-not a game for coomers and gooners as many have said !!! fr though i have seen lots of both pos and neg attention being given to this game in that regard and in a way i do absolutely understand the negative reaction to it. however idk it’s all mostly in the background and in the advertising,, i think my politics and opinions on womens bodies and issues tend to lean more radfem than anything else (tho not in a scary or bad way bc like lmfao look at the site im on yk) and i dont have much to say about the treatment of women in this game. obv it’s shitty that in 2024 a game that’s more than a one handed type of thing has to be sold as such but that’s more to do w where we’re at a society and culture lol the word society being said earnestly. but this is not a game that’s turning any straight man into anything he’s not already + the game never treats womens bodies as commodities or objects but obv straight men will see it as such. the story never treats womens pain in a overtly sexual way and while theres def weirdo type men that’ll see women being violent and having violence done onto them and be gross about it, the narrative of the game and the framing of bodies in these scenes is never truly gross or objectifying. idk idk TnA exists and it’s a fact and not necessarily smth that’s bad it just usually leads or ties into smth kind of gross and shitty but personally I don’t think so here.
-which is to say i like both the design and characterization of eve!! she’s cute and strong but still obviously can fail and let ppl down and that’s not an especially riveting or new concept but it’s nice ig. love a good dress up sim lol. thought the characters of lily and adam were like genuinely pretty poorly written and consistently boring,, kind of bad designs too. idk idk im not uhh fourteen so marvel type quips rlly do nothing for me but rlly thought all the other npc’s were v charming and lively and well rounded
-tbh it’s okay that the actual dialogue is pretty bad bc i dont gaf about dialogue but i do care lots about like world building and lore and especially vibes and feelings and w all of that the game excels sm. u can feel how real the games world feels and how each individual place in game has a reason for being and it’s own sad shared history w the ppl in these places. very much so fucking w like how hard games in the last decade lean into overgrown mall abandoned core pinterest image search type aesthetic. shit looks lovely and almost always gets across this nice nihilistic and melancholic worldview that maybe I don’t one hundred percent fuck w irl but do in stories about the end of the world.
-been watching lots of anyaustin as of late and find his thorough searching of game worlds and lesser explored areas of those worlds endlessly fascinating!! this game is like full of unexplored and uninteresting areas. every inch of the world of the game exists as a simulacrum of a real worlds pain and sorrow and regret. everything looks purposeful but also painfully real,, places left in a hurry due to a panic, stores shuttered and places of living abandoned but still furnished. every new area tells a story visually and doesn’t need to or care to explain it to u. <3 seeing a game so thoroughly committed to being realistic in some way break apart in small ways under close examination. lots of smart ppl have said it in more intelligent ways but yeah it is very pleasing to see textureless and flat rocks ur not supposed to jump on or even rlly see off of or above these highly detailed and sort of realistic looking cliffsides. it’s nice to see the bones of a game and the real life work spent on creating them inside the game itself. love how goofy the blood will sometimes look and how shii just clips sometimes.
-don’t usually gaf to do side quests in open world/open world adjacent games but idk feel like I did a vast majority of them here. like 75% or so and not everything has the strongest writing but all the side characters/quest givers do feel like real ppl w issues and problems that u can choose to fix. very rarely is the reward needed or worth it but idk think the places u visit and stories u piece together by doing a bunch of the side stuff is def worth it for ppl that enjoy exploring in games like this. u open urself up to see more unexplored areas by doing all this random content.
-crazy how each new area looks so visually distinct and diff from each other. for a game that very rarely changes up type of gameplay I never felt bored or like I saw everything I needed to see,, always felt like there was something more yet to be seen. don’t even gaf that it’s clear that part of the visual identity for levels in this game are heavily inspired by the resident evil remakes and the avatar films bc what the game does w those areas looks rlly good. there’s also all these beautiful slow moments where ur just meant to chill in the games environments and take it all in and stop the bloodshed and action for a sec and appreciate the art of every abandoned building or the backgrounds of shops or whatever. to me the best and most remarkable and memorable moments are when the game takes itself very slow and just wants to invest and immerse urself in what the game is doing.
-most side quests narratively are about finding some sort of closure. it’s a bleak world and most side content begins w suspicion of death and ends w confirmation of a death. ur usually tasked w either finding out what happened to ppls loved ones or finding a keepsake belonging to the loved one. it’s incredibly repetitious but i still found myself consistently doing these types of quests bc i wanted to see a good ending for these npcs and i think that says sm about how excellent the world building is and how real some of the stories feel. I loved these stories of false hope and delusions that these characters needed to rely on to simply keep surviving in this world.

Alright. The time has passed, and I don't have to pretend this is the best thing ever anymore. Armored Core VI has a SHIT ton of problems. The biggest thing is that it's nothing bold or interesting. It's actually a downgrade to many previous games in the series with fewer parts and less part types and less in game mechanics in general. Whilst I don't dislike this game a whole lot, I am in the end an Armored Core fan and wish for the series to improve. First off, the sekiro stagger meter was an awful design choice for this game. It makes fights that should be two giant mechs with a shit ton of fire power just going off on each other but instead your mechanised combat machine staggers. It interrupts the flow of combat, and it makes fights feel so much less tense because you can straight up see their health bar and how close they are to getting staggered by you. The soundtrack is... not very great. While there are some standouts, the track list is quite boring. I'm a huge fan of cyberpunk sounds and the influence from vangelis is a great thing to hear but it just doesn't make for a very good soundtrack over mecha fights none of the song particularly get you hyped up or get your blood pumping or stressed it's just pretty normal stuff. The mission design is actually pretty good and is pretty on par with an Armored Core game specifically its more like AC4/4A, which usually did things much nicer. The lack of parts is quite a bummer to me and even if the mission designs are good there isn't a mission that's like super grand and amazing that makes me feel like it's utilising two generations more of power compared to For Answer. You'd think that after being told we were getting a new Armored Core for a decade and being told it was being cooked, we'd get something you know, bold. Something that does something interesting and cool, yet we get heals and a stagger bar, which is just so disappointing from a new gen Armored core game that should be huge and unique. Also, the multiplayer is like for answer in the way that it feels super haphazardly thrown together with no real thoughts about how fun it actually is. It's quite mediocre. I'm not a very big fan of the 5th generation but they had very engaging multiplayer that has kept people invested for a decade (which they now shut down cause come play our mediocre new multiplayer instead of your cool clan wars.) it's just such a disappointing thing to see. The game is just a standard Armored core experience, which makes it such a disappointment to me having to wait all this time. It'll be fine to a newcomer to Armored core because they didn't have to wait for so long and be forced to expect more. Is Armored Core VI the worst thing ever or the worst Armored Core game? No, it's just extremely safe. You could tell they wanted to cater to some souls fans too with healing and the more forgiving tracking. I think it's fine. Hopefully they do something more interesting for the next Armored Core game. I didn't wish to speak much on the story because I think it is just fine. Its quite a normal mecha story with some memorable moments but usually quite normal. The final boss also boils down to almost the same thing in each ending which was disappointing. I think the endings were fine though so there's that.

I have this annoying problem where, whenever I play a truly transcendental videogame that wows me from head to toe, I enter a state of post-masterwork malaise where even other good games just look worse.

And Library of Ruina was phenomenal. Truly the best game I've ever played, which naturally meant playing anything else was an impossible task.

But I'm old now, and I know how to cure this: I need to play something terrible. Something that, top-to-bottom, inside and out, is just irredeemable. Something not only indefensible, but laughable.

Every brilliant light casts an equally dark shadow, and as Library of Ruina stands at the zenith of gaming, I must look to the nadir for guidance.

Having slogged through the entire game and it's DLCs, I think it's time to put the pin in this journey.

It's interesting to consider just how much Bethesda lucked out with this game.

Soon after its release Fallout: New Vegas would be birthed in a haste at Obsidian's hands, proceeding to dominate the overall population's idea of "Fallout" for a good few years before Fallout 4 came out and the conversation became an eternal NV vs. 4 debate, underscored by endless quibbles about voiced protagonists and that one "yes/yes (sarcastic)/no (yes)/no" meme about FO4's dialogue. In the midst of all this is Skyrim, a game so influential and popular despite its flaws that Bethesda are "The Skyrim People" to a not-insignificant number of people on Earth.

All of this is to Bethesda's benefit, because it means people have forgotten about Fallout 3.

Not me, though. That's my curse; I'm a career hater, I can't forget bad games.

But let’s put 3 on the backburner for a moment.

Let’s talk about Oblivion.

Even a decade on from its end, people are still trying to figure out which games defined the 7th generation of consoles the most. I’m going to throw my 2 cents into the ring:
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was, by far and bar none, the most defining title of 7th gen.
Not to say that other titles weren’t influential, of course, but even though we live in a time where the words “Ubisoft open world” have entered most people’s lexicons, I think the progenitor of said open worlds was Oblivion and Bethesda.
Oblivion was a game with a very clear message: You don’t need to meticulously design every part of a game for it to sell well or be beloved. You don’t even need to meticulously design a small part of it. All you have to do is make a big empty bowl, put in some markers that allude to it being bigger than it actually is, and then give it a clutter pass before dotting some reused fortresses/caves/mines into it. There’s no need for a personal touch in every corner, merely the illusion of one.

