So often the joke is just "lmao we're wasting your time, isn't that funny? Here's a stack of papers, do a boring minigame while we play some of the most aggressively unfunny dialogue on the planet in the background. Once you're done with that minute straight of sorting papers and listening to dialogue that is entirely set ups with no pay offs, have another stack of papers to sort. And another stack. Fuck you. You actually want to play our game? Fuck off."

I think the concept is great and the execution on the gameplay side is decent enough but fuck me if there isn't a better word to describe playing this than "misery". Make a joke for fuck sake, deliver a punchline, stop just giving the pretence that something funny is happening without actually being funny.

Rick and Morty is good because it has jokes in it. This doesn't.

Don't get me wrong I fuck with LEGO® Batman™ 2: DC© Super Heroes as much as the next guy, but I do think it's a massive shame that the main LEGO games barely incorporate building stuff into the gameplay loop. Yeah Harry Potter or Chase McCain or Batman get to wiggle their arms a bit and summon an entire shelving unit into existence but I don't do jack shit! I want to build something, I want to be creative, I want to have a minigame where the batmobile breaks down and I have to reassemble the engine from a set of instructions.

I haven't played a new LEGO game in like 7 years so I don't know, maybe LEGO engine maintenance is a thing now. I know they tried to make a LEGO Minecraft clone a couple years ago and it looked like shit. I guess the technology for emulating the full LEGO experience wasn't there yet...

I'm rambling but point is, I thought this was really cool. The most authentically LEGO 'LEGO Game' I've ever played. Made me feel like a little kid snapping together my LEGO Creator 3 in 1 house all over again, and I didn't even have to take out a mortgage to afford all the pieces!

A lot of what this does is fucking genius but the way it uses fonts to portray someone's culture, accent or tone is pure distilled captial G Genius.

There's a bit where you're talking to this farmer and he starts talking with this hard to read, messy handwriting because, y'know, he's a farmer, he's got a thick accent, the font represents that. Then in some throwaway line of dialogue he mentions that he's actually quite well read and suddenly the font changes to this beautiful script, as if the guy writing the text also got to that line in the book at the same point you did and hurriedly tried to correct himself.

And it does this a ton, playing with something as simple as font choice to give these character interactions so much more "character". If you're talking to someone who speaks another language, it prints the original first, then scrubs it out, and then prints it in english. If someone's angry, the entire text box shakes, or the ink splatters across the page. If someone's whispering, the text is miniscule. The town printer firsts speaks in printer press blocks, which then pull away to reveal the printed text underneath. It's a fucking genius way to make up for the lack of voice acting, it's not just text, it's text with a personality and culture attached.

Pentiment is so good because everything has this amount of thought and care put into it. It's a game about history that revels in the details. It's a game about art that is full of gorgeous, culture specific, time period accurate art. It's a game about making hard choices with limited information, and forcing you to live with the consequences of those choices. It's a game about a village, the ways it evolves and changes through the ages, and the impact you can have on it. Absolutely adore this game.

There's sporadic pieces here I really like; being a porter travelling through harsh environments sounds like a really cool video game (and in places it is), the story stuff (when it gets weird) is fun, piss grenades is a masterful concept. But it's also really really fucking boring, well beyond the inherent level you'd expect from the "postman video game" pitch. It's like its been meticulously designed to bore you to death as much as possible, with clunky menu after quick time event after dropped package after terrible boss fight after baby shake minigame. Every time a BT encounter showed up it felt like a punch line: I was just starting to relax a bit and enjoy the hike and then boom, world's shittiest stealth section, kill me.

The "postman delivering packages across harsh environments (and it's also a fun video game)" concept remains untapped, hopefully we'll get a good one before the world implodes or melts or freezes over.

The store page farts on about how this has "the best parts of bioshock and bioshock infinite": no it fucking doesn't. It's cool to revisit rapture (my beloved) but it's missing the atmosphere and claustrophobic level design that made the original location so enchanting. The combat tries to bring in the survival horror elements of bioshock but trying to hamfist those into Infinite's action heavy style just makes everything worse. Fighting a big daddy without all of the immersive sim elements just feels wrong; fighting anyone else is just annoying.

That plot twist is stupid as shit too.

I feel dirty playing this. There's barely a game here, it's just slow bullet hell with idle game elements. I'm not working towards anything significant, I'm not really getting anything out of it beyond dopamine (and lots of it, fucking hell this thing is like a fruit machine). And yet I boot it up and my brain just goes into autopilot for the next 2 hours; I wake back up and I've gained nothing except the regret that I could have done about 200 better things with my time. It's like going on twitter but without all the bickering.

How the fuck do you even rate it? I want to say I hate what it represents but there's also a part of me that loves how much it says "fuck it" and commits to the bit.