The writing's severely bloated, and there's this awful mechanic where half the time you can only pick up usable items after you've already found what they interact with. "Luke," you might ask, "aren't the writing and item puzzles the two things that need to be good in a point-and-click adventure? Why did you like this game if those weren't up to par?" Well, hypothetical reader, it's because I'm a sucker for the DSthetic, and this is the most quintessentially "Nintendo DS" game I've played in forever! It's short, easy, laid-back, largely family-friendly, and uses quite literally every single hardware gimmick the original DS shipped with. (Seriously, if you get stuck on a puzzle, odds are you can solve it by asking yourself "which frivolous console features haven't been used yet?" It worked twice for me!) It's the sort of game that could easily have been a formative piece of media for me if I'd encountered it 15 years ago, and one I can see myself replaying whenever I need to de-stress and just sit down with a game that isn't too demanding. Especially since I'm pretty sure I got the bad ending this time around.

Charles Martinet popped OFF on this one. Could’ve used another world or two, if only to help pad out the difficulty curve (the last level especially feels like an ultra-sadistic bonus stage), but Treasure keeps a steady flow of creativity running through these levels, which mostly manage to balance sprawling layouts with focused design. I actually think the game could’ve been even better if they’d leaned more into the non-linearity—each level is full of alternate paths and entire sub-areas that fold back in on themselves beautifully, but progress is often gated by annoyingly specific bottlenecks. (That is to say: required area A and optional areas B and C will all be fully interconnected, but required area D will only be accessible from area A. I’d like these levels a lot more if A, B, and C all led to D. U C?) Gloriously unhinged boss designs, too; shame the final one is such an anticlimax. Would’ve killed for a 3DS remake of this back in the day.

Amazing: they finally made Lego Digital Designer: The Game. Breathtakingly beautiful if you've got the GPU for it (I had more framerate drops in the last 15 minutes of this than in all 60+ hours of Elden Ring), and the puzzles are mostly great, though some of the late game areas disappointingly fall into "keep clicking stuff until the game decides you've done it enough" design. But you know what? If ever there was a puzzle game that earned the right to let the brainteasing take a backseat for a bit, it's this one. Would love to see a sequel one of these days.

Better than The New Order—much better for the first couple hours. More (and better) stealth, great new guns, none of those pace-destroying third-person cutscenes…it's everything a spinoff needs! (Actually, the new guns might be too good. I had hardly any reason not to just switch between the Bombenschluss and Schockhammer for 90% of the game.) The halfway point introduces a couple annoying difficulty spikes, though, both in the combat and through "where am I supposed to go now" level design hiccups. It doesn't help that the new traversal mechanics leave a lot to be desired—the visual indicators for both climbable and breakable walls are indistinguishable from the variance in the regular textures, and there's no way to use e.g. ziplines for any strategic purpose in battle. It's just "press E/LMB to go to the next part of the level". Also, the final boss kinda sucks. Not as awful as last game's (I think the scenario has potential, at least), but for some inscrutable reason, the boss's hurtbox is tiny, and he moves around a ton, and every time you take a shot at him he retaliates with a nigh-unavoidable attack. Recipe for disaster! At least I didn't have to lower the difficulty to "Can I Play, Daddy?" to finish the damn game this time.

But you know, I had a good time with this one. It's three hours of the game I desperately wanted The New Order to be, and three hours of mildly frustrating silliness. 3 star classic!

"Assento Dele" is the real star of the show here: a short, heartbreaking, neatly packaged short story revealing new depths to the greatest character in video game history.

"A Requiem for Innocence" proper was…a little disappointing, if I'm honest. The first half especially feels like a compilation of all the most widely criticized aspects of the main game, from its overreliance on "misery porn" to its repetitive dialogue. The way the game doubles down on the nature of Jacopo and Morgana's relationship is particularly unfortunate—it's not quite the emotional crux of the story as I feared it would be, but the notion of Jacopo the Groomer still sours an otherwise perfectly believable caretaker relationship, all for the sake of a few dozen lines of dialogue (which is a pittance in this context). By the time the "Part II" title hits, apart from the introduction of two new characters, there's hardly anything in "A Requiem for Innocence" that couldn't already be gleaned from the base game, in terms of breadth or depth.

The second half shines, though. Once the plot refocuses itself on the themes and dilemmas that define the series (most notably its explorations of the different ways people respond to pain and hardship), it becomes a gripping tragedy, with even scenes taken verbatim from the original game taking on new significance. (One in particular receives a new, totally gutting presentation that's up there with any of the most excruciating moments in the original.) Part II is so many orders of magnitude better than Part I that I almost wish the story had just started at the halfway point. It's still decent overall, but superior to The House in Motherfucking Fata Morgana? Not a chance.

Also, that Michel/Giselle story is lovely. Just the sort of epilogue I wanted for them. I'll still play Reincarnation at some point, of course, but a part of me wonders whether it was really necessary, you know?

Great shooting and a serviceable story when it isn’t getting shoved in your face (I even belatedly appreciated the safe house missions by the end), but the encounter design is unbelievably inconsistent, with some of the most severe difficulty spikes I’ve ever seen in a game. When every walkthrough I can find says things like “this part comes down to luck” and “just run past these guys because it’s annoying to fight them”, you have done something wrong! Would still probably be a solid 3 if not for the final boss fight, which condenses everything I disliked about the game’s design into two phases of concentrated frustration. If Steam achievements are to be believed, 15% of the players who made it all the way to the final boss (that is to say, beat the miniboss that railroads you into the final boss immediately afterward) did not end up completing the game—that’s an insane drop-off rate for five minutes of gameplay, right at the end!

A grand old time; the first FPS I've ever played where I actually enjoyed the combat. Not a big fan of the "key hunting" aspect, which feels retrograde more than it feels properly "retro" (I applaud people who can find the fun in wandering through empty environments to look for a corpse they missed), but I was very pleased to discover that the second half of the game has almost none of that! Two of the three boss fights are also a bit underwhelming, but the good one is reeeeeeeally good, so y'know, it's all fine with me. These are all nitpicks, anyway. DOOM's good aspects are all but self-evident. Explaining why this game is fun would be like explaining the appeal of the whole medium.