Y'know a few hours in I was thinking that the game wasn't that bad and that I'd shoot for the platinum but the more you play it the more the horseshit just permeates the entire experience and by the last two levels I was completely spent of caring about any of it.

The implementation of the costume feature is fucked the whole way through. To get a costume in a level, you need a key to 'unlock' it, even if you've already done so. Keys are always like 3 seconds away from the costume so it's completely superfluous and completely useless design. Because the game is a literal one button videogame and they needed to make a shitload of costumes to give the game some sort of selling point, costumes do one thing and there's plenty of overlap. Also while the game allows you to switch costumes at checkpoints, costumes are finite and can be lost. This can lead to grinding out an inventory of the good costumes if you're so inclined because yes, the game is a lot better when you can air cat or frost fairy around and over shit vs having a land locked costume (yes, you can't jump with some costumes) with a shitty projectile. Also all costumes are based on like in game creatures but when you wear the costumes the shitty face of your character ruins the design and it's crap amigo it's CRAP.

What else is there to say about the rest of game? It looks nice enough, obviously the CG cutscenes are the big stand out here and they're good. The stuff with the tims are alright because I just think of Tim Hortons jokes and the little TIMBITS and I could see myself engaging with the shit if the game wasn't trash. Speaking of trash, the fuckin music barely exists and the only combat music in the game has the fuckin chanting samples from the small airfield stage in street fighter 4 and it's fuckin dumb and I hate it.

But the real shit, the real shit that made me quit caring about the game, is Balan's Motherfucking Bout. Balan's Whole Ass Bout is a 'special' thing that appears in every level. You'll find a golden hat and when you jump into it the Balan's Bunghole Bout can begin. Balan's Big Booty Blowout Bout is a 1-2 minute QTE segment where Balan cycles through the same 10 animations and you have to time a button press or maybe mash at certain points to earn statues. You only earn the statue if you get an Excellent rating on all the QTEs which is far more annoying than you think because you're lining up Balan's butthole with a moving silhouette which can be visually confusing and there's variable timing between bouts so it's incredibly easy to fuck up. But hey, you can easily retry them right? FUCK. NO. To retry a Balan's Fuckhead Bout, you have to exit the level, complete the final boss of the area, re-enter the area AND THEN make your way back to the hat to try again. It's incredibly blatant padding especially when the back half of the game has multiple hats per area AND they have more animations between them, going from 4 QTEs early to 6 QTEs in later levels. It's complete horseshit and a complete waste of fucking time and life.

Balan's ultimate problem is that with it's one button gameplay you'd think it'd be on some rated EC for early childhood bullshit where it's just kind of easy and breezy and it ends and if you want to put in the extra smidge of effort you can get the platinum with little issue. This is not the case for Balan goes out of its to be an annoying piece of shit at every fucking turn to the player and the game's detriment. Unless Yuji Naka was gonna solve all the annoying bullshit with the time he wasn't on the project (and remember, he lost his job because he pissed everyone off, by his own admission) this game was always gonna be fucked, and no amount of Evil Dolphins could save it.

From the outside looking in, art school seems like a weird experience. My partner dedicated several years to developing their degree and I’d get to hear first-hand details of just the bizarre petty problems it would entail. High school level cattiness, teachers who would see students as competition instead of talented individuals, cliques between different departments, so on and so forth. But out of all of it, there was one observation from my partner that really stuck with me.

“A lot of great artists don’t know how to write and a lot of great writers don’t know how to use art.”

Stray’s art direction might have, genuinely, one of the highest bars to clear I’ve ever seen. This is the new peak for me. Every single aspect of this game is firing on all cylinders. The world is vibrantly sharp in its beauty and structure. Each street corner, every nook, every room, every chair, everything feels personal and designed for that specific space. It's a game about the subtle beauty of an urban environment, about lived-in spaces and how people build their homes around themselves. You can easily beat this game in under two hours if you’re racing through, but that would be a disservice to the utter care and craft that went into building this world. Most playtimes last five hours and mine lasted longer just for soaking in all the visuals. I’ve never been someone who stopped to take pictures of impressive game visuals, but took numerous opportunities to take screenshots while playing this game. Every AAA game after this is gonna have to do a LOT of legwork to make me half as impressed with its visuals as I am with this one cat game.

