Wrath's appeal is a niche within a niche- the throwback shooter pivots itself on high-octane action inside of short/varied levels usually, and Wrath isn't this. It's high-octane; it's more intense than any other throwback shooter I've played by a heavy long shot, but it doesn't let you cool down. Levels are designed with less focus on a gimmick (arguably to its detriment) and more so with a focus on being gauntlets. Each one clocks in at about twenty minutes to half-an-hour if you're not speedrunning, and the appeal might seem limited given the small enemy roster and lack of variety, but I think Wrath taps into something totally worthwhile once you give it some time. The game slowly feeds you new content, thus demanding you figure out the ideal strategies for each enemy- which might reveal maybe the best weapon/item roster I've ever seen in these types of games. Every weapon has a primary fire and an alt-fire that is practical for the constant hostile ways enemies swarm you, and I do mean swarm you. Some levels clocked in at around 500+ enemies, and that's where Wrath's secret lays. It's as much a Serious Sam as it is a Quake, and it's a lot better than the average horde-shooter, too! Every weapon choice allows for high player expression here because they're pretty much all equally practical; you really need to balance out function and conserving ammo to invent your own ideal combos to put down the increasingly tanky enemies or large swarms. As the game really starts kicking you down with full on armies later on, it's always encouraged to explore for secrets and collect items, which are super utilitarian and I didn't find one of them uninteresting. Importantly, items are so limited that collecting them (and ammo) across multiple levels makes the entire game a resource-management challenge, as opposed to just one level usually. Saves themselves, being turned into an resource, also fixes one of the things I dislike most about classic PC gaming: the encouragement of save-scumming. Yeah, they could've dumbed down the number of Soul Tethers you get quite a bit, but just the notion of them and the Shrines is great. All of Wrath feels like a trial of reflex and moment-to-moment wit to me, and I love it! You might find it repetitive/padded, and I wouldn't blame you, but I loved Arcane Dimensions.

I suspect Myst will go overlooked by the vast majority of modern audiences due to an (arguably) lackluster presentation, yet that may just be the ace up its sleeve. When you compare Myst to any other puzzle game, it's sort of mind-blowing how it has pretty much only individual puzzles per area, barring those having to directly interact with the Age gimmick, and yet there's next-to-zero communicative failure on a sensory side regarding what those puzzles do. Even if you're pixel-hunting to discover the mechanisms you need, or just clicking hopelessly to find another screen you missed somewhere, the actual mechanisms at play are immediately quite clear-cut and intriguing in function. They're industrial, you read the cues of how you'd physically interact with those objects and voila, you've done it. The scope of the areas leaves you still scratching your head about the greater purpose of anything you find in spite of this though, and it's this combination that makes Myst both a solid game for those completely unfamiliar with video games, and those who've spent their life on the medium. Almost every technique here is beginner-friendly, but doesn't push away hardcore players, so much so that the only method of movement is extremely intuitive in a way I think almost anyone could immediately grasp, and is hard to formulate solid complaints against at the same time given Myst's goals. It'll lure in newcomers... but it'll also interest anyone deeply familiar with video games as a whole, with its fascinating setting and worldbuilding that don't fall clearly into any genre of fiction, alongside the creative puzzle concepts, which make the process of "fucking around with (effectively) alien contraptions" all the more alluring. If there's any point to take away from all this: designers of the future, and players, should probably go back to Myst to voice how to clearly communicate unique gameplay ideas without overt text being a driving factor, because it's excellent nonetheless.

When you think about bosses in video games, and you think about how video games translate to other mediums, bosses are one of those abstract elements that get confusing in translation. A boss, would presumably be some kind of side villain or obstacle on the journey to the destination in another story, but of course video games supplement you with way more than just one side antagonist or so usually. The dissonance here is that usually an antagonist of any kind is expected to have some kind of prominence, or power, or at the very least personality. They need to serve a purpose, and serve it well, and it's arguable video game bosses don't succeed at this. Rarely do they really activate the sensation you're "fighting" so much as the sensation you're just going through clear-cut scripted motions to get through them. Most bosses are sub-par, basically. Often they're only stressing one element and not the most important factors of being an engaging combatant; even in the best boss-driven games. Furi's success is completely natural then, because it's a neon anime-fight lightshow. You'd be struggling to convey how it blends genre but saying "it's how a kid imagines a swordfight" might just sum it up best. Flashy, snappy, fast-paced and constantly changing perspective, aggressor and methodology of attack. Jumping from swarms of bullets to rapid-fire melee quick-time events works out perfectly thanks to the general aesthetic and flow that makes it all feel natural. Bosses have linear phases, but they still move quite freely around the arena usually, and, using some tension built up during the fight, contextualize all their actual scripted phases perfectly. If anything, Furi should tell you that every game from now on focused around bosses should strive for these kinds of multi-phased monsters, and we should've known it since Seven Force. What Furi might not be able to tell other games is to match its exceedingly strong degree of variety per-fight that sees you seamlessly jumping between everything cool in the book, which helps further differentiate every (already solid) phase of every (already solid) boss.

If you've ever felt disenchanted by the lackluster and untense sameyness and structure of boss fights in even the greatest of action games, then Furi is waiting for you with open arms.