This was a massive disappointment for me. I was sold on this game when I saw its trailer during the Nintendo Direct, thinking it was going to be a sort of dystopian hip-hop rebellion kind of game. What I got was what if Bit.Trip Runner was terribly designed.

Maybe I'm missing something, but to me the music seemed utterly uninspired. It was the same kind of dull instrumental jazz tunes throughout the vast majority of the game. No song stood out as very different from any other song to me. Based on the trailer, I expected something with a bit more rapping in it, hoping the lyrics would tie into the dystopian setting. There was really only one level, the last one, that had some good rapping in it, and even then it wasn't able to keep it up for the whole level. The last level had a clever gimmick to it, and while the song was more enjoyable than the rest of the game, it was much too little, much too late at that point for me.

Worse yet, the music doesn't really sync up with the gameplay in any way whatsoever. While games like Bit.Trip Runner and Sayonara Wild Hearts have their soundtracks inextricably linked to their gameplay; Never Yield feels like a slog through the same obstacles over and over again, with a disconnected soundtrack in the background. And the repetitive obstacles are made even worse by the fact that some levels of this game are just repeats of previous levels. Even in the final level which had some enjoyable elements, after the rapping ends it goes right back to feeling like the same grind as the rest of the game.

Also, the default difficulty of this game makes a slow motion effect happen anytime you approach an obstacle. Not only does this mess with the flow of the game, it will sometimes happen so early that if you react to it immediately, you'll have reacted too soon and will end up hitting the obstacle anyways. At the same time, there were many moments where I timed a jump too late, and my character would clip through the obstacle and keep going as if I had cleared it.

As for this game's story, there hardly is one, and it's told through cutscenes that lack any sound effects, and have animations so poor they look like they were made in Gary's Mod. I haven't felt this swindled by a game in a long time, hard pass on this one.

No joke, the first time I played this was by borrowing a friend's GBA copy as a kid, and I thought it was a new game. That's how well it holds up. Idk why people on this website seemingly hate retro games so much (there are a lot of people who refuse to rate anything from the 8-bit era anything higher than a 3.5), but this game is still super fun to me, despite never having enough skill to actually beat it. Also, this game basically single handedly saved the video game industry from the crash in the 80's. We wouldn't be where we are today without this one.

When Bastion was first released on Xbox Live Arcade, it was the first indie game that made me go "huh, this is a small little $15 dollar game, and it's one of my favorite games of all time." Now here I am, and the majority of my favorite games are all indies. This is a top down hack n' slash with a gorgeous art style, where the world forms around you as you journey on. This game has a really clever solution to the "how to account for minor player actions narratively" problem, and that's with the incredibly voiced narrator character who will comment on something as small as your decision to linger in an area to break boxes, and make that feel like an important part of your narrative. This is up there among the greatest video game soundtracks I've ever heard, and a few of the songs are really well incorporated into the themes and overall story of the game. Speaking of story, this is a well told story about prejudice, and learning to live with and learn from your mistakes. It's not the most complicated story in the world, but there's an emotional weight to it that I really liked.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is the first game in the reboot/prequel series of the Deus Ex series, and it does everything the original game did but better. It has a really cool cyberpunk story about augmentations and transhumanism, and it portrays how those things would interact with capitalism. Through the open world streets of the game you can find people both pro and anti augmentation, with the anti side ranging from "this is an unnatural affront to God" to "this only benefits the rich." And you'll also find harvesters, people who harvest augmented body parts to sell on the black market. The game is a little too mainstream to explicitly say "capitalism is the problem here," but I could feel the class struggle in this game's world. When I was playing and listening to all the game's opinions on augmentations I couldn't help but think, a lot of the problems here aren't inherent to the technology, it's about the system this technology finds itself in. All of this is really cool sci-fi that I could imagine actually happening one day. The game also does away with the original game's weird early 2000's racist voice acting of Chinese characters, and has them either speak English with a slight accent, or often has them actually speaking Mandarin. And the way that Hengsha is envisioned as this city that's had to build itself vertically in order to expand for its population is really cool. The other huge improvement on the original game that makes this one of my favorite games, is that the game will not give you enough skill points to invest in everything by the end. This forces you to have to really think about how you're going to augment your character, because those decisions will influence what ways you're able to approach any given situation. It's that gameplay choice that makes this a story that I don't think would be as effective in any other medium than games.

Edit: Well I just watched the three and a half hour long HBomb video that will surely become the only way anyone talks about this game going forward. So that certainly dates this review based on my teenage memories of playing this! A lot of my enjoyment of this certainly comes down to something HBomb says in his review, which is that at the time this game came out, unless you were playing retro PC games, there was nothing like this so it was kind of a breath of fresh air. It was my first immersive sim and I didn't even know that genre existed. I was also still a Liberal at the time and so even the small hints at the larger class issues this game touches on were like revelations to me. I think something interesting that comes out of sites like backloggd and letterboxd will be that you'll see a lot of reviews calling something groundbreaking when by all account it's not at all, but it will have been that user's first experience with that type of thing, and have completely shifted their perspective. I think I still enjoy this game over the original though. If only due to the fact that when I played the original, the moment I got the blue-lightsaber-destiny-sword I immediately switched to just massacring hoards of people with it because it made the game exponentially easier and quicker to get through, which made me turn off the "making interesting choices" part of my brain. And also the racist voice acting. Like, my god the racist voice acting.

I have to agree with Flatterdorsch's review of this game. The presentation is clearly this game's strong suit and if you're a fan of games with a unique aesthetic you'll love this one. The improvisation scene and a scene towards the end are stand out sections of the game that have a lot of creativity in them, and are what push my score up to 4 stars. I do have to say though, that I had trouble wrapping my head around the puzzle segment with the scientist, and had to look that one up. I also had to look up the final fifteen minutes or so of this game, because as of right now, I've attempted the ending 3 times on Switch, and it keeps crashing.

Onrush is a racing game without a finish line. Instead of trying to just be the fastest person on the track, Onrush pits 2 teams of 6 against each other in objective based matches. So for example one of the modes has a moving circle, and whichever team has the most drivers in that circle begins to take it to score a point, another mode has you trying to use more boost than the other team to win. It also has class based vehicles with different abilities to make matches more interesting, examples include a car that can give boost to teammates nearby, a motorcycle that drains boost from nearby enemies, one of the motorcycles is basically out of Tron leaving a trail of death behind them. This is something I think it'd be really cool to see more games try out, to expand the racing genre beyond who gets across the line the fastest, it has potential to be a whole genre of its own. The only reason I have this as "shelved" is because I'm literally one trophy away from the platinum, so I may return to get that at some point.