Fairly good walking sim in the vein of Everyone's Gone to the Rapture where you slowly piece together the story of a remote village but unlike that game, this has a more linear structure to it even if the story is delivered in the non linear fashion. The use of water color styled textures gives the world a unique dreamy look that I appreciated. The story has a tinge more melodrama to it, specially towards the end than I'd have preferred but otherwise this was a good time.
Recommend if you're into the genre.

Look, I'm sure at release this must have been a quite the novel experience and that novelty combined with competent design can trump any flaws but in [current year] having already played RDR2, this game really drags. I've played it for around 20 hours now and my target Bill has been on screen for a few seconds at the start and Javier not once. I have been doing meaningless quests for one odd ball after another and any meaningful depth the story could have had, specially in the mexico revolution story is shot to death by the R* brand of comedy writing.

Rapture uses a scifi apocalyptic premise to tell personal and intimate stories of the inhabitants of an idylic english town, problem is it goes out of its way to be as vague and mysterious as possible about it. On the surface, it doesn't sound much so the best way I explain the problem by comparing it with a tv show I recently watched called Broadchurch.

The show is a who dun it murder mystery where the dirty secrets of an isolated town are dragged to the broad day light as the investigation goes on. There the mystery is the hook and every detail revealed adds to intrigue. But make no mistake, it is primarily a drama of inhabitants. The show makes you want to know about the characters, and when you do, it's their struggles and pain that you care about over even the mystery.
Now Rapture is similar case, but the hook is vague and kept mysterious. The characters are faceless wisps of light where little dialogues snippets are drip fed to you in potentially (most likely) non linear fashion due to how the exploration is structured. Not only is it hard to keep track of who's who, but the dialogue is of mundane variety. Very little of it adds to overarching mystery, serving more to form a vignete of a group trying to deal with apocalypse that anything concrete. It left me with little reason little reason to care about anyone or what happened to them and that is why I stopped playing.
I can see how some may connect to this form of storytelling as it is a pretty game with great VA and soundtrack. The use of light to guide you and the solitude that comes from the lack of information helps to project your feelings and ideas on to the story. Maybe I could have gotten more out of the story if I finished it but I already played more that I wanted and I don't want to indulge in sunk cost fallacy.

Heavy Rain was lauded critically at launch but later on I saw the sentiment popping up quite frequently that David Cage was a hack and this game too was a comedic disaster. Unsurprisingly for me, having finished my first Quantic Dream game, I can say it falls squarely in the middle.

As a murder mystery junkie, this plot was right up my alley. The brown and grey tone with constant rain created a suitable backdrop for the mystery. The murderer's motivations feel reasonable and there are enough red herrings for the player to question a lot of characters. Till the midway point at least cause it starts giving such obvious hints as to who the killer was that it becomes a "why dun it" instead of "who dun it". This is no Fincher movie but I found the story to be quite competent for the most part.

The real issue that's holding the plot back is that the characterisation is paper thin. Not only it is really weak but the only female character is written so poorly that it almost feels misogynistic. What's baffling is that characters have optional inner monologue you can listen to but it's never anything but the most obvious thought. You could describe everyone in a single line and that's all there is to them, they only exist in the moments to serve the scene they are in and push the plot forward. There are no themes to be explored or character arcs to be had. The detective character is hurt by this the most since his role is mainly using a scifi gadget to do sleuthing and navigating office politics with a corrupt cop. It sounds interesting but the sleuthing part is boring and the theme regarding corrupt cops isn't explored. I won't write about the gameplay separately so here I'll mention that I'm really not a fan of fixed camera movement in any game and whatever cinematic view achieved by that is undercut by stupid clunky controls. However the contextual actions that helped characters do a wide variety of mundane tasks was a pretty decent design choice helping in grounding them in the world. The action sequences and Saw type scenes were also quite tense due to how the quick time events were set up. The threat of characters actually dying added to it.
Overall, alright game and worth trying if you like narrative driven adventure games.

I debated whether it’s worth writing anything about TLOU given it’s been 10 years since the original release and talked to death about. But this was a special landmark game, one which pushed “mature” grounded writing in gaming to the mainstream. So, I want to praise the aspects I find impressive enough to tie the whole game into a worthwhile experience and the shortcomings I noticed that could have elevated it.

