"There are none happiest in the world but those who enjoy freely a vast horizon."

Ruminate on life, choices, and our place in the world with a deer while teetering on a cliffs edge from sunset to sunrise with moments of humor sprinkled in. Inspired in part by the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, and Henry David Thoreau. Your choices mostly made to highlight her outlook on the current situation with mostly small conversation changes. Good art work and relaxing music.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1295250273816862720

Vertical shoot em up. Two characters with one shooting straightforward lasers and the others attacks having more of a spread. Attack button will fire a few shots, holding fire will slow you down but maintain a constant higher damage attack. The game has some cool features, "bombs" reduce a power meter with your character having an aura around them that grows as you drain the meter to charge an attack while also protecting you (so a quick tap of the bomb button will drain limited meter while possibly saving you from being hit). You can also build power for a mode that slows down enemies and their shots while also charging your attacks and changing your characters gender and outfit, it will also change destroyed enemies active bullets into gold but it will increase enemy attack speed if overused (though going into the overdrive mode is enough way of scoring in itself).

Fairly dull stage design and similar enemies in them.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1344603415226109953

Vertical shoot em up. Similar to the first game but makes a few small changes and adds a third character option. Changes up some scoring elements, gives you a button that can be held to constantly shoot the main weapon without going into the slower charged shot mode, "bomb" attack now visually looks to pack a greater punch, the music is better and feels like it has its own style, you don't have to chase down your powerups every time you die. Much higher difficult with even a couple enemies usually filling the screen with bullets.

Still fairly dull stages/enemies.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1344786531739865088

One of the best beat em ups I've played. Some great changes with desperation moves now draining health that can be gotten back by damaging enemies if you aren't hit and being able to catch thrown weapons allowing you to rapidly throw them at approaching enemies 12 stages that all look great and have their own quirks to help or hinder you. 17 total characters with five being main characters that make full use of the game's full movesets and the other 12 being the playable main characters from Streets of Rage 1-3 and Shiva from 3, all looking like they did in those games. All around great art style even making good use of the ambient stage lighting.

The responsive nature of the game and the move-sets and sound effects of those old character make them still fun to play as. Five difficulties with the most difficult at least doubling the amount of enemies to fight and making them come at you with greater speed but still allowing you to deal with large groups well from the speed of the series attacks and ability to quickly change your direction (and the back attacks and desperation moves). Some hidden arcade machines that, when hit with a taser, let you fight a boss from the older games in their old area. A few good enemy types change up the best way to fight them by countering your attacks or needing you to connect a hit just as they lunge at you with one of their moves.

Has the occasional odd hit box, would like a mode that allowed you to use weapons more often. The boomerang at the start of one level is fun with the new mid air weapon grabbing ability.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaa5gGHKr8E
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1257113090388144128

This is the Police 2 is heavily story focused and tells an interesting, slow, and uncomfortable story of fetization of power and those with it, toxic masculinity, and people doing or trying to convince themselves that they are doing the right thing often while abusing the power given to them to combat other people abusing their own power. Rarely getting into how the police force as a whole abuses the town through their normal actions, you won't be causing accidents with speeding cameras, meeting quotas of black people to arrest, no stated abuse of the sex workers you arrest, and your officers aren't framing people for crimes on their own time. It's not a story about the systemic problems of the wider organization. The plot primarily follows the main character of the previous game, former police chief Jack Boyd, now on the run and hiding out in a small snowy town of the poor and forgotten middle America in the late 80s. A town filled with a cartoonish level of crime, murders, gang wars, sacrificial pagan cults, and Christians wanted to purge the nonbelievers, and all with a new sheriff that is unable to control the men working under her.

Voice work has the the characters sounding like they are always on the edge of a breakdown if their own sudden monologue become incapable of convincing them to keep going. Everyone is perfectly acted, even when overacted, and practically everyone is unlikable adding to the uncomfortable nature of the narrative. The scenes are primarily done in motion comic style panels with characters that are given no eyes and at times appear completely faceless, there are random lengthy dialogue bits about what color and how long the mold has been showing on the roof of the dilapidated police station, even done in a motion comic style it effectively allows panels, sounds, and darkness to linger long enough to convey the mood of the scene. The style is unique for a game and striking. Even the moments that could easily be cut or shortened were such amusingly strange or foreboding things to watch that I wouldn't want them to be. The soundtrack is excellent, varied, and perfectly matches the tone of the game.

The main gameplay involves looking at an over-world map of the town as you answer emergency and investigation calls that have you choosing what officers to send on the call and if you want to send your volunteer sniper with them, or if you think the call is a prank or a mistake that you should just ignore. The prank calls are often pretty easy to identify by what kind of information is being given and who is giving it. There are certainly some Karen wants to speak with the manager style call ins. You will choose what and how many officers to send based on their professionalism level with each calling having a minimum required amount, what their skills are and what you believe you will need, what equipment they each carry, and how much energy they have. Skills consist of strength, intelligence, speed, stealth, shooting, and negotiation with each having three levels. Every call gives an officer 10 professionalism if they were just there for the ride, 30 if they were the one that solved the situation, or -10 if the offender wasn't caught. Officers can become tired or drunk which can cause them to crash their cars leading to a few days of injury if they are sent out in those conditions. Once your officers arrive you get a description of what is going on and then choose an officer to take on of three options that might either end the event or continue it with a new series of choices until it is solved. An event might end with an escaped, killed, or captured offender, a safe, wounded, or killed victim, and possibly a wounded or killed officer. As you help townspeople you will also unlock options where you can pay to train your officers in each skill, help them to end their alcohol addiction, recover their stamina, or you can gain access to stores to buy and sell given or confiscated materials.

