists and I completely do not get it. This game is just trying to turn God of War into The Last of Us but doesn't understand what made The Last of Us so great.

Firstly, much like The Last of Us, this game's narrative is clearly structured to be told in a linear fashion. However, the player is allowed to hop on a rowboat and go off to do side quests whenever, completely ruining any sense of pacing that the narrative demands.

Secondly, perhaps one of the biggest similarities to The Last of Us is that this game's narrative also centers around a parent/child relationship. Only again, the relationship between Kratos and Atreus is nowhere near as compelling as the one between Joel and Ellie. Not only that, but there were multiple other games that centered around raising a child the same year that all did it more compellingly. The Walking Dead: The Final Season, Life is Strange 2, My Child Lebensborn, I was more invested in all of these than God of War.

And lastly, there is so much ludonarrative dissonance within this story. The game wants to tell you that violence is bad, but with every visceral kill Kratos does, the camera lovingly zooms in to show you a splatter of orange goop spurting out of these mythological creatures. It wants you to love the power fantasy as much as any of the previous entries in the series. Then at the end, Kratos kills Baldur saying something along the lines of "the cycle ends here" as if we didn't just spend an entire game doing what we always do in God of War, killing dudes and ultimately killing a god. The game is afraid of committing to its "violence is bad" narrative because ultimately, it still wants to be a God of War game.

I really liked this game. It’s an Earthbound style rpg with some horror elements, and if you dig games like Undertale or LISA, or even Yume Nikki to a certain extent, you’ll probably like this one too. The music and the visuals are so good in this, and the Earthbound-esque writing is perfectly fun and silly, while the horror elements are suitably creepy, and the story will take you to some high highs, and some low lows. I don’t have a whole lot to say about this other than it’s a really well done game in that style.

The only thing that I wasn't really a fan of is that there is a twist towards the end which I have issues with. For the vast majority of the game you're under the impression that a character has committed suicide, and the narrative deals with this really well. The suicide has caused your friend group to break up as everyone has their own methods of coping, but in the end they come together and deal with it in a very well written way. But then a plot twist reveals that it was actually the protagonist who killed this character in an accident, and then he and another character framed it as a suicide to cover up his guilt. It just felt like a gross way to engage with that topic to me, especially since it was handled so well before that point. I just wish that between the suicide story, and the dealing with guilt story, they chose one or the other rather than combining them in this kind of gross way.

If they wanted to do the guilt story, they could have kept everything the same but simply not gone the extra step of having the characters frame the death as a suicide, and rather just had the protagonist lie about how the death happened. But even with all that said, it still does some cool stuff with its ending that I really liked, and it’s definitely earned its spot as a top tier game in my opinion.