JezzatheJenius
2020
Awesome game, and I think i enjoyed it slightly more than P5. Cant wait to dive into P3 now!
Only thing about these games is the INSANE amount of dialogue, like my first playthrough was over 100 hours, second playthrough i fast forwarded all the dialogue and it cut about 50-60 hours off the game time. Thats crazy! Thats like 5 seasons of televisions worth of dialogue and cut scenes. And lets not pretend the dialogue is like super clever or funny, a lot of it is straight filler.
Also, the dungeons are pretty boring and grindy. But it didn't really matter because the actual gameplay is so amazingly fun and addictive.
Only thing about these games is the INSANE amount of dialogue, like my first playthrough was over 100 hours, second playthrough i fast forwarded all the dialogue and it cut about 50-60 hours off the game time. Thats crazy! Thats like 5 seasons of televisions worth of dialogue and cut scenes. And lets not pretend the dialogue is like super clever or funny, a lot of it is straight filler.
Also, the dungeons are pretty boring and grindy. But it didn't really matter because the actual gameplay is so amazingly fun and addictive.
2022
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.
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.
2022
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.
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.
1996
Yeah its got clunky ass tank controls, laughable voice acting, blah blah blah who cares. Its 5 stars. Lets move on.
1998
Top 5 all time games IMO. Ive played through this so many times and every time its amazing. People say 2 or 3 is the best but nah, OG is still King.
2022
1 star? That's a bit harsh you might think. Well let me lay it out for why I honestly think this is a genuinely terrible game, and why I'm officially fucking done with Supermassive games.
So, backstory: loved Until Dawn. Had such a fucking blast with that game. And so I've played every Supermassive game since, chasing the high of that experience. At the time it felt fresh, new and fun, a cool interactive choose your own adventure horror flick. And then with each Supermassive release since then, I've been constantly disappointed, none of them have been that horrible, yet none have been great either. And they've cranked them out at a ridiculous rate, releasing a new game every year since 2015. All having the same tired mechanics, all having the same middling horror stories. Well, after playing through The Quarry, I'm fucking done man.
Firstly, the dialogue, sweet jesus the fucking dialogue. The dialogue is diabolically awful. Every line of dialogue makes me want to thrust knitting needles through my ears. And look, the voice acting is good, they actually hire good actors to say this shit. But it sounds like dialogue written by a particularly crude AI scripting program. Its so clunky, tin eared and un-natural, it instantly makes you hate EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER, because all of them sound the same, spouting the same unbearably cringe, trying way too hard dialogue.
And just to rub a big pile of salt into the wound, you cant fast forward or skip dialogue, and you cant skip any cut scene EVER. Even when you have beaten the game, they refuse to give you the option. So if you want to Plat this thing, oh boy are you in for a a god awful time, because you will have to sit through 3 FULL playthroughs, and a few partial playthroughs. Each playthrough is about 7-8 hours. Imagine sitting through a terribly written 8 hour fucking movie which cannot be sped up in any way, not once not twice, but 3 full times, and then having to do the equivalent of another full playthrough backtracking to various chapters and hoping you don't fuck up that one particular QTE, because if you do, oh shit son! You gotta quit out, reload the chapter FROM THE FUCKING START, and do it all again and hope you don't fuck up again. Some chapters are over an hour long. FUCK THIS GAME.
The characters are all annoying AI dialogue robots who you want to die ASAP. The story is a fucking lazy mess, some shit about an evil hillbilly family battling some werewolves, and these camp counsellors are stuck in the middle. This weird fucking woman who you meet after every single chapter, she spouts absolute drivel that never has any significance and is always just boring nonsense, and then she asks if you want to see some 2 second scene that is supposed to give you a hint of what not to do, but is never really helpful in any way. Her whole character doesn't make sense; is she talking to you the player, who exists in the real world? Because she is also a character in the fucking game too, so HUH? This makes no fucking sense! Its all just absolutely maddening nonsense, and some of the worse writing I've ever experienced in a video game, or any medium for that matter.
Phew, what else....ok the graphics. So the mo-cap they used has an unfortunate side effect of looking really good at one second, before looking horribly, ugly bad the next. And so we are constantly in the uncanny valley, characters facial animation and body movements constantly fluctuating between natural and disturbingly un-natural. Its REALLY off-putting, and very distracting.