What you will need in calls often makes sense based on what kind of call it was, if two otherwise normal people are fighting a negotiation skill will likely work, if someone seems to be trying to beat someone to death you will likely need more strength and possibly a baton or taser to deal with the situation, armed suspects might be negotiated with but might be better dealt with stealth or a stun grenade, car chases are unlikely to need your personal strength or speed skill, investigations need intelligence, and a call sending you to respond to someone armed and with a body count will likely need an officer with a high shooting skill and possibly a taser for a better outcome. When receiving call for favor from town residents they will tell you what they need your officers to be good at and if they need them to being anything. Calls can range from being extremely dark, to sad, to being completely ridiculous and amusing.

When a day starts you can assign available batons, tasers, taser ammo, stun grenade, shockers, and pepper spray to your officers with each one having four open slots and each one always carrying a gun and knife. Each new day will likely have officers not show up to work, ask for the day of for mostly ridiculous reasons, and disloyal officers that refuse to wear their full uniform will only come to work every other day. You will also assign your more intelligent officers to investigations, Each investigation can have 1-3 people assigned to it with one looking for clues and the others looking into the 2-3 potential suspects. You will have to look at the clues and piece together the events that took place for the suspect you believe did the crime before being able to arrest them. There are two larger gangs where you will follow a chain of crimes by asking the right questions of the gang members you capture, or torture if you fail to ask the right questions, that will lead you to missions where you arrest the leader of the gang.

Officer skills also come into play during the tactical turn based events. Some days will have a hostage situation, bomb threat, gang assault, or robbery that will need you to choose officers to respond to call. Once they arrive each officer can choose four skills based on what they have unlocked through their skill ranks. They might be able to move more spaces, get an extra turn if they remain undiscovered, hide better and with more cover, see further, go into overwatch, shoot faster or more accurately, locate and disarm traps and bombs, negotiate for more time in hostage situations, hold up and ask criminals to surrender, break open or silently open windows and doors, jump fences, etc. Combat is lethal, every shot allows you to aim for the head, body, arm, or legs. Headshots are kills, body shots down a person and put them in a bleed out timer, and leg and arm shots create a slower bleed out timer but prevent either movement or shooting while leaving the combatant active. You never want to get into a gunfight as it is better to use stealth to get into range where you can hold up or stun with gadgets so you can handcuff your enemies, both safer and leads to a better outcome. Sending a cop that isn't loyal to you will cause them to be AI controlled, they will basically just run up and shoot at people causing everyone to get killed, meaning it shouldn't even have been an option to send them in the first place. It's overall a decent system with tense combat if you end up in it or are forced into it, stealth is pretty simplistic, some skills are clearly better than others, and some skills that would be cool in a more focused game are never really utilized. The sequel to this, Rebel Cops, made an entire game focused on this turn based stealth combat with additions. Each tactical stage allows you to retry it, so messing up or being bad at it won't cause you to have to suffer a huge loss or to replay the rest of the day.

Something I can certainly praise this game for is that when it comes to your decisions during events it is often quite clear what would be a good or bad idea, what skills would effect your options, allowing having the right equipment and using it to almost always be a successful option, and the events that allow you options outside of your normal skill range usually give you all the background information you could need to make your decision or are only set dressing. You will never get a random left, right, straight option where two of the choices lead to failure and random death. Though I can't say the same for some of the game's overworld events where taking on a cleaning lady can make one of your officers retire to marry her or where taking in some pound dogs can either lead to two of your cops playing with them for fun or one of your cops getting bit while trying to pet them and instantly dying. If something just utterly ridiculous does happen that is out of your control, you could even just reload the fairly short days to either make a different decision or for the random event to play out differently.

It would be nice if this loyalty and ridiculous number of calls-ins system was mostly dropped in favor of giving you fewer officers with more interesting and varied personalities and backstories. As it is now you do have a few characters with unique quirks, typically only shown with an annoying habit or one unique line they say. Two work very well together and double each others professionalism score, two are germaphobes, one won't use batons, one steals things, one likes to play dress up and won't go on tactical missions, one refuses to go out on call more than once a day, a man refuses to work with women, a woman refuses to work with less professional men but doubles everyone's experience when sent out in all female squads, and a few characters tend to be naturally loyal or disloyal or start out as alcoholics. All of them also have their own appearance, with most definitely looking cooler in their street clothes and hair when they are disloyal to you, you both gain and lose when they finally put on their officers hat that they respect you.

The game is unfortunately, full of half baked ideas that, luckily, effect so little or it is so easy to get around them that most do little to sully the experience but they do interfere thematically. The collection of goods and money needed to continue the game or to complete side activities becomes pointless as once you have access to two of the shops money no longer means anything as you can just buy leather shoes and chocolate from one store to sell to the other at 2-4 times the price. Money no longer being an option and two activities you can pay for to help with stamina or to raise loyalty essentially make stamina meters, loyalty, and to an extent even call ins have no real effect on you. One of the shops will even sell you police equipment which you are unlikely to need as you can already buy more by doing well in main activities, this and the lack of a need for money makes all side missions where town resents and organizations request you to do terrible things pointless. Sitting on $200,000 with everyone loving me after a couple weeks kind of hurts the narrative of desperately trying to acquire money and power. You can refuse to perform the more questionable actions that people want out of you, but you can never take the good option and arrest the person making the request, and the linear narrative of the game gives you no reason to believe your character would have the morals to deny many requests. Though, rolling in money and trust from all my other good work did allow me to take the moral high ground of ignoring any calls to bring in sex workers or recreational marijuana users.

