It's a Daniel Mullins game alright. I think it's very easy to look at his love of Creepypasta/creepy internet culture and feel frustrated that his narratives don't have much meat to them. There's a love of the mystery, the search, and the atmosphere that replaces conventional elements like, oh I don't know, an ending or themes. Still I find this juvenile fixation on loose story telling incredibly charming.

How many times will there be an old haunted video game that shouldn't exist? Infinite, I hope, as long as Daniel's imagination is running wild.

There's clearly an immense amount of technical prowess running the atmosphere here. The sheer amount of time it must have taken to get the woodsman's hands just right both disturbs and delights me in one complex package my therapist has yet to explain to me. There are so many little things throughout the experience that show a wild amount of imaginative visual/gameplay styles that really intertwine into a diverse and engaging experience. The implementation of standing up from the table gives the player such an uncomfortable diegetic feel that I find it easy to forgive the hacky metatextual segments.

The gameplay really does peak in the beginning though. The introduction of more mechanics overtime feels like bloat rather than expanding upon the already good basis. I can't even begin to explain how the circuit system works, and nothing says bloat in a card game like a useless mechanic that never got in the way of me beating the game.

I appreciate Daniel Mullens for his imagination, his technical/atmospheric prowess, and the absolute love he puts into his games. He still suffers as a designer from not knowing how to make his gameplay adapt and change over time, and his twisty narratives never really rise above the realm of fun pulpy Creepypastas. I think Daniel Mullins is wonderful creator in the medium, and the technical work he puts into all of his experiences should be celebrated far beyond their shortcomings.

When I began Metroid Dread one of the main things that stuck out for me was the immense amount of friction I felt between my desire to explore and the game design telling me to follow the path. A lot of people are comparing Dread to Metroid Fusion but fundamentally their flavor of linearity is vastly different. Fusion will lock you into specific areas to explore that you can look for the objective, or take time to look for side objectives that you can grab or will be able to grab later when you come back with more powers.
In Dread, once one path opens up the gate behind you shuts and won't open again until much later in the game. Mind you, I don't mean area to area, I mean room to room. A majority of the time there are switches that must be hit that will change the environment such as pushing blocks or changing energy flow. These decisions can never be reversed and will often lock you out of rooms you were just in for hours until the games lets you off its leash for a bit. Specifically this only lets up once around the midpoint point of the game (after defeating the 4th EMMI) and for the last stage while getting ready for the final area.

Like I said before, I find this frustrating. When given the movement tools like you are given with Dread I want to spend time searching to find small upgrades and environmental puzzles. I would always try and explore when I got a new ability but the only way open to me was the correct direction.
The core path is still fun with some particular high points like the 8th boss and unlocking the gravity suit, but it feels like they sacrificed an immense amount of freedom to make sure you NEVER get lost.

Quick side note on the bosses, I found most to be boring. 2D bossfights are hard to make well, just ask Retro Studios, but most of these felt boring/uninspired. Rather than relying on actual skill in the combat, most bosses just obscured their weakness/attack patterns so you have to waste time until you figure them out. The best bosses will still require you to put in work and effort after figuring out their patterns (just see boss #8 in the game), but most of the bosses in Dread are trivialized once you figure out what you're supposed to do. Most are closer to a Super Meat Boy boss rather than say a Hollow Knight boss.

As for the story, everything here is bunk. Metroid was never known for particularly great storytelling, but before there was a heart and soul in reflecting on the morality of killing an entire species just to stop other intelligent beings from weaponizing it. Now the story is all about Samus and her backstory, which is the exact great idea that Other M used to carry it's plot.
Here in the year 2021 technology has gotten to the point where we can completely eradicate the most deadly animal on earth, mosquitoes, simply by releasing a small genetic mutation in just a tiny fraction of the total population. You would hope following the grim themes on human intervention from Fusion that Dread would have even the slightest discussion on the real world issues and ethics that have come up in the past two decades since it's release, but I was probably just hoping for too much.

At the end of the day, Dread plays well and was fun enough to go through, but it lacks the soul of
its predecessors. Better than the worst of the series, worse than the best of the series. More polished than your average indie Search Action game but also 3x as expensive.

