Manhunt is a game that's always really interested me. I've always had a grim, morbid fascination in the transgressive and controversial, the way the media can make people fear a film or game more than the actual work itself could. When I was younger, I probably had the entire Rockstar history memorized and would spring into a hearty speech about how "games aren't really the problem, it's the people", but you'd never really find me playing any of Rockstar's games; in an ironic reversal, I was just as fixated on the controversy of the material rather than the material itself. Of their entire catalog, Manhunt was the game that piqued my curiosity the most, since the very concept was so boiled down: you just kill people in gruesome ways, no morality tests, no philosophical questions. I played the first few levels when I was 13 or so, and thought I was a real scary edgelord for loving a game where brutality was so rewarded (guess what my favorite fighting games were), but I never really got far in it. I felt satisfied with the couple hours of exposure I got, and I think that feeling hasn't changed for me now, years later.

Manhunt lays its cards on the table early, and lets you know what you're getting into quite clearly: a dark, almost noiresque atmosphere, aided by the gritty PS2 visuals and clearly Carpenter-inspired soundtrack, and the sneering voice of Brian Cox cheering you on as you brutally murder the people in your way. For the first hour or so, it really is effective. The camera angles and quality of the Executions, along with the fluid mocap work, provides a grisly realism that works to unsettle even the most grizzled of horror vets. Combine that with some high-level sound design, and the end result is a spectacle of potently macabre entertainment, but it's not something that lasts.

As with most horror-adjacent media, exposure and desensitization are its Achille's heel. Not only is the arsenal of weapons surprisingly limited, a good third or more of that arsenal aren't available for Executions, and some of the weapons even reuse their Execution animations, which leads to even the most effective kills feeling dull after a couple levels of repeats. Unfortunately, rather than try to "up the ante" and make the game progressively more disturbing, it feels as though the developers completely throw in the towel somewhere around the third act, and turn the game into something more like Max Payne (sans bullet time) or even a "3D Hotline Miami"; the difficulty spikes, stealth is thrown to the wind, and guns become your primary tools against enemies, drying what remained of the atmosphere out completely, and turning it into a repetitive chore as the game gets closer to the finish line. And once you get to that finish line, is there a grand revelation waiting for you? Something that completely changes the context of the game, and perhaps even gives an "explanation" of the savage bloodthirst that you willingly took place in?

No. The antagonist dies, and the game ends with a brief news montage giving a slight bit of depth as to what happened, but never any concrete answers or commentary, which leads me to ask: what was the point? Was this a meta-commentary on how the elites are the real monsters, how police are just as cruel as the sadistic gangs you've been victim to, but society still finds a scapegoat to blame rather than looking at root causes? Is there perhaps an ironic connection between me, the player, never finding out any reasoning for why this all happened, leaving me in the same shoes as the protagonist? Could Rockstar be criticizing themselves, using the antagonist as an obvious stand-in for game developers who revel in the controversy garnered from subjecting the world to gruesome imagery?

Then I remember that this is a game that actively applauds you for performing more sadistic kills, with no cartoonish overexaggeration or a detached "silliness" to the bloodshed, just a jagged realism to everything you see. I believe there is no deeper meaning to be extracted from it. The game is sick, and I'm sick for playing it through to the end.

I'm a bit more jaded talking about this game than most others I've talked about and loved, because seeing some of the reaction towards it has really soured me. It took them a while, but Remedy has finally made a game that I enjoy from every angle. Max Payne I found too janky (mainly due to its age), and Alan Wake's gameplay really ground me down, but this just got everything right. Everything it takes influence from it does in wonderfully unsubtle ways, but in no way does that take away from the end result. I really can't stress just how fucking cool it is that we had a AAA company who saw a rinky dink little fan wiki and decided to make an entire game this openly inspired by it, AND to tie it into one of their preexisting IPs. The Oldest House is like a cross between The Overlook Hotel and the House (of Leaves), and is one of my favorite settings in any video game for that alone. To all the people knocking the combat... lmao, no. The abilities you get are delightfully open for comboing and pulling off stunts with, and it makes for some very fun, high-octane gameplay, even if I did admittedly find myself using one ability (you know which) way more than others. Still, at its worst, it was frustratingly difficult, and that was typically a fault of me rather than the game.