There is a brief point where the station's cook leaves and you need to spend a combination of station and your own money to feed the on duty officers, some of them will make requests, some that contradict other officers, and not getting someone the french fries they wanted that day might cause them to lose their loyalty to you. This strange distraction is likely over a few days later as you are given the option to pay for catering for the rest of the game. Most of the tactical missions happen on each day but two force you to plan for four days, assign officers to roles, and gather information, this would all be great except that it forces skill and equipment choices on characters and adds in an extremely odd system where the chosen six characters are unable to come to work until the assault happens but they are unable to be used at work but they can be taken off the team and just added back to it if you want to use them in a normal day but taking them off gives them no equipment for the day. Even this really doesn't matter as you will likely have more than enough officers to just not assign anyone until right before the mission happens, it's just a very what the hell were they thinking kind of system.

It ended up being a lot more interesting that I thought it would be, with some good ideas, some common ideas that were better realized than most games, and some bad ideas that for the most part came together in a way where none of them caused many real issues with the overall experience.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1249818269659234304

A good story and setting trapped in a terrible card game.

It makes a good use of its setting. Has a great main character, it's well written even putting in world details or the inner thoughts of character for every minor battles, very nice artwork in the environment, in the cutscenes, and for some of the cards. The framing of the game is a guy telling a story and everything that happens is either narrated by him or voiced by the game's characters, all with well done voice work. There are important and difficult decisions throughout the game that can change what cards you get and what named allies follow you, with characters have dialogue in and out of battles and can help in random events, there are some weak elements to decision making as your army morale never really matters but choice can come back to help or hinder you long after you make them and the game only keeps one save file automatically updated.

So why did it take two years to finish? Because, Gwent is a terrible card game and the battles tend to be so easy that the problem is more the length of the game forcing you to play such a large slow number of dull encounters in between nearly every good story moment. It would be difficult to explain why for people not at all familiar with it. It was a passable distraction in The Witcher 3 with an interesting element of leaders getting use of a one use battle order that could change the field up, weather effects, and having to place units in melee, ranged, and support areas which was hurt due to overpowered character cards you could keep adding to your deck and with the game only being a side focus. So of course, when they go to make Gwent an official game weather is basically removed, leader abilities are done frequently, and the melee and ranged rows now do nothing except for effect a very small handful of the game's cards.

For the majority of the game (all but the final battle) I used roughly the exact same deck, only adding in a few hero cards from the characters I kept with me. I made no use of spending the gold, recruits, and wood you gather to create new cards until I realized that there were achievements for having all of them in the last chapter of the game. This does hurt the decisions and narrative a bit as you end up swimming in money and wood by the last two chapters of the game. Do you help the peasants? Well that will cost a small fortune of 1,000 gold. Good thing I have 60,000. The game is so mindlessly easy that I just never cared to exploit any of the ridiculous strategies you can make use of. Gwent is a game where you could pull off bullshit like this if you construct an annoying enough deck with hero, relic, and main cards that interact with each other enough https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBIsZlV1jHk

Your choices effecting who joins you and if they ever decide to leave you (not counting ones who always will leave you) is obviously perfectly fine in a normal game and how it works is handled well here, but when those characters also act as cards that you might create entire strategies around you have a developer that clearly doesn't know what they are doing. Nonsensical siege battles when you have to take forts or towns are frequently said that they will be costly battles but never matter in terms of story, only gaining you resources, and the fortification walls that block the entire melee row for the enemy side, only hurt them as they limit where they can play cards and for some reason provide them no benefits. As my deck always used guys that could set a row on fire to deal out damage to ever character on it each turn, limiting the defenders to one row is certainly not helping them.

The game's final main battle resorts to doing what all games like this do, just blatantly cheating with two massively overpowered leader abilities and overpowered cards in their deck. Luckily the AI is nonexistent when it comes to actually using card abilities so I built a deck (really for the first time in a 30 hour game) that gets stronger as characters take low amounts of damage and gets much stronger when characters are killed and the AI used the 10+ turns they had on me after I could no longer do anything to keep constantly attacking me (on average doing about 10 damage to my side, and then gaining me 20-40 additional strength from the game each time). ...And I still barely won. Good thing I made the story decisions that got me and allowed me to keep all those cards I needed.

The game is full of optional puzzle battles in a game that doesn't really function as a puzzle style card game, so these are frequently throwing you into situations where cards do completely different things that you need to try to learn for a brief extra event or they might have the puzzles just play like different card games (Hearthstone or even one that is just a flip over pair matching card game).

I still kind of recommend it. It's an enjoyable narrative with some good events to interact with and a good use of The Witcher's setting. But if you've playing any kind of remotely good card games, Gwent is just terrible by comparison. Even dull simplistic things like Hearthstone are better.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1248524673249234944

Action adventure game that continues the series tradition of having you play as a wandering ronin that arrives in a town and through your involvement with different events reach a variety of different possible endings based on the people and factions you support. Large number of combat styles for swords, spears, unarmed, guns, and dual wielding with the better ones giving some cool (or amusing) looking moves. Easier to follow events than previous games and to see what choices lead where by looking at a branching narrative tree. Town, building related events, and things like your ability to understand foreigners can change based on actions in previous playthroughs. Hilarious and ridiculous dialogue choices, from what I remember this is least serious of the series. A number of side activities, though most aren't that interesting other than the four side quest chains.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1284465847084318720

