Cool game. I really love the aesthetic, vibe and overall presentation. However, after the novelty wore off I felt that runs are far too samey. As long as you get a decent setup at the beginning and figure out what works you go for the same strategy every time. I really like deck-builders that have you try to make the best with what the game gives you but in Balatro, some items are great while others are completely useless or extremely unreliable.

The difficulty levels that are the stakes are just not any fun and only serve to make the game more RNG dependent and frustrating. With the notable exception being the Eternal Jokers. They are the only interesting addition to the gameplay that these stakes offer. The later stakes are way too RNG dependent and just not fun to play. Orange and Gold stake are especially annoying.
In the higher difficulty levels, you will be restarting runs over and over again until you get a decent start and then you'll have to be lucky that you won't get screwed over by any of the boss blinds. As they can sometimes completely counter your strategy and oftentimes you can't really properly prepare for them.
Then there are the different decks which actually aren't all that different and they basically all play out the same. Some are just more annoying to get going.

These problems became more and more apparent as I spent more time with the game. When I first booted up Balatro I had a blast though and I was hooked right from the start. And while that enjoyment started to turn to frustration as time went on I never lost that initial feeling of fascination with this game. It's strangely addictive.

I am more than done with this game now though after getting gold stake on one deck (Blue) and getting 100% of the collection. I don't feel like beating any of the challenges or to beat every deck on gold stake as that's just a giant RNG-fest and that would just feel like a chore to me.

R-E-P-E-T-I-T-I-V-E
Persona series overall is letdown, but P3 is actually a waste of a masterpiece, and I'll explain why.

Narrative structure: Its ending shines. I completely kneel for the last 10 hours of the game, Burn my Dread is one of the COOLEST final battle themes I've ever listened (the lyrics, oh my God), and all the meaning of the journey was top. I love how, for example, how P3 deals about facing fears, and living each day as if it were your last.
HOWEVER, the entire beginning and half-game are terrible (except for the Aragaki scene middle game). The stories of Persona games are NOT bad, but they are kind of destroyed by its own structure. They are not long stories, but the structure makes it long, bullying the pacing of the games. You have 90 hours games that could be 30 or 40, but due to you needing to live every single day of the month, farming points, seeing useless social link or characters, and discarding your time instead of investing in more things to improve what is going to come (or just skip all that), the series insist that you need to grind useless no matter what. Because of this, I genuinely find impressive anyone who completes a Persona game without finding it a tiring journey, as Persona is the most repetitive series I've ever consumed. Not only that, also its worldbuilding is too simple (still efficient), and the story overall is shallow, as it's not of the interest of the creators diving into a well deep and explored narrative. It has good moments and very good connections, but the construction of the scenes are very flawed and superficial (I still remember the grotesquely bad script of Fuuka's persona presentation).

Characters: with very fun interactions, the characters are cute, cool and stylish, but they can't sustain this structure for most of the time. They're not deep and they're not incredibly well developed. They are, de facto, good characters, some unique and ones that I really like, but this does NOT carry a story for 80 hours or more. There will come a time when everything will be a record played again. Repetitive. Also, I'm already tired of saying Persona protagonists are completely bland (making a slight exception for Amamiya Ren), but I don't even care anymore.

Gameplay: The gameplay that exists is that you climb a tower with 200 floors identical to each other to kill mobs. With the exception of this defect, it's fun. Okay, serious now, the battles are very interesting. The battle system is one of the strong points of Persona games.

Soundtrack: Unique, beautiful and fantastic. A very beautiful mix of elements such as rock and jazz to create compositions that anyone in the world could familiarize themselves with in just one listen. I love Persona soundtracks. For anyone who have complained about the remix, go fuck yourself. In Reload version, the songs were better and cleaner than in the original versions. And even if you didn't like it, you're a fool for complaining. The original soundtracks already exist, the new ones give a new perspective and fresh air for those who want it to have that air.

The Art Direction continues to astound, consistently elevating the Persona series with its stunning visual presentation. Since Persona 5, it has showcased a breathtaking artistic vision that truly makes the game shine. Paired with its exceptional soundtrack, the art direction are the heart of the series.

For all that, this franchise could be much better than it actually is, but I know that will never change. The flaws will continue, and I will always be complaining, because it'll never get there. I know Atlus is like the RGG studio that likes a bit of a comfort zone, and won't change their games much.

In short, Persona is a series that is destroyed by its own exhausting structure that seems to want to suck you in at all costs, but still it's overall a fun experience with a good message.
I tried gaslight, but when a game is objectively mid, not even my gaslight can help it.

