[Written in 2020]

I can only hope that the recent popularity of all things pandemic have boosted sales for A Plague Tale: Innocence, a surprisingly fun and engrossing action puzzler. Emerging from relative obscurity, French developer Asobo Studio has crafted a respectable bleak narrative told through a number of interesting gameplay ideas that service the story in really cool ways.

You play as Amicia, a teenage girl whose peaceful upper-class medieval life is torn to shreds when Inquisition soldiers wreak havoc on her home, closely followed by a remarkably deadly outbreak of vicious rats. With their parents dead, she and her brother Hugo desperately search for refuge in an extremely hostile and deadly landscape. This is a game all about rats, be it learning how to get around massive seas of hundreds or even thousands of them, and even learn to use them to your advantage as you use the environment to direct them toward soldiers in your path. It's impressive how many of these little scurrying monsters are rendered on the screen at one time, and you'll see them greedily swarm and chew Amicia to death time and time again as you work your way through puzzles.

Amicia is far from a warrior, especially when the game starts. She is armed with a sling with which she can hurl rocks at enemies, but the weapon is slow, your ammo is always limited, and many soldiers are outfitted in heavy suits of armor and deadly ranged weapons. Often the best approach is to sneak by enemies entirely, or use the environment to your advantage. For the most part, A Plague Tale is a stealth based puzzle game with moments of harrowing action mixed in. It craftily introduces you to new ideas as your arsenal of tools expand to include various potions (with functions such as lighting fires or drawing rats to the location you throw it to). I was impressed with how the game would consistently throw new variables into the puzzles without forgetting old ones, keeping things fresh all the way through the campaign which will run about a dozen or so hours. Once you have enough tools at your disposal, the game will even offer up open-ended challenging scenarios toward the end that have multiple solutions, but will require some versatility and a mastery of your tools to scrape through. A couple of times, I was frustrated when my idea of how to get through a situation didn't work as expected because the developer had something else in mind, but those moments were few and far between. For the most part, A Plague Tale's action puzzle logic makes sense both to the player and contextually in its world.

The story is also fairly compelling. Throughout much of the journey Amicia is accompanied by Hugo, which could've been annoying but he largely stays out of trouble (usually holding Amicia's hand so that the player can control them in tandem). Amicia is an excellent protagonist, forced to take on a guardian role for her little brother despite her own fears and inexperience. Her relationship and banter with little Hugo is believable and endearing. The siblings also encounter other survivors along the way who become allies, which leads to some interesting command-based puzzles and fun moments of camaraderie. This is a really dark and quite violent story which takes some surprising turns later on, as you start to learn how the hellish plague came to be and it begins to embrace some more fantastical elements I wasn't really expecting. Since the developer is French and the game takes place in France, I played the game in its native language with English subtitles, but even through that I could sense some respectable performances all around from the voice actors (and this is a very chatty, dialogue-heavy experience).

A Plague Tale is also a surprisingly polished and good-looking experience top-to-bottom. From ornate castles to horrific battlefields to massive caves, the campaign consistently changes up the location, and when it does return to old settings the area has always changed significantly as a result of the story. I only encountered one bug during my entire experience where an item didn't load after I had died forcing me to restart a chapter (about 10 mins of progress), but the problem fixed itself on my next try. Other than that, this game is smooth as butter and really only loads between chapters.

A Plague Tale: Innocence is a really remarkable game that served to be a massive surprise for its excellent quality, especially because the game doesn't come from a triple-A studio, but is right up there with some of the best single-player offerings on the market. All signs point to a sequel in development and I'll be really interested to see where they take this fascinating new series next.

I feel like this game usually gets a bad rap in conversation with other Mario games or other platformers, and in all honesty I can see why. When you compare New Super Mario Bros. Wii to other platformers at the time, the game is very simple and plain. There isn't a whole lot here that other games haven't done, outside of how you use the Wii remote or the updated graphic qualities from the DS game. The story, like most Mario games, is no thrills, has no interesting ideas and is basically just yet another Peach rescue mission. The characters are basically interchangeable, which is a shame since having a Co-Op version of Super Mario Bros. 2 sounds fun as hell. The level designs are basically Nintendo making Mario Maker levels for their full priced game at the time. It's very, very, very easy, if you've played other Mario games, to look at this and not care. It's effectively the Foo Fighters of Mario: simple, to the point, no thrills, and just kind of a basic game.

And you'd think, with all those complaints, that I just wouldn't care, right?

Well, actually, I had a lot of fun!

See, here is the thing about video games for me. While the impact of better, more beautifully crafted video games make this feel very throw-away and plain, there is a simplistic beauty of this game, and it's one of the many reasons why I think it is a great game as well as kind of plain: it's just a Mario game. It takes the series right back to it's original intention, and creates a simple, fun, get to the end goal of interesting levels that I think makes for one of Nintendo's most refined games. Aside from the overly sensitive motion control shakes that sometimes occur, the controls are butter smooth. I feel like this kind of intuitive design in how this platformer feels to play makes this one of the most assessable video games in all of creation, letting anyone pick up, play, get frustrated but want to persevere in order to reach the goal, to get that last Star Coin, to find those cannons. Every level has a secret warp pipe that can get them coins, a Power Up, or a whole ass Star Coin, and you can feel the excitement that the developers had creating these little mini secrets in this game, just in love with the fact that this game is just simply fun. It's not just taking Mario back to it's roots in it's 2D aesthetic, but this intention is baked into the game itself; it's just a Mario game.