Yeah man I dunno, everything about this just kinda rocks. I really, really don't get people's beef with it, it soars over the other games in Remedy's catalog for me and is one of the coolest, most visually interesting, engaging, and inspired games I've ever had the joy to play.

A confusing mess, but a confusing mess in a way that I kind of liked, I think? All the complaints about the gameplay are true; the level design is remarkably weaker than the first game's, the enemy placement goes from strategic to infuriating, and you're going to be spending moreorless the entire game holding down the Shift key, which isn't comfortable nor does it play well. That being said, I think literally every other aspect about the game is better than the predecessor. The soundtrack is much more varied, with levels ranging from surprisingly emotional to adrenaline-pumping fever dreams, and it fits the rapidly changing storylines and characters really well. Speaking of, the way the story is told is even more of a brainfuck than the first game's, but I love that shit, so I'm cool with it. Still had no clue what happened by the end, but that's alright.

Yeah, this is a rambly stream of consciousness review because this whole thing was just a mess. Desperately in need of having its fat trimmed, yet that fat is what gives it so much personality compared to the first's incredibly lean gameplay. I admire Dennaton's boldness for looking at Hotline Miami 1 and deciding to do, in every sense, the opposite of what made that game work; it paid off in the end (i think), so, good call on their part.

Talking about this game is a little difficult for me because I've never played it alone (extreme fear of the ocean), so I've always had to have friends holding my hand through it. Now, I'll be honest and say the infamous "Open World Survival Crafting Sometimes-Horror Early Access Available Now On Steam For $30 (But More Content Will Be Added In The Future)" genre is at the bottom of my interests, and I was put off at the game's mechanics at first, but all of those expectations and prejudices are completely shot down within the first hour.

Subnautica has such a unique and exceptionally thought-out alien world, with the designs of the creatures, the natural formations, even the man-made structures never really feeling like our world, what we're used to. The developers use those differences to put you in a very clear and distinct position that affects the game's tone as well as affects how you play the game: you are not the top of the food chain. It's textbook for games like this to have enemies that are bigger, meaner, tougher than the player so that there's some form of obstacle to overcome, but the challenges that Subnautica offers often don't point towards that solution. Your solution, most of the time, is to let nature be. You're in an ocean with creatures tens, hundreds times bigger than you; in the game's context, you are prey rather than just "an enemy." It creates a very unique symbiosis with the world, where you grow to feel like a part of the ecosystem, rather than an invasive species.

The game also has a fair amount of pull due to its narrative. I went into this expecting "Minecraft in the ocean with scary monsters", but I was shocked to find that there is a surprisingly compelling story, with lore found through scanning through the things you come across and putting the pieces together. I won't say a thing about the story here because Subnautica is full of so many fun surprises I would hate to spoil, but a certain moment a few hours into the game (anyone who's played knows what I'm talking about) is such a massive right hook that immediately grabs your attention and slaps you for thinking this was going to be "just another survival game."

Now, I do have to say my major qualm with the game also comes from this narrative I'm praising: the pacing. I won't blame the developers on this, since I feel like pacing a story in a game where the player is free to do whatever they like at whatever pace they please is probably impossible, but I do feel like it perhaps shows its cards a little bit too early, and leads to long stretches of having to do a lot of hunting and gathering just to make one single step forward in the story. Of course, that does inspire you to explore and learn the land more, which is smart, but... it feels weird saying the story is so interesting that it makes the gameplay feel uninteresting as a result, but that's what I'm saying. Also, while it is a bit nitpicky, I found that some enemies in a couple major biomes were a massive pain in the neck, and led to me feeling less terrified and more annoyed. To any game dev reading this, please never make a creature that moves you around from one place to another, it's incredibly disorienting and frustrating, and not in a good way.

