Resident Evil 7 is such a baffling game to me. It's a game that manages to be the best Resident Evil of the modern era in some respects while also the worst modern Resident Evil in others. Whenever I think about this game and its imperfections, I always find myself with a lot more to say about it than I think I did, so I decided to replay this game and it's DLC to finally be able to get it all out in words.

If you looked at just the gameplay and presentation of RE7 you would see nothing really wrong with this game. RE7 was the first RE game to shift to a first-person perspective and I think it works surprisingly well to the point that the third person perspective hardly feels like a series staple anymore. This first-person perspective also adds to the horror element of this game, which when paired with the setting adds up to make one of the scariest RE games I've played. The setting of the Bakers secluded and condemned Louisiana estate is a really good one, each area in the estate matches to one of the Baker family and they all have a different brand of horror to go with them, making each of these main sections feel unique and interesting. The puzzles, combat, and resource management gameplay are all really good here as well and what you'd expect from an RE game. The game is also just really good looking. The way the environments are crafted both visually and in terms of details just feels so real and that adds to the eeriness of the game as a whole.

So if the gameplay, setting, horror, and the presentation of the game are this good what's holding it back you may ask? Well, that'd be the story dear reader, the story is a fucking mess. To give it one thing, the basic plot setup and the way the game starts off. Ethan, being a normal guy who gets dragged into all the game's madness because he's looking for his wife is a good setup and the motivation for him to stay and try to save her is believable. It's in the unbelievablly stupid twists the game takes and the lackluster explanations of whats going on here that this game falters. This is where I get into spoiler territory so if you want to read on just press this link (https://pastebin.com/BhaFdRAE) and it'll take you into the rest of the story section.

The last thing I want to talk about is the DLC. I hadn't played the DLC prior to this playthrough, making it some of the only modern RE content I haven't touched yet and now that I've played it I can say it's alright. Starting off with the Banned Footage, which is where the main meat of this DLC comes from, I'd say this is pretty good. This shows the story of Clancy, another one of the Bakers victims that has to endure and survive their gauntlet of challenges. The Nightmare tape sees you surviving a hoard of nearly endless molded enemies as you try to survive until dawn in a sort of tower defense like mode, the Bedroom tape is an escape room of sorts where you have to use the items and clues available to you in the room all the while avoiding making a lot of noise to avoid attracting Margurite to the room and making sure to put everything back where you found it before she comes back each time otherwise she'll realise you're trying to escape, and the 21 tape sees you playing a few sadistic rounds of blackjack against another victim in Lucas' warehouse, the winner of which is allowed to go free and the loser of which is killed gruesomely. These are all pretty fun ideas that don't outstay their welcome for the most part and are neat little additions. The fourth Banned Footage tape works as a prolouge to the main story thatb shows us from Zoe's eyes the day that things went to shit, showing how Eveline corrupted the Bakers with her gift and how Zoe manages to escape meeting the same fate as the rest of her family, even if she can't leave the estate. There's also two other DLCs that serve as epilouges in "Not a Hero" and "End of Zoe", Not a Hero focuses on Chris Redfield going after Lucas Baker who turns out was much more evil than the game initially showed and is related to the Umbrella corporation, this mode is just a really short epilouge with basic RE gameplay that only really serves to tie the events of this game into the main RE story. End of Zoe focuses on Uncle Joe Baker finding Zoe in a crystalized state and searching for a cure for her all while a swampy version of Jack Baker follows him, the mode has you using Joe's bare fists and brute strength as weapons rather than guns and feels pretty fun and satisfying in that way, it's also nice to see Zoe's story get concluded so satisfyingly and brings closure to the events of the main game as a whole. Overall I'd say this DLC is mostly worth it, it's not a lot to write home about but it's something and if you get it on sale it'll provide you with a few more hours of entertainment if you liked the base game.

Despite its glaring story flaws that hold it back from greatness, Resident Evil 7 is still a really fun game and a good return to form as well as innovation for the RE series. The excellent gameplay, setting, and horror elements add up to what I believe to be the most genuinely scary Resident Evil
game and without it being made and returning the series to it's roots I probably wouldn't be such a big RE fan today.

Slowly this year is becoming the year of great reimagined “casino” games. Buckshot Roulette takes the simple premise of Russian Roulette and makes it an indie horror gem.

