[37 hours || 70% completion || Immortal Difficulty]

Absolutely fantastic game!
A definite must-buy for anyone who loves metrodivanias or enjoys platforming and intense combat

[Short Summary]
The strength of game lies in it's bosses, puzzles and platforming design which is better than some of the best in the genre.
Metroidvania as a genre have so many aspects to them and some people like certain aspects more than others.
Despite some issues with the game, I still believe it's a fantastic overall experience.
The extensive accessibility options make it enjoyable for players of varying skills,
allowing everyone to enjoy the game on their own terms.

[What I Loved]

-The Bosses were fantastic really well designed and the required use of your abilities in them

-Accessibility options is one of my favorite thing about this game,
option to retry,the difficulty options, screen cap as a marker ,option to be guided,not having to mash to unfreeze,showing interaction prompts.

-The controls are responsive and feel great.

-Platforming is fun and has a lot of great challenges.

-Combat has a great amount of depth for the genre.

-All the abilities were enjoyable, providing a smooth and responsive experience, and they were appropriately utilized for both exploration and combat.

-The puzzles were enjoyable and never felt overly tedious or overly complicated.

[ General Criticism ]
1)The Art Style, Story, lore texts, and Characters all felt quite generic. It's not necessarily bad,
but there need to be something more captivating to grab my attention
I must say that I really appreciated how the story never obstructed the gameplay,
even if I wasn't entirely enjoying it.
It didn't overstay its welcome or attempt to convey a depth beyond what it was presenting

2)I found the music to be somewhat forgettable. While it serves its purpose, it simply blends into the background, often going unnoticed

3)When it comes to platforming, failing at one section results in a complete reset,
requiring you to start the entire sequence anew.
It the management of checkpoints in between could be improved for a more seamless and fun experience


[ Gameplay | Combat and it's Difficulty ]
1)There aren’t enough enemies, like i am actually surprised how sparse enemies were
and the ones that are there, just get destroyed, even on immortal difficulty
I enjoy the combat thoroughly but it isn’t quite hard or meaningful enough
and punishing.
||Basically You mow them down or you get killed in a few hits, you never get into
that loop of killing enemies ,dodging where you can feel the tension building
The game makes me long for more pressure||.
also I don’t think the damage sliders would help this.

2)I've frequently found myself resorting to killing sargon on traps multiple times
Just to warp back to the last save.In my opinion,the act of killing yourself to cross the map is really bad and a big design flaw.
To address this, I would suggest that the game should either allow traveling to fast travel points,directly from the trees
or
provide the option for free teleportation from and to trees once you receive the task to collect constellations

3)The map is well-crafted and easy to follow, but it gives off a pre-explored map vibes ie certain parts of the game map are revealed without the player having to physically visit those areas.
that dampens the thrill of exploration and After reaching around 70% completion,
my only choices were either to painstakingly explore every corner of the map or resort to using Google for guidance
Even when I make the effort to explore, the rewards just aren't motivating enough


[Bosses]
1)My BIG problem with the the boss fights particularly >!vahram!< fights is the fancy animation sequences.
If you happen to miss a dodge or parry, you're stuck in a 10+ second animation of the boss dealing damage..
While the game's animations are undeniably impressive, having to endure these sequences repeatedly, especially when I'm already being punished with damage, feels unnecessary.
It disrupts the flow of combat and takes me out of the immersive experience.

2)Given the game's intriguing range of abilities and movement and the option for instant boss retries,
I was left with a desire for a higher level of challenge in the bosses' mechanics.
I was looking for a tougher and more engaging experience to make the most of the game's potential.

From the creators of Rabi-Ribi comes a game that you can safely play without fear of someone looking over your shoulder and wondering what's wrong with you (probably)!

TEVI plays pretty similarly to Rabi-Ribi, with a bigger emphasis on melee combat. Tevi's got some pretty versatile moves you can weave in and out of, complemented a side of simplified ranged combat. Supplementing all of this are "sigils", an expansion on Rabi-Ribi's badges. When I say "expansion", I mean that there's an absurd amount of these to collect. The sheer quantity of sigils kinda dilutes the sensation of finding another one hidden in the overworld, but each one tweaks the combat mechanics in a tiny way, which adds up in a big way, and can change your entire playstyle. Good combat would mean nothing without great bosses, and TEVI doesn't disappoint there either. I do think the game is on the easier side though. I didn't die once on normal difficulty, so here's my PSA that you can change the difficulty at any point by having Tevi sleep in her bed back at the Oasis.