Overall, if things were tightened just a bit more, and if the ending didn't feel like a footnote (again, this could've been affected by me being a chronic hoarder in these games), I feel like I'd like this game even more. But, as it stands, it is such a creative and lush experience that my problems don't bring the game down as a whole. I recommend it to anyone who has a fear of the ocean, you'll come out of it loving the ocean more and simultaneously never being more afraid of it.

Resident Evil 6 is a game that exists.

I do not mean that in a condescending or reductive way, and don't let my score tell you otherwise. This is a rare situation where I have perfectly balanced mixed feelings on a game. I truly have never felt this way before. Everything I think of that I like in this game, I also dislike. Everything I dislike, I also like. What works conceptually, is executed poorly. What is executed greatly, is broken conceptually. There is nothing I can say about this game that feels concrete other than the fact that it does, indeed, exist.

Is it a bastardization of the Resident Evil name to turn Chris's campaign into a "zombie" Call of Duty, or is it just the natural progression of where the fourth and fifth entries took the series? Do the new additions to the cast work well with the returning crew, or should they have just been swapped out for other classic characters (e.g. Claire for Helena)? Does the multilinear hyperlink cinema-esque storytelling lead to one of the grandest and most intense stories in a horror game, or does it just end up as treading water and repetitive for the player? Is this the result of Capcom truly wanting to create the biggest, best Resident Evil game they could, or is it the result of giving the game designers a blank check after Resident Evil 5 rolled in such impressive numbers?

These are the questions Resident Evil 6 leaves me, and the answers to all of them are "yes." Part of me thinks it's bold for not trimming itself down at all, the other part of me thinks it's exhausting. Part of me thinks it's impressive to not have a single filter on what you put in your game and cram every idea possible into it, the other part felt like quitting halfway into the game. Part of me really does think this is the sprawling, maximalist epic it's been described as, the other part thinks it's terminally bloated.

Am I sounding repetitive? My apologies. I suppose I should've thought about how to word this review better, but instead, I was too busy putting in every single thing I thought of.

I'll have to eat crow here: This game isn't quite as good as I remember, and I found myself less impressed at every aspect like I used to be when I was obsessed with this game when I was younger.

It's still a 10/10 and one of the best games ever made, though. Also, GLaDOS' character arc in this might be the best arc in any singular video game. Also also, Want You Gone might be my favorite ending song to a video game, too. Also 3, the co-op is ridiculously fun and is basically another game in and of itself, though that's not factored into my rating at all, I just want you to play it if you haven't.

Also, J.K. Simmons.

If Alan Wake 1 was Twin Peaks' original run, then this is without a doubt The Missing Pieces. The combat is snappier and feels a lot more fun, which is a big step up from the first game, but wow, is the game structure somehow even more thin and repetitive. The way the characters wise up as you continue is a cool touch, but it really doesn't make up for what is essentially 3 fetch quests on repeat.

That being said, I might just say this is worth playing solely for the TV clips. They're fantastic, and easily the best part of this whole game. If Sam Lake had scrapped this entire game and instead made a 2-3 hour film consisting of what he put on the TVs, I'd probably give it a 4.5/5. If you really can't stand the gameplay, just do all the quests once and then watch the clips (and maybe read the manuscript pages) on YouTube, it'll give you what you need to know from this game without making you trudge through repetitive missions.

God, fuck the gameplay in this. It sucks so fucking much that I need to get it all off my chest. Every enemy is frustratingly tanky, the dodging is so clunky and unresponsive, the movement in general feels sluggish, the stamina meter is ridiculously small, and the amount of things you have to keep track of for a basic fight is just a mess; not to mention a certain "enemy type" (I use that term very broadly) that gets added around the halfway mark that is borderline undodgeable due to its "attack patterns". Oh, and the level design very frequently works against the game's favor, with way way way way way too many sections that are overly long for no good reason, specifically every goddamn trek through the forest. You can absolutely smell the fetid stench of seventh-generation game design coating this game at its worst points, and it makes for a grueling experience at times.