The famous cat itself is of course the star of the show. The animation work done to nail the gamefeel of this cat is beyond compare. The Stray feels exactly as it should, fluid and seamless. The gameplay is perfectly designed around being a cat. I found myself genuinely surprised at a few points in the game because my expectations as a long-time gaming person clashed with the rules of being a cat. A single fence in your way? Games have trained me to think of that as an impenetrable barrier. I return to a quest giver to find the police blockade set-up? I’m not supposed to go in there anymore, the cops will see me. But that’s silly. A cat just finds a hole or climbs up a fence. The police won’t notice a cat passing them by. The real obstacles now are just doors or shelves that are a little too high off the ground. I had to retrain my brain over what was and wasn’t possible to accomplish in the gameworld.

People have sort of turned on accounts like Can I Pet the Dog for being a little too twee, and I do understand why. But I think people misinterpret the purpose of accounts like that. While there’s certainly a marketable wholesomeness to wanting to pet a digital line of code in a video game, the real core of Can I Pet the Dog is about encouraging more methods of interaction. Allowing players to personally interact in the game world in ways that make that world seem more real. It's the Who Framed Roger Rabbit animators making their job harder by making Roger bump into real world items constantly. It's Shovel Knight adding a useless crouch button that can’t dodge anything, just for the sake of giving players that option. The useless button or the useless interaction is one of the most subtle but beautiful ways to add a special polish to your game.

Stray is a master of this thesis. The game provides hundreds and hundreds of ways for the player to interact like this. Nuzzling random robots. Little cat nap locations that just pan over to the gorgeous cityscape. Knocking over boxes and paint cans. Places to claw at carpets. The dedicated meow button. The way the Stray lies on the ground or walks around in annoyance when someone puts an outfit on it. Standing in the middle of the road can lead to a robot completely tripping over you and collapsing into the pavement. All these details and nuances add so much life and personality to the world. Stuff like Catlateral Damage falls apart because it features one stiff movement as the main centerpiece of the entire game. It only offers one level of interaction across three hours of gametime. Stray offers so much variability in ways that speaks to something about the world and its protagonist.

It's in the writing itself that the game sort of wobbles. Don’t get me wrong, putting a cat in a cyberpunk landscape is truly ingenious. If it was just a cat game wandering through city streets, I think it’d be too lacking in personality to really shine. If it was just a game about a robot society living underground, I think it’d vanish into the forgotten sea of other simply alright sci-fi games. Combining them together allows unique gameplay elements and makes these ideas feel fresh.

But the reason it needs to be combined together is that the robot society element would likely be very dull when left on its own. The set-up of the robot culture is initially interesting. The robots have built their own language, their own history, their own religion. They’re certainly aware of humans, but only in a mythical sense. They’ve mimicked their creators to an extent, before passing down that mimicry through the ages and getting naturally distorted through the times.

Yet it's hard not to feel a little disappointed after a while that mimicry is sort of all that society is. The robots have just recreated the same social structure, same concepts of gender, the same jobs and hierarchies. Old robots complain about “kids today and their music,” while I’m trying to understand how kid robots even exist. When you have tiny robots repeating phrases like “That’s what I want to be when I grow up!” without detailing how growth and age works for robots, it's hard not to get a little confused. Robots get drunk like humans, have developed digestive systems within their systems… I’m not trying to Cinema Sins whine about something being illogical. I was just hoping that a game this creative could demonstrate a culture more distinct than just being Metal Humans.

The character work itself also runs into this problem. There’s occasional aspects of sincere depth. The cat’s companion can visit different locations and the game and speak emotionally about their surroundings. Reminisce about forgotten drinks and lonely nights and how those moments stayed with them hundreds of years later. But several character arcs can pass by so quickly it's a little jarring. Grumpy drinker Seamus acts as a disgruntled, bitter character for his early appearances. Yet it only takes giving him one journal from his father to make him completely 180 into someone with hope and optimism. It was a sweet storyline, but given the subsequent fetch quest you get sent on, it would also be easy to give Seamus some more time. Have your companion say “we should fix Seamus’ thing while he copes with this extremely personal item we gave him” and then have him express his change in demeanor after he’s had some off-screen time to process. Breathing room, you know? Another character decides to swerve to betrayal in the late game. But that character has had so little presence so far, I barely recognized who he was. He just didn’t stick out.

