The Gunk is a fine way to waste a couple afternoons, I guess.

The Gunk focuses mainly on two characters, Rani and Becks. For a substantial portion of the game, I assumed these were nicknames, or at least first names, and that these two were best friends or possibly even romantic partners. After reading the scan entries in the pause menu I realized that Becks is actually the character's last name, that these two likely had a more formal relationship, likely just coworkers or space-roommates out of financial necessity.

The Gunk revolves around these two following a signal to a potential energy source that they hope to be able to sell. The mid-game "twist", if it is to be called such a thing, can be seen from miles away. Not just because the foreshadowing is so obvious, not just because healthy amount of the protagonists' banter is musing about the nature of the energy, but because so many other games have done it before. At the very least it's not a poorly told or constructed version of the story.

Aside from the overt conflict between nature and industry, so too is there a conflict between the aliens' willingness to have been deceived, and their need to face the truth that industrialization has only made their lives harder to the point of becoming impossible. This is ultimately made most personal and direct in the conflict between Rani and Becks: one seeks the adventure of radical liberation, the other just wants to pay the bills on time. Ultimately the result is a compromise.

The Gunk has Super Mario Sunshine-style goo cleanup, Luigi's Mansion-style vacuum cleaner combat, Metroid Prime-style scanning, and combines basic platforming with the puzzle-focused action/adventure stylings of 3D Zelda. It does none of these as well as the games it's clearly influenced by, but I don't think that was ever the goal. The Gunk is not a game that you play, it's an experience that you sit through.

One of the fears that I have about Xbox Gamepass is the nature of games coming and going from the service encourages games to be one-time flings. Game that aren't focused on delivering interesting gameplay worth mastering, games that are focused on delivering content to the exclusion of any meaningful exploration of form. Games which use ubiquitous or at least well-understood mechanics to focus on simple narratives or pure audiovisual spectacle. Games that don't need to be satisfying on their own, because they aren't really a static piece of art to be appreciated on its own merits, but a single piece of a continuously crawling cultural conveyor belt; games that don't even need to be purchased or for people to be interested in them directly or for their own sake, because they're just part of the same trough where we all gather.

I think that this is a significant part of why there was such a stink about the "walking simulator" a decade ago, though while I think Games as Content (or perhaps Content as Games) tend towards being weaker experiences I do think its important to clarify that nothing here is universal. The probably isn't exclusive to games of any genre, games on any service, games with any budget. It's not even universally a problem at all. I think games can be an effective medium for elevating other types of content through interactivity, and I would even say that many of the more high profile walking simulators are great examples of this.

One of the main reasons I think walking simulators can be effective is their simplicity. While I may wish that The Gunk has deeper platforming with more interesting ways to maneuver, or more combat options to string together in satisfying combinations, I recognize that for a game like this it may do more harm than good. Games like Bugsnax feature such winding messes of systems and mechanics that whatever center they do have is both nebulous and ineffective at holding the experience together. Games like Dear Esther or Gone Home only capture the feelings that they do because their focus is so narrow. The Gunk gets about as deep as it possibly could without going too far out.

The consequence of being a Game as Content is as much as I generally enjoy The Gunk, its drip feeding of incremental upgrades and movie-like focus on dialogue mean that this is probably not an experience I'll revisit until enough time has passed for me to forget it, if I ever go back to it at all.

It's somewhat strange to me that in a game which seems so anti-industrial that the sole reward and progression aside from literal traversal, for any challenge whether combat or puzzle, is an opportunity to strip mine a section of the planet for its resources. Becks even makes it clear that the secondary purpose for this, beyond the game's upgrade system, is selling these valuable materials once they leave the planet. Perhaps its a potent symbol that regardless of her views on the injustices of industrial civilization, Rani is still a person whose very body has had parts of it replaced with an industrial tool she lovingly calls "Pumpkin". Perhaps it's recognition of the irony of the medium being used both to craft and experience this narrative.

