(not yet finished, may play more)

Good stories wrapped in bad systems. I'd rather a more visual novel or 80 Days style interface. I don't feel like the travel adds to my understanding of the sprawling country. And the fireside chats where I need to produce the "right" story are an exercise in failing forward. I don't remember what the tone of half my stories are, sometimes I have nothing that fits and sometimes my read on the stories is just wrong anyway. Nevertheless I make progress despite repeated failures, why not make it more conversational at that point?

This is a game about collecting and telling stories, and watching them change and grow with each retelling. You play as a drifter during the dust bowl, although time is a little wonky in this game so not everything is tied down to that era. This game's biggest strength is that they intentionally hired many writers from diverse backgrounds to write the game's diverse cast of characters. The main characters you talk to can range from a preacher, a sharecropper, a war veteran, a union organizer, the list goes on. The game spans the entirety of the continental United States and regions have their own distinct feel to them. You'll collect a wide variety of stories, some hopeful, some not, some happy, some sad, and one of the most interesting parts of this game to me was how you'll collect folk tales like The Jersey Devil, but also historical tales like police busting up unions. It gives a real sense that the class struggle in the United States is just as integral to its culture as any traditional folk tale.

Where The Water Tastes Like Wine starts with you losing a poker game which ends up causing you to be turned into a skeleton that has to travel America collecting and spreading the stories of the people. The game features great music, voice acting, backgrounds, and writing. You will collect over 200 short stories that can morph into more farcical tales twice after you tell them to 16 main characters who then go on to share the stories you told them. These main character will show up at campfires and telling them the kind of stories they want to hear will allow you to get to know their true selves better until you complete their storylines. The varied short stories with a diverse cast of characters are often interesting or entertaining which is impressive for the number of them in the game.

On the negative side the movement over the map of America is slow and reflective but doesn't work as well in a game this size, it doesn't help that the art for the map also gets very dull fast. You can pay for train rides or hitchhike in cars but even when you get in a car you are stuck riding in it until the next town even if you start passing things you would want to get out for. A health, stamina, and money system feels like like a pointless addition since you just respawn in the last major city you were in if you die, which just ends up adding more time to game that already starts to overstay its welcome. It can be very difficult to tell genre of some stories unless you try to use them and then remember what it was so you can just keep telling that story over and over which is a more dull way to play the game.

I enjoyed the game and respect the work that a lot of the people that wrote for this game have done over the years but some of the odd design choices and the playtime likely lasting over 10 hours is not something most will appreciate. This really would have been better a a twine or point and click style thing rather than whatever they were trying to do adding all these "gamey" elements to it.

Going into Scarlet Nexus, I had no expectations whatsoever. I didn't see any trailers or gameplay due to lack of interest, and I've never seen anyone mention much about this game other than it's existence, so I decided to give it a try and was somewhat pleasantly surprised with what I experienced.

Let's start with the two things that I think are absolutely amazing: The Art Direction and the Combat Interactivity.
Starting with the first, most of the environment design ranges from good to amazing. Some of the earlier areas feel a little generic, but by the time I reached the mid game mark, there were plenty of moments where I stopped to take a few screenshots of the areas and their design. However, this doesn't even compare to the stellar enemy designs. All enemies in this game reach a balance of feeling alien, while at the same time bringing some sense of familiarity in their design. Just looking at some of the bosses it's clear the love an inspiration the artists put into their designs, which there's nothing quite like it. Unfortunately, the same can't be said about the character designs. Most of them are pretty standard and dull generic anime designs, which I guess isn't exactly bad per say. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing "bad" about them, but nothing good either, it's just something that's been done hundreds of times before.
Now, onto the other subject that surprised me: the combat.
The combat mechanics are pretty simple, your character has a basic attack combo, a dodge, a jump and the ability to use items to supplement combat.
But perhaps the best addition, is the powers that Scarlet Nexus brings to the table. Both main characters you can play as have psychokinesis, which is the ability to move things with their mind. This brings a new edge to combat, where the player can use objects in the environment as extensions of their attacks, supplementing a character's lack of range or damage by throwing big objects from a distance at the enemies. To explain further, in the setting, most characters have superpowers and use them in combat. While it might not seem relevant considering you can only play 2 characters which have the same power, the game introduces the SAS system. When you're choosing your party members, you're not choosing only the characters and what they can bring to the table, but how their power can affect your gameplay style. Using the SAS system, you can connect with a character and user their power, which has some slight alterations to gameplay. These powers can range from elemental buffs to your weapon, to invisibility or the ability to teleport. While appearing not much by itself, the SAS system really shines in it's interactivity with the enemies. For example, the simpler powers like applying a fire buff to your weapon burns the enemy, a lightning buff can paralyse them and so on. But the more esoteric powers, like duplication can duplicate the objects you throw with your psychokinesis, or hypervelocity severily slows down every enemy on screen. This goes much further with the introduction of the Crush Gauge, which functions sort of like a stamina bar, which when depleted opens the enemy up to either be instakilled or to be dealt a very large amount of damage. By a combination of targeting enemy weakspots and correctly choosing the power most effective at dealing with those enemie's weakness, one can master the combat of Scarlet Nexus and truly show the depths of what appears to be such a simple system. There's more combat mechanics like Brain Drive or Brain Field, but they mostly function as combat buffs (the former) or a super mode like Devil Trigger (the latter), and aren't all that innovative.

