Breathtakingly stupid story. While I could probably pick it apart for multiple paragraphs, let's just say there is absolutely nothing to take away from this. It exists purely to give "emotional moments." There is no meaning to be gathered whatsoever that is not contradicted 100 times over by the game itself. The facial capture is extremely dry, and ruins what are some decent voice performances from the cast.
The gameplay is the same as the first, and while I do get people thinking there wasn't enough for another game, I don't think it's that bad as someone who hasn't touched the original game since I beat it years ago.

Never have I played a game that takes so long to get good. The first 8 chapters out of 16 have maybe 15 minutes of important plot stretched to 7 hours. Once the games second act kicks off, the pacing stays slow but interesting things actually start to happen. By the end of the game, the story is actually really gripping and emotional.

Add in a great soundtrack and some excellent dualsense support and Plague Tale is almost a winner. The Last of Us 2 meets Max and Ruby plot is kind of predictable, but it works thanks to great performances . (I played with the French dub, so YMMV)

Not a GOTY by any means because the pacing is so bad, and the gameplay is still as sluggish and uninteresting as ever. The rat puzzles are especially boring, as making one slip up causes you to instantly die and restart a lengthy, linear puzzle. They happen way too often as well, without challenging the player. They're basically needless filler stretching a solid 8 hour game to 15 because of nerds who can't get quality over quantity. All in all, too much bad to call it good without caveats, but still manages to pull through plot wise and make me leave with a good impression.

Really conflicted. In spite of an amazing story and an amazing foundation, the gameplay is a letdown. While Innocence overloaded you with rat avoidance puzzles and forced you into weird combat situations with wonky combat in the endgame, this game overloads you with weird combat situations with wonky combat almost the entire time.

I appreciate what Asobo went for with reworking the combat, and I do believe that some of the encounters in this game are fantastic in a nearly Last of Us Part 2 kind of freedom. But using the sling and the elements in play just do not work in active combat, and the one item that feels great to use for this (the crossbow) has severely limited ammo.

And when so much of the game this time is more action-heavy than Innocence, it unfortunately sinks the game quite a bit.

That said, I still think this game is stronger than the first in terms of its side characters. The core relationship is stronger and better-written, with Amicia and Hugo's actors delivering the performance of a lifetime. The game also has such good writing to the point that I was an emotional mess during the near-credits. But it's all about that gameplay loop, and what I played was frustrating and disappointing at times.

A really really good game that somehow self-sabotages itself from being a masterpiece.

Subverted my expectations. Not a gritty look at the black death from childrens perspective. Its a game about a little boy who is "the chosen one". Very cliche.

The gameplay totally blows. Walk slowly down a corridor, throw a rock at some random box of pots and pans and walk by despite that making zero logical sense. Despite being braindead easy, theres no effective way to defend quickly, so i still died a lot. The final boss is also pretty tough, so I cant even really recommend it to super casual gamers who just want The Last of Us but mid and shallow.

On the upside, the graphics are fantastic, Amicia and Hugo are lovable protagonists, and the audio is expertly done. As a free game pass or psplus title, it could be worth a shot at 8-10 hours, but go in expecting glacial pacing and simple gameplay.

An interesting idea made mediocre by cliche unneeded video game mechanics and genre tropes detracting from the setting, characterization, and atmosphere. What could be a more horror style take and narrative of a common person (a noble but common as in not an unstoppable hero) trying to keep her brother safe during the plague/war while on the run, while dealing with other regular people, becomes an idiotic story about mystical bloodline hero child, occasional whining about killing terrible people in between all your killing, busy work stealth and "puzzle" sections, and magical plague rat tornadoes with occasional hit them three times boss fights and a sling that can defeat entire armies.

At its best when you can more slowly appreciate some of the locations and when you have some time to build the relationship between the main characters you meet (your brother that you spend the most time with being the least interesting, of course). Could have been great with a more narrative, avoidance focused stealth gameplay, horror. Instead you just start killing everyone halfway through the game with brief moments typically spent with one main character at a time while saying that everyone's relationships grow over time that you don't experience with them, ridiculous main villains, and out of place gamey moments like old woman saying, "Oh you have a sling little girl, yes you will need that, make use of my upgrade station."

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1260789090485547009

Stray is a cute little adventure/puzzle game, I had a good time with it.

