Perfectly playable, a billion-dollar polished sheen in service of unimaginative game design. Look, not every game needs to break new ground, but FORBIDDEN WEST would have been dated in 2018. It's a cluttered pile of compromises; it doesn't commit to open-world realism (RDR2, Death Stranding), nor spatial boundlessness and narrative minimalism (BOTW, Elden Ring). Let me feel the thrill and danger of hunting and crafting, please challenge me to tread the vastness of the terrain. A game so ensnared by ecological themes should by all means structure its core gameplay loops around this dance, around this duality of man and nature – the alternative, what we have here, just leaves me cold. Traversing its world becomes a matter of formality in between the story missions, a story revolving around not just saving, but preserving, cherishing, that very world, and the life it bears. If you want to create a world oscillating between resplendent beauty and danger, don't mark machine-territories on the map like a Far Cry game – just let me stumble into the lion's den, and then provide the players with the tools necessary to engage that challenge. The players will remember that location next time, and can then choose to avoid it or tackle it head-on. Providing total clarity of your surroundings (through either the Focus or the map, or worse still, Aloy herself) destroys the world, it defiles the core tenet of its themes. More than that, it makes the game a slog to play through.

Transcendental, and even for From Software’s unparalleled pedigree, a monument. As others have mentioned, late game bosses and enemies are perhaps a tad too ruthless, to the point where the last 10-or-so-hours are spent beating your head against increasingly egregious walls, but even then the game’s most punishing challenges (Malenia, Mohg etc.) are optional, and there are always tools and weapons to experiment with to find the path to victory. Difficulty quirks aside, this stands as one of the most accomplished works of any medium in the past decade or more, an impossibly vast canvas of endless discoveries both horrific and beautiful, set to the tune of oneiric myth. It’s Miyazaki’s THE RETURN. That is all, I have no more words.

I am just over six months older than Ocarina of Time. It's one of the recurring thoughts I had while playing through this game. Seven months and five days, to be exact, is what separates the beginning of me and the release of one of the landmark achievements in the medium, a watershed work often lauded as one of the greatest the medium has ever seen. Despite this, Ocarina of Time feels older than me. Much, much older. I'm not the right person to equate just how much today's games industry genealogically descends from this game alone, so I will leave that for someone more qualified, but suffice it to say, Ocarina of Time feels part of the very fabric of video games. It is a primordial emblem of video games. Video games didn't start here, of course, but Ocarina of Time might just be the video game, the main character of the medium. Much the same way that Vertigo seems to re-centralise and gravitate cinema around its existence, consumed as it is by the very act of looking and creation, Ocarina of Time is the perfect encapsulation of video games for the sheer virtue of being a work about growing up in a medium still very much in an adolescent state. It arrived at the generational crossroads of those who grew up with arcades and those who would grow up with Ocarina of Time. Looking back at the game now, it is impossible to shake the feeling that the game's legacy, as a timestamp for the art of video games, is no accident. We are supposed to return to Ocarina of Time as adults, of course we are. We are supposed to return to see, to realize, the truth of those prophetic passing years. To see the brutality of adulthood as the shadow looming over childhood. To witness, with blinding familiarity, fascism rise from the shallow grave of inaction. There are rough spots in here, sure, but how many legitimately canonical titles retain their statures simply by being good, rather than being technical powerhouses or through the economy of nostalgia. I hope Nintendo does it justice and remaster (not remake) it for the Switch, so that I never have to play it with the fucking Wii U gamepad again in my life, thank you very much.

The type of work that elevates the rest of the medium, daring them to keep up, raising the bar as a result. Despite the sheer bleakness of a game that literally begins with your character re-emerging into the world — reborn from the void — from an apocalyptic bender, it paints every citizen of Revachol with empathy. It's hilarious and beautiful, a rendition of a world in a state of utter despondency where the real detective work is piecemeal-ing together a semblance of fully-formed hope of a brighter tomorrow. That hope begins and ends with its inhabitants, by the very flesh-and-blood toilers who have to pick up the pieces of foregoing generations and keep on carrying on. If ruin and decay swathes us in a thick fog in the game's beginning, then the people we run across and occasionally help throughout the runtime positively reaffirms the values of living, of choosing to wake up from the void. Oblivion will have to wait.

(P.s. petition to make "disco" into the new "based" please)

Been struggling for hours to write something of note about this, having just finished it earlier today, and now just laying awake at 4:a.m torn between several essayistic topics to choose from, but they will have to wait (for never, that is). The short thing I will say is that I don't think Miyazaki's intention of meta-reflective nostalgia-baiting really sticks here, as the story (or whatever the hell the russian formalists would call whatever the spines in these games are) are held up here by gameplay fundamentals that are of shocking craft by his/their standards. Totally understandable how the general sentiment around this game on here, and among the community at large, is that this is the natural step from the previous entries, since the surface of this game is so souls-y, but peel back barely half a layer and this'll feel like the most transparent studio-mandated rush-job since FromSoft's rebrand as a certified video game couture brand. From plain (or worse) level-design, to flaccid weapons, this just falls flat for me. Call me old-fashioned, but I don't fancy FromSoftware making easily-digestable content whose intended audience are people who undulates between words like "mid" or "epic". By absolutely astronomical proportions my least favorite FromSoft so far.