logging into a private Discord server that only I'm in to play Krunker by myself with all the lights out and noise-cancelling headphones on so I can divert 100% of my brain to the task at hand. all these fucking automata aren't even engaging with the game they're just treating it as secondary to whatever frivolous conversation they're having. I pick them off effortlessly with a sniper rifle I paid real-life money for while they spawn back in and brainlessly run around in the gaming equivalent of highway hypnosis. this is the place where I am the strongest. I am Chris Kyle. I am the Red Baron. I am a fucking killer and I'm glad you're just sentient enough to know you should be afraid of me. You and I are fundamentally different animals

my hobbies include:
-Being cruel and sadistic to everyone around me
-Leaning over and admiring my very sharp, deadly "Evilest Woman in Finance" award
-Going to my soundproofed room alone and ruminating on the incompetence of my employees
-Sipping the mysterious drinks that appear in my office
-Overlooking the patrons of my bank through the dangerously thin glass of my office window and monologuing about destroying the middle class for fun
-Keeping sensitive files out of the hands of Ruby Red, investigative reporter.

I understand if you don't appreciate what I enjoy doing with my time, but my self-care is my self-care.

When I was 6 my grandma wouldn't let me put Lego Island on her computer because she thought it "might have a virus" since I got my copy from the library and then burnt it (a process which, in her mind, invited potential digital dangers). Instead I had this to keep me occupied and it potentially saved me from running into the street and dying in an attempt to find SOME source of stimulation other than the bible or the three Nickelodeon shows I was allowed to watch. Good fun, nice sound effects, 3 stars.

first three missions: hmmmm seems lame :\
last mission: GO WHITE BOY GO

IOI cooked so hard with the final mission of this campaign it's actually crazy. The concept of an infectious target who can turn any civilian they're near into a target as well gives the player a crazy degree of narritive agency- I know a big part of the appeal of this mission is that it's the one where the game gives you express permission to Just Kill People, but the fact that you have the chance to totally prevent any spread of the disease is so fucking cool. Whether 100 people have to die here or only your targets is entirely in the player's hands, not in some "you can just shoot everyone for no reason" way, but in the sense that the choices and mistakes players make moment-to-moment can ripple outwards and potentially change how the story proceeds entirely, going where it wants whether the player likes how it ends or not. Every second you're dragging an unconscious gaurd into a closet is a second during which every NPC on the map is moving and coming into contact with others, potentially transmitting the disease. You're not just trying to kill a target- so long as Cage is still alive, you're actively working against him and trying to contain the Situation he's engineered. It's cool!

I also love that the game never tells you that everyone can be saved- that you actually can get an "everybody lives!!" ending. I'm gonna be honest, while I like 47's characterization in Blood Money, where he is a much more explicitly sinister force, I kind of love the more optimistic tone of WoA and how much fun it seems to have with 47 being this calculating avatar of death whose rigid professionalism and respect for his handler also incidentally just kind of makes him a force for good. I think that kind of got me especially invested in the stakes here- I want to see that lovely bald man save the day, not out of some sense of inborn altruism, but because it would be a blow to his pride if he didn't succeed at containing the virus. My first playthrough of Patient Zero had a moment where I audibly said "oh fuck" as Diana started freaking out over one of the infected making it to the bar and the target counter shooting up to 40. The elevated danger here and the general feeling of urgency made solving the puzzle of how to take out Cage without letting anyone else get sick extremely gratifying. Also, very glad that the final mission got a sci-fi horror soundtrack. Love the spooky bitcrushed synths that come in as you're choking out some idiot who almost just came into contact with the world's most sickly old man.