Anyways, it's one of the most unique (yes, I said unique. I'm an avid Twin Peaks fan just like you, blatant influences are not something writers should be ashamed of) stories I've ever seen in a video game that had me gripped at every turn, and it's the type of game I want to see so much more of in the industry. Sam Lake is a very impressive and very intimidating writer, and is the sole reason I loved this game and am confident in my high rating of it.

I haven't played the DLC yet but I've heard it's good, when/if I do, I'll append my thoughts to this review.

A cute and charming Nintendo take on the ever-popular Resident Evil aimed at kids. It gives Luigi a character, which I like, and some of the puzzles here are there are neat, but overall this just felt repetitive to me. The gameplay loop of "knock on thing, ghost pops out, press R and wiggle stick" got old very quickly, especially in the final third of the game. I also severely struggled with the controls due to the odd perspective; I might go and play the 3DS remake to see if that helps my eyes a bit more. Great sound design all around, though, which is a weird compliment I didn't expect I'd make, but hey. Like I said, it's very charming, even if I personally didn't really care for the end result.

Let's get the obvious out of the way: Yes, this game looks fantastic. I won't be someone who tries to deny very obvious quality simply because I don't like the game itself, the graphical fidelity is stunningly pretty. The magic effects look really bright and colorful, the detailed armor makes for great photos, and some bosses benefit greatly from the upgrade, especially Leechmonger. Aside from graphics, there are some good QoL features this remake provides, too. Your World Tendency being shown at every teleport is useful, the increased ladder speed is heavily appreciated, and being able to rest at Archstones a la Bonfires makes farming a bit less tedious. Oh, and the way the controller's speaker and vibration are used is pretty excellent too, really wish more games would use DualSense's vibration to this extent.

Now, typing that entire paragraph made me feel a bit strange, and that strangeness is reflected in my low rating. This remake is not meant to be a thoughtful recreation of the original game, it is meant to show off the capabilities of the PlayStation 5. I take no real issue in games being made to be essentially tech demos (Mario 64 and Halo: CE for example), but I do take issue in a company pulling out an old IP that was locked to a far outdated console and tossing it to a team who do solely remakes with no input from the original developers. I want to make that very clear: I don't think the remake's issues are solely a fault of Bluepoint's, but rather Sony for letting this entire thing happen without enough care given to make it a true re-imagining of the original artistic vision. However, I will still take issue with the way Bluepoint handled a lot of the game, and I'll list them out just so I don't have to string them together cohesively.

=== SOUND DESIGN ===
The worst offender, which is why I'm putting it here first. I find that all the Souls games, especially Demon's Souls, have a very deliberate stillness to their sound, with great attention taken to when noise is being made. You have your obvious times like killing an enemy or getting hit, but there's a lot of subtle ambience that often goes unnoticed (e.g. the nature sounds in 3-1) but provides a lot of atmosphere, giving so much with so little. The remake decides to ignore that design philosophy entirely and have everything make as much noise as possible, the biggest offender being your character grunting and hollering with nearly every move you make. Certain cutscenes that had a very delicate low volume are now flooded with dramatic breaths, coughs, and grunts to really sell you on just how epic this current moment is. Aside from that, there's a particularly big offense in Tower of Latria, a previously dark and skin-crawlingly eerie level turned into just a generic fantasy prison due to both overbrightening and a constant distant female vocalization. Sure, it's subjective, but I find that all of the scary atmosphere is broken by changes like that. The bosses themselves feel like they just make more noise, too? I can't really place it, but everything just feels very very loud at all times, and it feels like a complete opposite of the faint, quiet nature of the original.