While watching the Making Of documentary included in the remake, I noticed that the devs had a goal in mind of having Ellie and Joel as a dual protagonist, especially after Ashley Johnson’s performance that they started giving her a more active role in the story too. They do form the narrative and emotional core of the story, their relationship and its growth are what the story even is but I have to say that I feel Joel is firmly the main protagonist here. Not because you play as him for the most part but because Ellie is too young to have enough of a say in this journey, it is Joel’s damaged psyche through which we primarily interact with the world and he acts as an antagonist to the themes of story and Ellie’s agency at the end.

Since I brought up the theme, I will say that I don’t think this is a theme driven story unlike TLOU2. It’s a character piece for Joel and an origin story for Ellie. But for the sake of discussion, my interpretation of theme is very simply laid bare by the Firefly’s moto: “When you're lost in the darkness, look for the light.” The world the writers created for this game is quite familiar in broad strokes, thanks in part to insane popularity of The Walking Dead. It is a world of strife, one where cruelty hides in every corner and the inhabitants need to match that cruelty to even have a chance at survival. But with each encounter the game shows the faint glimmer of humanity retained by the people still living in it, that is the humanity that lets the main duo keep going on their journey. That is the light that is worth fighting to preserving in the darkness. Specifically for Joel, we start the game with him losing his daughter plunging him into a life of darkness, a topic he kept avoiding for most of the story but in Ellie he found a surrogate daughter to warm up to. Ellie was his light. But Ellie was also the light for humanity due to her immunity. That is the light Joel stole.

The laser focus on Ellie and Joel’s relationship does come at the cost of story with substance however. There were a lot more details I wanted from the world. I wanted to know how the factions worked like how the Metro series does it, I wanted to spend more time with the side characters so that they didn’t just feel like fleeting encounters built to create a tone for the experience rather than add actual meat to the story. But I will also admit that there’s a beauty to the simplicity of the narrative here. The world is familiar yet just unique enough with the zombie replacement, and you spend time in Joel’s shoes just enough to leave you wondering if or why his action was just.
On a personal note, post TLOU2 I saw a lot of discussions surrounding what kind of person Joel was. I don’t think he’s a bad person from the point where the story starts, his ruthlessness was born purely out of a survival need and rarely if ever he was needlessly cruel. Killing the Fireflies was an unquestionably wrong act but it’s understandable why a man would do anything to protect his family, I would too.

From a game design standpoint, I think the whole experience was paced really well. Every frantic action scene almost always gave away to calmer exploration or story sections. I have heard the remaster tweaks the combat from the original but what’s here works quite well in both stealth and shooting with serviceable enemy AI. I think for loot they might have had a rubber-band design where you get more loot as you start to run out, but whatever the design was it felt just right. I was never so out of resource that I was forced to a playstyle but I was not given enough to be comfortable with only 1 method of playing. It could have been better for sure and the exploration puzzles were too simple but the game didn’t overstay its welcome for me to get annoyed.
Major props to the art and sound department, they did a terrific job at portraying a city reclaimed by nature. Some areas like the college dorms genuinely impressed me with how much environmental storytelling they with the design. And the clicker sounds were especially effective at maintaining a sense of tension. I liked that sometimes not engaging them in combat was the smarter choice.

Back in 2014 when I had just started gaming, I had watched a “game movie” version of this on YT since I don’t play on console. I thought it was a neat story back thwn but preferred Uncharted more. I later came to know that many people claimed TLOU1 to be a masterpiece and I also had the displeasure of encountering an absolute clusterfuck that was the TLOU2 discourse. I was not sure I would enjoy revisiting this but I’m glad it turned out to be a quite positive experience from actually playing it. I hope TLOU2 gets ported to PC soon so I can impart my objectively correct opinion™ on it.

The game equivalent of a MCU movie, high budget and polish but generic and utterly safe. Dunno if it's fair to criticize the story too much since it's not poorly told exactly, but I was so fucking bored the entire way since nothing intrigued or excited me.
Highlight of the experience for me is most definitly the swinging, the track accompaning it is suitably epic. It felt so good to boost off perch points. The combat also feels very polished, simply enough to be effortless from the get go but just enough variety in moves to spice things up. For the 1st 4-5 hours I was having a good time with the gameplay but eventually it wore off. No matter how good the swinging track is, hearing it a 1000 times really starts to grate and the combat which seems really fun before now made my thumb hurt from pressing X so much while every non boss fight played out very similarly no matter the location. MJ and Mile's sections which could acted as a refresher are instead some of the most tedious forced stealth sections I've played. At least they let us skip the boring puzzles.

