To not only save and elevate your series from niche middle market eurojank to a name any Cool Gamer Worth Their Salt cares about, to not only be one of the only western studios to survive Square Enix, but then also to now provide one of the best deals in gaming through bundling every map in the reboot trilogy into one mega-game AND THEN put it it on Game Pass, this version of Hitman 3 is truly special. There aren't many stealth franchises around these days but I'm glad one of them is also one of the greatest games of the cross-generation.

One of the greatest gaming psyops is pretending this game would be good.

Watch the E3 gameplay and count all the numerous AI and presentation bugs. Then remember Human Head told you the version shown was "pretty much complete". Then remember that back in the 360/PS3 days it cost $10,000 to certify a patch, meaning the odds of it being fixed into a playable game were next to none. Then look at The Quiet Man, the embarrassing arthouse Yakuza wannabe Human Head developed years later. Then find out that after creating and pushing the "we didn't want to get bought out by bethesda so they cancelled our game" narrative for years, they intentionally shipped a broken sequel to Rune and got bought out by Bethesda the very same day.

...Starting to see where I'm going with this? Prey 2's nonexistence is required to maintain HH's ideal image of victims and not as what they actually were, hack developers who lost the sauce years before this game was on the chopping block. If this actually came out I think it would've been bargin bin material.

Take the red pill, Neo.

You ever wonder how we have comedy games and horror games, but not comedy horror games? Worry no more; your day has come.

Stray Souls is a horror game developed by a guy too crap to stay at Bloober Team. Constructed using unreal engine store assets, metahuman technology, and AI, it weaves a tale of a horror protagonist so goddamn fruity he'd be embroiled in a James Somerton plagarism scandal and his vaguely incestuous cannibal sister that'd make The Coffin of Andy and Leyley seem quaint. If that sounds like it's kicking down the barriers of taboo, it doesn't end there, as the game also asks questions like "what if a grandma was weird?"

This is truly one of the most fucking baffling games of all time. Its opening is the first and probably last piece of media to be directly inspired by Spike Lee's remake of Oldboy. Your character is 7 feet tall. He's using tinder on a computer from 1998. You shoot demons with a golden desert eagle (later revealed to be the gun that JOHN WILKES BOOTH USED TO KILL ABRAHAM LINCOLN??????????????) as you shout epic win quips. It's a survival horror game with the ammo economy of a penultimate resident evil level, except at the final boss where its very possible to softlock yourself out doing all of the three endings. The motion capture is all wrong and your characters idle facial animations look somewhere between a guy in LA Noire trying to lie and you really needing to hold in your piss. Your sister remembers being shot by your dad but not the part where she was eating a human body as she was being shot. They used AI art and the result is a legally indistinct Bryan Cranston with 8 fingers.

All of this to serve a finale that, to nobodies surprise, suicide themed. Turns out you can take a hack out of Bloober Team but you can't take Bloober Team out of a hack.

The studio behind this game shut down a few days ago leaving behind only a legal threat against people who damaged the reputation of the game. What they mean by this is that people found out the director was retweeting 13/50-tier racism and transphobia. They could also mean the numerous videos about the game being shit. Either way they'll probably be SLAPP'd down.

If they don't, however, please enjoy the streams by my pals at the Kemono Friendzone while you can. They pay me in lint to say this.

https://youtu.be/olFpQ_nJ3_0
https://youtu.be/6-VZ57B4BnI

Ubisoft is a right wing company.

Yeah, sure, they use women and gays in their marketing but you have to understand that it's all in the same way republicans have started to use them; as gizmos from a toybox of image. And the thing about toyboxes is that you'll grow old of them and throw them away.

Otherwise, from Serge Hascoët yelling out "There's a monkey on the screen!" when he first saw the trailer to The Force Awakens, to Tom Clancy's The Division where the first third of the game is curiously about shooting black men who deal extra melee damage, to Far Cry 5's inexplicable "hey maybe the christofascist child groomer cult had a point about forever wars" end, to Tom Clancy's Elite Squad honest to god "George Soros Funds BLM to destroy the west" conspiracy plot that they had to patch out to be less fascist because it launched only a week after George Floyd's death, to hiring people who post "rapefugee" and "holohoax" memes (this is a personal anecdote and unfortunately considering their lax attitudes to sex crimes I don't have faith in Ubisofts HR team to respond to it), the company is just straight up Hitler.

If you think they are woke you are morbidly incorrect. In fact, they're on your side! Have fun reconciling with that the next time you repost a /v/ greentext about how Red Dead 2 is shit because Arthur Morgan doesn't have a dedicated lynching button or whatever. For everyone else, particularly on this site that tends to lean left, that might be your cue to stop buying their games.

So how about the game?

I played a few hours, it sucks. It's the same Far Cry 3 you already played except now its several magnitudes more annoying. I was on board with the idea of an urban far cry after 9 years of forests and rural areas, maybe make a more consistently fun version of Homefront: The Revolution, but the game is quick to turn around and say, "Fuck you! You're stuck on the mmo tutorial island you dumb fuck! Enjoy your destiny hub and questgivers asshole! Eat shit! Slop is my politics, slop is my life!"

Wow, thanks. I'm never leaving the island and I'll keep that in mind when I review your game on backloggd dot com.

I'm sure you can find a breakdown of the politics of this game but it's funny how thin the illusion is this time. They had to put out a statement that their game about DIY imperialism has no bearing on reality. Cuba is just a mass hallucination, deary. Oh whats that, Cuba, which we established doesn't exist, has a lung cancer vaccine that the US forbids you from trying to get? Well... uhh.... it turns out the vaccine gives you more cancer, because its made out of tobacco or some shit. You know how the cubans love their cigars? quick throw in a few more words the gringos won't understand in the middle of the dialogue. (That's me, by the way! I'm the gringos!)

I feel like Phil Lord has 200 hours in this game. Actually, let's put that to the test: can someone ask him for his playtime in Far Cry 6? I checked and he not once tweeted about the game.

Is there a positive? Sure, but its not even related to the game-- Xcloud runs really well! I put it on a steam deck and minus some oversteering when im aiming its largely playable...

...You should play a better game on it though.

It's bad!