actually very disappointed. this would've been right up my alley, i LOVE crusty, clunky, old, & source games.. i love dark & twisted stories. but i think i hyped myself up for it too much. everyone told me it is soo scary & one of the best horror games they've played... but it just felt lack luster.

i actually put off playing it because i thought i would be too afraid.. but it wasn't really anything scary. the steam community pages are like "how to play CoF without shitting your pants!" but it was just like.. 2010's jumpscares & ooOoO bloody head. :(

the enemies all felt the same combat-wise, the first boss never even tried to attack me.. the apartment puzzle made me lose my mind.. ugh. i feel like i would love the story but the other characters that talk to you feel so awkward. i'll definitely be back to give it a try, but i definitely psyched myself up for something that is just kinda.. there. :(

very difficult to put a number on this experience so i wont bother. must open by saying that for the most part i am very very displeased with the changes made in scholar...the updated visuals unlock a lot of the game's majesty which could be harder to appreciate in the often extremely flat light and color of the vanilla version, and Very Occasionally an area will actually feel less sloppy and more focused (like drangleic castle). for the most part though i have to agree that 40 dollars for an aimless and annoying romhack is absurd. shrine of amana and iron keep are especially fucking criminal because theres no new experience on offer, just a more time consuming and annoying variation on the experience that was already there. almost nothing gets as infuriatingly pointless as the changes made to heide's tower (which, being early, created an immediate bad taste in my mouth) but persistent aspects like the abundance of fragrant branch statues never let me forget "oh yeah, ive never had this bad of a time playing vanilla"

but despite all this, counter-intuitively, this playthru rly made me appreciate just how good dark souls 2 is. this is my fourth or maybe third and a half playthru, and every single time ive felt the larger narratives about it melt a little more in my head. many of its supposed flaws stay purely in the realm of the theoretical for me, and dont actually do anything to bring down my experience or make me not have fun. i know how to play around adp, ive learned how to do (and enjoy!!!) crowd control and approach relatively slow-paced multi enemy fights, i know to set the windmill on fire, and its especially difficult to care about Abstract "flaws" like "the balance of the healing system" when on an actual experiential level, lifegems make this one of the most approachable and welcoming souls games for a casual replay.

rly the game just rewards replay and intimacy at every turn...i once dismissed the level design, but i think that had more to do with the fact that dark souls 1 required intimacy with its levels from the getgo (with all the interconnectness and backtracking), so just blazing thru each level on Mostly first try didnt give them any time to leave a similar impression. going back to them repeatedly, i see levels that are not only often enjoyable in their tightness and spatial deliberate, but i see flashes of demons souls-esque creativity that stir my imagination. i love the machinery in iron keep and how you can control some of it, i love aldia's keep with its Dont Touch The Exhibits Or There Will Be Permanent Consequences, i love huntsman's copse with its ambushes that make u feel like prey, and more then anything i love brightstone cove tseldora's vision of an actual inhabited place...cozy homes built in harmony with the earth, filled with sand and decay and the scars of cruel mine labor and military/religious enforcement. probably one of my top 5 or 4 favorite fromsoft locations ever.

this may, to me, be the most low-level pleasurable souls game of them all, its weirdly forgiving mechanics (lifegems, tombstone revivals, centralized hub for merchants, level respecing, warping available from the start) combine with unique never-reused quirks that are enjoyable to play around simply due to their novelty (this is tbh my preferred vision of weapon durability) which combine with an extremely varied and aesthetically pleasing world. it is, necessarily, less gravitatous in my mind then dark souls 1 or demons souls, which i always feel the need to take my time to savor. but i think ds2's unique appeal for those on its wavelength rly has something to do with how strangely nice and approachable it is, providing all the expected beats of a fromsoft game in a way u can just blitz through with no speedbumps