I just feel there's been a saturation of Spiderman and Batman media in popular culture and it's time for something else. Excited for Insomniac's Wolverine.

In many ways Lost Legacy fixed or improved issues I had with UC 4 on the gameplay side. The big open area actually rewards exploration with small puzzles; The level design feels more conductive to the choice of stealth vs action by introducing silenced pistols as well as more points to swing across in battle; There are supply caches which act both as a reward for exploring and changing up your strategy. Hard to praise them too much though as these are common features in most games and it's not done particularly well here either.

The main reason for my lesser enjoyment is however something Uncharted has excelled in all previous entries, enjoyable banter between lovable characters. Now it's not bad by any means, and Chloe is still probably my favourite character in the franchise. The problem is Nadine, she just doesn't have the charisma to pull the weight of conversation. Credit where credit's due, they tried to improve her as a character by introducing slightly more backstory. But what's here would have improved her antagonist role in UC4 if it was there, not enough to carry the protagonist role of Lost Legacy. I assume they tried to add a buddy cop dynamic here with the 2 having opposite traits and the friendship evolving through the course of the story. But in stories like that the differences accentuate the comedy, while here Nadine's dead pan no nonsense attitude dampens whatever charisma Chloe brings. Naughty Dog has had above average writing quality compared to the rest of the industry so it's still an enjoyable romp, I just wished it was better.

Certainly an improvement over Mars War Logs but that only serves to highlight how far behind its ispiration it is. From what I remember of Greedfall and now playing through their older games, I'd say Spiders is much better at ideas than execution.
Unlike their other IPs, the setting and story here is a bit too generic but the characters in theory should be interesting. There just isn't enough meat to their story to really flesh out their personality. The romance is good microcosm of the whole issue in all their games, where characters show 0 romantic interest in you, you get a half hearted romance scene towards the end outta nowhere and then it's back to what it was before.
They really need to stop this checklist approach to RPG design and hire writers that can write more evocative characters. Otherwise I'm sure the upcoming Greedfall sequel will fail too.

Spiders is a company of lofty ambitions, still holding on to the faded glory of cinematic RPGs from the Bioware era but unable to meet its demands. This was true when they released Mars: War Logs too though it's almost endearing to see how rough their initial attempts were. Despite still not having reached the bar set by old Bioware, they have continued to make incremental improvements with every game and for that they have my respect.
Anyway coming to the game itself, I find it a bit odd that it markets itself as a cyberpunk game. Setting wise if you squint your eyes it might be true on a technicality however it carries neither the themes or the visual motif of traditional cyberpunk media. Here the "corporations" are in change but that didn't happen because of the rot of capitalism but rather them just having the most resources after the countries collapsed so now they act as pseudo countries themselves. There are no themes of profit chasing, humanity sacrificed for progress because these corporations are barely holding on and going to war for the limited resources present on the planet Mars. It would be more apt to call it post apocalyptic. Having said that, I find the setting the most compelling part of this game for its uniqueness alone even if its a low bar.

I could rag on about how dull and lifeless the characters and the story is, how repetitively and clunky the gameplay is along with its maddening backtracking for quests and it would deserve it. It is not a game I would recommend to most, even a RPG fan but I want to take the time to highlight why I even bothered to finish it. There's a surprising feeling of authenticity to this fictional Mars that Spiders had crafted. The grimey dusty brown shithole of a world sells an almost Fallout meets Midgar like dystopia where water is so scarce that you use sand to wash yourself. There are no heroes in this world and everyone is doing the best they can to survive for the little resource there is but that doesn't stop the usual bigotry, power struggle between classes that humanity always has dealt with. People use "serum" as currency which is probably just water or some sort of fluid and given how rare it is, you have the option to kill enemies you defeat to extract it from their body. The equipment you find all fit scavenged and jury rigged aesthetic everything has and Technomacers add the added fantasy spice to make it more compelling.
All considered it's an interesting setting and if the writing and gameplay problems are fixed I could see it becoming a cool franchise someday.

