For a while now, Persona 4 Golden has been in the back of my mind as one of the most special pieces of fiction for me. So this review is a poor attempt to verbalize what this game means to me.

In the middle of 2022, I was at one of the lowest points of my life. Through my own admission, I had lost the people around me. My days felt empty, my future looked bleak and I struggled to get out of bed, let alone take care of myself. In an attempt to make my life a bit better, I purchased a new PC, to delve into new games that I previously wouldn't be able to play. To at least get out of bed.

Luckily, my best friend stuck with me through these tough times. He introduced me to Persona 4 Golden, a series I had previously been aware of and been mildly interested in through Persona 5, but never got the push to quite get into it. Ironically, I could've easily played Persona 4 Golden on my older PC, but nonetheless it felt like the mark of a new beginning.

I would love to say that starting the game and playing it was a magical experience, but it was a struggle at first. But it was a reason to talk to my best friend, it was a way for me to keep going so I managed to keep going. Through the daily struggle to keep up, I got to know the characters slowly, but surely. I started to pick a favorite, get invested in their character arcs, try to figure out the mystery of the town and most importantly, feel a bit better every time I saw that friend group that had started to mean so much to me.

Of course, the characters of a video game cannot replace any real friends or any real interaction, but the bonds that were being forged in front of my eyes were enough to fill that temporary emptiness in my heart. The perseverance of these kids, to have the courage to keep moving forward when it all seems so bleak, gave me hope in my darker hours. To be able to share that with the only person close to me at the time was a special time and allowed me to keep the hope that life would get better.

And it did. Because of Persona 4 Golden and my best friend Goh, I was able to persevere myself and keep faith in the future. To me, they saved me.

I usually like to close off a review with a quote that meant something to me in the story that I experienced, but here I would just like to thank Persona 4 Golden and Goh to be there for me and I'm grateful to anyone who took the time out of their day to read what this game means to me.

This review is mostly spoiler free for those who don’t know what this game is and/or are interested in playing it



“The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself. Thus science seems to be at war with itself: when it most means to be objective, it finds itself plunged into subjectivity against its will.” - Bertrand Russell



I first heard of Tobor through a singular word of mouth in a Discord server I’m in. It was one person recommending it to me through mutual interests in other games. When I went to look it up on Steam, my first thought after reading the synopsis and the descriptions on the page was, “I need to play this game.”


And then my excitement met my shock as I saw only around 70 people had reviewed it. I looked it up on How Long to Beat and it didn’t even have a page to its own. I looked it up on Backloggd and the page was completely blank. Barely any logs, no ratings at all, no reviews, not even a release date. The game had been out for 2-3 months at that point. After finishing my recent and first playthrough, I went to IGDB and personally put in a submission along with a friend for the proper release date and it was thankfully added a couple days after.


The first point of this preamble is that I want to really sell home that this game is UNKNOWN. It is not in the public eye. It does not exist as far as even more than 99% of people who play games are concerned. I looked into other indie games released in the same month of November 2023 and all of them have thousands of reviews and logs across Steam and Backloggd. They have HLTB pages as well. And I think all of this is for lack of a better phrase, a damn shame.


The second point of this preamble is that I became interested in Tobor and wanted to learn more above all else by experiencing what it has to offer, partly because it is so unknown. It is that observation and that interest, that desire to learn more, that is the driving force behind all of Tobor’s narrative and gameplay.


To put it simply, Tobor is a surveillance game where you control a spy robot named “Tobor” who is in charge of collecting information and learning more about a secret society and world dubbed “Undercroft” and its current 5 esoteric and eccentric inhabitants. You do so through controlling 16 live cameras on a monitor, scanning voice lines and objects in the environment, and then concluding the day by reporting to Ra Corporation (the company you work for) with your assembled pieces of information to figure out what’s happening.


Your first thought upon hearing this might be “How the hell am I supposed to keep track of 16 cameras?” and therein lies the first beauty of this game. The description on Steam and the game itself recognize this and ask you to focus on one of 5 individuals who will go about their day in specific cameras and task you with following their actions and thoughts to report back on at the end of the day.


Your second thought upon hearing that might be “This sounds really cool, but what about the other characters?” A playthrough lasts one week, technically 6 days of camera viewing and the final day, where you can chose the same or different character to focus on or keep track of. HOWEVER, this does not remove the other characters nor their lives from the feed. The character you chose to follow will walk around, do things, and interact with the 4 other characters which will let you learn more than just who that one person is. This is all happening LIVE as characters go about their day in this weird and twisted world that you constantly, through some unnerving feeling, gain the notion that you should not be viewing.


Realistically, you could follow the same character every single day based on personal interest and attachment. You could mix and match a couple. Or, if you’re the person I am and are interested in everything, can go through all 5 with a repeat on the last day. I gravitated towards starting with Stella, the entertainer of Undercroft, due to her upbeat, cheerful, and oddly tilted nature. And that was who I ended with on the 6th day after going through all the other 4. She caught my eye and I wanted to learn more about her. To hopefully empathize and understand her better. There were even multiple instances of me remembering what she said on a previous day and lamenting not following her or what she was doing, thinking to myself that I should have cared more about her story, her desires and wishes, because even though I followed her twice throughout the first week, it still feels like there's SO much to her character I didn't care enough to see on a first playthrough.