In order to progress you often need to completely remove all gunk from an area. On several occasions I found myself unable to progress for several minutes because I missed one tiny piece of gunk. Sometimes this gunk was simply out of view, sometimes it was stuck inside of level geometry, and in one instance even after intentionally dying to reset the area I still could not progress and had to completely restart the game. I also often found my character getting stuck on geometry, or getting caught in a falling animation despite being on solid ground.

The environments are attractive, and the level design is engaging. The character and creature designs are fine. The music is serviceable; it creates the appropriate mood but is rarely if ever memorable. The controls actually feel like a video game. If this had controlled like, for example, a Naughty Dog game, I would have rated it at least 2 stars lower and probably not finished it. I probably would have left a review that was like "The Gunk? More like... The Junk."

Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble is a perfect toy.

A toy is not a bad thing for a video game to be, it's not a bad thing to be at all. While a certain type of person will drown themselves in sobriety, the reality is that the joy of play is not only a worthwhile positive experience, it is a constructive one. A toy is a piece of art that informs and prepares us for other art. Kirby is in one sense an early exploration of the possibilities of now formalized gyroscope-based control methods, and in another sense the most fully-featured and high-concept game of the "Pigs in Clover" type. A perfect example of how primitive and romantic art are two sides of a single coin largely informed by the flow of time and changes in technology.

This isn't just a game where you lead a ball through a maze. The ball is a character with a voice and a personality, and the stakes of their journey are at a cosmic scale. The game asks, what would it be like for gravity to drag this "ball" through sand? What would it be like for it to glide through water, to pop it up into the air with a flick of the wrist? What would it be like to steer a raft or manipulate a cloud through the sky? No other game of this type that I have ever played has payed so much consideration to the eccentricities of the actual activity of rolling a ball, and nearly all other games of this type shed any kind of whimsy in favor of being a literal digital recreation of the original wooden toys that inspired them.

Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble has space shooter segments. It has a shooting gallery that uses much more typical, modern gyro-aiming. It has a hurdle race wherein the player jolts their GameBoy to jump. Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble is like if the Wii Remote was designed for only a single game, and that game was the best possible version of both Wii Sports and Skyward Sword in a single package. Gimmicks aren't bad unless they're put somewhere they don't belong or aren't utilized to their full potential, and Kirby puts its novel input method to perfect use.

This game has possibly the best 8-bit artwork that Kirby ever received, its certainly the best looking of the GameBoy entries in the series. While much of the soundtrack is from the Dreamland games, its original pieces are some of the best chiptunes that the GameBoy ever squealed out. While classic characters like Kracko and Waddle Dee make their appearances, the game also has various new funny little fellows; I especially like the robots and ghosts that appear in the boss stages.

There's all kinds of interesting and tactile gameplay quirks here. Repeatedly bouncing off of the pinball-style bumpers will put the player in an invulnerable state, and many of the game's secrets are hidden under objects that can only be destroyed while in this state. The game has a number of segments where the player is on some kind of floating platform, but even when the platform moves automatically as in most platformers, the player's tilting can influence the speed of these and other objects in the game world. The floor of the play area is littered with collectable tiles which can be flipped by the player to either reward them with more points towards their score, or more seconds towards their time limit.

And the cartridge is pink!!! How cool is that?!?!?!

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is uhh.... remember that ad where the guy's enunciation implied that Zelda was the wind waker? Or... I can't find it online, have I been Berenstein'ed? Anyway...

The gameplay loop of Wind Waker is defined by two elements: it is a game that, moreso than any other 3D Zelda, is returning to the roots of the series, and it is a game that was rushed to meet a deadline with gaping holes barely patched up. The result, somehow, is a game that feels shockingly similar to the modern open-world game in terms of structure. Somehow too, it took only a few small changes in this more recent version to make Wind Waker one of the best open-world games ever made, if it is to be considered a part of the genre.

