Almost certainly the most consequential way I've wasted my time playing a video game since spending a truly embarrassing amount of time playing Mass Effect: Andromeda at the beginning of 2019 - roughly 80 hours worth of middling to cringeworthy content buoyed by a fun action game stuck in the middle of it all and enough aesthetic nods to better memories it made my head spin. When people talk about the Assassin's Creed-ening of video games, Andromeda is about as good a place as any to start.

I've often derided this series' game feel thanks to some deflating experiments with Assassin's Creed II and Black Flag, but as someone who has great enjoyed quite a few games that get compared to this franchise (particularly Sony stalwarts Ghost of Tsushima and Horizon: Zero Dawn) it seemed prescient I give the more modern iteration of the franchise the old college try.

And if it weren't for God of War: Ragnarok's iminent release, I very likely would have sank 80 or 100 hours into this brutally pointless video game just the same as Andromeda. Aided by podcasts and an imitation Siwan blade from an incredibly random side quest that happened to result in one- or two-hit kills for all of my time with it, Origins proved quite an efficient timewaster.

While wasting my time, I marveled at all the ways the Ubisoft conglomerate could craft settings that hinted at individuality while always, inevitably succumbing to the soulless nature of crowdsourced art assets. Noticed hints of why many critics in 2017 praised Bayek while also being constantly surprised by the dumb, Pathfinder Ryder-like grin he'd be struck with. Even wilder, not only is the pacing remarkable in its inscrutability, the rubric applied to nearly every story beat of this game appeared to be "vague implications". These are some of the most poorly directed cutscenes I think I've ever seen, at least in a game that seems to consider its story worth telling. Beyond that, it also contains one of the most abstract final chapters possible, with so many surprise new villains, blatant "hey, we're makin' a video game over here!" effort to cram new mechanics in at the last second I've been through in a long time.

But in the grand abstract, no matter the unrelenting pop-in and awful looking far off landscapes (Red Dead Redemption II came out the following year, somehow) this game could stumble into looking beautifully unique. You also, at some point, just had to commend the skunk works teams that were tasked with foisting Final Fantasy XIV lore onto unsuspecting audiences, or telling entire, multi-part stories of rebel leaders consumed by an unending thirst for vengeance that many players will certainly never see. If this game had been stripped entirely of its main plot - no matter how fun it is to see Bayek and Aya's horny asses reunite over and over - and focused solely on the Desert Cop aspects...the game wouldn't have been any less boring, and I suppose it would lose a certain bonkers quality that can be charming for how delirious and jaw-droppingly bad it can often be, but it could've just been this weird chore simulator wrapped around a super basic combat system and a unique, insanely large setting.

This game left almost no impression on me other than a better understanding of why this franchise is so huge and why I so many other games that have learned from it better. I played it for nearly 50 hours. Oh well.

Well, throw this one on the special list of games I never gave much thought to only to fire it up via Playstation Plus and lose my damn mind. Essentially a Dan Brown novel in video game form, I really was not expecting this (often gorgeous) budget mashup of Uncharted and Brothers, let alone a really enjoyable rendition of that. I'd always pictured a lot of walking slowly with a torch through catacombs while silly looking rat hordes stream all around you.

And there is plenty of that, but again the rats actually look pretty comical the moment you get past the horror of the scenario itself so horror prudes like me can easily endure it. Likewise, it was quite surprising to realize how much depth there is to the combat system here (the devs name drop The Last of Us rather than Uncharted, and its influence is perhaps most evident in the crafting system) considering how basic the actual mechanics are. While the A.I. is dumb as rocks and the stealth gameplay is pretty boilerplate, by the mid-game there's a decent amount of immersive manipulation more serious gamers can dig into if they want.

While I chose not to hold any of the following against the game, it's worth noting that A Plague Tale often animates with all the charisma of an early PS3 adventure game, imagining a world where motion capture technology never got better than the original Uncharted and faces stalled at Final Fantasy XII. Despite the high stakes and heavy focus on blood bonds, it's impossible to think of a single moment I was truly invested in any of the characters. Imagine a movie with an incredibly evocative production designer helmed by a B-movie director and stocked with community theater actors and you've got the gist of Innocence's vibe.

I found that really worked for this game, though, much in the same way Vampyr took my world by storm during COVID lockdowns in 2020. There's so much ambition on display, particularly in the eye-opening sequences that center on the aftermath of the Hundred Years' War, its many presentational flaws are charming rather than anything to really get unnerved about. The pace is absolutely breakneck, as well, and does an incredible job of switching up what the player is doing from chapter to chapter. What really won me over were the quieter moments, of which there are plenty; while I love Naughty Dog's games, they're undeniably guilty of feeling pressured to throw some game in their game when they could probably let a dramatic moment breath a little more and Asobo Team is pretty good about that here.

Speaking of Asobo Team, it's an absolute riot to look over their gameography. After years toiling on Pixar tie-ins and ports, suddenly they find it in them to openly state they're out to make "The Last of Us meets Brothers", meticulously detail the atrocities of medieval warfare and throw in a little rat magic along the way. Oh: they'll serve up a side of Microsoft Flight Simulator while they're at it, I guess. Truly bonkers development for the Frenchmen and good on 'em.

I found that some of the script's weaker moments were exponentially improved by switching the voice over to French as well; I can only imagine how weird it would've been to hear someone actually say "skidaddle" as the English sub suggested. It's a shame there wasn't a way to keep the Britons speaking in English while the protagonists spoke French but another ultimately minor quibble.

Again, can't really stress enough that I scorched through this in a single, insomnia-addled sitting and had a hell of a time. Unfortunately, the game does seem to have some issues on PS5 and perhaps the latests XBoxes as well, as myself and multiple others have experienced a penultimate combat scenario that's absolutely borked. The auto-aim starts failing (manual aim, at least on consoles, is absolutely useless) while some ranged enemies have an exceptional ability to clip Amicia (and this is a one-hit kill adventure!) which makes for a definitively demoralizing experience. There's only about a half-hour of game left after this moment, but considering that half-hour contains one of the most comical final bosses I've ever seen it would've been nice to be able to play it myself.

But after a solid dozen or so attempts I just couldn't take it anymore. Besides, I'd had such a good time with this game for free that I'd paid full price for its sequel a few hours earlier, and it'd just unlocked on my dashboard. The marathon continues.

If you play a bunch of these sorts of games, I can see how plenty of my minor issues could become glaring flaws. Aside from the initial environment, the combat arenas are pretty aggressively hard to get a read on and that's often compacted by enemies that have imprecise animations and/or hitboxes. Likewise, the cult simulator side of the game hints at a lot of interesting ideas before, much like its feel-good cousin Spiritfarer, seeming to try as hard as it can to obfuscate how much time you're wasting trying to maximize cult efficiency. While I've admittedly played just a handful of either type of game - more combat than homesteader, also - I can see that neither half of this game is a definitive example of the form.