Persona is the biggest collective delusion I've ever seen, I find it unimaginable that the majority of people acclaim this series and don't point out any flaws, not even the elitists or people that know how to write good reviews. It's unbelievable to me.

Goodbye puzzles, goodbye labyrinthian level design, goodbye ink ribbons, goodbye limited inventory, goodbye horror. Goodbye... most of what I love about Resident Evil.

It really is wild just how different this is from the classic Resident Evil style; you can barely even recognize it as Resident Evil beyond the title and a couple reoccuring characters. Even wilder, this game is somehow the fan favorite, even today after a series wide tonal redirect and a remake of this exact game.

And yet, RE4 is still so damn good. I don't know when was the last game I played when I was absolutely giddy at the start of each play session. All I wanted to do for weeks was go home and play Resident Evil 4.

Part of it is the campiness is perfect. It's the exact right type of unironic tone fused with ridiculous dialogue to make a perfectly blended horror/action smoothie. As much as I love how terrifying the isolation of Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2 are (and as undeniably disappointing it is that this isn't that), the cheese is hilarious and delightful, without ruining the potential for good scares. This is a script I want to quote with people forever.

The shift in tone also extends to the action. You could totally call this an action game before a horror game and you wouldn't be wrong, but it somehow fits with the series and feels like a natural evolution of how much more action there was in Resident Evil 2. There's no reason to ever run past anything, just kill everyone. Ammo drops are practically bottomless, and the gunplay is always fun no matter what weapon you choose to use. My kill count at the end of the game was 929; I think combined between RE1 and RE2 there weren't even 929 enemies total. This ends up being the main avenue that the game delivers scares: the shooting is still so fun, so just focus on that, keep the resources limited, and overwhelm the player with sheer numbers to keep the risk of failure. It could easily have become a disaster, but they miraculous strike the perfect balance of scares, difficulty, and fun gunplay to make it fun throughout (mostly, more on that later).

The biggest hurdle with the experience is easily the controls. I got used to it semi-quickly, but not being able to move and shoot at the same time makes it feel extremely archaic compared to every other shooter ever, before or since. This restriction made sense with tank controls and a bird's-eye perspective, but changing to over the shoulder and kinda-sorta tank controls limits both your mobility and visibility, and with this level design and sheer number of enemies, it's a tough pill to swallow early on. That said, I did get used to it fairly quickly, and once I did it was a great time. Plus, it's obvious to see how everything else in this game is weighted in the player's favor to make the controls more tolerable. Enemies more often than not walk super slowly, giving you plenty of time to take aim or just run away. Music only plays when there are enemies nearby, and they yell at you before attacking, so you'll rarely be caught by surprise.

The village is a great intro that really emphasizes the scares, and I like the castle too, it feels like a good setting for your now more intermediate skills. The island however I'm not really a fan of, and I think it leaves a bit of a sour final impression to end the game off. Not only are there a lot more enemies now, the military base aesthetic of both enemies and locales makes the experience feel a lot more Uncharted than Resident Evil, both in the sense of the scares being super toned down, but also in the shooting feeling much more generic. Saddler as a final boss also ends up feeling underwhelming, mostly due to the free rocket launcher you get. Also the final cutscene just feels rushed and sloppily handled with Saddler's unceremonious fight and with Ada's escape at the end. Like, Leon's really just going to water ski into the sunrise after losing the sample like that? Get outta here. I haven't finished Separate Ways yet, maybe that will help.

I guess I can throw in the token comment that Ashley sucks. I'm really glad that more often than not she's kidnapped so you don't have to deal with her, but realistically even when she's with you she's not that much of a pain. There are even a couple good sequences where you're forcefully separated from her that do a good job at making you tense.

Between this, RE1 and RE2, I think this is my least favorite Resident Evil. Partially because of the focus away from horror, but I think more so because of how chapter 5 drops the ball a bit. That said I think I could more easily see myself replaying this than RE1 and RE2, and a second playthrough feels like it'll be completely different. Still, this was a great time; an easy recommend and a must play in the series.

It’s been a long time since I’ve played a game that so immensely inspired my imagination, possibly since I played Earthbound many a year ago. There’s a real wholesomeness to this one despite the various heavy themes it tackles: capitalism, fascism, loss, grief, and the failure to learn from the past among them. Our heroes are plucky underdogs to an increasingly hostile society, and despite their relative lack of dialoguse, you really come to love Lucas Kumatora Duster and Boney (and Salsa! Don’t forget Salsa). Far more than the completely silent children of previous Mother games, the main cast here really feels like a loveable and unforgettable found family.

