Platted on PS3 back in 2010.

While I like Dark Souls 1 more, this game has so many odd systems - World Tendency is truly wild - and the willingness to make every world's final boss a "puzzle boss" is bold. The world isn't very well-connected so it feels more like Mega Man as compared to Dark Souls' Metroid. And, of course, obtuse RPG mechanics including carry weights and absurd upgrade costs. I'm in love.

To get a plat I had to farm one specific enemy that only shows in one specific area at maximum black world tendency (requiring me to go offline and suicide like 50 times to tank my tendency) for hours. No wonder you never see people with maxed out Sharp modifiers lol. I love this shit.

Great game. Deranged.

Extremely cozy game. Obviously Half-Life 1 inspired. What if you played the scientist team and had to survive with your wits instead of your inexplicably amazing way with guns?

I'm generally anti-survival-crafter because they mostly seem to be about stripping the environment of trees and rocks and shit and building an extremely ugly-looking box house. This game recontextualizes that behavior into strip-mining an office complex to build little hovel-apartments to support your work exploring each zone. As a result it feels like the intermediary period between the start of the cascade and when you as Gordon Freeman run into some scientist guy huddled in a corner behind a makeshift barricade going "please help me!!!"

The other thing I super love about it is that so much of your time is about exploring a specific path until that path eventually loops back into the main "unlocked" part of your run. There's five billion shortcuts per area, all bespoke, all uncovered by digging through every nook and cranny. It's extremely rewarding to just wander around and get lost and follow some arbitrary path because it'll give you resources AND open up new parts of the level.

Brilliant stuff. Palworld could never.

Really wanted to like this one, and there are some parts of it I do like - the broad brush strokes of the narrative, the soundtrack (sans the rapping; lyrics were too cringe for me lol) - but ultimately it felt easy, repetitive, hollow, and boring. Making most of the enemies in a Max Payne homage melee was not a good move, and there's way too many levels. You don't have to slo-mo or dive-dodge basically at all in this game, and in fact will actively hurt you in the boss fights as the roll-dodge is how you get away from the boss tracking. A strong effort for sure, but a weak outcome.

Achingly mid. Sure, it ~resembles~ Hotline Miami, in a very shallow sort of way, but it lacks that special touch.

Where Hotline Miami (1, anyway) is bold, shocking, beautiful, transgressive, and lovely, this game is completely rote. It lacks so much of what I love about that game, and instead replaces it with a drab monochrome roguelike. A game about careful positioning and clever engagement reduced to slo-mo and dodge rolls. You can't kick a guy into a wall and bash his skull in with a hammer, or use doors as improvisational weapons, or ride the tense razor's edge of a single hit. The mildly intriguing premise quickly gives way to tedium. And the music sucks.

I might return to this later, but where I voraciously devoured Hotline Miami in an afternoon, I have been procrastinating playing more of this. I'm going to take that as the sign it should be and shelve it for later.

Hard to describe.

At its most material, it's a form-shifting platformer where you can swap forms at any time, allowing you to chain form swaps to do funny movement combos. Some stuff is self-explanatory - Tine attract you to magnets, Car is low to the ground and fast, Bomp is a bouncy ball - and some stuff is so odd that its utility has to be experienced - Polyp allows you to phase through walls by altering your center of mass, Pray disappears blocks which slowly reappear. In addition, there's several common rules that lead to some clever puzzle solution, like geometry backfaces being immaterial but not their fronts. You'll have to return to some levels later when you have the right forms to attempt them.

Married to this is a surrealist psychedelic aesthetic that is definitely unplayable to anyone with photosensitive epilepsy and which is more than a little disorienting. As a friend described it, "game looks like my graphics card is dying."

And... it's also very emotionally affective. To reduce this game to its most mechanical elements is to do it a disservice, although not much of one since the platforming challenges are very clever. Lovely music and surprisingly smart pacing/writing that caught me off guard. Most games I play don't/can't surprise me either mechanically or emotionally, and this game has done both. Maybe I've just experienced so many games in my time playing that straightforward "dad loses daughter" stuff can't touch my heart where this can. I dunno.

Definitely a game for the discerning player who is looking for something very different from the pack. Hits the mark for me. Love it.

I love Cultist Simulator and Book of Hours quite a bit on their technical and design merits; a blend of idle game and adventure game, where you build up your abilities through "time spend" choices. I think this one is better than Cultist Sim in many respects too.

Unfortunately they are almost always too finicky on either side. The fiction is so overwritten and florid in the precise way which is fun in doses but lacks the direct punch you want for continued exposure. There's also almost no incentive to read all this fiction floating by, because you have to be juggling ten things and also thinking four steps ahead. Who has time to read this shit?

So you're left with the raw idle / crafter treadmill, where you optimize your resources so you can move on to greener pastures. This game is better in some ways on that front, in that items are actually unique and interesting things you see in the world and interact with. But it's often annoying trying to hunt down an item of a specific type-combination (say, Sky Forge Tool) and the interface is only partially "there" in terms of helping.

This is worst when you are trying to do something precise. You can't do the search-highlight across a specified quality combination using a filter, you have to manually and slowly search the whole property by swapping which quality your mouse is over in a tooltip. It's fucking agonizing.

On the shelf it goes. Maybe I can come back when other people have fixed this game's interface woes, just like its predecessor. Also the guy who writes this stuff is annoying and I would like to see this style of game in a better writer's hands.

Actually that's probably Pentiment lol

Kinetic, expressive, subtle; full of all the joys and terrors you could want from a game like this. Most easily described as "Metal Gear Solid V as a roguelite", but I think that does the game a huge disservice.

It truly understands the slapstick comedy potential of teamkilling and ragdolls. Like accidentally fragging your friends with a 500kg bomb you dropped at your feet when a bug knocked you over. Or diving off a ledge slightly too high and colliding headfirst with the ground in what I like to call "the concussion special".

And it also has the nuance for different approaches, like silently dispatching a whole outpost beyond their range to sense you. Then there's all the details enabled by its structure, like watching other squads' ships help with stratagems while you're in space. Clearing an entire map of its enemies is both fun and rewarding, even though missions are procgen. It can be as hard or as easy as you like it, and the higher difficulty content is very fun even when you're fucking up and dying constantly. Helldivers 2 has a near endless capacity to surprise you with its wit and playfulness, if you let it.

Really glad I picked this up and played it before my friends group moved on from it. I play it an hour or so a day, I'm 50 hours deep with everything unlocked, and I'm excited to see where they take it.

Just two missions into the Allied campaign and a few skirmishes and already I appreciate the map and balance work from Westwood and company so much more. Completely overstuffed and immediately throws you into the deep end where your guts promptly get sucked out through your anus.

Units do too many things at once. Not sure why the art for every vehicle needed to be replaced with greebled versions that make unit readability worse? The tech tree reorg doesn't make much sense. Lots of unit tweaks, particularly to costs, that upend the feel quite a bit. I do like a few of the changes though, like letting defenses gain veterancy and better garrisoning.

I get a distinct sense that this mod is for someone who isn't me; a player who has mastered the APM micro game of every RTS and is looking for the most intense challenge possible. All the grace and texture of RA2 stripped out in favor of poorly-ramped challenge missions.

This one is shelved for now, after one session. Might try again in the future.