Stray is definitely carried by its world -- an evocative, post-apocalyptic city-scape populated by robots. There aren't a ton of environments (the game isn't super long) but they are varied and convey the world extremely well, from nearly abandoned slums and lively urban centers to overgrown waterways and corrupted industrial districts. Structurally, there are a few large, open, explorable areas connected by more linear areas with simple navigational puzzles. In the open areas, you play as the titular stray, meeting the robots that live there and doing simple quests to help them.
Stray is helped on their quest by a small flying robot that translates for you, carries items, and manipulates doors. This robot, B-12, is also your link to what the world was like previously. They provide commentary on how things are and have memories of how things were in the past and how they got this way. It is an effective narrative device that believably uncovers aspects to the world as you progress, even though the functionality of the robot itself is a bit convenient.
The world is surprisingly colorful and the characters are varied and well animated. There are a huge number of robots that feel unique and the environments all feel bespoke and lovingly crafted. The robot characters are reactive and the stray has a lot of environmental and character interactions that really feel like things a cat would do. There is a bit of animation jank with the cat, unfortunately -- popping and sliding happens fairly regularly, but it doesn't take much away from the game.

The narrative is carried more by the characters than the broader story. It is satisfying to reach the end, but I found the stories I explored along the way to be more compelling. This extends even to the cat itself since, strangely, there isn't anything about this story or anything that happens that seems to be connected to Stray. Even your initial motivation for your journey (reuniting with your cat-pack) never really reaches a conclusion. The game is more about B-12 and the robots, despite its title and main character.

The strangeness in the narrative also extends to the mechanics of the game. There are very few problems that are answered in a uniquely catlike way, usually you are depending on B-12 to do something for you. The mechanics still work for what they are, but there is just a distinct theming miss here.
Most of the quests and navigation challenges in Stray are very obvious and straightforward. There are a couple of multi-step fetch quests you do for robots in the open levels, but most often you are presented with a path to follow and switches, climbing/jumping obstacles, or light stealth or chase sequences. Difficulty in Stray is tuned to keep you occupied and fill space more than to be a real challenge, which makes the game relaxing, but rarely satisfying.

I had a good time with Stray. It is a very well-made game with cool environments and characters. Worth trying out if you like adventure games with light puzzling!

I'm never going to love the series' combat or the dull large enemies but it's a beautiful, varied, fun to explore world that gives you a large number of build options (if you can find what you need).

You can more easily play as the type of character you want to play as faster thanks to both starting builds and how fast you can use the open world to find weapons, skills, and magic you want. Your focus can ber around using shields, using a weapon two handed, duel wielding, intelligence magic, faith magic, dragon magic, being a spellblade, archery, etc with all being viable options as well as focusing on damage types like bleed, poison, lightning, fire, holy, and frostbite.

New mechanics give you more options than before. There are better stealth elements with you being able to sneak in bushes or use certain items and attacks to cause noise to attract enemies to a location. Jumping is now an action, and in addition to being useful for exploration and just a better way of movement through the environments, also allows for more attack options and dodging strategy. There are a lot more attack options with your light and strong combos with one hand or two hands, duel wielding combos, duck attacks, jump attacks, dodge attacks and every weapon has one or two special attacks that can be changed by finding and equipping Ashes of War items and there are a very large and varied amount of these to find. On top of the skill variety, there are many unique or different versions of weapons from a large number of different weapon classes that you are constantly finding that can have their own attacks, skills, speed and length compared to other versions of the same weapon, and with different skill growths attached to them, giving even spell caster focused builds good weapon choices (you can find intelligence and dexterity based greatswords). You also can find a large number of summonable and upgradable companions and creatures to help you fight, maybe giving you a powerful attacker, someone to give you passive buffs, or maybe just multiple weak allies to distract a mob of enemies while you hang back to cast spells or to fire off your your bow, crossbow, or spells. Varied and visually interesting enemies and bosses.