There are a few gameplay hangups, namely a handful of absurd difficulty spike boss fights (shout outs to Miracle Fassad and the Jealous Bass!), but it isn’t anything that can’t be overcome with enough strategic play (use shields like your life depends on it). We’ve got otherwise a smooth, enjoyable turn based rpg that never devolves into tedium or grinding, partially helped by the excellent rhythm battle system and the series’ signature sense of humor.

In this type of game, though, the gameplay is ultimately just a means to the incredible story, which as mentioned above is thematically rich and emotionally poignant- if you didn’t cry at the ending, are you even human? It’s a story that shows the rise, fall, and redemption of a misguided peoples, and then asks us to apply those lessons to our own world. A beautiful tale, and a masterpiece game.

major props to hal lab for avoiding cashing in on yearly picross 3d releases like in the 2d series; round 2 is a complete overhaul of the original concept. the original picross 3d struggled with integrating its 3d nature into the actual puzzle solving, as the game's loop involved slicing its three-dimensional voxel sculptures into two-dimensional slices, where row hints pointing towards the player had next-to-no bearing on the solution of any given slice. round 2 instantly solves that by transforming the game's mechanics into an adaptation of color picross from the main series, where instead of chiseling out a monochrome image, you instead have to deal with multiple colors on each line. hints perpendicular to a slice now show the possible colors for that particular block, and thus the loop now involves checking hints on all three axes instead of just the slice's primary two. switching to colors also vastly increases the potential number of hint arrangements. as in the first game, each hint may indicate an unbroken string of blocks, two separate strings of blocks, or three+ strings of blocks, but now each of the two colors can have its own variable number of strings per row. the amount of different idioms that arise from this far surpass the original game.

what makes this particular interesting is that the coloration of the blocks is not random or chosen purely mechanically: it actually reflects the construction of each puzzle. the voxels of the original game are now marked blue, and new, variably shaped, curved blocks are marked orange. this addition adds substantial context to the chiseling process: compared to the rectangular jumble of the original, you can now clearly make out the structure of what you're building over time. while aesthetically pleasing in its own right, this also assists with the mental leg work, as educated guesses can be made much more easily with a rough idea of the puzzle's shape and edges. this creates some pseudo-idioms in its own right as well: for example, edges with a taper at either end generally appear as a single blue string and then two one-block orange strings. the game can get quite inscrutable at times without some real brute forcing of all the different possibilities, so the organic natures of the game's mechanical structures eases some of the tedium and allows for some guesswork.

I played a couple more rounds of the original just to feel it out, and honestly playing this has dampened my enthusiasm for that entry. so many QoL additions here, from the ability to swipe across the screen to break/paint a bunch of blocks in one go to finally being able to isolate the edge-most slice from any direction. the structure here has been changed from tiered assortments of puzzles from easy to hard to thematically driven "books" of puzzles, with the easy/normal/hard selection individualized for each puzzle. goes a long way in making the on-ramp smooth coming out of the original; no need to slog through the piss-easy stuff if you already have some experience with the concept. the ranking system is also much more granular, with your amount of misses (now including incorrect painting, unlike the first title) and time taken now converted to a numeric score, which gets multiplied against the chosen difficulty of the puzzle to get your final score and rank. also a testament to how difficult this game can get: later puzzles can have top "rainbow" ranks allow for 25-30 minutes on a single puzzle with up to three or four misses. the very final puzzle in the game took me over 45 min!

Sega had a rough transition to 3D.

It all started with the 32X. This is unlike most stories, which usually start at the beginning. The 32X was, to put it politely, a fucking disgrace. A lot of historical accounts regarding what a nightmare it was to work for Sega start around this time — Scott Bayless claims that former CEO Hayao Nakayama sent the order down from on-high for a project that was ill-defined and mismanaged from the start, comparing the company to the Hindenburg; Tom Kalinske says that he desperately tried to get Sega to kill the console, to use a Silicon Graphics chip that would later be poached by Nintendo, to partner up with Sony to make the PlayStation long before Sony did it by themselves and made a boatload of money — and was rebuked at every turn. A bit later, Peter Moore told Yuji Naka to fuck off and left for Microsoft after the latter accused the former of faking a video of a focus group who said that Sega was old and boring. Of course, these accounts are all clouded by a combination of bias, the Pacific Ocean, and a language barrier; I admit that I find it a bit difficult to believe Kalinske was such a good businessman that Nakayama was “literally slapping subordinates” (in his words) because of how bad Sega of Japan looked compared to the American branch. Still, though, it paints a picture. Sega is broadly described as being a nightmare company to work for starting right around the time the 32X started being developed, and its reputation never once improves in anyone’s retrospective accounts. The games on the 32X could run in primitive 3D, which was neat, but that was about it. The 32X launched, bombed, and was unceremoniously killed within three years.

