I’m very glad this version of this game is available on my Switch. Link’s Awakening is a completely wacky game, filled to the brim with incongruous pieces that constantly keep your brain off kilter. Despite that, the completed puzzle is satisfyingly cohesive and oozes with the charm, intent, and creativity to leave a lasting impression.

The “it’s all a dream” theme of Link’s Awakening is pretty boilerplate at first glance, but the execution is so superb that I ended up forgiving it. The game delivers the dream with a tasteful degree of self-awareness: it nearly breaks the fourth wall to announce some hints, yet lets other unnerving components hang without acknowledging their absurdity whatsoever. This balance is struck tactfully to show the player that something is off here, for the entire ride. As a given from the start, the impending doom of your quest to end the dream begs you to confront the consequences of your actions—it’s not a cop-out surprise to save the narrative. The dream is a vehicle for storytelling, not the story itself, and it left me with pangs of remorse as I approached the inevitable end.

Link’s Awakening pairs those painful undercurrents with the brilliance of its colorful world, which expresses whimsy and delight around every corner. Koholint Island is chalk-full of pure and endearing friends, baddies who don’t take themselves too seriously, and a diverse array of regions and dungeons efficiently compressed into a tiny area. The Switch remaster embraces the original’s tight design and carries the intentional movement and curated precision of the Island into the current generation. It’s a shame that frames chug in so many circumstances both docked and handheld (especially given Nintendo’s track record for silky-smooth first party games), because the children’s-toy-plastic sheen applied to the 3D graphics is an absolute triumph which could be improved only with consistently buttery performance.

I love the graphics vision in the remaster, but playing Links’s Awakening also made me realize I should be more open to forgoing modern graphics to spend more time on older games. The core of Link’s Awakening is a great experience regardless of how much I like how the trees look. The overkill foliage and modern conveniences like a contiguous overworld only help reinforce what a treat the Link’s Awakening remake is to play on Switch.

I feel somewhat bound by how I rate games here, ironically similar to the code by which Wolf is bound that incites the entire journey in question. On one hand, Sekiro is a well-crafted game with an incredible combat system. On the other... I didn't enjoy playing this game. At best, I was on enough sleep and stimulants to almost reach the flow-state it tried to create. Mostly, I struggled to get through even the most basic of tasks in Sekiro. That grueling struggle (and skill issue) isn't one I can ever hope to enjoy, or even finish, without gaming eclipsing my education or personal life.

I bought this bad boy after loving Elden Ring... and cheesing a decent bit of it, too. I wanted to git gud, and I got Sekiro for that reason. Nobody needs me to harp on how this game does that to a player. Precise, creative melee combat with zero room for error forces you to learn every possible scenario and react to it in the blink of an eye. It's as much a twitchy puzzle game as it is a combat saga, and that problem-solving element begs players to return again and again to confront challenges.

The problem is... I'm in grad school, gearing up for a career in a field with no respect for my time and effort. I do problem-solving full-time, and video games are my haven to unwind from those stresses and find enjoyable worlds to escape in. Challenging games are fun for me, up to where they begin to disrespect the sanctity of my time with them. Sekiro is so unflinching in its premise that it becomes excruciating to play; that, combined with the addictive Soulslikes formula dragging me back hoping for the high of a victory with just "one more try tonight" (it's not gambling, right?), left me a little infuriated and very, very defeated while playing this game. Sekiro demands you play a single way to beat it, and it turns out I kinda hated playing that way. Don't get me wrong, the zen you achieve when eventually memorizing every possible attack pattern, reading (guessing?) what comes next in an instant, and responding perfectly for like 8 minutes straight can feel thrilling! But I didn't find it fun.

After finally getting through a full cycle of that process and beating Genichiro, I'm content to put this one away. Some of the other elements didn't land for me, too; for instance, after even my worst Elden Ring moments, I always found the story/lore/world compelling enough to press on. I didn't feel that pull with Sekiro. The world-building is fine, but not a reason to stay. Oh also, the everyone-gets-sick-when-you-die thing is basically like kicking a puppy, given that I (the puppy) am trash and died regularly while traversing the world and like 70 times to a single boss. Nobody needed to trip my guilt by making me incite an epidemic when I was already sad from my repeated personal failures lmao.

