In my review of Demon's Souls, a point I brought up is that the battles in Demon's Souls ended before they begun, due to the reliance on deliberately sloppy balance that meant players either had all the tricks prepared beforehand, or there was functionally no way to win the battle regardless. This required you to assess situations and often genuinely look through all the tools you had, and this mattered in situations where you couldn't pause, so you'd have to pre-emptively critically assess what to do and how to do it. The immersion and engagement bolstered by the design of Demon's Souls is unmatched, especially when considering its sheer aesthetic in mind on top of that. The question is apparent then: how does Dark Souls improve, or at least, follow-up on that?

For the most part, the only real strong changes in overall design are a focus on world design (note: not level design) and a change of structure to remove the non-linearity. This changes the games flow significantly, since Demon's Souls balance relied on backing out of challenges and stocking up from another area on tools to get you the win. Dark Souls difficulty amounts more to bashing your face against the wall until it breaks, and granted: this can be engaging depending on the content itself, but I don't quite think Dark Souls sticks the landing. Demon's Souls style of challenges relied on variety; each boss has a different mechanic that required you to rethink how you played each time you arrived at the next fog door. The World Tendency system makes it so that enemies are haphazardly placed to blockade your path to the boss, and for all you could argue this is frustratingly unfair, it is variety and makes boss-runs fresh repeatedly, which are already not too bad given the games length and the boss-runs lengths themselves. It's all about offering new perspectives on different challenges and letting you do the thinking. Dark Souls' bosses aren't really... like that. You'll find yourself dodging behind them and dying repeatedly, but there isn't much thought to do often besides just mastering the reflexes, which are so consistent across the game that it can get quite easy once you know the exact rhythm of combat. This is a problem because difficulty aside, Dark Souls really doesn't do much to expand upon Demon's Souls, and it's style of difficulty is reliant on mindless tedium often within fights and general exploration. I'd like to remind everyone of the Basilisk which you'd often have to travel way out of any area where it's present just to cure the effect it gives you. There's nothing to think about when a Basilisk inflicts a Curse upon you, it just adds more length onto the game.

Length becomes Dark Souls biggest problem on the whole and it's fairly plain to see. Not only is it significantly longer than Demon's Souls, but the game doesn't warrant it in regards to richness of content. Even the most hardcore die-hard fans of the game will argue with each other over whether the second half is rough, but I'd argue the symptoms of stretching the content thin rear their heads quite early on. The game is mostly padded out by somewhat bland areas and boss-runs, but if you take a vague sense of "challenge" aside I'd argue it's not particularly engaging; which is fatal for a game centered around unique challenges - because a good challenge, to me, at least, relies on high reflexes, intense thinking, or ideally; a little bit of both. The general point is that Demon's Souls is overall just a tighter game and it makes coming back to Dark Souls feel exceptionally dull when you realize how tedious and bland a lot of the content is. There's less mechanical tweaks and additions as much as there's more mechanical reductions and content that actively was taken away from Demon's Souls (see: again, World Tendency, a system with huge potential which only saw the light of day once.) This leaves you with the world design as the only strong suit of the game, and it's gorgeous. The landscapes convey a sense of scale and decay that's unrivaled by basically any other game. The sense of how it all interconnects is breath-taking... if you ignore the fact that all it really has going for it is interconnection. Not many areas rely on very interesting level design themselves individually, and if you take the scenery aside, it's often very basic areas that are either labyrinthine, cramped or extremely open, and none feel particularly polished or thought-out to me outside of just looking pretty. The game carries itself on the sensation of forward momentum above all else and the interconnection is a sign of this, even if the level design and bosses and enemies are all tremendous downgrades, and it's true: no game does a sense of forward momentum better. But, at what cost? I don't hate Dark Souls, it's decently fun, but it's a poor follow-up in my eyes, and it feels like a weaker version of a game FromSoft already made before it. In spite of the fact I find it enjoyable, I find it functionally impossible to recommend because I can't think of any quality it does that much better besides a strong sense of progress - yet even if that's unmatched, there's still other games that come close, and I don't think it's worth slogging through Dark Souls for that alone.