The Sega Saturn surprise-launched in the west, to the complete and utter dismay of retailers. So incensed were they by what they perceived to be a fuck-you on two fronts — the miserable launch of the 32X leading into the Saturn just six months later combined with the fact that only some of them were selected to stock it — that many of these retailers outright cut ties with Sega. Hell, the Sega CD wasn’t exactly moving units at the time either, so Sega was cannibalizing itself on three different fronts. As much love as I have for the Sega Saturn and its utterly strange architecture, the console really wasn’t setting the west on fire. Japan liked it, largely because it ran arcade games pretty well. But there was one major, horrifying problem.

The Sega Saturn didn’t have a Sonic game.

It was going to. Sonic Xtreme was planned to be the very first mainline 3D Sonic game, which is probably a sentence that was a lot more exciting to hear in 1994 than it is thirty years later. But there were too many fires that needed to be put out behind the scenes at Sega to continue development on Sonic Xtreme, and the console went without the killer app that most people really wanted a Sega console for. Imagine Nintendo going an entire console generation without a mainline Mario platformer, or Sony bankrolling a new game that isn’t a cinematic, third-person, over-the-shoulder shooter. That’s just not what these companies do. It’s all wrong. You can’t drop Sonic the Fighters or Sonic Jam’s “Sonic World” and pretend like those are good enough replacements for what was supposed to be the 3D Sonic game. The Saturn launched, bombed outside of Japan, and was unceremoniously killed in western markets within three years.

With every last ounce of power and goodwill they had within them, Sega released the Dreamcast. This time, it would be different. This time, they would have their mainline 3D Sonic game. This time, they were going to beat their competitors to the newest console generation. This time, people would be ready for it. This time, it would be Sega’s turn to reign.

The Dreamcast launched, bombed, and was unceremoniously killed within four years.

Well, it was a good run. It wasn’t, really, but at least they managed to eventually get that 3D Sonic game out. They were late to the party by about two years — missed deadlines and the cancellation of Sonic Xtreme meant that Super Mario 64 had been out for three whole years before Americans could even buy a Dreamcast — but they at least managed to finish it. After all that time, the world finally had Sonic Adventure. It was worth it, right? After everything, it had to be.

It wasn’t. The game is bad.

Sonic Adventure is ambitious, like Macbeth. It has a lot of ideas for what it wants to be, but it doesn’t quite have the ability nor the aptitude to make it all come together. Sonic Adventure is a platformer, and a pinball game, and a snowboarding game, and Panzer Dragoon, and a kart racer, and Pro Bass Fishing, and a pet simulator. It’s a clear and obvious case of “fuck it, throw it in”. Rather than one good game, Sonic Adventure is about ten different bad games, summed together in the hopes that having enough content will make people look past the fact that none of it is actually on par with games that were coming out years prior. Quantity over quality is the name of the game here, which means that it’s about four hours too long and it made me wish that I was doing something else, instead.

Sonic himself is most emblematic of this lack of focus, both because he gets the most screen time and because his stages tend to be the most widely varied. Set aside the bad pinball minigame, the fiddly snowboarding, the boring rail shooter sections (you get two, because one wouldn't have been enough!); how does the platforming in this platformer feel? The answer, as it turns out, is also bad. Sonic moves fast, and that's good! It takes him a while to get going, and he benefits a lot from going downhill rather than up. It's nice for a 3D Sonic game to at least gesture towards concepts like momentum rather than relying on the instant capital-B Boost mechanics in later entries that let you go from zero to six thousand in the press of a button. This speed comes at a cost, however, and that's the fact that the game itself can't really keep up with him.

I managed to clip directly through the world several times over the course of about the two hours I spent playing as Sonic, and I was never certain exactly what caused it. An area in the snow level sent me directly through a loop-de-loop after I hit a boost pad, so that one was easy enough to figure out; Sonic went too fast for the collision detection to keep up with. More confusing was when I floated on a wind current that was meant to transition me from Mystic Ruins to a different stage, at which point the camera jerked into the wall and Sonic voided out. I still don't know what happened there. Regardless, Sonic is too cool to follow rules, and that includes the fundamental laws of nature about solids not being able to pass through one another. I've looked it up and people say that this is primarily a problem in the DX GameCube port, but this is the version on the original Dreamcast. This is the third revision of the game. How fundamentally broken must the game logic be for two rounds of bug fixes to not catch this? I wasn't even trying to glitch it out. Clipping out of bounds for going too fast in a Sonic game was a known shippable?