Gameplay is primarily passing a loaded shotgun back and forth between yourself and a dealer while using a mix of items and luck to turn the odds in your favor. A general run will involve chipping away at your opponent’s health bar before taking away life support to really up the ante. Once a run has been won you will unlock a double or nothing mode that spice ups items and become essentially endless if you are prepared to take the risk for bragging rights.

Buckshot Roulette seems to take place in some kind of secret backdoor Russian nightclub that lends itself greatly to the twisted washed-out horror aesthetic. All runs begin in a dirty bathroom as you pass through a walkway with loud thumping techno music before entering the dealer’s den. At all times you can almost always hear the music muffled through the walls as the sound design is honestly fantastic.

The simple premise makes it easy to pick up and the addictive double or nothing mode is great to try for a high score. With such a low asking price I can’t recommend Buckshot Roulette enough.

Certainly not lost on me how shallow my revisit of LBP1 was. This was something of a childhood fave of mine I threw countless hours at; be it in couch co-op with fwiends or alone in my room exploring the avalanche of user-created content people spun together. Neither of which was a factor in me revisiting it for the first time in well over a decade now (jezus farckin christ!!!!), the servers are long gone and I’d need to be the richest man alive to bribe someone to play this with me over a cocktail of Parsec + RPCS3 input lag. Nobody will ever understand the joy of slapping the aztec cock motif on your co-op partners’ faces siiiighghhh…. Still, an illuminating experience that rekindled something in my heart about what LBP1 stood for!

Admittedly, I was always more of an LBP2 kid, these games being modular meant there was very little reason to revisit the first game once the sequel came out. There is a very strong difference in vibes between the two games though, if LBP1 excels at anything, it’s in encouraging the player to go off and create for themselves. It’s kind of wild the extent to which LBP1 offers and explains its tools to the player - its relatively simple levels make no effort to hide the gadgets that make ingame events work. Stages are littered with visible emitters, tags, switches, stuff like only-slightly offscreen circuitry that you can watch move around to inform a boss of its attack patterns and phases. It feels like a child’s art project or something, a simple array of pulleys and string animating rudimentary creatures and swings. It’s all so laid bare, I kind of adore it, and is certainly a handcrafted energy that LBP2 loses in its explosion of visual polish. The constant delivery of decorations, objects, prebuilt things you can make your own edits of, it’s no wonder this game blew up in the way it did - it’s with you every step of the way and always acts as a shockingly good teacher for its own mechanics.

Anyway this was a lot of fun. Unquestionably a hilarious platforming title to insist upon having no-death run rewards when so much of your survivability hinges on Sackboy’s physics-based astrology. You don’t realise how much nostalgia you have for something until the first thirty seconds of a song makes you tear up. This kind of williamsburg scrapbook aesthetic is hard to stomach nowadays but it really works here. Holy shit I can’t believe the racist caricatures this game has in every corner, this truly is a quintessentially British game.

When people will ask me of the definition of "wasted potential" I'm gonna show them this game.

A build up that was thrown in the trash for a dumb and unnecessary plot point, leading to an abrupt and unclear ending. The beginning had me so hooked that I decided to call off most of my day's chores so I can see this to the end. I'd rather a hundred times now that I had cleaned around the house than to just waste my precious time for something that had all rights to become a really interesting detective, fury-based videogame with a nice storyline.

I wouldn't recommend playing it. Just watch it on YouTube or something. It's visually appealing but forcing myself to see the end of this story just saddens me.

Heard a lot of fun things about this game and decided to give it a shot since it was free on game pass.

Very fun basic premise, creating battle like simulations with different groups of soldiers like Vikings, Romans and Greeks. A lot of fun to mess around with for a while but nothing to keep you playing for excessive amounts of time.

I like the addition of mods, it helps add to the amount of content available. Also its just awesome to set up massive clone wars battles with all the starwars mods.

Id recommend this if you are looking for a quick timewaster game to sink a bit of time into. Ill probably dip in and out of it if im bored but wont keep at it consistently. A lot of fun regardless.

I had never played a gacha game before Nier Reincarnation, and I likely won't play one again - my experience with this thing, which I'm reluctant to even call a game, exists as a weird peek into a world I willfully don't understand and hopefully never will unless a couple of things go REALLY wrong in my life. I dropped back into Reincarnation after hearing it was being shut down, and they were giving you everything you needed to make it to the end of the story for free. I had an almost allergic reaction to it the first time I played, but I was grimly fascinated in what a game like this looks like in its dying days.

