"Curiosity killed the uncool cat, ya dig?" - Chad Ghostal

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a first-person horror game where your character wakes up in an abandoned building and has to solve paint-by-numbers puzzles while armed with a flashlight that has limited battery power.

In Sound Mind makes a poor first impression, its opening oddly lifeless for a game touting the collaboration of The Living Tombstone and presenting itself with psychedelic cover art. However, as I got my bearings in its first hour, hunting down a cassette tape that would whisk me away to its first proper level, I remained hopeful that the game would make good on its promise. I pet my cat before I left and got a trophy, "GOTY 10/10." Bad sign.

Protagonist Desmond Wales is as poor a therapist as he is a pet owner, inviting poisonous plants into his home and staring out the window while his patients doom spiral. Now you have to repair their broken psyches and give them closure while unraveling a conspiracy involving the highly psychoactive drug Agent Rainbow, which led to their deaths. What this means from a gameplay perspective is that each level centers around a specific patient in a location pertinent to them, such as... an abandoned grocery store. An abandoned lighthouse. An abandoned factory. An abandoned military base. This may all be the doing of Agent Rainbow, but each of these locations are drab, downright colorless both in aesthetic and flavor, occupied only by cookie-cutter enemies (of which there are three variants through the whole game) and uninspired puzzles.

Desmond's patients also haunt their respective levels, having mutated after succumbing to their inner-demons. You can't just shoot them like your typical fodder-type enemies and will need to employ more inventive methods to counteract them, with most of these encounters doubling as a means to solve environmental puzzles, like luring Max Nygaard - now a disembodied mechanical bull head - into breakable walls.

The problem is that much like all the other puzzles you run into, once the solution has been presented to you, you're expected to repeat it ad infinitum. Shining a light to scare away Allen Shore (nice Alan Wake reference) loses all its tension when you find yourself doing it a dozen different times, never once iterating on the mechanic after its introduction. The third level has you ferrying three CPUs between power panels to unlock doors, and by that point I became conditioned enough to know that would be my main method of progression through the next two hours of game. Everything you're tasked with feels like it was written out for you on a torn piece of notebook paper and stuck to the fridge, just a list of chores no more engaging than taking out the trash.

Speaking of trash: this game's performance. Something about open environments is incredibly disagreeable with the framerate, and unfortunately most of In Sound Mind takes place outdoors, so the game is constantly choking to death. It also has a tendency to checkpoint you in the middle of hazards, nearly locking me in a death loop once as I was stuck respawning on top of a toxic puddle while getting hit by an enemy with 30% of my HP remaining. I managed to wriggle my way out of that after multiple attempts, despawn the mob, and then ate a candy bar which made Desmond go "Nom~" in a cutesy voice. Almost shut the game off there.

And I wish I had, because In Sound Mind's technical problems ultimately resulted in the game becoming unbeatable. During the last leg of the final boss, all objects became non-interactive, something that permeated through several earlier saves and which could not be resolved by restarting the app or the console. Just locking me minutes from rolling credits, something it could've had the decency to do hours earlier. I don't normally rate games I abandon, but considering the conditions under which I did and how close I was at the end, I'm comfortable giving this a 1/5. Would've clocked it at a 2/5 before that.

We Create Stuff is an aptly named studio, because "stuff" is such a vague, "whatever" term for an end product that there's no promise of it being worthwhile. In Sound Mind is just that, a cobbled together collection of rote design elements scraped off the bottom of the first-person horror barrel, served up with no imagination, neither invested in saying anything or being fun, it's just stuff. Great job, guys.

idk, man, it's Diablo 2, what do you want from me. one of the greatest to ever do it. hang Diablo 2's jersey from the rafters. frame it and put it in the louvre. let it retire to a peaceful life in the countryside.

A few years ago I reinstalled Diablo 2 from my battlechest disks and tried playing it and, man, all the quality of life type stuff that all the other ARPGs of the last twenty years is really nice and having zero of that in Diablo 2 was kinda rough because I am a big baby. But also it turns out Act 1 on Normal also just kinda sucks (at least for the classes I tend to play). You level up pretty slowly and it takes so long to really get going. So back in the day that made me put the game down pretty quickly. But not this time! I persevered and also they added just enough nice little QoL things that I truly do not mind the ways in which the game didn't get "updated".