Now, let's move on with my biggest gripe with the game: the writing in general.
Starting with characters, most of them are really bad, and even the best ones aren't more than decent.
None of them have any depth to them, and are mostly there to fill anime clichê roles and tropes.
I'll describe some of the party members so you can see what I mean: A Spunky Happy-go-lucky Childhood Friend, a Shy and Quiet girl that likes flowers, a Walking Talking Oedipus Complex, a Too Old For This Shit Boomer, and so on...
The biggest problem is that they have nothing to offer outside of filling their clichê roles, the characters have no depth whatsoever, they just feel like they were all taken out of really bad seasonal anime.
And the protagonists might be even worse. The male one is just your typical shounen protag who wants to do good and save the world, and the female one is unredeemably rude, to the point where it's her whole personality, being cold and rude for no reason whatsoever.
Moving on, let's talk story. And boy, if you think the characters were bad, you're gonna be even more surprised. Huge spoilers ahead.


Starting with the setting, it's a technologically advanced society where most people have powers. However, monsters called Others fall from space, so the people with powers joined together to form a military to fight them.
The story starts off with the male protag joining this military, and pretty standard slice of life stuff with the characters going from one place to another saving people and killing monsters.
However, the story quickly takes a dark turn when one of the characters is suddenly turned into an Other, and your shady military superiors clearly know more than what they let on.
What follows next I can only describe as akin to a group of children who have been caught doing something bad so they start blaming each other.
It starts off with a reveal that the goverment you work for is doing 1984 shit like brainwashing whoever goes against them or turning people into Others for research.
This sparks a rebellion led by a dude who creates a rival goverment and who is apparently really important, but you've seen him like twice outside of cutscenes.
Okay, so the government sucks and is behind it all, not giving any points for originality there but it could be a decent setup.
Some shit happens and now there's a gigantic black hole consuming the Earth.
Nope, they then shift gears for the bigger bad being a secluded religious group who you've seen being mentioned in dialogue literally once the entire game. Turns out humanity came from the Moon and that religious group wants to use the main characters power to take control of the Black Hole and open the way up to return to the Moon.
Okay... so you go and beat those guys up but turns out that the true villain behind it all is the Dude that rebelled against the goverment.
All of this happens because the main character's actual power is Time Travel, and the main villain wanted to use that power to try and save his dead girlfriend.
Yeah. That's the plot.
I just have no words for it. It clearly lacked a direction with all the ping-ponging the plot did about who was the actual villain. It just feels really disjointed, especially considering the characters conveniently forget some of the plot elements so the writers can setup reveals.

To conclude this review, I kinda enjoyed the game I guess. I felt like it was held back a lot by the lack of direction that the story had, and it was particularly held back by the awful and boring characters.
The combat system certainly has potential if fleshed out a bit more, but the whole thing is so dedicated to the anime aesthetic, that it ends up being chained down by it in most aspects.