I wish I had more good to say about TEVI, but this game has a serious structural problem: its nonlinearity is fake. I spent a lot of time backtracking and exploring in TEVI, only to realize there's like, a single powerup I can grab before I hit the brick wall of "go to the objective please". There's almost never anything meaningful to discover off the beaten path because all the bosses are fought on the linear plot path, and you're barred access to the upgrades that would give you access to new areas until you beat those bosses. The game does offer a "free roam" mode when starting a new game, but that hits you with the exact opposite side of the spectrum: exploration and boss fighting with no real direction. Ideally, you'd want to meet in the middle somewhere, something that Rabi-Ribi already excelled at.

The story itself is fine. I hate to shoot it down for not catching my barely-a-zoomer attention span, but the game loves to infodump on and on about its world, society, past, present, races, and whatever. It became exhausting to read very quickly, and I don't even think it earns a lot of its emotional moments either. So many points where a character dips out of the story for several chapters after being introduced (I'm looking at you, Sable's brother). The best parts were where the characters bounced off each other with charming banter, something that is pretty infrequent after the first few chapters of the game.

The focus on linear plot progression rears its head in other places too, like the map. For some ungodly reason, its default mode focuses on current objectives, and not something like individual areas. You have to press a button to freely scroll the map (otherwise you'll just be scrolling through your current objectives), and you can't even add markers for points of interest from this menu. No, you have to be standing in the room you want to mark, open up your quick-inventory, and add the marker there (same for removing markers!). It's just weirdly inconvenient for no discernable reason. Item totals are measured between loading zones and not by each area too. What I mean is that areas not separated by a fadeout have their item totals lumped together, which is extremely inconvenient for anyone who wants to clear out the map. Pretty sure Rabi-Ribi did this right, what's TEVI's excuse?

The opening statement was meant as a joke, but in all honesty, while TEVI has its own strengths, I do vastly prefer Rabi-Ribi overall. There's a minigame called "Rabi Smash" in one of TEVI's towns, and playing it provided a brief reprieve of charming, non-serious bunnygirl mayhem. And that's just where I feel TEVI falters. They really tried for something more serious, but it feels like a mismatch for this type of game. If anything, TEVI inadvertently elevated my opinion of Rabi-Ribi. Maybe that says more about my personal preferences than it does about the games in question. (And before you ask, no, it's not that I'm into bunnygirls. Good guess though!)

Unchecked maximalism leading to a game that's very much less than the sum of its parts. With insane boss design, fantastic combat, pretty fun exploration bits it should've been a slam dunk. But for me it ended up ringing hollow due to game's unwillingness to restrain itself — be it from sending you on yet another McGuffin hunt, introducing unnecessary traversal mechanic, or throwing a new location with subpar gimmicks. Many parts of the game are great, and the marriage of extrinsically and intrinsically motivated gameplay to a point worked so well I was ready to proclaim that GemaYue invented digital crack. But somebody should have stopped him before stepping on rakes.

The other side of the coin is the story that's so earnest, sensational and... bad in ways that's consonant with Tevi as a whole, putting you through the wringer of non-established conflicts, unearned drama and neverpresent characters. It's easy to feel writer's excitement and how invested they are in their world, but with so many story bits flopping once the initial charm of adventure evaporates, you've yet again left to reflect on the virtue of moderation.

"Only humans practice deception so intensely for reasons that are so... unnecessary."

In my previous review I made a rather kneejerk response to merely seeing Lies of P on the store page, I see the word "Soulslike" as an adjective and I instinctively want to frumple up and cringe like I just had a warhead candy. But hey, it's on GamePass, and Iron Pineapple gave a glowing review for it but with a caviat that though not as bluntly put, is very succinctly written by u/psychebomb in their review about two paragraphs down, which I quote, "If you like Dark Souls, you'll probably like this game. If you've made liking Dark Souls into a defining personality trait of yours, you're going to fucking hate this game."; truer words have never been spoken on this site.