You get the gist. I don't think I have a single, like, objective criticism to level at this game. It is very good. Sadly, I am not gud, and I really loathed playing this thing. It was punishment to play, and the few positive elements amounted more to an adrenaline rush than enjoyment. I have to remain true to this being my rating of Sekiro, and I just didn't have fun. I'll let the sea of other positive reviews outweigh my outlier negative experience. This alleged masterpiece isn’t for me and I have to respect that. Humbling.

The best thing I can say about Outer Wilds is it made me genuinely say “what the fuuuUUUCK???” (cresc.) probably a dozen times, each instance with increased disbelief. It’s a truly awe-inspiring take on the video game medium about, among many other things, finding solace in uncertainty. For every time it left me frustrated with a lynchpin mystery element (I chalk one key puzzle up to a poor design choice), I had dozens of instances left with only my own problem-solving skills to blame in the near-perfection of this little solar system (I chalk this up to, um, raw hubris). I played this game at a horrible time to enjoy the gameplay loop, given the fatigue I’m feeling from my worst semester of grad school yet; I had no desire to come home to read and solve more riddles. Ironically, that timing is exactly what made the lessons Outer Wilds teaches so impactful for me: the uncertainty in my own life feels more manageable after what I felt exploring this charming universe.

And man, I felt a lot. Both existential terror and unmitigated wonder. Haunting hopelessness and dogged determination. The centrality of community and the sheer oblivion of our singular loneliness. It also kinda makes no fucking sense and that’s okay. I never knew going places and reading stuff could elicit this range of emotions, so deeply. A near-essential 22 minutes 20ish hours for anyone with a controller.

Hogwarts Legacy is a book best judged by seeing the gorgeous cover, maybe reading the inside flap, then never digging too deep into the pages contained within. While it can leave you drooling at an audio-visual buffet at times, I didn't find enough substance in this game to want to see the end.

The highs here are quite high. Potter fans will, expectedly, get the most out of Legacy, and I looked at its launch as a now-jaded adult who unabashedly adored the franchise as a kid. I left my skepticism at the door after my trans sister raved about Legacy (and shared her Home-Xbox-privileges with me for free access). Legacy never turns the fan-service meter down below "Medium" and frequently ratchets the level into the stratosphere, but ya know what? I liked it. This IP has been somewhere between dormancy, mediocrity, and public shame since the last movie released, and I was happy to immerse in the world I knew as a kid once again.

Players don't have to wait 45 minutes before the first crank of the nostalgia machine, with a brilliant pan through the woods before Hogwarts is revealed to a remix of the John Williams movie theme. This moment is, in many ways, a microcosm of Legacy at its best: a stunning view, complemented by excellent sounds. Legacy is frequently gorgeous. The interior of Hogwarts is ludicrously-detailed, a true love letter to the franchise and really everything a player could want to see. They probably could've sold this game at $70 with just the immediate Hogwarts grounds and gotten away with it tbh. But they didn't! Instead, Hogwarts is surrounded by a decently large open world, which tempts the viewer with scenic vistas and eye-catching details in the distance. The world is also vaguely dynamic, shifting noticeably with the seasons and select in-game events. It just looks great.

I elected to play Legacy on the Quality + Ray Tracing mode, a first for me (60fps is a must usually, but I figured the intensity of gameplay was low enough to try it here). Uh... nobody should play this or any game on RT mode on XSX. It's cool that the hardware technically supports it, but next-gen consoles are really at their best when smoothing everything out, not pushing the boundaries back towards the jankiness of last gen. Legacy usually holds 30fps in QRT mode, but can really chug in dense areas like large Hogwarts rooms or anywhere in Hogsmeade. I largely chalk that up to me forcing RT on an Xbox, but other problems (strange texture-pop in particular) are more on the game optimization side.

The other highlight of Legacy is audio. The game sounds fantastic. Music is a brilliant mix of old and new, where familiar tunes are fleshed out and expanded upon by new additions to make the world feel lively and authentic, not limited to a suite of songs written for linear movies two decades ago. Voice acting is also surprisingly good. I fully expected it to suck, especially with a voiced main character, but I was really sold on how basically everyone talked.

