a million different things can be said about death stranding, it's probably one of the most thematically complex pieces of work done in this medium so far and reminds me of so many different films while also managing to be completely idiosyncratically kojima. it took me about a year and a half to fully complete this, one restart and over 80 total hours of gameplay. in the time it took me through various starts and stops, i managed to complete kojima's metal gear solid series and get more acquainted with him as a "auteur" before jumping back in to finish this. much like sons of liberty it's a game constantly playing with your notion of who kojima is as a creative, what games even really are as a medium, and what we should expect as players. it's also a game about the gig economy, covid (even though it came out in 2019), growing american (and world) division, fascism, terrorism, the military industrial complex, and the question of whether governments or communities keep us truly safe. it's also a game about love, fear, memory, faith, connection, separation, loss, grief, and hope. all this to say it's a game that's really impossible to actually pin down but constantly has me thinking about it and comparing things to it. through all it's messy gravitas and earnest guts spilling it becomes a unique and beautiful experience that while feeling indebted to cinema can only truly be captured in the interactive medium.

not to say that it's all a narrative or thematic project, the actual gameplay is simply invigorating in it's overall simplicity. as a courier, you are given starting points and destinations, but the route you take is entirely up to you. by utilizing equipment you slowly start to build your world outward, constantly changing the environments you inhabit to make paths and routes for sam to take. as more of the game opens up, you also get access to building roads and collaborating with online structures to access even more locations in less and less time. it's devilishly simple, climbing mechanics controlled by shoulders buttons, combat at it's best when you're simply avoiding it, but it iterates on the core design philosophhy of metal gear solid v (objectives given with no course of action specified) while de-emphasizing combat to create a game that just has an addictive gameplay loop that makes all the side objectives fun to complete. if this had been released simply as a courier simulator with none of the narrative interest, i'd probably still give it a very high rating based on that alone.

feels like possibly the current pinnacle of kojima's career, given so much freedom to create whatever he wants kojima decides to put out this messy sprawling epic that raises more questions and has even less answers than the best in the metal gear franchise. possibly a case for more "auteur" driven video games but more than that it's a case for giving actual budgets to teams that want to create things as audacious as this is, the only AAA game worth a damn.

as an ending aside, some of the films it reminded me of were: southland tales, the end of evangelion, the rebuild of evangelion series, david fincher's the killer, shyamalan's old, tenet, first cow, universal soldier: day of reckoning, cronenberg's crash, the resident evil films, the matrix films, cloud atlas, inland empire, twin peaks: the return, spielberg's AI, and so many others that i can't remember to just list here.

decided to just run through this one again real quick, i don't know if this is my fourth or fifth time playing it all the way through but it's a game that's stuck with me since i was a very young child. i had inherited my dad's NES to start out with gaming but on christmas 2003 i remember going downstairs to find a nintendo gamecube plugged into the television with the title screen for super mario sunshine radiating from it, and i remember it absolutely flooring me. if we were to tally up the combined hours i've sunk into this game since i was six years old it probably clears any rpg or multiplayer timesink i've ever played, it is just that good.

i think what it really comes down to is the movement mechanics, this is simply the cleanest and most responsive mario has ever felt. it takes almost everything from 64 (already a masterclass in character movement mechanics) and adds on the FLUDD system which softens a lot of the platforming for beginners but also allows for so much more freedom once you really know how to harness it for your own devices. spraying water and sliding faster to yr destination, flipping out of it into a triple jump and wallkick to gain height before using the hover nozzle to float over to a hard to reach area. when the moment to moment gameplay is so much damn fun it's really hard to criticize anything else.

even then i don't really think there's much to criticize here. the production design of the tropical paradise is so lush, the locations all instantly iconic to me, themes remixing classic mario music as well as original scores are all absolutely bangin, and the actual graphical quality still holds up to this day because of it's simple but strong art direction. sometimes, amidst all the chaos, it's nice to just relax and a enjoy this virtual vacation for a few minutes, sit at the beach with yr water gun, looking at the sunset and pondering what mess to clean up next.

anyway, that might have been slightly too poetic to say about a game staring a cartoon plumber cleaning gunk off a tropical island, but this game will always hold a special place in my heart, something i can instantly pick up and beat in just a couple days and it never gets old. for all the innovation of 64, the scope of galaxy, and the freedom of odyssey, it's sunshine that will always be the greatest to me.