But I can forgive Oblivion for a lot of things even if it is terrible. It was one of the earliest titles released in 7th gen, and the first of its scale. It took four years to make in a time where that was an incredible abnormality.

Fallout 3 gets no such mercy from me.

In part, because it’s worse.

Most RPGs either force a goal onto you but let you pick your motive, or they force a motive onto you and let you pick your goal. These are streams that’re best left uncrossed. Fallout 3, for some reason, attempts to do both.

F3 opens with you, the player character, being born and causing your mother to die of postpartum cardiac arrest. This is already a horrific indicator of how obsessed it’s going to be with its own unearned sense of profundity and much like the actual act of being born, it gets infinitely worse.
Just to get this out of the way: This sucks. It sucks on a creative level - Bethesda clearly couldn’t figure out how to stoke player investment without giving you a dead mom, a sad dad and showing your birth - but it also just sucks as the opening to a Fallout game?
This observation is so common that even comparatively normal people who don’t engage with Gaming as a culture often make it: Fallout 1 and 2 open with “oh yeah some shit’s fuck, go save your home”. Fallout NV starts with you getting shot in the head, and sends you off after a brief intro.
Fallout 3’s intro, then, sticks out like a sore thumb even compared to its more immediate sequel.
Afterwards you get warped to a birthday party filled with named NPCs who share voice actors and who you don’t care about. After that you get warped to a school test with the same named NPCs who share voice actors and don’t actually speak more than one or two lines, who you still don’t care about.

After that most of them die and the game tries to make you feel sad about their deaths I guess, but it’s moot because you finally get to leave the Vault and I’m incredibly confident 99% of people regardless of age or maturity felt elation at not having to wander through boring, visually bland corridors anymore.

Unfortunately, that’s all Fallout 3 has to offer outside the Vault too.

Over the years I’ve started to take incredible amounts of umbrage with the establishing shot of DC the player is greeted with upon leaving the Vault.

It promises a grand, open world - a reprieve from the suffocating Vault you just slogged through!

Springvale School is just down the road. It looks like this. Walk a bit further and you can find a metro. It looks like this. You can even find some sewer tunnels. They look like this.. Maybe, if you go a bit further, you’ll find an office building. Looks like this!.

Okay. You’ve now seen 99% of locations in Fallout 3.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s just have a little design chat.

I’m not a game dev, but I’ve played so many open world games and developed a fondness for them that I’ve managed to figure out some criteria that helps measure how good these games are on a technical level.

To wit, a ‘good’ open world is dotted with areas where one or more of these applies:

A visual reward, in the form of a lovely view.
A progression reward, in the form of loot that directly makes you stronger.
Something you can’t see or obtain anywhere else in the game world.
Depending on the world structure, it should lead to somewhere else that’s only accessible via a specific location.
At the very least, for more out-there or hidden areas, there should be some acknowledgement that you made the journey successfully.

Right, all that is out of the way.

Fallout 3’s open world is badly designed, but to really dig into why we need to talk about the other parts of the game that’re badly designed, and I think the topic of loot is perhaps the most pressing.

The first shotgun the player can acquire in Fallout New Vegas is the humble Single Shotgun. It does respectable damage for how early it drops, but true to its name it only carries a single round and its short but frequent reloads can leave you wide open against hordes or particularly tank enemies. It also uses 20 gauge shells as opposed to 12 gauge, so while it hits hard early on it ultimately stops being useful fast.
Later in the game’, the player can luck into possession of the venerable Riot Shotgun, an absolute beast of a weapon that boasts a 12-round drum magazine with 12 gauge shells as its primary ammo type, on top of a high rate of fire and respectable reload time.

Meanwhile the first shotgun the player can potentially find in Fallout 3 is the Combat Shotgun). It is, like the Riot Shotgun, a veritable moment that can dish out respectable damage and uses 12 gauge ammo. In the Capital Wasteland, this is an extremely common weapon with an extremely common weapon type - 20 gauge does not exist, so all shotgun wielding enemies are walking topups.

To really illustrate this issue, we need to talk about damage.

New Vegas uses two types of defensive stat: Damage Resistance (percentage-based) and Damage Threshold (flat reduction).

All incoming damage taken is reduced by the DR value at a percentage. So if you, for example, take 100 damage and have 50 DR, you take 50 damage.
Next is the DT value, which is a flat reduction. Seeing as we’ve just taken 50 damage, let’s imagine we have 20 DT. Since it’s just a flat subtraction, all in all we’ve taken 30 damage. This goes both ways.

This hypothetical only involves a single instance of damage. Shotguns, as they fire multiple pellets per shot, have the formula applied to each individual pellet. The end result is that despite high damage stats and seeming to be catch-free, shotguns in NV do a lot less damage than you’d initially think - though, as NV is a competently made game, this can be circumvented with alternative ammo and perks.

Fallout 3, however, only uses Damage Resistance. This is alarming on its own, but it gets worse as you learn that DR in Fallout 3 rarely if ever gets above 40. Most non-humanoid enemies don’t even have any DR stats, just health.

This is where the problem really starts to take shape.

While this does still impact the individual shotgun pellets, the reality is that a 10% reduction applied to 10 damage is incredible miniscule, so the Combat Shotgun becomes a weapon sent down by the gods to smite anything with a pulse.

The Combat Shotgun is incredibly powerful, uses bountiful ammo and is incredibly common. As are the Hunting Rifle, Missile Launcher, Assault/Chinese Assault Rifles, and Laser/Plasma Rifles.

Final result?

Most loot rewards are utterly worthless and incredibly unsatisfying.

99% of Fallout 3’s generic, copy-pasted dungeons end with you getting little more than some sellable stuff, a few caps, a handful of consumables, one weapon which you already have 15 of in stock, and a surplus of ammo that you’re probably already overflowing with. Fuck dude, even a lot of main story stuff just dumps excess on you. The final ‘dungeon’ doesn’t offer anything you don’t already have assuming you’ve bothered to go for a walk between the midgame and then.
I can only really describe this game’s world design as a sort of maniacal creative ADHD. You’ll find a marker or something to gawk at every couple of minutes, yes, but in actuality all of the stuff you find is superfluous gunk that at best rewards you with thirty 5mm rounds and a stimpak.
A couple of years ago I replayed Deus Ex: Human Revolution. While that game has many issues, the only relevant one is: Loot scarcity. In a sort of dim, artificial attempt to keep the player ~on their toes~, Deus Ex HR frequently has players break into hidden vaults and armouries only to find at best a weapon they already have and some ammo.
Fallout 3 has both this exact same issue and the opposite problem: Loot excess. Because there’s so little of it, and because it’s all so strong, the simple act of finding things is simultaneously unsatisfying and unneeded. What am I going to do with some leather armor and a knife? I found a weapon to kill god in a bin.
Lastly, there’s a very strange issue running through Fallout 3 wherein loot containers that need skill investment to unlock often have worse loot than random bedside cabinets. In the game’s final dungeon I cracked open a Hard-difficulty terminal, and behind it was… 19 10mm rounds, a Stimpak, some drugs, and one missile. Opposite, in a random footlocker, was a useful amount of money and a significant handful of Microfusion Cells.

Truthfully, though, all of that isn’t the actual problem - New Vegas also has its fair share of dud locations. The actual problem is that there’s a lack of loot progression. You get a Combat Shotgun or a weapon of your choice and you’re basically set for life. Besides Mini Nukes there are no rare ammo types, and caps are plentiful - in part due to loot itself being plentiful - meaning it’s easy to just cycle around each vendor and empty their ammo stock if you need .44 Magnum or .308 ammo.

There are some unique pieces of equipment here and there, but they run into a teensy tiny little problem:

They’re overkill.

Fallout 3’s greatest sin, looping back to that discussion about damage earlier, is that it’s an easy game.

Most enemies rarely have health in the hundreds, and basically everything besides the .32 pistol and the Chinese pistol is capable of outputting that with impunity. Conversely, unless the player cranks the difficulty right up, enemies don’t deal enough damage to be a threat unless they’re in large groups and even then it’s incredibly rare to fight groups of enemies in open terrain. Indeed, the first real swarm most players will find during the main quest is fought with tons of cover and chokepoints to exploit.
It’s not until the DLCs that enemies start appearing with difficulty attached, and said difficulty is little more than them getting a +30-40 extra damage for free. They do have bloated HP, but realistically if you’re at the recommended level for the DLCs then you have enough damage output to ignore that.