So, I decided to play it, it's practically free to me anyways and I'm just off the credits of the equal parts tranquil and exciting journey of The Last Guardian (review soon maybe) so I'm craving something a little more intense. Intense might be an understatement, right away I can tell I'm less equipped than most Souls games at the beginning, enemies are surprisingly tanky; what gives? Oh, it has the thing like Bloodborne where the enemy goes into a special state after receiving enough damage, then with the finishing blow of a charged heavy attack (or sometimes Fable Arts™, this game's "weapon arts" essentially) they get put into a position to deliver a Fatal Blow™. ...Alright I won't pretend the terminology in this game is a little goofy, but it's not difficult to understand either.
Anyways, the combat is already a lot more close and personal than Souls typically allows, likely due to the near complete rejection of ranged builds (there's only a limited use "gun", consumable throwables, and one weapon with a ranged Fable Art only); to offset this, the game has a parrying system similar to Sekiro where you block on reaction to Perfect Guard™, "but why would I need to do that when I can just circle strafe and block" says the DS1 fan, or "why bother playing the game when I can roll?" says the DS3 fan; the real spice here is this happy marriage of all of the similar mechanics wrapping around to something we saw in Sekrio: Unblockable, unrollable attacks; that can only be avoided by outright outspacing them or Perfect Guarding™ (or in special instances mostly only available to you in the late game). Immediately my Souls poisoned brain clenched, "NO ROLLING?", but the little bit of Sekiro I played clicked in instead, TWANG, I did it! TWANG, TWANG, TWANG, .... grabbed, SLAM SLAM SLAM CRUNCH!!! Oh, and not everything can be blocked either... lol... So I had to get these parts of my brain to agree on something: This isn't Block Souls 1 / 2, or Roll Souls 3, or Rhythmiro, or BloodBoR1ne, but will ask me to juggle all of these things in nearly equal amounts. That is to say, it all amounts to me using all of the knowledge I've accumulated from DeS, DS1, DS2, DS3, ER and Sekiro. To point to any one of these things as the thing it's aping is just plainly incorrect, because playing it like any of those (besides debatably Sekiro) will leave you in for a bad time.

That was a lot of words to basically say "some attacks ignore i-frames" but I cannot stress enough how much they use this to force you to be proficient in a variety of different combat situations. It's not just the bosses too, most enemies in general have an attack like this. You need to decide to space around it or go for the perfect guard. Now how about those enemies and bosses yeah? Overall pretty fantastic, I think the game has a notorious difficulty spike by the 3rd boss, because it immediately asks you to be able to perfect guard and identify when they're going to grab you (it's a subtle cue but you can definitely see it, I ate it like 10 times before finally never being hit by it on reaction). There's one explicit gimmick boss and of course it's probably the worst one in the game, though not nearly as bad as From's worst output (I'd list them but I want to keep those games spoiler free for those who haven't played them yet)
The enemy placement is often difficult in a variety of ways, either in group management, lack of space, or just a strong hitting "elite enemy" as I call em relative to the area you're in; they also love to hide them around corners and behind walls, crates etc. akin to all of the cheekiest moments from Souls and ER, which I absolutely love as it kept me on my toes, and despite that I fell for some obvious traps when I became impatient. The "lack of space" bit was very relevant at a lot of points where I'd switch weapons to a spear or something with a vertical arc to fight in hallways, reminding me of DeS in this regard (good), which leads me to the general level design: Significantly better than DS3, but that's a low bar; probably better than DS2 on average and a hair below DS1 (please stop pretending the game ends at Sen's Fortress, DS1 fans). The constant wrapping around to previous Stargazers (this game's checkpoints) and verticality is very impressive and shows the levels are a lot more deliberately thought out than the likes of DS3 just peppering its straight line with constant bonfires. The one thing the game is significantly weaker on is overall environmental diversity, well, at least compared to DS2 and Elden Ring; it's about on par with Demon's Souls, DS3 and a bit below DS1.