I don't know why but I had notion that Banner Saga was some indie masterpiece so that explains why I'm more than a little dissapointed. The art style is stunning and the world building is fairly unique and well done, I specially like how the map is used to convey the lore in 1 or 2 setences. The combat felt alright if a bit lacking so my initial impressions were quite positive. But the more I played the more I realized something about the whole experience wasn't quite grabbing me.

The lack of many enemy types and abilities made the combat feel quite stale. Whatever abilities you do get isn't interesting enough to vary how you approach fights, positioning being the main factor to consider. I think the game wanted the experience to one of survival on a long arduous journey but the whole injury mechanic coupled with morale didn't really impact my playthrough in any meaningful way. Maybe I just got lucky in my choices or maybe the mechanics shine on hard difficulty. The writing while quite good on the surface felt too dry for the lack of a better word. Events happened, characters died and people just moved on without much deliberation. I feel odd complaining about that as it fits the tone of the story but it also make me, the player feel like a distant observer to the events rather than intimately engaged in their story.
I've seen people praising the story and since I haven't finished it, I'm hopeful it will get better. I'll give it another shot when I'm less burnt out on viking media.

This review is more a reminder for me than for others

I had played this years back and had forgotten why I dropped it. So picked it back up again recently and it was relatively enjoyable, the plot was simple but with an interesting enough hook and the characters were pretty interesting too as expected of Bioware. But the more I played, the more the small annoyaced piled up on the gameplay side.
The level design is boring, long and confusing to navigate, in-game map does not help. The combat has very little strategy to it and clunky on top. Actually the combat for melee duels look great since the animation does most of the heavy lifting, the really nailed the SW prequel movie type combat but it's so bad for anything else.
All of these issues are something I could put up with individually, but it's a death by thousand cuts type of deal. I could have pushed on just for the story and characters but I choose to spend time on other games that I would enjoy more.
A shame cause I really was looking forward to what's so good about KOTOR 2. Let's hope the remake comes out someday.

I was initially surprised as to why this game exists in the way that it does but after doing a little digging I found out that it takes after a mobile game that the devs previously did and by the dev's own admission, is a little side project to flesh out the back story. In that context, I don't feel like dunking on this game too much but I will briefly mention why I don't think this is worth playing unless you really liked the first game.

Mile 0 lacks substance in terms of story, what backstory explanation it adds is minimal and what new content it adds is forgettable. Primate reason is that the characters fall completely flat, barely straying from how they can be described in a sentence. Admittedly you can influence how the 2 main characters think but it hardly matters given how dull they are. To top it off, it caries over the juveline half assed political theme from Road 96 too.
The environment art might be alright but the character models look janky and oddly oily, to the point where Zoe looks worse here than the original game. On the gameplay side it combines bare bones exploration and subway surfer like minigames which are somewhat reminiscenet to Sayonara Wild Hearts, to its detriment I say cause it's nowhere near as good.
At least the soundtrack is good, they even managed to get a track out of The Midnight, one of my favorite bands!

Fallout 3 opens with the birth of your character, you go through a relatively long prologue through the years upto the point where you're forced to get out of the secluded protection of the vault. It grounds your character in the setting in an organic way, more so than any other Bethesda in my opinion. Which is why I find it funny that I felt least connected to the setting and my character of this game than any other.
These games have always have always had a theme-park design to them, sandbox with toys to play around for you. But if you decide to meet the games half way, acknowledge the limitation and roleplay within the confines of the sandbox, they can be some of the most immersive experiences in gaming. But here I felt really hard to connect myself to the world. The writing and the quest design lacked the extra oomph for me to get immersed in the characters and their struggles. The main story is supposed to be deeply personal to the PC, but the none of the main characters have enough depth to make you care. It felt more like playing an outside observer briefly looking into the stories of the people in this worlds and way too happy to kill some mutants and raiders. It really was like being in a theme park.

This is not to say I didn't have fun with it, the labyrinth of DC metro aside exploration is a lot of fun like all Bethesda games. There are a lot of attractions in this theme park, both quantity and variety. The comically evil choices also makes more sense with that perspective. I even got used to the janky gunplay after a while, it's oddly satisfying blowing up meat bags with bullets. That's why the positive rating here. Still, this is probably my least favorite Bethesda game.