Even beyond that, the way the robots react to the Stray is hard to quite pin down. They all view the cat as an intelligent being and assume it’s just a particularly tiny, fuzzy robot. They try to have intelligent conversations with it, with your companion B-12 translating for the audience’s benefit. But they also don’t mind what they think is a robot stranger nuzzling up to them or lying on their chest. It's cute and I love those moments! But it gives you pause sometimes.

It's particularly weird with the character of B-12. B-12 knows what a cat is and shares a lot of emotional dialogue with the Stray. But I kind of wish B-12 talked to the Stray like a cat owner. Call the cat your stinky baby. Giving speeches about friendship and things like “I can’t believe you came to rescue me!” just feels… I’m not sure what I’m asking for. The game wants to convey its story but I think it created a weird necessary suspension of disbelief where the cat has to be both a cat and an intelligent silent protagonist that takes in character monologues. Its just a weird needle to thread and I think it makes the character work harder to pull off.

I think maybe the game could have experimented with no dialogue at all. Some of the game’s best segments are when there’s no translator and the story needs to be conveyed through visuals alone. And the visuals are so striking that the team is absolutely capable of doing so. Player goals are perfectly directed through excellent lighting choices and level design. Visuals alone can carry this game. Drop the players fully into the life of a cat. No words, no dialogue, just pure cat living.

Its hard to be disappointed with this one though. I might take another run at this game to get the last few achievements, just because I adored the world so much. Its a real marvel and easily high in the running for GOTY 2022.

GhostWire: Tokyo deceived me. While I was pretty on-and-off about following this game's very turbulent press cycle, I was still pretty interested to see a western game that goes into one of my favorite settings ever with such a heavy emphasis on Japanese mythology. The first chapter exemplified this, going through the hospital with really trippy and creepy visuals, and unique uses of the Dualsense's adaptive triggers. That one scene in the hospital with Hannya was amazing and completely hooked me. However, the moment I left the hospital in chapter 2... the reality of the game set in, and realizing what the game was doing turned all of my excitement into dread.

Once you peel off the mask of its aesthetics and its mythology influences, what you're left with is the most generic and formulaic open world experience possible. It becomes a mindless loop of running from waypoint to waypoint, only broken up by bad feeling UDG-ass combat and sidequests where the main appeal is "oh, it's a thing from mythology I recognize". And like most other open world games these days, it shoves in RPG mechanics that I think it would've been better off without. It's indistinguishable from its contemporaries outside of its setting.

Even then, GhostWire has the most bland experience of running around Tokyo that I've ever experienced. Due to its premise it inherently can't have the liveliness that makes me love the city in games like TWEWY or even P5, but it also doesn't do anything interesting with with going around an abandoned or wrecked Tokyo that the Shin Megami Tensei series excels at. It's perfectly content with turning one of the most fascinating places on the planet into a drab, repetitive slog to explore. It's such a shame, because its more mystical and trippy visuals are really strong throughout, but they fail to impress after they have the same tricks for the 50th time. I feel like it would've been much better if it took a more linear design approach over this. If I knew this would be how I felt about my first full game that released 2022, I'd've just kept waiting for Xenoblade 3 instead.

EDIT: It turns out it isn't actually a Western game. It was made by Tango, a Japanese company founded by Shinji Mikami, and just published by Bethesda. I was under the impression that it was an in-house Bethesda joint. My bad!

A large improvement over the original Fire Emblem Warriors game, but what makes it cool is that a lot of the improvements are tied to the mechanics of Three Houses. Gameplay is normal musou affair but it saw some polish with how guard breaking works with three houses weapon arts and how those work with the weapon durability system. On top of that a greater emphasis was put on directing the AI so they can accomplish things themselves and gives the game some manner of tactical gameplay.