Gone is the habit of the classic Souls "you basically have 3 weapons because if you change you need to completely respec and grind materials", now you can usually buy the ones you need outright without seeking out some random mcguffin in someone's poop shack on the other side of the map to do so; and the weapons are in two parts: you only upgrade the blade, so if you have a good blade already but want to try a different moveset, you can just swap the blade to a new handle. The only downside with this is a lot of weapons are only proficient in either slash or pierce, a good number are fine at both though and if you want to spend the least resources I'd upgrade those. I ended up using probably 8-10 different weapons through my playthrough before settling on this heavy, oversized cleaver looking thing on a "dancer's blade" handle lol. I remember people saying "heavy builds are unviable in this" but I think the opposite, I think they're favored if anything at least for a casual playthrough; lightweight, fast weapons require a lot of Fable Art usage and timing to close the gap which while an extremely active and rewarding playstyle is incredibly demanding in a game that already demands a lot from the player execution-wise.
One thing that can be a little confusing, and again taking the wrong notes from Souls here, is that some upgrades and such can be kind of unclear about how good they are. All you gotta know is that in the skill tree, Dodge Link is a must.

Aesthetically I think the game has a really nice look for the most part, though I'm not as hot on the swamp and castle. People like to go "it's just BloodBorne" but it really isn't, there's been discussion about how both are rarely the architecture described (bcus people genuinely can't identify architecture 99% of the time and just repeat verbatim an architectural word they heard in front of an image they now associate with it with no further study) The weapons in particular are awesome and the ability to have a costume separate from defense items makes it a lot easier to create a look while optimizing stats and not looking like a clown. Tangentially related but the game runs like a dream for me on my 3700x and RTX 3080 at 4k "Best" settings (using DLSS Quality I maintain in the range of like 90-120FPS), all while stuttering less than DS3 ever did on the same system. Also, kind of unreal playing a game like this above 60FPS... It feels so good.
The music is serviceable, some boss themes are better, I just wish the game leaned into the clockpunk styling more and had a more industrial, mechanical, percussion-heavy soundtrack; seeing clockpunk boss with roaring choir orchestral music is serviceable but would've benefited atmospherically from this.

The character writing in this is okay, it's definitely weak at the beginning but a lot of them expand towards the back half as you get to know each other better. I think the story conceptually is pretty neat too, I've been a fan of the whole "what makes a human person?" philosophical conundrum for as long as I could read, and I think the way Lies of P handles it does a serviceable job in this regard, but I won't be reminiscing on it the same way I would DS2 (y'all sleep on that game's narrative too much). This isn't exactly glowing praise, but make no mistake that in this subgenre Lies of P has one of my favorite NPCs and a couple honorable mentions on top of that. One of them kept me engrossed in conversation for almost 10 minutes straight, which I can't say any other has really done. (personal favs are Stockpile Thomas, Ed, Andre, Seigmeyer, Saulden, Vendrick, Seigward, Hewg, Alexander, Rya, Blaidd, Ranni)
I'd decided on a score of 8 a third through or so, but it kind of only got better especially as the rather flexible weapon system kept things interesting for me.

I was quick to judge, and was happily wrong. Lies of P is the big surprise of 2023 imo that easily punches alongside FromSoft's greats, weaker in some areas but stronger in others. I'd place this firmly just above DS2 in my list of "Them wacky soulsemup things", all while having a team that gets completely dwarfed in comparison. Your enjoyment will highly depend on whether or not you're the kind of person who goes "Pac Land did it first" whenever people talk about 2D platformers.

In a word: Riddles.

(Played on Nightmare, mods used: Original TAG1, AI Restoration, Fixed Immora)

Doom Eternal feels like it should be the greatest single-player FPS ever for me, and I really admire its ideas and ambitions, but instead it's just a pretty good game. Why?

My main problem is that most of the encounters have a "soupy consistency": they feel similar despite me ostensibly making different decisions in the moment. I am still not sure what precisely is causing this, but I think most of the complaints about this game aren't getting at the core issues, so I'm just gonna throw out a bunch of things that I think are primarily contributing.

Movement in Doom Eternal is just ridiculous. For comparison: Quake allows for building momentum and doing crazy jumps, but this is very geometry dependent and difficult to execute while in combat. Doom's movement is more straightforwardly fast, but enemies have large hitboxes which easily bodyblock you, and the vertical axis is off-limits. Halo (and many other FPS) simply have slow movespeed that forces you to commit to positioning. DE has fast immediate movement + easy height and momentum boosting with meathook and ballista + 2 dash charges that cancel momentum and can go any direction. Faced with this kit, enemies have an extremely difficult time contesting you, especially in the air, and it's more likely that you'll get clipped by some random projectile than from misjudging a situation per se.