Wind Waker HD is flat out the best looking Zelda game, and it will probably continue to be the best looking Zelda game even after the release of the presently untitled sequel to Breath of the Wild, both because of its superior fidelity and its incredible aesthetic. Games like Four Swords Adventures and Minish Cap already felt so full-fledged that rather than the top-down games feeling like de-makes of Wind Waker, the original Wind Waker instead felt like the impossible, imagined, ideal version of its 2D contemporaries; the resolution bump and new lighting system may be a substantial enough change to alienate purists, but I think these additions are for the better.

Wind Waker's aesthetic was originally more of a point of contention, and frankly it's not hard to see why. Something important to keep in mind is that even though Ocarina of Time obviously had an art style influenced by its concept illustrations, just check out what's sitting next to it in the top rated games of all time on Metacritic; Tony Hawk 2 and Soul Caliber, games which today would not even be remotely considered the best in their series, let alone contenders for best game ever. The truth is that these games were so well-received in large part because they were some of the first games to showcase realistically proportioned human figures. The visuals of Ocarina of Time, in 1998, could pass for "realistic". This is the exact reason why some will look at games like Dark Souls and exclaim "this is what Zelda should've looked like!" Though, in the same sense of course, it should be noted that Zelda was always going for a more or less illustrative aesthetic, and that while Wind Waker was certainly a shift in style, it wasn't as large a leap as many may have felt it was at the time.

Wind Waker is one of the best feeling 3D Zelda games to play. The way that it handles is more fluid than any other game in the series, and while I may personally prefer the slight amount of friction and additional complexity that Twilight Princess added to the mix, I think that this effortless feeling is completely appropriate for this game's cartoon vibe.

Toon Link is basically the best character Nintendo has made since at least the turn of the millennium, and he is unambiguously without a shred of doubt the best incarnation of Link. Not only is he stupid cute, he is more physically expressive and consistently shows a much wider range of emotions than most cute Nintendo characters ever would. It's like if Pikachu did the Excalibur face, real ones will know what I'm talking about.

My biggest issue with the game, and perhaps the only thing that really keeps it from being a 10/10, is how reluctant it is to just let you go out and do stuff. You can't freely explore until you've cleared two of the game's relatively few dungeons. You can't fast-travel until you have the item from the third dungeon. Even then, tons of the optional areas require that you have items or abilities from late enough in the game that, aside from filling out the map so you know where everything is (and hitting the submarines and outposts for the handful of items hidden there), there's not much reason to explore a lot of the map until the late-game. It has pretty much the opposite structural problem as Breath of the Wild: they take too long to truly let you loose, and they don't fill out your toolset fast enough.

Also Breath of the Wild has ruined the koroks. :( they are yucky now :((((

Kaze and the Wild Masks is a two button platformer, and neither of those buttons is "run".

I really want to like this game, because there are so few Donkey Kong Country rip-offs and I need my fix. If your favorite parts of Donkey Kong Country are the collectathon elements or the animal buddy levels, and your favorite character is Dixie, this is a must play. If your favorite part of the gameplay is the flow based platforming, and your favorite character is Diddy, Kaze is probably a hard pass. It has a pretty good soundtrack and I like the artstyle and character designs, but its core movement lacks the nuance of the classics.

As of writing I haven't beaten it. I'll add a rating once I've played enough.

Really great score, John Williams-esque. Great sound design, love the release of tension when a room is clear. The characters have a surprising amount of charm given their appearance and the kind of game it is, and while the immediate experience of the world is largely ugly hallways, the larger concepts are intriguing. The core combat has an interesting rhythm and I definitely prefer it to, for example, Halo. The game is paced pretty well, never letting the player go too long without acquiring a new weapon or meeting a new enemy.