But the soundtrack is killer, the writing is often just clever enough, there's something fascinating about the game's commitment to feces as a resource (not since Conker...) and more than anything the art style throughout is undeniably immaculate. Because the rogue-like half only ever wades in difficult waters and the cult building half is kind of inconsequential overall - if you want to become an OP little lamb as quickly as possible it's got a rhythm to it, but otherwise the stakes are quite low - Cult of the Lamb is the weird, comforting sort of game that spends five or six hours piling concepts and mechanics on top of you only to be totally cool with you ignoring or forgetting most of it.

In a year that seems to be full of games that have their One Big Thing - and that Thing often being "a shit ton of bugs" (worth noting: it took a few patches for console versions to get optimized) - it makes sense Cult of the Lamb stood out late in the summer. While the game falls short of each expressed ambition save "look real good", the advanced weapons and later bosses are just neat enough that the game remains compelling for the 15-20 hours you'll sink into it.

That's not even entirely fair: Cult of the Lamb's actual secret weapon is its heavy contender for soundtrack of the year, a tidy collection of bangers and vibes that keep the momentum up through each consecutive loop. Sometimes I found myself spending another half hour with the game just to get another couple tracks in as much as advance the game itself.

Low-key best shit: all the supporting characters serve very specific functions and never move from their one spot, yet all of them are memorable without feeling tied to their gimmick - no small feat when most of their dialogue is some kind of riff on said gimmick.

After spending much of the past two years wandering through the endless sprawl of the Yakuza Remastered Origins bundle, let me just start by saying it was a real thrill to finally return to the Kamurocho of Yakuza Kiwami 2, awash in neon lights, overwhelmingly high resolution advertisements that hint at a Metaversian confluence of real and fake, full of dense infrastructure and a far too common propensity for truly epic brawls. I'll come back around to that latter bit, because much to my surprise I wound up enjoying the combat far more than any previous Yakuza game. In a game that spotlights combat as often as Judgement does (the street fight slider feels as much as 50% more aggressive than those PS3 titles) that's no small thing.

In my roughly 30 hours with the game, however, I found that Ryu ga Gatoku Studio had either lost some of what made Yakuza's unique blend of melodrama and slapstick cohere or, even worse, found a clever excuse for a dumping ground to wrap various mini-games cut from the Yakuza series over the years and have a little fun with it. About half way through the game I'd realized that the latter might actually be a more charitable take than the former. If that's confusing, think of it this way: through one lens, Judgement is a fun brawler you mostly ignore in favor of side stories and awful mini-games. Through another, it's like listening to a b-sides collection in an anthology, and that's not so bad, right? Who'd listen to the b-sides if they didn't already like the band to begin with?

Judgement really doesn't do itself a ton of favors off the bat, though. For one thing, Yagami is a total mess of a character. At his most abstract, he's essentially a blend of two classic Yakuza protagonists packaged in a mashup of a couple previous side characters. The honor of Kiryu married to the aloofness of Akiyama while slipping in and out of the cop world like Tanimura via the underworld lens of Shinada. There's a version of this on paper that works, but in practice he's a nearly impossible character to get a read on. I was always pretty taken aback by the Yakuza franchise's ability to keep introducing new characters that were neither caricatures nor hard to find the motivation for, but Yagami is kind of a generic superhero archetype. His motley crue of buddies feel similarly market tested, particularly the mysterious masked teen that's been ubiquitous for half a decade at least. Contradicting what I'll argue later, at least the yakuza dudes continue to contain layers that feel as personal as they do burdened by plot or screenwriting.

Some could argue, probably rightly, that Kiryu has the same problem as Yagami generally. But if Kiryu at his core is always wound tight and prepared to spring back to a stoic scold at any moment, Yagami seems too prepared to adjust to the moment. Sometimes he's a hard drinking party guy, sometimes he's practically a clergyman, and his role in the story stumbles around in much the same way. If you're the sort of person that every so often while playing a Yakuza proper found themselves wondering, "why is this character being allowed to live right now?" - keep in mind that the yakuza of Yakuza spend about as much time discussing the operational restrictions of suboordinates as they do actually killing people - Judgement can only amplify that effect.

This is where I spend a little time talking about all the ways that even such a subtle shift as yakuza protagonist to civilian protagonist upsets the balance of the franchise a bit. Whatever the reason may be, Judgement is by far the horniest game in the series. The side missions are full of stalkers, perverts and outright predators (remember, in Kamurocho stalking is a kind of clumsy, nerdy behavior but not actually that worrying) while a key plot point of its middle third involves a She's All That sequence surprisingly had the potential to be more than a "wow, she took her glasses off" trope but air balls the hell out of the shot. All too often are conversations about sexual abuse and coercive sexual conduct met with a comedy soundtrack, or a camera panning up and down the female body, or just otherwise inundating the game.

The Yakuza series has always had a problem with that stuff, but it was a problem that it seemed to be commenting on within Japanese subcultures as a whole. While never outright excusable, these moments were sparing in the grand scheme of each game and the joke was always on the perp. Somehow, in 2019, that no longer always feels like the case, which is what makes it so shocking when you spend a brief mid-game sequence playing dress up with a friendly, helpful, named cast woman like a child's doll only to then inhabit her as she walks down the street, gawked at and cat-called on the way to the next waypoint.

It's simple, and the second time the player is put in this character's shoes neither the effect nor the scenario is nearly as surprising, but as I'll keep exploring this is a game that could've really been onto something if it had just focused more on its core competencies: small claims cases and sexual lunatics.

While it makes sense that a private eye would come across, or be asked to uncover, plenty of lewd moments in the Kamurocho underbelly, there's something about the frequency of it here, let alone the sloppy way most of it is played for laughs rather than any real cause for concern, that exposes Judgement's main flaw: the involvement of the Yakuza at all. As it turns out, when you aren't approaching the streets of Kamurocho from the perspective of a shot-calling wiseguy a lot of these smaller tales from the common people being thrust into the spotlight makes it all feel weird in a bad way rather than a little lark.

Similarly, while the yakuza characters allow for the game to track similar plot details as, well, every Yakuza game in the series excluding Zero and Kiwami and go all the way to the top of the political food chain...it doesn't allow for the player to really get intimate with another side of Kamurocho life in the way this game often suggests. From its "previously on..." stylized recaps to the shockingly dense business and hospitality districts, heavy emphasis on getting to know your local service workers and of course Yagami's position of P.I., Judgement teases a ridiculously enticing pivot for the franchise and it's a real shame RGG either didn't see it the same way or couldn't bring themselves to take such a risk.

