Dark Souls 2 has to be one of the most unfortunate victims of circumstance in gaming of the modern age.

I wholeheartedly believe most of this game's "negatives" can only be read as such if you're comparing everything about DS2 to its precursor. In any random game, not giving you i-frames for animations like open doors/chests would not make the game 'unplayable', it would simply be a part of the game you have to play around. But, because so much of how people view DS2 has been informed by how people view DS1, it becomes a negative; some runbacks are incredibly frustrating because of this, and you're now unable to just dive into a room, aggro 20 enemies, get a gate open, and expect to make it back to a bonfire. In general, you can't play most of this game like DS1. If you watch a video like Feebleking's 'critique', the constant thing you will find people comparing this game to time and time again is, naturally, Dark Souls 1. A lot of the people that adopt a 'ds2 bad' attitude like Feeble are very eager to blame the 'incompetencies' of DS2 on the b-team devs, which to me reads as a very blatant, hostile and unearned disrespect to the people who made the game.

I just can't buy into the idea that this game is 'bad' because people who didn't know what they were doing took over. Every design choice about this game strikes me as trying to purposefully disrupt almost every tie this game has to the 'Dark Souls' name without severing the core ideology of the franchise. It's not like the devs didn't know about the first game when they were making this. They didn't come into production trying to drum up the best way to make the most divisive game of all time. There's an intent and purpose to the design changes of this game that the prevailing negative lens fails to interrogate. For example, take Lifegems; Lifegems completely disrupt the Estus system of the first game which itself has been gimped dramatically as Estus healing is much slower and more limited, especially in the early game. DS2 is a game that takes place in a world where bonfires are on their way out or forgotten by most; Firekeepers are spoken of as if no one's seen any in years, and the fact that there are three of them living together a five minute walk away from Majula is an absolute oddity. It's the same world of Dark Souls, but it's absolutely nothing like it. This game is not Dark Souls 1, nor can you really play it like Dark Souls 1, which is why I think pointing to Dark Souls 1 as to how DS2 could have 'done it right' is a really flawed idea; It's absolutely trying to not be DS1. But it still is very much a Dark Souls game.

I think about systems in DS2 like Lifegems, ADP, Bonfire Ascetics, and Soul Memory and think 'Dark Souls 2 was made to be broken', which I think a lot of people have overlooked as the years have gone by and DS2 has been relegated to being the 'black sheep' of the series. When I realized Ascetics could be used to re-fight bosses, it wasn't long after I learned how ridiculous the souls drops from The Rotten were on higher NG+ iterations. Then, I learned I could buy a stack of ten from Grandahl (so long as you're part of his covenant), and another ten from Agdayne, and after a few hours I jumped like 150 Soul Levels and got Rotten up to Intensity 19 or something before the returns became ~1.5 levels per clear and I had most stats for my build at their softcaps. I was in shock during the first couple clears, half expecting myself to walk through the fog gate at around Intensity 10 to see like, three Rottens in the arena, or maybe he grows four more arms each with a new weapon; any sort of indication from the game to say "ah, I see what you're doing, you naughty boy. But this is where your fun ends!" but the game just lets you do this. The game just hands you a car, the keys, and enough gas for the US to plan an invasion, and doesn't even try to call to make sure you're still in the state or something (This is also a large part of why ADP just doesn't bug me nearly as hard as it seems to for a lot of other people. I had ADP at 24 for 99 Agility for almost the entire game and I was fine, you absolutely do not need to farm levels to dump into this stat like some people would have you believe). This isn't some strange glitch like menu duping in DS1 or the areas of the Elden Ring map that will give you hundreds of thousands of runes if you jump off them with Torrent that sometimes get patched. You were absolutely intended to do this if you were clever enough and not averse to experimentation and risk. This is also 'the' way Soul Memory becomes a useful tactic for skipping the first half of the game; on NG+0 the Soul Memory required is 1 million, which you can get with <5 Ascetics.

I really hate to just sum up why I'm nowhere near as bothered by the game's shortcomings as most people to a 'skill issue'. Honestly, if you've tried playing this game and can't get past Iron Keep or Shrine of Amana or wherever, that has to suck, and I wish there was more that I or anyone could do to help you besides saying 'sorry, guess you're gonna have to kill everything enough times for the enemies to stop spawning or possibly respec/restart your playthrough after researching tips on builds or what weapons to use on fextralife.'

But let me just be honest having only played the first two Dark Souls games so far: Both of these games are built on mountains of jank. Dark Souls 1 manages to give you a view pretty enough to distract you from what you're standing on, but Dark Souls 2 is just begging you to look down. It wants you to realize what you're walking on, no matter how jagged, abrasive, and clunky it is, is actually not that different from the sky.

RuneScape is not a great game, but it was an adventure I went on when I was young and it mattered a lot to me. Retro charm isn't everything, but it's not nothing either: Saying something like 'gameplay is repetitive and grindy' is almost meaningless for this games intended audience, myself included. All you care about is the crude, evocative presentation, bloopy sound effects, and a throughline to your inner child. The music is genuinely very impressive for what they were working with, and it actually still stirs emotion.