Circling back to fan-service: Legacy certainly isn't limited to it. I was pleasantly surprised that the game dared carve out a new story in the Potter universe, rather than pull a Skywalker Saga and make everyone tie back to each other somehow. With that said... beyond those initial meta strokes, story is where Legacy quickly begins to lose its luster. This tale is as basic as it gets, with generic forces of good and bad clashing. Imagine this--turns out you have a mysterious new power (somehow not just the whole being-a-sorcerer thing), and have to save the world from the bad guys. It is generic storytelling 101, and Legacy rarely makes a solid attempt to even mask that straightforward approach. Even your binary nice-or-mean dialogue choices always seem to round out into a net positive for your good-guy character. I may be speaking too soon on that point, as I've heard rumblings you can become a dark wizard (Avada Kedavra is sitting locked at the bottom of your spell sheet from minute one), but even so I have a hard time seeing how Legacy might separate itself from the good-vs.-evil story.

Also, people just relentlessly compliment you. It's actually kinda annoying how readily they decide you're the chosen one, their best friend, a most impressive student, etc. Even when you do something bad they still find a silver lining on you. I want to be bullied just once, damn.

The reductive story elements are furthered by the gameplay. This is easily the most basic western RPG I've touched in a while. Like, bro. Everything.

EVERYTHING.

In this game is a task. Go get 2 of these. I'll meet you at X so you can do Y for me. Hell your professors give you homework and they all admit they're making you do 3 tasks before you can advance the story. It just kills me that this world, so charming on the surface, is wholly flavorless to actually interact with. The map is just littered with locations and repetitive mini games to complete. None are interesting after the first few attempts.

The best part of the gameplay is the actual fighting, amazingly. I thought this was doomed to fail before playing it, but it's actually kinda cool! You have a decent number of different spells, they interact with each other differently, you can do some creative stuff with it all, and all of that is wrecked by the fact there are like 6 enemies in the whole game. You got goblins and people and those stone knight things, a few boring animals and some zombies. How is that it?? No matter how many spells you unlock, it gets boring to kill the same enemy over and over with them. I really needed more variety here.

My biggest takeaway from Legacy is that it is, ironically, crafted to be as inoffensive as possible. Generic story, generic activities, generic movement, generic loot system (though why do I have only 20 slots for clothes), generic open world, etc., etc., etc. Sometimes this works well; for instance, I genuinely appreciate how much they washed history (and Rowling) out of this game. There's no racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, or really anything rude to other people at all here. Representation is excellent, at least compared to (checks notes) every other video game ever made. This is an alternate history where wizarding schools have flying horses roaming around them, and I want to happily escape into it while thinking of a world I entirely wish I lived in.

Other times, that placation goes beyond what I'm interested in playing for endless hours. In the interest of appealing to as many people as possible, Legacy dilutes itself of an excellent experience with enduring appeal. I had a good time, and I don't need to sink another day of my life into finishing this game to have gotten what I want out of it: the chance to walk around Hogwarts and pretend to be a wizard for a moment.



(My hot take, despite never having played a game of this genre before, is that this would be a better game as a life sim. Avalanche could've taken the effort they put into everything outside of Hogwarts/Hogsmeade and put that into creating better stories, more characters (the few fleshed-out characters in Legacy are usually quite good, but rare), and a thorough experience inside Hogwarts. I don't need to be Harry Potter-lite from 150 years ago, but carving my own (relatively normal, lower stakes) wizard-school story out in that beautiful rendition of Hogwarts would be super fun.)

Many great video games have earned my respect in one way or another. Elden Ring is different—it demanded, no, compelled my respect. I had no choice but to love it despite the oppressive difficulty and staggering scope it provided, because every single time it kicked my ass? The reward for pressing on was worth it and then some.

