This game exceeded even my highest expectations in almost every way.

I could talk about it for hours but as with Remake I don't think it's possible for me to do it justice, it's peak. I've spent over 200 hours with FF7 Rebirth now and I could easily jump back in for a 3rd playthrough today.

This game is such an achievement, and home to some of the most beautiful scenes, characters and music in memory. If the final part is able to do even half as many things as well as this does, then we're in for a phenomenal trilogy of games.

As an aside, getting the platinum for this was insanely fun and surprisingly easy ... until the last few combat simulations. It took me around 40 hours over 5 days to get them done. I am begging that part 3 is easier 🥹
Thanks for reading folks, hope you're all doing well!🙏

Blown away by how much more I ended up enjoying this over the original Alan Wake and Control which this game should also be considered to be a sequel to. Remedy already surprised me with Control with the amazing bizarre aesthetic they have been running with while mixing in Live Action footage seamlessly and this game is that dialled up to 10 it’s easily the best looking game I’ve played graphically and aesthetically. All the new characters are great I actually ended up enjoying their segments more than most of the Alan Wake side of the game and the combat feels miles better this time round with none of the floating furniture being thrown at you returning this time round to ruin the game. Huge recommend especially to Twin Peaks or True Detective Season One Heads really surprised how great this is Remedy are easily one of the most charming game studios on the scene right now.

Alone in the Dark is the next remake in a long row of remakes that we got over the last few years. But is any good? Yea I mostly enjoyed my my time with the game but a huge disclaimer at the beginning, this "remake" is rarely a remake of the original and more a reimagination because there isn't much left of the original game. Simply there isn’t much left of the original mansion. I just recently played the original game for the first time and I was shocked when I noticed how different this game is. There are many new characters and locations and now you might say that this is a good thing but they also cut a lot of the old rooms of the mansion. So much that I didn't recognize it and I finish the original just 12 days ago. But maybe I'm just suffering from amnesia. What I liked about the game was the cast, it was cool to see David Harbor and Jodie Comer as the main characters. I'm also happy that almost every note is voice acted even with different voices which is great. This contributes to the dense atmosphere and the lore of this game was pretty interesting, you can't say that about the story. It's also more puzzle oriented than survival horror, there are only 4 weapons with no upgrades and the meele attacks also only consist of spamming R1. The game in general is very clunky, I frequently got stuck on objects in the environment and the combat feels clunky too and the hit feedback is bad. There are also only very few types of enemies and one of them are these "facehuggers" things. Fighting them was annonying as hell. They completely ignore bullets and they are the only enemy that has a QTE and you go from QTE to you recover from QTE to camera glitch so you can't see to QTE again until you are dead. Most of the cabinets that you can search loot either don't open very wide so you can't see what's inside and they were empty 90 % of the time anyway which made exploring feel very unsatisfying. The game also only has 2 boss fights, one was very easy and the other one very annyoing. The ending felt rushed and was kinda underwhelming. But the pacing after chapter 3 was overall not the best and it needed more polish. After finishing the game twice, once as Emily and once as Edward I can say that there are a few different dialogues with the side characters and some level segments are slightly different but nothing too major. All in all the main story is still the same. There are also different endings which can be unlocked after collecting various collectables but sadly all of them besides the main ending are glitched and can't be obtained.
Overall I still enjoyed Alone in the Dark, especially due to the great atmosphere and the focus on puzzle rather than action. I also liked the lovecraftian vibe that the lore gave me. You should probably play it on the easiest difficulty because the fights aren't the reason why you should play this game. Emily's story was also more consistent and I would recommend you play her on your first playthrough. Alone in the Dark's focus on puzzles and story instead of action/fights was a nice change but you can notice pretty quickly that this game didn't have the biggest budget.

Games I finished in 2024 ranked

CDPR once again prove themselves as masters of the art of creating rich, deep and fun-as-hell DLC content. Phantom Liberty is up there with Blood and Wine as one of the best DLCs I've ever played.