And look, I get it. For all its groundings in the real world, the Yakuza franchise is all this studio knows and in many ways the comic book characters that help them get away with the luxurious bullshit they're known for. But from the chapter structure to the severe reduction in the dramatic needs of the protagonist, I had this strange feeling of being let down the more interesting the story became. Initially I figured this was because the story itself was, however relatively ambitious for a video game, quite stock for a noir-adjacent corruption story - though the Resident Evil reference was appreciated when it barged in. Near the end of the game I'd realized that what I was actually bemoaning was that Judgement hadn't fully invested in that zoomed in vision of Kamurocho nor the gimmickry of its nods at procedural television. Who wouldn't want a series of Murders of the Week from RGG Studio, their sort of take on LA Noire's desk-based progression?

Let me step back from that train of thought a bit, because this was ultimately a game I quite enjoyed. In the most basic ways, Judgement knows its way around making a combat encounter shine in their next-gen Dragon Engine. Whether its offices full of desks, chairs and other ephemera, street fights surrounding by glass for the breaking or backyard brawls with water features to duel in, creating moments on par with some of the cutscenes' more clever set pieces has never been easier. Of particular note is a fight at the batting cages in which characters can spill out into the parking lot or a few areas with fish ponds. It's never quite as polished as what you'd see in a Rockstar game from an experiential standpoint, but then Arthur Morgan never leapfrog threw a street thug through a plate glass window like a ragdoll Shane MacMahon, either.

As I got into the later stages of the game I definitely was grateful to have purchased some kind of special edition during a PSN sale, as I had a trio of flaming fists, explosive ground pound and perpetual healing extracts that never left my side from the very beginning. I suppose this means I never fully explored the fighting system, but that's always been my M.O. in these games. My experience with the weapons manufacturers, for example, basically begins and ends with the side quests that unlock them. That was again the case here with the medicine man, but I can see some potential in that whole system being fun in a more concrete, less excessive aspect than the arms of previous games. It's the most Game Ass Game concession the Yakuza franchise has ever made to players who might find its core brawler both too simple and too cheap. Especially if you're in my position and are granted a number of infinite stones that may as well by cheat codes. Anyway, back to the complaining - Kamurocho is showing its damn age.

For what it's worth, Judgement doesn't always look at its play space the same as a Yakuza game would. Several of its missions amount to little more than going to work, heading to the bar for a little R&R then heading home for bed.
Similarly, the side missions are often far lower stakes than those presented in the Yakuza series, to the point that many of them simply revolve around frequenting coffee shops or setting characters up on dates (in a strange twist, you usually don't even accompany the clumsy teens to offer your virginal advice about flirting). Unfortunately, for me this exposed that I've spent the better part of five years indulging in this game world and yet I could turn off the GPS and get you from Armadillo to Valentine in Red Dead Redemption faster than I could Shellac to Ebisu Pawn. A slight exaggeration, but adding all these interiors and businesses into the same square mileage more often just makes this confusing rather than feel more lived in. Yakuza characters may wield fascinating turns of phrase, often strange day jobs and at the top level some of the best variety of face scans in all of gaming, but even in 2019 nobody could excuse them of being all that emotive and the city itself flows from that core robotic state.

Which is to say that by nodding to the bigger ambitions of the modern world's open world game designs, whether that's a sprawling map, a quest log that never quits updating, zoomed in and slow paced interior infiltration types of missions or just hanging out on a date, playing a Yakuza release that's practically contemporary for the first time one can't help but notice how slapdash its approaches to these open world staples is. Likewise, Judgement's base charms can't really distract from the fact that RGG have never so much as teased they could crack the code of narrative pacing in a world where the player could just as easily fuck off and play Fantasy Zone for five hours. Especially in the last three acts of the game, there are all kinds of urgency stacked onto the player from death sentences to members of the party's own desire to see things end quickly. The cumulative effect is a game that feels like its trying to do a little too much both in the stereotypical way all modern video games do but also simply a project of this scope and story of this ambition.

The thing that really, really hurt my time with this game however and had me worrying this might be the absolute worst RGG product I've played was Judgement's pacing. While this is clearly a procedural at its core - again, see the "previously on..." segments and first ten or so hours of the game - the bulk of its storytelling is quite serialized. Unfortunately, this means roughly 65% of the conversations you'll be watching in this game are little more than recaps of the information you'd acquired before. Accompanied by a ripping, endless heavy rock guitar line, most of Judgement's most fraught scenes are little more than Yagami and a character he went on an adventure with explaining what they did and learned to the other characters who weren't there, spiraling their way towards an idea for what to do next. Not only that, the player character often interjects with a blue-coded inner-thought that both accidentally implies the player is an idiot who can't follow along AND stops the flow of conversation until you press X alongside an annoying chime noise.

Quick tangent: musical cues are an entire other gripe with this game, whatever positives the soundtrack might have to offer is far outweighed by the looney tunes way its spare number of themes are employed throughout the game. It's so rarely comedic, or dramatic, that the times they do feel sympatico with the cinematography it feels accidental. This chime, likewise, highlights a pointless aspect of the game that in attempting to be "detective-y" just slows things down. I won't even get started on the whack-a-mole interrogation or crime scene investigation scenes, let alone the dreadful tailing (scored by the game's standout track no less, a beautiful little acid jazz cut reminiscent of Final Fantasy VIII's Deling City theme among others) sequences that do little more than insult everyone's intelligence and suspension of disbelief.

If this seems like a lot of complaining, it's only because Judgement has made a bunch of problems for itself at the exact same time that it solves the franchise's longest running flaw. The combat is still mindless, of course, but it seems ready to accept that and stop throwing enemies with specific attack patterns, cheap weapons, aggravating special tactics or any other cheap bullshit at you. We're a long way from the Blockuza meme of Yakuza 3 and while I'm quite sure there are those who wish Judgement weren't so easy to mash your way through I'm personally ecstatic. Y'all mad men and women can have your Amon pit fights; I just wanna mash my way to the same basic EX move cutscenes for dozens of hours and watch a soap opera on the side.

Finally, generic as a quality doesn't necessarily condemn a story, and Judgement comes out the other side just fine on that front. When suspicious characters aren't telling you the full story of a photo you and your friends already sussed the details of 10 minutes prior, it doesn't necessarily matter that Judgement is using the same story agriculture as previous Yakuza games. There's just enough of a sense of audacity in the fire at the center of it all that, for whatever reason, the incessant pauses to explain why a bad dude isn't all that bad, really, other than how bad he is of course that the core charm of the franchise can still shine through. I liken it to boys playing with new action figures - sometimes there is a bit of Marvel-esque creep into these characters, especially Sugiura and Kaito, that feels threatening - in the same corners of the room they always have.