There's a frustrating mix of genuinely clever ideas that improve upon the framework left behind by Victoria 2, and an overall experience that is just glaringly half-baked. The player is given a lot more fine tuned control over the economy now, regardless of economic laws, with the result that every country plays out the same repetetive loops of construction queues. The AI economy seems insensitive to the profit potential of critical commodities, with the result that the mechanisms of indirect economic hegemony feel useless; You need to directly invade and occupy territory to make sure oil rigs and rubber plantations are actually built. AI nations will attempt to pursue their relevant ambitions, but if they hit a speed bump they can't figure out how to recover or develop a backup plan, and fall into holding patterns for the rest of the game. The Balkans never destabilize, China never collapses properly, there's never a proper World War, and none of the alternate histories these outcomes entail are lively or dynamic. And so on.

I do genuinely like the war system. This kind of indirect strategic control, where preparation is key and the national government doesn't directly command the movements of every soldier, is exactly what I wanted from this game in general. It's baffling to me that they reigned in player management on the war system only to give us direct control over where every infrastructure building in our nation goes.

fully automated gambling is a mainstay of digital entertainment, but whenever its presence is established in other titles i never once felt the need to participate. too much time, too little reward. i imagine most players feel the same given the achievement stats for new vegas, a title where hustling on the strip is the game’s core motif. and yet in spite of my disposition, i found myself spending an inordinate amount of time in red dead redemption II playing poker. when i wasn’t playing poker, i’d be hitting blackjack, and if i wasn’t betting against the dealer i’d be making my bones in dominoes. on paper, none of this served any real practical purpose. unlike the brisk pleasures of most computerized gambling, a round of poker in RDR2 takes much, much more time – your opponents need to shuffle the deck, lay out the cards, or place their chips on a bet. sometimes their decisions won’t be near instantaneous, and in all cases, the victor will smugly reap the spoils of their bet, dragging their hoard of chips inwards. as if the protracted length of gambling wasn’t enough, RDR2 axes the high-stakes poker variant from the original game, so even in the best-case scenario – a six player poker match, no player leaves early, and you rob everyone of their chips – you can only stand to net $25 dollars in profit. a handsome sum in 1899, but a pittance in contrast to RDR2’s other revenue streams, especially when you factor in the time investment. it’s all too likely you’ll end up losing money if you gamble poorly. why bother?

i still gambled a lot though. no matter the inconvenience of the supposed realism on offer, i wanted to fleece people. i wanted to stop and think about my decisions, and i wanted to withstand droughts of bad luck only to tap in when fortune was turning in my favour. and i guess uncle’s smug aura at camp made me want to rip him off all the more. the defining trait which enables this engagement is also RDR2’s greatest strength: the level of verisimilitude it aspires to. the slowing-down-of-affairs intrinsic to RDR2 is somewhat uncharacteristic of rockstar, but they’ve thrown their immense weight behind a kind of granularity not often observed even in comparable massive AAA productions. i honestly think it saved the game for me. i had to force myself through gritted teeth to finish the first red dead and GTA IV, and i’ll never finish GTA V at this rate, but conversely for close to three weeks straight i lost myself in rockstar’s portrait of the old, dying west, however illusory it was.

GTA is very much predicated on extreme player agency in real-world facsimile. the dedication the team committed to this vision creates this inherent friction where in the absence of real limitation, the world rarely feels alive but feels more akin to a little diorama or a quite literal playspace. the devil is always in the details with these titles, but i find the fetishism for the microscopic to be little more than framing at best and rote at worst. maybe if you walk the streets of san andreas in GTA V and get lost in a suburb, quietly observing the mundane (they need an umarell minigame in these games), a lived-in feeling really does exist, but this does not feel like genuine intent so much as it feels like supporting the foundation of american pantomime.

while the quotidian is nothing more than a byproduct in GTA, its function in RDR2 is the games essence. new to the series are various impositions which carefully stitch together simulation elements, asking for a stronger degree of investment from the player than past rockstar entries, both in a literal and abstracted sense. hunger and stamina have to be continually managed for both the player and their steed, money is harder to come by than prior rockstar games, and every activity (hunting, fishing, crafting, cooking, gambling, weapons maintenance, chores + camp support, horse grooming, even just simple travel given that fast travel isn’t immediately present) represents an innate time investment – gone is the sense of casual gratification, tightened ever so slightly more for the sake of a more cohesive world. naturally i’d be remiss to not point out they’re intrusive to only the mildest of degrees - it’s certainly the ‘fastest’ game ive ever played with a simulation bent - and rockstar’s aim here isn’t necessarily to rock the boat but instead one of vanity, to impress with their technological prowess and visual panache.