=== GRAPHICS ===
The thing everyone focuses on, and one that I don't have as many personal complaints with outside of general things. Yes, it's incredibly bright. The original game had a very deliberate visual style (hey this sounds familiar) and used stark contrasts between darks and lights to create a striking image despite the lower texture and model quality; a good example of this is with the boss Maneater. In the original, it's a harshly-silhouetted flying monster against the dark Latria sky, the main thing visible being its blank green eyes, and in the remake, it just looks like a generic Warcraft monster. That's really the whole game; there's no contrast between lighting anymore, everything looks bright and comfortably lit even in times where it was a very specific and obvious choice to not have things lit, the best example of this being the Valley of Defilement. Yes, I know the original's dark swamp was hard to navigate, but that was part of the challenge, learning to navigate it. By raising the brightness to, again, a comfortable level, there's no challenge anymore, it just becomes like every other FromSoft poison swamp. Why keep things unique when you can make them like later games?

=== GAMEPLAY ===
This is simultaneously the least touched part and also the one that's maybe the most upsetting. Demon's Souls, for both its flaws and its strengths, is a unique and daring game, still fresh as a new player 14 years later. The lack of elements from future installments helped add to the uniquity of the game as well, still providing new things you had to get used to, but very appropriately fit the game due to it being designed around these "outdated" elements. Bluepoint, for whatever reason, thinks that they understand the design of this game better than the creators, and choose to add in the ability to warp to any Archstone from any Archstone, thus kneecapping the importance of the Nexus and making it feel like the "pitstop" hub world of Dark Souls 3 (and 2, to a lesser extent). In Demon's Souls, the Nexus is a safe haven, a break from all the combat to level up, upgrade your weapons and, unique to this game, attune spells and manage your inventory. Later games may have those former aspects, yes, but they lack the atmosphere that the Nexus (and similarly, Bloodborne's hub world) has that make it feel less of a hindrance, and more of a decrescendo before embarking on another adventure; a specific way that The Nexus handled this was by having each world be separated, thus making the jumps between worlds feel a little more weighty and purposeful. By being able to warp to and fro however you like, sure, it makes the game more streamlined and simple, but it takes away from that unique player choice and strips the Nexus of some of its importance. Similarly, both the inventory system and Stockpile Thomas have been butchered by a "Send to Storage" option being added in the menus and even when you pick up a potentially-overburdening item, thus removing any real importance to managing your weight at the Nexus and directly halving your amount of time spent with Thomas. In the original, he became a fan favorite character due to how reliable and compassionate he was, and that was because you saw him and used his services so much; by removing the need to see him to move items out of your inventory, you're doing that character a disservice by making him feel like a checkpoint to get your items back. Also, it bothers me to no end that they changed a couple balance things for whatever reason. By adding in a ring that allows for normal movement in swamps hidden behind Pure Black World Tendency, not only do you make the swamp seem like less of a challenge to overcome by giving the players an out, but it also makes that out incredibly tedious rather than challenging. It's not hard to use a bunch of valuable items to return to human form and dive off a cliff in 3-2, it's just time-consuming and annoying, all for a "get out of jail free" card that didn't need to be there. But I suppose I shouldn't be that surprised, considering the team wanted to add an Easy Mode before realizing that would be taking a step too far.

I know a lot of my complaints seem like nitpicking, and to be fair, they are, but they're representative of a team that didn't care about truthfully recreating the original game and just cared about drawing new players in while still keeping just enough the same to not completely invoke the rage of veterans. So, despite all my complaints, why the relatively high score? Well, because, at the end of the day, it's still Demon's Souls. It's still a good game, not so much because of Bluepoint, but rather in spite of them, and it's probably the version I'll return to the most out of sheer convenience (and a more lively online server), but I would recommend any beginner to play the original first, and then play this as a subpar substitute for getting janky emulators to work or setting up an entire older console for one game. I'm upset that I have to dislike this game, but oh well.

Coming back to this game and getting it feel so rewarding. I tried a few months ago and put it down around 4-1 due to it feeling too unforgiving and frustrating, with not enough moments of satisfaction afterwards, but even then I knew there was something special about this game. Now, I'll admit that it is a near impossibility to not relate this game to the members of the lineage that it spawned, especially with this being the last one I played in said series, but it really is mind-blowing just how much right they got from the start.