I played all the way through on the updated graphics and they are, largely, fine but they really make me glad there's a quick toggle to swap back to the old graphics because it's so easy to see how artistically inferior the new shit is. Yeah, sure, it's all 3d rendered and got nicer lighting and particle effects and whatever but the vibe is wildly different. The darkness isn't as consuming and oppressive. There is so much more gray and brown. If you are interested in Diablo 2 as a Game To Click On Things then it doesn't really matter much but if you care about Diablo 2 as Art then it extremely matters!!

It's kinda wild to me that they've made balance changes and even added new items and runewords and shit! Somewhere there are people hiding in a basement hoping that the bean counters don't find out about them and ask "wait, you're spending how much time on this? for a game with no battlepass? or microtransactions? from how many years ago?" and I love that for them. It's cool to see it get items with some new mechanics and also they fixed Summoner Druid to be Actually Viable and I appreciate that a lot because I love all my killer puppies and big bear friend and weird forest spirit tentacle creature.

Act 2 was always my favorite act as a stupid teenager. But oh my god duuuude the fucking Maggot Lair!! All-timer for Worst Dungeon. Gotta be one of the worst. Trying to just move around is bad enough but then having to fight shit, too?? And good fuckin' luck if you're a dope like me who likes to play summoning classes. The rest of it is pretty alright. Just gotta watch out for those stupid lightning beetles, y'know.

Diablo 2 Nightmare Difficulty is still the sweetest sweet spot. You've got solid gear and you've got quite a few skills leveled up. You can actually kill shit and not immediately fucking die. It feels so good to play. It's the best part of the game. And then you get to Hell Difficulty. And it is so aptly named. You really gotta do a lot of extra farming for more levels and more loot and it's so miserable. I am simply past my "spending all day farming stuff" days. I got better shit to do. Apologies to socketed items and runewords and high-tier set items, I am simply in a different part of my life now.

Act 3 isn't good and it was never good. Annoying-ass maps with annoying-ass enemies, fuck Durance of Hate, fuck Mephisto, fuck Act 3, all my homies hate Act 3.

Playing this with someone who played the game once many years ago (long enough that this was essentially a fresh experience) was an absolute treat because so much of this game is deeply burned into my brain. Hearing reactions to story beats that I basically didn't remember because I was a hardcore ladder girly who didn't care about the story was fun. The first time we hit some beetles in Act 2 and got wrecked by lightning, they made some noises that were somewhere between a shriek and squeal and it was a delight. I highly recommend this extremely specific experience of playing the game.

The end of Act 4 is so fucking funny, dude. Like, imagine getting Diablo 2 before the expansion and the game just fucking ends there. Modern games could never. Extremely funny.

There's a new thing with "Terrorized" zones and I have no idea what's going on there? Like, the affected area has all the enemies made to be your level +2, so you can use areas you wouldn't normally be revisiting to get level-appropriate XP and loot but I don't fully understand if that's better than just your classic Baal runs or whatever-the-fuck.

Act 5 sure is Some Shit, huh. This time around I really noticed the small changes in things here. How, even back in 2001 or whatever, they were iterating and pushing on what was possible in the game.

I still haven't ever gotten to level 99. Or fought an Uber Diablo. Or gotten and Annihilus or Hellfire Torch. And I probably never will. And that's okay! But if I ever somehow get that desire, then this is a very solid version of the game to do it in!

In an industry that is so obsessed with franchises and selling you the same shit over and over and loves to do "remakes" that fundamentally change important aspects of games, this is one of the absolute least egregious examples of modern remake-thinking.

Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow is a respectable sequel to the first game, but still retains all of its jank, making it equally frustrating despite its magnificent ideas.

There are some meaningful improvements from Splinter Cell 1. The swat turn is invaluable for staying unnoticed in certain indoor situations, and there is now an indicator for whether it's safe to hide a body. The laser sight on the pistol allows you to see exactly where your shot will land with the tradeoff that it's also visible to enemies. It's still ultimately a bandaid solution to the problem with Splinter Cell's shooting, though. The unpredictable bullet trajectory, which seems to exist to discourage shooting willy-nilly, can also completely blow your cover when you line up a seemingly accurate shot only for it to come out of your gun sideways and alert everyone nearby. Adding a sight made this issue less frustrating, but it just didn't need to be there in the first place and it took until the third game for Ubisoft to finally do away with it.

