This review contains spoilers

Simultaneously the most unoriginal and the most original game(s) ever made, Lies of P isn't a "Soulslike" game, the term that implies awful student projects made by Full Sail University graduates, armchair game devs with zero understanding of what works and what doesn't, putting slapdash ""cel-shading"" on top of asset flips, no, Lies of P just IS a Souls game, merely by a different hand. IP ownership should never exclude participation in an ongoing design dialogue, mechanics, game feel, all of that belongs to the people, hell, intellectual property belongs to the people but most aren't ready for that conversation yet.
Some may (and do) balk at the way this game carries itself with such unearned pomp, with such cringe swagger, but as a connoisseur of unhinged media I couldn't get enough of what this game was laying down and was marathoning it for days, barely tearing myself away to eat, which is not a reaction I've had in a while

70% of this game is made up of FromSoftware, much like how 70% of Hideo Kojima's body is made up of movies they both commit the necessary social transgression of creating transformative art, but let me tell you, the 30% of this game that doesn't come from From is so wonderfully and delightfully made stranger by incorporating it into the Souls framework
Characters overexplain and exposit in ways atypical of their work, they make their motivations clear, clearly tell you where to go to help them, largely make their quests unfuckupable, and to top it all off the menu design feels like a direct reply to internet brainwormed accessibility discourse that pops up every single time From releases a new game, doing things like pointedly marking when a destination has a character that needs helping
But lest this make you think they decided to go easy on you with this one, I love the way this game innovates on From's pantheon of spectacle bosses, with Leechmonger as a modern two-phase spectacle boss and Nier Automata carnival colliding with Raiden Metal Gear being some personal favorites, when parrying a massive string of freakishly moving attacks from the second phase known as Puppet-Devouring Green Monster, it dawned on me that with the way this creature is moving and lunging at you, this game would terrify children and you absolutely should not play it around them, and when it comes to design in this context it feels like an accomplishment
Level designs aesthetically cool as hell too aside from a couple that feel like padding, the Opera House scared the shit out of me, it almost feels like they developed the game in the order you progress through the areas because it feels like there's a consistent increase in quality as you go, alpha footage from 2021 being exclusively of early areas presented largely unaltered would seem to support this
They take a bold step of making the actual process of playing the game as frictionless as possible, the edges that Dark Souls III sanded off are further sanded down, shortcuts are way up, less side paths, key items are within a stone's throw of their locks, everything is in service of relieving the mental strain of navigation and decision-making in favor of reusing the now-freed tension headroom for ramming the boss patterns straight up your ass, parry like your life depends on it because it does
There's something immensely satisfying about the way From's games cast you in the role of archaeologist piecing together 10% of a forgotten history, but there's also something satisfying about the way this game gives you 100% of recent history, you get told everything you want to know
And perfect optimization too! 4K120 and not a hint of a frame drop throughout the entire game

Despite those accessibility changes (which I must stress I don't think are better so to speak, moreso that they make the game feel tonally different in a way that befits it), my instinct is to say this game is for sickos who played all the """Soulsborkiring""" games prior though, and if that's you and you weren't feeling this game I question if we were playing the same game, and maybe we were! You might've been burnt out, but also patch 1.3 apparently improved the game design pretty substantially with clearer windup animations among other changes
I can't overstate how incredibly funny it is to graft a cynical "I'm putting together a team" "The legendary Pinocchio will return" "Everything is going according to plan Mr. President" stinger ending onto a fucking Souls game, I rolled my eyes so far into my head they looped back around, if that doesn't make you crack a smile I don't know what to tell you
And the game ending on a Crash Bandicoot 1, Sen's Fortress channeling megacastle that conveys its scale to you visually by showing you every place you had been before, while showing you in real-time the entire journey up from the beach to the very peak, you can tell they really paid attention to complaints about From's game design by making sure to end the game on a strong note, and they wait until then throw Malenichiro at you, and then two more 2-phase bosses after that
This can feel like a soulless game at times, sure, but like Pinocchio himself, the game is ensouled by the uniqueness of its soullessness, the way it animates itself in imitation of life captivating if nothing else