Encounter design is hit or miss, and going off-script is gravely punished even on the easiest difficulty. The game itself though has absolutely no problem going-off script; the AI partners' pathing is terrible, and on multiple occasions scripted events (doors opening, cutscenes starting after fights, etc) simply wouldn't happen until long after they were clearly supposed to. Certain artistic elements of the game's visual design are interesting, but the classic idiosyncrasies of the Unreal 3 shooter aesthetic are just technically atrocious.

I love quest logs, affinity charts, dialogue trees, weapon wheels, the Pokédex. I love systems, I love rules, I love formal standards. I love when every button, every menu widget, does the exact thing I expect it to do from playing other games in the genre. I love when the only remotely unique things about a piece of media lie entirely within its content rather than its form. Weenie worm’s voice actor liked my tweet “who up playin with their weenie worm” so I’m basically legally obligated not to give this game a half star.

Elden Ring caught me completely off guard.

Prior to the game’s release people would ask me of I was “hyped” for it. I could only describe what I felt as a dull excitement. I knew that I would probably enjoy it, but I also felt like I knew exactly what to expect, and that the game would be nothing more than that, and nothing less at best. I didn’t ignore pre-release coverage of the game, but I didn’t really absorb it either. Pre-release coverage of most games is kind of useless to me, I don’t know what parts of marketing and previews I can really trust until I have the game in my hands. I saw the game, I watched others play the network test, but I didn’t have any real frame of reference for what exactly was going on or how it fit together.

My first run felt like I was going through the game at a breakneck pace. While I struggled early on, once I got some momentum I was killing many of the bosses on my first try. While I spent a good portion of my playthrough exploring the game naturally, at a certain point in the game I stopped doing optional content, and tried to rush to the end. I wanted to kill two birds with one stone: ignoring optional areas meant that I would have something new to do on subsequent playthroughs, and in reaching the end I would finally know the limits of the game’s scope and could play more leisurely, without such fervent thirst for whatever grand surprise could be next.

Even playing the game this way, it took 10 days of treating the game like a second job to beat it.

I remember when I was a kid I watched my dad reach Ganon’s Castle in Ocarina of Time. An area of the dungeon presents the player with about half a dozen paths laid out in a large circular room (or at least as circular as a room could be on the N64). Each of these doors lead to a short gauntlet, but I couldn't help but imagine: what would it be like if this style of action-adventure game had a Super Mario 64-style hub area. Demon’s Souls is perhaps the closest thing we ever got to the idea in my head, but it also made me realize that the hub world was never really the important part.

What I really wanted was an action-adventure game with environments that were varied, striking, unique, and imaginative. An action-adventure game that was willing to trade a realistic environment for an absolutely incomparable one. Early 3D games often made unusual choices in how to portray their settings, and while this more primitive aesthetic was born out of limitation, its abstract qualities allow us in retrospect to assign it certain romantic characteristics completely absent from even the most contemporary and sophisticated attempts at naturalism. Elden Ring may be the only modern game I have ever seen that so consistently offers up such numerous and diverse visuals of this same character, but with cutting intentionality.

The entirety of the Lands Between feels like an old secret, everything feels as impossible and forbidden as Ash Lake. Ash Lake, buried beneath a difficult downward platforming section, tucked away behind multiple trick walls in an out of the way corner of one of Dark Souls’ more sprawling areas, was something that From Software did not expect every player to see. In Elden Ring, virtually everything beyond the introduction and before one of the later dungeons is optional, and not just in the sense that it can be bypassed or circumvented. On my third playthrough I used a guide and tried to see as much of the game as I possibly could, and to try and play through each area in some semblance of an “appropriate order”, and I’m now confident that From Software did not really want people to play the game this way. There is so much content in this game that feels like it doesn’t want to be found, and having spoken to other players both online and in-person I know that many people miss even the more major areas in the game. While Ash Lake was a single hidden area, Elden Ring is an entire game that does not expect the vast majority of its players to see its whole, a game so vast and so truly free that even a person who has seen it all would have trouble feeling absolutely certain of it.