The base camp stuff is a better way to sort out all the micromanaging stuff vs the menus of the original FEW game. And the obnoxious skill trees have been given to certain facilities instead of the characters and have been super simplified which makes maxing them out much less painful.

I didn't really care for the bigger story but I liked the characters and having more time with them is neat. Even if some characters get shafted by the amount of supports being scattershot, but the game still has stuff from three houses like the expedition thing being a tea party equivalent so it's fine.

So yeah game's pretty good, needs a bullshit golden route so that I can use all the characters in one route.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land is essentially an iteration on Super Mario 3D World of all things. It's an inspired choice but it pays off well because the franchise and gameplay changes suit the wider levels more. General gameplay is largely a refinement on what you'd want from Kirby but the switch to 3D allows for new secret design, and there's a lot of secrets to find and
conditions to satisfy to collect all the waddle deez.

The game's pretty hefty to 100%, my gameplay clocked in at just over 22 hours and it's probably the easiest Kirby game to 100% because the game's true arena equivalent can be cheesed with a well spent 600 coins and a specific thing you get later on. It's a Kirby game so it's generally a fun breeze through, outside of the true arena optional power based challenges can be difficult when opting to go for the target times or at least simple but with tight time requirements.

Ultimately gameplay is good but the Kirby charm is what matters and when you fully complete the Waddle Dee town and all your waddle homies are chilling out, eating food, playing music it Feels Good and that's what I want from this franchise so who cares don't read this review or any reviews from this account they're too long they ramble about nothing I got Ds in High School English what year is it I'm going to bed bye

Capcom’s no stranger to top of the range action platformers and Demon’s Crest is no exception, which makes it all the more unfortunate that it was so overlooked in its day. I think you could release it today almost totally unaltered and it would gel quite well with the tastes of certain modern audiences, albeit probably at a relatively low price. From its good degree of non-linear exploration, gloomy atmosphere and reasonably tough difficulty level it has a lot of hallmarks of recent hits big and small, and yet it still feels like we have a lot to learn from it.

It’s impressive that Demon’s Crest manages to live up to Ghosts ‘n Goblins’ challenge despite how much more versatile its movement is. Explore a bit to find some crests and Firebrand can fly in any direction, cling to or climb up walls, shoulder bash his way through heavy objects, the works. The reason you can’t just dance around everything all willy nilly is because Capcom employed some sensible restraint. Firebrand has to position himself to push away from a wall before you can jump off of it (think Super Metroid), his shoulder bash has a hefty amount of start up before it kicks in and he can only jump so high before flying, a bit like in Kirby & The Forgotten Land. This is all great because, while Firebrand has enough weird and wonderful abilities to give you some semblance of a devilish power fantasy, you still have to be patient when using them. There’ll be plenty of moments where you have to stop and really analyse your surroundings, lest you subject yourself to repeated clumsy deaths and Firebrand’s “AH!” that seems to become more maddening each time.

Dying itself never becomes annoying thanks to the surprisingly generous double whammy of infinite retries and pretty brief levels. Don’t let the levels’ shortness trick you into thinking that Demon’s Crest doesn’t have some bang for your buck, though. Whether to find hidden levels and bosses by clearing obstacles with upgrades you didn’t have before, collect indispensably useful life upgrades or to unlock the true ending & final boss, there’s plenty of reasons to revisit each area. Action platformers had had branching paths and secret alternate levels before this, Rondo of Blood being my favourite example, but they didn’t let you crisscross between them all in whatever order you please on a quest to become the coolest demon on the block. Progression-wise I suppose the closest thing would probably be Mega Man, but even it’s not quite the same.

What would be truly demonic is if I didn’t draw attention to the soundtrack or the art. Cartoony horror tickles my fancy like you wouldn’t believe, and the only other game I can think of that does it so effectively is the also superb MediEvil. As with MediEvil, you’re in for a lot of moody church organs, and to that end, one of the first tracks you hear in Demon’s Crest is a masterclass in tone setting. Melancholic as befits a world where demons rule the roost and humans are all gone, dilapidated buildings littering the backgrounds of the game’s gorgeous sprite work, but there’s hints of vengefulness in there too, maybe even hope. Definitely piles on the atmosphere something fierce.