and even this Frivolity feels meaningful and expressive within the boundaries of the game's story...monarchs struggle for their names and kingdoms to be remembered as theyre paved over by someone else with an equally meaningless title. vaguely familiar echos in unrecognizable late stages of iteration. dark souls 2 often plays like a high-concept horror story of a world without history...nothing but an eternal present that cannot learn from past mistakes nor imagine anything beyond itself. the ultimate uselessness of the player's autonomy here is a great trick that feels, in a way, far more meaningful and biting then any other dark souls game. i enjoy dark souls 3, but theres no question that its far more self-important and loudly insistent about its take on similar themes...strangely insecure as it puppets recognizable images in a way that takes them out of being sad and scary and into the realm of popcorn fanservice. there is a quiet and deadly confidence to dark souls 2 keeping its echos of the past as only vaguely recognizable, its past as decayed and rotting and not like anything you would think to cheer for. there is no comforting familiarity, just sickly emptiness. despite all its troubled development, it is a wholly unified, cohesive, and enduringly unique piece of work that frankly doesnt require any big brained revisionism or galaxy level counterintuitive approach to appreciate. time has been kind to it, and it will only get kinder. kind of a poetic inversion!

bought and installed within the first minute of availability, which idk i will ever do for a game again, so feel free to take my autism with a grain of salt. but this is an exceedingly, endlessly lovable piece of art, one which reaffirms just about everything ive grown to believe about art in the first place. the source material , once uncomplicatedly loathed, has been slowly chipped away at by years of collective intimacy...sentences heard as groups of syllables, individual frames of animation immortalized, control quirks forced to be grappled with, npc requests and locations forced to be stored away in memory. this is to say nothing of the dedication it took to create an entire fan remaster, which leads directly into arzette via its lead developer. the result is a combination of nostalgic warmth, a grasp of what is compelling and memorable and striking about those games, and a melancholy stare at the parts that could have been better...a melancholy that could only be sated Through creation.

arzette will be described by many people as "the cdi zeldas but good." having enjoyed the remasters of those games, its more the final step in a process of escalation towards "the cdi zeldas, but there is less in the way of the good." the ultra-memorable quirk and expressiveness of the animation and voice acting are more widely acknowledged as boons now, but arzette also runs with the gorgeous background art, the lush and memorable music, and the miniature zelda experience via an interlocking spread of bite sized metroidvania maps. since its no longer on the cdi, individual screens are much meatier, which does make it slightly longer to recheck places (and rechecking places is what youre doing a Lot in all of these games, but especially this one with its more complex item progression), but it also allows for much more deliberate and satisfying level and encounter design. tricks from the cdi games have their most unpleasant edges sanded off, yet still retain their character. its by any measure an improvement on its inspirations, yet it never once feels judgemental or callous...instead it feels freed and joyus, the result of passion and time and effort and improved technology, chipping away at a dream created almost accidentally by people working with a bad console under tight time pressure.

and more then anything, even with some fun and dry meta jokes, i may not play a game more full of shamelessly earnest love this year. its close proximity with its source material allows it to share a bunch of discoveries its made that its so bubblingly excited about...yet its also an individual and distinctive piece of art carrying with it all the best sensibilities of contemporary metamodern media engagement, a plea to look closely at things that are dismissed and create beauty out of them. its most singular advancements are not its polishing up of rough gameplay ideas, but are in its disarmingly heartfelt and kind story and general tone. i know many people are cynical about pastiche, esp in a world where the same ideas are endlessly recycled over and over...but art should be about the free exchange of ideas, putting them out in the world for other people to respond to, feel about, and create on top of. it certainly cant be dismissed out of hand if it produces results like this even occasionally. hot moose man.

Another of those games which I should theoretically love but somehow it just doesn't do it for me.
I've read multiple times that this game is like a spiritual successor to the FEAR games, but I don't think that's the case at all.

Pros:
- The gunplay feels very meaty

Cons:
- The story is laughably bad
- The "horror" is laughably bad
- The mission design is all over the place
- The hub in between the missions is completely useless and totally lifeless (a mission select menu would have been way better for this game)
- The weapon customization feels tacked on

tldr: The gunplay is fun but is not enough to carry the full game. Don't get fooled that this game is the next FEAR, it is not. Get this when it's on sale somewhere for like 10 bucks for some quick fun.