i understand that rockstar titles are now once-in-a-generation events subject to whatever epoch of games discourse they are releasing in but it is with great amusement that i look back to two strands of dominant conversation at the time of the game’s release: that it is too realistic for its own good, and that its mission design is archaic. both are conversational topics that, at least from my perspective, miss the forest for the trees with critical rdr2 discussion, and at least partially feel like people taking rockstar to task for GTA IV & V’s design after forgetting to do so the first time. firstly, everything addressed as cumbersome in rdr2 is polished to a mirror sheen; whatever truth might be found regarding rockstars digital fetishism impacting personal enjoyment loses a bit of edge when one considers that the inconveniences imposed on the player are essentially operating at a bare minimum. for every measure of sternness here there is a comical remedy. players might be expected to have attire fitting for the climate zone they travel in lest they suffer core drainage, but the reality is that preparation is easy, conducted through lenient menu selection, and at no point is the player strictly via the main narrative made to trudge through the underutilized snowy regions. even a snowy mission in the epilogue automatically equips you with a warm coat, negating the need for foresight. temperature penalties are easily negated for lengthy periods of time if you consume meals that fortify your cores. you don’t even really, honestly have to eat. the penalties associated with the ‘underweight’ class don’t obstruct players very much and individuals can forego the core system entirely just to rely on health cures and tonics alike, meaning it’s a survival/simulation system carefully planned out so certain kinds of players don’t actually have to engage with the systems at all. the most egregious offender for the audience, then, is time investment, for which my rebuttal is nothing so eloquent: just that it’s barely a significant one. there’s something genuinely fascinating about this undercurrent of somewhat strained response to an AAA production making the slightest of efforts to cultivate a stricter set of systems for immersion only to be met with the claim that it goes against the basic appeal of games, something which i at least find consistently prescriptive, contradictory, and totally self-interested. that breath of the wilds approach to open world design predates this is probably at least somewhat contributory - after all its priorities are to filter reality and freedom through more sharply accented and cohesive game design, far from the totalizing rigidity of rockstars work – but it’s not a case of one needing to mimic the other when it’s simpler to state that the contrasting titles just have different priorities. all this is to say that RDR2 is really missing something without some kind of hardcore mode, which would have probably increased my personal enjoyment exponentially and led to a tighter game.

secondly, the complaints regarding mission design are reductive and downplay a much, much broader foundational problem. there are a lot more missions that i actually liked compared to the usual rockstar fare this time, in part because character dialogue is mostly serviceable and not grating, but also because several of them are content to serve characterization or to convey some kind of tailored experience. all the best missions bring the combat to a halt rather than a crescendo. serve on a mission alongside hosea, for instance, and the odds are unlikely you’ll end up drawing your revolver. likewise certain missions are focused entirely on camaraderie, narrative, or some other kind of unique quality. this works really well in spite of the game’s tendency to anchor the proceedings to the mechanically dull yet market-proven gunslinging. it’s unfortunate to center so much of this game around combat when the shooting rarely, if ever, registers as more than serviceable; pulling the trigger feels great, but its repetition, lack of intimate level or encounter design, and oddly weighted aiming reticule underscore a game in need of some kind of revision. strangely enough there are many options for mixing melee approaches and gunslinging in a manner that feels close to appealing but is never leaned on because it’s just not efficient, paired nicely with level design, or geared towards survivability. likewise, the scores of ammunition types and combative crafting options feels redundant in the face of the simplicity of the ol’ reliable revolver and repeater, the lack of genuine ammunition limitation (you’re always able to stock more ammo than you could ever reasonably need) and every enemy’s total vulnerability to precise aim.

but the fact that there are genuinely enjoyable missions that focus more on the game’s verisimilitude is indicative of my chief takeaway from RDR2: all of my favourite components of the game managed to make me finally understand the appeal of the rockstar portfolio, and all of my least favourite components reminded me that i was playing a rockstar game, with a formula and brand reputation that now serves as a millstone around the neck obstructing genuine innovation or risk. for one thing, it was absolutely lost on me until RDR2 that these are open world games which are concerned with a loose sense of role playing but don’t much care for the implementation of stats, skill trees, abilities, or what have you. because these systems are handled with more care than in the past, i found there to be genuine pleasure in this complete reprieve from the mechanical, with an emphasis towards simply just existing and being. without the admittedly illusory constraints of the core systems or the time investment required from its activities, i may not have stopped to have felt any of it – it would have been every bit as inconsequential as GTA. but RDR2 demands to be soaked in. its landscapes really are vast and gorgeous. the permutations of the weather can lead to some dazzling displays; tracking and hunting down the legendary wolf at the cotorra springs during a thunderstorm is imagery permanently seared into my brain even after dozens upon dozens of hours of play.