The music as well just adds such an upbeat personality to the game. I know it's a joke now how the turtles hit the goofy aah dance on the 'wah wah's on the music beat, but why add that if you didn't just love what you are creating? This music, while obviously not touching what came before or after, just has such a fun, lively and colorful groove to everything. I adore the melodies in World 2, the ominous Tower music, the rising tension of the Castle theme, the fact that these simple little melodies add so much happiness and joy, even in the most stressful situations. You can tell that these composers were doing a little boogie to this soundtrack when they added those little rhythmic background noises whenever you got Yoshi. Not a huge boogie, but a little boogie, and I find that lovely.

And the way it's fun just really tickles me. I would honestly consider these Power-Ups to be way more iconic then people want to admit, because these powers were built on one principle: fun. The Helicopter Mushroom feels so delightfully OP, but never in a "oh, well I'm just getting the Helicopter Mushroom and beating this game tonight" way. The Penguin suit has so much energy behind it. The Mini Mushroom, with it's slight glide, rushing on top of water, makes for some incredibly memorable moments that I feel could have been taken even further. Each of these powerups just feels so fun and exciting to use, and always feels like a slight cheat code when you get it, but it's baked into the game itself. The games challenges are baked into these power-ups, especially in the games final moments (FUCK 9-7 MAN) where it's all just up to the player. It's so fun.

And sure, it's simple, and my biggest complaints are with what the game didn't do as opposed to what it did. Because what it did do? Great fun, but dreaming of what could have also been done on top of that, as a Galaxy or a Sunshine or even a World did before obviously will lead to people saying that this is just a pretty boring release. And I don't think that's fair. Playing this game, I got reminded why I love these platformers, why I love coming home and turning on a console and trying my best to beat a level. Not because it's the most challenging thing in the world. Not because it's the most technical thing in the world. But because, at the end of the day, it's fun.

...but seriously, fuck 9-7 that level can suck my dense chode.

Forspoken, the first game from developer Luminous Productions and published by one of 2022's gaming punching bags Square Enix (deservedly so), is a new IP open world action adventure game. There is nothing particularly engaging or innovative in its design, especially in the very rough opening hours, leaving you and the character to explore a fairly bland and empty world.

Forspoken has seemingly been in development hell since it was announced a few years ago. It received several delays including twice just in the last 10 months. You would think this would of given Luminous time to fine tune the product but while the game isn't buggy in the literal sense it is very choppy and disorganized just in its movement, cutscene/dialogue transitions, and combat. Once you start unlocking different spell types and more spell options the combat does become a lot more fun, it allows there to be almost no down time and keeps the combat feeling very fast-paced. The main story only takes roughly 10 hours to beat, and the game takes probably 6-8 hours to get its footing, which you can probably see the problem with.

The story starts off very rough but manages to settle in to an acceptable if standard and predictable pattern of the reluctant hero trope. Frey initially will do nothing unless it is in direct interest of helping her escape this new land she has been transported to. Her motivations don't really change until late in the game when the twist and true antagonist of the game is revealed. I will say that the twist is handled well, but it is one of the most easily predictable twists in gaming history. Seasoned gamers will be able to easily pick up on it in the middle stages of the story.

Graphically is hit or miss, some of the vistas and environments are well done but as you get closer to things all the brightness kind of washes away. There is a lot of artificial fog that severely hampers the draw distance. Enemy design is pretty putrid here, there are some standard zombies, zombified bears and wolves, and some ugly gray/brown masses to fight. The facial animations range from decent to hilariously bad, and its just bizarre that somehow the worst facial animations are all on the main character, who's mouth just will not stay in step with the dialogue.

Overall, it was a fun 20 hour romp through a well structured but dull/standard 3rd person action RPG. Definitely not worth the full retail price.

One of the best platforming games out there. Never thought a platformer will have such good mechanics and ideas.

The tough levels are really fair and so rewarding when you finally get the flow and nail them. It also has a surprisingly good story to it. And also the music bit is good and makes you hum.

Bottom-line - Best platforming game i have ever played.

Resident Evil 7 es un excelente juego por sí solo, uno de los mejores exponentes del survival horror con una historia decente y una atmósfera magnífica. La Gold Edition es la versión completa con todos los DLCs, que son muy bien logrados y, sin exagerar, contienen segmentos que superan por mucho varias secciones de juego de la historia principal. Algunos de ellos nos llevaran a vivir momentos que suceden antes que Ethan llegue al hogar de los Baker, y los dos más importantes nos cuentan lo que sucede después, de la mano de nuestro Chris Redfield y el hermano de Jack Baker, en donde descubriremos que sucede con Zoe después que Ethan sobreviva. Se resalta el minijuego de tortura de parte de Lucas Baker, bastante logrado y que puede llegar a convertirse en un juego completamente diferente por si solo, de querer hacerlo. Si existe la posibilidad de obtener esta edición, lo mejor sería no desaprovecharla.