Somehow went from exclaiming "this is the perfect videogame" multiple times in my first several hours in Rune Factory 4, to being 20 hours into it and pretty happy to never play it again despite only being around about halfway through the main storyline.

Rune Factory 4 really has everything. Effortless, overflowing amounts of charm with every character leaving some sort of positive impression, an expansive farming system with so much depth sprawling in seemingly every imaginable direction, arpg goodness with a ton of different environments each with plenty of personality and unique touches, a ton of weapons (some delightfully goofy) with meaningfully different movesets for you to go chew through all manner of environments with, the ability to turn almost any enemy in the game into your own personal Pokémon and either set your army of critters to work on your farm or take them out adventuring with you, loads of secrets, loads of polish (I can't really overstate quite how impressive the level of polish is here), always something exciting to be working towards both narratively and in terms of building up your home/farm/town.

Rune Factory 4 really has everything. My mind freezes up as I use my magnifying glass to see so many stats about the soil quality of this specific tile, half of that stats feeling like they mean nothing. Five different crafting systems, a few of those with several different subcategories of crafting system associated with them, all of which need to be levelled up individually, and you better engage with these myriad mediocre crafting systems because you have to sell all this pointless garbage you're making to get the shipping rate higher. Stats you can level up for literally anything you can imagine, from using a specific class of weapon, to walking, to bathing. Storage boxes and fridges stuffed full of literally anything and everything you've found that you haven't had to either sell for money or use up in crafting. Yellow speech bubbles above characters indicating you haven't talked to them yet today, begging you to go find every single one of them every single day because of course the game expects you to befriend each and every townsfolk. Endless rooms of enemies where you just resort to bashing the same two buttons over and over to grind experience. Vegetable and flower seeds that start at level 1 and which you can specifically go out of your way to individually grind up to level 9 one growth cycle at a time. A princess points task system that gave me nightmares of Animal Crossing: New Horizons' Nook Miles for all the pointless busywork it encourages. The same handful of trees and stones you have to return to day after day to get the ever crucial lumber and ore you need mountains of in order to build anything.

Leaving you drowning amongst its menagerie of empty compulsion loops, Rune Factory 4 is the perfect abyss. I loved a lot of my time with it, the game is genuinely beautifully made in many regards and it's hard to imagine a game really being better at the specific thing Rune Factory 4 is trying to accomplish, but despite this fuck I'm glad I got out when I did.

Definitive proof that games have just gotten better.

It's clean. It's good. It's perfectly serviceable.

It is also the platformer equivalent of reading Peanuts in the 2020's instead of Calvin and Hobbes or literally anything in Shonen Jump.

Its concept of internet humor is dated. Its idea of gender dynamics for comedy and drama feel dated. I have to pause for a moment to let the insanity that I'm attacking those details in a puzzle platformer about rectangles wash over me and ok I'm back. But those are the first tangible details I have for conveying how it feels old while scarecly a decade young.

We're just used to better. Maybe this feeling is in part because it spawned so many imitators that its whole conceit feels dated. In its efforts to be timeless - the acting style of the narrator, the non-melody indie game music, the graphical flourishes stradling the line between reserved and cheap - its identity is defined by its quaintness.

Playing this on my OLED LG TV was an absolute nightmare in some levels, these color choices were made when monitors were just worse.

2 stars, C rank, someone fix that terrible and noticeable jumping input delay.

Having failed in just about every way imaginable to make a good game with The Nomad Soul, David Cage realized the true meaning of the words "The only way to win the game is to not play". How this translates into Indigo Prophecy is an experience that is more of a suggestion of interactive storytelling which defines "interaction" into the most patronizingly condescending gameplay imaginable. Only David Cage can design a videogame whose primary method of interaction is Simon fucking Says.

Regardless, I may be inclined to agree with the design practices of Indigo Prophecy if this "minimalistic" gameplay method was in service of complex, multi-faceted, and masterful storytelling. But of course, Indigo Prophecy fails at that too, but perhaps the fact that it fails so spectacularly is what makes the game ironically entertaining as a result. The beginning hours are a slog of Cage's usually offensive portrayals of sex, race and violence combined with convoluted storytelling meant to give the impression of depth by means of confusion more than complexity.

But, after a glorious moment of what I can only describe as "enlightenment" the game makes a hard switch into stupendously over-the-top action schlock that is so non-sensical and so emotionally charged that it circles back into being a fun time, though if only because it's easier to laugh at the game than alongside it.

Go ahead, play it with a few friends and see what I mean. You may not regret it. Or just don't play it at all.