however well-intentioned it is though, this emphasis on simulation betrays a tendency towards excess that is profoundly damaging and saddles RDR2 with a lot of detritus where a sharper lens would have benefitted its approach to simulation. this is especially bad when considering that a good deal of these extraneous elements are where the crunch surrounding RDR2’s development is most inextricably felt. broader discourse often struggles to find a way to discuss bad labour practices without either treating it as a footnote in the history of an otherwise ‘good’ title (thereby excising its role in production completely) or only writing about it from a pro-labour critical stance, but RDR2 makes my work in reconciling these threads easy: it’s just too sweeping in scope for its own good, and it’s difficult to see how mismanagement and crunch resulted in a better game. after years of these scathing reports and discussions, it’s hard not to let out a grim chuckle when you reach the game’s epilogue, which opens up an entire state in RDR2, only to realize that all this landmass has zero main narrative context. new austin and the grizzlies are massive regions, perhaps not pointless in their inclusion per se, but the campaign has difficulties integrating them yet leaves them present in their totality. it’s a wealth of untamed land included for its own sake.

this is especially frustrating because the game’s structure is suggestive of, strangely enough, sly cooper. the van der linde gang moves further and further away from the west over the course of the game into new and uncharted territory and in each chapter, comes to grips with the surrounding locales trying to pinpoint where the next great score or heist may present itself. every time seems like a small reinvention. the atmosphere at camp changes, new dialogues present themselves, new opportunities, and the narrative is content to settle on one small pocket of the world rather than its sum. perhaps it’s not the rockstar modus operandi but when i realized this was the game’s impetus, i thought it would have been a fantastic way to try something different, for a change – to focus on a small number of higher density regions with a bit less sprawl. i think at least part of why i feel this way is because the narrative is not one bit committed to its stakes. they want you to feel like an outlaw on the run, the law at your heels, the world shrinking around you, and your freedoms slowly being siphoned away, and yet there’s no tangible consequence in RDR2’s worldstate for sticking around valentine, strawberry, or rhodes – three towns that you wreak significant havoc in – like there is for even daring to return to blackwater, the site of a massacre which kickstarts the events of the game proper. obviously the ability to return to blackwater would break the story on its hinges, which is treated as such, but it’s hard to say why any other town gets a free pass.

anyways i find it somewhat ironic that after a journey replete with as many peaks and valleys as the old west it's modeled on, it's the comparatively muted epilogue which is still holding my attention and adoration. the first game's epilogue was, similarly, a striking coda to a wildly uneven experience. after screeching to a halt for its final act, RDR1's culminating grace notes center around a hollow, self-gratifying act of vengeance which succinctly underscored the alienation & ennui of the world you were left stranded in. it was a weirdly audacious swing for rockstar to take in 2010 - to explicate the ever-present emptiness and artificiality of their worlds as part and parcel of RDR1's thematic intent – but in spite of my dislike of the rest of the title, i found that it resonated with me.

RDR2 has a somewhat similar ace up its sleeve. following the game's highest point of intensity, the player (now with john marston taking the reins instead of arthur morgan) is thrust into a narrative scenario ill at ease with the game's prior formal language, seemingly begging at all turns for the player to put up their guns. every triumph in the epilogue chapters won by means of gunslinging bravado is, as a result, sharply dissonant; the score is often explosive, almost mythic in the way that it recalls RDR1, but there's a sort of uncanniness present because, in leveraging its prequel status, one has total clarity as to where this path eventually leads. like in RDR1, the throughline here is still one of inevitability.

complimenting this is the epilogue's equal amount of focus afforded towards john struggling to acclimate to the simple pleasures of domesticity. a natural extension of john’s unexpectedly genius characterization in RDR2’s narrative up to this point as arthur’s perpetually irresponsible and imprudent little brother, this focus on smaller-scale character study allows for his character to be more fleshed-out than he ever was in RDR1. similarly, the missions present in the epilogue are afforded more variance than anywhere else in the main game, taking the title’s previously established simulation elements and bringing them to the forefront of the proceedings. taking your wife out for a nice day in the town is probably my favourite mission in the game - it felt tender in a way that i have never once come to expect from these titles.

it's a taut novella that honestly represents some of rockstars finest work, so naturally it's only accessible after some 40-70 hours of ho hum debauchery and mediocrity. no reason to waste more time on this so let’s carve through the more important bullet points quickly. arthur is a wonderful protagonist, likely the best rockstar has conceptualized for how he compliments the structure of these games. he’s someone who isn’t a lone wolf nor a second-in-command, but rather a mover and shaker who is third in the hierarchy and remains blinded by both loyalty, cynicism, and self-hatred. it’s a reasonable enough marriage between the game’s pressing narrative demands and the freedom to act that a rockstar title is built on, disregarding the horrid implementation of a trite morality system. all the little flourishes animating his character are excellent – the journal he writes in quickly became one of my favourite features of the game. roger clark’s performance alone is enough to carry the game’s writing when it sags, which it often does – clemens point and guarma are terrible chapters. side quests are also largely bad, save for a few that present themselves in the beaver hollow chapter - up until this point they are rife with the kind of desperate attempts at juvenile humour rockstar built their empire on. it’s less good that so much of arthur’s arc is connected to the game’s worst characters in dutch and micah. rockstar’s writers just do not have the capacity and talent to bring the vision of a charismatic leader to life in dutch – they want you to believe in the slow-brewing ruination of the gang and dutch’s descent into despotism but the reality is he starts the game off as an insecure, inept, and frayed captain and only gets much, much worse as the game chugs along. micah is just despicable and not in a compelling way, an active thorn in everyone’s side who no one likes and whose presence makes everything worse. reading about the van der linde gang’s initially noble exploits in-game and contrasting it with an early mission where micah kills almost everyone in a town to retrieve his revolvers is actively comical and it never really stops gnawing at one’s mind. just registers as a total impossibility that not one person in the gang considers this guy an active liability to continued survival. i think he’s someone who can be salvaged since he’s already an inverse to arthur and implicitly serves as a foil to john but not enough work was done to make these elements of the character grounded or believable. cartoon villain level depravity, dude sucks.