SHODAN is the best villain ever put into a video game. That alone wouldn't sound like much in proving it's a great game, given it just implies a tight narrative but nothing about how it plays, yet this is actually a huge deal because I'm talking about her in a gameplay sense. Looking Glass' design philosophy was always to simulate the balance between a player making active choices, and the game master responding adequately in tabletop games. SHODAN is a living representation of Citadel Station, and a pure evil game master on top of that, as the bridge between the concept and execution of this "simulated game master" idea bringing it into more literal territory with a computer trying to kill you. Everything that goes after you in the game and every trap that befalls you is SHODAN. She sometimes unfairly sweeps the rug from under you, locking you in game over scenarios or opening up monster closets, but this combined with her voicework only adds to realize her in a way no other villain has ever achieved. Each step you take in Citadel Station is a fight against SHODAN herself as she's always finding ways to one-up you. Standard action-adventure game progression is flipped on its head as you don't know what to predict and must carefully observe clues, manage resources and take notes to get further while expecting the worst, stooping into straight up dungeon crawler territory more with each level. This tense crawling approach to a usually speedy genre is what separated System Shock at first from contemporaries, but you could really argue this is just an extremely abstract form of adding in more "realistic" mechanics; it adds a lot of believability ducking behind cover as you desperately fiddle with the user interface to reload or consider opting for the specific position on the screen you'll throw a grenade from, just imagine a few animations instead of a user interface being fiddled with and it suddenly clicks. System Shock juggled tons of concepts modern games still struggle with relatively effortlessly; from the precision in combat only VR games seem to have given a shot, to genuinely tactical and intimidating firefights while exploring an immersive environment. It may seem sloppy at first, but taken as a whole, it's extremely elegant.

The thing barring most people from enjoying this genuinely amazing game is that the user interface and controls are too clunky and dated... or are they? Really, I think it's just the visuals that date this game. We live in a post-Cruelty Squad post-Receiver world, it's not like these unorthodox approaches are out of place now, they're usually just prettied up... or slathered in shit in the case of Cruelty Squad. Either way, if those games can be enjoyed for what they are now, what's stopping someone from enjoying System Shock today too?

Subnautica won't work for everyone. I think this is the one game that stresses how important having a certain niche as an audience is. Tiresome, tedious survival busywork and backtracking turn into nightmarish romps through the alien and the unknown as you plunge deeper into the abyss... but this relies on something, doesn't it? If someone playing Subnautica doesn't have thalassophobia (and it's not like it's marketed as a horror game) all they'll get is an extremely straightforward relaxed game with basically no real challenge to it. Hours I spent fighting against myself to go deeper into one of the richest video game ecosystems ever made just to find out what happened and get resources I needed to actually escape this planet would be meaningless without a pre-existing sense of horror, because Subnautica isn't hard. Even the funny face eels aren't programmed to wreck your shit, they're programmed to stalk and ambush at the most vulnerable moment. Perfectly serviceable and commendable AI as far as making a convincing alien creature that echolocates prey, and it's genius for creating an unending sense of pure terror without letting you get used to the games tricks, but that just goes back to the start, doesn't it? Subnautica, a game about diving into an alien ocean that doesn't market itself as horror, is a game I can only describe as "extremely fucking good" to people who really, really, really don't want to dive into an alien ocean.

This isn't addressing late-game issues like grinding, some poor storytelling choices and the actual instability of the game which all do come to actually bite it in the ass later on, especially when getting the resources for the biggest step of the journey involves going into safe, boring zones where my thalassophobia was quenched by how routine it became. In spite of all this negativity however, it's worth stating that I think if you're someone as scared shitless of both the sea and scary space things as I am, I think you could get endless worth out of Subnautica. It stands as one of the most interesting and memorable games I've ever played, where, to progress through extremely solid exploration infused with your bog-standard survival game elements, I'd have to regularly fight my fears and cartoonishly gulp as I found my way into new territory, daring not to look down. The dread and atmosphere of Subnautica is unmatched, but your enjoyment will lay squarely on if you think the premise is interesting, and if it scares you. I'm never going back to the ecological dead zone ever again personally.

Sometimes iteration is a positive for series, but sometimes it never got better than the start. While technically a remade port of the arcade release, the important thing is that the first Contra still utilizes its mechanics the best. All of the weapons have different applications you have to pick between on the fly, there's a genuine focus on platforming and the game has a near-perfect difficulty curve. Later run 'n' guns, especially the Contra series itself, would end up focusing on set-pieces more and more with time and had you wandering flat terrain just shooting right primarily, but not the original. If you want a near perfect encapsulation of challenging and fair design (in spite of its brutality) this is the way to go.

