I think they should be terrified of you.

It's about hate. It's about revenge. It's about loss, regret, violence, trauma, guilt, fear, pain, death, hopelessness, zombies, dismemberment, war, action, stealth, decay, faith, growth, renewal, regression, absolution, friendship, family, loneliness, kindness, nature, nurture, hope, acceptance, consequence, love...

It's about just about everything. It's overwhelming. It's the most affecting interactive experience I've ever had. I hate it. I love it. I want it to stop. But I never want it to end.

The game so nice, they made it twice! Honestly, it was inevitable that the title an overzealous journalist once referred to as "gaming's Citizen Kane moment" would become a lightning rod for the most obnoxious people on the Internet. You know who you are, don't be shy! While The Last of Us certainly isn't a Wellesian masterpiece, it is a Druckmannian masterpiece, which is just as good if not better. The Last of Us has a story to tell, something to say about the human condition, and it doesn't pussyfoot around with bullshit player agency or time-consuming open-world checklists. It's a polished experience that knows when to give the player control and when to take that control away; an experience of unmatched visual presentation and aural splendor. (Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson are giving better performances here than the entirety of the games industry has in its near 50-year existence.) This whole campaign of negativity spurred on by people with anime avatars and games with titles like "Boku No Wife's Boyfriend" as their favorites is a massive psy-op and if you don't believe me, check the profiles of everyone giving this remake anything less than three stars. The Last of Us is an unparalleled interactive experience that looks finer, plays better, and hits harder than it did now that it's been brought up to the standard of its magnificent sequel. There isn't much more to say that hasn't been said by myself or others already. The wizards at Naughty Dog perfected perfection. Get Druckmannized.

"No one will care about my death if I can't prove to them that I lived."

A bite-sized piece of surreal horror that sees you wielding a sledgehammer in an office high-rise with reckless abandon until, eventually, you find a chair that bleeds. Visual direction and sound design are playful and crunchy, the act of destroying the sets you are placed in is itself a joyous catharsis that will quickly become a panicked rush to save a dying man from a game of Prop Hunt in ever-increasing rooms of uncertainty. A melancholy fantasy about turning a life of inaction into one of constant action. The cancer wasn't just within.

A regression from the varied gameplay encounters of the base game (that thankfully axes the Mary Jane "stealth" missions), Turf Wars feels like it was written and designed by an entirely different team, a team whose primary goal seems to be numbing the player with tedious combat arenas and side activities to the point where they mindlessly nod along to the overt copaganda. Replete with a cliche-ridden checklist of revenge tale mainstays, this second chapter in the expanded Spider-Man saga does little more than irritate and baffle, oftentimes simultaneously, and it doesn't even have the decency to include more of Black Cat. Shameful.

Unsurprisingly, as an "expansion," this falls flat throughout its entirety, not iterating upon the core game in meaningful ways and barely - barely - justifying its outright anemic narrative. The City That Never Sleeps should have been a side quest that evolved over the course of the main game rather than a piece of the experience that was carved out and repackaged as overpriced season pass guff not even six months after the title's release. I like Felicia Hardy as much as the next red-blooded coomer, but come on... be greater.

Over time I seem to have compartmentalized how this origin story needlessly brutalizes its characters, sometimes in service of the hackneyed narrative but mostly in an attempt to slather Lara Croft's journey from wide-eyed idealist to hard-edged "survivor" in a layer of faux maturity that pokes at ultra-violence with all the gravitas a triple-A adventure of this scale can muster. It will never not be ridiculous that this game features a cutscene where Lara breaks down after shooting a man's scalp clean off his dome only to immediately turn around and clear out a shooting gallery of nameless crazies without batting a teary eye. Ignoring all narrative context, however, Tomb Raider is a bop. Uncharted-lite gameplay with a large focus on bow and arrow combat (as was the style at the time) with aesthetic flourishes ripped directly out of The Descent. Not super complex, not super challenging, just the right amount of levity in gameplay that is severely lacking in its overwrought story. Square Enix are cowards for not making Sam and Lara a couple. Lara literally bridal carries Sam down from the top of a goddamn mountain. Cowards.

The perfect companion piece to Disco Elysium and not just because of their stylistic similarities. Where ZA/UM's unapologetically cerebral point-and-click RPG challenges the player by constructing an identity around their successes and failures, Citizen Sleeper challenges the nature of the player's identity - their avatar, their Sleeper, a lens through which to view the interactions on a starport in decline. Both games have rich world-building, a sense of imminent collapse, but through it all, the human spirit - our drive - pushes on, past what we once thought impossible, creating something remarkably poignant yet altogether unfamiliar. In short, the political text-based dice roll games made me cry. A humbling experience.

The first half of this BioShock Infinite apology tour leaves much to be desired. As a staunch fan and defender of the core game's narrative despite its rampant flaws, Burial at Sea: Episode One seems content to make sure the BioShock critic of every stripe is dumbfounded and disappointed. Can I safely say this is Ken Levine's The Rise of Skywalker? I'll need to play the second part before I hand down that guilty verdict. Regardless, much of the problems from the base game carry over here: laborious FPS arenas, lacking level design, and the added bonus of copious 'member berries for fans of the original BioShock, all tied together into a narrative that undercuts BioShock Infinite's ending and adds more fuel to the fire for anyone with a negative disposition towards that game anyway. If I wasn't just coming off of revisiting BioShock Infinite, I'd probably call this expansion "perfectly cromulent." It isn't, however. It is remarkably worse.