The writing is actually very similar to the overly-verbose nonsense time travel version of Dark Souls II that we never got (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fQYr9xTdohZfnPvh27WZR_enJfggRmjmCOxSSN50mYk/), before Shadow Tower Abyss director and later Elden Ring co-director Yui Tanimura was dragged in to clean up his original co-director Tomohiro Shibuya's mess, and you could argue "they cut that approach because it didn't work", but it's nice to see for myself why it wouldn't have worked, you know?
It wouldn't work for Souls, too off-model, but it works for this game because despite all the Bloodborne memes this game is very much its own thing and synthesizes From's work into a cohesive whole where Sekiro's parrying mechanic and Bloodborne's rallying mechanic achieve a magnificent symbiosis alongside its weird, French-inspired, forgotten mid-80s OVA energy
This game is like an overproduced April Fool's joke made real and I wouldn't have it any other way, feels like a 4.25 basically

do you remember that episode of Spongebob where the Krusty Krab gets bought out, becomes Krabby O'Mondays, and starts serving new synthetic burgers that look just like the old burgers, but once you bite into it, it's revealed that it's actually raw gray sludge that came off a conveyor belt, just painted to look like a burger from the outside

Up yours Tosa Loyalists....we'll see who cancels who!

A very hard, windingly long for the genre, story-based precision platformer with lots of celebrity cameos and a singular artistic vision from its one-man team Paul Helman, former developer on PS1 PAL-exclusive game Terracon, who describes Horace as "his life's work"
Said vision comes off as that of a British Gen X Dad whose sense of humor consists of quotes from 80s movies and who will share his weed with you, his beloved child, even though you're a year or two underage because "it's better you get it here than from some stranger"
Sounds obnoxious I know but it's a lot more endearing if you have people with some or all of those attributes in your life, give some respect to Gen X they only created the entirety of the cancelled future eternal present pop cultural landscape in which you inhabit, therefore it's okay if their sense of humor is mostly composed of "do you remember That Guy from That Movie"

It's Celeste if it was about a robot trying to attain personhood and if you accept the game on its own pretenses and check your cynicism at the door it's just as likely to make you cry, worked on me at least, yeah I said it this game made me cry, it really goes to faraway places from where it starts and achieves its objective of setting out to be a grand journey encompassing the whole spectrum of human emotion, whether it's grief at the inevitability of death, comedy at the way the main character's unshakable morality and robotic bluntness clash with the world around him, and inconsolable rage at some of these level designs, this game truly has every emotion contained within its couple gigabytes
Inspired by the 1979 film Being There, if that means anything to you, it's a coming-of-age story that starts out feeling a little childish at the start because you follow Horace over his entire life with all the ups and downs that entails, as he learns the ropes of the world like an inquisitive child would, and by the end of the game you truly feel like you were right there with him through an entire lifetime of victories and traumas
Maybe Celeste is selling the game's unique approach a bit short, its edge in this genre is that of employing lots of walking on ceilings and walls and spheres with your magical grandfatherly loafer shoes, which is always something that appeals to me, joining the small-but-honorable pantheon of such famous ceiling-walker platformers as Gravity Armor MetalStorm, VVVVVV, and of course Super Mario Galaxy, especially that game's 2D side-scrolling segments
It's also somewhat of a collectathon, with a big open-ended map focused around maximizing the fun factor of the main character's quest to cleanse the world by collecting one million pieces of junk (don't worry, there's not exactly one million item pickups)
Some people might think this game too difficult, with an obvious case of "the programmer mastered the game" difficulty, but games where you're not in a life-or-death struggle all the time bore me, so I really liked this game's difficulty curve

I think what makes this game work so much on me is the way nobody can accuse it of not swinging for the fences, it earns its characters, endears them to you despite the difficulty in taking seriously its Newgrounds-ass sprite comics-ass cutscenes and the monotone text-to-speech delivery
Everyone is given ample amounts of screentime and plenty of chronological years to grow over and when someone betrays you it genuinely hurts despite being understandable from their perspective