Gameplay is as stale as a loaf of 8 year old bread. Since 2015's Until Dawn, there has been absolutely no innovation or attempt to mix up the basic gameplay. We get loooong ass cutscenes, then you get to control a character, you walk (no you cant run, but you can hold L1 which makes you walk only slightly faster....like what's the fucking point??!! just make us walk faster or give us a run button!!!! FUCK!!! but of course they just want to pad out the game to make it seem longer) around, finding clues, occasionally you will get n action scene where you either button mash or do a series of QTE's. just think about that. button mashing and QTE's.....this shit has been around for 20 years now and is just the laziest bullshit, most games have discarded it because its lazy ass trash.
And that's it. Exactly the same fucking gameplay, story, writing, game design, graphics, characters as very game since Until Dawn. The same boring fucking formula that they crank out year after year. And well done Supermassive, you kept me hooked on your line until now, playing every new game to see if they changed or tried to improve it in any way. And every time Im disappointed and depressed. But nah, after The Quarry, Im fucking DONE man.
Oh yeah, and the end credits are un-skippable, and cant be sped up in any way, and they go for 15 fucking minutes. Seriously dude? FUCK. THIS. GAME.
So, backstory: loved Until Dawn. Had such a fucking blast with that game. And so I've played every Supermassive game since, chasing the high of that experience. At the time it felt fresh, new and fun, a cool interactive choose your own adventure horror flick. And then with each Supermassive release since then, I've been constantly disappointed, none of them have been that horrible, yet none have been great either. And they've cranked them out at a ridiculous rate, releasing a new game every year since 2015. All having the same tired mechanics, all having the same middling horror stories. Well, after playing through The Quarry, I'm fucking done man.
Firstly, the dialogue, sweet jesus the fucking dialogue. The dialogue is diabolically awful. Every line of dialogue makes me want to thrust knitting needles through my ears. And look, the voice acting is good, they actually hire good actors to say this shit. But it sounds like dialogue written by a particularly crude AI scripting program. Its so clunky, tin eared and un-natural, it instantly makes you hate EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER, because all of them sound the same, spouting the same unbearably cringe, trying way too hard dialogue.
And just to rub a big pile of salt into the wound, you cant fast forward or skip dialogue, and you cant skip any cut scene EVER. Even when you have beaten the game, they refuse to give you the option. So if you want to Plat this thing, oh boy are you in for a a god awful time, because you will have to sit through 3 FULL playthroughs, and a few partial playthroughs. Each playthrough is about 7-8 hours. Imagine sitting through a terribly written 8 hour fucking movie which cannot be sped up in any way, not once not twice, but 3 full times, and then having to do the equivalent of another full playthrough backtracking to various chapters and hoping you don't fuck up that one particular QTE, because if you do, oh shit son! You gotta quit out, reload the chapter FROM THE FUCKING START, and do it all again and hope you don't fuck up again. Some chapters are over an hour long. FUCK THIS GAME.
The characters are all annoying AI dialogue robots who you want to die ASAP. The story is a fucking lazy mess, some shit about an evil hillbilly family battling some werewolves, and these camp counsellors are stuck in the middle. This weird fucking woman who you meet after every single chapter, she spouts absolute drivel that never has any significance and is always just boring nonsense, and then she asks if you want to see some 2 second scene that is supposed to give you a hint of what not to do, but is never really helpful in any way. Her whole character doesn't make sense; is she talking to you the player, who exists in the real world? Because she is also a character in the fucking game too, so HUH? This makes no fucking sense! Its all just absolutely maddening nonsense, and some of the worse writing I've ever experienced in a video game, or any medium for that matter.
Phew, what else....ok the graphics. So the mo-cap they used has an unfortunate side effect of looking really good at one second, before looking horribly, ugly bad the next. And so we are constantly in the uncanny valley, characters facial animation and body movements constantly fluctuating between natural and disturbingly un-natural. Its REALLY off-putting, and very distracting.
Gameplay is as stale as a loaf of 8 year old bread. Since 2015's Until Dawn, there has been absolutely no innovation or attempt to mix up the basic gameplay. We get loooong ass cutscenes, then you get to control a character, you walk (no you cant run, but you can hold L1 which makes you walk only slightly faster....like what's the fucking point??!! just make us walk faster or give us a run button!!!! FUCK!!! but of course they just want to pad out the game to make it seem longer) around, finding clues, occasionally you will get n action scene where you either button mash or do a series of QTE's. just think about that. button mashing and QTE's.....this shit has been around for 20 years now and is just the laziest bullshit, most games have discarded it because its lazy ass trash.