When the new protagonist of the Yakuza series was revealed a few years ago, I was partly worried about his often humorous appearance and expressions signifying that the series was going to lose a lot of the more emotional elements and problems heavily grounded in reality to fully embrace the absurd. That was not the case. Ichiban is a fun and likable protagonist with a backstory that fits the series norm of having a protagonist that never had the culturally accepted family lifestyle which also causes him to fit in well with his new friends and companions. Even his Yakuza back tattoo of a dragonfish highlights the way his past is viewed, being seen as someone lower in society while also representing trying to take the reigns as series protagonist from Kiryu. He even comments when asked about his tattoo by saying he wanted a dragon but that represents the top of the food chain, and that one day it will shine brighter than a dragon. His look and usual antics make him seems like more of a doofus but he can often be smart and frequently uses his knowledge of criminal and Yakuza lifestyle and hierarchy to trick or intimidate the games antagonists. There is also a focus on bonding with your party and friends that often feels like an extension of the bar friends and conversations from Yakuza 6 with conversations at your favorite bar hangout spot, conversations when you go to certain parts of the city, and conversations that happen when you eat certain meals with your friends that all allow for a deeper understanding of each character. The usual high quality voice work, character expressions, and clothing detail the series is known for continues in this entry.

The change to an RPG battle system is both fun and fits well with the main character's desire to be a hero like in the old Dragon Quest games that he played, and that ends up supporting a plot often dealing with Ichiban becoming a source of support towards the abused and forgotten of society (homeless, sex workers, orphans, elderly, immigrants, poor, whistle blowers). With the main plotline also having the usual well written Yakuza fare of the dealings and backstabbing of Yakuza and police, rising politicians, a family at odds, surprising reveals, and a group of foreign gangs that put your party in the middle of a decades old counterfeiting operation that has been keeping the peace between three rival factions.

A well made assortment of side quests are here, featuring both the touching and funny situations that the series is known for. There is also a variety of activities to participate in throughout the cities such as karaoke (with all but one of your party members having their own song to sing), go kart racing, shogi, mahjong, cabaret clubs, Sega arcade cabinets, gambling, baseball, darts, golf, pachinko, movie watching, a bicycle riding can collection game, and a property management and shareholder meeting side quest. Three different areas are featured with the main one being Isezaki Ijincho and with both Kamurocho and Sotenbori being available to travel to at a later point in the story. The new area is well detailed and as enjoyable to explore as Kamurocho.

The new battle system is fun and often works well but the biggest issue is one that I didn't expect the game to have. A shift to an RPG like commands seemed like a change that would just get us even more of the great visceral/hilarious/bone crunching heat attacks of the main games (even more so with a lot of the more out there combat elements just being what Ichiban sees in his head), instead many of moves are just dull to look at until you start getting into a lot of the late game unlocks or co-op attacks. You also miss out on a lot of the environment based combat that has been around since Yakuza 6, apart from hitting enemies into cars that are still moving in the background, you won't be seeing friends help you out with special heat moves, knocking enemies into stores, throwing them over railings on trains, throwing them into microwaves, etc. Other problems involve awkward battle positioning when it comes to hitting multiple enemies, people getting stuck on things (though the game will eventually just teleport them to the correct position if it the environment is causing characters to get completely stuck), and using objects in the environment to attack doesn't always seem to work to the extent that half the time it doesn't even seem functional. The camera can also make it difficult to block attacks well (by hitting O/B before an attack lands) and can sometimes be so slow to react that you can be hit before you even seeing the attack coming.

Grinding job XP if you want to try out new things, the sudden loss of 4th party member unless you have done the business management side quest to replace him, quests to find and beat certain enemy types that the game sometimes just never seems to want to spawn, at times almost immediate enemy respawns, and enemies that have no chance of killing you but have ridiculous amounts of health can all make the game feel like an old JRPG in a bad way. The women in your party job role's and some of their character skills are much more sexualized and flirty than anything the men get and some of the enemy types you run into can be questionable (like how most any black guy you run into is giant muscleman, wearing giant chains, or someone who draws a gun on you and starts shooting it sideways). Plot wise the game ends with some of the most expressive and emotional acting in the series, rivaling Yakuza 0's best moments, though also hurt quite a bit by having your only real attachment to the moments being what Ichiban is personally feeling. This is due to one of the main antagonists that you watch him pour his heart out to being easily one of the most repugnant people in the entire series, to the point that I can easily see people (especially people from the kind of backgrounds that you have been supporting through the game) liking Ichiban less for his actions at the end of the game.

There is a decent number of classes with every character tending to fit two or three of them well, but all job skills and animations are the same for each character. While you can learn and keep two skills in every class that can then be used in a different job those two carry over skills are the same for every character, taking a bit of characterization out of it (though each character does have different color costume options). Each party member does have their own unique class (Ichiban has two) to give them a few unique options, though three of them basically start as their most useful one. It is also unfortunate that two of the classes are locked behind paid DLC.

Like A Dragon succeeds at not just being one of the best Yakuza games but at creating a new protagonist that isn't just a great character but who is every bit as strong as Kiryu and reworks the series into a completely different combat and party focused style that, for the most part, works well while being fun to play but also further surrounds you with the friends, allies, and social issues that have always been at the heart of the series. It sounds like Ichiban is planned to head future games and that is a great choice. If the series continues with the RPG like battle system I think a lot of the issues would be fairly easy to fix and what we have here was a good start to a new gameplay style.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1343379463740878848

Adventurers Adol and Dogi are stranded on a cursed island with about 20 other survivors of a shipwreck, needing to band together to build a camp to defend against attacks from what should be long extinct creatures (basically dinosaurs). Later involving a threat to the world from the goddess of earth, a serial killer, and a scapegoated ghost pirate.