Thought about a lot about music while playing this- how it could occasionally transform the game, but so often failed in its implementation. The game has a “huddle” mechanic, basically a super mode for the whole team, and it’ll pick a song at random to play alongside the action.

Sometimes it’s incredible, a dramatic and tender scene will lead into a massive fight, only to be scored by “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” It’s a great idea, too often brought down by the fact that you’re most often activating the ability at the end of fights, so you’ll likely hear the first few seconds of something like “The Final Countdown” before unceremoniously killing the last enemy.

There are also a few songs that reach near “Big Iron” levels of airwave dominance; despite having a decently-sized tracklist, the game seemed to have a strange fascination for “Tainted Love” and “Jitterbug,” playing them in fight after fight. What I assumed to be the anthem for the game, “Zero to Hero,” was noticeably absent for my playthrough, and I kept on waiting for the lavish set piece where the vocals would kick in- the “Rules of Nature” moment that never seemed to happen. Turns out the licensed and non-licensed soundtracks are mutually exclusive; you’re choosing between a near-constant musical bait-and-switch or a stream of more fitting, but less iconic, buttrock.

I guess the reason I want to highlight this feature in particular, is that I don’t think this game suffers so much from the Triple-A problems of a compromised vision or some horrific development cycle, as much as one of a slightly lacking execution. I could go on about the shortcomings of the combat or the weaker points of the story, but I think I begrudgingly liked it. All of it’s issues at least speak to a game that’s earnestly trying to make systems that suit its characters- and the few moments where everything aligned, with the full range of abilities unlocked, the cast trading banter with another, and “Relax” playing in the background- it all works.















But seriously, I’ve rarely had a moment as deflating as when I used my powers to pull a guy into a bottomless pit, only to see him plop back into existence on the nearest platform. Deeply unsatisfying.

When this game isn't bugging out, soft locking, dropping audio, straight-up crashing, or putting you through gauntlets of repetitive combat arenas that drag on too long and ruin the pacing...it's probably one of the better comic book adaptations in recent gaming memory.

The combat system is essentially "What if GOD OF WAR 2018, but you controlled 4 Boys at once?" It really flows after you get yourself accustomed to the awkward button layout (which you can't remap). That said, the fights frequently run long, and there's only so many times I can hear the cast repeat the same quips before I got really annoyed.

Still, the main event here is the narrative. Very well designed in its core ideas, and with a lot of creative room for replays based on its branching options. This is one of the first games in a long time that has me EXCITED for New Game Plus. Takes a lot of queues from the popular MCU adaptation, but remixes everything with Cosmic Marvel Comics Lore to make something that stands alone.

Worth a play, and honestly I would love to see this get some DLC or a sequel. But first and foremost: This needs some effing patches.

Time loops! I seem to be playing a bunch of time loop games lately, this one is based on a Skyrim mod that was so popular they made it a full release. It’s mostly an investigative game where you explore a small town and interrogate a little over 20 different citizens to uncover how to escape the loop. I found the mystery to be compelling but the games brevity hurts the overall package.

If you played Skyrim you basically know how it plays, you know exactly how talking to NPCs work in that game and it’s the same here. You pick responses from a list and see where the dialogue tree takes you. There is limited interaction in the world, you can’t just pick up anything, no pickpocketing, the game has its own rules you can’t break; it basically sticks to uncovering a thread and following it by questioning the right people.

The plot is you are a person from modern times you wakes up having been recovered from a river by some woman and is told to investigate a temple nearby, there you fall into a trap and find a portal that takes you to some small contained town that looks Roman from two thousand years ago. The residents there all tell you they are stuck there and all have to follow the golden rule, the sin of the one would end the many. If any one person commits a sin every citizen is turned to gold by the gods. Since no one can test the theory without actually dying you have a whole mix of opinion on whether the threat is real and what constitutes a sin. This is where the political commentary comes in as you will find references to social justice and civil rights, some interesting points are brought up but overall the game isn’t making some grand political point. For the most part it’s a good old fashion sci fi mystery which I enjoyed uncovering.