And that's it. Exactly the same fucking gameplay, story, writing, game design, graphics, characters as very game since Until Dawn. The same boring fucking formula that they crank out year after year. And well done Supermassive, you kept me hooked on your line until now, playing every new game to see if they changed or tried to improve it in any way. And every time Im disappointed and depressed. But nah, after The Quarry, Im fucking DONE man.
Oh yeah, and the end credits are un-skippable, and cant be sped up in any way, and they go for 15 fucking minutes. Seriously dude? FUCK. THIS. GAME.
2001
The game that spawned so many imitators, and is kinda underrated in how influential it was. Ushered in a new kind of action game, with high intensity, white knuckle combat and solid difficulty. Amazing atmosphere, great story and characters, and so many little secrets to find.
2022
Literally put in 15 minutes before I knew this just wasn't for me. Its a bad Tony Hawk rip off but with shooting. And this was the best of the 3 PS Plus offerings this month? Super lame Sony, super lame.
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.
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.
Wow. Just fucking WOW.
At its best, a clumsy, boring and poorly executed horror game. At its worst, a complete misfire at making a game which deals with teenage trauma and bullying and suicide. Frankly, its just fucking irresponsible to make a dumb horror game which uses real life shit like this to sell some units (and i know it was free, but Konami wouldn't make this if they didn't intend to make money off it at some point, probably in the form of a full length game down the line). The whole story and its execution is in such poor taste.
The writing is atrocious, the voice acting is very bad, the graphics pretty average and the gameplay is so boring and uninvolving. Basically walk around with your phone, click X to interact with items, look at your texts, watch a boring cutscene with some Japanese girl, and then run away from some monster who looks like a rip off of the clickers from TLOU. rinse, repeat. I just got sick of it by chapter 3 and gave up.
What a complete fucking misfire from Konami. What a fall from grace from this once great company.
At its best, a clumsy, boring and poorly executed horror game. At its worst, a complete misfire at making a game which deals with teenage trauma and bullying and suicide. Frankly, its just fucking irresponsible to make a dumb horror game which uses real life shit like this to sell some units (and i know it was free, but Konami wouldn't make this if they didn't intend to make money off it at some point, probably in the form of a full length game down the line). The whole story and its execution is in such poor taste.
The writing is atrocious, the voice acting is very bad, the graphics pretty average and the gameplay is so boring and uninvolving. Basically walk around with your phone, click X to interact with items, look at your texts, watch a boring cutscene with some Japanese girl, and then run away from some monster who looks like a rip off of the clickers from TLOU. rinse, repeat. I just got sick of it by chapter 3 and gave up.
What a complete fucking misfire from Konami. What a fall from grace from this once great company.
2009
First hour: wow, controls are weird and clunk AF.....what, I died?! Thats bullshit, this game is unfair. oh you're suppposed to die...
Hour 3: Ok....getting used to the controls....jesus! that dragon just burnt me to a fuckin crisp! that was kinda awesome.....this castle is actually brilliant level design.
Hour 10: OMG, it took me 15 tries but I finally beat that fuckin blob covered in shields! I am the greatest gamer alive!!! More, gimme more! This game is fucking amazing!!!
Hour 20: Fuck Flamelurker. Fuck this game. Never playing it again.
Hour 3: Ok....getting used to the controls....jesus! that dragon just burnt me to a fuckin crisp! that was kinda awesome.....this castle is actually brilliant level design.
Hour 10: OMG, it took me 15 tries but I finally beat that fuckin blob covered in shields! I am the greatest gamer alive!!! More, gimme more! This game is fucking amazing!!!
Hour 20: Fuck Flamelurker. Fuck this game. Never playing it again.
2024
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.
Edit: Just hit 100 hours on Balatro and somehow still don't feel like I've totally mastered the game yet (how you get to Ante 12, get $400, or hit 100,000,000 in one hand is a fucking mystery to me). The last 10 or so Jokers and last few vouchers is the TRUE grind, real ones only need apply.
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.
Edit: Just hit 100 hours on Balatro and somehow still don't feel like I've totally mastered the game yet (how you get to Ante 12, get $400, or hit 100,000,000 in one hand is a fucking mystery to me). The last 10 or so Jokers and last few vouchers is the TRUE grind, real ones only need apply.
1994
Best Metroid. Exploring this amazing world, getting new upgrades and weapons, fighting bosses, the eerie music.....love it all.
Probably my fave story and humour in the series, even though I love the animation of part 3 more. Same ol' bullshit puzzles that will make you smack your head in frustration when you look up the solution.
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.