I remember being a kid in Gamestop seeing the trailer for this on their TV. It looked so cool I wanted it so badly. Then the day came when I got this and it was so damn boring and lame. I hated the gameplay in this. It was so damn jank. And believe me, I have tried this game multiple times as an adult. I just can't stand it. It's so damn boring. How do you make zombies boring? All you do is press R2 and swing a weapon. I think every weapon has the same basic animation. It's been a while. But yeah, I don't like this game or think it's very good.

It's a fun game and a good concept but it overstays its welcome without adding anything new. The game up to chapter 3 is alright but the last chapter is too much of a grind.

This game has a very pleasant atmosphere about nothingness, which I'm surprised isn't mentionned more often. While the story is very minimalistic, the few moments of it are pleasant to go through. The dialogue is well written and the pixel portraits are awesome.

The game's main flaw is how quickly it becomes repetitive because everything major is unlocked early on. It's also easy to discover most possible combinations of cards, so the game gets stale. I honestly feel like the game just... stops. You've discovered everything, you HAVE finished it. Sure, there's a few cards requiring a lot of grind to unlock but you have seen 95% of the content, you have unlocked all classes and base facilities, you are at the last chapter and the next ten or twenty hours are a repeat of the exact same thing. At that point, the game feels incomplete, the gameplay loop starts falling apart.

It doesn't help that the game is very RNG oriented and there's little skill you can develop overtime and there aren't that many strategies either. Perhaps the worst part is the extremely punishing death penalty which slows down your progress, making it a serious grind to beat the final level.

The game is also so slow! Seriously, the maximum speed needs to be raised way higher. Too much of the playtime is just wasted looking at the screen while you can do nothing and there isn't even much in the way of animations to look at.

A hell of a incredible couple of games that play with some interesting theories I've never heard of before, but needlessly, make a far more interesting interaction all together. These two games were out before the other Zero escape game that was released first on Steam.

Not only due to have multiple paths based on your choices and where you go, but due to the Morphagentic Field, it makes perfect story sense that you could view one timeline, pick up some information, then take with with you for consecutive timelines to unlock the true ending.

Both games have very interesting set ups and some very difficult puzzles, though not unfairly difficult. I recommend this to any fan of the escape room kind of game where you need to look around and attempt to find a way out of wherever you are trapped.

I wish they made this game with the intention of "more Hotline Miami" instead of trying to revolutionize the formula. This game shares the core gameplay of the first game, but the design choices that have been made in this game awfully hindered the enjoyment I had from this game.

What I liked about the original was that there were a lot of ways to play and the game never forced you to play in one way. Hotline Miami 2 demolished this principle of the first game and instead added a lot of gameplay sequences that force you to play as a specific character in a specific style. There were sequences that were just like the first game and those sequences were absolutely amazing, but because of the “forced” sequences my enjoyment never reached the levels I had in the first game. Also, I think difficulty balancing is generally bad. There are sequences that I completed in 4-5 minutes, but sometimes there are sequences that took me 30-45 minutes to complete. This became a major annoyance for me after a while and it made me want to stop playing altogether. Other than that, some new abilities are added but they are not polished and usually junky. Some enemy types here and there but I do not think they are creative or add anything to the gameplay.

Hotline Miami 2 is a generally disappointing sequel to me, the first game was already short and if they just did “more Hotline Miami” it would have been enough on its own. I’m giving it a 6.5/10, in terms of experience this game was one of the most frustrating ones in recent memory.

Oh I love this game. It so perfectly captures the feeling of being a kid on a summer vacation that feels endless and magical and then all too short, and I would have loved this even if the immaculate vibes were all it had to offer. But no, Boku no Natsayasumi 2 ALSO has gorgeous 2D backgrounds and great character writing!

The story plays out through short scenes Boku has with the other people in town throughout the month, and they're all very charming. While Boku is having his idyllic, carefree summer vacation, the adults are dealing with the kind of grown-up problems you can't really grasp as a kid—you know something's going on and it seems like it's a big deal but it doesn't make sense. In the various vignettes, they allude to their grief, family conflicts, loss; Boku lends an ear, tries to understand. A lot of these conversations end with him walking away scratching his head in confusion. It all feels like the kind of off-handed comment you hear as a kid that you look back on as an adult and think, "oh wait, that was kind of dark!"