Released with a poor translation that was later fixed. Uses the more active battle system started with Napishtim and the party system of Seven with character switching, weapon weaknesses, dodges, blocks, and specials, and the mapping from Celceta. Has a second character you play in the past that will alter the island in the present, though these are always very obvious and few changes.

Fun combat. Good music and characters. Gives a lot of time to not just your five other party members but to the NPC characters you are stranded with. A lot of the early bosses are pretty good, getting you used to mechanics or having interesting details. Later bosses can start to just have dull gimmicks, have way too much health, or can just be so pitiful and awkward to fight that it seems like they ran out of good ideas with the large number of them. Still has the problem of unlocking skills that are just useless when put next to other options or when you are limited to only four skill bindings. At about 30 hours it is on the longer side for Ys games, like Celceta was.

Minor issues starting the game where it might just close itself (and would always close itself if I clicked to start it in Steam and then brought up a different window) but was always quickly and easily solved by just starting it a second time.

A solid entry in the series.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1337838147342745600

Interesting well written sandbox murder mystery with mysteries inside mysteries, in an even more interesting Vaporwave inspired setting involving syndicate and council members living in a pocket dimension called Paradise Island. The island is regenerated after mistakes/tragedies with the coming 25th said to be perfect. Each with adducted enslaved citizens to serve as fuel to resurrect ancient genocidal gods, run by a council that has lived for thousands of years and other chosen who have started to grow bored of their lives, the way things are run, or their place in the island's hierarchy. When the council is discovered to be murdered by what is assumed to be a demon an investigator is called back after over 3,000,000 days of exile to discover the truth.

The look, setting, writing, music, and being rewarded for looking into things and exploring are the strong parts of the game. The actual investigating and case connections are basically done for you when you find new information by exploring the environment or questioning characters. You can't actual get your questioning wrong and even the trial at the end only involves accusing the people that make sense based on the evidence you discovered (you can easily miss things or start the trial early) and clicking every choice to present all of your findings to the judge. The actual running around back and forth, looking for currency in addition to collectibles and evidence to pay for upgrades or fast travel, and platforming to reach those collectibles also ends up being a fairly mediocre part of the game. Though the actual lore based items you find can be interesting and give a clearer picture of the game's unique setting.

Not everyone will be satisfied with the ending as the trial doesn't have the tense, shocking, back and forth moments of games like Phoenix Wright or Donganronpa, you don't have to piece much together like in Return of the Obra Dinn, and it isn't in the game's or your character's job's scope to solve or influence the problems with the setting's society or to delve deeper into real world/gods/demons talked about in the lore. But it does tell a good story in a world that is both unique with a rarely used art style, and searching the island to uncover more of the facts about the case and the island's citizens is different but very satisfying experience.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1330782389035966466

Origin takes place around 50BC and is primarily set in Egypt. It is easily the best setting change in series since Ezio's games, and a unique well made location just in general. Detailed beautiful environment that can be explored outside of the game with a historical focus. Excellent weather effects, and day/night changes that alter how NPCs behave. Your eagle animal companion, Senu, serves as stand in for the usual dull vision mode is a very nice change as it allows you to focus on the world more and to use the view as the eagle to mark enemies, find alternate paths, or just to get a different view of the environments.

Easily the best series protagonist, a character focused on revenge as a motivation but not in a dull constantly raging or drunk way that tends to go there are a lot of moments to humanize the main character throughout the game. You are older than most game protagonists and your role in Egyptian society has you running into a lot of friends, your wife (also a playable character), and past acquaintances in your travels that lets you learn more about him. When he's not dealing with his enemies, Bayek is friendly, sarcastic, good with children while seeing his own dead son in them, and actively attempting to help the people he cares about and learn about the problems effecting his people. Side quests are the best they have been in the series, showing more about the main characters past, continuing to aid allies after their role in the main story is done, showing more about the people and culture, and offering much more variety gameplay and world building wise than the past games obsession with killing random targets or tailing people for information. The first good modern plot in some time, both character and information wise but also easier to ignore it and to just quickly get back to the main plot if its what you want.

Animus hack feature allows you to edit many different games settings, animations, how enemies and NPCs behave, it and the lab for Total War Warhammer 2 are two of the best setting/cheat/mechanic altering features added to games that I've seen in recent years.

The only real negative I had with the game is the amount of experience you need to not only gain all of your abilities but to at least gain all of your tools or options to engage with enemies. It would be nice if you at least gained all of your tools through normal gameplay.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1125222020877152257
https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1124939314943578113
https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1125218250390827008

Story told by cutscenes is the melodramatic ridiculousness that I remember from six with the more interesting moments both character wise and thematic coming from the in mission dialogue. Story about how war is bad and there are drones but drones are bad so human pilots should be fighting in the wars instead of drones, and going to space, and drone country took over a lot of other countries taking the culture and language of those countries away from the natives which is bad but they should also just move on so everyone can come together to watch the only not useless pilot (MC) shoot down the super drones. Some story moments and characters do seem to tie into Ace Combat 0 and 5, which I have not played.