In most other open world games where loot is a frivolous, tacked-on system with no merit, usually exploration is its own reward. This sentiment carried BOTW to many people’s good graces, after all.
Fallout 3 has no such luck: The Capital Wasteland is a horrifically unappealing place. There isn't much in the way of landmarks and the ones that do exist are so… American. I suppose it may be resonant and even disquieting if you’re an American with any degree of patriotism but I’m an embittered Scot that views the entire country as a disease that’s gone on too long. The sight of the Washington Monument in disrepair makes me feel about as much as the styrofoam box I get my chips from.
It’s easy to throw up one’s hands and say “Oh, but this is a post-apocalyptic game, Mira! Of course it looks like shit!” which isn’t an entirely unworkable stance, it just ignores that pretty much every other famous piece of post-apocalyptic media - especially the Fallout game released immediately after this one wrapped - managed to nail this while still being ‘ruined’.
I have a relatively good sense of direction, to the point where my friends instinctively put me in charge whenever we need to find somewhere in Glasgow. With that said, I find it incredibly easy to lose where I am on Fallout 3’s map, for once the player leaves the downtown DC region the Capital Wasteland is little more than a grey/brown wasteland dotted with the same 4-5 ruins for miles upon miles. Most of the notable map markers are in the southeast of the map anyway.

Not helping this is that, as opposed to having regional spawn lists to spruce up the act of exploration, Fallout 3 uses a global spawnlist which deposits the vast majority of enemies into the world at random.

Which sucks because there’s not that many enemy types. Humanoids, Radscorpions, Radroaches, Yao Guai, Deathclaws, Botflies, Feral Ghouls, Super Mutants, Centaurs, Dogs, Mirelurks, Mole Rats, Ants, and robots. There, that’s basically every enemy in the game. You will most likely encounter all of them within 20 minutes of following the main path.
Oblivion has a similar problem of dropping random enemies all over the map, but that game’s level scaling is kind enough to replace enemies rather than simply dropping reskinned versions of them with higher HP in the same places.

The enemies, I feel, are where every issue I talked about up above comes to a head. Bad loot variety? Human enemies attack with the same 5-6 weapons. Bad location variety? You kill the same enemies with the same gear in samey locations. Bad quest variety? Regardless of context, you’re hitting the same things in the same gear in the same locations for only slightly different reasons.

And, as is the trend for Fallout 3, enemies being miserable to fight is both a culmination of other issues and introduces its own!

Namely: Combat is, at a very base foundational level, deeply unsatisfying.

Normally I wouldn’t repeat criticisms that other people have said uniformly for decades, however as a career Fallout 3 hater I reserve the right to do so.

It’s accepted by now that Bethesda games lack weight in their combat. Melee feels floaty and impactless, and every gun regardless of caliber or damage feels like using a BB gun. Nobody reacts to damage besides the odd grunt and maybe a canned stagger animation until they die, at which point they either limply collapse like a puppet with severed strings or explode in a shower of gore which is… Honestly, kind of juvenile? And I say this as a certified gore whore.
This in itself is an extension of the game’s nauseatingly childish fixation on gore; raider camps have dismembered corpses impaled on hooks, many areas are filled with random bits of internal organ, and Super Mutants carry entire fishnet bags filled with gore.

But on a technical level, shooting things in Fallout 3 is both deeply unsatisfying and badly designed.

FPS games were some of the first to really crystallize as a genre, and by the time Fallout 3 ripped itself free into the world there were already certain ground rules that not even outsider games dared to break.
If a gun sways, it’s accepted that it should aim where it’s pointing. If a gun’s projectiles have spread, it’s commonly accepted that the gun itself should be steady. Easy enough, right?
Fallout 3, for some asinine reason, does both.
On some level I can vaguely maybe kinda possibly appreciate the attempt to recreate the experience of trying to fire a gun in Fallout 1 with low stats at a target far beyond its effective range, but the problem here is that that experience was temporary until you powered up and here it’s a permanent fixture of gameplay. Weapons have less sway as you increase their respective skill, but unless your Int stat is high (because skill points are asininely tied to it) then that’s a relatively slow crawl - doubly so when there are other skills to increase.
What really hurts shooting is that hit detection is wildly inconsistent. The hitbox for projectiles is seemingly tiny, and it often gets caught on terrain or misses ‘direct’ shots by one thousandth of an inch. Said terrain seems to be poorly constructed, as wafer-thin bits of rebar will obstruct bullets around them and cause them to seemingly clatter off of thin air.
Call of Duty is terrible yesyes but this game came out a year after CoD4 had already introduced the average person to snappy, responsive and satisfying shooting which also lets you shoot through chainlink fences. I have no idea what was in the water to make people believe this game’s shooting was enjoyable.

As a brief aside: I discovered only now that oftentimes projectiles in third person mode don’t even go where you aim them. My metric for how good shooters are at a base level revolves around how good it feels to fight in close quarters, and because of this Fallout 3 feels even worse.

“[Developer] made a competent [genre] and didn’t bother to make the rest of the game” is a phrase that popped up a lot around the late 00s and early 2010s as more and more people began trying to blend genres together. See: Alpha Protocol.
Fallout 3 is unique in this front because Bethesda not only failed to make a competent shooter, but the corpse of an RPG around it isn’t very good either.

Let me just quote myself, from earlier:

Most RPGs either force a goal onto you but let you pick your motive, or they force a motive onto you and let you pick your goal. These are streams that’re best left uncrossed. Fallout 3, for some reason, attempts to do both.

Fallout 3 gives the player a rigid, established backstory and also an annoying rigid, established goal. It’s quite alarming to come across as an NPC related to your father and see every dialogue option be variations on “where my dada :<”.
But even beyond that, there isn’t much room to actually roleplay in this game. The Lone Wanderer as a protagonist is painfully straight forward, and their two forms are “person with human decency” and “guy who condemns kids to slavery.”
Fallout 3, like any other RPG, has quests but I hesitate to call them that. They’re more like guides towards shooting galleries that sometimes stop and ask you if you want to be a nice person, if you want to use a perk/skill to bypass a third of the quest, or if you want to be unfathomably and needlessly cruel.
Even within the main story, there isn’t much framework to roleplay because the Lone Wanderer assimilates their father’s purpose without even giving the player a morton’s fork dialogue choice.

As for the actual main story… I’ve always hated it for the same reasons most other Fallout 3 haters dislike it - it’s flimsy, way too short, has no room for player choice, is entirely linear, etc etc - but as I replayed it, something stood out to me.

Do you know what the Great Man Theory is? In short, and in layman’s terms: The GMT is the belief that Great Men aren’t necessarily nurtured or cultivated, but are simply great from birth. It is these Great Men, and only these Great Men, that are allowed to dictate the course of history. It sucks, I hate it. We don’t use the phrase “product of their environment” for nothing.

I’m gonna take a hard pivot here. Bear with me.

When you think of the word “fascism” you likely have a strong image in your mind. Goose-stepping Nazis, death camps, red hatted Americans screaming in hordes, the most boring European men in suits putting uncomfortable emphasis on the word “superior”, that kind of thing.
Those aren’t invalid. Good on you. Fascism sucks.
But my mental image is defined by a lot of uncomfortably up-close experience with these kinds of people, and it’s boring.
My mental image of Fascism is the dark underside of the Great Man Theory. Of people who believe that, if Great Men are simply born, then Un-Great or ‘Degenerate’ Men are also born. If there are enough Great Men, why shouldn’t they rule? Why should the world cater to Degenerate Men when Great Men can be classified? We should keep Degenerate Men from usurping our Great Men! So on, so forth.

What I mean to say here is that Fascism as a belief system often manifests in incredibly boring ways that’re so banal they often go unnoticed even by people that’re otherwise keyed into such things - at least when they’re not like. Insane.

Fallout 3’s main story is passively Fascist, then.

I don’t think Bethesda Game Studios’ writers are Fascists. I feel you could probably convince Todd Howard to write “1312” on his shirt with a mild amount of transgender Charisma. There’s enough queer people in this IP that I don’t think they hold any real malice for anybody, albeit in much the same way I don’t think they hold any beliefs at all.

But they are incompetent writers, and they’ve accidentally made a story which has awful undertones.

Your first real hints as to the game’s nature come up if you take a walk around DC. There’s a lot of veneration towards the USA Founding Fathers that at first seems quaint and in line with the setting’s propaganda, but…
As the story goes on, it’s made abundantly clear that the player’s father was a Great Man, being the only one capable of rallying a team of scientists and the only one capable of actually putting Project Purity into motion.
When he inevitably dies thanks to the Enclave delaying the ending of my suffering by 2 hours, it falls to you - only you, nobody else - to follow in his footsteps. Because you’re a Great Man too!
In the original version of the game, you die activating the Purifier, and a statue of Thomas Jefferson looks down at you - unmoving, yet seemingly approving… BECAUSE HE’S A GREA-

There’s also the matter of Three Dog’s radio commentary which gets a little… Suspicious, I’d say? It starts out innocently enough, but even a neutral Lone Wanderer starts getting referred to as an actual saviour, with such overdramatic gestures such as Three Dog admitting you cured his misanthropy by being a saint. It’s rather telling that the Very Good Karma icon is a Jesus caricature.

