The gameplay is serviceable. There gunplay is pretty basic, and most of the puzzles are sliding block puzzles for some reason. Thankfully, it never got annoying, but there's no standout moments.

The story isn't anything special either, but it's told in a fun way. The game revels in the 1930s Louisiana accents in a way I dug. The story regularly breaks from reality transporting the player to different locations at the flip of a switch which reminded me of The Evil Within (a game I love). And of course, the two leads are played by actors I love which is biggest selling point. Because of this, the game kept me hooked while playing my way through both characters' stories. The disappointing part is that both playthroughs are mostly the same: same enemy encounters, same puzzles, and same locations. The dialogue is different keeping true to the characters' personalities and history at least make for fresh interactions with NPCs. It wasn't until Chapter 4 (out of 5) when these characters finally split off onto their own paths.

It's a pretty painless experience. It's just that it doesn't do anything well enough to be good. It's a bit disappointing.

This game comes with all the strengths of the previous games: good ghost stories, fun, likeable cast of characters, striking, creepy art, and good atmosphere created through sound effects, music, writing.

It also improves over the others with better pacing and handling of the Suspense Acts. They come up with an odd RPG-ish solution that gives the player multiple chances to guess the right answer instead of an immediate "Game Over" screen. It cuts the frustration I felt from playing the previous games way down. There are collectibles in the game to help improve the odds and amount of attempts during Suspense Acts. Thankfully they place them along the main path, so I didn't have to search the entire map every chapter. I was able to find most of them without having to resort to a guide.

It's the smoothest, most enjoyable Spirit Hunter game. I've been loving playing this every night, and it's been making time fly by quickly.

It really shows that PlatinumGames worked on this. The boss battles are awesome and full of hype spectacle. For the combat, it looks like they took Xenoblade Chronicle's battle system and made it fully action. It works surprisingly well. At first, I wasn't feeling it that much. The boss battles were always great as I mentioned. During those, the team and I can unleash everything we have creating thrilling highs, but fighting the smaller enemies were either uninterestingly easy or annoying. That was on me though. As I explored my characters abilities more, got a set of arts I felt good about, and got more thoughtful on when and how to use them, the smaller fights got much more satisfying. There was more depth to the game than originally seemed, and I grew to love it.

The story was decent. I wasn't expecting this to be a continuation of an existing story, so I was a bit lost. Also, the hyper cheeriness of the characters was too much for me. The fate episodes helped flesh out some of the characters. The story is standalone at least, so I could eventually get into it. It's big on the power of friendship and redemption which is like plenty of anime stories.

The game isn't the most graphically impressive, but it looks gorgeous because of the art direction. It also runs really smooth. The developers know how to create big moments in and out of cut scenes. I was in awe of what I was seeing often throughout the game.

This is definitely one of the best action RPGs I have played. It's a genre I've never cared for that is now the most exciting genre to me because action game masters like PlatinumGames and Team Ninja have jumped in.

This plays so much better than the main game. It leans more action. Yuffie has a small enough moveset, that I could map all my attacks to the face buttons significantly decreasing the number of times I have to pause the game during combat. Also, she is the only controllable character which removes the awkward character switching. Too bad this is a one-off. I would love for them to keep this for the next game.

This did expose how bad the lock-on system is in this game though. The game has fights that throw many small enemies at the player. Trying to target the right one was such a hassle. Then there are training missions where I had to destroy a bunch of boxes in limited amount of time, and this was a nightmare. I would have a box in front of me, sometimes it would target it, sometimes it would target a box way off in the background, sometimes it would target a box that was offscreen. It was so annoying.

The story is a wash sadly. I was happy to see the game return to the story of Avalanche, but it seems contradictory to the main game's story. Shinra said Avalanche was working with Wutai which wasn't true, and Barrett took offense to the lie. In this story, Yuffie is from Wutai and is working with Avalanche. And the game doesn't really dig into Wutai at all for me to understand what's going on there. Also, the character backstories were confusing. Yuffie reminds Sonon of his sister. The game shows a flashback of his sister who looks exactly like Yuffie. This confused the hell out of me. Is Yuffie actually his sister? I'm assuming not, but they should've used a more distinct character model for that. Also, Yuffie taking offense to the idea that she reminded him of his sister was weird. It was a bit hard for me to get a grasp on Yuffie as a character.