To appreciate Ocarina of Time as a new player is to appreciate a game as the sum of its parts. No individual element will blow you away as "the greatest of all time" because everything ever since Ocarina has outclassed it in individual ways, but it might just be the most solid game you can get when looked at as a whole. As a follow-up to a Link to the Past it does pretty much everything right in steering the series in a new direction; better dungeons, better progression and structure, and more interesting items for the 3D space it now utilizes. Each dungeon has a great gimmick to it with extremely memorable setpieces compared to prior games which often repeated themselves aesthetically to a tiring degree. The game lacks the overall charm and mystique of prior Zelda's on a surface level but maintains a large degree of weird shit (seriously, what is a Dead Hand) and a genuinely solid coming-of-age story under the surface, with an emotional hook to it with how far the journey will take you. This isn't to say it's flawless, far from it; the overworld frankly sucks, combat relies too much on waiting, there's still occasional directional crypticism that involves fucking around and finding out and Ganon's Castle was largely underwhelming. But as far as a game goes, that's a sum of its parts, that sells you the idea of a classical Hero's Journey so thematically powerful you can taste it in the gameplay? Ocarina of Time knocks it out of the park.

Some kind of a miracle had to have happened to let this game come out today. Between the buddhism, virtual ecology and perfect ludonarrative harmony, Rain World isn't just difficult, it's Nintendo-hard. While panned at release, Rain World's method of difficulty isn't anything new, and it's not even comparable to something like the Souls-series due to the degree of randomization and lack of tactile combat. No, it's a modern day Famicom game through-and-through. Characterized by the historical respawning off-screen enemies that can one-shot you, punishing consequences for death, methodical calculative movement, cryptic progression and a constant timer ticking down on the player. Rain World isn't innovative in its methods of difficulty, but it's innovative in how it achieves those methods, which is where the modernization comes in. Extremely rich detailed ecosystems with constantly varying placements of enemies due to their own intelligence telling them where they belong rather than a designers hand and varying lengths of cycles turns you into a gambler each time you go back into nature. For people who think the best video games are oft as simple as a good challenging gauntlet alike classic NES titles, then Rain World may be to them, a legitimate contender for the best game of all time thanks to the fact it's a gruelling challenge generator that wastes no time taking the pressure off you. I, also, am one of these people, and if you ask me for what game has the most consistently engaging gameplay ever, even without the incredible theming, presentation and emotionally impactful ending, it'd be Rain World.

Probably the most straightforward execution of a "speedrunner game." It's not quite focused on actually going fast like the more popular Sonic games so much as it's focused on creating flexible, high-skill ceiling levels which take much time to master. Sonic CD has a genius grasp of how to give the player both interesting levels to cross through and interesting levels to figure out the kinks of so that when the time comes, they'll be able to blast through the game like nothing else. Extremely dense design with convoluted branching paths that fold and weave into each other are usually decorated with a level gimmick/obstacle that tends to, at first sight, impair movement, but actually can be used to increase your speed with the correct knowledge, timing and placement. All of it relies on both stage knowledge and actual understanding of Sonic's movement, a high bar that the games don't usually reach besides demanding fast reflexes every now and again. Quartz Quadrant and Wacky Workbench are the best examples, with seemingly haphazard placement of the stage gimmick gradually making complete sense and feeling perfect as you gracefully flow through the stage every time you play. The real kicker here is that by focusing on this type of branching and gimmick-driven level design, you tap into plain fun platforming and exploration too; gone is the sensation of merely speeding through levels and not thinking (though some may have preferred that), instead you get a great exploratory platformer that offers Infinitely Fun reward if you climb the ladder.

Note: this review will be written in the hypothetical scenario that, this was 2009 (barring the multiplayer I can't speak on) and the rest of the series does not exist yet. Why? Because I think I can indicate why I feel so strongly about it, and why I feel the opposite about later entries only with a certain context. With that said...

It's rare to see a game this solid just out there without much appreciation, and the appreciation it does get doesn't go the full mile for what makes it so good. It's an unconventional action-RPG, pretty much anyone could recognize that, but Demon's Souls isn't the best action game, nor the best RPG, yet I prefer it to anything I've played of those genres other than itself. Weighty, slower combat, methodical exploration and an extreme variation in landscapes characterize a sensation of exploring its world in a way that isn't something you frequently see these days. Ranging from a vast sea of blood in a murky green haze filled with Lovecraftian monstrosities, to a stormy landscape populated by flying stingrays which blast you from above, I never got tired of the landscapes. But what really makes it great is the way they tie into the gameplay at hand, thanks to the unique systems the game has that are very experimental on the whole.