Of all the modern niceties that Elden Ring forgoes, its lack of progression trackers is one of the most appreciated absences. From annualized franchises to series reinventions, nearly every game of this type is constantly presenting the player with fractions: you have done X amount of objectives, and there are Y amount in the game. Breath of the Wild’s shrines, Forza Horizon’s races, all kinds of statistics shown during loading screens and in menus. Elden Ring lets you mark graces and place pins on your map screen, and you could use this, for example, to keep track of which dungeons you have or have not completed, but you can’t be sure for yourself that you’ve found all of them, or that you’ve found everything within. The first time that the player finds a dungeon behind an illusory wall, the first time they find a dungeon with multiple bosses, the first time they find a dungeon within a dungeon within a dungeon, how can they ever be sure?

In this sense, Elden Ring might be a game that, as far as the design of typical modern open world game is concerned, does a lot of things “wrong”. Whether its the complaints that some people have made about the minute details of its user interface and experience, or simple basic facts like From Software’s decision to not make this a direct continuation any of their more recognizable intellectual properties, people are having some trouble processing the idea that Elden Ring is not a sleek, edgeless product. This is almost without a doubt simply a result of Elden Ring’s massive popularity, having doubled the sales of From’s previous bestselling title; however, it is frankly embarrassing that we’re having the same tired conversations about this game that we were having about Dark Souls over a decade ago.

The game’s great triumph lies primarily in its structure. The reality of open world games is that the open world is almost always something necessarily separate from the rest of the game, and Elden Ring is no different. This is not a bad thing, the key to making a good open world game simply lies in making both the open world and the rest of the game equally interesting. From the loose platforming and exploration of the open world, to the careful crawl of dungeoneering, to the tight and tense combat and boss fights, Elden Ring’s core loop funnels the player into a more perfect rhythm than almost any other game of its kind.

I was a bit worried initially that background music would be more prominently featured throughout the game compared to previous From titles, but I have to admit they’ve knocked it out of the park. Every track so effectively created its mood, from the mystery of Liurnia, the oppressive noise of the Caelid wilds, the somber aura of Altus. I love how much of the game’s music is diegetic, the horns of the capital, the singing in the underground river city, the stringed instruments carried by the merchants. Where previous From games merely created feelings of tension in boss fights and relief in the hub areas, Elden Ring’s music gives the world its own sense of culture.

The only significant problem I have with the game is a handful of late-game bosses. It’s a particular shame both because the end of the game is basically just four back-to-back boss fights and its kind of a sour note to end on, and because if most of these bosses' individual phases were separate fights they would be some of my favorites that From has ever done. As they are though, they are at best brutal gauntlets requiring such a degree of consistent execution that it becomes difficult to really appreciate the encounter, and at their worst, they are Malenia, blade of Miquella.

I said once, and I’m not the only one, that “Elden Ring is someone’s dream game, but I’m not sure if it’s mine.” I now think that Elden Ring is a game I could not personally have dreamt in the first place. It’s a game that delivers on promises unkept by so many other games, that so thoroughly fleshes out ideas that other games only hint at. Often when a new game comes out I find myself wanting to replay games in the same series or genre to see how my perspective on them has shifted; no other game has forced me to reevaluate so many of its predecessors. No other game has so insistently made me grapple with the possibility that the best game I will ever play is one that has yet to be made.

Balan Wonderworld is a unique disappointment.

The character designer and lead programmer behind Sonic the Hedgehog unite once more, and while Arzest doesn't have the best track record they do have some number of former Sega staff. While its initial reveal didn't have much of an effect on me, as the months went by I began to wonder if this could be a kind of return to form, a rebirth of that classic Sega ethos that was largely lost not too long after they started releasing games on hardware that was not their own. The release of the game's demo, of course, quelled whatever hopes I had.

Discourse on the game around the time of its launch followed a clear pattern:

"The game is mediocre at best."