This is a reminder for why I never cared for action RPGs. I don't like this turn-based/real-time action hybrid style of combat. I love turn-based RPG combat. I love action games. This combination of the two loses the appeal of both. I can't take time to consider choices and plan several turns ahead which is something I appreciate about turn-based combat. The action is constantly interrupted because I have to select my attacks from a menu which removes the visceral, reflex-based satisfaction of action combat. This hybrid style also brings elements from turn-based combat that makes action combat frustrating such as unavoidable attacks that pretty much kill the targeted party member, and elements from action combat that makes turn-based combat frustrating such as lack of situational awareness with attacks hitting you from offscreen. Some of these problems are the fault of the game not including solutions that modern action games have such as visual feedback that tells you you're being targeted or a move is unblock-able. Sometimes I'm not even aware I'm being hit. I would just look down at my health bar and have no clue how it got so low. This all just made playing this game an often frustrating experience.

What I did like for a while was the story. I was impressed how much nuance was given to the story of the radical environmental activist group Avalanche trying to take down the big corporation Shinra that's destroying the planet. And the characters are all fun with big personalities. Too bad the game moves away from that. When the group gets to Shinra, this section of the game goes on for too long, and introduces new story around an ancient civilization and fighting fate. I started tuning out at this point. It all leads up to an ending that falls flat. I never played the original game, so some of this stuff didn't really make much sense to me. I didn't care anyways.

This game has high production value, but that wasn't able to save it in the end. I'm just left thinking about how much more I enjoyed playing Strangers of Paradise.

I usually avoid games like this since I didn't like Amnesia, Outlast, or Devotion. I gave it shot after hearing it was only 2 hours, and I'm trying to make more of an effort with horror games. This is the best one I've played in this style. It's really light on gameplay as it's mainly walking through one floor in an abandoned building reading notes and avoiding a monster, but the story grabbed me enough for that not to bother me. It's a story about teen suicide. The way it's presented through notes, everchanging environments, and even FMV was surprisingly effective. It provides more detail about the environment in which the story takes place than I expected with real world events like COVID-19 playing a part. I appreciated it as that's something many stories avoid, and it only makes this story more fascinating. The playing with reality was another effective tool to pull me into the story. I couldn't just accept details I was given and had to keep questioning what's true or not as the lead character was struggling with low self-esteem possibly making things seem worse than they are along with the supernatural environment that could be messing with her. The finale packed a surprising emotional punch exposing how invested I was in the story. It's pretty well done.

It's like Spirit Hunter: Death Mark without the whole Death Mark aspect to it. Instead of that, a teenager is forced to play games with an evil spirit named Kakuya who has kidnapped his little sister. Each game involves uncovering the mystery of some urban legends just like in Spirit Hunter Death Mark. The differences I've notices is that the locations in this game are much smaller making the game a bit lighter on exploration. Also, there's no option to choose what location to go to. None of these are issues, it just makes for a noticeably more limited experience compared to the original. The writing is good. Every character is likeable and a bit offbeat in interesting ways. All the ghost stories are creepy and disturbing. The game has a "Scary Mode" which just leads to some ghost jump scares. It's kinda weak. Only a couple worked on me. The issue I have with this game is the same issue I have with the first game. There are some puzzles I found to be too unclear for me to figure out. I had to use a walkthrough to get through this game. Even getting the answers doesn't make it clear how I was supposed to get to them from the clues I was given. It's frustrating. Other than that, it's a good horror story that kept me hooked.