Recognizing that it's a weird game is one thing, but Demon's Souls best strength isn't actually its combat or complexity as a choice-driven RPG, because it'll continue to beat you down no matter what path you pick. In-fact, it's not even an action game in my eyes - it's a game of preparation. The moments of high thrill and intense action have their fates usually already decided before they begin, by the environment, by the number of enemies, by the items you have on hand and the items you have directly equipped at this moment. All this means a lot since you can't pause, an utterly bold choice, yet a meaningful one. Before several boss fights, I found myself having to choose between weight and fast movement, between high magic defense or slow regeneration, between landing lots of hits or maintaining range, knowing I wouldn't be able to pause and change anything in the heat of the moment. My in-game stats didn't define me, it was my wits, and managing to outthink a world clearly out for my blood. The games most experimental edges all have a purpose, which is to add a preparative element to adventure. It's not just a matter of trial-and-error, it's a matter of figuring out what to do just as much, if not more, than execution. Some bosses I'd find would just be near impossible to damage, or would revive after I killed them, always throwing new hurdles at me I had to factor in. I remember when I was around the Leechmonger Archstone, I found myself consistently getting pushed down no matter what I did, so I found myself going to other areas (which you can access in a non-linear fashion) and exploring there instead. After conquering those worlds and accumulating rings, I managed to get enough poison resistance to muster my way through the poison swamp, utilizing my Soul Remains to lure enemies away as even with my best gear I could never take out that many, but I had another challenge on hand, which was that thanks to my own failures of dying here after entering my human form, the world had changed. The landscapes of Demon's Souls often change ever so slightly in regards to things like enemy placement tied to your own direct failures, and while I think more could have been done with it, it's such an ambitious idea that I can't help but praise it anyways and love how it feeds into that notion of being careful every step of the way. Other games may put you on scripted adventures, but Demon's Souls non-linear exploration and gruelling difficulty saw me taking things at my own pace, yet simultaneously going with the flow of how much the game would punish me for failures. Learning and discovery are necessary to overcome the greatest challenges, because a fight means nothing if the outcome is predetermined by what you know.

Demon's Souls true greatest quality is that most games punish exploits and trickery, but Demon's Souls fully expects you to utilize them to overcome how much it exploits and tricks you, the player, in an act of unfair-fairness where both sides play dirty. What you gain on your adventure and what you learn is what carries it, you go at the order that suits you yet it'll always have something in store to clobber you down with, even if you're finding one area more comfy than another. Checkpoints are far from where you need to go? If you get far enough, you can mitigate the trials of the map via using interconnected level design to create shortcuts. Enemies are damaging you too much? Distract them, or alternatively, use long-range to immediately kill them without them standing a chance. Everything that would be disincentivized in another game under some idea of the game designers valuing honor amongst their own systems is thrown out the window here. You play in a cruel world, and you will play cruel to the world. Everything you find on your journey benefits you and balance is wishy-washy in a way that somehow only serves to make the game better rather than worse, as I was constantly weighing out what I needed; especially thanks to the system of Souls being both money and experience points, leaving even my ability to level up in the air. It's not a flawless game but it's an enchanting one to get lost in. I just hope for a sequel that utilizes some of the mechanics more, perhaps less focus on the RPG elements and more focus on the scavenging for tools and exploits side of the game given builds don't mean much? Some of the bosses were a bit too straightforward too, I'd kill for more bosses that make me think outside the box almost like they're puzzles. World Tendency could affect the world even more when you die, perhaps having entire environments warp. Hell, given the existence of the Thief's Ring, maybe just a full-blown ability to sneak around enemies, more variation in the quality of the AI could be good for this too; with some enemies being smart and snooping you out, while others are equally as mindless as is. All just ideas, but for a game brimming so full of possibilities, who knows what one could expect from a sequel?