The lighting and atmosphere are superb as ever, and the level variety is much better than in Splinter Cell 1, with much more diverse and memorable locations.

Unfortunately the action sequences from the first game have been forced in again, though thankfully slightly fewer in number and I found them less annoying. But they also just didn't need to be there and it once again took until the series' third attempt to understand this. And even then, Chaos Theory didn't completely learn from the mistakes of its predecessors.

The detection system is incredibly janky, much like Splinter Cell 1, and was by far the most frustrating issue I had with this game. Even the tiniest movements could make the enemy turn around and start blasting while alerting everyone around immediately. This is the main reason, along with the bad combat sequences, that I can rarely recommend the first two Splinter Cell games.

"Character action" has never done it for me. I feel the floaty combos and distant cameras really dampen the impact of combat. I'm so glad that we live in the timeline where instead of representing the future of the Resident Evil series, Devil May Cry became its own franchise. Resident Evil 4 was a game that Capcom attempted to make several times, before begging Mikami to come back to the director's seat, and even he scrapped a couple of false starts before he settled on the game he ought to be making. The change in camera was the big thing that players talked about, but it was the shift in focus and tone that really made Resi 4 so beloved by its biggest fans. Mikami had gained skill, establishing multiple complementary mechanics and tying that to a campaign, but he was also more confident in his own sense of humour and whimsy. Resi 4 was a game with a real sense of personality, but it was compromised by the pressures of the surrounding franchise, the publisher and the fanbase. For his next game, he'd disregard all these aspects and make it entirely for himself.

When I first played God Hand, it took about five seconds before I knew I loved it. It's very much built on the back of Resi 4, but makes no apologies for its eccentricities. It takes the weight and impact of Resident Evil 4's shotgun and puts that behind each punch. Resi 4 utilised the sensibilities of modern games just enough to adopt a mostly useless camera manipulation system to the right analogue stick, but God Hand foregoes those conventions entirely, tethering it to your critical dodge system. God Hand doesn't care about any other game. It's fully confident in what it's doing.

God Hand's vibe is a very divisive thing, and not something you can choose to opt out of, but a truly cultured mind will undoubtedly side with it. Its sense of humour comes from a very specific place. It's a deep affection for Fist of the North Star and low-budget 70s kung fu films, but there's so much fondness for late-80s and early-90s action games, too. It loves the ridiculous, digitised voice clips from Altered Beast and Final Fight. The greatest joy is when you encounter an absurd, one-off, late-game disco miniboss, and he hits you with the same audio clips as the standard grunts from Level 1. This is a game full of explosive barrels and giant fruit. Shinji Mikami started production on Resident Evil 4 trying to fulfil the obligation to make his scariest game ever, and by the end, he got so bored with that direction that he created a giant stone robot Salazar that chased you through brick walls. God Hand was the logical next step for him.

There's a focus to God Hand's ambitions that implies Clover really knew what they had with it. A few ridiculous bosses and minigames notwithstanding, the levels are typically fairly boxy and nondescript. All the attention is on the distribution of enemies and items. It's spectacularly un-fancy. Flat ground and big brick walls that disappear when the camera gets too close to them. It doesn't care. The fighting feels great, and we're having a great time with all these stupid baddies. Fuck everything else.

Your moveset is fully customisable. Between levels, you're given the opportunity to buy new moves, and apply them to your controls, either as specials tethered to a specific button combination, or even as part of the standard combo you get while mashing the square button. It offers players real versatility as they figure out their preferred playstyles, and what works for them, while trying something less intuitive can open you up to new approaches. There are quick kicks and punches that overwhelm opponents, heavy-damage moves that take longer to pull off, guard breaks, and long-range attacks that can help with crowd control. There are certain moves and dodges that are highly exploitable, and risk breaking the game's balance. Clover are aware of this though, and whenever they found a strategy that made the game boring, they made sure to penalise you for using it by boosting the difficulty massively whenever you try it.