I really like Nier. I like its characters, its music, its strange approach to game genre, the measured barren minimalism of its 3d spaces - Nier Reincarnation takes all of the things I like about Nier and uses them in service of what amounts to a slot machine for perverts. The way in which Reincarnation wears the glamour of something loved and familiar in service of what's essentially gambling is almost grotesque - like a child snatched by a changeling, a monster wearing their skin.

If you're new to gacha games like I was, all the things the game does in service to cultivating a long term audience of whales seem completely insane. There is a colossal amount of math happening at all times, all in service of nothing - numbers get into the hundreds of thousands, yet the game must be frictionless enough at all times to be played via automation. Each story chapter consists of ten battles, but the game gives you the means to skip up to 100 encounters a day for free. There are fourteen discrete categories of upgrade material. The most expensive premium currency package on the in-game store was 150 dollars. To look into this game's community, a relatively small one by the standards of these kinds of games, is like looking into a parallel dimension where value is completely decoupled from time and reality. Upgrade mats, grinding for bookmarks, pity pulls - none of these words are in the Bible. There's a dark engine at the heart of Reincarnation, of almost genius construction, and its sole function is to obfuscate the fact there's absolutely nothing here. The game plays itself, and gives you tools to skip the playing. Nier Reincarnation is not a video game - it is a magician waving their hand while the other sneaks into your pocket.

There is, despite everything, something interesting and almost compelling inside Nier Reincarnation, separate from grim academic fascination with its genre - the art direction, soundtrack, sound design, and voice acting are all beautiful, better than any of this deserves. The writing, which takes the possible funniest parts of Nier - the pointlessly tragic weapon stories - and places them center stage, is mostly really dumb! In one of my favourite stories, a young soldier hunts down the guy who killed his parents, only to find out that the murderer was his biological dad and he'd been cradle snatched as a baby. The little girl who's ostensibly the main character of the story is part of an invented caste of peasants called "goat people". A son tries to kill himself to give his mother his heart for a transplant, yet she dies before he can bring himself to do it. I still mostly liked the pulpy melodrama, and the direction they go in this last chapter - finally linking Reincarnation to the previous two games in a meaningful way - is pretty cool! There's a lot of talent on display here, and in another version of reality present in The Cage, all these clearly very skilled people got to make a real video game instead.

At the end of the game they put up a "THANK YOU FOR PLAYING" screen and then change it to "THANK YOU FOR PRAYING". What the fuck is that, that's nothing

weird ass ugly ass console exclusive mid 00s immersive sim-lite fps lol what. maybe one of the ugliest games ive ever seen?? like graphically so flat and textureless, a lot of the plot elements and character designs just rlly seem like the creative team behind this were on some nu metal type shit and I don’t rlly vibe w that era of design lol. however beyond the very cookie cutter story ripping on fuckboy movies and corporate grunge mid 00s angst designs there is some amount of palpable emotion and feeling in regards to jackie and his relationships w others and that’s kind of v surprising. v fun how many ways there are to go about fairly simplistic and rote missions and objectives,, gives u lots of powers and freedom and very well designed maps to allow u to have fun in. ultimately I think there’s too many options and abilities for how like short the game is like it introduces so many interesting things but it ends as soon as it starts. I rlly like short games but like this prob could be longer lmao. teeming w a real sense of life in it though,, like rlly fun and highly stylized posters and graffiti everywhere in this game, lots of ppl to interact w and call and obv the movies u can watch in game. makes it grounded in a sort of reality that it needs to be grounded in so u can buy into some of the bigger emotions this game is trying to get at. remedy ahhh game mechanics w rockstar ahh game writing. horribly cruel game at points and basically uses nyc as a microcosm of everything that’s wrong w america which sure?? but also I just think satires and critiques of america and it’s failings are way more interesting and true when coming from americans not to sound like uhh a patriot or whatever. also I didn’t finish this bc it’s ridiculously hard and commanding of ur attention and I don’t have either time or attention idk I got other shit to do lol so imagine this is rated four stars lol. anyhow check out this short little doc that’s available as extra content even if you don’t gaf about the game itself,, it’s nice to see ppl so passionate and creative :3
https://youtu.be/pMyEgsv-N3g?si=OLKnWMCtHjLgwZtI