Clearly I found much - MUCH - to dislike about this game, but I also found its 30 hours to be pretty breezy and cordial, completed in about three weeks despite everything weighed against it. Sometimes, I couldn't help but wonder if I hadn't been making my way through this series in as short a time as I have if some more of that RGG charm could've made up for the complaints.

As it stands, it was nice to spend some time in this world that wasn't quite as intensely splayed out as Yakuza 4 or 5 and also take a break from some of the more byzantine paths Kiryu and Co.'s lives have gone down. And I can't stress enough that however annoying the frequency of the combat can be in this game, the fact that the GAME bit of a Yakuza game is the most successful aspect is a minor shock and went a good way towards Judgement not joining Yakuza 3, or in some ways 4, as a bad game propped up by compelling characters and bonkers translations. Judgement is sparingly good, often bad, and far more mediocre in the middle than you'd like...but this is still a world in which you'll have an actual belly laugh every hour or so. That's not nothin'.

And for what it's worth, I'm not even necessarily opposed to a beelining of the NG+ save with the English voice acting at some point, just to see how that feels in a Yakuza setting.

But it'll probably be quite a while before I look into whether Lost Judgement sorted all of this out. I heard something about a high school...

Just needed to log that I love the idea of a huge Japanese man yelling "Hey, where's my spaghetti?!" too much to research whether that's a localizer's creative license or not.

About a week later...now that I've finished the game, the months-in-the-making follow up to my Yakuza 2, 3 and 4 reviews!

I entered Yakuza 5 with a strange feeling. I'd enjoyed my time with Kiwami, Zero and Kiwami 2 so much that I screamed through Yakuza 3 and 4, the latter of which was clearly intended to devour my free time. Thanks to some very compelling narrative choices, some unfortunately obscured side stories and the inevitable awkwardness of moving forward with a world that was jumping backwards in time mechanics wise, Yakuza 3 and 4 had not been the most enjoyable experiences. If Zero can rightly be pointed to as the catalyst for renewed Western zeal for the franchise and the Kiwami entries essential if modest modernizations of desperately old action games, Yakuza 3 and 4 function primarily as stark reminders of how exactly such a charming, idiosyncratic world of sexual deviants and back-tattooed soap opera stars could struggle for so long to find footing outside its home territories.

Yakuza 5, then, is a much needed balm for the marathoning first-timer. It combines many of the aspects that make those middle chapters as thrilling as they are infuriating with many, many hints of the strides the team at RGG Studio would make five years later with Zero. The result is a game that might have the least impactful story implications of the entire franchise, functioning mostly as a greatest hits mashup of Kiwami 2's baffling convolution, 3's dedication to the bit and 4's 50-piece puzzle brand of "so simple you'll never guess it" interweaving tales.

That might not sound appealing on its face, except that Yakuza 5 is such an effective time waster in part because each character is gifted with side stories equal parts absurd and heartwarming and an absolute litany of mini-games to play, all of which would be embarrassingly simple if not for the plucky charm inherent to this world. This was the first time in nearly two years plugging away at this franchise that I felt back in that old familiar groove of becoming so invested in Kiryu's street racing and taxi cab adventures, or Haruka's quest to refine her femininity for the stage, or Shinada's volcanic commitment to the bit during a multi-hour subplot involving nothing more than the batting cages that far more than half my time with Yakuza 5 was spent blissfully unaware of the entertainment industry chaos unfolding over in the shadows.

The cast is also far better realized than the last go around, even if the core story is practically more of a superfluous metaphor about the power of love, inspiration and ambition (or, y'know, "dreams") than an actual story. Kiryu's isolation feels both more earned and more sad than his time on the orphanage, Saejima once again goes to jail before once again mostly being sidelined by his own, strange place in this world but almost anything is better than convoluted rooftop and sewer navigation, Haruka lets the player explore this world free of conflict for once, Akiyama remains this period of Yakuza's secret, throbbing pulse while Shinada is maybe my favorite character yet in the franchise.

Scorching hot take, I'm sure, but there's something about the approach to his character that's oddly refreshing. He's not honor obsessed the way Kiryu or Saejima are, nor is he a swaggering rags to riches type like Akiyama. Instead he mostly plays as the embodiment of Akiyama's fantasy of himself, ceaselessly funny, charming and self-deprecating without the infinite piggy bank to get himself out of any jam. Thus he actually is a man of the people, and lets the player sink into Yakuza's universe as just another player in the game, rather than some legendary Dragon or other God-like figure taken human form.

All in all, while Yakuza 5 at times can certainly feel debilitatingly pointless - I started this game on Christmas Day, 2021 and beat it nearly a year later in no small part because I just couldn't bring myself to care about Saejima's adventures in bear country (I finished Part 2 on August 26th, 2022 and the rest of the game less than a month later by comparison) - as a total package it's a vital return to form for a franchise most Western players are likely experiencing in this backwards fashion wherein the game is actually signaling that the best is yet to come for this charmingly singular franchise.

But I suppose even that is fitting - what franchise other than Yakuza could find players in a position to celebrate signs of better and better things to come, only to remember those better things happened as many as five long years ago and you've already experienced them. Oh well! Now to decide whether I go play the child rearing simulator I apparently have to look forward or detour into the police procedural offshoot, Judgement, I suppose.

I don't think this game is worth expounding on too much, and I'll not bury the lede there. That said, I also think it's a perfectly perfect showcase for what the Playstation brand can bring to a Gamepass competitor. Who's to say if they'd entered this sort of market earlier that a game like As Dusk Falls, about as Sony Game a Sony Game that's ever Sony Game'd, would have wound up an XBox exclusive?

Stray fronts a lot of prestige tropes. It's got a Radiohead-esque soundtrack (and lowkey, this is by far its most impressive feature) paired with a telescopic portrayal of Final Fantasy VII's post-cyberpunk aesthetic and an exploration of very NieR: Automata-like ponderings about the nature of humanity and what role robots, let alone nature and the habitats people build to shelter themselves from said nature, have to play in a world without said people.

Stray gets a lot of mileage prior to playing the game out of being a game in which one embodies a cat; if the player owns a cat and just as importantly is predisposed to filming everything on a smartphone rather than simply chuckling at it in their own reality, it seems those players and even more importantly those cats really enjoy hanging out with Stray's unnamed cat.