I've made it no secret that Dark Souls 1 is by far my favorite entry in the Soulsborne collective, and I made the foolish-in-hindsight error of praising it for concepts like bloodstains, messages, summoning, etc. while never acknowledging that this game did it first. I knew it did, but I wanted to believe that "oh, this is some archaic version of the TRUE VISION that is DS1"; I could not be more incorrect. While it is true that the later games in the series did polish up a lot of various aspects, the core gameplay and soul (no pun intended) of the series was exquisitely laid out here. Infinite retries, big boss battles, XP currency, the multiplayer aspects, all of that started from this. I know I'm repeating myself a lot, but it is genuinely unbelievable that so many unique and now iconic mechanics in video games were done perfect in the first attempt. But enough waxing poetic about its history, how does it hold up on its own?

Demon's Souls takes an incredibly interesting and subversive look at the concepts of "levels", with everything feeling simultaneously extremely segmented yet also open and fluid. The five worlds you're given are all wildly different from each other, some experimenting in verticality, some experimenting with status effects and different elemental damage, each one having not a gimmick but rather a theme that makes them all super memorable and unique. As an aside, it's also really cool to see the flickering wisps of level design ideas that would go on to be recreated in later games. The individual segments within the worlds also switch things up between each one, with the layout of said levels being absolutely superb. The leanest cut of meat possible; every walkway, every set of stairs, every top and bottom of every single room is crafted with the express intent of "the player will go here for a reason", there is positively zero wasted space. The use of shortcuts, while regrettably a little sparse, also makes thorough searching and emptying of every level that much more rewarding, for you may be able to save yourself some extreme repetition should you fail at the boss. Speaking of bosses...

It seems as though the biggest turn-off for this game for a great many amount of people, specifically Souls fans, are the bosses being "underwhelming". Well, yes, but it feels a bit unfair to say that considering this was the first attempt at doing boss fights in this style, especially before the shift away from having the runback to the boss be part of the challenge. Now, I'll admit that I do prefer the quality bosses we got later on after the reduction of said runbacks, but that doesn't mean these are "bad", they just strike a different tone. It's a comparison many people have made, but they feel more like the puzzle bosses of Zelda games, except here they serve a slightly different purpose. Here, they're checkpoints, the things preventing you from seeing the rest of the world you're in, and that factor alone gives you the motivation to beat them. I wanted to see the rest of the Tower of Latria, which made me all the more determined to beat Fool's Idol, despite the demoralizing taste of failure and remembering the required runback. But, seeing what awaited me made it totally worth it, which retroactively adds to the challenge and satisfaction of beating these bosses.

I've held off on talking about this, since it's so subjective, but good lord is this game beautiful. Sure, maybe not in the "traditional" sense (ᵗʰᵃᵗ ᵗʰᵉ ʳᵉᵐᵃᵏᵉ ˢᵗᵘᶜᵏ ᵗᵒᵒ ᶜˡᵒˢᵉ ᵗᵒ), but it has a wistful, half-forgotten feeling to the art style, like a canvas that's been hung up in a gallery for a long, long time. It's faded and worn, but in a way, that adds to its melancholy. The architecture feels like a perfect blend of the familiar medieval and the dream-like uncanny, often stepping between the two at a moment's notice, which adds so much to the thick, foggy atmosphere that completely blankets this game. That atmosphere alone is what really sets this game apart from the rest, not just the (rather overstated) Soul Tendency system or the Archstones; I've made the "playing a painting" comparison to Dark Souls 1 many times, but I feel like this game might encapsulate that feeling better. Seeing 3-2 made me feel like I was seeing something that's never been done before or since in video games.

Not much else I can say. The main thing holding this back for me is just the clunk being a bit too much for me to want to come back to as often as I do the other games, and builds being much more strict, but I think that aspect adds to the weight of your adventure and purpose in the game's world. Though, I can not stress enough, even if I think other games provide this gameplay style in a more refined and replayable way, this game has a feeling to it that none of the others come close to; a feeling strong enough that it outweighs nearly all the negative feelings I have towards certain parts. A very special game made by a team of very special people.