RPGs as a genre do admittedly have a problem with sometimes accidentally stepping into the Great Man shit, it’s just the nature of the genre; to have things occur without the player’s influence or awareness is unsatisfying from a design perspective, so of course things have to be up to you. Wiser RPG devs go out of there way to ensure you’re just an everyman, or you’re woven into the setting in such a way that it avoids such pitfalls.
Fallout 3, unfortunately, leans a bit too into it. Especially with the way Raiders are portrayed, and how often Three Dog talks about them and other wasteland randoms as if they’re actual animals.

It always did strike me as odd that handing total control of Project Purity to the Enclave is rightfully seen as a mistake but handing it over to another authoritarian organization - the Brotherhood - is fine. Yes they’re allegedly benevolent but even in Fallout 3 they show a distinct disgust for ‘wasters’ and it’s stated outright they shoot Ghouls on sight. If you have a more holistic view of franchises (as opposed to my individualistic one), then Fallout 4 confirms they’ll go on to be an actual Fascist organization.

And what better topic to add into this mix than slavery?

In invoking many prominent figures from America’s history, Abraham Lincoln naturally gets brought up a lot, and so do slaves. Slavers make up a decent number of the Capital Wasteland’s population, and they’re everywhere. The few settlements dotted around the map have an eternal fear of them, and their base is perhaps second only to the Brotherhood’s in size + population.

But slavery in this game isn’t really substantial. It isn’t something to be commented on or observed or interrogated, it’s basically another vessel for quests. There’s one liberation faction, and one enslaving faction. Kill slavers, or enslave people. Enslaving people is 100 negative Karma, giving two bottles of water to a beggar is 100 positive Karma. Ethical slavery, yeah!
But even though there is a faction dedicated to the emancipation of slaves, that’s your job - if you want. The slave liberators are tucked away in a corner of the map, easily missable because there’s frankly not that much out that way. Their fate, and the fate of all slaves, is up to you.
I don’t like Fallout 4 all that much but even that game was willing to create the idea that people other than you were working to liberate the Synths.

All of this really compounds the banal and straightforward design: Arguably more than any other Bethesda game, or indeed open world game, Fallout 3 is the one that feels the most static. It is your playground because only You can do anything.

With that all said, there is one part of the game I admittedly think is decent.

Vault 101, the player’s home, is like almost every other Vault in the Bethesda Fallout canon: A social experiment under the guise of a shelter for humanity. Note that this concept basically doesn’t exist prior to Fallout 3; Vaults in 1/2/Tactics/Van Buren were simply shelters.
Vault 101’s experiment was simple: Stay closed. Never reopen. Compared to other experiments in Fallout 3 and subsequent games, this one was incredibly merciful.
Naturally, like other Vaults, 101 faces a violent reckoning when your father leaves - violating the experiment - and the Overseer reacts harshly.

When you return, the Vault has split into people who want to keep the door closed and people who want to go outside.
Uniquely for Fallout 3, there is no right answer here; barring ‘destroy the vault’, each branch of the story offers a degree of good Karma and neither are explicitly better than the others.
You could side with the rebels and open the Vault. They’d be free, and the resources of an active Vault could do good for the surrounding area and settlements… But the Wasteland is filled with a lot of people who’re pure evil, and while you might be able to survive out there there’s absolutely no guarantee anyone else will besides Butch.
Or, you could side with the Overseer and keep it closed. Despite the Overseer being authoritarian, the Vault did run fine until your dad leaves at the game’s proper start and considering future games it’s one of three depicted on-screen that actually were completely fine. Every negative about opening the Vault is a valid reason to side with him, but… It’s quietly brought to the player’s attention that the Overseer’s control over Vault Security isn’t as tight as he thinks it is, and they’re all too willing to take drastic measures to enforce compliance. Not to mention that while he might be able to end the conflict, the Vault still needs a doctor and families have been either destroyed or split asunder.

This is the only quest of its kind in Fallout 3.

Unfortunately like every quest in Fallout 3 even potentially poignant moments are ruined by the voice acting.

I have to commend Jennifer Massey (Dr Madison Li) and Erik Todd Dellums (Three Dog) for being the only voice actors who’re even pretending to give a shit about this script, because everyone else is phoning it in. This game only has a small handful of voice actors and pretty much all of them are audibly reading the script for the first time as they’re saying the lines.
More often than not, the subtitles carry a tone that the actual voice acting doesn’t. It’s marginally improved in the DLCs, but only slightly. In the base game, the same 5-6 voice actors will mumble out their lines with zero enthusiasm or variety. It does, to an extent, turn into accidental comedy when you walk into the Rivet City Market and have three different NPCs greet you in an identical voice.

There’s a somewhat sad irony to the fact that Fallout 3 can be played through New Vegas via Tale of Two Wastelands and yet it doesn’t make it better - it makes it worse. That’s really this game’s legacy, isn’t it? It needs sunlight to grow, but New Vegas is the sky and it won’t be having it.

With everything I've said, observed and read in mind, I'd ultimately argue that Fallout 3 shows more signs of a rushed, ramshackle development than New Vegas. Of the two, it's infinitely buggier, rife with cut/scrapped content and saddled with an omnipresent feeling of "this game isn't done".

As I reach the end of this review, I find myself struggling to answer a question: Why do I keep playing this game every couple of years?

It's not Schrodinger's Game, I don't need to observe it to find out if it's shit or not. Not once has my opinion on this game gotten even SLIGHTLY more positive over my various replays - which, as of writing, is the only game this sentiment still applies to.

But yet, like clockwork, I return to it. I install Fallout 3, then New Vegas, then Tale of Two Wastelands followed by the same QoL/maintenance mods I always get. I boot it, I beat it, I hate it. We're sitting at like ten full replays over the last decade. It defies all sense to me. Is this what a manic compulsion is? Something my body craves but the brain cannot comprehend? It's so very eldritch.

In typing that, I awakened a memory of the day Fallout 3 barged into my life, a week ahead of schedule thanks to a shipping error. My father text me while I was on my way out of high school for lunch: "Yer game's here". Wanting to play a shiny new game and not wanting to read The Cone Gatherers, I opted to make the lunch trip into a trip home.
Having a lot of free time these days, I decided to retrace my steps and walk that route again.

I boarded the train to my old town, and as trains do it came to a stop at the end of the route. I departed and made my way to the route I once took - mercifully, the train stops right behind where I went to school. Following my steps, I did everything as it was; popped into a cafe for a hot roll, got a can of juice from the (still open, yay!) newsagent, and took the long way around to what used to be my home.
I grew up in one of the many, many towns in Scotland whose only real purpose was to house poor people and host an ironworks/coal mine - and those were shut down decades ago. As a result, going back during the quieter hours fills me with the same kind of discomfort one can also vaguely experience in the remnants of Fallout 3's depiction of Washington DC. My old town, too, is a place mostly occupied by shambling zombies and people that might kill you if aggro'd.

You're perhaps expecting me to admit that returning to Fallout 3 is secret nostalgia, right? That I hold a soft spot for it and have been denying that?

No, I still think it's terrible, but I did find out why I keep coming back to it.

On my walk I passed by a bus shelter that, in my day, was little more than a standing rail encased in bricks with a sheet metal roof. Nowadays it's been renovated, with a bench, windows, and a bus timetable.

Looking back at it, I recalled a discussion I once had at that old bus shelter with a good friend of mine who we'll call Gary. We'd been out that day for quite some time, poking through forests and trails with our friends. It was a long day in the middle of a mild Scottish summer, something we no longer experience. By the time we were due to go home, both of us were exhausted.
Exhaustion, for teenagers, is often the harbinger of naked sincerity. The kind you can only really experience in that time where your 'golden years' are in their twilight and their end seems closer and closer every time you turn, trembling, towards the horizon.
I offer to walk Gary to his bus and he accepts. On the way, our chats are about normal things, nothing heavy. When we sit down, though, the silence around us creeps in. A busy town center, now without a soul save for the odd car. We sit by ourselves, wordless, as the last breaths of sunlight choke and die beneath the coming night.