That's the big feature. The difficulty. God Hand starts out really hard, and when the game registers that you've dodged too many attacks or landed too many successive hits, it gets harder. This was a secret system in Resi 4, but in God Hand, it's part of your on-screen HUD, always letting you know when you've raised or lowered a difficulty level. Enemies hit harder, health pick-ups drop less frequently, and attacks become harder to land. The game's constantly drawing you to the edge of your abilities, and if you die, you have to try the entire section again from the start. It never feels too dispiriting, though. You retain all cash you've picked up after you died, and you feel encouraged by a drop in difficulty. If you do well enough on your next attempt, it won't take long before the difficulty gets back to where it was. There's also some fun surprises for those who get good enough to maintain a Level 3 or Level Die streak for long enough, with some special enemy spawns and stuff. You feel rewarded for getting good, but never patronised or pandered to. Your reward is a game that felt as thrilling as it did when you first tried it.

It's the little eccentricities in God Hand's design that I really admire. Pick up a barrel and Gene will instantly shift his direction to the nearest enemy, eliminating any extraneous aiming bullshit, and pushing your attention towards the opportunity for some cheap long-distance damage. If an item spawns, it remains there until you pick it up, giving you the opportunity to save it for when you really need it, even if the backtracking route becomes a little ridiculous. Since the camera is so stubbornly committed to viewing Gene's back, they've implemented a radar system to keep track of surrounding enemies, and it makes little sense in the context of the scenario, but the game doesn't care about that stuff. It's another thing that makes the fights against gorillas and rock stars more fun, so run with it. Between each section of the game, you're given the opportunity to save, or warp to a kind of mid-game hub world, with a shop, training area and casino, which you can use to unlock better moves and upgrades when you need them most. You can gain money by taking the honest route and chipping away at its toughest challenges, or take the less honourable route with slot machines and gambling on poison chihuahua races. It's blunt, utilitarian, and it's entirely complementary to the way God Hand feels to play.

It's the consistency in tone and intention that completes the package. God Hand knows what it is, and how it feels, and it never betrays that. It doesn't obsess over lore or characters, but it really has fun in introducing new baddies and scenarios to put you in. And I really like its taste. I like that all the big bosses meet up at a secret hell table to exchange barbs between levels. I like the fight on an enormous Venetian gondola. I like the dumb, weird, repetitive soundtrack. The developers are world-class talents, and they just wanted to make a dumb, stupid, fun game.

I probably ought to give the soundtrack a little more credit. This is from Masafumi Takada, out on loan from Grasshopper Manufacture before he became a real gun for hire, working on Vanquish, Kid Icarus: Uprising, Danganronpa and Smash Bros Ultimate. He's great at elaborate, high-energy compositions, but his work on God Hand is some of his dumbest stuff. It's great. The constant Miami 5-0 surf rock, the warbling Elvis boss fight music, and the Flight of the Bumblebee guitar for the fight against a giant fly. He's having the time of his life on this one, fully liberated from the pressures to convey a consistent tone or atmosphere. It's stunning work, and he makes the correct call every time he has to write a new piece of BGM for God Hand.

Shinij Mikami is a bit of an enigma, and his work on Resident Evil has unfortunately typecast him as a horror director, but he's never expressed a real affinity for the genre. He was put into that position under an obligation to Ghouls 'n Ghosts' Tokuro Fujiwara, and the game he ended up making was full of corny heroes and giant snakes. The subject matter was a shock to audiences in the mid-nineties, but in reality, it wasn't that far removed from his work on SNES Aladdin. By my estimation, God Hand's the closest we've come to seeing the real Mikami through his work. He's made Resident Evil 4, and he wants to leave that behind him, but EA and ZeniMax kept dragging him back to his biggest hit.

God Hand feels like the only point in history God Hand could have happened, and it's pretty wild that it did in the first place. I mean, it makes sense that once you hand Capcom the Resi 4 Gold Master disc, they'll let you do whatever you want, but they were so rattled by the result that they fired all of their key talent and started making calls to Canada to produce Dead Rising 2. Confidence in Japanese development was at an all-time low after 2006, and the PS3 and Xbox 360 resulted in some of the most embarrassing entries in many legacy franchises. The PlayStation was born out of a SNES project, and that ethos was what drove the first decade of Sony Computer Entertainment. Afterwards, a new game proposal would not be greenlit without referencing the design of the latest Grand Theft Auto. The Konami, Namco, Square and Capcom that we have today don't reflect who they were in the nineties and early 2000s. To me, God Hand feels like the final page of that chapter. But, man, what a fucking statement to close out on.