I realized pretty early on that I was playing the Best Video Game I’d experienced to date. That’s not to say ER is my Favorite Game, though it’s certainly top 5. But the unbelievable detail, care, and polish this game radiates is unmatched. The open world alone is an absolute feat, impossibly large yet impeccably handcrafted. Anyone complaining about a reused enemy here and there needs to remember—this game is leagues beyond its open-world rivals in attention to detail and variety. Much praise has been said about ER’s sparse map when compared to the question-mark-riddled competition other studios provide. All I will add is that the map can afford to be sparse precisely because of how unique and exciting the world is. Players need no motivation to go new places, because every place is a genuinely new and exciting experience. The best of these experiences are the legacy dungeons, almost all of which are simply immaculate challenges.

The brilliant, unique world design is complemented by an almost-as-diverse cast of bosses. Like for many, ER was my first FromSoft game, so I can only compare these bosses to other titles. Normal games, ya know? Normal games don’t know what a boss is. This game knows what bosses are. I completed all 30 achievement bosses, the other few mandatory ones, and who knows how many others. They are all sick. Some are sick, as in “awesome.” Some are sick, as in “a sick person must have created this.” Most are both. A few were among the hardest things I’ve done in a video game, and a few more left my jaw on the floor. Perhaps above all, I am uniquely proud to have defeated them. Most were a genuine challenge I couldn’t have imagined surmounting before giving ER a try.

That’s not to say I got gud. In fact, I am quite bad at this game. I definitely beat way-too-many bosses with cheese strats. This is because my partner may have rightfully committed me to a mental institution after watching the insanity I exhibited with a few bosses and areas. On day 1, I walked straight up to Margit. The game is clearly designed to have eager players do this, get stomped by him, and say “hmm, that was too hard. Perhaps I should go farm and return stronger.”

No.

Not King Bug.

Instead, I just… kept running at him, over and over again, utterly determined to best him and prove the game wrong, I guess? Demonstrate that Soulsbornes were no match for me? Who knows. I probably died to Margit 50 times on my first day with this game before the Greater Will mercifully let me defeat him. My stubborn ass apparently had to do this game in a quasi-linear fashion. Thankfully, I allowed myself to look at some guides on spellblade builds and where to get key goodies in between bosses, but I ran with this headstrong strategy straight through to a certain massive heat boi, who I definitely died to more times than Margit. I do think that guy is bullshit, but I also finally realized after beating him I was perhaps severely under-leveled at that point (low 70s, around 45 hours in, on a glass cannon INT build no less).

That point, to me, marked and separated the two games contained within Elden Ring (though in retrospect, it probably started at the end of the prior area). One game is the open-world exploration masterpiece, primarily played in the first 2/3 of playtime, which is an experience every gamer should have. Every run of this part will be a unique journey, and it can be played in basically any way a player wants to. This part of the game takes BotW, makes every part of it better, somehow, and is clearly among the great marvels in video gaming history. You will be left in awe.

There is a second game contained in Elden Ring anyone wishing to see credits must play—the later, more linear dungeon/boss marathon. It requires a degree of leveling, skill, or both only attainable through either extensive early exploration or later grinding. Perhaps this is the great Miyazaki ploy to make all players do his bidding; perhaps it is an accident; perhaps it is evil. Regardless, I reckon anyone who was addicted as I was to the first game will need to do the second one, even if they’d prefer to gun through to the end. I gamified the grinding by making a list of key bosses and areas I missed, and ended up having a blast! But, to be clear, I could not have seen the end game without some grinding.

Still, the big guy mentioned above was my biggest challenge, largely thanks to my own stubbornness at that point (and I promise, I only Comet Azur one-tapped Niall, everything else was less cheesed than that). One night I sat down and, uh, possibly did the last 3 legacy dungeons and 8 major bosses in a 6-hour reign of terror over the Lands Between. I was amazed how strong I felt. Part of that is because my character was substantially stronger (and respecced to have some vigor) than when I first pushed nearly to endgame—I finished at level 142. Still, there was no denying some of that strength was intrinsic. Elden Ring made me so much better at gaming. The challenge forced me to be better. That sense of personal achievement and growth (I beat Malenia, dude) is possibly the best gift this game delivers.