Firefights in shooters are usually defined by positioning more than anything. Where your Zombiemen and Imps are pretty much defines how the whole thing is gonna go down, and just pulling out the right weapon for the job is pretty much the big decision the player makes when engaging. Halo is different. Positioning matters, but it's not always due to the designers hand that the player and enemies end up in their positions - it's the aliens themselves choosing where they go. Reloading a save for the same encounter will still often see it going drastically differently each time, and this is due to a multitude of factors: Master Chief has a limited arsenal at all times, and the enemies you fight directly tie into this. You will actually need to consider which weapon you want to keep as you can't predict which enemies will be ahead of you, or what they'll be equipped with, or where they'll be. Master Chief also has a shield system that will work alongside your healthbar, with which you get a brief window of protection from oncoming strikes but not full-blown protection; giving you just enough time to perform any risky maneuvers you may need. Everything you do is slightly delayed; from jumps to grenade throws and explosions to reloads delaying your fire to punches landing, giving you a constant need to think about every action you take. The real icing on the cake here though is the intelligence of the Covenant enemies, and how they interact with everything else.

The Covenant has, by no stretch of the imagination, probably the best artificial intelligence ever seen in the genre. The designers have claimed they merely attempted to make them seem smart rather than be smart since they weren't sure how to do that, but I'd argue they hit two birds with one stone. The real trick is that they're reactive, and equal. Reactive in the sense of emotionally expressing reactions to almost every situation, but reactive also in the sense of seemingly playing alongside the player for each gunfight. They'll flank you, toss grenades whenever you get into a comfy position too long or just overwhelm you with numbers. For almost every strategy you have, the Covenant have something up their sleeves to counter it usually. Each Elite has a shield system of their own, so every single fight you get into with an Elite will likely lead in you both taking cover to regenerate since Halo knows to also give the foes some self-preservation instinct. Want to charge in and just damage the Elite? They'll probably do the same; get pissed off and charge at you just hoping to kill you before you put them down. Hell, you might try sniping an Elite only for him to hop in a Banshee and start circling you in the air, and the thing is; this is only the Elites, and while yes: they are the most intelligent Covenant enemies, the true magic is emergence. This is only describing one Elite, what about two? What about his squad of Grunts? Well if you leave the Elite alive they'll have the confidence to charge in and try attacking you on their own terms, but if you take out the Elite first you'll be opening yourself up to them and the Jackals fire. Your assault rifle will make short work of the Grunts, but can it counter the Jackals and Elites shields? That's something new to consider, so you'll want to keep multiple types of weapons on you at once for this situation. What if there's too many to take out? Well there might be a Warthog nearby which you could straight up crash into them with, or just have a Marine fire for you as you strafe around them. Every single encounter requires you to rethink and preplan how you'll handle things, and you'll always need to keep on top of ammo/charge per weapon too; so you can't rely on, well, old reliable, forever.

Just when you've gotten comfy, the game throws the Flood at you. As divisive as they are, and as arguable the Library's quality is, I'd wager they're a necessity. They're a great shake-up to the more strategic combat centered around the Covenant, requiring you to pretty much treat every encounter with them as a gauntlet as they eat up bullets and plasma but just don't go down, and will revive other enemies as more of themselves. But just as is the case with the Covenant, emergence is their true strength. Late-game Halo: Combat Evolved has you overseeing armies of Flood and Covenant fighting to the death and it's your job to just get by while the games systems play their own little RTS as you go off shotgunning more zombies.

The truth to Halo's design is it's multifacted, and it makes the most out of very little. Compared to your average shooter there's not much variety in the enemies or weapons but the core behaviors are so nuanced and dynamic that they change moment-to-moment, encounter-to-encounter. It gives you a sandbox of weapons and vehicles against decently tough enemies (though this will vary depending on the difficulty you pick, but I recommend Heroic as it seems to be the intended experience) and asks how you will deal with it. Halo gives you tons of ways to play, but the enemies can play at that game too and utilize basically anything you can. It leads to an immense creativity in encounters that comes from the most fun form of problem-solving that makes it, in my eyes, one of the crowning jewels of the genre. None of the sequels rivaled the quality of the combat, because it's already the pinnacle of evolution.

I think we can all agree there's that one old game of our personal choice that we think people give too much praise due to novelty (presentative quality or gimmicks) and not due to design. You'll hear the term "ahead of its time" a lot in the case of other games, but Prince of Persia fits exactly within the timeframe it was released and yet games still have a lot to learn from it.