The level design is exacerbating this problem! Almost all the arenas you fight in are huge spaces filled with monkey bars/jump pads/ledges/etc which allow you to easily run in big circles, flee when threatened, and glide over enemies' heads. Cooldowns incentivize this too! TAG1 and the Master Levels try to combat this somewhat by using more environmental hazards, shrinking arena sizes, and placing major encounters in the comparatively cramped areas between arenas.

In the former context, the enemy roster generally struggles to pressure you. This is a real shame, because in many basic ways they are quite well-designed and differentiated (some writeups here, here). The Marauder has strong (and annoying) defense that demands you hold specific spacing, but even then it's not all that hard to just run away and ignore him. Most everyone else will let you flit around whatever range you want to be at and fire away, as opposed to the melee-oriented action games that Doom Eternal is drawing on, which require spacing and attack commitment.

There are a few exceptions. Carcasses subvert the issue by hiding and spawning energy shields at a distance which can abruptly block your path, i.e. actually contest your offense. Blood Makyrs reuse the annoying traffic light mechanic to prevent you from bursting them, but shoot massive, fast, movespeed-reducing projectiles that are dangerous and predictable enough to warrant playing proactively around. Cyber-Mancubi at least incentivize closing into melee range, where they can easily deal damage to you (unless you use the very silly chaingun shield).

The Spirit, in fittingly maximalist fashion, brute-forces the issue by just cranking up the health and speed of possessed enemies. Suddenly ranged enemies are difficult to dodge without cover, and melee enemies become relentless harassers that can actually keep up with you. On top of that, you need to make sure that you have ammo + time + space to kill the ghost itself, or let it possess something else. I wouldn't say it totally fixes the aforementioned problems, but it helps.

I say this about almost all fast FPS but this game really needed an enemy similar to Doom 2's Archvile or Quake's Shambler, something that can control space without the player just reactively dodging. Obvious, persistent homing missiles like Doom 2's Revenant or Quake's Vore might have helped complicate movement too, and the Glory Kill iframes couild even be used to avoid these big attacks (see: Ninja Gaiden incendiary shurikens).

Watching high-level play of DE is kind of weird, because of how ridiculously powerful weapon switching is. Nonstop swapping between ballista/rocket/precision bolt/SSG dilutes their individual characteristics as tools and turns them into one giant DPS hose. Almost all enemies can be bursted down near-instantly, especially with the various swap glitches that have been discovered over time, and meathook + ballista boosting to create sightlines quickly. Most players of course won't reach this level, but even for me I could feel the echoes of this playstyle when tackling the hardest content.

This game has a weird relationship with difficulty in general. Not being able to scale intensity isn't a critical flaw IMO (arguably original RE4 is like this). But I don't generally find Doom Eternal most compelling when the fights are easy, for reasons mentioned above, and trying to make the game extremely difficult presents issues. Because enemies move and fire so erratically:

* Initial placement is generally unimportant, and cannot be used as a design lever

* Single enemies struggle to exert pressure, but if the mapper places too many enemies at once, it becomes difficult to discern order from the chaos, and generic "just keep moving" strategies will dominate

Environmental hazards and AOE spam can work, but don't always feel like they change your decisionmaking that much, and feel vaguely annoying for many people, including myself at times. Limiting access to your tools, as seen in the Classic Mode for Master Levels, certainly does, but this is rarely used so far, and certainly not to the level of e.g. Doom maps.

Sometimes though I think that everything I wrote above actually doesn't matter that much, and the real problem is some difficult to pin down game feel issue. The game feels vaguely "floaty," in a way that makes it less satisfying to move around and fight. Sadly I can't identify exactly why this is, but it really does matter, even for a game near-exclusively focused on combat depth. For example, even after putting thousands of hours into Monster Hunter, the way the classic games control still feels viscerally enjoyable to me, and hurts my experience with the new games in comparison.

I found this game very difficult to analyze, so forgive any shortcomings. Check out Durandal's writeups here and here to hopefully fill in some of the gaps. Hopefully this team's next game can somehow overcome these issues and fulfill the potential of this style of design.