And boy, does it deliver gifts. ER rewards the player in droves. The best are conveyed through visual storytelling, complemented by always-serviceable music which occasionally becomes excellent in boss fights (seriously, the Godskin song does not have to go that hard). The world of ER is filled with unbelievable vistas (stepping out into Liurnia for the first time will be lasered into my brain forever). Some boss effects and cutscenes are the best I’ve seen (hello, Starscourge). And, while I know it’s not for everyone, lighter cryptic storytelling woven into excellent gameplay is my preferred style. I like getting dropped into a rich world and not knowing what’s happening, then slowly piecing together your subjective understanding of what’s happening through exploration. The complexity of ER’s narrative is a bit overwhelming and I hate that every important character has one of like 3 names lol, but I loved almost… rushing to understand what was happening in the Lands Between as the weight of destiny began to settle in, like my growing power was outpacing my decision-making capacity.

This game is so damn big, it could be discussed forever. It certainly has a few flaws, and I totally see how it could turn some players off. For me? I love every element of Elden Ring, as it is. The ups and downs, risks and rewards it provides are just better than nearly every game I’ve played and feel wholly one-of-a-kind. It left me in shock, amazement, rage, and a compulsion to keep playing it. An utter masterpiece, one I’m so glad I tried and so proud I finished.

A great idea implemented with too many execution errors to forgive. MOBAs can and should be right at home on mobile. I spent some time as a Vainglory diehard, and Wild Rift is a natural successor to that legacy. The core concept is really great--take a compelling game, eliminate some of the bloated elements for a widely-used platform, and profit. I find Wild Rift to be more appealing to play than PC League for countless reasons. The shorter, 15-25 min games are the sweet spot and best feature of this version. Everything is pared down to accompany the shorter game time--fewer champs, less complexity to builds and runes, streamlined objectives, etc. Much of the metagame and mechanical adjustments are surprisingly good, too. I'd wager the controls are more intuitive than PC for new players, so the barrier to entry is pretty low. Games are fast-paced, exciting, and more fun to play than PC (though I find watching PC, and thus probably the game overall, is probably "better" fwiw). Plus, you can play in bed! What's not to love?

Uh... everything else. First and foremost, the game is slipping further and further into F2P mobile monetization hell, with more and more cosmetics hiding behind gacha bullshit and/or unreasonable pricing schemes. Riot's trademark selective hearing is in full force and getting worse for WR. Efforts to promote the game outside of China are tanking, with non-Asian pro leagues getting axed and special events focused entirely on China. I'm all for the effort put into China and east Asia, and only wish it would be extended to other regions. Riot is happy to copy and paste the Lunar New Year event into the US to profit from it, but can't be bothered to support content creators or pros in the region. American WR players feel like cash cow afterthoughts, rather than valued players.

That selective hearing extends to player QoL concerns. Inexplicable game changes are frequently paired with inexplicable balancing decisions. Why the devs thought removing all-chat was a pressing matter, but substantively nerfing Aatrox after release could wait, is beyond me. Champ balancing issues aside, much of the game's strategic vision seems to revolve around introducing as many PC features as possible, as fast as possible. (Of course, cutting all-chat speaks to the China-centric bend of this vision.) There's a big gap between that tone and the half-assed content releases on the aesthetic side. It's frustrating because this game doesn't need to be PC. It should be different, less complex, and less bloated. It wants to be something it shouldn't, and makes the Vainglory idealist in me sad.

Beyond that, the standard MOBA problems exist. It's naturally a competition trap, purposefully addictive to keep the micro transactions flowing and server numbers up. It provides zero enjoyment in wins and terrible emotional response to losses. The community is endearingly, grossly toxic. My mental health declined substantially while playing this game regularly. Massive investment of time is required to know the champs and keep up with the insane volume of items and variables present in every game. At a certain point, I realized my time was worth more than spending it on this game. I enjoy being knowledgeable enough to watch people with reliably available, often competent teammates play on occasion (pro play), but I don't need to play it myself any more. The game at the core of WR is good, but everything on top of it sucks.

This game has consumed far too much of my life. It suffers from terrible matchmaking controls with boosted accounts and smurfs alike ruining games. The Epic acquisition infected Rocket League with a serious case of Fortnitulosis--there are so many atrocious vehicle aesthetics, limited-time "events," and horrendous new maps which make the game insufferable. At least before F2P, those elements were closeted off and/or completely ignorable for players, but they're now shoved in your face regardless of if you want it or bought the game initially. It can be downright maddening to play this game, and it has probably made my life worse in aggregate as a result.