THE BINDING OF ISAAC WARP ZONE: S H A R D S O F I S A A C

This is my Shrek the Third.

Straight and to the point, this is the ONLY, and I mean ONLY time I genuinely do not have anything that is unambiguously positive to say regarding The Binding of Isaac. Rebirth is an INCREDIBLE game. Afterbirth was decent. Repentance is my FAVORITE game of ALL time. Flash was good. The Legend of Bumbo was also good (if unpolished at times). So that leaves ONE release, that flabbergasts the mind at how it costs 10 United States Dollars. That ONE stain on Isaac’s legacy that shan't be forgotten. That ONE DLC that’s more worthless than that 25 Lives bullshit in Sonic Lost World. THAT ONE DLC THAT IS...

Afterbirth+, also referred to as the worst fucking thing in existence by the overarching Isaac community, is easily the worst DLC I have ever played, and I mean that with no hyperbole, or anything of the sorts. It’s that BAD. There's almost NOTHING to be enjoyed here that couldn't be found within the previous, and infinitely more fun predecessors, and I highly recommend that literally skip over to Repentance.

EXHIBIT A: The new items are actually dogshit! There were about 70 new items in this DLC at launch, a poultry amount compared to the likes of Rebirth and Wrath of the Lamb, and almost all are terrible to boot. The most gimmicky, incompatible, Enter The Gungeon-tier bullshit you could ever imagine. The items are far too niche to be useful, and rarely synergize with the hundreds of previous items. Almost all provide little to no benefits to any run, or are just too finicky to be worth a damn. Remember the old-school D-Infinity? You know, the item that gave you a new dice each time you used it? That shit was so ass. Or Adrenaline? Which gives you more damage for each empty heart container? Or Greed’s Gullet? Or Large Zit? Or Brown Nugget? Or Shade? Sure, each DLC had it’s fair share of bad or niche items, but not to this level. And even if you got a bad item, it didn’t matter because they all SYNERGIZED. That’s the ENTIRE FUCKING POINT of The Binding of Isaac, and ensures that most of your runs are GOOD. But when your items border on no synergies, you lose a lit of your run’s overall potential. And the items themselves plainly suck, so what’s the point? Introducing too many bad items into the fray doesn’t make your DLC harder, it makes it more unfun and luck based. But difficulty doesn’t mean anything when your DLC is even EASIER than before! Not only is it as easy as previous releases, the game breaks have only gotten easier. A new item introduced, The Tarot Cloth, is a GAME WINNING item, and it’s pretty common at that. It doubles almost all consumables’ effectiveness. Ever wanted to have infinite money? Bam, Tarot Cloth + 2 of Diamonds, and you’ve broken the game. Or hell, Rune of Jera for the easiest game breaks in the world. Or get IV Bag and Restock for quite LITERALLY infinite money and items. Shit, you might as well remove the roguelike elements of Isaac at this point. And the actual content here? It is some of the most irritating bullshit you’ll ever find in roguelike history. The Void? GREEDIER MODE??? CHALLENGES?!?!?! ALL FUCKING TERRIBLE. I’ll be damned if I could find genuinely anything within the rough here, filled with rehashed and unfun content. I WISH I was joking, this DLC genuinely sucks and is a fundamental misunderstanding of the entire game’s DESIGN. Let's start off from the very top, with THE VOID!

