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.

The concept is brilliant, the art direction is wonderful, the world design is engrossing, the music is enchanting, but fucking hell if it isn't all completely ruined by how blatantly unfinished this is. I held off playing this for a year because of how terrible it was at launch (audio barely worked, constant stuttering, etc) and now it's slightly better, but it's still a complete embarrassment. The sound still stutters randomly, lights flicker, pop in is a constant issue. The glider feels awful to control, the smallest bump will send it spinning away, a jump will catapult it head first into the ground. If it gets stuck in a pit it is now permanently stuck in the pit until you fast travel away.

Worst of all, the game runs like shit. You can chuck it on the lowest graphics setting and certain areas will still tank the frame rate to a laughable extent, and I don't know why! I've got a decent computer, I can run other stuff fine, the graphical style should be the opposite of demanding, but it somehow runs worse than Cyberpunk. How?

The worst thing is that there is a good game in here. I just wish they finished it.

Had a tiny sliver of hope that this might recapture the glory days (at least in spirit) but nah.

I miss when Overwatch was basically just TF2 2, when everything was goofy and no one was really taking it seriously and it was okay to have gameplay mechanics that were kind of broken, because it was fun! Now every single edge has been sanded off for the sake of "Competitive viability", and what's left behind is just kind of hollow. Great for the guys who inhale more G-Fuel than actual food and have their mouse DPI set to 10,000, not so great for everyone else...

Not to mention they managed to ruin pretty much everything else with the transition to free to play, so, yeah, maybe could have done with a little bit more time in the oven...

Enjoyment here entirely comes down to difficulty. Normal mode is pretty good, up until you hit a boss that the designers clearly cobbled together in 5 minutes and never tested. Easy mode though, is a fucking treat. Clicking triangle on a boss and watching Kiryu delete three quarters of their health bar in 10 seconds is comedy gold, even the slipperiest of fuckers can't avoid my simple life deletion trick!
Got an annoying man in front of your face who has 10 health bars? Triangle.
Got a horde of fellas that enjoy stabbing you in the back with a cutlass? Circle, Triangle.
Got a funny fella who dashes about five miles away in the time it takes you to make one swing? Grab a sofa. Triangle.

I'd congratulate Housemarque for making the second ever roguelike I actually reached the credits of, but this is barely even a roguelike. It's barely even a roguelite honestly, the frequent checkpointing and overall lack of build variety means that this is really just a bullet hell shooter that forces you to replay its levels a bunch. And I'm fine with that. I don't enjoy the roguelike formula that much anyway, so it's cool to walk into this expecting to hate it and come out the other side resoundingly not miserable.

It helps that the combat loop is as fun as it is, especially once you get towards the end and everything is moving at a million miles an hour. It's so satisfying to walk into a room, filled with enemies, absolutely demolish the place, and walk out with barely a scratch. I wish the game shook up the formula more though, there's loads of weapons and items to play with, but most of them are dreadful, or situational to a fault. Hades is brilliant because it's so varied AND all of the content is top notch. Returnal has about two guns that are good, a ton of items that I got about one use out of, and a gambling system that more often than not can be ignored entirely.

The story is easily the worst part though. I think the ideas it plays with are really cool, but the direction it goes with them is so underwhelming. The house sequences are unapologetically shit; slow, clunky, uninteresting PT knockoffs that feel so out of place and barely develop anything. Every part of the storytelling is so drenched in metaphor and symbolism you can barely even work out what the writers were even trying to say, when really the story they were telling is laughably simple. Actually cackled when the credits rolled, could not believe it ended as abruptly as it did.

Is fun though. I'll give em that.

Absolutely one of the coolest fucking things I've ever seen. Especially as someone who is in film school, getting a degree in editing, it's fascinating to see a game take that and turn it into a super compelling mystery. Editing is already inherently a puzzle to solve; you're sitting there staring at these rushes, trying to work out how it all fits together as one cohesive whole. Immortality does the same thing, you're piecing together these stories through the eyes of an editor, working out how all these different pieces slot into place, as the full picture slowly comes into view. It's absolutely wonderful narrative design, and that's before it twists itself on its head.

The ending had my jaw on the floor, horror doesn't usually work on me but god I could not sleep after that. This shit festers in your head like a parasite. Fucking amazing game.