There's two core tricks Prince of Persia has up its sleeve that make the retroactive "cinematic platformer" label go from an implication of novelty to a legitimate stroke of design genius. The first is the timer; throughout the entire runtime of Prince of Persia you are constantly fighting the clock to do anything and the entire game was built around this. The reason for the style of movement games like Oddworld would later go on to adopt was not just for the sake of realism alone, but because it makes sense within the confines of needing slow, careful movement that you have to constantly weigh the actual value of applying due to it constantly wasting your time with even the slightest misstep. This drastically changes the game as even grabbing health upgrades could be seen as "too risky" in terms of wasting your time as opposed to just rushing through. The second trick is that Prince of Persia is a game of logical consistency and learning, and not a game of actual precision or high difficulty. Prince of Persia is brutal not because its systems are that hard to master but because what you do and don't know defines everything. The game doesn't give you a single scrap of information so learning what you can and can't do really shakes up how you play it. This is obvious when it comes to things like level layouts with the timer, but the game constantly toys around with how it feeds you information. In Stage 3, you fight your first skeleton, there are not many of these across the game but they serve to teach the lesson of environmental awareness; they must be killed via environmental hazard, thus reinforcing the idea that your realistic movement is a logical consistency and enemies can be killed with the environment due to realistic limitations too; a major factor in late-game time management as enemies start taking longer and longer to kill normally. In Stage 7, you must make a tile fall from the ceiling to reach a new part of the labyrinth. This requires jumping up to bring the tile down as you hit against it, but an observant player will note that every other flimsy tile in the room shakes too when you jump, thus meaning you can pre-emptively spot falling tiles via jumping before you enter a room. In Stage 8, there are several screens you'll enter twice, first from the bottom going right and afterwards from the top going left. As you do this, it'll become apparent there are several guards on the upper side of the screen as you're coming in from the lower sector, and during the process you'll notice the guards shift directions based on where you run. This can become frustrating as often guards will just immediately ambush you when you're going through the screens on the upper sector, but in actuality, this can be avoided by simply using any movement abilities that just don't make noise. An extremely basic game mechanic, but relevant in that anything that might at first seem overtly gamey or archaic ends up being mostly a realistic extension of the mechanics at play, and this focus on knowledge coupled with the time turns Prince of Persia into a very different experience to anything else.

Prince of Persia is a game that wants you exploring its dungeons not just as gamey constructs but as things you need to evaluate and carefully move around while the clock constantly ticks out of your favor. There is a constant consideration going on of what actually is relevant to you and what isn't given the circumstances that mean wasting even a single second is a big deal, as you know you'll probably die further on ahead anyways and be struggling with what would otherwise be a short game because you just don't know the fundamentals of what's coming. This takes Prince of Persia from merely being a platformer into being something... different, it's not just about learning to pull off the tricks, it takes the form of a game that requires genuine problem-solving in a still retroactively unique way. Prince of Persia is a slow-burn as it wants you being completely attentive, and it left me hooked by the end. In spite of how old it is, finally reaching the Princess at the last minute still manages to be one of the more cinematic and memorable moments I've had in a game, and for anyone who wants to have something they can genuinely sink their teeth into without feeling like it was all for nothing, this is the game to play.

LISA, in a sense, is what indie games are all about. It's one thing to be willing to make a game with an identity clearly inspired directly by another, but despite having the most apparent inspiration of almost any of the EarthBound clones we've seen emerge, LISA forms its own personality by virtue of just... how indie it is. There's something to be said about how most games you play now, even independent ones, had large funding or a larger team than they let on, and LISA is no different being a kickstarted game, yet LISA has something... special about it. Other developers might wonder "Should I really include that?" "Is that a step too far?" "Does that fit?" "Is this unfair design?" And many, many more questions, but Austin Jorgensen (Dingaling) clearly just kept on rolling.

Take it this way, in a world where even more games that claim to be made by only a few guys now have some form of great funding, playtesting and refinement, LISA isn't refined, it isn't perfect and it isn't pretty, but it tells it like it is, whether that means making you sit through a monologue that's overly long just because the developer thought it was funny, casually joking about ridiculously dark subjects, or subjecting you to legitimately heartfelt but brutal scenes; none of it would fly elsewhere, nor would the ability to permanently have party members die or the weird 2D platforming welded into a JRPG, but at least it's sincere. Scrappy, weird and crude, but profoundly sincere in a way no other game is.