Notable interior designer, Juste Belmont, has a beautiful stride in this drab castle. Harmony of Dissonance tries hard to lift the best parts from Symphony of the Night and put on to the noble GBA. The movement is snappy, the enemies are compelling and varied, the nonlinearity allows for so much room to explore before following the main objective. In many ways it should be the perfect follow up and a great showing from Igarashi's new team, but really it's kind of a mess. Bosses are uninteresting, take place in the same arena each time, and are far to plentiful. The experimental 3D backgrounds are nice, but make it hard to tell what's going moment to moment in multiple areas (this is likely why they put a trail on your character). The magic system makes it so you have to constantly change both your spell element as well as your whip element in the middle of combat.
There are so many fundamental grievances with how the game is designed that all of the good parts fade into the background.

The game feels sloppy. Not horrible, but very sloppy. In many ways this is just a new team trying stuff out on a deadline and coming up a bit short. Not the worst, but also nothing unique enough here to make it recommendable. I only wish the interior design side mode was more in depth

This is not a rougelike. While there are procedurally generated dungeons (2 in total) this lacks anything that remotely resembles run-based game design.

After the first combat encounter you will be quickly defeated in the dungeon that "represents your fears" to learn that there is a concrete leveling system separate from the relationship levels with each weapon. This player level represents both your offense and defense in every combat encounter, regardless of weapon. Meaning there is no skill involved in combat, it is simply a game of numbers.
Everything becomes trivial with time, strategy is the same regardless of weapon, and the only satisfying part of combat is to see the numbers go up.

Of course the trick is that you only level up when you leave the dungeon... and you can only level up your weapon relationships outside the dungeon...

The only way the developer feels like they can get the player to both engage with both the dungeon side as well as the dating side outside of the dungeon is to force them to leave the combat side regularly in order to go date.

This game is an Action RPG, and not a particularly good one at that. There is nothing that changes between trips to the dungeon except for a few floor shakeups, combat is busywork and only varies with enemy design, and every relationship skill is pretty much meaningless. Boyfriend Dungeon is simply a loose collection of ideas tied together by some lite game design knowledge as well as a high concept that's hardly explored.

There's a "Boyfriend" game here, as well as a "Dungeon" game, but the connecting systems feel loose at best. Sure, the only way you can move forward the "Boyfriend" sections is to level up your relationships in the "Dungeon" section, but if it weren't for the final boss requiring a maxed out "Boyfriend" you could just completely ignore half of the game and get by just fine. Boyfriend Dungeon wears many inspirations on its sleeve but fails to recognize how games like Persona use multiple systems to incentivize the player into Wanting to engage with the text in its entirety.

I could go through and analyze all the boringness that is the "Boyfriend" part of this game, but honestly there's not much to say. It's schlocky and, no cap, I skipped a lot of dialogue.

At the end of the day I still enjoyed the game. A couple of the romances were fun, and the game hit enough of my dopamine centers to help me ignore my anxiety and stress for a few hours.
Not much that you could write on though tbh, I will probably just forget about it in a few days.

Also the controversy here is silly. I get it's easy for some LGBT+ twitter communities to devour media people who are perceived of pandering/not doing enough, but come on the stalker warning was there from the beginning. I can see people being upset with the treatment of the theme of stalking in the narrative, but no need to censor bad media ya know.

This expansion made Civ V get to the point where it both has a large and varied amount of mechanics that change in focus throughout the course of a match, as well streamlined them to where most individual actions don't take an excessive amount of information or time to do them successfully.

I reached the point that I can't do with most games where I put this on and play it mindlessly for several hours while listening to an album or a podcast. The changing flow keeps me engaged while the simplicity of each action makes it so I don't have to think too hard for turns ahead.

I would never argue that Civ V BNW is the peak of 4x design from a strategy perspective, but it hits a perfect balance for me where it is utterly therapeutic

*important note, base Civ V is basically unplayable when compared to this, this expansion far exceeds the base game

A very compelling experiment for the use of nonlinearity in storytelling in an interactive medium. I found myself fully engaged through the end by simply uncovering bits and pieces of information using keywords from each video. The chase of the mystery kept me going.

The story itself however? Shallow, unmemorable and lacking any real conclusion to stand on, an unfortunate byproduct of the games adherence to nonlinearity.

It takes 3 hours to play, I'd recommend it if your interested in seeing how games can tell unique stories when compared to other mediums, rather than for the story itself.