the rest of the characters range broadly from underused & underwritten to charming in a quaint way. arthur and john are the highlights, i liked charles and uncle, the rest...mixed bag of successes and failures. javier and bill are more well-realized than their RDR1 incarnations, but most of their character work is tucked away in optional & hidden scenes. sadie is one of the few other characters to be given narrative prominence towards the end, and she kind of really sucks. the list goes on. despite this, lingering in camp is so easily one of the game's strongest draws - wandering around and seeing hundreds upon hundreds of little randomized interactions is a delight, and there's no doubt in my mind that i still missed scores of them.

those more inclined to cynicism probably won't be able to reconcile any of this game's messy threads, and its strengths will likely be eclipsed by its tendencies towards waste as well as its tactless emulation of prestige drama, but for a time i found my own pleasure in the illusion of the west. i think i felt enthralled by it realizing that this was the closest to a great experience rockstar had in them, knowing that they're only likely to regress from here on. rockstar has an unfortunate habit of only being able to conceptualize one’s relationship to their environment if it’s predicated on danger, but at its best RDR2 is able to overcome this, however briefly it might last.

a wild experiment for the--then nascent--FromSoftware. ARMORED CORE proves to be a rock solid foundation for its genre and a game that still stands on its own as a worthwile experience.

one of the rare examples of a game that actually benefits from the artifacts of its age. the slow methodical controls and the delibarate combat mechanics kinda providing a simulacrum of "real" mech piloting.

this, combined with the game's carefully designed missions, create an addictive and rewarding gameplay loop. said loop rewards player progression and mastery of the movement mechanics with increasing levels of freedom.

ARMORED CORE has a pretty perfect amount of mechanical complexity. the customization is at a level of being rich enough to entice you with upgrades and build possibilities, while being agile enough to keep the game generally... arcadey.

the aforementioned missions do a fantastic job of touring you through the game's depths. they're often more creative and atmospheric than you would think for a "game about giant robots". it uses whatever little dropplets of storytelling it can leverage to build one hell of a strong tone.

some of the later missions create genuinely intense "plot twists" and set pieces that you will remember for a long time. this hand-crafted designed coupled with a very considerate difficulty curve make loving ARMORED CORE completely effortless.

I don't really know what but there's something that really pissed me off about this game. I think at the core of it, it's that, I know some women who are influencers or streamers of various scales, and I think about this game and wonder "does this game do any justice for the kind of stuff they deal with online and offline, or the kind of social conditions that even pushed them towards that stuff in the first place? Does it primarily push a player to consider those things deeply?" and my answer, regardless of any interpretative gymnastics aside, pretty much comes down to: "No."

I think humans are generous and thus you CAN find something good in this game. But I don't think the game is, itself, meaning to be 'good' towards the types of people it takes up as its subject manner.

I guess one way I can frame it is, what if the premise of the game was flipped a bit and it was something like "Desperate Asian Girlfriend?" We play as a boyfriend of some unspecified age who has surprising control over an 'unstable' asian girlfriend. Through your choices you can lead her to all sorts of terrible endings! In fact the game revels in that - the endings are flashy, 'cool,' and a big selling point for the game, more than any look into why this 'asian girlfriend' is 'unstable' in the first place, historical precedents, etc. That's just what this feels like but for I guess, young Japanese women who use the internet a lot or something... like are we really playing this to somehow get a better look at mental illness and the internet? Or for something else?

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As a "princess-raising" style game it's a bit flat-feeling - having to go through the same motions of opening the messages, twitter, etc each day make replaying stuff a bit of a slog.

Beyond that idk. I understand how people could see themselves in this character and the pressures of the internet, but there's just something to the way that feels a bit more like a exploitative look at "various kinds of mentally ill streamer women" - I think, because of the way the game really pushes you to do things like overdose her on drugs, push her stress to the max, as it places (!) icons on all sorts of options. I would wager that more endings than less have these sort of schlocky, shock-value endings.

Does the game think that women who become streamers are stupid, emotionally unstable and manipulative? Does the game think that streaming is an exploitative system that perpetuates loneliness amongst viewers and streamers while video companies profit?