Tails is largely considered to be Sonic's junior, which is funny considering the fact that he completely fucking blows Sonic out of the water at his own game. Sonic's whole thing is supposed to be that he's the fastest thing alive, which is a bald-faced lie in a world where Tails exists. Tails gets not only the benefit of being able to fly over most of the levels that Sonic has to platform through, but he also has unique-to-him boost rings that give him a fast, automatic, optimal path towards the goal. Tails can complete a level with a three-minute par in sixty seconds. He completely trivializes a game where the most difficult challenge is not clipping out of bounds when the collision gets confused. Playing as Tails is fun in the way that spawning a jet pack in San Andreas is: the joy is in cheating.

Big was up next, because I wanted to get him out of the way after everything I'd heard about his section in the intervening years since this released. Funny enough, I had a friend growing up who had the GameCube port of this game, and he used to play the fishing minigame all the time for fun. I watched him do it. It looked like a great time. I never really got a chance to try it out, because he was a controller hog, but I never really believed all of the naysayers. My friend liked it well enough, after all. What's the worst-case scenario for something like that? It's a fishing minigame. How hard could they fuck it up?

Well.

It's bad. It's real bad. It's about as bad as people say it is, but not for the reasons that they usually say it is. Apparently there was some big Game Grumps drama blow-up over the fact that Arin Hanson railed on this section and then got flown out as a mock apology by Sega so that they could all make fun of Big the Cat as part of a marketing campaign. If you don't understand that last sentence, that's okay. It's better that you don't. If you're up on your Game Grumps drama, however, people who go on the attack against Hanson claim that his gripes are only because he didn't know to hold down on the control stick to latch Froggy on the hook; had he known it, it wouldn't have been such a problem for him, and he wouldn't have been so harsh. I agree insofar in that he probably would have had an easier time with it, but I seriously doubt that time spent would be better. Shorter, certainly. I suppose that's a form of better, because it means you get to stop playing the fucking fishing minigame earlier than you would otherwise.

The problem is multi-fold. Froggy doesn't get tired the longer he stays on the hook, but Big gets tired from reeling him in. You can get a series of bad rolls (it seems random, from what I can tell) where Big's stamina drains absurdly quickly and Froggy manages to haul ass three meters in the opposite direction before you have a chance to recover even a quarter of your stamina bar. Froggy can just go and go and go, and you can be put in a position where there's no choice but to let him go without any chance of getting him back. If Froggy stays on the line too long, it automatically breaks without warning, which can be especially frustrating when you've almost got him after a lengthy struggle. The reel likes to fucking jam more often than not, which gives Froggy a free couple seconds to make distance. Froggy will refuse to take the hook if there's three meters or less of line remaining, which is really annoying during the ice stage where the hole is tiny and Froggy clings to the walls. It's probably the worst fishing minigame I've ever played, which is impressive, because I wasn't sure that it was possible to make a fishing minigame that was both this rudimentary and this bad. The nicest thing you could say about it is that this is either the first or among the first 3D fishing games to be brought to home consoles, so it's a bit more understandable for it to be complete shit. It carries a deep and terrible burden, like the sin eaters of old, or our Lord Jesus Christ before them. Big the Cat absolves us of original sin by taking it all upon himself. He ought to be canonized.

I regret not saving Big's section for last, because the following three ended up being something of a blur. As the Joker once said in Christopher Nolan's seminal 2008 film The Dark Knight, you should never start with the Big the Cat levels; the victim gets all fuzzy. What's left probably isn't very good even if you play them first, though: Amy's levels are as forgettable as they are slow; Knuckles flies better than Tails and uses this power solely to float around re-re-re-reused stages collecting emeralds; Gamma just holds forward and the shoot button and all of his levels complete themselves. This Rashomon-ass story also starts getting very old around this point, where you're watching what are broadly the same, unskippable cutscenes over and over again with only minor dialog changes between them. It's cute the first time you play as Tails and Dr. Eggman suddenly sounds like an absolute evil menace, and it's fucking annoying the third time Amy convinces someone not to kill Gamma on the deck of the Egg Carrier.