didn't originally think i was going to play this. 2d platformers outside of mario have never fully been my thing, especially with these indie games that more often than not goes out of it's way to be punishingly difficult for HARDCORE CRED. i also was somewhat wary of it because of the connection with dunkey, who i do like and have watched for years but have increasingly found myself at odds with his philosophy of gaming and criterion for what makes a good game. in the end though, i saw this game for free on the playstation+ catalog, saw all the glowing reactions it was getting, and saw it was only six hours long and decided i might as well take the plunge.

and might i say i was quite pleasantly surprised! as to be expected from a game dunkey distributed, this is a very gameplay focused experience. there's no dialogue and very little narrative, but it more than makes up for that with atmosphere and world design. while i don't find myself drawn to try to figure out the machinations of this fantasy world, i do find myself admiring the lushness of it all and wanting to simply exist within it. i love the sound design, the sound effects of creatures moving through the wilderness and the droning synth score that simultaneously feels foreboding and calming. the world is all rendered in this beautiful pixel art which has a certain griminess and organic quality to it that i think helps it stand out from the hundreds of other indie 2d platformers on the market and gives it a distinctive look of it's own. the strong art direction also helps keep a lot of the rooms from feeling samey, which can really give the player a sense of place in this labyrinthine metroidvania adventure.

the game itself is a metroidvania, but places all of it's emphasis on puzzle solving instead of combat. there are still enemies in the game and some of them can be dispatched by certain items, but it's clear the game wants the player to run away from the majority of monsters rather than engaging with them. this leaves the majority of the gameplay focused on exploration, platforming, puzzle solving, and the mix of these ideas to accomplish all of them. there is never a point where the game holds your hand and tells you what to do, no tutorial introducing the various mechanics to the player, no screen explaining what an item does, and no narrative pushing the player towards a set goal, instead everything must be figured out through experimentation. while initially this might seem frustrating, the mechanics of the game are actually pretty streamlined and the player gets a handle on them all fairly quickly. i'm not ashamed to use a walkthrough when a game is frustrating me, but every time i found myself stuck here and pulling up a walkthrough, i never got more than halfway through reading before just figuring it out on my own by carefully considering the problem. it all feels very intuitive and challenging while never getting to the point of actual frustration.

there are a couple of minor gripes i have with this, though nothing that every really put me off. for starters, while the lack of narrative isn't a deal breaker by any means, the lack of any kind of thematic idea (at least for me) does kind of put a damper on the project, for while the world is a joy to explore it ultimately feels like exploration purely for exploration's sake. your milage may vary with how much of an issue that is for you, in fact i bet a lot of people will consider this a feature rather than a bug. i think my bigger complaint (and again, not that big of a deal) is the constant need to backtrack. i know in a metroidvania the backtracking is part of the point, a wide interconnected world that every nook and cranny needs to be understood before it can be mastered, but i think honestly it's just the fast travel system being somewhat underutilized. each colour coded area has multiple save points within it but only one fast travel point, but i found that many areas were simply too large (and some puzzles too frustrating to do multiple times) for them to be serviced by a single point. if they had made each save point it's own fast travel point i think it would have alleviated some of this, although i also understand the mechanical reason for nerfing this in allowing the player to TRULY understand their surroundings.

this need to be one with the surrounding world is the very core of this game. i played for six hours and rolled the credits, but it's clear i've only really scratched the surface of what this game has to offer, with so many secrets and literal easter eggs hidden all over the place, and an ending i haven't even gotten to yet because there is just so much to explore and do with this game. i'm going to leave it there for now, i tried to be fairly vague in terms of the games surprises as i feel it's best to just let the game reveal itself to you, but needless to say i was surprised with how engaging and wonderful this passion project turned out to be, and would recommend even to skeptics.

where to start? kingdom hearts has always kind of fascinated me as this absolutely insane idea to blend disney cinema with final fantasy characters and storytelling, an utterly bizarre clashing of styles that doesn't really work in the traditional sense, but in the kind of hot-topic mallgoth edgy snow white way that was very prevalent in the early 2000s. it's clearly chasing more of a teen demographic rather than a child demographic, with it's slightly more complex systems and labyrinthine narrative, but there's never really a point where it can transcend the strangeness of having goofy in the same frame as cloud, or donald saying stuff like "the keyblade" in that bizarre raspy voice.