It honestly doesn't particularly argue for either, but it definitely plays into the shock value to increase its sales, and it takes advantage of players' preconceived notions expectations as to what hope to see happen to the character. It barely looks into Ame as a character outside of a malleable doll tumbling towards any one of the bad endings.

It ironically plays entirely into the streamer and social media fodder that partially creates the space for people like Ame to suffer, or creepy dude producers like P-chan to take advantage of young womens' streamer labor for money or sex.

I don't really know what to say but young women struggling through life or the internet aren't lab rats to be categorized and put on display in these kinds of bizarre simplified archetypes. I understand that women could find themselves represented in this game and I'm not faulting them for liking it, but to me that just feels like a slight positive to the game rather than an argument for the game's holistic goodness.

I'm not against a more nuanced take on the struggles of streaming, but I don't think it should be done through this cliche of the 'huge big streamer' - what about the majority of streamer, people who perhaps - are equally unhappy - but with small audiences in the 100s or even 10s, working each day towards... what exactly?

I don't know. The kind of latent misogyny I feel from this just pisses me off for some reason, something that is just profiting, via spectacle, off of the whole culture of fame and whatnot that makes a lot of people I know suffer

Disco Elysium, like its protagonist, seems at first to fumble for transcendence. It will not stop asking questions, trying to better understand itself, and by better understanding itself, understand all things. Even when these questions are pointless, devastating, self-destructive, malcontent, frothing, tear-stained, bloody, bleak, by measures tender and frivolous, seeking no true purchase but to have their money returned. It’s so sprawling in its scope that one would be forgiven for thinking all its detours never tie together. It’s manic. It’s hard to tame. But somehow, easy to love.

The game feels like the death of something pitiful, tragic, beautiful. Its hero, its city, are great beasts that forget themselves, are poised to die in isolation, too lost in wailing to articulate a final sentence. They are graffito’d time-fucked bird-shit-upon monuments to their former selves, and the player’s job is as art restorer. What truly vandalized the detective, vandalized Martinaise, is a red herring, an answer with a million questions. It’s the thing underneath the damage that the game is concerned about, whatever that is. That still lives on, even now, after seasons of ruin, in the work of artists that saw something in need of a monument. And so the detective. So Martinaise. So Elysium. So ZA/UM.

Disco Elysium would tell you it’s a detective story. It is not. It is a love story.

Some of the most fun I’ve had with a game in years was learning how to kill lizards in Rain World. In my entire time with the game in my first playthroughs, I’m not sure I ever intentionally killed one of these beasts. I saw them as impossible foes. But in order to reach many of my goals in Downpour, I had to learn how to conquer them. The first kill feels like a fluke, like luck, and in a way it is. But each spear that pierces their hide feels more real, more earned. They never stop being terrifying. They never stop being a threat. But I had to learn how to take them down anyway, backflipping, juking, stabbing, feasting. I had to learn how to slay dragons.

I have a brand, and part of that brand is that I really like Rain World. In all my poetic waxings, I often am remiss to mention what makes playing Rain World itself actually so cool. So for once, I’ll try to offer an admittedly vague explanation. I’m sure you can find no shortage of mechanical rundowns, so I’ll keep this brief: Rain World is a unique game where you play as a little slugcat trying to survive and find shelter before the devastating rain comes. It’s quite a difficult game where challenges may often feel insurmountable. What makes Rain World such a unique game is its emphasis on emergent and procedural systems. The vast majority of these systems are not explained to the player at all, and as such have to be learned by experimentation and exploration. The behavior and animations of all the predators and creatures you encounter is unpredictable and dynamic. The game is a bountfiul garden of consistently surprising gameplay.

The result, for me, is something unlike anything else: a constantly exciting game. It’s always a thrill playing Rain World. Even dozens of hours in, I find myself yelping and gritting my teeth. I can get into specifics but I don’t want to dispel the magic of experiencing it yourself. I adore this. It can also end up making making the game agonizing. This is why initial critical response was negative, and why many players will find the game simply too hard or too cruel to even play let alone enjoy. But that agony is a part of the experience, or at least my experience, and it’s part of what makes the slugcat’s journey so beautiful.

So what about Downpour? This is an expansion that adds a litany of new features. If you just want a straight recommendation, I don’t advise going into anything related to the expansion before playing the base game. It’s not a required expansion and frankly is extremely geared towards die-hard fans. Most of my time was spent with the new slugcats, but they also added co-op, Expedition mode, challenges, and other stuff. A major addition to the game was Remix, a suite of new options that is available to owners of the base game. This alone makes recommending Rain World significantly easier, because it now comes with a big list of checkboxes that can help you tailor the game to your own needs. (If you want help figuring out what to use, check out my forum post here.)