Super Sonic is a broadly boring fourth or fifth traipse through the jungle maze that culminates in the best sequence of the entire game. You finally get an opportunity to go incredibly fast down some straightaways with no immediate danger of clipping through the world. Crush 40's Open Your Heart is playing. Sonic flies along the surface of the water and bashes Chaos on the underside of his brain. It rules. It fucking rules. The second phase kicks off and is the exact same thing with worse music. Rinse, repeat, roll credits. It's a limp end to a bad game. Big the Cat is there, but he mostly just stands off to the side and doesn't have a single line of dialog, which makes me wonder why he's even here. He doesn't do anything. For the whole game, he doesn't do anything. He exists solely so Sega could shoehorn a bad fishing minigame into an already bloated, half-baked title. Fuck Big the Cat. I hope he dies. Sorry. I know it's not his fault.

What I'm ultimately left with is a small handful of decent Sonic stages, vaguely entertaining Tails stages, and a miserable experience everywhere else. Aside from nostalgia reasons — and nostalgia is a factor whose power I cannot and will not attempt to diminish — I cannot possibly understand what people see now or saw then in Sonic Adventure. It's hardly a wonder why the Dreamcast failed when its biggest flagship titles were games like this and Shenmue. Personally speaking, I wouldn't want to give the console any time of day if I was a contemporary buyer and this is what was being marketed to me. The PS2 plays DVDs. What's this have? Bleem? There are some phenomenal Dreamcast games in the back catalog that make it look like a tragedy that the system was killed the way that it was; there are games like Sonic Adventure that make me wonder how Sega even got as far as they did.

Killer soundtrack, though.

very ahead of its time I think, like in the way that it predates modern society’s obsession with true crime via netflix docs and podcasts. really like the option to just be able to quit basically as soon as it starts, but you won’t because there is this weird grip true crime has on us all that makes us for a second think we’re a detective and become truly obsessed for a short period of time. like the way the game is structured is very critical of true crime media, you never need to know the full extent of what happened here, there was a murder and you can choose for that to be all you ever know. but I also feel weird about how barlow approaches femininity here in much the same way that McGee’s Alice and to a lesser extent Taro’s drakengard 3 sisters are portrayed. it’s like weird hang ups on women and specifically female sexuality and it just kinda grosses me out and I really do think the story here would be better and have a bigger punch if not for the psychosexual lean to it and also the ending.
I thought the actress was kate lyn sheil for like years tbh

Decided to play through this after finishing Immortality, and while I think Immortality is the far more interesting game and executes on the idea of piecing together a nonlinear narrative from random clips better than Her Story, I still enjoyed my time with it. I think the mystery itself ended up being fairly mundane, but I thought the actress' unemotional demeanor obfuscated some of the blandness of the mystery. You could never really tell what she was thinking or if she was lying or telling the truth and that kept me plugging away at trying to figure out what was going on. Overall, there are worse ways to kill 2 hours.

Also there was an unintentional jumpscare for me the first time there is a reflection and it spooked me more than most horror games do and I feel very silly looking back at it...but damn it got me for some reason...

Her Story is obviously a game about detective work in specific, but more broadly it reads to me as being about research. Between piecing things together, chasing down and eliminating dead ends, and making note of every errant details, the game is able to make database trawling into a surprisingly thrilling affair, through its simulation of the work of uncovering the needle of truth buried twenty years ago in a haystack located in a police barn that subsequently flooded. This game understands that the hardest part of finding the truth is sorting through the detritus of data that exists at its periphery, and through that understanding was able to impart sublime moments; I straight up cheered when I discovered the name of a character I began wondering about a few dozen clips prior. Still, some pacing issues afflict proceedings, perhaps inevitable with such a freeform structure. By my count the game has two major reveals, and I had found both by the time I had seen 50% of the database. By the time I hit 75%, I felt I had sufficient context for the reveals, and trying to push onward to 100% was exhausting, having run out of leads and having already found numerous eight second long clips featuring only a single word. I gave up, and while I still find that frustrating as a whole, I’ll admit that there’s a fitting aspect to it; at the end of the day, there’s only so much certainty the truth can ever have and eventually you’ll have to go home hoping that you've at least uncovered enough.

Something I find very interesting is how a lot of the reviews I'm seeing for this game are about the story, about the writing, or about the performance of the main character. And criticisms of those things are fair, sure.

But for me, when I think of Her Story, I don't remember the story. Really at all. What I remember is a sensation. The sensation of clawing and scrounging through a poorly formatted database, looking for answers, roughly assembling meaning out of snippets of conversation.

That's a sensation I found really, really engaging.

When are we going to get a mahjong roguelite?