I'm not a cat pervert, unfortunately. I didn't find it cute that there were nearly a dozen places to take a nap in this game, seemingly half as many places to scratch aimlessly as there were bosses in Elden Ring (spoiler for Elden Ring, or Stray, or both: half the bosses in Elden RIng is still a LOT of scratching stations), some truly pointless (other than a trophy!) interactions with balls of yarn and basketballs (basketballs?) and then the semi-Army Men/Toy Story gimmick of exploring spaces designed for 6-foot adult men as a tiny cat.

And when the cat bit comes last, it's a lot easier to laser focus on how simple the actual game design is. I like to jokingly refer to licensed character action games of the PS1 era that are truly terrible like Garfield's Lasagna World Tour when I get to the nuts and bolts of this game (that game in particular because, y'know, cat memes) but I'm also fairly serious: aside from an appreciably dense if not remarkably challenging Slums area, lose a few hundred thousand polygons here and a number of clever signposting techniques in level design there, Stray is a PS1 game in a 2019 game's clothing, released in 2022.

That sounds insanely harsh to me so I'm sure it'll read practically absurd to others, but I only fixate on that so I don't dwell too much on the fact that - brace yourselves - this is NOT a cat game. It's a game about a tiny floating robot companion with a complicated understanding of its own past and the context within which it can translate any language, open any door and manipulate any form of cybersecurity. I guess I won't spoil exactly why that is, though I admit that's in part because the game doesn't actually think about it too much either.

Anyway, I said I wouldn't pontificate much yet here I am, so: you control a cat in this game, but the cat could just as well be an extremely agile possum and nothing would change other than how cute it is. It vaguely points at some post-apocalyptic themes without any curiosity about what that means for the cat. It's a game all about the little robot friend, peppered with mostly fetch quests and the occasional stealth or chase sequence that in either case mostly imagine what it'd be like to play a vertical Crash Bandicoot level from behind the protagonist. The actual novelty of the cat perspective begins and ends with "this avatar looks like a cat."

Which is to say, again, it's a perfectly good pilot program for what Playstation can offer players as an incentive for their upgraded tiers of Playstation Plus. The puzzles are simple enough that you feel clever completing them on first go, while the art direction, music (the music!) and rudimentary inventory system keep the video game player's lizard brain demanding their fingers push them forward to seeing and hearing more of what Stray has to offer. Other than a really rough start (I wholeheartedly rejected the discovery of the little robot friend) in the first hour, I did the other four in a single sitting. That was nice, having the achievements pop as consistently as they did and the game progress as quickly as I could manage.

That bit was refreshing, I suppose. I liked feeling nostalgic for the sort of gameplay that was undeniably mindblowing when 3D environments were brand new. But the cat perverts really need to chill out - as I said at the top, this is not a cat game. Don't get played.

A quite begrudged rating. Trek to Yomi is a game whose strengths only get clearer and stronger the deeper into its hell you descend, yet this is accompanied by combat that betrays the game's messages as often as fortifies it. Like Ghost of Tsushima, Yomi seems eager to grapple with ideas about what it means to desire personal strength and revenge over coming to terms with what got you there in the first place...only most of its gameplay leaves the player feeling less like a samurai and more like a mere rice farmer gripping two hands to a blade.

With what seems like two dozen potential combos at your disposal, even on the Story difficulty (notably, this is the default option when starting a new game) there are several notable and confounding difficulty spikes. The player is never quite sure whether these spikes are due to the actual encounters, either, because the combat never feels better the more capable you become, nor more complex, honestly.

This makes for a game that doesn't offer much satisfaction as a game most of the time. The environment design is fun, with many sections that feel like they have multiple paths and many of the side areas offering some of the more striking cinematography this game has to offer. And boy does it have some good looking motion photography going on here. While I could never fully square with the critics that found Ghost of Tsushima's "Kurosawa mode" laughable - from lighting to sound, it's a high water mark for filter settings in video games - all it takes is 10 or 15 minutes of playing Yomi to recognize how much classic black and white action film owes to shot composition and directorial intent.

Likewise, while an exceedingly simple concept overall - explore areas in a north-south fashion when out of combat and a west-east orientation when expecting conflict - because of a constant assault of clever foreground elements and bravura lighting arrangements Trek to Yomi simply gets more and more impressive to behold as you progress.

As someone who is often looking for games that offer a fresh perspective on how games can be designed to present and tell stories, I ultimately value this aspect of Trek to Yomi quite a bit. I also think that, however fleetingly, when the combat does click this is another reminder that the idea of a brutally efficient samurai with a sword is an underutilized starting point for combat in modern games. Sure, I may have abused turning my back to the enemy only to spin around and cut 'em down (as it seemed clear 99% of enemies on Story could never anticipate this) for most of this game, and ultimately the story is exactly what you might expect (I didn't know what "Yomi" meant, so I found the back half more surprising than Japanophiles will) so one could fiercely and rightly argue that 2/3 of this game are mediocre at best...

Again, I just love how aggressively this game nails the thing it clearly wanted to get right the most. The attempt may not make for the most fun game I've ever played, which isn't great considering the level design, brief by modern standards runtime (about five hours, give or take) and set up of the finale clearly hope to coax players into at least three runs through the game, but then even having spent about $20 on this as a Playstation owner, I feel it's worth acknowledging this is pretty widely available as a Game Pass rental and if that had been my personal investment in this game I'd be complaining about some of its flaws even less.

This isn't some "drop everything and go play this now" sort of indie, even for lovers of all things samurai or even just Playstation owners jonesing for some more swordplay and "what is honor, really" pontification two years after Ghost of Tsushima kicked the door wide open for this sort of thing. But if a large part of why you enjoy games is just seeing beautiful art that you can explore and occasionally feel cool by triumphing over a handful of mediocre gameplay moments, Trek to Yomi is quite a neat ride despite its many flaws.

I finished this game, for all intents and purposes, nearly a month ago yet have struggled to determine when and how I'd write about it. It's felt doubly weird because of how passionately enthusiastic I am about Zero Dawn, a game with proficiencies so extreme that in the four years since its release (and over two additional playthroughs) I've only felt emboldened in my take that the game was always unworthy of being "overshadowed" by Breath of the Wild, not least of which because the game is just clearly better at a foundational level.

Doubly weird because, purely on facts, Forbidden West is everything you'd want a video game sequel to be: that old thing you already liked so much made more complex and varied. More ammo types, more weapon types, more armor varieties, more types of side quests, more characters influencing and moving the story forward, more ways for the player to engage with the story in the first place, more enemy types and more variations on the common enemies you remember from the first go around...it's truly the platonic ideal of a video game sequel.