I whip out my iPod Nano and, on the screen, is the last thing I was listening to: A song from In Flames' 'A Sense of Purpose', which at that point was two years old.
Gary scoffs, and we begin the ritual that teenage boys do where we rib one another for our tastes over and over.
But we're both tired, it's just past 8pm, and we were kinda enjoying the silence. The jabs and japes soon end without much fanfare, and silence falls in.
The bus was late. This I remember clearly. So late that Gary, a jovial and relatively stoic lad, was getting antsy.
Apropos of nothing, he turns to me.
"Mira," He asks in a surprisingly cold voice. "You know, I hate A Sense of Purpose, but I love it at the same time."
This so dumbfounded me, it did. My thinking was so very binary back then: Things I liked were good, things I disliked were bad. How and why would one love a bad thing?
"Gary, that makes no sense." I croak out, bewildered.
"Aye," So he says, like he just confessed to a murder. "Wanna know why?"
Of course I did, and nodded in assent.
"Things keep changing, and I'm scunnered [tn: tired] of it. But that album," He nods to my iPod as though it were a child - not a creature of sin, but innocently misguided. "That album is always shit. No matter how much time passes, it's always shite. I like that."
I didn't have an answer in me, much as I wished I did. It was my first introduction to the concept of 'terrible but I love it'. We sat in silence for another few minutes before the bus pulled up. I wished him well and we saw one another off.

Coming back to this memory 14 years later, I get it.

Fallout 3 and A Sense of Purpose were both 16 years ago.

In the intervening years, my tastes have changed. My top 25 from 2019 looks alien to me, the same list from 2015 utterly unbelievable. My walls are no longer adorned with band posters and game memorabilia, but shelves and stuffed rabbits I collect. While I once longed to work in the IT field, experience has made me pray that I never wear a shirt and tie again. I no longer live in the old mining town, the sun does not hit my face from the same angles while I rest. When I exit my house I do not see fields of green and distant towns, but endless houses, apartment blocks and industrial estates.

It is, suffice to say, rather obvious that not only have I changed, but so has the world around me. Indeed, I often wonder if I'm the same person as the one in these memories, or if they were simply taken from another when I was constructed at the age of 21. The changes I describe have occurred over what is now half of my entire lifespan, a period of so many years that not even my pristine memory can keep those years from occasionally blending together or faces from getting blurred.

But Fallout 3?

Fallout 3 never changes.

vague half formed ramblings but like this used to be sort of fun right?? like obv a gimmick and not smth you’d play around w for long stretches all at once but yeah i remember liking this site and being impressed/scared that he always got it right lol. was playing this w my bf last night and seeing who could win first one of us or akinator and this just straight up doesn’t work now. how is it that my bf was trying to get domnhall gleeson, famous midrate nepo baby actor, and the genie just ran to almost a hundred guesses before giving up. feel like before it would be able to guess way more obscure shit relatively fast,, idk shit got me reminiscing on when the internet was a lot smaller pre-2020 pre covid pre tiktok. like I remember being scared at like 12 bc akinator was able to guess a youtuber that i liked that always hovered around 300 k subscribers,, that impressed AND terrified me. and idk now this shii now keeps asking about cancelled-for-being-creeps mcyt ppl even after ive already answered several times that no i am not trying to get you to guess that im thinking of the mcyt guy that bit his girlfriend lol…
idk jus thinking and I don’t want this to seem like screams at cloud formation simpsons gag type review I understand enough of my perception of this is playing it at a v formative age and then not thinking about it for like almost a decade lol. rose colored glasses and all that and ig i dont know how to end this other than by saying it is nice when u revisit something from ur childhood/teenage years and it’s still v good. like ive been listening to lots of pure heroine lorde this week and i haven’t listened to that album in years,,,, still great !!!! 💗💗

Okay nevermind my Operation Anchorage review.

Coming back to it as an adult with a fully formed brain and an actual belief system, The Pitt is my least favourite FO3 expansion by a country mile.

In part because while the others are bad, The Pitt is both bad and actually offensive.

Fallout 3 already has problems with invoking the imagery and motifs of American Slavery - a very real thing that scarred entire generations for about three centuries, killed hundreds of thousands of very real people and ruined tons of very real countries - while attempting to be impartial and ~nonpolitical~.
Fallout 2 is a dogshit-ass game that I have little love for, but when it brought slavery into the equation it had the correct idea of not invoking the Civil Rights Movement and associated iconography.
Fallout 3 had no such wisdom, which means you use an "underground Railroad movement" to free uh... A white man. Hey fun fact, the black leader of the escaped slaves - Hannibal Hamlin - is white in his ending slide

The Pitt doubles down on this in the worst way possible: By trying to Both Sides slavery.

Let's just lay out Ishmael Ashur's whole deal, right?

Ashur is an insane but erudite ex-Brotherhood religious zealot who, upon seeing a city dominated by endless hordes of cannibalistic murder-rapist Raiders, decided it would be best if he built a manufacturing empire out of its corpse. This empire is built with slave labor. Lots and lots and lots of slave labor. Slave labor that, given Ashur buys from Fallout 3's slave labor, almost certainly includes children too. These slaves die at such a rapid pace that external slavers are struggling to fulfill the shipment quotas thanks the horrific meat treadmill Ashur runs.
This regime is enforced by a system of eugenics (wherein slaves aren't allowed to have children), propaganda (in which Ashur promises all this is a "temporary measure" and that slaves can "earn" their freedom in brutal gladiator battles) and a caste of ex-raiders who - despite Ashur's alleged reformation - are still murderous rapists that are far too eager to torture, kill or maim slaves.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand The Pitt wants you to consider him a valid choice against his opponent.

Wernher is a bit of a dick, he's blunt and to the point at all times. He doesn't really care about the slaves but is entirely willing to free them for his goals. All he asks of you is that you steal a baby.

"WHOA!" Said most of the gaming landscape and also all of FO3's writers. "Stealing a baby is fucked up. This is such a morally grey choice."

But to take The Pitt's main dilemma as a morally choice is to not at all interrogate the seting, which is a really embarassing thing to happen when you wrote it.

Let's just interrogate it right here, shall we? Fun teambuilding exercise.

The core conceit of this allegedly "morally grey choice" is that Marie, as a literal baby, is innocent of the sins of her parents and thus shouldn't be subject to harm as a means to punish them. This is fair on its own, but to take that at face value means either deliberately or incidentally having major blindspots.
First of all, despite Wernher declarig he doesn't give a shit about Marie's health, it's also stated more than a few times that Midea - her carer if you side with the slaves - is looking after her during the experiments... Experiments which also happen if you side with Ashur.
Secondly, The Pitt naturally doesn't bother depicting child slavery - ostensibly due to developer cowardice - even though it's abundantly clear that's a thing given the connection between Paradise Falls (a place that sells to The Pitt and has numerous child slaves) and The Pitt, plus The Pitt is infinitely larger than is depicted ingame. With that in mind, one has to ask: What makes Marie more entitled to safety than the child slaves that're almost certainly a part of Ashur's great 'empire'? Sure, she's a baby, but this machine has already trampled over the corpses of children.
Third, and perhaps the most impactful question: What happens to the children born of Ashur's slaves? I like this one because there's no answer that makes the slavers look good. If the children are enslaved, then there's the obvious caveat; they're enslaving children. If the children are free, then the slavers steal children from their parents to be indoctrinated as brutal, amoral raiders. How is it worse, then, to steal a baby away to relative safety? It may not be squeaky clean, but no liberation movement ever was and the opposition are hardly innocent angels.

Ashur's sole defence when confronted with his crimes is that this is a "temporary, necessary measure" on the road to "emancipation" for everyone, which... does not work. At all.
To buy into this is to believe that Ashur's Raiders, with all their brutality and slavery and their entire arsenal of systemic oppression, would relinquish total control over The Pitt and elevate the slaves to a position of equality.
I regularly lay into Bethesda Fallout for being overly cynical garbage written by people who're emotionally still 14, but in the case of The Pitt I feel that cynicism has dug a grave for the story pre-emptively. If you take Bethesda Fallout at face value, it encourages the player to view things cynically and bitterly. Why should The Pitt get an exception? Nothing about this DLC stokes optimism.

It feels like this DLC was made by and for people who think Malcolm X was bad because he advocated for violent resistance, or think that any social movement is only valid so long as it remains entirely peaceful, quiet and out of mind. The core dilemma just falls apart entirely if questioned or interrogated at all, so while it might appeal to people who say the words "thinking too hard" about people who take videogames even slightly seriously, it must be pure brain poison to people who actually use that wet sack of meat inside their skull.

In other, less kind words: This DLC sucks doodoo shit and the writers should find jobs working as janitors in a kitchen - not chefs, because they clearly can't cook shit.

The only slightly redeeming part of this DLC is the Steel Ingot collectathon; a treasure hunt where you can scavenge up to 100 ingots in a map that's relatively well designed and may be the only cell in FO3 with any real thought in it. It's not very long if you, like me, have memorized the route, but the area it takes place in is relatively atmospheric and also conveniently disconnected from the overall conflict.

That the only good part is entirely detached from the rest of the DLC should be all the review you need, honestly.

A waste.