It's still pretty early to give a proper opinion, but I really liked this. It's not perfect like I thought it would be with the demo since it seems to lean on a lot from Slay the Spire. The stakes (difficulty system) are really pretty harsh, and it seems very hard to ever come close to consistent wins there. Lots of runs will just die so early if you don't get anything to help you survive. I think doing the highest difficulty really did drain me from how helpless it feels. It also just feels like such an excessive grind for each deck to have its own stake progression. 15 different decks (a good number of them are really interesting though), each with 8 stakes, is kind of insane when I compare it to the two big games I've spent the most time on: Monster Train with 12 (2 dlc) different champions all sharing the same progression up to 25 covenant ranks, or Slay the Spire with 4 (1 new) characters and 20 ascension levels for each. Since these decks need you to unlock stake levels too, it made me feel like I should incentivize 1 deck rather than going for the variety like in MT (rotating every champion to 25).

The unlocks lean more on that too, with some strange out there requirements that pretty much force you to go look up each one if you truly want to get everything and set up your run in a specific way while hoping to get lucky. Not to mention, you can also sticker every joker at every stake level (insane). I ended up winning with every deck at various stakes and got a couple of decks up/at to max (lvl 8), but I didn't really go for insane scores. I can see just playing lower stakes and going for score/variety being a lot more fun. Anyway, this is only after about a week of playing, and I'll definitely get back into it in the future since there are other games I want to play. Maybe I'll go back and joker/voucher hunt the final ones. Maybe it was better to just get every joker before going to stakes. Maybe there will be some new stuff to see, and they will ease up on some of the other things.

Maudlin Clown Companion

Edit: After playing the game for about a week or two up to gold stake difficulty and unlocking all the cards and vouchers, I have decided it's mediocre and underwhelming. Most of the problem is found in a lack of options in the shop. The demo had us go to ante 5 with 2 options and this worked. The full release has us go to ante 10 with still only 2 options. It feels in retrospect outclassed even by it's biggest inspiration luck be a landlord. It also only has 1 song which gets extremely repetitive. Uncomfortably top close to the appeal of casino flow states in that sense. On top of this the alternative decks force play styles like flush builds or going for chips, unlike the first 2 decks, this makes most of the game a novelty. Longer thoughts from earlier on below but can't in good conscious reccomend this.


I've won 8 different times now over the course of about 25 hours with a few different starter decks. For a roguelite thats not too often but that on its own is not a knock. People will play Nethack for 100 hours without a single win. It's about what you do in a game that matters. The decision making and that overall goal. In a game like Astrea or Nethack these goals are discreet yet ambitious, killing a big heart after going through complicated dice or ascending after dealing with a litany of confusing combat engagements.

Balatro is about taking a 52 card poker deck and using the hands you're given to make points off a sheet to eventually win. When you do win the celebration is mild and unsatifying and it asks you if you want to play endless mode immediately. In one of the early dev builds there was a simple story where the joker that sets the game up and jeers you in the meantime, setting up some fairly simple motivational stakes to beat the asshole joker. That was removed from the finished build, leaving no core motivation to play besides winning for its own sake.

The game is a simple maths strategy game, after you beat a round you are entered into a shop with an option to choose between 2 different cards to buy in the shop and a few 'booster packs' below. All the sounds are satisfying but this is where the game runs into its main issue. The main cards, the jokers, only have 2 options to buy between and especially as you unlock more of the pool that pool becomes flooded with useless stuff. Tarot cards you cant use, planet cards that dont help, jokers with no multipliers, etc. This leads to the fundamental problem of the game: None of the runs feel special unless you have really curated your deck somehow or you have 'won' that particular round. You're just walking into a shop hoping it feeds you what you want (usually early on its mult jokers). If you can get out of the early game then you have plenty of time to decide in the midgame but often, you wont. I've often lost before the end of the first 'boss blind' or in other words the third 'fight'. You only have 2 options, buy from shop or skip a blind. Even if you skip a blind you have to play the next round which expects more points so it isnt usually reccomended. So the meta usually ends up being playing rounds and hoping the shop has useful things. There's a 5$ reroll button but usually it only makes sense to use that when you're desperate. Leaving you with only making a few choices until the mid to end game.

So eventually the game turns into an issue of restarting for a good opener, whether or not you restart you play the opener through. Because the combat engagements are so abstracted there's no feeling like in an ascii roguelike that an early failure is amusing in its own right. You don't fall off a horse and instantly die, or get consumed by a random slime because you forgot to equip your weapon, you just lose to a poker table screen. In my view the input variance was just made too high with a lack of stakes and a fairly simple opening meta to follow (play the first three rounds clean unless you see a multiplier joker).