Some people (myself?) have interpreted the "critically mixed" (according to Normal People) film Bicentennial Man as being a trans and/or autistic analogy, whether or not that was the initial intention of the writer, and I think the same can be said for Horace
The both of them are about a character who is built different, singled-out for not looking and acting the same way as others, and an uphill decades-long battle to assert personhood in a normative society that keeps telling you you're not good enough to have that, in the process being very straightforward in how the titular android endures and is alienated by brutal systemic oppression from being part of a group that is legally designated to be less human than those making the rules

It's been a couple years since I played it (ignore where it says completed again, just wanted to leave a real review this time) otherwise I'd quote the game itself or something, but if you want a memorable existential treatise on how horrifying it would be to exist as an artificial humanoid who cannot die in a world suffused by the stench of your flesh-based loved ones' deaths, AND you want to humiliate Twin Galaxies former world record holder Billy Mitchell, then have I got the game for you

Quick go play this game while you can before it gets shut down to evade taxes

so perfectly unfinished in that PS360 sort of way to where you almost have to wonder if it's intentional
a less-smart-but-better-playing version of Binary Domain, seriously if you think this game had a cool world but failed to explore its premise you have to check that game out, the Yakuza people made it and everything
this game should've had a multiplayer mode, Devil's Third multiplayer was incredible and you should feel bad you never got to play it

from HexaDrive, the would-be Japanese equivalent to Bluepoint, artistes who brought you Rez HD, Okami HD and the year-late damage control 2.0 patch for Zone of the Enders 2nd Runner HD on only PS3 that fixed the abysmal framerate and Kojima had to personally fund as an apology, comes their very first original game
checks notes wait, wait, no I'm receiving information that their actual first original game was...uhhhh...The 3rd Birthday? the Parasite Eve game for PSP that seemingly nobody liked? poor guys, they got so critically SLAMMED that they retreated into the shadows to be a support and port studio for the next decade or so, and then their first original IP game was 2022's Voidcrisis, a "tower offense" game with mechs that has mixed reviews on Steam and looks like a visual clusterfuck, both that and this game echoing ZOE2

a decent enough successor to games like Metro-Cross and Temple Run (compare and contrast to Namco's cancelled but leaked also sci-fi successor Aero-Cross that I also reviewed), it's as short-lived as it is fast as it is free (as in free beer), featuring an exceedingly lean four short levels wherein you guide Genji Overwatch through an obstacle course, one of them being a tutorial, once you start it you may as well finish it instead of fritting about to another game in your Steam Library because if you don't care about the S-ranks you can complete it in 15 minutes
if you do care about the S-ranks add another hour or so
atmospheric-enough programmer art visuals, seemingly taking inspiration from the virtual areas in Astral Chain or Metal Gear Solid VR Missions

the title screen has such chill music that it reminds me of the eminently-loungeable soundtrack of a game they ported from 3DS to PS3, the excellent excellent E.X. Troopers, a Japan-only spinoff of Lost Planet that has since received a fan translation, the forbidden result of splicing Vanquish with Monster Hunter and the fastest most technically impressive shooting action the 3DS has to offer

oh yeah, did I mention Bright Tracer is free? and only in Japanese? fear not though, it's one of those imports that are just gameplay and soaked in tons of English text to look cool, so pretty much the only way a language barrier manifests is wondering whether you're changing from windowed to fullscreen or vice-versa

it's Unreal Engine 5 so it looks pretty nice, ran well enough on the Steam Deck OLED to look smooth, but it's pretty evident this is just a test project to get used to the engine, which makes you wonder, could they be making a proper full length original game in UE5? maybe one day we'll find out, or not

it's a weird feeling to miss the PS3 and 360 library of digital only PSN and XBLA games, but it's a feeling I have

anyway here's the URL, it's worth 15 minutes, it's FREE, might as well have it in your Steam library: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2253460/BRIGHT_TRACER/

nothing compares to the mounting sense of dread you feel when, 20 tracks into a long race, you're in first and the last track is finally due to come up, and you see the words "Next Track: Skyscrapers" or "Next Track: Milky Way"

Sony PSP3 (aka Steam Deck OLED) launch title

I already told you, I'm NOT Yakuza (2005). Are you [redacted] or just deaf?