Also just want to say it's very funny that the target who feels like they have the greatest degree of agency and is actively trying to fuck you over during the mission is the catatonic, perpetually groaning sick guy who will immediately drop dead if you hit him with the tummyache gun

IO Interactive do not know how to structure or pace a story across 3 games and I did not care about WoA's overarching narrative up until this point, but somehow the final missions of the trilogy actually managed to get me properly emotional over 47 and Diana's dynamic, and, by extension, the series's events as a whole. It's crazy how having these two extremely likable characters be the only real anchors throughout an otherwise pretty tame conspiracy thriller plot allows 3 to pull this trick and retroactively make me care about the story of Hitman (2016). The interactions between Diana and 47 were always my favorite bits of characterization in the previous games, and even in Blood Money I found their whole thing charming, but there's something about how tangible it feels here that got me. I think going through K-8 with a paraprofessional who was payed by the school district to make sure I didn't bite people just makes me predisposed to having their deal resonate with me- her helping a man who's Literally Neurodivergent distinguish between right and wrong and him being thankful enough for it to put his life at risk... such a fun concept and the execution of it in the last real mission put a smile on my face.
It's WoA so obviously the level design is fucking phenomenal and the core gameplay's still extremely engaging if you're into this kind of routing-based stealth. Camera's a weird addition and feels kind of clunky to use, and I wish the ICA facility in China had been... better? I liked the level itself but after all the goofy sci-fi shit I was dying for them to just let me infiltrate an underground supervillain facility; was very sad to find out it was one of the more underwhelming areas in the game. Anyway though- I love WoA! All games with this kind of budget should have the decency to be good

There should be more adventure games where you can fill the ventilation system of a building full of people with chloroform. If you have the "what if I attacked you" gene then I think WoA scratches that itch wonderfully. Turning off mission stories and some of the other hints transforms each map into an intricate puzzle to figure out in tandem with the spy thriller gameplay, encouraging numerous replays to find each map's Horrifying Murder Tricks. Compared to 1 I strongly prefer 2's levels (Ark Society, Golden Handshake, and Last Resort are just three back-to-back bangers), and their intricacy kept me invested enough to play the escalation missions to, something 1 really didn't draw me into my first time through. Mastering a map in WoA always feels stimulating and engaging on a fairly cognitive level, but it's also an action/stealth game where you sneak around and choke guards unconscious while cello music punctuated by synth stings plays- it's the kind of game that I'm bound to swoon for, so it's entirely possible I'm not being as critical of it as I might be if this wasn't exactly my shit, but I'm comfortable with that. It's just a joy to dress my precious little darling Agent 47 up in all his lovely unlockable suits, and I'll play every mission until I've seen him do his clever tricks to my fancy while wearing each.

I think this is sincerely one of the most infectious games I've played in a long time, and it's incredibly well-suited for the Playdate. Went over to watch The Game Awards with some friends; as I stared at Geoff Keighley stand surrounded by alien geometry and speak about how games are different from other mediums because they have the power to change people my eyes began to glaze over and I started thinking about patterns in Pick Pack Pup. It's a super simple puzzle game, so that probably sounds bizarre- I might be stupid, but as far as I can tell this doesn't have the same technique ceiling as something like Tetris or Puyo Puyo. Still, the fact that your progress and score is constantly being literally fed into a mulcher means that you need to assemble packages in a mad dash- if you're not paying attention, it's easy to panic and pack dismally low-value packages of 3. It requires some discipline and practice in order not to throw points away from being in a rush. Thinking about it while I was falling asleep or experiencing Game Awards Fugue gave me a chance to figure out dead-simple little heuristics for moving packages about safely into high-value positions, something I don't think I could have done easily if it had more complex rules. Pick Pack Pup, largely due to it's very accessible and simple mechanics, has become the first puzzle game of this type that I've genuinely gotten engrossed in/kept feeling drawn back to. It's easy to figure out if you sit with it for a moment, but consistently tricky to actually play given the pressure of the timer. Also the pup is cute! The game is definitely "wholesome" but in a way that feels more reminiscent of charming E10+ Comic Mischief/ Cartoon Violence DS games than like, Donut County. Mean that as a compliment (to Pick Pack Pup). Didn't expect to give this one such a high rating but it deserves it. Good boy!