Like the best of TES mysteries you will uncover some shady characters, twists and turns on who is lying, who is hiding something, and slowly piece together this grand mystery. One of the biggest quest lines involve a vote occurring that night to replace the current magistrate, who is a Roman general who is strictly enforcing the rules, to some politician that is saying the general is inventing the rules and there is no reason to follow them. When the vote occurs regularly the politician wins, he declares there is no more rule and a sin is committed immediately leading to the curse being activated and you having a less than a minute to run to the portal to reset the day. So it becomes a priority to alter the results of the vote by any means.

There are a bunch of side quests to uncover, which all have ties to uncovering the big mystery, where the hell are you and why are you stuck. The magistrates daughter is missing which is strange because it’s a small town with no exits. Recently a man went into some catacombs and was killed by a “monster”. There are signs of older civilizations scattered throughout and a mysterious pillar in front of a sealed temple that makes references to four different civilizations. The storylines are fun to explore and the smaller play area makes the act of going around solving quests be stress free.

Most of the gameplay is just dialogue options and exploring the world for clue but at some point you can get a weapon and there is a quest line that takes you through an enemy filled location. It is as basic as combat can get, two shots go down any enemy and there is almost no real threat. I will say there is some minor puzzle solving as in some places you need to use this weapon to “freeze” objects and enemies in place. That quest was a nice change of pace, I enjoyed it but it’s not exactly top of the line gameplay. It adds to the overall variety you encounter.

The act of resetting the day is streamlined as the moment you start the next day there is a very useful NPC that you can tell to instantly complete pretty much any side quest you previously completed meaning there is no need to repeat actions over and over. This is an elegant solution to one of the issues that plague time loop games. That said this means the beginning of the game feels like the grand quest but after a few hours in once most of the side quest are done you realize just how narrow the final leg of the story is, my final two hours with the game was mostly spent reseting my save file to see one of four different endings. Overall there is like 5-6 hours of playtime, it really feels like small expansion for Skyrim, lucky for me It’s on gamepass so length to cost doesn’t matter but if you are considering buying this game I would warn against it feeling small.

The Forgotten City is a good mystery adventure with enough twists and turns that kept me engaged from start to finish. I enjoyed the first half more than the second half because once you know what to do you lose a lot of that player input, I felt the end was just me asking a bunch of questions. On gamepass definitely try it out, even if you are someone who dislikes time loop games this is mostly a stress free one with limited repetition. If you ever enjoyed the more elaborate side quests of a TES game, and I usually find those to be great, then this is something worth playing.

Score: 7.0

After 80+ hours of Red Dead Redemption 2, a question pops up in one’s mind:
In the process of making a game that examines the fall of the American frontier and the decline of the Wild West, did the irony register at all with Rockstar that they were also making a game about the end of the triple A design structure that has plagued the medium ever since the birth of the 7th gen?

Regardless of what pre-established biases one might come into RDR2 about the value of graphical fidelity and closeness to real life and focus on cinematic design and film language in games, it’s impossible not to be impressed by Rockstar’s commitment to the simulation of realism. Your character will meticulously grab each item he loots and place it in his satchel, craft each new tonic or bullet one at a time with detailed animations, remove and place his weapons on his horse whenever you switch them up, shuffle dominoes and grab each piece one by one in every game, and skin every hunted animal with gruesome detail and carry them on his back to his horse every single time. NPCs all have their per-determined schedules that happen regardless of your presence or not, wild animals behave accordingly to their nature and even hunt other species, and every mundane action, be it taking a shower, mounting a camp, cleaning your guns, or brushing your horse, carry a level of detail and weight never before seen in a blockbuster game. It also boasts one of the most beautiful environments to walk around, filled with detail and big expansive nature landmarks, frequently creating moments of awe as you ride around the mountains and landscape.

This level of realism is further elevated in the gang’s camp, where you have a group of misfits you can deal with daily and who all have their respective quirks, goals and actions. Rarely will you hear the same line of dialogue from these characters in the course of 80 hours, and the impressive amount of scenes and conversations that occur not only between your character and them, but also between themselves, means that you will finish the game without experiencing half of the camp scenes that happen dynamically and without feeling like scripted events. When you find yourself around a campfire with your gang after a well succeeded mission, being able to join in the singing and festivities with them, suddenly all the effort in creating a realistic world comes together and for a few seconds the immersion is achieved and one feels like he is a part of a fully realized world and that these characters are tangible and real.