"Any prize for Backloggd reviewers?"
Note: no prize for Backloggd reviewers.

Egomaniac's LP is far and away the definitive Kenzan translation, with everything including all sidequests being translated and having a natural conversational flair, the full translated text superimposed onto the videos themselves, like the more well-known KHsubs LP but much better
The ASMR explanations of actual Japanese feudal history by an expert are a welcome bonus and genuinely made me feel like I learned something

https://lparchive.org/Ryuu-ga-Gotoku-Kenzan/

Playing this game with his LP on a second screen and pausing to sync up with the cutscenes is the best way to play this game and I got a lot of enjoyment out of it
What an immense amount of effort for something only a couple thousand people have appreciated after 10+ years
Reward his efforts and treat yourself to the best translation of this game that will probably ever exist

Great characters too, Sasaki Kojiro (the original Sephiroth!) will strike the fear of God into you and Marume Nagayoshi steals the screen every time he makes an appearance
Miyamoto Musashi (alias Kazumanosuke Kiryu) offers a compelling view into an alternate reality in which Kazuma Kiryu has a sex drive
The masters over at the Houzouin are more compelling than a lot of characters that were introduced in the other PS3 Yakuza games

If you're a fan of this series you're missing out if you don't play this, go to LParchive/Youtube, sync up those cutscene subtitles on a second screen when a cutscene starts and go to town

I went through this series in release order but played this after Dead Souls and before 5 because the anniversary montage in the Dead Souls credits showing beautiful cutscene cinematography from this game made me feel like I was missing out
And I was missing out, it's a great game and despite Yakuza 2 having insane production values and feeling like an excellently written movie that actual people would watch willingly, Kenzan was the breakout moment that ensured Yakuza would have more cultural staying power than Urban Reign or Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance

As many have said this game will likely never get translated officially because a significant amount of the plot involves the implication that Haruka has been sold into slavery and you have to earn back her freedom, and at least once you will have to beat the shit out of someone infatuated with her
But this game was set before the turn of the first millennium and I felt like it did a tasteful job (for a Yakuza game) of empathizing with the women of the Tsuruya while not wallpapering over the historical reality that women did not have personhood in the Edo period
I don't know, I guess they could probably make it work in English if people wanted it bad enough, but that's the "Michael Jackson Sonic 3" "Beatles references in Earthbound" word on the street reasoning that people provide for the lack of a translation and who knows if that's real or if it'll ever get resolved

So don't hold out, if you're a fan of this series it's about time to boot it up, and if you play through in release order starting with the PS2 games like me, slot this one in-between Yakuza 2 and Yakuza 3 and you'll be glad you did, it has sidequests that tie into some from Yakuza 1/2 somehow, bespoke mechanics in the classic PS3 engine that would never reappear in a modern setting, and the PS3 era Yakuza games call back to this one enough to where it'll enhance your enjoyment of those later games, most notably one of Yakuza 5's locales is set in the modern-day Gion, where Kenzan was set over a millennium prior
And they do bold stuff in this game that they wouldn't be able to get away with using Kiryu because Kiryu is too on-model now, too manicured as a character
tl;dr: good game worth the trouble of playing in a kind of unnatural way, as opposed to not playing it at all, if you're hARDCORe like me it beats the hell out of not playing it

look up this game and look up Castlevania Judgment, honest to god they play and control identically and I'm not finding anyone else online mentioning this, what madman thought it was a good idea to clone that game

This review contains spoilers

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

~ Philip Larkin, "This Be The Verse"