EXHIBIT B: Look guys, it's the ultimate conclusion to Isaac’s story! For the first, erm, second... third... FOURTH, FOURTH TIME GUYS! Aren't you excited? And what's the ultimate final floor? What do you have to get in order to see the true ending of The Binding of Isaac? It's fucking random. Upon each Final boss kill, a small Void portal has a chance to appear. No items needed, nor skill involved. Off to a great start. And then you have the actual floor itself. It's a big, open floor, with 6 bosses each (one of which holds the final boss, Delirium), built off the backs of each individual floor already within the game. How fuuuuuuun… This is so fucking shameless. I'm not even fucking kidding. There's literally NO new enemies on this floor, aside from these weird ass portal things which… spew out other reused enem- 10 UNITED STATES DOLLARS EVERYBODY! It's so fucking LAZY. It just becomes so repetitive, traveling slowly between every floor, likely smiting anything in your path because of how strong you are, doubly more so if you dare to get Curse of the Lost and have no fucking map. And when you eventually, after 9 million years, find the final boss Delirium, you're in for an ass-blasting finale. Now, before I speak, let me just say that conceptually, Delirium is such a fucking cool fight on paper. AND he has a pretty banging design. Representing Isaac’s final dying delusions in a single boss is really interesting. But fuuuuck me if this fight isn’t annoying! Guess what Delirium is? Literally all of the bosses encountered in your past runs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1!!!2!2!2! He transforms into each boss that you've encountered in prior runs, but now with a million bullets and twice as fast. Oh and get telefragged because fun and fair game design. Self admittedly, the boss isn't too bad to fight, in fact, it's kinda fun at points. But the fight itself is so creatively bankrupt and anti-climactic. When I think of the Repentance bosses, they all stick out in my mind because actually cool stuff happens leading up to them. In fact, there's borderline no storyline to this floor either. No rhyme nor reason. A Void just appears. Happens every Tuesday. And the contents within the floor barely correlate to the ending at all. Isaac dies… again? We get to see an argument between his Mom and Dad (not a new plot point but I digress), and then he dies. PLUS CAN'T EVEN INVENT NEW STORY! It's so funnily terrible at everything it does. And then Isaac walks into Purgatory? I was so confused when I got this ending. It’s not something I brought up, but almost every Isaac ending had correlated to the story, even a little bit. Even the one that was least connected to the story, the Hush ending, made sense because Blue Baby (dead Isaac) IS Hush. It’d make sense to show Isaac dead after that, BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT FUCKING HAPPENS! What does some Semen-esque Demon have to do with parents fighting? Sure, the actual floor connects with this, but not the ending! Yeah, I guess Isaac dying would be something that Delirium represents, but where the HELL did the parents’ arguments come into play at all? But in the end, does it matter? Because overall, the Void FUCKING SUCKS. It’s so ludo-narratively dissonant for its own good, and the gameplay is abysmal as the final chapter of The Binding of Isaac. Good music but 2/10. Moving on.

EXHIBIT C: Speaking of Voids, Apollyon, the new character! He starts with The Voi- It's the fucking D6. The Void absorbs items and gives you stats. Literally, in WHAT SCENARIO DO YOU NOT USE THE D6 WHEN YOU USE VOID??? Oh, it can absorb active items??? Okay??? Oh, no, that's some QUALITY 5 shit right there. Apollyon sucks and he is lame good character design tho 3/10.

EXHIBIT D: Greedier Mode. Need I say more? 0/10

Okay, but for real this time. Greedier Mode is commonly cited as one of the worst elements to Isaac as a whole. And this time, I actually agree. Hell, I even LIKED Greed Mode in the original. So what's so bad about Greedier?

First off, you have to donate 500 coins just to UNLOCK IT. That’s a big issue when it comes to game progression, as you won’t be able to even play Greedier even if you wanted to. Isaac has already let you play Hard Mode from the start, so I can’t see why Greedier had to be different here. Second of all, the mode itself fucking SUCKS. You get a poultry amount of money, barely enough to even SURVIVE, one extra wave spawns, and the timer is so sped up, oh my god, make it end please. Basic enemies also can be champions with no rewards for killing them. But hey, at least the Jam chance for the Donation Machine is decreased!!!! God. I am tired. And now the final boss has a second phase that lasts all of 2 seconds? Cool???

Exhibit E: Challenges. THIS is my breaking point. You might’ve thought Greedier was, or Delirium? No. The challenges in Rebirth and Afterbirth were fine, if a little short, and perhaps too easy. THE CHALLENGES IN AFTERBIRTH PLUS. They’re all TERRIBLE. EVERY SINGLE ONE HAS GIVEN ME FUCKING EPILEPSY. Pokey Mans and Pong are the only moderately okay ones, but the final 3 made me lose all hope for this game. April’s Fool: Everything has the wrong sprite and everything is the Bloat. We’re so funny, guys! It’s not like Spelunky, Nuclear Throne, and almost any roguelike is cooking us up on the market right now! Backasswards: Clear the game with 8-10 randomized items and do it backwards. Fun game de- LITERALLY JUST HOLD R UNTIL YOU GET A BROKEN ITEM COMBO!!! But, believe me folks. None of these compare to the worst challenge in the history of The Binding of Isaac. Do you wish to know the name? Well, here it is (barring the curse word).

