The Devil May Cry format, set up as a rhythm game - and while its not uncommon for the game to fail you for QTEs, the real magic lies in how Hi Fi ties every aspect of the game to the beat. Encouraging (instead of strictly requiring) rhythm promotes a groove within players, a sense that with every action they take they are jamming along with the game - achieving a potent and unbelievably addictive sense of flow when synchronized.

Frankly, I think Hi Fi’s aesthetic would otherwise be a liability for me. Garish color palettes, generic and undiverse enemy design, even the music selection is not my favorite. The supreme, engrossing nature of the combat puts me on a wavelength that elevates every other aspect of the game, I can forgive significant holes in the character writing because I am actually, literally vibing. Any mission thats mostly a gauntlet of enemies is a great time - the opposite of how I usually feel about the genre.

This was so good! I'm really stuck between giving it a 4 or a 4.5... it's so hard to choose... I may change it in the future...

Tormented Souls completely nailed the RE1 vibes. All of it. The feel of the mansion, the puzzles, the areas, the music, the storytelling, even the colours.

At the start of the game, I was actually freaking scared bro. I was pooping my pants because the tension was so high. It wore off as the game went on, but at the start of the game, I was actually scared! Which I can't say for any of the classic, fixed-camera RE games.

One thing about the camera I liked was that it wasn't always fixed to the corner of a ceiling. Sometimes it would be like a third-person camera that you can't control. It would follow you and make it feel like you're in control, but you still can't look around that corner without walking around it - no matter how much you want to. This, paired with the minuscule amount of Saving Items in the first half of the game made me feel so tense exploring every new room. The Healing Item scarcity was really good, I never had a stockpile throughout the entire game. The ammo scarcity could've been a bit harsher, I killed most enemies I came across and didn't really run out.

This game does a lot of the classic survival horror mechanics really well and even improves on them in some cases.
The music is really great and memorable, although it could sometimes feel a little bit too similar to Resident Evil.
I actually enjoyed the story quite a bit and the way it was told! All of the notes told the same overarching story but from different perspectives and they were interesting, I never wanted to skip over any.
You don't have to worry about sorting your inventory in this game which makes the gameplay much more streamlined.

But at the same time, there was still a bit of clunkyness with certain things. Like changing weapons, you have to navigate through two menus to do that which feels quite interruptive. Now, I'm not asking for a Doom Eternal weapon wheel, that would be stupid. But this wasn't it. And some puzzles have point-and-click aspects with things that are easy to miss. I looked up a solution for a puzzle, but it turns out I was doing the right thing all along, I just hadn't clicked on the exact correct part of the screen. The "plot twist" is also completely obvious after playing the game for less than a minute. Literally. That's not a massive deal, it's just kinda funny.

Overall, Tormented Souls is awesome! I'm super excited for the sequel to come out. If they can improve on this game, the sequel is going to be amazing.

One of the greatest souls-likes.

This game just gets it, the level design is marvelous and combat, although minimalist at first, quickly begins to grow on you as you unlock more and more mechanics, making you feel like a true umami master by the time you reach the endgame.

It isn't too difficult, the biggest challenges were auto-imposed by myself, but still a really fun time just due to how great the movement and levels feel. The story is also solid, it takes itself a little too serious at times, but most of the time it's equally engaging without being intrusive and also funny, with a strong, sometimes in-your-face leftist message, which isn't surprising coming from this studio.

The skins are also very cute and some of them are neat references to other games, I specially like the one referencing Going Under, the studio's previous title.
Overall, an incredibly solid experience, totally worth your time and money, crafted with love by a small indie studio.

(Third Playthrough)
...April 30th?

Calling this work of art my favorite video game ever made doesn't do it justice. A lot of people say video games change their lives, but this game actually changed my life. This game isn't just my favorite video game ever, It's my favorite piece of art ever, It's my favorite piece of storytelling ever. It's been about 2 years since I played it for the first time and cemented it as my favorite. This game will always be the most personal piece of art ever created for me and I will continue to cherish this fantastic work of fiction for the rest of my life.

anyway im gonna go play as raiden in fortnite now

Meu primeiro jogo do Kojima, e tudo que falaram é verdade, o homem é bom. O jogo tem uma história muito boa que realmente me cativou, cheia de reviravoltas e parece até um pouco a estrutura de um filme.

É um jogo extremamente interativo, quebra a quarta parede toda hora, o que é muito legal e extremamente avançado para a época. Lembro de escutar gente falando sobre o Psycho Mantis lendo seu save desde os meus 7 anos de idade.