"It's for kids, of course an adult would find it dull."

"A game being for kids doesn't excuse its flaws."

Frankly, even if this game wasn't meant to be anything more than an ultra-accessible spectacle for toddlers (which I don't think is particularly unlikely), I think it trips over itself to get there.

Much has been said about the "1 button" philosophy, and at the very least I do think there is something interesting going on here. The sticks and buttons on the face of the controller, the part of the controller visible to the player, are manipulated with the thumbs and control the character; the shoulder buttons, atop the edge of the controller and pressed with the index fingers, control the more indirect and abstract costume switching. There is a very clear sort of psychological separation between these two elements of the game's control, and at first it could seem almost clever, that this is something which a person unfamiliar with games could find intuitive.

But there's one glaring issue with trying to interpret the controls this way: why do the triggers, which are also obscured by the face of the controller, act like face buttons when it would make more sense in this framework for them to have the same effect as the shoulder buttons? Is it because the game expects you to control the camera yourself, meaning that if you couldn't use your index finger to jump you would be stuck using the claw grip if you wanted to play with any degree of finesse? Is it because the game released not too long after the launch of two new consoles, each boasting their own form of Adaptive Haptic HD Rumble trigger vibration?

Whatever the case is, it's just one aspect of how this particular manifestation of the "1 button" mandate fails. Sonic the Hedgehog was a game that aimed to take the Mario platforming format, and lower the skill floor while raising the skill ceiling. It made the character control as simple as possible: get rid of the run button, and make acceleration a standard feature of movement. Jumping is then the only remaining action, but the complexity comes from how the player's basic abilities interact with the slopes and hazards of the environment, this is what makes the game hard to master.

What made Sonic easy to learn was not so simple as "all the buttons do the same thing", or even that the player could always jump. The most vital piece of the puzzle is that pressing a button always consistently performed a single action.

Balan Wonderworld is not a "1 button" game. That one button can perform so many possible actions that this simply isn't a worthwhile way to think about the game. It's an entire modular keyboard, but you only have 3 key caps, and you can only press one down at a time. The player's capabilities lie in such a tangled web of conditions that the simplicity of a single button is completely undermined, yet the limitations of each of those abilities are so rigid that there's no room for growth. Balan Wonderworld is a game that is hard to really grasp, and this knowledge has no reward.

Balan Wonderworld is a game with beautiful cinematics (that look so good in fact that they make the in-game graphics somewhat pitiable), a memorable soundtrack (though a certain amount of this is definitely due to how heavily it leans into tropes and borrows from its contemporaries), and lovable character designs (that are made mostly forgettable by the fact that this game has no dialogue and the story is instead buried in supplementary material). It even has some well-structured levels that would probably be a lot more fun to explore in a game that wasn't so scared of letting you interact with them. Even the mere conceit of the sort of "Sonic Team Reunion" that put this game into motion has since been revealed to be a begrudging one.

There are things to like about it, but each comes with some obvious contradiction nested within. I can't bring myself to truly hate Balan Wonderworld, but it is one of the most hollow and rote platformers I've played in years, possibly ever.

Doom Eternal is a fantastic new Doom product, with excellent brand integrity, a newly repaired continuity, new renditions of the music you know and love, and all kinds of hidden treats for fans. The gameplay is a fresh new take on classic shooter gameplay that reinforces implicit facets of the original game to the point where that singular element is all that’s left, how focused! Updated for the next generation consoles and the newest flagship graphics cards, the groundbreaking ray-traced visuals will have you saying “wow, it looks about as good as it already did.” Doom Eternal reminds me of a time when we could have a truly great new first person shooter experience, which is almost as good as actually being one.

edit: now that the ice in my heart has melted a bit, i just want to make it clear that the only reason i give this game as high of a rating as I do is because, despite the obvious snark, I do actually believe the above statements to be more or less true

The PS3 may not have games, but it does have a game.