truly if five nights at freddys as a franchise is defined by Anything, its seeing how far u can stretch something obviously flawed on the strengths of the high level aesthetic experience...not just visually , but the core Feeling of Existing Within The Confines Of The Interactive Object. for the scott-created games, this mostly manifests in the fact that theres no Perfect Universal system for the fnaf gameplay loop...every game has different little imperfections and half baked ideas. what allows each game to be compelling, esp taken as a collective whole, is the wide range of appeals they offer, scratching different itches of interaction and atmosphere. they cover for eachothers weaknesses very often...if fnaf 1 isnt exciting enough for you jump to fnaf 2, if the lack of camera usage in fnaf 2 bugs u jump to fnaf 3, if fnaf 3 isnt tight enough jump to 4,,,all this means that none of the games are rly Towering Masterpieces, but they cover so much ground that theres probably at least One that is For You (ik i have my favorites!)

security breach rly takes this to its absolute breaking point...with previous fnaf games the individual entries were simple and polished, some rough edges but for the most part if u didnt like them it was due to a disagreement with the fundamental concepts rather then incompetent execution. security breach has no such armor to hide behind...it is full of flatly bad ideas, and full of flatly bad execution of those ideas. even playing the most patched and functional version of the game yet to exist, the seams come apart pretty often...but they stay together long enough to make it clear that even without that, this is not a good attempt at adapting fnaf to a 3d free roam environment. plays mostly like an absolutely trivial stealth game with occasional gimmicks and some needless frustration from undercooked player-hostile design like the save system. it took me nearly half the game to realize that when i was playing it as a trial and error stealth horror game, i was taking it far too much at its word...i had to stumble into a series of revelations of how weak and easily beatable the ai is, how useless the cameras are, and how generous your stamina is. and all this before getting an item to stun everyone! it was a conflicting disappointment...by taking the game seriously, and assuming it was capable of enforcing the intended playstyle, i had created friction and texture and tension and all the other stuff the game was clearly supposed to have, but i had also made it needlessly frustrating because even if u opt into the slow and steady route, the game barely holds it together anyway.

and yet...once i realized that i Wasnt playing a slow and frustrating stealth horror game, but instead a somewhat annoying but largely stress-free frictionless exploration game, i started to have genuinely tons of fun. whatever steelwool failed at, their misguided division of attention and resources paid off in the places that actually got focus...vibrant visuals and character designs, a wholly enveloping and instantly recognizable aesthetic identity, all spread across the absolute feat of Dreamy Architecture that is the pizzaplex. designed as full scale childhood wish fufillment to create The Coolest Possible Place To Have Your 10th Birthday Party first, a compelling place to explore and discover second, and an arena for stealth gameplay an astronomically distant third. but those first two pay OFF,,,,if nothing else, im sure ill come back and replay this game because i know i have so much more left to see in the pizzaplex, and im sure ill just miss the feeling of being in it. the commitment to making u a small and agile child running up and down this extremely appealing and lavishly lovingly rendered world might as well be the most vivid aesthetic appeal this series has yet managed...only rly surpassed by the Other fnaf game where u play as a child, but while 4 is a nightmare, SB is pure soaring dreams. in being so unsuccessful at subverting its cheery and colorful exterior for real horror, it simply inherits all the advantages of a cheery and colorful exterior.

it rly is just endlessly lovable, full of relentless charm and character, and what is achieved there intentionally brings a more likable levity to the numerous problems. it is pure ambition and energy without experience or temperament...ideally it could have everything obviously, but its hard to be angry at a game that just wants to blow yr mind this badly. so idk, why should i care that the fun game that i played isnt the one they meant to design! its there, i experienced it, and while im not soooo forgiving that i can overlook everything, this is almost certainly the entry in the series i am most inclined to go back to someday. as apt an illustration as anything of the limits of looking at game design as a formula to be solved by the developer, rather then an experience to be absorbed and reckoned with by the audience. much good is to be found here, you need only be willing to see it.

and besides which, are u rly telling me this is worse then sister location????? aint no way !!!!

Been struggling for hours to write something of note about this, having just finished it earlier today, and now just laying awake at 4:a.m torn between several essayistic topics to choose from, but they will have to wait (for never, that is). The short thing I will say is that I don't think Miyazaki's intention of meta-reflective nostalgia-baiting really sticks here, as the story (or whatever the hell the russian formalists would call whatever the spines in these games are) are held up here by gameplay fundamentals that are of shocking craft by his/their standards. Totally understandable how the general sentiment around this game on here, and among the community at large, is that this is the natural step from the previous entries, since the surface of this game is so souls-y, but peel back barely half a layer and this'll feel like the most transparent studio-mandated rush-job since FromSoft's rebrand as a certified video game couture brand. From plain (or worse) level-design, to flaccid weapons, this just falls flat for me. Call me old-fashioned, but I don't fancy FromSoftware making easily-digestable content whose intended audience are people who undulates between words like "mid" or "epic". By absolutely astronomical proportions my least favorite FromSoft so far.

