Cant believe I haven't logged this yet. Top 5 game on the SNES for me. Me and my cousin spent countless hours playing this. Still remember we hit a wall for ages against that bastard Hoy Quarlow, the pure joy when we finally beat him was indescribable. And then once we beat it, I fully got into speed running the game, before speed running was even a thing. So many great memories from this amazing game. The original Punch-Out gets way more attention for some reason, but this one is so much better IMO.

Very pretty, very short. Those are the two things that come to mind when describing Gris. Its basically a Journey clone, but with more of an emphasis on side scrolling puzzle platforming. The story is almost non-existant, although it alludes to themes of death and grief, and a mother/daughter relationship. Graphics and soundtrack are gorgeous, and easily the games strongest suits. But I definitely had that slightly empty feeling of "Oh really, that's it?" as the credits rolled.

Ill go back and clean up the collectables for the Plat, but I doubt Id replay this down the track. Its nice while it lasts though.

Edit: Got the Plat, took about an extra 4 hours. Always a bit annoying when tracking down meaningless collectables takes like twice as long as the main story.

So I needed something to cleanse the palate after 100,000 hands of Balatro and this did the trick nicely. Beat the game in 10 hours-ish and now going back to find all manual pages.

Stuff I really liked: The manual of course. Its so goddam cute, and a nice way to give hints and maps to the player. The music is superb, with some absolutely gorgeous tracks (between this and Cocoon, we're in a great era for indie soundtracks). I like how it rewards the player for exploring every inch of the maps, as secret rooms are often out of sight and obscured.

Stuff that was ok: graphics are nice, but not jaw dropping. Combat is basically Dark Souls-Lite, you got attack, dodge and then items and magic to use. Pretty basic, but serviceable. The game is pretty hard, and you will get more than a few very cheap deaths because the combat is not refined enough, and also the camera is too pulled back for really precise combat. Level design is ok, and the way the maps all connect is cool (and once again very Souls).

Stuff that got old, fast: cheap combat deaths, annoying enemies. Bosses are pretty hard, but mostly because of how spongy they are and how easy it is to get hit because of the imprecise controls and camera not being close enough to the action. Backtracking and not knowing where to go next. The manual gives you just enough hints, but man there is so much random wandering around and backtracking through areas, over and over again. Constantly pulling up the manual to check the maps to see where to go, just to get to the fast travel nexus area, to get to another area, just on the off chance there is some treasure or some room that wasn't accessible the first time through, but now with new abilities might be.....yeah that aspect of the game is tedious and boring.

With its Zelda inspired aesthetic and Dark Souls mechanics, this was a lot of fun. I like how getting the manual pages are so important, because without them you are basically wandering blindly through this world. Cute graphics, great music. Really good game, and with a few tweaks could have been a classic.

Edit: an extra 5 or so hours to get the Plat. The puzzles you need to decipher to get the secret treasures and fairies, not to mention getting all the manual pages and opening that friggin' mountain door tho.....ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS. Took me about 5 hours using online guides, without those it would have been about 50 hours, if I could have done it at all. Really obscure crazy "how the fuck did anyone work this out?" kind of logic. That input to open the mountain door is just bananas on its own. I kinda respect it, but at the same time, I don't wanna have to use guides to work this shit out. If anyone got the Plat without using a guide or getting any help, I call bullshit.

Jesus Christ, this thing has its claws in me, but good! I was immediately hooked, and the last few days have been me playing a few hands of this whenever I have a spare minute, with sessions going way past the midnight hour. This is the game I needed to fill the big Inscryption size hole in my heart, and I'm loving the hell out of it. A story would be nice, or some characters of some sort, and that's where Inscryption has the edge, but its still an absolute banger. I could have spent $125 on a new AAA game, but I took a chance and bought Balatro. Best $17 I ever spent. Just give it a chance people, you wont be disappointed.

Edit: Bumping it to 5 stars. 50 hours in now am I'm only just starting to feel a touch burned out, which for a game this simplistic in its gameplay is a miracle. Fiendishly clever, deep and almost insidiously addictive. Determined to get every Joker, deck, and beat every challenge there is. Can easily see myself putting in another 50 hours.

Another playthrough of Arkham City has revealed more of what I love and more of what hasn't aged so well about this classic. Its still super fun, super atmospheric, great graphics that hold up to this day. The feeling of gliding around the dark, crumbling city is just unmatched. The story is pretty good, not outstanding but good enough to keep you playing through til its end. I liked Asylum's story more, but the bigger map and more open world design really works better than Asylum's more linear, smaller playground.

Where City fails is in its side missions. They start out so cool and interesting! Deadshot is sniping people, someone is going around skinning the faces off off inmates, some myserious ninja guy is appearing in random locations and leaving strange symbols, the Riddler is kidnapping paramedics and holding them hostage....i was pumped to do all the side content. But the problems are two fold. Firstly, its easy to start the missions, but then they become super hard to continue. Finding the clues to continue to the next parts of these missions becomes like finding a needle in a haystack. Like searching this huge open world map on the off chance youll run across this guy standing on a rooftop somewhere, and when you do actually find him all he does is spout some nonsense and leave a symbol for you to scan. Rinse and repeat 5 times and the missions over. And you're just sitting there like "wtf was the point of all that?" This applies to all the side missions. Some are especially half arsed, like rescuing the political prisoners, or the Mad Hatter mission, which you can barely even call a mission. They all feel so half baked and unfinished.