Finally, the metaprogression unlocks just end up sullying the shop pool, so the game on a base level gets more difficult to play than you started only as a result of input varience increasing. In a world where games like Astrea, Wildfrost, Desktop Dungeons, Griftlands, and Cobalt Core exists, Balatro ends up feeling too simple and yet too high varience to be reccomendable. It's a time sink roguelite, something to toy around with in the background in hopes of a next win. The early game is very satisfying to play but as the shop pool clogs up and the hedonic treadmill hits in you can't help but think you should probably be doing something else. This focus on refining difficulty to this point along with high varience reminds me of how Binding of Isaac played out. At first it was narratively focused, a story of a traumatized kid running through the basement in tears, playing pretend. Eventually that game was turned into an RNG fiesta and made so difficult and took away most of the scaling options through variance that even for most players the ability to win became way too difficult. I feel like Balatro is learning the wrong lessons from late Isaac in this sense. Not every player needs a perfect narrative to anchor their play experience, but the difficulty spike with a lack of early game options just turns the whole game into a grinding treadmill. Mind you this is a criticism coming from somebody who has some of the rarest achievements in the game at the moment, including finding a legendary Joker, so I have actually played the game I'm not just trying to be difficult for no reason.

It's a shame because I was looking forward to balatro but I think while it will be a flash in the pan for a while it won't ultimately stand up to the test of time. Unlike something like Vampire Survivors its not egregious, because runs arent strictly stuck to a time limit you have to sit through, nor is it an eye sore, nor is it entirely without decision making. Yet, the difficulty being as high as it is, without any narrative amusement for failed runs, means that it becomes mind numbing repetition to play. You end up playing just to win to unlock the next meta progression unlock (which can all be unlocked from the menu anyway if you don't care about achievements thus nullifying any goal other than 'win'). The appeal of the game only lasts for the first dozen unlocks and first win and becomes more or less busywork after that point. I will probably get 100% but I'll remember my experiences with it in a year far less fondly than Colbalt Core and I think on some level a game you can feel happy reminiscing about matters a lot more.

i’ve been playing this game every day since it came out, and have a good amount of wins on different decks and have gotten up to purple stake (the 6th difficulty) on one of them. this is definitely an rng game. that’s not necessarily to say i don’t think you can win consistently (at least on the lowest difficulty), but rng does play a big factor. as someone with over 1000 hours across platforms in The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth and its dlcs, i have heard a lot of different opinions about rng’s place in rogueli(k)(t)es. while i can totally understand feeling frustrated by the concept of rng having some sort of chokehold over how successful a run can be, i think that is largely the fun. when i play games like this with heavy dosages of rng, i’m not throwing shit at the wall and waiting for it to stick. i don’t restart over and over until i finally get a hot and sexy build with some good items that lets me beat the rest of the run into submission. you optimize. it sometimes feels impossible to win with the boons you are granted, but it is totally possible to get a higher winrate. you can get a win streak in isaac. you can even get a win streak in balatro (my highest is 5). reception for this game is pretty high, and for the most part, the criticisms i have seen are based around this concept of rng’s importance and not being able to win every single run. yeah! it’s frustrating to not win, but changing my frame of reference or end goal with games like this helps a lot. more skill-based rogueli(k)(t)es are pretty cool, and even some that aren’t quite as “skill”-based can still be good in my eyes as long as there are meaningful decisions you can make. in balatro, i think there are.

as i’ve started getting up into the higher difficulties, it’s clear that the odds get more and more stacked against you. i appreciate how the stacking difficulties are not purely numerical and add new features, such as eternal jokers that you cannot destroy or sell. there are even some positive use cases for such a joker, such as pairing it up with a joker that frequently consumes other jokers to power-up. it adds some nuance and leans away from just “haha you need higher score to win now.” that is still a thing, however, which i think is a little undesirable. there’s a good amount of unlocks with some cool and new effects. good cards become a little diluted, so it can sometimes feel like the odds get further stacked against you as you unlock things. i can’t speak to how the balance of the entire unlocked joker pool is. if you play this game, and you’re obsessively completionist, you’re probably going to have a bad time. to get a true 100% and all of the steam achievements, you have to win a run on the highest difficulty with every single joker, and beat every single difficulty on every deck. while this is a goal i will slowly be going towards, i don’t expect to ever achieve this. luckily, there are no real unlocks locked behind these goals, and there is a button in the profile page to unlock all the meaningful unlocks at once.

overall, i think this is a very fun game. while it’s not unfair to describe this as a time-waster, there is definitely some optimization and skill that can go into it. take full-completion with a grain of salt, but if you can look past the unfortunate state of the highest difficulties, this is a delight. the visuals are awesome, and the sound effects make my brain hum, but it’s not solely a slopfest throw-shit-at-the-wall experience.