A IA me impressionou. Eles são muito espertos para a época e até para hoje. Se você se encurrala em algum lugar que não tem saída, eles não vão atrás de você; eles jogam uma granada e esperam você sair. Isso é mais inteligente que muito jogo stealth que já joguei (Hitman e AC).

O level design é muito funcional, com fases lindas e cada parte muito diferente uma da outra. A câmera em primeira pessoa foi uma sacada muito boa afim de evitar problemas com a câmera e funciona perfeitamente bem.

O Kojima, em entrevista, disse: "I've got backstories for these characters that cover their whole lives, from the moment they were born to their current situation, but probably only 1/3 of that will make it into the game." É notável o quão gênio esse cara é. Embora tenha alguns furos bem óbvios de roteiro, a história é muito bem amarrada. Todos os personagens têm uma história que não é apenas jogada na sua cara; ela é contada de maneira natural ao decorrer da campanha.

Em geral, é um jogão, envelheceu como vinho. Tem alguns problemas de jogabilidade, mas é um jogo de 1998, então temos que dar um desconto.

"Humans can choose the type of life they want to live."

Unstellar Blade

A game so milquetoast that it literally crashed my PC in switching inputs from my PS5 to my main display so I could write this review, and thus I lost all of my notes I had carefully constructed over the past three days of playtime. What I pulled together is that this was an attempt at making Nier: Automata without actually making it fun and without Yoko Taro.

I remember Stellar Blade's Official Reveal as Project Eve, named after the game's main character, jumping out of an otherwise uneventful and boring Sony State of Play with its flashy combat, beautiful environments, and overwhelmingly attractive protagonist. Hot character bait aside, I was interested in this game because of the influences it was clearly wearing on its sleeve in the aforementioned Platinum Games magnum opus. Many have tried and few have succeeded in nailing hack and slash as well as Platinum or their cousins in Capcom have done with the plethora of impressive titles between the two. Did I think Stellar Blade was going to go one on one with Nier, DMCV, or Metal Gear Rising? Absolutely not, but I did think it was worth a try, to see if there was a company out there who could go to bat with the best of them and put an effort forward that would be worth paying attention to in the years to come. I was excited for Stellar Blade as the release date neared, because it meant that I could one quell the discourse over the design of Eve by providing actual input on how the game plays, and secondly because the need for a fast paced hack and slash was weighing heavily on me after playing slower burn titles like FF7R2 and P3R fairly recently. Within a day of playing my interest waned but I remained hopeful, however on the third complete day of playing and the day I ultimately completed the game... I came away fairly perturbed.

The good, lets start with that why don't we? This game is downright beautiful. I played it on my PS5 on my 4K display with HDR enabled and woah nelly, it looked great. One of the greatest aspects of this title was how great both characters and the world looked from a graphical standpoint. As you transition from dilapidated buildings and streets into destroyed railways and misgiving deserts, your eyes will feast at the eye candy abound in the backgrounds of the world. I found myself navigating the camera up and down constantly at the world I was interacting with as it was tremendously rich in flavour and care from a design standpoint. I felt like the developers put a great deal of effort into creating a visually striking game, which unfortunately seems to have accompanied a trade off in other aspects of the title. More to come on that shortly, as I do want to praise the team for putting some of the best facial and body design in gaming forward. As I've already experienced, much of the conversation about Stellar Blade has been lost in the perceived attractiveness of Eve, but every character you interact with truly looks incredible. Though their proportions and mannerisms may not be totally... human, they are indubitably crafted with an intricacy and care to look astonishing. Stellar Blade if nothing else is a journey of eye candy, but that's kind of... it.

While not exactly fast enough to be a Nier-like, and not fun punishing and explore heavy enough to be a Souls-like, Stellar Blade attempted to forge a path forward that played out like a middle ground between Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and the Jedi: Fallen Order/Survivor games. Eve's combat relies on using a plethora of learned abilities and tech to parry and dodge her way through a litany of grotesque alien foes who have claimed Earth to be their own. Where this goes wrong is in quite a few places, but the most apparent and earliest was in the poor "janky" feel and lack of reliability in both parry and dodge timings. This can be sort-of remedied by investing in Eve's skill trees and upgrading Eve's exo-spine but never really feels... good. Even if I was a dissenter of Sekiro over all, I felt like it mostly gave the right kind of feedback and snap to the parry/dodge timings required to master such a difficult title. For a game as infuriatingly hard as Stellar Blade gets in its late game, I felt like I was at the whimsy of luck in my dodges not directly feeding into a followup attack by a boss and my perfect parries not being read by the game because of poor latency or buffer timing. Time after time I'd land a perfect dodge only to be hit by the boss moving faster than Eve could recover right after. Cheap is the way I'd put that and it proliferated throughout the entire runtime of the title.