But then you've got the worst of the worst. Perhaps the most time consuming, ridiculously over bloated side mission in all of gaming. The Riddler. So in Asylum, tracking down all the Riddler clues and riddles was so fucking fun, its made a very good game a great one. And there was a lot, but not an overwhelming amount. But they went SO far overboard in City. Asylum had from memory 240 collectables, City has 400! And its much, MUCH harder to get all of them, some of them just being so fucking aggravatingly hair pulling and frustrating. I have never got them all. In this latest playthrough I was determined to get them all, but after about 300 I was just so fucking burned out and annoyed I gave up. Takes A LOT to get me to that stage, as I'm usually an OCD completionist. The pure amount of time consumption is mind boggling. Beating the actual game, and most side missions will run you about 20 hours. Beating the Riddler side mission will run you about an extra 20 or more just on its own. Hell, you might even spend an hour on just one of the more difficult ones by itself.

So Arkham vs City. There's stuff I love from both games. Asylum had a better story. City has a better open world. Asylum had just the right amount of content. City has way way too much content in some areas, like the Riddler mission, and not enough in every other side mission. So I love both and consider them classics for different reasons, but both games definitely aren't without their faults.

Great puzzle games are few and far between these days, and when I find a great one, I devour it with glee. Cocoon is a pure puzzler, with no story whatsoever. You're thrust immediately into this world as some little bug guy, and then its just hours of puzzling goodness. The main gameplay mechanic involves moving around different coloured globes/worlds, but then it truly gets interesting when you get to travel within these worlds within worlds.

The graphics are modest, but actually really beautiful. The music is phenomenal, evoking a Blade Runner like sci-fi atmosphere that I loved. The puzzle difficulty is almost pitch perfect, I only had to consult a guide on one or two occasions, and even then when I read the solutions I was like "Gah! I totally could've solved that with a little more persistence."

It could have been a little longer, I beat the game and got the plat in about 7 hours. And some kind of story would have been nice I guess. But Im just grateful when we get a great puzzle game. More please!

A game that sucked me in straight away, and I really enjoyed its gameplay loop of exploring, fishing, upgrading. The day/night cycle is cool too, I really started to sweat every day around 6pm as the day grew darker and I knew night was approaching, and all the dangers unseen. And heck, just cruising around in your boat is pretty relaxing in itself.

But at about the 10 hour mark, when I had explored pretty much the entire map and found all the docks, I found that all my remaining quests were just simple boring, quite grindy fetch quests. Some random guy in a robe on an island says "Catch this fish/crab and bring it to me". OK, so I have to find where this fish is at on the map, if its in your encyclopaedia cool that helps, if not its basically a time consuming game of chance. Oh I found it finally, oh shit don't have the right rod to catch it though. Gotta go to a dock and research it. Oh I don't have any research tools, ok now I gotta go find some of them (more time consuming), now i can research the rod. Oh shit i don't have enough money to buy it, now i gotta go fish for a few days to get the money. more time consuming. Ok ive bought the rod, now i gotta go find the fish again. Ok ive finally caught the damn fish, return to the NPC. His reward, some book that gives me a 5% discount at stores. Hmmm.

It was at this point, I was like, as much as I enjoy the game, the quests suck, there's really no story to speak of, and im kinda just over the grindy boring fetch quests. Im still undecided if ill finish it or not. I just wish it had more of a story to keep me playing.

So I wrote this big long in depth review of Pentiment, and then accidentally hit some key that magically CLOSED THE MUTHAFUCKING REVIEW WINDOW WITHOUT ASKING ME TO SAVE AND LOST ALL MY WORK. Sigh.....

So after much swearing and yelling, Ill just say that Pentiment has a really great story, well written and impeccably researched. The artwork and music are exquisite too. But the simplistic and boring gameplay mechanics definitely mar the experience, and made going back to replay the game again an unappealing prospect. If the game didn't rely so heavily on pure dialogue, so as to make 90% of the game a continuous mashing of the X button to get through dialogue sections, it would be a greatly improved experience. I also thought the big reveal at the end was rather weak and not very believable either. Nevertheless, the story and worldbuilding are amazing, and definitely makes it an easy recommendation, at least as a one time playthrough.

Decided to buy the double pack of Asylum and City cos it was $8 on sale and its been a while since I played both. For a 15 year old game, it stands up so well. This is probably my 4th playthrough, and the atmosphere, voice acting, gameplay, combat, and overall presentation is so fucking great, even if the graphics def look like PS3 graphics. This game accomplished something that a hundred other modern AAA games just cannot: it made the collectables fun! Every time I play, I love finding all the tapes, Arkham stones, Riddler question marks, and working out the riddles. Why oh why is it so hard for other games to make finding collectables not a fucking boring grindy slog??? Just goes to show, Rocksteady really gave a shit about every single aspect of this game.

Oh, and I totally don't remember it being this short, its like 8 hours to beat, probably get it down to 5ish if speed running. And can I just reiterate how fucking awesome the voice acting is? Hamill is the GOAT.

5 hrs to beat, 2 more to get the plat. A fairly simple, repetitive and short experience. Feels like a game that ran out of funds half way through development, so they had to dispense with things like combat or a story. The graphics and music are nice. Controls are a little jank, both on foot and in the boat. Its very repetitive: go around the world map in your boat, grab a shit load of collectables, go up lookout towers, and grab a big seed thing and drop in it a hole, do that 9 times and the games over. there really isnt much of a story at all, but I enjoyed cleaning the map and getting all the collectables. Its short, unchallenging, repetitive, and the gameplay mechanics are pretty dated. But sometimes that's the kind of 'turn off your brain' game you need.