Now, there is a criticism that Downpour in many ways actually distorts and weakens the unique core identity of Rain World. I’m torn on this. On one hand, I think it’s a bit paranoid. Even with an expansion (which is still optional!), Rain World remains a singular game like no other. Hunter and Monk were already additions and didn’t distort that vision. On the other hand, this game has a lot of things in it. There’s five new campaigns, a bunch of new game modes, and major additions to the map. There’s a chunk of community easter eggs, which frankly rubs me the wrong way, and the involvement of fandom in art can get ugly fast. The expansion also ends up adding a fair bit to the lore and narrative, and I don’t have simple feelings about some of the choices. (I won’t get into it for spoiler reasons, but there are some big swings that I don’t love.) It’s so much that I couldn’t possibly cover it all, and all the implications and complications in this review; even what I’ve written here is longer than I wanted. I wanted to just talk about the lizards, but this is too dense with content that I can’t just leave it at that. I would never go as far to say that Downpour ruins or fundamentally changes Rain World, but it does definitely add a lot to the mix.

There’s a reason for all this. Let’s talk a bit about the history here: years ago, some Rain World modders began developing the More Slugcats mod, which would add new playable slugcats to the game. Eventually, Videocult took these folks onto the team directly and made the expansion official. This, perhaps, explains why there is a sort of eagerness and lack of restraint to the expansion. The developers have announced intent to continue working on Rain Word, though I get the sense that this will mostly be the Downpour team and not the Videocult duo. I won’t lie that this concerns me; I don’t necessarily want to see this game endlessly expanded. I’m still waiting on the Signal project, and I want to see what else these teams are capable of putting together.

I think part of this comes from the fact that I don’t really engage with games in the way a lot of others seem to. For some people, Rain World is there forever game. I don’t want a forever game. I don’t generally seek to play a game for an indeterminately long amount of time. When I see credits on a roguelite, that’s generally when I stop playing. I am so puzzled when I see people gripe about growing tired of something after several hundred hours in a game. Even my favorite games of all time I generally do not return to ad nauseaum.

But that’s sort of why Downpour ends up making me happy. In spite of some of my concerns and gripes. A messier Rain World is still Rain World, and Rain World is good. And at the end of the day, Downpour gave me a reason to play one of my favorite games again. It gave me a reason to learn how to slay dragons. And that’s worth a hell of a lot.

This is a rough one.

I think it's a fantastic little game, but I don't think I could ever give it an unconditional recommend. There's a lot of asterisks.

Dredge is a simple game: The Fisherman (That's you.) goes out to catch fish and other shinies through a series of varying-but-limited QTE prompts. A Tetris-style inventory and Amnesia-esque panic mechanic ensure you can't go out for too long, thoguh upgrades can alleviate this. At night, things take a turn for the worse and weird spooky threats come out to play.

Despite the simplicity and relative repetition, I like it... For the first 60%. Dredge is perhaps the only time where 'cozy horror' has been appropriate, rather than a joke. It is repetitive, and kind of dull, but there's something about the monotony of your day job contrasted with the unknowable horrors around you. Yes, there are awful things beyond your window, but they're not targeted at you directly and you still ultimately have a job to do. You are just a passive but employed observer to the horror, and you better clock in at the start of your shfit. It reminds me of working retail in the 2010s.

It carries on into the dialogue, too. Everyone is either mad, desperate or withdrawn. It may not be the end of the world, but it's visible if you squint. You can do small gestures of kindness here and there, but that's all you can do. Much of the 'horror' with the NPCs is far more human than mutant fish or demon sharks; grief driving a man to mania, the inherent horror of distance from one's family, the weight of being unable to feed the mouths of those you love so dearly, the emotional and social isolation of being a woman in a highly androcentric field, so on so forth.

And I liked the loop too, honestly. The routine of find new fishing spots > get more cash > get upgrade materials > get better upgrades > find new fish > repeat is nice for the first few hours. It's decently interspersed with the plot and the game mercifully doesn't have you hang around one spot for too long. All of this is bundled up in some excellent visuals, tight controls, and great music.

So why isn't a 5 star? Or even a full 4 star?

Because once the game runs out of tricks, there's still a pretty hefty amount of game to go, and it never really iterates on itself. There's no curveballs, unique mechanics, or remixes in the actual fishing/dredging mechanics. Unlike, say, Stardew Valley, there aren't even any fish with unique patterns to tackle. There are increasing environmental threats, sure, but those want for variance as well. It doesn't help that it's very easy to max all the upgrades by the third island (of five), leaving you with little to work for but the plot.

Many Lovecraftion videogames make the player ask how they'll avoid such unknowable horrors in their path. In Dredge, the answer is "Have an engine speed above 55 knots". No, really. If you spec into engines early on like I did, the threats are just speedbumps. Get used to the turning curve, and not even the narrow paths in the last area will let them threaten you.

And the plot honestly ruined a lot of nicer things I had to say about the story. That whole spiel up there praising the dialogue and feeling is torpedo'd by the end of the game. Without spoiling it, the lategame turns you from a passive observer to an active participant followed by a frankly annoying last minute ending choice that reeks of someone on the devteam going "Oh bother, we're a Lovecraft story". This is certainly one game that would've benefitted from not having a story.