And yet there are so many moments while playing this game in which the player is encouraged to ask...why did this happen? Why is this happening? It's trivial bits, like the fact Aloy has a three-tier inventory: her "pouch" for items actively in her inventory, her "inventory" for items she can pull into her pouch from the ether while in the field and finally her "stash" which is where the items that don't fit in her inventory (or have an inventory allocation in the first place) get sent, to be collected at bases and special campsites placed throughout the world. Again, trivial, and yet it takes a paragraph to describe the solution Guerilla Games had for Zero Dawn's previous inventory, with Aloy not being able to carry an infinite amount of the crafting materials she could and would find on her journeys through the world.

Likewise, the story bloats to the point it's really hard to ever gain a feel for where one is at in the grand narrative. The game's initial Big Bad, Regalla, is met early but then can become as essential as a ghost for nearly 20 hours of gametime. Likewise, a new and seemingly immortal group of superhumans are introduced that seem aware of exactly what Aloy's goals are...only to also potentially disappear from the game's individual beats for 15 hours or more if the player is of a completionist, overpowering the player character persuasion. In the middle of it all, this lends Forbidden West a truly exciting, anything can happen and this game I'm really enjoying may never end quality, but in the rearview it's increasingly clear how distracting this is.

In the same vein, Forbidden West recognizes that many players were enthused by the original's story because of its characters firmly rooted in a previous era of human civilization. It corrects this in many ways with amazing sound design, clever conceits surrounding new and far more technologically engaged civilizations and a general boost in much of the game's incidental and minor character writing...but it also keeps the past in the foreground to such a degree that can leave the player feeling a little embarrassed for Guerilla. Never does this feel more apparent than whenever the player remembers that the quest to restore the systems keeping Earth's climate from spiraling into chaos is by far a compelling enough excuse for a sequel, and yet by the time credits roll it's entirely possible to have forgotten that was Aloy's primary objective for these 60-100 hours.

This is where I need to emphasize that Horizon's combat is still incredible, and while the skill tree can feel a bit convoluted it allows for players to find a lot of interesting ways to mold and even break that combat to suit their whims. Likewise, the new enemies can take a bit of memory jarring to figure out (prominently, the AI introduced in the DLC is producing purely antagonistic machines as a result of a corruption in its core logic processes) but are incredibly fascinating to watch animate and decompose in their fights. It is always the moment when Aloy strikes an exposed tendon, chips off a key upgrade resource, gains access to a new elemental damage or special skill that you have to take a step back and think, man, Guerilla is really gleaming the cube here.

Likewise, while the magic can certainly wear off after hours and hours of dialogue wheels, for something like 30 or 40 hours it is truly amazing the tech at work during even the most obscure conversations in this game. I'll admit that it eventually became clear that much of this animation was canned and at least somewhat (if not entirely) AI driven, Horizon represents a huge leap forward for what it means to have a character stop and chat with another in an open world video game. While undeniably front loaded with impressive interjections from otherwise inconsequential NPCs and background scene work, Forbidden West evinces a stark and necessary new way forward for players who obsessively exhaust dialogue for more world building, lore and character detail. It takes for-eeeeeever to realize each conversation is not a bespoke set of animations and camera angles, no matter whether that chat leads to the next main questline or some minor, tit-for-tat errand the likes of which video game heroes have long been tasked with in the middle of their universe-saving exploits. It's truly without peer, in the same way The Witcher 3's camera cuts and voice acting made players feel we'd moved on from the Bioware/Bethesda formula seven years ago.

And then there's just the damn art of the world itself, not necessarily surprising but so explicitly lush and unattainable at every turn that you feel a need to gawk. No matter if its a sly eyebrow raise from Aloy during a cutscene or the moment you realize chipping a piece off a machine has changed the way it navigates its environment, Forbidden West is intoxicating to watch unfold. Marry some intriguing fakery around its not-quite-real-time lighting system, many varied biomes and vastly increased verticality to that core bit of gameplay and, dude, you've got a video game that's a singular pleasure to fire up. There was a novelty to fidelity/performance modes in the initial years of the PS5, but Forbidden West makes a significant argument for how fidelity modes could eventually win out among primarily console gamers.

There's so much more to praise and diminish about this game that I feel it's important to wrap up here before I get too in the weeds, though I will summarize with a specific interest that may eventually explain why I'm sure this will be my favorite game of the year but will certainly explain why this a four-star review: in the mid-game, you're faced with a Normandy-like hub area in which you accrue trinkets, NPCs and activities that increase your engagement with the wider world. This should be pretty fucking cool, especially since there's still a scant number of games (Wolfenstein: The New Colossus comes to mind as an outlier) have figured out how to make these situations feel of a piece with their worlds. And yet it quickly begins to feel like you're checking off a number of completionist boxes, or in other words, making it so the icon disappears from beside the character's head. On the one hand you want to see Aloy spend more time with these characters, but on the other the way she's enabled to do so is one of the story's rare relapses into early 2010s structure. Which in turn opens the player's eyes to all the ways in which Forbidden West, in attempting to solve for modern open world dilemmas, either creates new ones or simply muddies the water even more.

Ah, and a number of story beats are incredulously insane. There's definitely that. But that's an actual essay about how and why video games are made, and that's not this. As long as Horizon plays the way it plays I am here for this franchise, but Forbidden West is a baffling mixture of perfect and flawed so impressed by the structure of a waffle iron it's impossible to anoint as a seminal game in the same way as its predecessor. I suppose I can't wait to see if Aloy herself can fly and shoot lasers from her hands in season 3.

This was a really strange experience for me. While I might agree that Ghost of Tsushima is a much bigger game than it had any need to be, I was also one of those people that was really grateful to have so many excuses to keep putzing around in its world. Like fellow Sony exclusives Horizon: Zero Dawn and Spider-Man before it, Ghost of Tsushima was the rare game I clicked so deeply with on a mechanical level that I found myself pushing into Hard and eventually Lethal difficulty just to get a rush.

And yet here I was, back in this game I loved pushing through Act I on a New Game + save to get to the DLC section and I was strug-a-ling on Lethal+. I knocked it back down to Medium+ and continued to struggle though at least I wasn't dying anymore. And then the DLC arrived.

One thing I've never loved in modern video games is designers' obsessions with trying to portray psychedelic experiences or supernatural phenomena. It wasn't all that novel to me even when it was novel to the industry when Rockstar got weird in Grand Theft Auto V, but in a post-Baba Yaga in Tomb Raider world it feels like it's a 50/50 shot whether an open world adventure game will turn its DLC into an internal struggle with tribal medicine designed to interrogate what it all means for the player character.