Blood has so many little subversive choices and little intricate details that you'd think it was a modern throwback shooter sent back to the past, with the only realization it's not one coming in the form of the fact it's actually original. That said, Blood is pretty much an embodiment of a game that you can tell pretty much only the developers seemingly playtested. It's the first cover shooter, and that's not a bad thing; the weapon roster is wacky and you're encouraged to take unique routes to deal with your foes with strategy. But when cover is caused by the cultists hitscanning you the moment you go past a corner from an extremely long-range distance, leading to savescumming being key to actually getting anywhere, it becomes a problem. The deadliness of cultists (the most common enemy) isn't consistent either, as no other enemy reaches their level, and often have braindead AI where they just circle you from above or below, which leads to a disjointed pacing of combat. It's worth a play cause it's fun and when it works - it works, but I can't deny it's got problems; checkpoints and better enemy AI would have gone a long way here.

It's the sloppiest good game you'll ever play. A lot of basic elements you'd usually want from a game they completely dropped the ball on but S.T.A.L.K.E.R. really knows what it's going for in spite of this. The flat landscapes and cutscenes don't immediately seem inviting, but this game really wants you to be absorbed in its world.

An incredible atmosphere and dynamism permeates the world of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in such a way that it constantly feeds into new content to see by sheer virtue of its everchanging quality. Missions may be randomly generated and often worthless fetch quests, yet it doesn't matter because I've been low on health from fighting off bandits and arrived at an area desolated by Bloodsuckers. Amongst all of the flaws, I think the number one quality at play here is that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. functions as an endless generator of stories. All the other people you meet in the Zone are extremely experienced and demotivated mercenaries, because the Zone is hell. Everyone has an understanding of what this place is, and you see them sit down gathering around fires to tell stories, spread rumors and play songs just to keep morale up in this place. This is a mentality that you'll see spread to fans of the games, with the fanbase often having a sense of comradery - and this is because even playing the game leaves you with tales and knowledge you probably won't forget. I'd like to ask for stories in the replies of this post for peoples first encounters with mutants, or really any interesting things they remember from this game as a testament to this. The game may not be perfect, but it'll give you endless memories of a true wasteland.

Hollow Knight thrives off of a combat system that ties pretty seamlessly into the exploration. Just by hitting a wall, you'll find yourself in a new area with several bosses/minibosses and usually they are all pretty solid. That's unfortunately about where my praise ends however, because although I respect its ambition, I feel it suffers from several choices that hinder both the combat and exploration elements that should naturally tie together.

Exploration-focused games usually go for relatively guided level design. Even if the world design itself is non-linear and lets you go anywhere, rooms will maintain a guided format because it allows the designer to add interesting trails to fall down. Going down into a new area off of a winding trail as the visuals slowly change and you have to interact with new mechanics is practically formula at this point for these types of games. Hollow Knight instead applies this philosophy to the entire map at large; where areas are effectively trails to other areas and that serves as their purpose. Ambitious in theory but troubling in execution; you will find that most areas effectively play out like big open boxes with a few mazes of blocks and samey rooms inside. Gimmicks are often relegated to extremely simple changes to the formula that don't compensate for the sheer amount of aimless wandering through repetitive, unfocused level design. If it's not an area you find in a wall, it's a generic item that isn't an actual upgrade and has very little gameplay purpose.

The progression of Hollow Knight is very weak overall to me; whereas Metroid-likes usually like to give you items for every milestone that would lead you being able to go back and open up a new area, Hollow Knight oft abandons the notion of backtracking because so much of it is open from the get-go. Abilities are spread out across hours of play and usually most of the most engaging parts of the game (the bosses) don't give you them and instead are just there to add clutter to the world. Now, in defense of the game, the boss fights are above average for sure. Snappy, fast combat that doesn't over-rely on tired tropes in action-platformers is satisfying to pull off and there's decent variety, but they don't feel meaningful. The fact is you'll probably in the end get more mileage out of random enemies rather than half of the optional bosses in this game since your most effective and active progression you'll be having is collecting Geo; the currency of Hallownest. The best way to collect Geo, is to farm respawning enemies. And there-in lies the issue with Hollow Knight. For a game with such scope and ambition, nothing feeds into another. You get currency to get trivial upgrades while sitting around to get the big cool abilities and fight optional bosses which more often than not give you absolutely nothing. I'm not opposed to a game being fundamentally unrewarding, but I'm opposed to it when all I have are blue mazes to explore. There's another game about blue mazes that released four decades ago, but at least that one has space dinosaurs.