A much more welcoming experience than Ecco’s original outing, Tides of Time does away with most of the obtuseness and repetition of the original and is a much more well-rounded game for it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t help but feel rather indifferent about the overarching narrative in this one, it’s hard to top traveling 50 million years into the past with a time machine sitting in the heart of Atlantis in pursuit of the alien civilization that abducted your clan. Tides of Time will instead gently remind you at times that something truly horrible is on the horizon… but it never quite manifests in a meaningful way during the events of the game, giving you a little taste during the conclusion before leaving as quickly as it showed up.

I’m happy to say the gameplay can stand on it’s own, keeping Ecco’s base mechanics and controls from the first game and destroying whatever previous expectations you had of how high a dolphin can fly. The progression of this game is much more straightforward, focusing more on moment-to-moment platforming and exploration than it does escort missions, while also mixing it up occasionally with transformations and “3D” rail-shooter levels that echo better games but have the decency to not outstay their welcome. When its at its most ambitious Tides of Time starts to fall into the same traps of its predecessor, forcing the player to rely on dumb luck rather than presenting situations a player could reasonably get through on their first try. These difficulty spikes are less pronounced than anything in Ecco 1, but it’s unfortunate that these moments of triumph often leave the player feeling more frustrated than satisfied when the rest of Tides of Time flows so well.

I would highly recommend playing the original Genesis/Mega Drive version, the soundtrack is superb through and through; the foreboding, menacing tone of the title theme stands unparalleled among its 4th gen peers, it gives me chills just thinking about it! The game is no slouch visually either, 94’ saw Sonic the Hedgehog facelifted into a gremlin with tude' while Ecco quietly became sleeker and sexier, his sprites redone and the backdrops much more colorful and vibrant than his last gig. Easily beaten in an afternoon, I recommend this game wholeheartedly to fans of Sega and the Mega Drive with at least a mild tolerance for pain, suffering, and existential horror… that should be most of you.

This was the cherry I was playfully juggling to and fro in my mouth during my entire playthrough of Control, all but certain it would be "The Good Part"- my unwavering motivation that kept me going down the same droll corridors and an even more mind-numbingly paced expansion immediately prior to this one. Imagine my feelings when the only kind thing I have to say about AWE is that it's at least shorter than The Foundation, neither of which meaningfully iterate on the gameplay loop of the original game- instead choosing to slather additional layers of pretentiousness on top of stories that were already a few yards up their own ass. Conspicuously, Jesse Faden herself has very little to say about the events that transpire within beyond the occasional quipping that I'm convinced is just lines recycled from the base game.

Upon completion your reward is a few precious seconds of unashamed intellectual masturbation masquerading as an ad for Twin Peaks Season 3: guest starring Alan Wake... and then ear shattering silence. You are coldly thrust back into the game world as if nothing of consequence ever happened at all, left to pick up a few generic scattered upgrades left over from the last encounter. After dusting yourself off, you are free to slowly walk back to the last checkpoint so you may carry on with whatever scraps of the game you have left to consume; tragically, I had just finished cleaning out the entire establishment. I guess this gamer got his money's worth, but if the questions Alan Wake 2 seeks to answer are anywhere near as vapid as those posed by this glorified advertisement clutching to the bones of a glorified RTX tech-demo, then I'm afraid I'm going to have to pass on another course of Remedy.

This game piqued my interest from the get-go, the melding of Wizardry style exploration and Punch-Out combat combined with the raw energy of Black Knight 2000 seemed promising if not interesting. Unfortunately, this elevator pitch barely holds together past the game’s first floor, unraveling into a series of incredibly tedious puzzles interrupted by constant ""random"" encounters. In reality, each floor has 3-5 distinct sets of enemy encounters that it will eventually stitch into the fabric of your soul as the monotony of the puzzle solving is interchanged with the monotony of repeating the same encounters over and over and over. Some fights do take you by surprise the first time, but ultimately most battles will boil down to:

*1. Hold Auto Attack
2. Parry
3. Repeat*

I suppose it lived up to its Dungeon Crawling influences more than I had anticipated, but at least those had a modicum of player progression and agency that FIGHT KNIGHT desperately lacks. Your options here are limited to supers and armors that add varying levels of risk/reward to your base kit, but ultimately the clunkyness of having to completely put the brakes on whatever you were doing in the dungeon to painstakingly walk back to the hub world just to change your equips defeats any situational benefit they may have had; and frankly, what you start with by default is better than the vast majority of what you unlock.

There is no carrot dangling on a stick here to keep you going, it’s so unbelievably bland in almost all aspects, and what is there in the way of dialogue is better left unmentioned; the amount of words spent saying absolutely nothing would make a Dark Souls NPC blush. Beneath the garish color palettes and repetitive music terribly unfit for how often (and how briefly) it rears its head is an experience that is nothing short of nauseating.
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Edit 12/05: It would be remiss of myself not to acknowledge the allegations of abuse levied at Team Sorcerobe and lead developer “Boen” by a former writer on the project. Boen has chosen to respond by flooding all available avenues of information including the game’s Steam discussion forums with vitriol and rage; engaging one-on-one with parasitic individuals lusting after the latest gamer drama and indulging them in kind with unprofessional and crude attempts at generating Kiwifarms-style interest in the matter for his own sake. The Steam reviews for this game are a reflection of that behavior, where you will find no shortage of hateful jabs at sufferers of mental illness and other depraved takes on the events. This is the Fight Knight Boen wants you to see, and I will not accept any spineless calls to simply "ignore the controversy" in light of this.

Inscryption is a poly chromatic card-based odyssey that replaces deckbuilding roguelike, escape-room style puzzles, and psychological horror with a 2D adventure and poorly produced FMVs, resulting in a blood-laced ARG.

Real talk? As someone who quickly became apathetic to Marble Hornets and the flood of copycat ARGs that followed in turn I am deeply disappointed that Inscryption’s strong core it had laid out in its first act was merely a sacrificial lamb; sacrificed in service of chasing the creepypasta zeitgeist 10 years too late for the remaining 2/3rds of the game. Painfully predictable and cliché, Inscryption clumsily tells a story you’ve already heard plenty of times. Meta tomfoolery is such low hanging fruit in 2021, and it’s frustrating that Daniel Mullins would rather lampshade his own unfinished game IN UNIVERSE instead of giving it the legs it needed to run, because he legitimately struck gold with the initial foray into Leshy’s cabin. It’s tragic to me that I spent the majority of my playtime begging for it to end, because it is a goddamn feat to get me to sit down and embrace a rogue-anything. Now I am left wondering if it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.