As far as I remember this plays like the Ace Combat 6 with no real improvements other than having missions that tend to change things up more with the environment or how you go about destroying targets, which can lead to some nice sights but more often than not the missions changing things up are easy, shorter, and lack the more intense fights of larger air battles or the more story heavy or fun moments of flying around the battlefield supporting your allies in larger fights. I think that's the thing I miss most from my memory of six, a lot of that game was fighting with the same groups of air, vehicle, infantry, and support crafts and you choosing who to help or helping everyone in time could change dialogue, mission medals and who survives, having more larger battles and allied communication is something I'd take over flying through a sandstorm to locate enemy vehicles with noting really posing a threat to your plane or your allies. Having so many allied groups over and over again gave you more of a connection with them unlike here where your support is frequently changing. Having less story significant enemy aces appear in most missions of some of the previous games that you may or may not shoot down also felt better than the one story guy appearing every now and then to do impossible maneuvers until you hit him with 8 missiles to get him to leave.

The game is a lot of fun though, even more so in larger battles, so it's just a shame so much time is spent with what are basically tutorial missions or doing really simple things like guiding bombs or flying in low viability areas against a couple normal targets. Really could have used more larger and more challenging battles.

One of the few survival style games that really forces you into bad positions not just for yourself but for the game's other characters. You will be prevented from doing everything that you want and saving everyone you want to save, aligning with a game's story where your doctor isn't a savior or representative of a power fantasy but just another player in a town's story. Excellent atmosphere and aesthetic choices with conversation screens, the opening of the game and moments throughout presents the story as a play with the dialogue screen seeming to put the stage light and focus solely on the character you are speaking to. Well written dialogue and translation with an interesting story for the Haruspex character coming home after six years and his struggle between his roots with the native people and recent past pushing him away from those beliefs and discovering his murdered father's role in the town and if and how to succeed him. Makes failure, struggle, and choice meaningful. You won't be able to do everything each day and certain events can be important to the game's completion, only there to give you more details on the town and characters, they might get you useful supplies and items, they might be little more than an interesting distraction, and some side actives might even be harmful to the town or certain characters if completed.

Combat and stealth is poor, but easily exploitable, which makes it more bearable but also a bit ridiculous that some doctor can fight off multiple people often easily. Also a bit unusual that everyone knows it was you if you kill, autopsy, or loot people but that they like you more if you kill surrendering people as long as they attacked first. It can be hard to get into, but the addition of difficulty sliders that cover a lot of different areas can be used while you learn the game, to make aspects you don't enjoy or that the game doesn't handle well more enjoyable, or you could use it to make certain aspects even more difficult than in the base game. The limited amount of time, resources, and stamina you have can make certain aspects much more annoying than they would otherwise be, things like having to take long detours to reach areas in town because you can't just walk on or jump over small fences, rocks, or knee high boxes. With only one of the three playable characters available at this point (or possibly ever) you don't get the full story of the town and some of the supporting cast barely has a role at all in the Haruspex's story.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1182560943848378369

I am in a near dreamlike state where a mocking voice warns me of the condition I have left my body in. Ignoring the warnings and sudden intense pain, I awake to a terrible hangover with no memory of the past night or of any aspect of my life. After I slowly drag myself to the bathroom mirror and attempt to wipe the grime away I am again warned, this time hearing that I won't like the sight that will look back at me. "It can't be that bad," I think as I wipe the mirror, only become horrified at the sight of the swollen and ballooned face of a late stage alcoholic that I have no memory of, just staring back at me with a ridiculous grin. I fail to try to remember what events in my life would cause me to want to have my face frozen in such a ridiculous way, again I fail when I try try to stop it from happening, failure starting to seem a common theme in my life. After collecting my scattered clothes and leaving my room, with the sound of my jingling keys helping me to find them in my jacket pocket, a woman tells me that I'm a police officer that was supposed to be investigating a recent murder and describes the events she heard from my room last night that lead to my sorry state.

Downstairs I meet my new partner, telling him that it isn't time for names yet when I realize I can't even remember mine. Trying to remember causes me to consider the colors gold and orange for some reason. We go on to question the manager, the conversation leads me to declare my feminist agenda, the one that I suddenly remembered after becoming upset at his attempt to ask out one of employees and seeing it as a misuse of his power. This gives me a new idea that I choose to consider for the next few hours, my desire to undermine the tyrannical gender roles of society gives me a better understanding of the existing power structures of the society, of which I am still trying to fully remember. The manager is unimpressed and demands payment for my room stay, as well as payment for the window I smashed when I threw one of my shoes through it. A voice speaks up, a voice coming from the ugly tie around my neck, a voice that is both making a lot of sense at the moment and one I am willing to listen to, it tells me to sneak away to avoid paying my bill. Unfortunately, my gaudy shoes and pants have caused me to stand out a bit to much and I fail to make a clean escape. Realizing I have no chance of sneaking away I begin a mad dash, followed by a dive through the air while flipping the manager off with both hands. The voices in my head tell me to just savor the moment before the crash and enjoy that I showed the manger who was boss. Just look at the shock on his face, no idea how to react to my rejection of his authority. These thoughts come to me right before I crash into a woman in wheelchair. The resulting injury leads to a sudden pain in my left arm, followed by my chest, followed by all enveloping blackness as death takes me. Maybe I shouldn't have listened to my tie, maybe I should have taken better care of my body in my past life. The paper reports on a cop that suffered a fatal heart attack, I'm described as having been a heavy drinker that suffered from a broken heart long before a heart attack.