Despite that, Rocket League has a silver bullet which will keep me playing it until either the servers die or I do: the core gameplay, remarkably unchanged since launch, is so damn good. This is as close as video games come to replicating the feeling of playing a sport. The game demands you learn a (ridiculously difficult) skillset, execute it as fast and accurately as possible, and usually work with others to score goals. You can do crazy shit and 1v5 carry! Overtimes are nail biting! You can also completely blow it for your team! (Also the pro scene is truly amazing to watch, I'll watch it when my traditional sports of choice are in the off season). In short, it is very much soccer with cars.

The skill ceiling is incomprehensibly high. I've come lightyears since my first months playing this game (peaking around C2), yet I'm at least as far from the pros today as I am from myself day 1. That repetition has created muscle memory I doubt I'll ever lose. I've gone months without playing RL only to come back and be hitting decent aerials within a game or two. On the flip side, I have spent many months-long (years-long?) periods where this is the only game I played. The five-minute games are like crack, just begging you to play one more, and never being too consequential to lose (except for tournaments, should you sign up for them). I can't end on a win or a loss, so I just play forever. This game, alongside Mario Kart, is my old reliable. Whenever I'm in a rut, I can come to RL. I'll probably lose and make the rut worse, but I know I'll have some desire to play this game.

Finally, the game is best with others. Obviously most game modes require you to have teammates, usually random ones. They're usually garbage bots but oh well. /s. On a personal note, RL has been at least the plurality of time I've spent communicating with my sister since moving out of the house for college. We'll game together every week or two over Xbox Live, and RL is almost always at least one of the games we play. She carries my ass while I miss bonehead ceiling shot attempts, but we've developed an unspoken understanding and play style together over years. Plus, we can catch up on non-gaming things while doing something together. That makes it our game. So, like it or not, this game is the most important one I've ever played.

Metroid Dread is an exquisite video game. In true Nintendo style, so much of Dread is manicured and polished to perfection. It leaves little wonder why the genre is half named after this series. ZDR is beautiful, basically the entire map looks great, and it's complemented by nearly-seamless 60fps performance (one late-game ability is the exception). The tempo of Dread is thrilling as well, ever increasing through the end game. I had difficulty putting it down multiple evenings as the clip of unlocks, possibilities, and revelations reached a fever pitch. The map design is usually a masterclass as well, nudging players towards objectives while convincing them they did it themselves. I adored the exploration in Dread. Each new area was a treat to learn, then flesh out, then master. I spent a non-trivial amount of time lost in new locations, and even more time thinking I had hit a dead end only to finally reveal a new route.

You can't master areas, or get far in Dread at all, without dealing with EMMI zones. These areas are fantastic, and their integration into player progression is amazing. After carefully (recklessly?) pushing through each EMMI zone, scared all the time that those horrid shrieks will mean your doom, you get to turn the tides and bring the fight to them??? Ugh, so good. Pre-EMMI, Samus feels like a helpless puppy roaming aimlessly through each region, hoping to strike gold down a corridor before some powerful foe shreds you. In EMMI zones, this sense is at the highest, and it forced me away from the map and to just run into whatever obstacle lays beyond the zone. After defeating EMMIs, it feels like you've genuinely conquered the area and are substantially stronger wandering around than when you entered. It's such a badass cycle every time. I would play the whole game with just them as bosses, I think.

Which is good news, because Dread is light on non-EMMI bosses. I think the game's boss balance is still about right, and the non-EMMI intermediate bosses help fill the gap as well. I also found most proper bosses to be great fun! I've seen complaints leveled at this game for its reliance on patterns and parries in boss fights. I didn't feel Dread balanced these in a negative fashion until the final boss. I probably should've come back to fight it after finding more collectibles (only got 51% at credits), but I didn't want to. Turns out my alternative was just... hope you have the right resources at the right time. I fought that dude probably 50 times over at least 3 hours before winning. Big sad, and clear skill issue, but I also would've liked to be able to do tangible damage to him instead of waiting for a phase trigger to appear. That experience, as the last in any run, really highlights some of the few weaknesses Dread has on the mechanical and game design fronts. I didn't mind them at all, up to that point.