That said, for a debut game by a small studio? This is still a fantastic effort. I may not be Dredge's biggest fan, but I honestly do like it for what it is and am absolutely keeping an ear to the ground for the devs' next game.

I've never played an Armored Core before (or a mech game in general), but I tried this out on the strength of the trailer and my enjoyment of the Souls series. I was expecting good combat and got maybe my favorite FromSoft game? As soon as I took down the helicopter in the introductory mission I was really interested - dodging barrages of bullets and missiles in three dimensions (so much more dynamic feeling than Souls!). When I took down the first chapter boss after perfectly-difficult trial and error sequence, I was completely hooked. When that fight opens with the sky completely eclipsed with a fireworks show of missiles, and that fucking music kicks in - video games are rarely that purely awesome.

That was a feeling I had over and over in AC6. It's pretty certainly the coolest feeling game I've ever played. Soaring above ruined cities on giant thrusters, punching huge robots in the face with a giant captive bolt, getting shot across the ocean in an aircraft carrier sized railgun, fighting on a city sized ship in outer space: this game is full of moment after moment that completely awes with the sheer spectacle of it all. There are a ton of setpieces here that are sick as shit that feel like they would happen once in a cutscene in another series - and you do them over and over here. And it's all enhanced by From's (certainly not newfound) impeccable sense of scale and artstyle. Most of the missions aren't huge but they convey mindbendingly huge machines and endless destroyed cities that provide perfect backdrops to the core robot fighting.

The combat feels fantastic. There's a good variety of enemies and challenges, and the loop of mission > garage > mission is immensely satisfying - it's almost as much fun to look at the new parts and speculate about builds as it is to actually test them out. The missions themselves are a varied mix of search-and-destroy sorties, duels with other armored cores, bigger boss fights, defend-the-point, and even an escort mission (that isn't actually that bad). Outside of the first mission, I played largely after the patches, which I think smoothed out the experience and enhanced what was one of my favorite aspects - the vast array of viable weapons that you can taylor to each hurdle. Most everything I tried felt like it could get the job done if I wanted to make something work, and there were plenty of weapon types that seemed like they would be best suited to a couple of specific challenges if I wanted to tailor my loadout to a certain boss fight. These boss fights are magnificent, too. Spectacular visually, literally the best music Fromsoft has ever had in a game, and really solid difficulties that kept me completely locked in but rarely frustrated. It was truly a pleasure to play this game, even as I replayed it once, and twice to really finish the main story.

The story side of things surprised me the most. The game is told entirely through MGS-style disembodied voice lines, with the occasional log picked up mid-mission, and yet - it's probably the most emotional From game, with poignant and tragic moments and really well defined characters despite that definition coming purely from a voice (and sometimes a mech design). The story itself is captivating, evolving and deepening as you finish NG and move to NG+, which is largely the same but with some extra details and an occassional mission from the opposite side, before finally peaking in NG++, where the entire thing takes on a different flavor. We start out as a mercenary, a cog in a disgusting corporate war machine, defending one company's supplies before blowing them up for a competetor in the next mission. As the game progresses it hits on themes of revolutionary struggle and capitalist greed, colonialism and environmentalism, AI and humanity, and sometimes the familiar Fromsoft fare of a mankind dooming itself in its pettiness and excess. It's still on my mind weeks after I finished, remembering badass lines, marvelling at the way they managed to keep the story perfectly paced and intriguing through 3 largely similar playthroughs, and thinking about the way it ends. Game of the year.

A great looking game, good songs, even fun movement, but the levels and enemy placements seem to be purposefully designed to punch you in the nuts every time you're about to have fun. I just finished 100%ing Super Mario World, first replay since I was a kid, and the best of those levels are designed so you can bounce Mario off koopas right through the entire thing—here, every time you jump the developers have cheekily placed a rake for you to land on. Your rings will explode everywhere, and then you'll see above Sonic in huge letters the only word that appears in the game world—"COPE." Sonic is looking into the camera and he is laughing at you.

In the best cases, the levels require slow, thoughtful exploration, and precise platforming, but Sonic doesn't want to do that. He wants to run fast and bounce off bad guys. But half the bad guys have itty bitty hit boxes and will kill you for landing on them if you're a pixel off their head. Why are half the levels underwater, where you move even slower than usual and have to get air constantly? The game clocks in at around two hours if you're not dying constantly, which you will be, and all of these choices feel like they're designed to pad the game out. The game feels at odds with itself.

Sonic as a character, and his animations, are cool and well done. It's easy to see why he caught on; he's a likeable environmentally concerned hero. In general the worlds look good, though the background tiles themselves are unvaried, which makes the slow exploring sometimes confusing.

I don't see myself returning to it—it's just not a fun platformer, and it's not a fun slow action game either. In the platforming space, the closest comparison I can think of is Bonk's Adventure, which is far more accomplished and fun. Where Bonk's Adventure levels are a bit too sparse and easy, Sonic the Hedgehog is too difficult and rarely fun to move through.