Existential, depressing, hilarious, political, cynical, hopeful, bleak, ugly, beautiful, and a police games that understands the role of the police. Disco Elysium does things that have been missing from the majority of RPGs. Set in a realistic setting that combines elements of different time periods and places to create a fairly grounded cast of characters and a story focused on the human condition and politics of the setting that mirrors real world elements, without a focus on being a chosen hero, forces of darkness, evil monster races, and what little combat there is governed through your skill checks. A focus on understanding, accepting, and letting go of the past to hopefully better yourself while finding hope in a depressing and cynical world. You are staying in a now destroyed room in the city of Revachol, a broken down city that experienced both a plague and a communist revolution before it was brutally put down by capitalists and then colonized by a neoliberal council in charge of much of the world. You have drank so much and taken so many drugs that you have effectively destroyed your personality and have no recollection of your past, you are told you are a cop and that there has been a body hanging outside for the last week likely connected to the current labor strike.

When starting the game you are given four stats to raise intellect, psyche, physique, and motorics with each governing six sub skills ranging from your ability to identify with the people you meet and their feelings, your reaction speed for physical reactions as well as witty comebacks, your attunement with the city around you, your ability to picture a crime scene, your ability to have informed hunches and gut feelings, etc. Every skill you have talks to you when you are dealing with people or noticing things in the environment, they can help you make informed decisions, clue you into hidden details, or cause you to make poor and ridiculous decisions. Your Physical Instrument skill might give you impressive muscles and the ability to use them but it also demands that you showcase your masculinity and to let nothing threaten it, Inland Empire might help you correctly see what isn't visible to the naked eye but as shown above it can be less than helpful when your clothing starts offering strange advice to you. Saying certain things or finding out information about people can lead you to having new thoughts, choosing to focus on a thought will give you temporary bonuses and/or penalties and when you have mulled it over long enough the thought will be locked into place with a new description and bonuses and/or penalties fitting your new understanding of the idea and what concepts you want to be important to your character as you rebuild his forgotten personality.

In most games you are rewarded for playing a certain way or for playing in completely different ways as the situation calls for it, giving your character no personality as you game the system. Disco Elyrium's frequently lore expanding or amusing skill anecdotes, the different options for playing your character different ways, and probably most importantly, your skills giving you an actual reason to want or understand the desire to do something you normally wouldn't do makes you want to play the game again as a character with an entirely different stat and skill focus. It is one of the rare games that can make your failure as interesting as your success. Some of the most amusing moments come from failure, some failure just leads to new logical paths to your goal, some failures might change a goal, seemingly minor choices or clothing items might lead to unexpected tasks or responses. Failing to find the cause of death during an autopsy can lead to a side activity to find a freezer big enough to store the body, succeeding in a Suggestion role might give you a task but play into the hands of the person that was hoping you would come up with such a suggestion, failing a Conceptualization role might lead someone to lend you her art supplies out of pity while succeeding causes her to think that you don't have the talent to create your masterpiece and that if you did you would be competition for her, failing to make a cool catch with your Hand Eye Coordination skill might lead to a loss of health buy an apology in the form of pity money. Unlike almost any other RPG, be it just because of how much combat there is or because some skills just have little or no real use, in Disco Elysium there is no right or wrong way to build your character because there is no push to succeed at everything, to do everything, to fix everything, or to help and save everyone, yourself included.

Disco Elyrium is a game that made finding my lost shoe a meaningful character moment. Multiple events make up some of the most memorable moments I've seen in a game. Your success or failure at singing karaoke leading to two entirely different styles of performance, a success gives you some applause and the satisfaction of the telling the manager that you knew you had it in you, a failure leads to a depressed wailing cover of the song drawing nothing but laughter and boos from the crowd, except for your partner who could genuinely understand the pain in your voice. One of the only instances of combat in the game having no positive outcome with a large amount of the text focusing on the fear you and your partner have towards being in a gunfight and the possibility of losing your new and possibly only friend. Helping to start a dance club and becoming completely lost in the moment while dancing brought on a vision where I spoke with the city itself. A dream of a lost love discusses the challenge of living with a man who sees the world in the way you know that your character does, arguing with himself and seeing a list of A, B, C, D questions that he wants to ask people at all times, a dream where a success at a skill check won't give you what you want but only inform you more clearly about what you no longer have.

It can often end up being one the darker games I've played, as well as one of the funniest, partly because it seems to understand that finding humor in the terrible situations that we find ourselves in or about the state of the world in general is how many people are able to survive. You are forced into choosing political stances as they are a major part of what people talk about, how you naturally react to them or things you see, and the game can't very well mock you for your mewling centrism if you weren't constantly choosing to refuse to endorse solutions or to take a stand on anything. No matter what you choose your positions will be questioned or outright mocked as absurdity or cowardice. How do you defend liberal capitalism and your foreign occupiers who put the city in the poor position it is in while getting rich off of its people hoping magical tech investors and the rich will generously create jobs for the people, how many lives would have been worth the victory of the communities and if they had won would you have just ended up with more corrupt unions like the one that seems to be protecting your main suspect, will you promote nationalistic ideas and fascism/patriotism/nationalism where your brethren are old miserable men rarely trusted by their peers or each other all longing for the good old days before radio signals corrupted the youths mind and destabilized traditional gender roles, or do you take the path of the centrist/moralist never standing up for anything and hoping things will slowly work themselves out? Well, it doesn't really make a huge difference anyway. Neoliberalism/moralism already won, they shelled the city, killed all the communists, and left the people you meet with little more than the crumbling ruins around them. The time for revolution has long past, and there's no money to be had in fascism and bringing back the king. Even the groups that would seem to be against or that actively dislike the powers that be know that they will be overthrowing nothing. The only people sharing your ideas are pathetic losers yelling at you from street corners, a couple college kids, and long since broken and dying old men and most of these people would never believe a cop working under the moralists who own the world would truly be on their side anyway.