It’s unfortunate then that each time you get into a story mission, that effort is collapsed and you are thrown back into the videogame. What was once acceptable in RDR1 now feels incredibly dated and restrictive, with the usual design structure of having you ride to the mission on horseback and having a chat with an NPC while you follow a yellow line, following every single instruction the game tells you without any chance to deviate from it, waiting for something to inevitably go wrong, and then shooting a comical number of enemies that spawn out of nowhere like a NES game until everyone is dead. Rinse, and repeat. The level of realism found in the open world aspects of RDR2 only serves to call attention to how detached and out of touch the story missions are, leading to incredibly absurd scenes where the main character chastises a crew member for killing too many people during a story cutscene, when you the player yourself have been forced to kill 50 people during a house robbery just the previous mission.

What ends up happening is that most of the stuff you will be doing in the open world won’t matter at all because that would be stepping on the story’s toes. Regardless of how much money you have or how much you have contributed to the camp and NPCs, nothing will have effect on how the story will progress, with the exception of a very simplistic and outdated Honor system. This in turn inevitably leads to the open world map feeling like just a bunch of lines between check marks to fill, with the occasional scripted event to deviate you, but not much!, from the beaten path, and the rare exploration quest that happens when the game decides you should. Even the act of hunting an animal in the wilderness is affected by Rockstar’s grip on your hand, having a highlighted line on the ground that flashes and leads perfectly to your prey. The simulation aspects end up being surface level mechanics used to visually impress the player, not really influencing in any meaningful way either the gameplay or the story. It’s all shallow spectacle.

Which is a shame, because RDR2 has one of the most compelling videogame characters ever created. Arthur Morgan’s story takes a very contemplative and introspective direction in it’s final act, as he finds out he doesnt have much time left in this world, and it leads to some of the most interesting and emotional moments that Rockstar has ever created. Arthur’s effort in making something out of the few life he has left ends up influencing the player’s action outside of the story, and in one of the most poignant and humane moments in the whole game, you are forced to lay down your controller for a few secs, as Arthur requests a moment from you so he can catch his breath, something that makes the player care and empathize with a bunch of polygons much more than any cutting edge cutscene in the whole game could. Even the act of playing the last stretch of the game mimics Arthur’s new perspective, the missions feeling like a slog to go through, Dutch becoming increasingly frustrating, repetitive and annoying to be around, and the creativity being lesser and lesser, which would have been an interesting and insightful direction, had that actually been the intention by Rockstar. But RDR2 is adamant in separating the story from the gameplay, even bafflingly inserting black bars on top and bottom of the screen each time control is removed from the player, as if to signal that it’s now movie time and no time for interactivity. Regardless of all the issues with the story and gameplay, Arthur’s story is enough to carry the whole game on it’s back, and any player invested in his tale will have a hard time not getting emotional at the gut-wretching ending.

But then the game continues. For 5 more hours. And it’s at this point that the dam breaks and the flaws of the game become full center and aren’t easy to ignore anymore. The epilogue, which lacks any self awareness as it presents itself as a two parter, drags it’s way into a fan pandering ending, filled with needless shooting, redundant subplots, and characters that completely undermine the impact of the actual ending of the game. We can’t have a simple mission about just herding some sheeps, shopping with a friend, or fly a hot air ballon. No, every mission has to have a bloody battle with a body count that would make Stalin jealous, because Rockstar cannot bear the idea that some players might be bored if there isnt anything to shoot at. During an exchange between Morgan and an NPC the screen fades to black as they start talking about their lives, as if to spare the player from all those “boring details”, instead leading straight to the action once more. Rockstar can’t bear the thought of giving more opportunities for normal interactions between the player and the NPCs, while I sit here thinking about how one of my favorite missions was when I crossed the whole map to see a character I was fond of, only to get a kiss and that being the end of the mission.

RDR2 is a bloated game that can’t read a room on when’s it’s time to bow down and stop the show, deciding instead to outstay it’s welcome for an absurd amount of time, like an old frail man clawing at the last moments before his time to move on. And maybe it’s also time for Rockstar to move on, and let ideas of cinematic grandeur and realism in videogames finally lay rest once and for all.