Returning to this years after the fact and I think it's kind of a crime that I sometimes see this game labelled as early 2010's YouTuber bait when it feels, rough around the edges as it may be, like a complete labor of love. There aren't a lot of games nowadays that can manage to genuinely frighten me- this remains one of them.

Setting it in this endless series of samey, dark corridors works well, in my opinion- maybe this is just me, but the fact that I know the map layout and monster spawns are random makes moving forward feel consistently risky. In most horror games I usually at least can count on the fact that a human built this level I'm walking through. Seeing someone else's design sensibilities on display means that I know specific rooms will be put together to be experienced a certain way, or that some thought went into how to best unnerve me. I do feel a palpable dread when I'm playing something like Silent Hill, but as tense as those games are I at least feel like the people who made this to scare me are keeping me company. I know there'll be a rhyme and reason to when a Creature appears. Even in Pathologic, I know that The Powers That Be put this all together, because the game seems to actively be playing cruel jokes at the player's expense. In Containment Breach, individual rooms may be bespoke or have a specific event linked to them, but for the most part I feel completely alone and cut off even from the people who made this. A totally indifferent algorithm is determining what's behind the next door. There doesn't feel like there's any intent behind the architecture of the building; I can't get the sense it was put together by a person, in the fiction of the game or out of it. There's a solid fog of darkness in front of me constantly. If something's waiting up ahead to trap or kill me, I don't know, and somehow, neither does anyone else. Whatever is out there, it certainly isn't human. Somehow the stock music and barren visuals kind of add to this for me- it feels cheap and uncanny in a way that somehow heightens the experience for me. This is a game that has a ton of soul, but a lot of it went into making the player feel alienated and alone in an environment that feels like it wasn't created with the intent to be occupied. Procedural generation is cool even if it usually isn't

I think if I played this when I was a kid I would have joined the military

edit: okay so I've replayed this a few times and even though I will admit that some of these missions are kind of rough around the edges (Battery is bad and there's specifically 1 room in bathhouse that can go to hell) I'm kind of blown away by how genuinely phenomenal this feels to play. Fisher controls like butter, and using the scroll wheel to control your walk speed works beautifully. You have such a tight control over your speed and movement, and every other interaction (taking out your gun, switching attachments, tapping phones, picking locks) feels as if it happens fast enough that the player can maintain a high tempo through each level, but takes just long enough that when the enemy is searching for you things become incredibly tense. This is complemented by the fucking phenomenal score. This is what makes the game to me- I'm pretty sure Penthouse is my favorite level entirely because of the song that plays in it. Chaos Theory's soundtrack conveys a ton of tension and momentum, and does an incredible job of encouraging you to do quick thinking to evade guards and de-escalate even as things get louder and more frantic. I get that stealth games as a whole tend to usually have some form of reactive music, but the composition and tone conveyed by Amon Tobin's work here is just so perfectly in tune with how the game looks, feels and plays. Wish there were more good crazy-budget stealth games

One time 3 years ago my brother-in-law asked me what my favorite Fallout game was and I said "New Vegas" and he said "ah, I can't play something that old" and now once a week I spend like 5 minutes imagining a version of that day where I ruin my dad's birthday dinner by giving a detailed explanation of why that betrays a deep lack of appreciation for games as a medium. Anyways I feel pretty confident saying that New Vegas is the only consistently fantastic and interesting Bethesda-published RPG that came out after 2003 or maybe ever

Three extremely cool characters and 10,000 geckos. Genuinely do not know how to feel about this one- almost every "tribal" character is flat and feels vaguely not okay, and the world can feel a lot more barren and dull than a lot of New Vegas's normal locales; the story it tells is definitely compelling, but, to me, feels less personal and affecting than Dead Money. In a lot of ways this holds the appeal of FO3 or Skyrim, where it's a largely empty open world that's also very pretty to gallivant through and is filled with things to shoot/experience points to rack up. Outside of its scenery and the writing of a few characters it's not very memorable but it's clean honest fun!