Elden Ring takes place in a very large beautiful open world that pretty much lets you go just about anywhere from the start. A world not covered in pointless waypoints and fetch quests, with a great looking map where you can identify caves, towers, map pieces, churches, etc just from visually looking at it while also being able to add your own markers to remember where things are. The world is full of hidden areas, secret paths, and for many locations, multiple way to get access or to become teleported to a place. The feel and look of locations vary widely, at times seemingly taking inspiration from every one of their Souls style their past games (Demon, Dark, Bloodborne, Sekiro) and you are pretty much just always finding a cool new spot or thing. Your horse is fast to activate, speeds up travel greatly, and is surprisingly fun to use and fight from. When you are out of combat your stamina bar does not decrease so you can continue to run while just exploring.

The HUD is fine, very minimal with basically just a compass and then adding your health, FP, stamina and weapon and healing flask bars when a combat starts, but interacting with menus and inventory is terrible. You will be picking things up constantly that you have no idea what they do and then have to find them in your large inventory of mostly garbage you won't ever care about not even sure what item type section it is in just to find and read a description that might give you an idea of what it is used for. There is no easy way to compare all of the equipment you are constantly picking up, or even to compare what you are looking at in a shop compared to what you have equipped, and side passive benefits of items are hidden in the more detailed lore description of the item and might not even show up in the main stat description page.

The terrible inventory isn't that much of an issue as you will just kind of know what equipment you want for your build and most of what you pick up will just be obvious crafting garbage you have very little change of ever using but there are still simple things that should have been better handled. You have only your d-pad up slot for spells and d-pad down slot for flasks and other quick items and can put like eight different things in them that you have to cycle through one at a time and identify by the image, and then I guess just do to the series obscure system doesn't even bother to tell you that you can at least hold up or down to switch back to the first item slot. One of the bad UI features that will likely get people killed is that you can both be knocked off of your horse or have your horse killed, the horse is basically a spirit so in either case it will just disappear only letting you know it died by the sound it makes, you can easily revive it by using on of your healing flasks but to do this selecting your horse brings up an awkward menu on the bottom of the screen asking you a yes or no question to use a flask with the default selected choice being no, obviously not a good thing to be doing in a never pausing combat event. There are times when it has you fighting two stronger enemies and when you kill one large popups of items it just have you appear on your screen that will prevent you from taking actions until you hit a button to confirm for each new item while the other enemy still attacks you.

Multiplayer and community options like a password to limit who you play with or to stand out in your community give you better options, but you're still not going to have an easy time just inviting someone for co-op, you are going to need consumable items, to be in the right area, you can't fast travel or use horses, and players are removed from your game once bosses are defeated. So this isn't going to be like Nioh where you can take on the game with your friend, even though this game allows for AI allies to be summoned for bosses and in the more difficult sections of the game. You can get summoned to another player's world to help protect them against invading players, this can be strange when it wastes your time by teleporting you nowhere near anyone (or where you can't even tell where anyone is) or when you get done loading just to be told the fight is over and now are going to be put back in your game.

After basically perfecting combat with Sekiro, this is back to very poor hit detection and a camera and lock on that don't like to cooperate. The combat itself is the usual poor Dark Souls and Blodborne affair but with some more cool moves at least. Combat is slow, awkward, heavily reliant on you parrying attacks that shouldn't even be blockable at times where the parry doesn't even make sense, or using your magical i-frame rolls to just ignore attacks that are still visibly hitting you. Like the previous game, your character's sense of fair play means that you have to allow enemies to stand at least 80 or so percent of the way up after being knocked down before you attack them or your blows will go through them. It's still awkwardly designed like some kind of fighting game where even with the extremely slow attacks it will remember multiple past inputs to use in the future as you now actively try to dodge an easily choreographed enemy attack but your dumb ass character is just thinking, "No you hit attack three times and I'm doing those next two attacks no matter what." I've always seen the game's combat as little more than they're cheating, you're cheating, but sometimes maybe the blows will look cool at least and if they don't at least the enemy design was cool. As always, this dull combat has brought all the weirdos out that think they are badass because they learned how to i-frame roll the boss after dying 400 times in between heart attacks from the stress of not being able to pause and had the biggest achievement of their miserable empty lives who are now furious that some people would like basic accessibility features that all larger studios should have long ago started to consider by default. Like maybe that pause button would be really nice for people with lives, kids, painful disabilities, and the guy screaming about the needed tension of no pausing in the impossible boss I beat in my sleep should just go outside if they are feeling that much adrenaline for a few dodge rolls.