As excellent as Demon’s Crest is, I did say ‘almost’ unaltered, and there’s at least one niggle that you’re bound to notice – you can only switch between crests through the pause menu. It’s really quick in the grand scheme of things, but still. If it were ever to get the Ghosts ‘n Goblins Resurrection treatment, it’d be great if you could switch crests in real time, probably with the shoulder buttons considering they go unused. There’s also a more minor issue of the fact that one or two crests are a bit redundant, one in particular being a high damage weapon for Firebrand’s base form which you’ll probably only get after already having obtained his ultimate form that does higher damage anyway.

Neither of those are egregious, though, definitely not enough to be offputting. With Capcom throwing so many well handled franchise revivals our way in the past few years, I’d love to see Demon’s Crest join them sometime (I did buy two copies of DMC5 like the good little pay piggy I am, so y’know, throw me a bone, lads). There’s plenty else to love about it that I haven’t covered, but you should really try it and see for yourself. Just make sure to keep exploring if you get the bad ending in the span of, like, an hour.

It's tough to say about a game that has had so much praise heaped on it but I genuinely really did not like It Takes Two. It started off pretty good in the first section with the nails and hammer- the puzzles were building upon the concept as you get more nails and it culminated in a good boss fight. But the game takes a nose dive in the sections after that. Each one feels like a cheap ripoff of the most basic mechanics of another game, except none of the mechanics actually evolve or go anywhere they just end after an hour or two. Ratchet and Clank ripoff section where you fight really similar enemies that drags on for what feels like a really long time and has blatant padding in the form of a pointless boat section and really easy bosses. Mario Galaxy ripoff section that also has too much padding without introducing anything new during it or using the powerups in creative ways, minus a basic connect the lightning rods part that isn't exactly peak original game design anyways. I could go on and on but the point is the game rarely felt anything other than derivative which made it especially boring to play if you have touched literally any 3d Mario. Story wasn't anything special even though it was passable. They just kinda go from divorce to okay we like each other I guess and it feels pretty off from the conflict at the beginning about May working too much and Cody not understanding her. Also the game had a fair amount of bugs and some weird detection on some jumps and platforms, not horrible but definitely there. If I could give it anything I'd say that the co-op puzzles definitely have some highlights and are competent for the most part even if a lot are really simple (leading to the padding and sheer amount of puzzles that are very similar).

I really want to see Josef Fares make a game rich with mechanics and at least passable story-wise which would allow his best trait, a strong cinematic feel, to really shine through but It Takes Two does not deliver for me. I don't think the split screen gimmick works well enough to carry what is just a pretty boring and a little too inspired game.

My first impressions of this game weren't too positive. Don't get me wrong, it looks good and plays well, but for the first two worlds the game feels less like an original IP and more like a Donkey Kong Country 2 romhack with a fresh coat of paint. The back half of the game still feels that way, with plenty of level gimmicks still straight from DKC, however the level design gets a lot better and the game becomes more enjoyable as a result.

The whole wild masks gimmick is a bit underwhelming. They're just powerups you get in levels designed for them and you have them for the rest of whatever level you get them in. Powers range from something you should have anyways (Shark), to something you get so they can do more DKC gimmick levels (Bird, Lizard), to something that sucks (Tiger).

Besides these gripes, it's a breezy game to 100% if you're seasoned at these games, they do end up making the most out of the gimmicks, (the lizard autoscroller with the corn is excellent) and the boss fights are better than most DKC games. Also if you're going to do time trials in your videogame, have a gimmick. Just running through the levels to beat a lenient timer makes what should be a fun challenge into busywork for some measly percentage points.

Dissapointingly average in nearly every way save for the sci-fi pulp art style. Incessant amateurish voice acting, thin writing and characterization, and a frictionless platforming gameplay with little challenge. It's also yet another example of a game taking a sort of anticolonial stance about unchecked greed and exploitation in its story, and yet its gameplay mechanics are literally about hoovering up plant life and natural resources to upgrade your abilities. Props to the art direction however. Marking as "Completed" even though I have about an hour left, not worth finishing unfortunately.