I suppose it doesn't help that, for as much as I enjoyed Ghost of Tsushima back in 2020, I never did care much for Jin. I found him flat in English and merely stout in Japanese, a strange attempt at making a sympathetic nobleman at a time when working class scrubs like me really were not in any way looking for heroes in rich boys with daddy issues. So I can't say I'm interested in this attempt to give him more depth and sympathetic layers - I'm still on the side of all the NPCs with no better name or designation than "peasant" here.

There are also few enemy types I find less interesting than the magical buffer dude that hangs out in the back and re-arranges pretty much every encounter he's involved in so that he's suddenly the most important guy in the room until he's been taken care of. This isn't just Iki Island's primary addition to the Tsushima formula, it's a part of every.single.fight in this expansion. This bummer is made more stark by their other, less "clever" but far more grounded introduction of enemy types with multiple weapons. It's stunningly obvious, but it never got old watching an enemy switch from sword and shield to spear or big sword to small blades or whatever - I wish they'd have spent more time on the significance of THAT than the shamans.

I also found the design of some of these missions just baffling. It really, really sucked trying to get that super cool horse armor (though I'm open to this being a meta commentary on the most infamous horse armor ever conceived) and during several other missions I found myself straight up confused where I was supposed to go or who I was supposed to want to kill. I can't remember how often I felt this way during the game proper, though my time with Act I this year didn't serve up any of those same feelings.

So...I'm walking away from this DLC with really weird feelings. The weirdest of which being something that I'm actually gonna worry about for at least several months onward: are the L1 and R1 buttons on the DualSense actually a little too sturdy for games designed around precise parrying? This is the first game of this sort I've attempted on this controller, and like I said I felt pretty useless on Lethal+ (despite most of my 12 hours with this game on PS5 that I'd Platinum'd over 75 hours on PS4 being spent on that difficulty) and over time I couldn't stop wondering if it was myself or the throw on the L1 that was the problem. I hate that that's going to sit with me for some time now.

So why 3.5 given all this complaining? Well, because on a pure aesthetic and gameplay level, the original game was my second favorite game of 2020. I love the animations, I love flipping between regular and Kurosawa modes (despite the game part of the game clearly not being designed with the lack of color in mind at all) and checking little meaningless tasks off my to-do list and I love, love, love sticking a sharp blade into fools (virtually, of course). The Iki Island expansion doesn't let go of any of that stuff, but it does expand on them in ways that aren't super appreciated, and that's on every front from narrative to core mechanics. It's just that the base game set such a high bar for pure fun that, despite one disappointment after another, I'm left admitting I had a real good time with this thing.

Fingers crossed the L1/R1 issue is all in my head.

This is my second time playing Frozen Wilds, as a story and gameplay refresher for Forbidden West. This also marked my third time playing through the campaign of Zero Dawn and second starting from a completely fresh save. Unlike my New Game+ run in 2019, this time I integrated Frozen Wilds into the main story, diverting to it as soon as I hit level 30 rather than being terrified of the Scorchers and Fireclaws the way I was on my New Game+ despite starting from such an overpowered position.

While certain aspects of this game haven't aged well, even in the two years since my second run - namely, there's far too many markers on the map, a lot of errands and side quests that aren't very rewarding narratively, some pretty rough facial animation during conversations and on the harder difficulties there are way more ways to get one-shot killed than you might expect - the core combat loop of Horizon is so, so, so goddamn satisfying that none of that matters. In fact, I appreciate how many junk side quests there are if only because it's another excuse to go shred some metal.

For some reason this isn't a universally beloved combat, but for me there's nothing more satisfying than setting all your traps, optimizing your outfit and weapon loadout, sneaking around for a bit capturing or stealth-killing a machine or two and then, suddenly and often without warning, cover's blown and the shit's constantly whipping through the fan. It's exhilarating in a way that never feels cheap (maybe my most disagreeable take) and often inspires a true sense of desperation I often feel held at a distance from in other hard games like, say, Bloodborne. Where a FromSoft game often feels like there's a prescription to its mechanics, so many of Horizon's encounters boil down to "good luck, good hunter" as you retry three or four different times, sometimes honing in on a particular strategy and sometimes altering it completely. The big open spaces help substantially with this, especially when you think you're in a small, intimate encounter with some huge beast only to have suddenly caught the attention of a heard of Broadheads or flock of Glinthawks because you started spamming blast bombs.

But besides all that, Frozen Wilds is an excellent DLC because it hints at a lot of different avenues Guerilla Games will likely take for Forbidden West. There are more fights with companions that have elemental affinities, often but not always in conflict with the enemies you'll be facing, which adds a neat RPG layer as well as offers a little more freedom to improvise because enemies aren't ALWAYS keyed on you. Likewise, animation and cutscene direction is notably improved from the base game despite being released in the same calendar year which should inspire a lot of hope for that side of the game in the sequel.

But more importantly, similar to legendary Mass Effect 2 DLCs Overlord and Shadow of the Power Broker, Frozen Wilds is both integrated into the main game (playing it before the major reveals of the main game will prompt Ashley Burch and Lance Reddick to have extra dialogue concerning how the events in the Ban-Ur relate to the Sundom) in smart ways but additive to the lore of the game without feeling either superfluous or 100% necessary. It's a tough balancing act, much in the same way the primary game's tone wobbles between melodrama and deeply humanistic empathy and humor without ever losing its footing, and quite a joy to experience again.

So...yea. Third time playing this game, really no reason to play a lot of the side quests other than an excuse to play more of the game...so why not dump over 60 hours into this game one more time, just because?

Absolute magic, man.

Every year I have to sucker myself into getting hyped for something heavily story-focused because there's just something about telling primarily cinematic stories through the medium of video games has always been alluring to me, going all the way back to 2002's The Getaway, an undeniably flawed game that still captures my imagination decades later.

Last Stop shouldn't have been that game this year, except for the nagging thought that this was made by the same development team that made Virgina, a 2016 release that promised Lynchian thrills married the sort of inventive art styles that always feel exciting to wander around in...only to come out the pot completely on fire. It felt like experiencing a student film in game form, so assured it was in its profundity only to swing and miss on just about every element.

Last Stop, I'm happy to report, is not that same level of highway pile up. It's got...decent writing, I suppose, some gameplay elements that feel like gameplay elements and a series of tropes mashed into an anthology that at least promises if you aren't feeling one storyline, another is just around the corner.

Funnily enough, the one thing that Virginia had going for - a striking, highly individual aesthetic - is Last Stop's greatest flaw. Removed from the heavily stylized art style and camera work, Variable State's animation work is shockingly shoddy and its framing of scenes disarmingly maudlin. Last Stop is never a thing you're happy to look at, a striking problem for any visual medium. Mediocre voice acting and writing paired with completely unbelievable human subjects who move like animatronics sucks, plain and simple, and that vibe never feels like an intention so much as lack of talent.

