Oh, so suddenly we're all against women's wrongs? They truly hate to see a girlboss winning and they love to see a girlfailure losing. We should probably do something about the Catholics though. I'm sure the debate about this has been very civil. Love to sit down with big hot cup of coffee to sip loudly while reading any history book on this.

With this and Misericorde, I might be really into nun based horrors, but with very specific presentation. Its too easy to miss the mark, and this really threads the needle. Things that haven't thread the needle for me:
- Sister Holiday Mysteries. Love the idea of a mean punk mystery solving nun, but the noir detective staple of "stumbling into problems and accusing the wrong person" feels like such shit when your character seems to care so little that she's ruining the lives of kids and coworkers.
- Lucifer Within Us: cyberpunk religious story just kind of sucks with its just completely uncritical about the church at all.
- coworker's personal published novel. Self-insert fights sin with a sword. Extremely embarrassing.

Nun dramas that have worked for me:
- this
- Misericorde
- Sound of Music

One day I'll figure out the pattern here, but tonight isn't that night.

"more of the same but greater" would be an accurate description of Spider-Man 2, but that's not a bad thing if you ask me. Unless you didn't like the first two games for w/e reason, SM2 is an easy sell, because almost everything to love from the previous games is there, but with so much more new cool stuff.

The worst part of these games, at least for me, is the inherent nature of the triple A open world formula; spending time just transiting from point A to point B while getting distracted by activites scattered all around the place to give you some small dopamine hits when you complete them is a design philosophy i don't really vibe with, and i think the SM games are the only ones of that kind i actually completed, and i think the reason for that, besides the fact that i think spider-man is awesome, is that the traversal system is just god damn good.

SM2 vastly improves on said traversal system. Right off the bat, i turned the web assist thing all the way down, and activated fall damage, which imo really makes the game better since you need to be more active in your swings. But more than that, i think the web wings they added in the game just works really well. Swinging around is fun, but the wings really let you gain speed really fast if you know what to do, and balancing wings, swinging and doing tricks in the air to gain as much speed as you want is just cool. And if you end up being bored from that, the insanely fast fast travel system is really helpful, i ended up basically using it all the time when i was finishing up doing all the side content and had to go from one side of the map to the other.

The combat also got some sick overhauls, the new moves are sick and playing as symbiote pete is BADASS. What i really didn't expect was how cool the boss are; in the previous games, they weren't really bad but they weren't good either, just kinda w/e (tho i do love the SM1 final one). In this game however, bosses feel way more dynamic: you can parry their attacks, some gadgets or skills will let you get openings on them, instead of being a game of waiting for an opening to get a combo in, this time around you can really make the fights go your own way if you're good enough, and it feels good.

I'm not gonna talk much about the story but it also was really good, i especially loved the arc Miles went through during this game. The side missions were also all awesome, they really showcase the "friendly neighborhood" aspect of spidey extremely well, i even wish we could have gotten a couple more of them because there's a few that can really hit you hard in the feels

A really engaging game about investigating a real life CIA conspiracy. You comb through archives to read real world documents about some Strange Events, pinning together a wider picture of collusion and manipulation.

Its kinda hard to sort of pin down the tone its going for. The gameplay most involves moving from upstairs to downstairs, picking up a box, opening the box, and reading the documents. To mix up this pattern, the game adds little tricks to amp up your paranoia. A phone ringing with no answer, a flickering light across the street, was that car always there..? Its a great touch but it also adds a sense of Narrative to a real life story. And because of that, its easy to expect putting together these clues will tie up in a nice tidy bow.

But the thing is, with conspiracies like this, a lot of pieces of evidence are just destroyed. Which is something the game points out! So it can't end with a big I've Solved Everything reveal. There's just a point where there's no evidence left and you just have to work with the clues you got. Frustrating for a narrative, maybe, and you can feel the difficult the game has in making a satisfying ending out of it. But its messy in a real way that I appreciate.

iron lung is the second game of my Halloween horror binge, and this was an incredible, short experience that was def worth the money. there isn't too much that can be said for this gem. the Szymanski's are known for their amazing visions for gaming, and there's a reason why this one in particular popped off so hard it got a movie. the atmosphere and the little tidbits of lore are fed to you perfectly, and it fully engrosses you into a world, that essentially doesn't exist. this game is very good at not showing its hand until it wants to. o l knew where the scares would happen and they were so scary it didn't even matter. this game is so worth your time. it's a cheap, short horror experience that'll def get you into the Halloween mood.

I was really conflicted on what to rate this game, the writing is easily the most glaring flaw with some of the overworld challenges being too tightly timed for my taste (besides the beats I love those) but at the same time everything else is a class act. The gameplay, music, atmosphere, art direction, level design, setpieces, character design, etc are all homeruns and then some. If the writing and storyline were better I could honestly see this being among my top games but overall was an amazing experience in spite of that and definitely a game I would consider replaying which is really rare for me. I hope DICE gets the opportunity to work on stuff like this again at some point.