ULTRA MOTHERFUCKING HARD. OH MY GOD. I have no idea what the entire developer team was on when creating this fucking challenge (or DLC in general!), but this is straight up poppycock. ALL CURSES ARE ENABLED, NO HEARTS SPAWN, AND EVERYTHING IS A CHAMPION!!! Do I even need to explain why this sucks? And guess what you get for completing ultimately one of the worst challenges in the game? A starting trinket. Uno. For Samson, which is a character you’ve probably 100%ed at this point. A SINGULAR FUCKING TRINKET. Not a cool ass item or anything for all of your troubles, like almost EVERY SINGLE ISAAC RELEASE HAS DONE AT THIS POINT, BUT NO! ONE FUCKING TRINKEY THAT SUCKS SHIT ANYWAYS. Hooray, I REALLY feel accomplished! This is a game that’s priced at $10, by the way? Could’ve fooled me!

At this point, what else is there to talk about? Victory Laps; runs that don’t even give you achievements during them? Or 100%, as unfun as the main game? Oh, guys, you gotta do everything with every character all over again. AND, as an additional fuck you, do 31 DAILY RUNS IN A FUCKING ROW. I AM NOT JOKING, AT LAUNCH, YOU HAD TO DO 31 FUCKING DAILY RUNS FOR A SINGULAR PILL. FUCK YOU! But yeah. Afterbirth Plus 100% SUCKS.

Before I close out this review, I wanted to mention the mod support, and zeusdeegoose policy. All products I review are reviewed as-is; mods are irrelevant to this discussion overall. Because if I did, basically every product I’ve review would be at least worth a 6/10; maybe higher. So that’s why I’ve neglected to mention it. But I will note that, while the mods for Afterbirth+ are cool, barring the numerous NSFW mods that have caused irreparable damage to the community (god, I hate you all), the mod scene for Afterbirth+ was limited by an incredibly shitty API. Not even Afterbirth+ could get mod support right, one of the main draws for the DLC in the FIRST PLACE! Later on, Repentance would release with these issues intact unfortunately, and modders had to REVERSE ENGINEER the entire game just to get an actually USEABLE API. What a shitshow, man...


Afterbirth+ is one of the worst expansions ever released, and I wholeheartedly stand by that. It’s unfun, recycled, unexciting content with absolutely nothing in it’s favor. Ultimately one of the worst releases I’ve seen, get it away from me, goodnight.

Or... was it? Well, announced before the release that the game would receive Booster Packs, small additions of content made by the community. What are my thoughts on these? Just as, if not more terrible than the base game. It’s just more items, and while some of these are pretty good, like Tech Zero, Mystery Gift, among others, the base game is still just as bad as before. Sure, The Forgotten is... cool, but other than that, there’s nothing. Delirium still sucks, Greedier Mode is still unfun bullshit, and overall, there’s still a major lack of content. But hey, at least they fixed the Dedication bullshit. God, what a joke. I have nothing else to add; Plus sucks, play Rebirth, Afterbirth, Antibirth, literally any other Isaac expansion instead instead, goodnight sweet prince, I’m out.

“The void inside cries / Consuming dissatisfied / Eating all alive ” - “Afterbirth Plus” by zeusdeegoose, Written on 4/22/24