I didn't finish the original Hellblade. I remember spending about an hour wandering through a forest where traveling through a gate would change the surrounding terrain, and it just kept going and going and going far longer than it had any right to. It was a ridiculously badly-paced section that was placed early in what was set to be a padded game, so I stopped. In the wake of the news of Xbox shutting down some of my favorite modern studios, I was surprised to see that they'd picked up Ninja Theory back in 2018; I hadn't noticed, given how many companies Microsoft has been keen on acquiring in the past few years. To be perfectly transparent, I was going into this sour. It was with my arms folded and my face screwed up that I downloaded Hellblade II — a sort-of defiant "well, let's see what Xbox thinks is worth keeping alive if not Arkane and Tango". What I had managed to play of the original game was, at the very least, interesting. I figured Ninja Theory would be able to tread water and release something that was about on par with the last title.

It's worse.

I wrote in my Breath of the Wild review that people who thought that game was doing anything seriously impressive or novel probably haven't played many games. It wasn't an especially polite thing to say, and it ruffled some feathers, but I stand by it. I'd like to take this opportunity to go further and suggest that anyone praising Hellblade II for being like a movie probably doesn't watch many movies; if they do, they don't have any actual understanding of the medium beyond blind, uncritical consumption. I've seen praise get heaped on this for its cinematography when it's comprised almost exclusively of over-the-shoulder shots, the most bog-standard drone flyovers you've ever seen in your life, and simulated shaky-cam group shots where everyone stands stark still in a circle while having a conversation about nothing of importance. This is shot, cinematographically speaking, like shit. Watching this feels like someone gave a film student an eight-figure budget. Take a shot every time you're in one of the over-long combat encounters and Senua gets grabbed from behind to transition into the next battle.

While I was settling in expecting a visual feast, this is more of a visual buffet. Maybe a visual McDonald's. It looks good, to be certain, but it's really not that impressive. The mandatory upscaling present here forces some compromise to be made where it really ought not to be; DLSS is hailed as being the best option of the lot, but it still leaves shimmering artifacts on the edges of models where it can't quite get the anti aliasing right. Switch over to FSR and you can mostly get rid of the edge-shimmer, but it similarly demands that you manually set the sharpness a bit too high and fuck up the graphics everywhere else. I can say without hesitation that I've seen a lot of games that look significantly better than Hellblade II. For probably the same amount of money and about six months earlier, Alan Wake 2 does everything that this wants to and more convincingly. Go back a few years to Detroit: Become Human or Death Stranding and it's plain to see that those are far more impressive works from an entire console generation prior. I wouldn't normally give a fraction of a fraction of a fuck about graphical fidelity, but seeing all of the praise for how good this game looks makes me wonder if our eyes are working the same way.

I appreciate Crystar for pointing this out in her review, but Hellblade II has a very funny concluding monologue. Ending the game on the statement "all the questions were answered" implies that any answers were given, and further suggests that any questions were asked. There's not all that much that's ambiguous here, and the parts that are don't manage to raise any interesting questions. I had a feeling that the giants didn't actually exist, which Senua seemingly confirms at the end when she screams it at the final boss. "There are no giants, it's just you", she says. Unfortunately, the giants not being real means that most of the game didn't actually happen. All of the characters who were talking about giants weren't. All of the characters who died fighting the giants didn't. Everyone who thought they saw Senua kill a giant didn't. The natural disasters that the giants caused were just random and unrelated; whether they ended after Senua "killed the giants" is either another coincidence, or they didn't actually end at all. Cut all of this away, and there's really not much story left. Senua and her friends (who may not exist) trek across the land (which might be ravaged by natural disasters) while fighting the undead (who may not exist) so that Senua can get a blessing (that definitely doesn't exist) from a group of underground mystics (who definitely don't exist) until they get to the slaver king's doorstep and beat him in a fight. This reads like one of those early-10s fan theories about Rugrats being Angelica's dying dream. I know I like to exaggerate for comedy's sake when writing reviews like this, but this is a stone-faced recap of what happens. There are no jokes here.

The command to not pay too much attention to the writing comes a little too late into the game, long after you've already sat through dozens of ridiculously trite scenes. The bar for the writing sits around the point where Senua cries while looking at her bloody hands, and the voices in her head say "you have blood on your hands", just to make sure that you understand. The voices aren't much more than exposition fairies. They exist to recap story events that just happened with breathless awe, never giving you a chance to think about anything being said. A character will mention something that Senua hasn't heard of — giants that control the weather, let's say — and the voices immediately pivot to acting like confused toddlers. "Giants? What are giants? Can we kill a giant? Are giants real? They can't be real. There's no such thing as giants. We don't know what's real. Giants might be real. What does he know about giants? Why is he telling us about giants? I wonder how much he knows about giants. Does anyone know what giants are? What if he's lying? Can we ask someone else about giants?" It continues at this pace for about five hours until the game ends. The voices chattering on and on is one thing, and I could at least understand it as something the devs were doing to intentionally provoke the player, but this constant motor-mouthing falls apart when you enter into combat. The voices somehow don't have enough lines to cover these incredibly strict and linear fights, so they're constantly repeating themselves. I heard the line "their bodies strong like rocks, you have to hit harder!" four times in a single encounter, and at least ten in total before the game ended. I was half expecting them to start asking if I had any potions, or food. Add this to the canon of game characters who manage to annoy the player by spamming voice lines like they're running HLDJ.

Pacing is, regrettably, another factor that Ninja Theory has regressed on. A vast, vast majority of this game is spent holding the left bumper and up on the left stick. You walk forward, and you walk forward, and you walk forward, and Senua's never really in much of a hurry to get anywhere. You'll have a good twenty minutes where you're doing quite literally nothing besides walking in a straight line while the voices ask questions about shit that you already know. They'll also celebrate you figuring out the solutions to the ridiculously simple puzzles in the most simpering way imaginable. I do not need to be told that Senua is a very, very smart girl who can do no wrong when the game told me where the symbol was, and then automatically solved the puzzle for me when I held the focus button vaguely in its direction. These over-long sections where you walk around and do nothing are occasionally interrupted by over-long combat encounters where you tap dodge and spam light attacks, and that's where the fun really begins.

Most of these fights are fucking silly; the part where Senua interrupts the ritual is easily five minutes, as is the cave fight, as is the undead raid on the village. This is only as much of a problem as it is because Senua can only ever fight one enemy at a time, which makes them drag. There are about nine distinct enemy types that exist in the entire game, and they all take turns to lazily swing at Senua and slowly get chipped down. A lot of games that do mob fights will have some enemies hang back while others slowly come at you, but this doesn't even attempt to give you the illusion. Senua never has to fight more than one enemy at a time, regardless of how surrounded she is. What really gets me is the fact that this wasn't a problem in the original Hellblade. Enemies would come at you in twos and threes, and that was even in the earliest fights of the game. This is a total regression of a system that was already pretty thin, and the fact that Ninja Theory have cut out a majority of Senua's attacks to streamline the combat even further than it was boggles the mind.

There are glimmers of something good in here. I really do like the part in the cave where Senua starts to get the blessing from the hidden men, and the entire place lights up like a LIDAR scan. It's got some genuinely good pacing, too; you've got puzzle sections that lead into little combat encounters, and then those lead into walking sections, and that leads into a stealth section, and then it leads into another puzzle. It's the only place in the entire game where any of these systems feel like they're working together in harmony, rather than existing solely to interrupt one of the others for going on too long. It's a shame that Senua has to exist outside of that cave. I thought it was a good place for her to be. It was interesting, at least.

Anyway, I'm not sure I buy Ninja Theory's Games for Impact-bait shift in the past few years. I see their logo and I think back to how they would write Monkey killing escaping slaves because it was badass, or that GDC talk they did for DmC: Devil May Cry where they dedicated a section to making fun of Dante for being gay. The company, to my knowledge, has never really had a reckoning for any of that. Tameem Antoniades seems to have slipped out the back door just in time for this to release, but he's still got the sole creative director credit. I'm willing to believe that Senua's actress Melina Juergens actually believes in what she's doing — she's said in interviews that her father had a psychotic disorder, and she seems to have the most solid understanding of the crew when it comes to how the narrative ought to handle Senua's mental illness — but I'm not extending that faith much further than her. There's something about the documentaries that Ninja Theory self-publishes where they go over how very, very carefully they handled psychosis (we promise!) that doesn't pass the sniff test. I don't think it's bad that this exists, and I won't erase the people who have said that these games have been genuinely good reflections of their own mental illnesses; I just have some strong doubts that Ninja Theory is doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. One look at their back catalog suggests to me that they only wanted to make a Serious Mental Health Story because their old shit stopped selling and they could tell which way the wind started blowing. With the constant distractions of giant-slaying, risen undead warriors, and the sins of the fathers subplot, the current big game on the market "about psychosis" barely has time for the psychosis.