Difficulty is something I've spoken about ad nauseum in action-rpg titles and I'll continue to do so as I have an affinity for these kinds of games. After grinding my teeth in the (generally) slower paced Fromsoft classics and the speedy Platinum/Capcom games of the last decade and change, I feel like I'm fairly qualified. Stellar Blade early on feels hard, but not in a way that cannot be conquered. If I was getting my tail kicked by a group of world enemies or a boss, I found that I could readjust my stratagems to craft a better gameplan, coming back smarter and using my abilities at optimized times to come out victorious. I found my confidence growing, something that did not happen this early in Sekiro, and I continued on to the later stages of the game. I opened up my Playstation menu to check my progress, a feature of the console that tracks how far you've made it through the main story, and saw I had notched at 89%. I labored on to the area boss on one of the last major quests of the game. It was here I through my face into a wall, stressing with every ability and item I had to make it through the three phases and effective six health bars that the boss had. I double this up because of the way shields work. See in Stellar Blade, simply doing damage and having fun taking down your enemy's health bar is simply not allowed, you must first deplete their shields before you can do any "meaningful" damage to their hitpoints. Meaningful in quotations because even then on a fully upgraded weapon, after laboriously taking away the superfluous shield bar, you are granted the ability to do slightly more damage to the bosses health per hit. I've played Dark Souls underleveled and with un-upgraded weapons enough to know torment when it comes to weapons doing very little damage to bosses... and even that does not compare to how insulting Stellar Blade's damage counter feels.

It wasn't even until a few bosses later that I truly came to terms with my disdain for the needlessly draconian difficulty that exists within Stellar Blade's late game boss fights. I threw everything together that I could into defeating the (name kept out of review due to spoiler) boss. I thought I could craft a winning effort of combining my ultimate abilities with my tertiary skills and burst maneuvers, but nothing was taking. I couldn't perfect dodge and parry any longer against the multi-faceted and multi-phase boss fight at hand. Visual clarity was completely nuked from orbit as I could barely tell what moves were hitting me, where certain objects were, or where my Eve's reactions would take me next. A greater qualm I have with games at large now, I wrote about these most notably in my FFXVI DLC reviews, is a complete lack of being able to actually see what's going on in boss fights because of the "ooh how cool" quality that moves need to have. Keeping this in mind, the bosses began to teleport away CONSTANTLY from Eve so as to reposition their efforts while tarnishing any offensive effort I had put forth. This was rhythm breaking and tore any motivation I had towards chasing the enemy down, I felt discouraged and unmotivated to capitalize on optimized windows because I knew the boss would simply teleport away at any given moment. After being unable to keep up with this, the visuals going on, and the randomly included DPS checks, I put the game on "story mode" (reminder this is in the last hour or so of a medium length title) and kept chugging. I'm not actually sure this did anything to make the game easier. What it does in theory is give you windows to dodge and parry, popping up with on screen prompts of what button to press to not be hit by the enemies maneuvers. Does this work? Absolutely not. Most of the time these move to fast to even parse what move you're supposed to use, and half the bosses moves don't even populate your screen with a prompt at all. Through the next couple bosses and into the final boss I became increasingly confused if this was actually a difficulty slider at all or simply an effort to make you "feel" better by putting a semblance of choice of difficulty in front of you.

A best in class soundtrack (potentially one of the best of the year) and impressive visuals couldn't prop Stellar Blade up enough to go against its resoundingly poor English VA (I eventually played in Korean,) drab narrative heavily borrowed from Nier: Automata, and impressively frustrating and unrewarding combat. This is absolutely not a title worthy of purchasing at a $70 price tag, maybe half of that at best. I commend Sony and SHIFT UP for putting together a brand new IP and throwing some serious marketing at making this game stick out, but it felt like a great value Sekiro meets Nier at best. I would not recommend Stellar Blade to anyone with a PS5.

Me and my friends saw this game go on Game Pass so we decided to play over the course of the past few months. We had a lot of fun together due to the cool weapons and brutal killing. I appreciate how the zombies in this game aren’t too absurd in their designs or abilities. Going back and forth constantly from objectives can be a bit boring though, especially when there isn’t many zombies around. The final boss was also extremely tedious. We kept comparing him to the Gold Hoarder from Sea of Thieves, only he had a lot of health and this guy had a lot of health and a lot of big strong zombies backing him up.