Because Ra Corporation has three rules: "DO NOT EMPATHIZE. DO NOT INTERFERE. DO NOT BETRAY.” And as a natural human being would, when one is told not to do something, their first train of thought is to ask why and most likely end up doing it anyway, especially when it involves a shady corporation that is trying their damndest to make you keep quota and nothing else. And it’s in this thug of war that Tobor finds its second beauty.


Tobor’s gameplay, as I’ve alluded to, is cycling through cameras to keep track of a character and to record voice lines that are deemed important by the game and scanning objects in the world. But what happens when you don’t know anything and everything is of interest? There were constant examples when I was watching my selected character and I caught a glimpse of something weird or sometimes even insane happening on another monitor that I forced myself to not care about because I felt compelled by the company to meet quota and not get a game over and be terminated. Working for this corporation was impacting my ability to care, to empathize.


There is a clock above the monitors. You begin your workday at about 10am and work until 9pm and the day ALWAYS ends at 9pm and the REPORT button starts flashing as the cameras are ongoing. Countless times I waited a bit after the button started flashing before pressing to squeeze every ounce of information I could see before fear of a game over or a termination got the better of me and the day ended by me turning in. I don’t even know what happens if you keep the button waiting at the end of the day but the mere thought of what could happen was, despite the embarrassment, enough to make me turn my eye away from the cameras.


Randomly, one of your assistants, will chime in throughout the day and say meaningless things like “Good job!” and “Ooooh, interesting stuff.” without a care in the world and it got to the point where something dramatic and important was happening and he chimed in to say “You’re doing great, buddy!” and I wanted to shout “Fuck off asshole.”


The gameplay also evolves to force you to make quick decisions or be unable to do your job, unable to see or care about what is happening on your screens, which is why I chose the quote at the beginning of this review for an express purpose: to illustrate the third beauty of this game.


Before I knew it, the game was influencing me. The people I was following, the world, the corporation and the choices were all things I was observing and influencing but were in fact also observing and influencing me. And the corporation’s and the game’s attempts to wrestle control away from me, to make me not care, to supersede my heart with scientific objectivity and certainty, made me want control back, made me care even more and made my heart glow with empathy in spite of attempts to crush it.

But at the end of the day, the game revels in learning more through viewing different perspectives on the same character or event. One character is not enough. One day is not enough. And one playthrough is not enough. The Steam achievement for completing your first playthrough is even called “Is there another Ending to this?” The devs wanted to make a game that you could play a bunch of times and still feel like you were getting something new or learning something you hadn’t known before. And while I haven’t started my subsequent playthroughs yet, they sure as hell succeeded in making me want to continue playing.


Obviously, there’s a lot more I could say but that delves into spoilers. And I think the beauty of observation is witnessing things you don’t know and/or that don’t make sense in the moment. But I will say this: if Tobor sounds like a game you would even remotely enjoy, please pick it up and play it. Observe it. Compel others to observe it. Allow the game to observe and influence you. Because in writing this review, I hope that above all else I have helped you observe this game and bring it to your eyes so that it will influence you just like it influenced me, so that it will not be forgotten and go unloved.

I feel so weird about this game but has gotta be the funniest game ever cause the 5 minutes of wesker screen time and him beating chris up 😭😭

Some of the best locales in the series, and a solid way to conclude the classic RE formula. A moment of relief and the majority of CV's ost is also by far the best in the series.

It's wild though cause I thought the actual plot was also pretty solid, great lore but AWFUL voice acting. It has its charm but like it annoys me when good scenes just sound awkward.

The split story was done well but god damn the item box issue with the second half could have ruined it for me, thankfully wasn't the case.

Gotta sit with this one for a bit.

A weaker sequel no doubt as I felt a lot of the cases up till the 4th weren't that great, theres still some good ideas like in case 2 with the culprit but nothing memorable outside of that. You can tell, as it took me well over a month to complete. I struggled through until I binged the final case in a day.

Though what stole the show for me was the final case and ending in which the final case made me appreciate the psycho-lock mechanic more throughout.

The final case is what I NEEDED from AA and it did so well in not only being insane but being the turning point in phoenix's character which I BEEN WAITING FOR AHHHH THEY PUT HIM IN A REAL TOUGH SITUATION THAT I WAS SO INVESTED IN!!!!! while showing some of the nice development of a certain character I really love at this point in the story. The soul is still there and I'm so glad they pulled it off there.

The ending scene as well is actually really sweet too, franziska last scene was great. Music ain't that good here though, bummer honestly considering how iconic and memorable the first games was.

Insanely great expansion pack that does everything you could not an expansion would do in terms of building on what the base game (and it's older expansions) get right and get wrong, keeping the high points and adjusting the things that hold it back. The highlight is definitely the level design which is a huge improvement on the base game, there's a great amount of variety and creativity that makes every level memorable in a way the original game doesn't have. Ruined earth is a major highlight but I want to shout out corpse runner for while not being as aesthetically interesting has some really great moments that again is something the base game just doesn't have. The weapon selection is great, taking the best of the previous dlc and cutting out the lackluster ones and unlike the previous dlc it gets raising the difficulty right, it's hard for sure but never feels unfair, I think largely a benefit of modern game design. The reason I can't quite give it a perfect score is the final boss leaves a sour taste in my mouth, it just reuses bosses from previous levels in a very bland arena that just wasn't very fun. But aside from that unfortunate ending this is a near perfect expansion to a game I already loved.