I got through the third act and realized I just wasn't interested enough to see this through. For what it's worth, each character's arc in each act is a crisp 30-50 minutes, so if you check out some footage of this game and aren't as off put by its look and feel as I was you can take solace in the fact that it's essentially a 15 episode TV show which makes it very easy to cut up into little bites, or binge if you're into that sort of thing.

I'm more excited for a sequel I'll likely never get to play than I might ever have been. It'll be half a decade before those of us who don't purchase Microsoft platforms or own a PC experience the burn of the Bethesda sale, but I promise I dread it all the same. That said, The Outer Worlds is very much a game of ideas in search of a thesis.

That excitement resides (resided?) as much in what I saw in this franchise as what it actually presented. That hesitation resides in what I actually experienced. While it's full of wonderful writing, uniquely interesting characters and pretty cool companion abilities (married to some truly silly mid-battle cutscenes) Outer Worlds itself felt like one big idea repeated three times to gradually diminished returns. In short: two factions disagree about a resource, but your mostly anonymous character can bring about resolution in favor of one side or the other based on your actions. There is the (not vague) anti-corporatist theme, and one of these two factions is always in some way leaning towards an anti-collectivist stance, so I imagine players often feel directed towards one decision emotionally if not functionally.

Outer Worlds would often make me laugh with a line reading from a random NPC just moments before I shook my head at a handful of consumables I collected or a garbage bin's handle of incentives to dig back into my inventory once again, only to find new items with perks and stat boosts I personally didn't want or need.

I've never been one to say it's hard to pick the interesting decision over the relatable decision, but this is a game that makes a certain working class of player really question how fun the anti-you choice would be.

And it's not just those lynch pin moments - the inventory is bland, the science weapons that present as most interesting are sometimes convoluted to collect and more often actually convoluted to use - that garnish a lovely looking and sounding explorative RPG with some less tasty flavors. Outer Worlds is one of those games in which the first 12 hours are incredible, the next eight pretty good and the final five (or so - I had 35 hours on my playtime so this is a lie) a bit of a chore. Anyone who plays this game should see ample room for improvement, but also feel gratified to experience a game that excels in the areas it excels more than most of its ilk.

I hope the best for this franchise, and feel sad I won't get to see how they expand on it going forward.

The sort of obscurist art that could only exist as a video game. I can't say that I was always having the best time - in fact, for such a simple game I recall ordering up a guide more than once - but I can say that I was always smiling, charmed and curious. Wattam hints at Katamari Damacy - which makes sense considering its lineage - without ever finding a way to bring that level of gameplay into this, but nonetheless a very approachable and charming exploration of how the ordinary and charming ought to be celebrated from time to time. I liked it quite a bit, and I think this would belong on any shortlist of "games your friend who doesn't play games should play". Especially if they like to fart and burp.

I love the way Netherrealms games play, and increasingly the way they look. I also think they are generally pretty creative about how to incentivize a single player to continue playing their games, especially compared to the only other fighter franchise I've really had any passion for, Street Fighter. Between their towers, their cosmetics, their story modes and even just the general zaniness of each fight and detail of the animations should you ever be foolish enough to log on to an online match, Netherrealms is among if not the most considerate developer of fighting games for single people with no game playing friends.

That said, WHEW is Injustice 2 a bloated and confusing mess. Like Mortal Kombat 11 it features hundreds of cosmetics that affect how and why you'll fight with a given character, earned through a literal handful of currencies (my favorite comment on a random Reddit thread asking to explain these currencies: "I assume by the lack of information in this thread no one understands?" - hoofrog) that make the whole thing idiot proof in that idiots will never penetrate its logic confidently. While baffling in execution, it's a pretty perfect encapsulation of what makes comic book properties so fun for artists AND players as there's a near endless number of looks for each character to embody.

But most of that isn't what I care about, because again I'm a solo player and more to the point I don't find the cosmetic lust all that appealing in its own right without people I eventually want to show them off to, so for me and Netherrealms it all comes down to the story mode. Coming off the heels of the original cut of Zack Snyder's Justice League, and following directly from the events of their own telling of the League's origins three years prior which was pretty strong, Injustice 2 is a whacky, ridiculous hodgepodge of ideas and half-baked dialogue that constantly floats just out of reach of cognition.

It's been long enough I can't really parse what I experienced here anymore - something about Brainiac, Gorilla Grodd (lol) and everyone flipping between being mind-controlled or not? - but I'm not sure I could have even if I'd been aware of this website and written this write-up immediately upon uninstalling the game. Looking back on the game, though, I can tell we never fully gelled: I first fired the game up on January 1st, only made it to the halfway point of the story mode over two months later while only 30% of the people who booted this game (A PS+ offering, I might add) even finished the campaign (I did so two weeks after making it halfway - I recall the Snyder Cut had dropped and I was in a Justice League fugue state). Meanwhile, so many of the other trophies are Civilization VI levels of specific and clearly designed for the hardcore player who, I guess, might've never launched the campaign in the first place.

To reiterate, I think Netherrealms has been on a real heater since rebooting the Mortal Kombat franchise in 2009 and I consider their games essentially must-buys though I often wait for a significant discount before jumping on board due to my heavy bias towards the narrative. Moments like these (and, if I'm being honest, much of MKX) make me feel justified in doing so because Injustice 2 is bizarrely uneven in execution and content despite being so clearly considered and labored over.

Are you a complete fucking idiot? Boy do I have a game for you!

As I understand, there are far more fair and involved (lol) clickers than AdVenture Capitalist, but as one of the first I was aware of and the only one I've ever played, this is my most favorite The Numbers Go Upian game of them all! One of the smartest things about it, at least on PS4/5, is that the game is able to keep track of itself while not actively launched, meaning even if I forget about this game for a year when I log back in it'll be as though I never said goodbye. Parents could learn a thing or two from this one!

On a more serious note, I've had this game running for around 63 hours - yes, 63 hours of screen time dedicated to THIS mess - and I've still not achieved the final two trophies. And there's no final trophy for the third page, Mars, at all! Those 63 hours began all the way back in 2016, years after Jeff Gerstmann had first namedropped this trash as a phone game on the Giant Bombast (helpful note: this game is actually evil, poorly made and aggressively shit on the iPhone - stay far away!) In many ways this is a scum game for losers and ought to be thoroughly detested by all.

...That said, the writing is exceptionally fun and there is a shockingly large amount of it considering you pop (in-game) achievements and whatnot every three seconds or so, while the way the bars progress from continually scaling to throbbing shafts of green really does give me the warm tinglies.

I'd recommend never playing this game, except not playing it is just as productive as playing it at a certain point, so...don't play it?