There's one more big part of this game I enjoyed, which is: good god, there are so many upgrades lmao. My only other metroidvania at this point is Hollow Knight, which has many possible upgrades but relatively few permanent ones. Dread is the opposite, cramming a million options into the Switch's control scheme. Upgrades are varied enough to provide a nice little dopamine rush every time, though it becomes somewhat of a hollow rush once you realize just how common they are. I probably forgot a few by end game, but I really expected there would be maybe a quarter of the upgrades I actually wound up with in this game. You are a machine by the end, and nearly all upgrades grant access to something new in the world. Very cool.

Last quick note--the story of this game is pretty fun, too! My first Metroid game, but I enjoyed the twists and one or two things genuinely surprised me. Very cool. Also, who is Adam lol still confused on that.

I thought Metroid Dread was a risky purchase. $60 for a <10hr 2D platformer with a quasi-horror stealth element kept me away from it for a while. I'm so glad I finally caved and got it. Dread is extremely fun to play, and I was itching to get home and turn my Switch on every day while running through it. Also, don't let those short playtimes fool you--I spent hours searching the map, there's no way that's included on the in-game clock. Boss depth and inflexibility (alongside some backtracking feeling more contrived than natural) are my only complaints. A damn good ride, and one every Switch owner should take.

Half of me thinks it deserves a 2, half of me thinks it deserves a 4. I saw this game described somewhere as something like “pretty good for a game comprised entirely of problems,” and I think that’s pretty spot on. Basically everything in Cyberpunk 2077 is broken in some way. I actually despise most of the gameplay mechanics, which all feel bad (except the Witcher Sense reskin dubbed “quickhacking,” which is how I did basically everything). Keanu sounds positively bored to tears in the vocal studio most of the time. I had a key character’s apparent demise interrupted by them floating off the screen in a T-pose, which honestly was hilarious but probably isn’t the intended experience. Oh, and don’t forget I bought this game (technically as a gift, but one which I had access to) as a preorder on Xbox One years ago, only to find it an unplayable catastrophe on Day One. Blah blah blah. If you want to read the laundry list of criticisms this game has very rightfully earned, type “Cyberpunk 2077” into any search bar ever and read away.

My experience playing Cyberpunk led me to find the game is more than the sum of its parts. By the end, I was invested in a few characters. The aura of Night City invades every element of the game—for instance, many features which would exist in a hard-to-rationalize menu in other games (you have a GPS in the top right corner of your vision in The Witcher, people) make perfect sense as a Kiroshi Optics overlay. I was never fully committed to the universe, but I can’t help but be thankful that it exists and I experienced it. It’s a gnarly place! I wanted to help some, hurt others, and wield what little agency I had earned as V to make my mark on the City (though V’s goal, being remembered or whatever, never aligned with what I wanted, and I probably should’ve internalized his goal more while playing whoops). I think the story, which is strong in broad strokes though weak in some details, really tees players up to believe that they did earn that agency and should be able to do what they please with it. Let’s just say the ending I reached wasn’t what I expected, seemed to rob me of that agency, and certainly taught me the bigger lesson CDPR was shooting for there. After researching other possible ends, I’m pretty confident that the game was mostly punishing me for my choices, rather than stealing my power as the protagonist. Fair enough, though I wish I’d felt more compelled to do basically anything off the main path to help get to better ends. Despite that, I was surprised at how manicured and polished the end was after playing a buggy, chaotic mess for the first 23 hours. It’s a good wrap!

So, what? I think as a game, it deserves no respect. Developer hubris led to this being a bloated, half-baked gameplay experience. Playing Cyberpunk sucks, man. But when I take my video games hat off and get a bit less critical, I had some good fun along the way and appreciate much of the story and world which actually exists in that game. I’ve never felt so polarized in giving a game a single score, but I think 3 stars is the average of my experience.

Sorry to my sister, who wholly adores Cyberpunk and would give it 10 stars if possible. Your favorite game is a weird one, but I’m glad I finally played it.