i feel like my fellow gay bitches online are all lying to me on this one. big issue: i think its story kind of sucks. Signalis is more interested in ominous poetry, mysteriously censored documents, and spooooky german words than actually setting an atmosphere or crafting a world. the protagonists' romance is supposed to be the beating heart but it read as very bland and hollow, you never get to know much about them and (SPOILERS) they all used to read Word Up magazine anyways. i'm not interested in filling in its blanks because none of it made me feel emotions. this would be fine if it was better to play but Signalis is too easy - its toughest element is its limited inventory, combat is largely avoidable and not too challenging if engaged with. there's not enough friction here, your android girl is a great runner and a great shot. the art direction is very nice, the models and lighting look gorgeous, but there's not enough unique assets in the game. it felt like i was mostly in the same few places fighting the same few enemies the entire time. i do think it succeeds at having some pretty inventive puzzles and i do love the first-person segments, i wish there were more (non-narrarive) setpiece-oriented ones. Signalis had one last thing it could do to hook me, but it loses me here too - none of this game is fucked up! there's never any freaky shit going down, no psychosexual pervert nightmares or nasty stuff or even anything slightly disturbing. i like yuri, i crave that sicko shit!!! Signalis felt like a dystopian teen YA with a bit of sprinkle of Twilight Syndrome and sci-fi militarism, very tame for what was supposed to be a hellish pseudo-reality.

the epitome of every common id tech 4 complaint; a show-offy tech demo with not much to actually show

prey seems to be far more concerned with its novel-at-first gravity shifting, portal hopping and other gimmickry than it is with delivering a fun shooter. almost every weapon feels pretty weak, enemies are as generic as they come and the level design is frustratingly boring - especially when it teases its potential so irritatingly often

there's some really cool aesthetic direction here - sometimes. the sphere's strange fusions of human civilization and mechanical-organic hodgepodge future tech that's reminiscent of quake's strogg is REALLY FUCKING COOL. but it's actively sidelined and little more than something to glance at in passing during the actual levels - steel halls with constant gravity walks, enemies popping out of portals and the occasional vehicle sequence. it's lame!

tommy's kind of an annoying jackass for most of the story. he embodies "Fuck off I don't believe in that made up nonsense" and constantly whines about how his heritage is a bunch of superstitious gobbledygook... even while he's literally talking to his deceased grandfather in the afterlife. though i guess i can't really blame him for not giving a shit, because his supernatural ability amounts to little more than being able to walk through forcefields and push the buttons behind them (usually to turn said forcefields off)

oh and to never die - tommy's really good at keeping his soul alive via 10 second bursts of spiritual whack-a-mole. i guess that works out because it means none of the dull shooting ever needs to be gone through a second time, but i'd have gladly taken some guns that actually felt satisfying instead. out of his arsenal, which is primarily driven by different flavors of machine guns, the only weapon i found especially great was the leech gun. i guess the weird caustic paint-splattering shotgun is kinda neat too. the grenades look cool but are functionally reminiscent of quake 2's, which is not a compliment at all and i barely touched them because of it

narratively, things pick up substantially in the last four missions. considering there's 21 of them, that's not a fantastic ratio, but it ended on an interesting enough note for me to wish prey 2 wasn't cancelled. so that counts for something

still, i find it hard to believe that a sequel to this would've been nearly as good as arkane's 2017 release

If I could jump that high...would I ever find the ground again?

Is it bad to jump that high into the sky of nostalgia? To let yourself slip away and put your head into the clouds? Will those clouds of nostalgia turn you against your peers who don't see the vision? The vision of a children's playground for you to jump around to your heart's content? Planting yourself on a little conveyor and riding on it like a first-person roller coaster? Pretending to pet the non-threatening round green birds that chirp "kiwi!" if you dare to shoot them?

I wish I could jump like Robbit, I wish I could shoot lasers like Robbit, and I wish I could make funny noises whenever I took a step forward like Robbit. Why is life such a bore? Why can't it be just playgrounds and rainbows? Why can I not be just like my hero Robbit? Fighting funny evil men with funny palm tree jellyfish henchmen.

Was it my mom's fault that she bought me this during a time where I got nothing for a majority of the year due to being a poor December baby? Is she to blame for this mess? My poisonous care for a simple video game that I had played too much? The rare time where I can attach my mom to a game instead of my gamer dad? My yearning for days that I didn't need to care about getting up for work in the morning? When I didn't have a constant worry for the struggles of others? Is it truly bad for me? To just make me forget, and make me care only about smiling and struggling to hold back my emotions? To just, feel once more?

Is it bad for me to feel like a kid again? For just one hour?

Why must life be so grounded...?

Let's go Robbit, let's jump and go...for old times' sake once more....