Whenever I play Dark Souls 3, I can't shake the feeling that I'm just running down a very long hallway. The entire game feels like a straight line from beginning to end in a way that's sort of unsettling once you notice it. And I could see myself maybe appreciating that experience... if I liked the areas, enemies, or combat in this game. Unfortunately, I don't.

The movesets on every enemy in this game are so fast and combo oriented that it makes progressing a slog. In the previous two games, basic enemies are threatening in numbers but rarely one-on-one, especially for an experienced player. This keeps early areas and fights from being too overwhelming for newer, more cautious players. Crucially, though, it also makes repeated trips through an area frustration-free on the combat side once you do understand what's there and how to respond.

This is not the case in Dark Souls 3. No matter how many times I play it, I live in constant fear of stun-lock combos and enemies chasing me faster than I can sprint even in early areas. I never feel like I reach that point where I can use my experience to confidently cut my way through an area that I do in the first two games. Every fight potentially being a near death experience is not what I want from Souls games, yet that's what FromSoft seems to want from them now if this and portions of Elden Ring are anything to go by. And don't get me started on how much they ruined magic with this one.

The story here is also the flimsiest of the trilogy, content to just shrug and say, "Idk, all that old stuff you liked is back because the world is ending, I guess". But in a nearly Rise of Skywalker-tier display of pettiness, the "old stuff you liked" is apparently all from the first Dark Souls. Hardly a hint of 2 anywhere to be found. The NPC stories are also a step back from 2, as following most characters' quests without a guide is now hilariously obtuse. How this happened when the game is the most linear of the three is beyond me.

This is the only one of the trilogy I haven't even gotten close to finishing, my motivation always petering out somewhere around the Smouldering Lake/Irithyll section of the game at the latest. It just isn't for me, and I'm okay with that. Even if it is disappointing.

>looking for a new NES game
>ask the balding retro game youtuber if their game is playable or peak
>he doesn't understand
>pull out illustrated diagram explaining what is playable and what is peak
>he laughs and says “it’s a good game sir”
>downloads a ROM
>it's playable

Nearly a year removed from its launch, free of recency bias, no longer swarmed by the theses of those more eloquent than I, I'm content in saying I don't like Elden Ring. I've beaten it a couple times, played solo and online, used a variety of builds, gone completionist and not, tackled its world in intended and unintended order, had fun and glazed my eyes over in boredom, been in awe of and readily mocked it through and through. I like so very much of it, but I don't like Elden Ring.

I don't like this GRRM-gilded world. There's a prevailing sense of deliberate obfuscation that apes the peculiarities of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls but it's a mere mimick. It is an inverse Rowling-style approach to worldbuilding -- she fills her holes and says they were always filled, Dark Souls had holes and never noticed them, Elden Ring creates holes to taunt the VaatiVidya watcher with the tar with which to fill them.

I don't like this ocean of content. Even if wondrous tsunamis are few and far between, the impetus to purposefully seek them renders them decreasingly effective. The novelty of Walking Mausoleums, Erdtree Avatars, winding tombs, subterranean cities all turn quickly to routine. I can only laugh so many times at a man getting hit in the groin by a football.

I don't like the perpetual breadcrumbs. Scattered like millet for fowl lay treasures for the taking. Of what use is a thousandth herb, a hundredth spirit, a tenth greatsword? None, so say I, if it caters only to that which I am not: the theorycrafter, the PvPer, the challenge runner. And for these redundant fragments to be handed to me after a repetitious romp through yet another imp infested tileset with a singular twist? I am left wondering why I put in the effort.

I don't like the ramp. Other FromSoftware titles, deliberately or not, have tremendous peaks and valleys in their presentations of power and the scope of encounters. From the terror of Ornstein and Smough to the odd simplicity of Sif to the potential headache of Four Kings to the humour of Pinwheel to the fear of Nito to the melancholic ease of Gwyn. Here, outside of minibosses, I proceed uphill eternal as Sisyphus. On paper it is an ideal, in reality it is a fatigue. Does it seek to frustrate? Does it matter? There is no reprieve on the intended path.