There's a lot of thoughts rattling around in my head about this game, since I put so much time into it and spaced the play sessions out as much as I did due to playing it with a friend, so this will be a much more ramshackle writeup than usual, but here goes.

This whole game feels like a giant love letter to The Legend of Zelda as both a series and a concept, boiling down what makes things fun and interesting to the most essential of ideas and refining those ideas to the best they can be. The sense of adventure I had while playing this is second to none; I'm not the type to actively roam around an open world game without something to do, but I found myself doing that a lot playing this. "Oh, I see a thing in the distance, I'll go fly there!" It really unlocks a very pure, childlike sense of wonder that stays with you the whole game, at least in the open world sections.

Now, using that last caveat as a segue, I want to talk about where this game's fatal flaw for me: its main quest. It's not bad, not by any stretch, but playing this game knowing you have to "do something" accentuates the overly sparse open world to a fault. When you're exploring, it feels intriguing and mysterious. When you're traveling, it feels tedious and incredibly monotonous; one too many cases of "holding up on the joystick for 5 minutes". If the main quest was its own thing in the background, that'd be one thing, but every major area you go to mentions the Divine Beasts and how they're making things go crazy and whatnot. It feels like the game's constantly tapping on your shoulder to remind you of something you literally could not forget about, and it got really annoying when my tolerance wore completely thin (specifically around the desert area).

Said Divine Beasts are one of two contentious replacements for the traditional dungeons/temples in a Zelda game, the other being Shrines. I'm mixed on how I feel about both. I think the puzzles in both the Beasts and the Shrines are serviceable and give a nice feeling of satisfaction a majority of the time, and the act of discovering particularly hidden Shrines in the open world is an absolute delight that can not be understated, but I wouldn't be telling the truth if I said I'm fully okay with this change. The reason I love Twilight Princess so much is because of how long and winding the dungeons were; they felt like true hidden temples lost to time that you were peeling back the mystery of. Outside of TP, the temples in the other games still had a level of mystique and atmosphere to them that the Shrines and Beasts are almost entirely lacking; the Shrines with their identical visual and audio design and the Beasts with their much too repetitive gimmicks that lack the lengthy, puzzling feel from dungeons of yore. That being said, I believe the bite-sized nature of the Shrines works well for a game of this scale while still keeping the general vibe of Zelda, so in the end it's mostly a success.

I do have one major nitpick with this game, and it is certainly a nitpick, but it is also major enough for me to give its own paragraph. The warp points in this game feel completely unthought-out and, at worst, actively immersion-breaking. The two main places you can warp to are Shrines and Towers. Okay, that makes sense; Shrines act as little warps for your map to both give a sense of understanding the land more as well as act as encouragement to explore so you can return to where you are more often, and Towers act as vantage points to let you scope out a region more thoroughly. However, it bothers me to no avail that they place a Shrine near important locations such as villages or stables to act as a warp point, because it takes the discovery aspect of that specific Shrine away, and reveals too much of the "gaminess" in the design. That Shrine no longer feels like a secret meant to be uncovered, it instead feels like a checkpoint to make sure you could come back later with ease. If you're going to put a Shrine near areas of importance, why not just let us warp to those areas!!! It's not even that far away, it would preserve a lot more of the magic of Shrines while still letting the player get to important locations. Plus, there are random exceptions made with the Labs being warp points, so why can't villages and stables be too arrrahhaargggh this has bothered me the entire playthrough and it feels cathartic to finally get out let's move on!!!!!!!!!

Yeah, that's about all I want to say. I have more thoughts on the game but they're really not important enough to list off here, so I'll leave with a summary of what all this means. This game is special. No matter how many times I complained about the combat, no matter how many times the cracks showed and I put on my nitpicking cap, no matter how many times I got actively frustrated with some of the controls, it doesn't take away from the truly enchanting feeling of adventure that weaves its way through you at every step. Go, chop that tree. Ride that horse. Climb that mountain. Slash those monsters. Run through those plains. Be a kid again. Have fun.