Not to say this game is super serious by any means. You can easily skip the conversations and have a pretty good time just taking in the atmosphere and catching bugs, but I appreciated the time the game spends fleshing out the supporting cast and giving them stories that I cared about. I also appreciated the little sleeping cats strewn about. Did not appreciate the tank controls 😞👎🏻🚫 he is a little boy NOT a large armored vehicle, you are being ridiculous

Looking past that (honestly I got used to the tank controls as I played, still mad about it though), this is a wonderful game that I loved playing. Boku no Natsayasumi 2 feels like stepping into a memory. Thank you to fan translator Hilltop for bringing this game to a whole new audience and helping me to discover a new favorite :)

Calling something "good with friends" is often the cruelest thing you can ever say about a multiplayer game. Yeah, you can have fun with friends in basically anything, it turns out friends are good, not Phasmophobia. And it's so easy to see that in Lethal Company, especially from the outside looking in - some bullshit lame horror coop horror game to scream at, acting as the new steam flavour of the month game to merely moisturise the slip and slide of socialisation.

Despite the resemblance, Lethal Company is not that. Flavour of the month, maybe, but versus the thousand souless PC games out there of it's breed it's truly closer to something like Dokapon Kingdom and hell, Dark Souls, for the kinds of emotion and socialisation it brings up.

Because truly, Lethal Company is a game about having a really shit job. There's no real sugarcoating it. It's a game about being explicitly underpaid for dangerous, tedius work salvaging objects from ugly factories, where the corporation you work under and the true majesty of visiting planets and experiencing it's fauna are so stripped back and corporatised that you don't even notice it. This setting and the gameplay really sets out a very clever vibe for the game, as frankly, it on it's own, is almost deliberately not fun, but it is a wonderful way of building up a camraderie between players and really get into the boots of a worker in a bad job slacking and goofing off a bit. On my first playthrough with friends I found some extraodinary catharsis in one of the gang spending some of our quota on a jukebox playing license free music and just having a jam for a while, and likewise, a good haul which takes some of the pressure off others is appreciated, and the "man in the chair" - the guy left behind at the ship to deal with doors, turrets etc, feels both valued as part of the team, but also themselves lonely, tense, awaiting their friend's safe return.

It is also, as a more obvious point, very funny. Basically every run of this game you'll make something funny will happen. A comrade fumbles a wonky jump to their death based on bad information. You walk just inside the range of your comrade's voice to hear them screaming for help for half a second. You watch as the man in the chair as a giant red dot slowly bears down on your comrade, try to warn them and then see the red dot taking delight in eating them, and there's so much more. It's surprising really as a game with so little going on in gameplay and so limited in variety of stuff that it keeps on bringing up new stupid shit to happen.

Its rarely legitimately scary, even in the rare case you're alone amongst monsters with all your friends dead. The stakes established are just set too low, the animations a bit too goofy for the intensity to ever feel too much. And that kinda folds back in on that "shit job" thematic of the whole thing. Being almost indifferent to the surprising variety of monsters, seeing them as much as obstacles as hell demons that want to eat your face, is ultimately part of the job. Yes, the fourth angel from Evangelion wandering around whilst you slowly crouchwalk across the map to your ship is tense, but almost amusingly tense. Gotta roll with it.

It's a delightful experience, really. If you wanted to you could linger on how cobbled together the whole thing feels right now and how limited the actual gameplay really is, but they do nothing to take away from the truly great times Lethal Company sparks. The closest a game will ever get to being on the last day of your christmas contract with debenhams and just slacking with the other temps, giving people discounts on their items for no good reason and occasionally the weeping angels from doctor who come out with a giant spider and they're in the ONE hallway that leads back to the exit and Ernesto is dead, damn.

I just beat all three of the Max Payne games over the course of a couple weeks, so I feel prepared to evaluate all three of them as individual entities, while also seeing how each may falter compared to a hypothetical "perfect" Max Payne game.

Max Payne 1 gets the whole thing started off with a bang, with a pretty easy, cut and dry motivator for much of the series - your wife and child are murdered by home invaders. Using this fuel, Max descends into a world of scum, villainy and other such shenanigans. By virtue of the games presentation and what the story is ultimately about, you would think that this game would be extremely self-serious, but there's a element of irreverence that makes you go "oh yeah this game is kind of ridiculous." Instead of undermining the tone, however, this makes it charming. The camp is a cherry on top so that you don't think remedy has a stick up its ass.

The gameplay here is great, although I do raise an eyebrow when people say this is the best the series got. Sure, the shootdodge is more fun here than in the others, but there are a few elements the others cleaned up. There are some enemies that are ridiculous bullet sponges (looking at you Frankie, dumped multiple smg clips into his head and I still died), and the amount of enemies that would essentially appear out of thin air and instant kill you was frustrating to say the least.

Don't have this discourage you from playing the game though, as there is so much to love with the package provided.