One night while I'm in the shower, the door gets knocked and I hear my dad shout "WHAT WAS THAT SHOOTING GAME I SAW ON THE TELLY?". After some confusing and loud back and forth, I realise it's this and tell him. "THANK YOU" is all I hear. The next day the game arrives. He'd immediately went on Amazon and got it for himself.

"Can you set up the virtual reality?"

I oblige, and he commandeers my chair, TV, and console for three solid hours. I spent a wee part of this time lying on the bed browsing my phone, listening to the game and looking up whenever he was getting particularly heated. He was having an absolute blast, and eventually I was enjoying just watching him experience this thing. You might say he was truly "In a world".

He so quickly went from weird arm flailing to precision reloads and headshots with shite one-liners. I watched my almost 60 year old dad become a real SAS dude. Childlike wonder from him experiencing full immersion, accompanied by patter like "Through his fuckin' eye" and "Go to sleep forever". At one point he was hanging from a window ledge 100 feet up on a building site, he drops one hand to his pistol, shoots a dude through the opening, leans in and grabs the fella's vape, takes a puff, chucks it and keeps climbing.

I barely remember what the game was about, but the live show I got to enjoy over three nights was incredible.

God I love how people who don't like this talk about it. From the outside you'd think it was some insanely transgressive thing. Gaming's "A Serbian Film". Some real visceral reactions.

It is merely some of the best "Brain off, number go up" fun I've had in ages. At times I thought it was gonnae crash from the amount of projectiles and effects layering the screen, slowing the framerate down to the teens, which made it even funnier and added to the daft power trip. Cost me like £2 and isnae trying to rinse me of my dosh through microtransactions. I don't see the problem.

It's great fun when YOU are the bullet hell.

At one point while playing this brilliant shit, I almost burst into tears because I got suddenly hit with a powerful memory of being 10 years old, on holiday in Gran Canaria. Playing a Game Boy Color I got from a dodgy shop for what must have been £30. A truly good and happy time in my life.

It wasn't even this I was playing back then. It was some 32-in-1 nonsense. But this smelly garlic man reached through time and brought joy from 22 years ago roaring back into me for just a moment. Thank you, you fat fuck.

Played through it again because I never got round to the DLC and had sold my PS4 copy. Grabbed the Ultimate Edition off PS+.

I enjoyed it before, and it's still decent, but this time I was hit much harder with how the game's biggest letdown is it being a shooter.

You read notes about stuff like employees boringly cataloguing 100 boxes of individual human teeth, or consulting incantations to calm a stapler that's tearing up the staff room, but all you get to do is shoot red dudes and float around. Pressing square to cleanse things, without even an appropriate mini game or something to jazz it up. The game borrows heavily from SCP shit, but fails to get that a lot of the draw with that stuff is the weird containment procedures and rituals in dealing with them. Control is every SCP story ending with "Agents drew their guns and put the subject down".

I genuinely wish the gameplay was about dealing with anomalies by using a big tome you had to lug about to consult what procedures to use. Discovering new ones from hands on experience and adding to the data. Unique interactions instead of just walking into rooms and enemies spawn in so you start firing. It's a shame because the environmental design is immaculate in places, and as such feels wasted on mindless floating and dashing.

Also every object that isn't concrete sounds like milk bottles clinking together when you bump into them. It's daft. Maybe that's an AWE or something too.

I am in awe at how much they fucked it. Lorne must have taken a bump to the head or something.

Abe was good because of its precise controls. The humour. The feeling of absolutely nailing a difficult section through timing and figuring out the puzzle set before you. It wasn't crafting, looting bins, or watching a gut-shot Mudokon fuckin' bleed out as Abe stares at his dead eyes.

I cannot believe this is by the same folk who made the originals. It reeks of a beloved IP handed to a new company years down the line. At one point I entered an area that sealed me in and I had to engage in some kind of battle arena shit possessing Sligs and trying to dispatch them as waves of Mudokons got mown down. It feels antithetical to everything Abe was about.

Sloppy controls, loose platforming, and dogshit AI. Lost count of the amount of times I had to kill myself because a Slig just stopped its patrol and stayed facing the locker I was hiding in. God, I really wanted to give the game a fair shake. Even though I knew in my heart what it would be from that initial presentation Lorne did showing the plans for it. I wanted to believe there might be something here for me. But all that was waiting was a character I love reduced to a crafting bastard rummaging through bins and missing jumps. Flaccid attempts at set pieces and weird overly long conversation cutscenes of static characters shouting at each other across level geometry.

I got six levels in, and near the end of the sixth one the game let me accidentally loop back through a previous area with no way to get back without just restarting the level again. Oh aye, there's no "Are you sure?" choice when you select Restart Checkpoint/Level or Quit. Careful you don't hit those by accident. Would be a shame if you had to stop playing like I did.

Cunt game.

A solid remake that feels like they're doing the best they can with the framework they had to use. It somehow comes across as twice the size of the GB original, and not in a good way.

The cinematic boss moments are nice, and work to remind you that Samus has that rep for a reason, but the regular combat is a bit of an inconvenience. They're insistent on this new parry mechanic, meaning almost every single jobber enemy desperately wants you to do it and then shoot them once to win. It gives basic exploration a real START STOP vibe that can get tedious quickly. So I understand why most folk dropped it, especially with the repetitive metroid fights being only slightly improved.

I first had a go on this game in September 2017 while my gran was in hospital following a stroke and a second heart attack (aye it's one of those reviews). I couldnae focus, and put it off to the side. She got home in mid October, and I went to stay with her for a few months as a carer. I didn't bring any consoles to her place, and decided the 3DS would be best. I played in wee bursts while she slept on the couch. It was comfy. A nice environment despite the circumstances. We were always close so none of it felt out of the ordinary. She was just weaker. Now, this isnae gonnae be some shite about an imagined correlation between Samus getting upgrades and my gran's recovery. I'm a prick, but I'm not THAT prick. She never got better. Never got back to herself. She died in 2019. But something about wee shots of the game are forever tied to that time and place. So despite all the wee shit things about this, I cannae bring myself to hate it because if I focus hard enough on the screen, I'm in that house with the familiar smells, and my gran is just out of my peripheral vision, asleep on the couch.

I have a real fear of the ocean. The shallows of a beach is about all I can handle. Subnautica was designed to truly kill me.

It is the best survival/crafting game I've ever played. It gets everything just right. Lovely feeling of progression as you explore and get a bit better at living in this hellish wet place. A bit braver each time you head out with new equipment. Places that were once the scariest thing you'd ever seen now paddled through nonchalantly because you killed the big threat there by freezing it in place and dropping thirty farts on its head. Less "bending the land to your will" and more "becoming confident and tooled up enough to make it".

It's actually got a great story too, not the usual thing where you're stranded with some baddies and maybe you find a couple of diaries/audio logs. It ramps things up so well to such a satisfying payoff and feels like you discovered it all organically.

I cannot believe how much I enjoyed it. A game I rightfully should have played ten minutes of, then got too scared and deleted. I'm putting this on the All-Timers list, easily. Most survival games aren't fit to swim in Subnautica's wake.