Western search action with an X-Files plot tied intimately with Alan Wake and the rest of the Remedyverse. It's obviously a banger, gorgeous, with many genuinely heartfelt moments as well as fun speculative worldbuilding. Anyone who grew up loving "monster of the week" shows like me would undoubtedly adore this game.

The core combat loop doesn't really gel until you get Throw, but once you do it's so fun. Played correctly, you're practically invincible, thanks to how good all of your weapons and utility powers are. Floating around the battlefield like some vengeful god, smiting corrupted soldiers with a flick of your finger. It's intoxicating and I think a much better expression of the combat loop of Quantum Break, which I liked but didn't love.

My biggest complaint? Ends sort of abruptly - almost like a TV cliffhanger - even with the DLC, some odd difficulty spikes, and a mod / challenge system that seems completely out of place. Seriously, why are there repeatable challenges to grind for weapon mods? I would've greatly preferred scattering concrete secrets around, like missile tanks in Metroid. Feels so out of place here.

Platted on PC and near-platted on PS4 so it's unlikely I will ever return to Control. I enjoyed my time here though and I hope the next game in this series leans into the exploratory strengths and discards some of the cruft.

They say you always love the first entry of a series you play the most, but I didn't actually play Symphony of the Night first. That honor goes to Dawn of Sorrow. I played SotN after Dawn of Sorrow, Aria of Sorrow, Lament of Innocence, and Portrait of Ruin.

It's my favorite though! I can see why it was so influential. The castle design is cool, there's so many random bullshit dead ends and gimmicks that don't matter, and the inverted castle recontextualizes the first half in a way I really like (why were those spikes on the ceiling? oh i get it now). It's a very "maximalist" game in that it's constantly throwing ideas at you, and it's also the easiest of the igavanias. Still near and dear to my heart.

I replay this every two years or so. Breezy 7-10 hour 100%.

Solidly okay. As far as "souls-like" games go, it's very straightforward and doesn't have a ton of RPG choices to make beyond what shell you have and what you put your level point into.

But that simplicity is nice too. And the parry mechanic is more forgiving + intuitive than a Souls parry (you release a block, rather than pressing a separate button or starting a block). Pretty easy and cute, and "Battle for Bikini Bottom" is a very novel aesthetic to apply to a game like this.

I don't think it'd satisfy the buildmaxxers or the grimdarkers or the combatheads, but I'm enjoying it for what it is. Inoffensively charming. Much better than other kid-friendly games I think.

I love Cultist Simulator and Book of Hours quite a bit on their technical and design merits; a blend of idle game and adventure game, where you build up your abilities through "time spend" choices. I think this one is better than Cultist Sim in many respects too.

Unfortunately they are almost always too finicky on either side. The fiction is so overwritten and florid in the precise way which is fun in doses but lacks the direct punch you want for continued exposure. There's also almost no incentive to read all this fiction floating by, because you have to be juggling ten things and also thinking four steps ahead. Who has time to read this shit?

So you're left with the raw idle / crafter treadmill, where you optimize your resources so you can move on to greener pastures. This game is better in some ways on that front, in that items are actually unique and interesting things you see in the world and interact with. But it's often annoying trying to hunt down an item of a specific type-combination (say, Sky Forge Tool) and the interface is only partially "there" in terms of helping.

This is worst when you are trying to do something precise. You can't do the search-highlight across a specified quality combination using a filter, you have to manually and slowly search the whole property by swapping which quality your mouse is over in a tooltip. It's fucking agonizing.

On the shelf it goes. Maybe I can come back when other people have fixed this game's interface woes, just like its predecessor. Also the guy who writes this stuff is annoying and I would like to see this style of game in a better writer's hands.

Actually that's probably Pentiment lol

"I Dive." -Dave

The surprise Indie* Hit Of The Year, Dave the Diver is a game that's occupied a strange space for me, as I've seen endless praise for it from vidja insider types but I have seen literally nobody actually talk about it. Maybe I just live under a rock but I heard nowhere near as much talk of this thing compared to something like Pizza Tower or Fear and Hunger, which dwarf this thing in cultural footprint despite apparently being less successful. Surely, something was amiss here.

There wasn't, the game's just a perfectly adequate AAA puppeting the skin of an indie game. The cycle of diving to restaurant managing is fun enough for a time, but after a while too many features creep their way in and I decided to hop off the ride before I knew I'd get bored n overstuffed. Wish the game had a smaller scope, it's definitely trying to do too much at once. I just want a game where you hunt for fish and serve them at a restaurant, I don't wanna do farming and gambling and shit! Dave's got too much dip on his chip!

The real thing that sinks the experience for me is just how soulless everything feels. The pixel art is nice but lacking in any real character or personalty, the dialogue has no wit or charm to it, and the ocean environments are largely vacant and bland. How anyone was convinced this was an actual indie game is beyond me, this has the "buffered and polished down all the edges and gnarly bits that leave the product with nothing to latch onto" vibe that basically all big budget games have now. just in 2D. One of the characters is just a weeaboo trope from 2013. It just ain't got no sauce to it!