The ruined city of Revachol is stitched together with tech, cultures, ideologies, and aesthetic choices taken from a variety of different times but managing to feel more real than areas in games directly created from real world places. A setting that can feel and become more magical than a typical fantasy setting as you attempt to explain how a glitch of an old recording playing long after its time seemed to be talking directly to you. You consider the history of the city's landmarks and notice the pronounced bullet holes and shelling damage still covering many of the buildings and walls, dried blood and bullet holes remain but no trace to mark the old bloodstains as being from the fascists killed by the communists or the communists killed by the liberals, residents watch you out of closed windows in buildings covered by weather worn peeling signs with slogans promising a better tomorrow. Revachol is one of the greatest fictional cities I've experienced in media, a city with a history told through its appearance and further told through one of the greatest skills ever put into a game, Shivers. An ability that allows you to hear the voice and see visions from the city itself. "Shivers come when the temperature drops and you become more keenly aware of your surroundings. It enables you to hear the city itself, to truly belong to the streets. It is a supra-natural ability; old wrongs play out in present time, scenes across the city happens in front of you. But who is speaking to you?"

Characters often feel real with nuance given to every character you meet, most of all to your assigned partner, Kim Kitsuragi, who has almost as much to add to the situations you find yourselves in as you will. Your moral compass, possibly your only friend. Kim characterization shows him to be a good man, but still a cop, still a man dedicated to the moralist of the game, though maybe getting too old and jaded to believe in the way he used to. Kim can grow to hate you if you play as a fascist, if you punch kids, steal, say racist and misogynic things, try to start fights, etc. But he is a cop first and as your partner he may voice objections but he will never stop you from doing anything, with the game only ending if you manage to choose a string of options that have you shooting a child. Only voicing his displeasure after the fact when asked by other cops. At one point in the game you can acquire paint and use it to graffiti a wall, one of your options is to write "FUCK THE POLICE." Kim is shocked asking why you would write that when they have a job where they work long hours and get shot at, only meeting you with a silent home if you point at that you only work towards making sure that everything stays as it is.

In place of the party of NPCs following you around you have your own skills talking to you and giving you visions into the lives of others, instead of learning about the past of your party members you learn about your own through your conversations with yourself. The voice acting is typically well done and the music and unique oil painting style of art helps bring the city to life, successfully capturing the world and characters in either vibrant detail or by having a more grimy look fitting of your mental state, the city's history, present, and seeming lack of a future. A police game where finding a body won't lead to any autopsy or fight with the responsible criminals but instead just ends with you and your partner trying to find the right words to inform the deceased's wife and the question of what happens to her and her kids now. Ample attention is paid to the small details of the world and characters, even making one of best moments of the game near the end being when a check tells me that Kim trusts me, followed by a second telling me that after all of our often dark, often ridiculous, misadventures, a gunfight, and putting up with my amnesia that he does truly trust me even beyond surface level appearances and beyond his desire to trust you as just another cop.

One of the few complaints I can make that has a larger effect on the game is that your skills talking to you is based on events or the successful hidden roles relevant ones make causing them to chime in, but there is no difference in which is more meaningful to you based on how high or low each skill is. None are louder or pushing away the other thoughts, though they might naturally argue or point things out about one another, but having a high ranking in something doesn't mean that it will take control of you. It is also extremely difficult to actually run out of health or morale and almost any health loss tends to come from kicking random objects or failing to kick them well enough. I don't know if its because I didn't raise some of them high enough to get additional options or many passives but Endurance, Pain Threshold, Electrochemistry, Hand Eye Coordination, and Savoir Faire seemed to have much less use than the other skills. Even with those not doing much (or at least not seeming to in my playthrough) you still end up with a game that makes better use of a large number of skills than almost any other.

This is not only my game of the decade but is easily one of my favorites ever.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1184282384205697024?s=20

The story of a Syrian woman attempting to seek asylum in certain parts of Europe and her husband still in their homeland texting back to her ideas and guidance, with paths and characters met based on accounts developers have heard from real refugees or on what was going on at the time in the locations you visit. The framing of the story showing both the journey and the loved ones left behind still in a war torn environment.

The interface uses a phone with text, pictures, emoji, as well as voice messages accompanying each of the 19 endings. The way it is sent up and with that feels like a real conversation. You can choose options that will lead your wife down different paths, to different countries, and to meeting different people but she also is treated as her own person and is very likable and will make her own decisions at times ignoring your advice or not telling you about more dangerous actions until they are over. Well written during the serious and grim moments of injured protesters, harassment, theft, scams, and less then welcoming locals but also in the more lighthearted times where humor or love between the couple is the focus or being used to help get through a tough situation, such as when an in joke develops between the two over their phone's overzealous auto-correct.

From what I've heard from other's playthroughs and saw on my own your path can make for a fairly easy trip, you might have to help your wife amputate the leg of a injured woman, your travels could lead to a protest at a closed border, walk over a former minefield, followed by a theft from a supposed friend and sneaking on top of an RV to make it into Italy, or could involve putting your trust in a cheap boat crossing run by mafia leading to more tragic results.

The only real negative is that it can make itself needlessly difficult or tedious to replay if you want to see the many alternate paths. You have no indication of what paths you took in the past nor do you have a way to quickly skip through slow conversations you'be already seen on subsequent playthrough. This can make the slower nature of the text and time skips that formerly worked very well to build tension or a feeling of realism now just take up a lot of time needlessly until you reach that new content. Remembering old paths and finding different routes could be made even more difficult by not even knowing what your message or sometimes possible emoji responses can lead to, with some not even looking like they might alter her path or knowing how she will react to it.