This game really got much better as it went along. It started out fine. I wasn't in love with the combat. I found some of the enemies frustrating as they would try to constantly move away from me as I tried to attack. Since my arrows are pretty weak against enemies, I had to try my best to chase them down which in the worst cases led me to stepping in pools of poisonous water just get get some hits in. But thankfully, as with how Metroidvanias go, I got more abilities for traversal and combat that alleviated all my problems making combat so much more enjoyable, cool, and exciting. The same can be said for he platforming challenges and boss fights. My character even got more badass in cutscenes. It managed to reach the greatness it was hyped up to be. I'm glad to have Prince of Persia back even though it's not quite the same as Sands of Time and Warrior Within. I would like a new one in that style, but I'm not mad at this new direction.

It's a solid entry into the series, but it doesn't do much to make itself standout. This throwback maybe took things too far into the past. The return of the old approaching to climbing I could've done without. It just takes a lot of trial and error with figuring out what's climbable and what's not. What's in reach and what's out of reach. It can be annoying. The rest of it works fine, and I like the new mark and execute assassinations. There's been a lot of criticism of this franchise I don't agree with. I thought Valhalla was a great game, and I enjoyed playing it to completion over 80 hours. Length isn't important when I'm enjoying the game. Assassin's Creed: Mirage feels more like a downgrade than trimming the fat.

The new free missions were disappointing to find in this game. They don't feel like proper campaign missions. They come off more like Spec Ops levels. I remember the rumors that this started out as an expansion, and these free missions sure make it feel that way. The thing is, the missions aren't bad. I enjoyed them even though they aren't what I want from a Call of Duty campaign. They actually reminded me more of Far Cry. I lowered my expectations for the campaign after I got a few of these levels back-to-back, but then the levels managed to impress me. I loved the level that took place in the high rise building. It was a clever subversion of what came before. It ended up being a solid, B-tier Call of Duty campaign. It's not on the same level as the last two Modern Warfare games, but it's still good.

The campaign makes up for the shortcomings of the campaign. I've been having a great time with it. It's free of the connectivity issues of Vanguard. It's been a solid experience outside of a couple of crashes I had. It all ended up balancing out to a great Call of Duty game.

This has to be the most "novel" visual novel I have played. Barely any gameplay involved. It's mainly just watching the story play out. Thankfully, the story is good enough for that not to bother me. This is narrative of the year for me. A story about people trying to resurrect their loved ones at the cost of other people's lives that creates it's own mythology around the urban legends of the Seven Mysteries of Honjo. It's a fun story that connects several strangers together and raises the stakes to unexpected proportions. The characters are immediately engaging and memorable even when they only have one scene. Which is good because the game likes to test my knowledge on this. Hitomi made an impression with her funny tough girl character in only one scene while companion character Mio ended up being one of my favorite characters of the year. The character art is great. Harue especially sticks out as she has to express a wide range of emotions and vibes, and it's often expressed in subtle ways in how her eyes are being drawn. The music is really good. I especially love the music that plays during the creepier moments. The true ending is actually a small moment that had me emotional. It's a great game.

I thought Celeste was a great platformer. I wasn't even halfway through this game when I acknowledged that Super Mario Bros. Wonder is a better game. It's a great showcase for how much Mario brings to the table in their games and why other platformers can't compete. It's about more than challenge. This game is filled with surprise, charm, delight, joy, and fun. I don't hesitate to take on the hardest challenges or to replay a level to get the 10 purple coin I missed or just to make it to the top of the flag pole at the end. Everything is worth doing because I want to see what every level has to offer, and it's fun and satisfying to make it to the end of a level no matter what the difficulty is.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was the best open world game I've ever played. Early on in Tears of the Kingdom, it was clear that it was better than its predecessor. Not only is this game the best open world game, it dethrones Twilight Princess as the best Zelda game for me. The amount of fun I was having playing this game is on the level I would expect more from the Super Mario Bros. series than Zelda. It's also one of the best puzzle games I've ever played. They find so many creative ways to play with these new abilities and the physics of the world. I was regularly in awe of what I was able to do. This game really expanded how I could interact with its world in comparison to the first game, but also in comparison with every video game. I've had a few times playing other games and had to remind myself that I do not have the Ascend ability. This is easily one of the greatest games ever made.