The conclusion that I'm forced towards, reductive as it is, is that people who love Hellblade II don't play anything else. They don't really watch anything else, either. I don't know what they do. It's not worth just harping on the fans, though; I don't think many people dislike this game for the right reasons, either. Complaining about a game not offering a good enough playtime-to-dollar ratio is peabrain shit. People also cry about Senua being Sweet Baby-core because she's got peach fuzz and bug eyes, all acting as though she isn't the the textbook definition of conventionally attractive. And the game isn't bad because it's story-focused — the game is bad because it's fucking boring. You engage with it in a boring way, and it tells a boring story. This isn't an inherently broken game. The concept is fine. It's the execution where Ninja Theory makes it clear that they've got no fucking clue what they're doing.

Great photo mode, though.

JESUS SAVES.

Sometimes a work comes along that feels like it was made for you. I’d like someone to break into the dev's office to confirm whether or not they’ve got satellite images of my house. I’m not certain what I was prepared for, going into this — all I really had to go off of was the ridiculously good box art — but the initial point-and-click exploration blobber gameplay hooked me. It’s a unique method of exploring this castle; most point-and-click games would take you directly to the next screen, while a game that gave you direct movement controls would be even more granular. This is more in the vein of something like Shin Megami Tensei, and it’s a really neat way to handle walking through these dark corridors. While this isn’t an especially frightening title, this is still a good method for building some tension while you explore.

Of course, this only lasts for about as long as it takes you to enter your first combat encounter. You meet a goddess who gives you a rosary to protect yourself, and you’re immediately pitted again a demon with the sole instruction to click the bead color that matches its eyes. A cross engraved with JESUS SAVES slams into its face, the demon’s head cracks open with a little hand-drawn animation, and you get a triumphant jingle on the following results screen which gives you an exorcism ranking. It’s a dramatic tonal shift, and it fucking rules. It marked the exact moment that I knew I was going to fall in love with this game.

I’m a sucker for the mixed-media approach that’s already here — a lot of the enemies look like drawings clipped out of demonology books, contrasting the overworld sprites and the dithered castle graphics — and the back-and-forth swinging between goofy minigames and tense exploration works in a way that seldom does anywhere else. There’s even a massive genre shift near the halfway point, where the game turns into a top-down RPG Maker game where you walk around solving puzzles and exploring dream-like areas beyond the castle walls. There’s so much going on here, and it would be so easy for all of this to feel sloppy and unfocused, and it doesn’t. I don’t know how Odencat and Fuming managed.

I’m just stunned at how perfectly this aligns with my tastes. It desperately needs to be experienced, because discussion without that baseline of having played it is near-meaningless. This is a dense work with a lot of little branches, and there’s going to be a lot that I missed on my playthrough that someone else picked up on right away. I'm surprised at how little I'm managing to come up with. Normally I'm incapable of shutting the fuck up. I've obviously written enough that I can't claim to have been left speechless, but there are only so many ways that I can say "I love everything here". This is my hole. It was made for me.

Oh, the power of friendship saves the day? Splendid.

First full-on review I'm posting on this website! This is the first game I've truly sunk a good amount of time into that I hadn't played before getting this account so now's as good a place to start as ever.

First off, Pokemon Emerald Rogue is a game that I've put a ton of hours into. I've had kind of a weird relationship with Pokemon lately because I want to love it, but the games themselves make it kind of hard for me to right now. The gameplay loop of main series Pokemon games and anything similar is EXTREMELY boring to me because of how many mandatory fights there are that are just completely free. I've also had a lot of experience playing the game competitively but it's frustrating losing a fifteen minute long match to one bad RNG roll and it's really unintuitive to try and learn where you went wrong otherwise. I've been in need of something a little different from both of these, to say the least. A highly replayable version of a Pokemon game that's difficult enough to be engaging should be amazing for me even if it's still on the easier side. So, why not give PokeRogue a try too?

Just as a fair warning, most of this game's art and music are all from preexisting assets. This is going to be a bit of a weird review since I'll be talking exclusively about gameplay as a result. For what it's worth though, this game uses Gen 5's artstyle and pulls music from both Gen 5 games and PMD which means it's really nice on both fronts.

If you've never played PokeRogue, I'll give a basic rundown of how the game works. You'll first pick a few starters from a list of every existing starter Pokemon as well as every unevolved Pokemon you've caught or hatched during a run. From there, you'll be sent off to do 10 battles. Most of these will be with wild Pokemon but there will be some trainers mixed in. When you win a battle, you will be rewarded with a choice between one of a few random items to enhance or heal your team members as well as the ability to buy items from a shop before moving onto your next battle. The wild Pokemon and Gym Leaders you fight will be determined by the type of biome you're currently in. Your 10th battle will always be against either a stronger Boss Pokemon or a Gym Leader and once the fight ends, you can move onto a different biome for the next 10 battles. Rinse and repeat until either your team wipes or, in the case of Classic Mode, you make it through 200 floors.

Despite how the gameplay is quite literally using main series Pokemon's formula, I think this game has a more similar appeal to Pokemon Mystery Dungeon from a pure gameplay standpoint than the main series games. I promise it's not just because 90% of the music in this game is from PMD, hear me out. Most individual battles in this game are very straightforward and will end in only a few turns. The biggest problem scenarios in this game come from your team being whittled down too much or not being prepared enough for a certain situation as opposed to the strategy that goes into each individual battle. Ultimately, big draw here is resource management, exactly like PMD. There's a lot of evaluating risk and planning for the far-off future and I do think this is to the game's benefit. The middle portion of the game might seem like it'd drag on for a while on paper but it ultimately is fine for reasons I'll talk about soon. It kind of needs to be longer so you can prepare for the endgame anyways.

The general speed of the game is very nice. There's no overworld so immediately after you're done with one encounter you move onto the next. You can also set the game speed to move five times as quickly as the average Pokemon battle in this engine. This might not sound like much but it is a huge deal when so many battles in this game are unimportant. Things change quickly and you're brought up with a lot of choices because of the item rewards you get for winning each fight. It's nothing too crazy, especially during the easier parts of the game, but it's enough to fill in for a bunch of the battles themselves being simpler. This is why the middlegame being longer is fine with me, by the way - you still do have things to focus on that keep you engaged enough.

My biggest problem comes from the unreasonable difficulty curve. This game is completely ridiculous at the very start, really calm during the middle, and just kind of ridiculous at the end. For the first 30 floors or so you can get screwed over bigtime by the game throwing something completely impossible for your team to handle at you. My team's levels are still below 20 and none of them have evolved. I should not be put up against a random trainer with a Paldean Tauros, a Spiritomb, and some third fully-evolved Pokemon that currently slips my memory. Literally nothing I could do. Is it normal for roguelikes to be this unreasonable at the start?? I had spent a solid hour or two bashing my head against the wall before I made it through the first part of a run.

Before anyone says this is a skill issue I proceeded to get 3rd place on the Daily Leaderboard a few days after this. I'd like to think I shouldn't be the type to struggle this badly here. The solution is with the Egg Gacha system. If you defeat a Gym Leader or get lucky with an item pull you can get a ticket to roll a gacha machine for some eggs. These eggs have no impact on any current runs, but whatever they hatch into will become usable as a starter from there on out. You can get a majority of all Pokemon from this, including legendary and mythical Pokemon, and a lot of the Pokemon you get from this may have an Egg Move as well that you can choose to add to your starter before a run. The main consistent way past the early game is to either get something with very good stats without the need to evolve or to get a Pokemon that gets very good Egg Moves. Otherwise it feels like it's luck of the draw whether or not you get checkmated early on.

Some ~100 floors of planning for the endgame later and the game throws a ridiculous trainer battle at you. A lot of people I talk to have had issues here but I don't think it's so bad mainly because the AI is VERY exploitable. They do arguably go a step above the main series games and make the trainers switch their Pokemon under certain conditions but these conditions are very easy to pick up on and exploit. You could just put up Stealth Rock and either switch repeatedly yourself or switch until you happen upon an ideal situation to use a setup move like Swords Dance on a Pokemon with a decent Speed stat and these fights become completely free. It really doesn't help that whatever method they use to decide each Pokemon's current moveset isn't very good. There was one point my active Pokemon was below half health, the opponent sent out Greninja against my Ground-type, and it proceeded to use...Water Gun... I ended up tanking the hit and knocking it out afterwards.

Then you reach the final boss. I went into this game blind and had no idea what to expect here but I'm going to be honest, this is one of the most poorly-designed boss fights of any video game I've ever played. After the absolute slog of throwing myself into the early game repeatedly in hopes that things would be different next time, and after the next 100+ floors of nothing of note happening, the final boss was quite literally completely unbeatable for the way my current team was laid out. I knew exactly what to expect the moment the final boss appeared on screen and despite the best spur-of-the-moment planning I could give, despite playing this game competitively for over a decade and sitting on the top of a Pokemon Showdown ladder for around six months straight, it just wasn't enough and I had to watch my team slowly crumble as the hours of time I spent getting to that point would need to be started all over again.