There are a lot of dragon enemies, and anyone who plays a lot of games instantly know that that is likely going to be terrible (unless the game is called Dragon's Dogma), and it is of course. Dragons are too big and unwieldy for some of the environments they are in, their flying just makes things needlessly awkward, their breath attack use is like a bad D&D game master that should just have the dragon kill you from the air but needs it to land so you can actually hit it, sometimes they fly and land too far away that ends the boss fight (running over to them again starts it with the damage they have taken luckily) and has them just walking around confused, they might land on an area above or below you wildly attacking nothing, etc. Many of the side cave/tomb areas end up using the same enemies and even the same bosses, although the areas themselves are often varied with different kinds of traps and secrets and unique ways to navigate through the mini dungeons. The bosses don't really even change up or add to attack patterns, just slightly powering up the exact same kind of boss in later areas until it finally just has you fighting two at a time for its biggest challenge. The enemy placement did start to make exploring those places much more dull than it had to be, which is a shame since they put some work in to make the navigation different each time.

The non linear playstyle of the game can see that you are so massively overpowered when you fight certain bosses that you can kill many of them (or have your summon do it for you) before even getting to see what they do and in many of the fights if you are using magic and found some decent spells you pretty much just have an instant win button. A lot of this is dependent more on if you found caves or areas in stronger areas and picked up materials to upgrade your weapons and summons. You can do that just from casual exploring, then you go back to fight some unique great classified boss only to take out 1/5 of its health in each attack. Even some late game bosses were easily killed for me like the Fire Giant who had an entire powering up cutscene when they got to half health only to be killed in seconds when they starting charging up their next move.

Basically requires a guide to keep track of quests and NPCs due to the large and non linear design. Interacting with items or people or getting to a certain spot might completely change where NPCs are or move them up on their story, you can have characters who will as part three of their five part quest list will just be standing in a corner at some church you visited hours ago that you have no reason to ever go to again. Even the people wanting a journal to be added for a quest log don't seem to see that that wouldn't help, unless it just worked as a device that always just told you where people were and showed them on the map. A character might say, "I think I will travel to here in the whatever area next." You will likely have no idea where that is (even if you already have been there) and maybe you've already done something or will do something by the time you are there that the character will have moved on before you would even have found them, sometimes they aren't even going to be at that spot next as part of their story. Rarely will moving ahead in locations break the quest at least and conversations can change for when you meet people or with the actions you have taken but so much of the story and NPC narratives are small details you piece together that it is a shame to miss things so easily, or to just never find most of them because you have such little odds of ever knowing where they will be.

There are are a large number of weapons, spells, and skills that drop from enemies, bosses, and little creatures that glow and run away from you or that are invisible, and some of these are enemies you would never think would drop anything or that only appear at certain times of the day. On top of the guide for quests, unless you are in a new game plus, you basically should be using guides for character build ideas before you play as well. Being able to explore basically everywhere means that it is extremely easy to both get items necessary for your build that could be hours and hours away if you follow the more obvious paths but that it is also extremely easy to just completely miss things like the few merchants that sell you your spells or the items required to memorize or to learn more of them if you want to focus on using sorcery or incantations.

On the PC, there are performance issues. They usually weren't a problem for me, but it seemed to get either worse after patches or it might just be worse in later game areas. Mostly it would just freeze up for a second or two every now and then. This is with a new PC with an RTX 380, i7-12700KF, and 32GB of DDR5-4800. I've seen and heard of a lot worse and more consistent issues among friends or mentioned in other reviews.


Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1510342322872979458

Videos
https://youtu.be/285TKTkPHVY
https://youtu.be/ZNxzfes3iZc

As a kid, one of my favorite ways to kill time while doing something with my parents that didn't interest me was to peel the foil layer off a gum wrapper while leaving the underlying paper layer completely in tact. While tactilely satisfying and enjoyable enough once you get the technique down, the exercise was always just a distraction until we could finally go home or get lunch or something. And even if you have good technique and infinite time, sometimes one section of foil is stuck to the paper so tight that it feels like someone at the gum company is mad at what you're doing and wants to put a stop to it.

Elden Ring is an endless series of gum wrappers that doesn't even bother to promise there's a frosty from Wendy's at the end of it all.

And you know what, everything I originally had here after that was overly long and less coherent. If I can take anything away from my time with Elden Ring, it's that I shouldn't drag something out and make it longer than it needs to be.