I don't like that this is designed for me to like it. Polished to a mirror sheen, every aspect is intended to appeal to me. A personality in flux to receive my adoration, never showing me that true, imperfect self. I long for the idiosyncrasies of a chance encounter.

I had so much fun with you, and I came away with the understanding it was all a falsehood. The dopamine was real. The sentimentality, a fiction.

The Far Cry Elden Ring-ification of Breath of the Wild with a smattering of end-of-chapter Fortnite and New Funky Mode.

While BotW was content to let players roam free in a sprawling world, Tears of the Kingdom reins in this freedom considerably and hides the guardrails from the player with horse blinders. Link is still welcome to run around Hyrule at will, but the primary storyline holds the keys which allow actual exploratory liberation. My first dozen hours completely ignored Lookout Landing, leaving me without critical tools like the paraglider and towers. That was the most challenging TotK ever got, and the most it (unintentionally) forced me to think outside the box. I dragged gliders to the tops of hills labouriously, I used a horse and cart, I made elaborate vehicles simply to get around. I scrounged for rockets, fans, batteries, and air balloons to ascend to sky islands, making it to a few of the lower ones with great accomplishment. I committed to putting off the towers as long as I could, not realising they were an outright necessity. Seeing how this additional layer of the map functioned demystified it severely, rendering a challenge into a stepping stone for parcels of content.

The depths, like the skies above, are filled with potential. Many of its spaces are similarly wide open to encourage blind exploration with vehicles. Only there is nearly no purpose to any of it. Lightroots are a checkbox which dismantle the most compelling part of the depths -- their darkness. The depths are a place you visit to grab zonaite or amiibo armour and leave. As the Fire Temple is within the depths, and it being the first I tackled, I falsely believed there would be more dungeons strewn about below, simply a part of the world rather than instanced away from it. Sadly, it is the exception.

The other temples are obfuscated and inaccessible without their related storylines, which is itself fine (the temples are impossible to progress through without their associated power anyways) but this leaves the world feeling more boxed in, a selection of rooms in an overly-long hallway. A spare few rooms complement each other, most of them do not. The walls of the rooms must be thick. Whether it is shrines, side quests, or temples, the developers yet again seemingly have no way of knowing what abilities the player might have, what puzzles they have encountered, what skills they remember. All that they know is that in the Fire Temple, you have a Goron. In the Water Temple, you have Zora armour. The positive is, of course, that these things can thus be tackled in any order without a fear of missing out on anything. The downside is that there is never anything more to a shrine, a temple, or anything than what the player encounters the first go around. There is no impetus to return to a location when you have a better tool, or a wider knowledge of how the game's mechanics work. You show up, experience the room, and leave. With 300 map pins at your disposal, and similar issues arising in BotW, there's a sense that the developers chickened out near the end, too afraid to let the player (gasp) backtrack or (gasp) miss out.

Ironically enough, the lack of FOMO is what I miss most. When I was towerlessly exploring with a hodgepodge of trash scavenged from around the world, I felt free. I felt clever! When I discovered the intended mode of play, however, I felt I was putting a square peg in a square hole. There's a crystal that needs to be moved to a far away island? Before, I might have made a horror of Octoballoons and Korok Fronds with Fans and Springs to get it where it needed to go. When the Fruit of Knowledge was consumed, I saw the parts for the prebuilt Fanplane were right next to the Crystal. There's a breakable wall in a dungeon? Bomb Flowers or a hammer are right there. It is incredibly safe. It is a pair of horse blinders that you can decorate as you please. Go ahead and make your mech, you are still on the straight and narrow path.

TotK tries to bring back the linearity of Zeldas past within the BotW framework, but it ignores that the linearity was speckled with a weave of areas which expanded alongside your arsenal, rather than shrinking. Everything here is incongruous, a smörgåsbord of cool set pieces that simply don't go together. There is too much content (Elden Ring) that is too self-contained (end of chapter Fortnite) and too afraid that you will not experience it (New Funky Mode).

Did I have fun? Yes. But I had to make it myself.