Despite all of that this boss is exceedingly simple to prepare for. I have not lost this fight even a single time since that very first run where I made it that far. You do need to prepare for it, but a lot of the time my preparation has come down to dedicating two moveslots to it and avoiding using certain items and that's just been enough. I can't even call this boss fight hard. It's just really, REALLY dumb, and I wholeheartedly believe that anyone looking to play this game should spoil themselves on the final boss before playing. The alternative is repeatedly using the built-in feature to retry the fight (which didn't exist when I first played) enough times to get good enough RNG to cheese it out.

So I think I've made it pretty clear that my first day's worth of experience with this game was dreadful. After you get enough gacha pulls to get a decent lineup of starters and know what the final boss's deal is you can definitely start to have a lot of fun with the game. Keep in mind this review started with me saying a lot of good things about the game's systems. I did go on to beat Classic Mode and try out the other modes the game has to offer.

There is an Endless Mode that removes all trainer battles from the game, adds a boss every 50 floors instead, and gives you certain debuffs after you clear a certain number of floors. This mode is fun to try out once or twice but isn't as good as Classic in my opinion. There's nothing super wrong with it except for the hardest fights here being very cheeseable once again but experimentation feels a lot more limited here and it feels much harder to run an actual team as opposed to one mon that hard carries you and a few "supporters" in a sense. It doesn't even feel like you can be super expressive with that one hard carry if you want to go super far either.

Then there's a Daily Run which is pretty cool. This game's RNG is deterministic and what Daily Run does is give everyone the same seed every day with a random starting team and random encounters for 50 floors. There's no shop and there will usually be around two Gym Leaders and a little boss fight at the end. Beyond just clearing the 50 floors, there's also a score system that will award more points the more Pokemon you defeat and the less turns it takes to defeat them. The pre-set RNG makes it very fun to go through with whatever route you feel like would be best and optimize each fight for a high score. It's a really fun change of pace that I'd recommend everyone try at least once.

The game unfortunately does have an issue with freezing and needing you to reset from what presumably is their servers being overloaded since it is a free browser game, and not all of the moves and abilities are finished unfortunately, but it's getting basically constant updates. It's really cool signing on and seeing that an ability you wanted to try out works now or that a new feature was added that improves the game. Oh, and when I say it's a browser game, I mean that this game works on ALL browsers to my knowledge. I've played it on mobile and it's been perfectly fine. Great stuff there.

As unfortunate as it is though, the fact that this game was as rough to start out as it was makes it hard for me to think too highly of it. I've had a lot of fun with it and I'd suggest everyone at least give it a shot with everything I've said in mind. I know the developers are actively changing things and they could totally make the early game easier but I doubt they'll change something as big as the final boss. I'm on the fence about bumping it down to 2.5 just for how brutal that first day of playing was but I need to be honest with myself and say that I did have a lot of fun with it still.

Pokerogue's biggest success in how addictive it is. It's so simple to just be hooked on trying to plan out a team based on the couple of members that have dropped, scout out ones to catch, try to catch a few more in order to get ideal IV's to bolster your starters with, and just grind out floors until you get that run where everything comes together. It's good like that! It makes great use of music and motifs from throughout the Pokemon series, both rival designs are great, and it allows for an incredibly speedy feeling out process of all sorts of Pokemon species, leveling them up insanely quick to feel a sort of greatest hits version of their growth. That Pokerogue can so effectively tap upon the feeling of wanting to catch 'em all and play with all of them is its greatest strength.

Unfortunately, it doesn't even take a full run for Pokerogue to show its faults. AI is rudimentary to a fault, being able to be easily baited based on type match-ups, effectively randomizing learnsets to the point of inefficiency, and ultimately just can't match up with all of the flexibility a player always has at their fingertips. Though this is really only an issue in the early stages of Pokerogue, when the player is still developing their team. By the game's midway point, five or so of the player's final party has probably been solidified, with one 'weak link' to drop out if they happen to see something better. Moreover, due to the way the battles are spread out as an endurance gauntlet, the same types of Pokemon are gonna end up being far more valuable. Whilst you could imagine a player picking up and bonding with whatever weirdos they happen to stumble onto and making some kinda grand narrative, the game is really only suited for two kinds of Pokemon: fast attackers and walls with a lot of resistances. Pokemon like Excadrill leap out to being so ridiculously good in this kind of format, it's almost a punishment to NOT have one on your team, and that goes doubly for any fast set-up sweepers. As the enemy loves to load its opposing trainers with Lum Berries, and it costs less to not get hit at all than to tank hits well, stall or status strategies are incredibly unreliable, inherently removing the usefulness of a littany of Pokemon. Pokerogue, ultimately, is a game where your run is successful because of one Pokemon who hits things really hard, a couple of switch-ins to bait that Pokemon's bad match-ups, and then the rest of your team can be rounded out with whatever losers who'll warm the bench. And considering the sheer length of a full run, they're gonna be warming the bench for a while!

I played way too many browser games as a kid to call PokeRogue bad - if I had THIS in my school's computer lab I definitely would've never played anything else and sacrificed all social time at school to play it. There's an intoxicating, addictive element here that's testing your knowledge of every generation of Pokemon in a massive gauntlet. It's just disappointing that the solution is "load Gardevoir with a bunch of drugs and spoons and then she hits everything with the moon until it dies", or variants thereof. It's an unbalanced but fun little experiment that I hope its devs do more with, but the core conceit of how the project works makes it a bit of a solved equation for me that undercuts the whole feel of Pokemon for me.

PokéRogue is, in my opinion, very much too ambitious for its own good. It's an insane endeavor, for a browser game, to do all that it does (and indeed, even just on a mechanical level, a lot of abilities and moves are still not implemented, though obviously that will pass with time), and at a base level, it does it pretty well. Along the way to the final boss, you'll fight a bunch of wild pokemon trainers, gym leaders, E4+Champion and a rival, and after every fight you get a random item. It adapts Pokémon to a roguelite formula fantastically well- the more Pokémon you get, the more eggs you hatch, the more options you unlock. And on the other hand, every run is different, because while you will eventually start with your absolute best aces, you'll have to fill up the rest of the team with whatever else you run into (probably something like a Gyarados and an Ursaluna, if you're like me).

That is all well and good, but where it falls apart is just how much stuff there is. Mainline Pokémon has over 1000 critters now, 900+ moves and 300+ abilities- that is all just way too much for one game to feature. This isn't about Dexit, there's never been a Pokémon game where more than like, 150-200 Pokémon are available to catch before the credits roll, and I might still be highballing that number. And those games are some 20 hours long if you're rushing, PokéRogue is only... well it's like, 3 hours long, but we'll get to the length in a second. My point is, this is just too much. The sheer number of options means they cannot possibly be balanced at all, which paradoxically makes the game feel more repetitive because why the hell would I use most Pokémon when I could use much more versatile and minmaxed equivalents? A Pidgeot is never going to hold a candle to a Staraptor, and why would I ever use a Donphan when I have access to Great Tusk for just a few points more? Worse than that, only a few select strategies are really viable. By the late game every boss 'mon is going to be holding a few Lum Berries, which is going to make status effect-based strategies fare pretty poorly. On the other hand, stat boosts last until you enter a trainer battle, so anything that can do those well is automatically high tier (You can't take those buffs into Gym Leader fights, but you can against boss wild Pokémon. Plus, with the somewhat janky AI, you can definitely find some opportunities to set up a sweep). Also, the final boss and the Rival's ace are always the same, so you'll really want to build around them by the end. Starting with anything other than the "ol' reliables" you'll inevitably get a few of quickly begins to feel like a self-imposed challenge, and with how incredibly fucking long the game is, that's just not appealing.

Length, in fact, is in my opinion PokéRogue's biggest flaw. When I said the game took about three hours to beat, I was not kidding, runs go between 3 and 4 hours which is just nuts for a game that's mostly going to be you clicking the same move on a wild Pokémon 20 levels weaker than yours. It just doesn't need to be like that, too. You can get up to level 200 compared to the official games' cap at 100, but learn-sets still go up to 100 so the latter half of your journey will be a lot more samey (unless you replace some of your Pokémon, but it's not like the new ones will be learning anything new on their own too), and so much of any playthrough is just fighting wild Pokémon that it's really easy to see how a lot of that could be cut off. Make every 10th floor from 10 to 80 be a gym leader fight, 80-90 is the E4 and 90-100 is the finale, and you've cut off the runtime in half and the amount of actual content seen by like, 5%. The difficulty might feel better, too- a lot of the game is trivial, but you're eventually going to hit a brick wall that just sweeps you and have to restart from scratch (or just reload your browser page and start the fight over...). I just don't understand why this free game feels the need to have so much padding, there's even an infinite mode for those who do want the game to go on longer, but at least for me it does ruin a lot of the fun- it's incredibly addictive, so it's common for me to want to start a run, but I know that halfway through I'll be absent-mindedly clicking Waterfall after setting up a few Dragon Dances with my Gyarados, while watching a Youtube video. So I dunno, extremely impressive effort, but I do feel the result is only kind of ok.