Perhaps even more so than Dark Souls, Demon's Souls' NPCs absolutely ooze charm. Their disparate outlooks on the worlds and events, their attitudes ranging from begrudging conscientiousness to friendly rudeness to completely earnest warmth. The world and story have an openness, a simplicity to them that lacks the esoteric feel that many From games have, but it's effective, the themes are strong.

While much of the game's action takes place in dingy underground or indoor areas, Boletaria in particular shows off a sense of scale quite uncommon in these earlier Souls games. Long winding bridges and sprawling courtyards the likes of which we would scarcely see through the next decade of From Software games, and certainly not with this enemy density. Environments do lack the subtle, jutting imperfections and surface details of more recent post-apocalypses, with a lot of flat level geometry and simple, low-poly objects. Aside from situations where the physics engine gets pushed too hard, performance is generally acceptable. Maybe it's just because developers like Nintendo are still putting out sub-HD games, but Demon's Souls on PS3 frankly still looks quite modern, and often flat out good.

Generally speaking the player is able to take many more hits than in future games in this style, but while it could be described as easier it is also probably the most punishing out of all of these games. Dying can do all kinds of things: it can take away your points, it can cut your health bar in half, it can ruin a side-quest, it can make an area inaccessible. The great punishment for death means that while sloppier play may be acceptable, slower, more cautious navigation is borderline mandatory, especially considering the lack of methods to mitigate stagger (which would only be implemented in future games). Perhaps most discouraging of all is the fact that the only checkpoints you will ever get in these relatively large levels are those that appear when you kill a boss. This, in conjunction with the typically plodding pace of exploration, means that a death will negate all progress since your last major obstacle, potentially as much as 20 minutes or more of careful play made worse than completely unproductive.

I said that the player generally takes less damage per swing but I must stress that word here. Magic is well known to be a powerful force in this game, and that goes for the enemies as well as the player. A melee hit might barely do 10% of your health bar, a projectile spell can be expected to knock out at least half of your hit points in a single shot. With only level 16 in the relevant stats, my most basic casting option already did more damage than a longsword that I had upgraded five times. Magic aside, even melee hits can be disastrous when dealing with groups, as the game presents no meaningful solution to getting stun-locked.

Whatever issues I may take with the levels, the bosses are only ever worse, putting the game's shortcomings on full display. Demon's Souls is, unfortunately, a game focused almost entirely on combat, and whether you want to view Demon's Souls as being primarily a Role Playing Game or an Action Game, that combat is simply not anything to write home about. As an RPG, Demon's Souls suffers from the same problem as Final Fantasy XV; as long as you've bought enough healing items, anything is possible. If you view Demon's Souls as an action game (which several encounters will force you to do), you will find the player's toolset lacking, and the animations stiff.

One element that keeps me coming back to Dark Souls III more than From's other games is that there is not a single level in that game that I truly dread; it doesn't have a Lost Izalith or a Shrine of Amana. It has nothing that I look at and wonder if it will sour my playthrough. The combined high price of failure (measurable in time, resources, and options) and often plain cruel encounter design mean that virtually every single level in Demon's Souls is one that I dread as deeply as any of the later games' worst duds. I find myself sitting in the Nexus with a negativist choice paralysis. While some might find this thematically appropriate, I find that it just makes me want to turn the game off. Attempting to beat Demon's Souls is something that I've been doing on a roughly three year cycle since I first played it. I have reached King Allant once before, but I have never yet beaten the game.

It wouldn't be false to say that virtually every major From release since has been something of a reinterpretation of this game's ideas. It's a tired and memetic sentiment at this point, but it's true: it is still amazing how much they got right on the first try (some will argue this isn't the "first" and point towards their earlier first person fantasy games but I don't see much reason to dwell on that comparison). Demon's Souls is a game with a lot of excellent ideas, though it features a wide gulf of varying levels of execution. It is absolutely worth playing, but I could never blame anybody for bouncing off of it.