As much as I love the narrative of the base game, I really appreciated how tight and streamlined the story here is. Dogtown is just small but dense enough to explore without it feeling overwhelming, and the story beats do a great job of introducing you to it slowly. I never thought a spy thriller in a game like Cyberpunk could work so well, but I really really enjoyed my time with it.

Idris Elba's performance here is downright excellent. He brings his charisma and icy coolness to the role perfectly, and he instantly elevated any scene he was in. I'd love to see his character make a cameo in the sequel.

The ending I got was bittersweet to say the least. It felt like a necessary end to V's journey but rang pretty hollow when the credits started rolling. I found myself staring at the screen wondering if I had made the right choice, and that to me was a sign that CDPR made an ending that didn't neatly tie everything up in a bow, and I'm grateful for that.

Cyberpunk and PL as a complete, interconnected package are some of the best gaming experiences I've had in a while. I think when you separate out the horrendous launch this game had and take into account what the game actually is on its own merits (especially with the 2.0 update), you appreciate just how good of a game this really is. I'll be thinking about this for a long while.

This isn't quite a 4/5 but I'm going higher to help the avg smh.

[Disclaimer: This 'review' is basically just a ramble I had in DMs with some edits to be real sentences and legible, if it feels like there's even less flow or format than usual, that's why! Also it's kinda long sorry oops ]

The hate for this game is so much more extreme than it deserves. Sure, I miss being able to throw cash registers as much as the next guy, I think they seriously fumbled by not letting you throw melee weapons, but I also think that the separated inventories is a benefit overall. Having only 10 slots or whatever and having to use them for food items, melee weapons and guns was arguably where the first games got their difficulty, but was mostly just kinda annoying. Getting stuck in a fight against humans with 8 melee weapons and 2 sandwiches was an easy way to lose hours of progress, and that's no longer an issue.

They've also removed the super restrictive timer in this game, which again could be called the 'difficulty' of DR1, but if we're being real that game's timers went so hard that if you weren't sprinting everywhere in the optimal order you couldn't do it anyway. There's definitely a charm to that, but the amount of times I failed something, even the entire story mode, just because I went the wrong way or got lost was frustrating. Especially when particularly useful items were often only found in corners of the map, so you'd head to the weapon shop before going to a psycho only to run out of time to fight them on your way back :p

Also, Frank is an ass and the plot is dumb, but there's no pretending that the first 2 games weren't just as silly. This one is just straight up zombie-killing fun, without the timer and with the map being more open with items scattered around more, it feels more like Dead Rising 3 did: You can mess around as much as you want, get sidetracked as often as you like, just play at your own pace. To me personally, that is what Dead Rising should've been like from the start.
Sure, I still wouldn't say that it's great or anything, but in a franchise that's built on killing zombies in dumb ways the only thing this does particularly 'wrong' is redacting our right to throw everday items, and honestly, I kinda got over this within the first 2 hours.

This game may have a random ass COD UI for some reason, but I don't understand why people are so mad or saying it 'killed the series'. When you encounter survivors in this game you can't accidentally kill them in 2 hits and when you save them they run off on their own. They actually run past zombies! Insane right, the first 2 games taught me that all survivors are obsessed with slowly walking to safety or sprinting headstrong into the horde 😭
I honestly believe at this point that it's just nostalgia. "Why can he be megaman" because it's fun killing dozens of the dead with a blaster why is that a negative 😩

I had never played this game before now because I was lead to believe that it was too over the top and had been stripped down to a sandbox. Just "here's a billion zombies and a bunch of dumb weapons, have fun" with no characters, story, nothing. Knowing it had a story and maniacs is all it took for me to wanna play it and now here I am having had a perfectly enjoyable time: It's Dead Rising, I experienced exactly what I expected to while playing a Dead Rising game 😅

To comment on the game proper: The UI is weird but it's dumb fun and that's really all it has to be, I don't care lol. Also the Christmas/Black Friday theme is perfect for this franchise, don't see enough praise for that. Hearing holiday music on the radio and pause menu is much loved by me, might make an annual habit of spending some time on this each December idk. Besides that the trophy list is atrocious as always. I want this series back, in the RE Engine please 😌

Happy Holidays everyone, appreciate you all greatly❤️