but there's a charm to it all, especially in the segments that aren't just replaying a disney movie (although there is still a certain disney charm there too), where there's this earnest naivety, seeing the world through the eyes of a child and trying to break free from what you know into a wider expanse of questions and adventure, and trying to pick up the pieces of what is lost and turn it into something new. a game with so many twists and turns and yet it remains as simple as just being a story of trying to right by your friends, and forgiving those who've wronged you when they try their best to make it up to you. while not as impactful as something like final fantasy x (almost done that one too lmao) in it's coming of age narrative, there's still an ultimate sweetness here that i can't help but let carry me on to the ending, even through the variety of frustrations.

and by god are there frustrations. i'll start with some of the most obvious ones, the top of which being the horrible platforming which is relied upon far too heavily. while never really punishing the player too much for missing jumps (with the exception of hollow bastion my god), the platforming remains imprecise throughout the entire journey, and can just add to so much tedium in sections like deep jungle or monstro where the player constantly has to retry sections due to missing a single jump. there's also the ever presence of backtracking throughout the entire game, which in levels like monstro, deep jungle, or hollow bastion which also suffer from confusing layouts, can become hideously time consuming and grossly aggravating. there's also heavy difficulty spikes throughout the game, which i will say could just be me being terrible at the game, but especially in the ending section there were bosses that took me upwards of two full hours to beat. the gummi ship adds absolutely nothing to the game and just extends travel sections with mind-numbing shmup levels. the combat is fun, but lock-ons can be clunky at the best of times and i could never get the handle of healing animation times especially when facing multiple enemies that just shred your health leading to a simply overwhelming amount of times where it felt like the game simply killed me for no reason. there's a gem of something really interesting in the combat system, with it's mix of real time battling and turn-based style menus, but it never fully comes together leading to a system which turns more cumbersome than engaging when dealing with the more difficult enemies.

there's also the elephant in the room of what this project looks like in the modern day. as we've extended further into the multiverse industrial complex, i think it's really easy to look at this as a precursor to some of the most diabolical machinations of the current-day cultural machine. combining all of these marketable properties for brand synergy, hitting both the disney fan and final fantasy fan at once, throwing all of these things together to make a boatload of money. but because this is so early on in the obsession with multiverses, and because it does feel like it has a really distinct and idiosyncratic voice behind all of the madness, this never really feels like a spider-man: no way home (had to look up what that one was called) or the flash type of debacle where they're constantly pointing at things you recognize for a cheap dopamine rush. in the end, it really is that charm that pushes through it all and keeps me interested in where this all goes, no matter how utterly stupid it can all be.

very fun! going to keep this short and kinda vague since i don't want to give too much away but as a little roguelite deckbuilder this is fairly simple (deceptively so) but what it lacks in complexity it more than makes up for in atmosphere. the sound and visual design is just remarkable here, drawing from playstation 1 low-poly aesthetics but with a lot more detail that actually manages to make it feel caught out of time, a weird middle ground between vintage and contemporary that actually stokes unease in the player. my one real complaint here is the kinda simplistic narrative. i love the presentation of the narrative, a kind of we're all going to the world's fair fake creepypasta/arg that ties it's multitude of different gameplay dimensions to narrative progression, and i thought the characters were all really charming to encounter, but just found it lacking in any real thematic depth beyond it's gimmickry. i think the narrative is worth it as it keeps the player strung through all of the different secrets getting revealed, but honestly feels overly sentimental and somewhat too pretentious for what it's ultimately trying to say, but that does all kinda fit the creepypasta vibe to be fair.

okay so i've been trying to get into a bunch of games recently. played baldur's gate 3 for about 25 hours before running into some weird storyline stuff that gradually wore me off it, tried starting bioshock and had some fun but couldn't really get into it, played a decent amount of ghost of tsushima because i was watching a lot of kurosawa films but then this game came along. i've only had it for about four days and i've already somehow sunk 20 hours into it, and feel like that playtime is just going to balloon more and more.

on the surface it's fairly simple, a poker based roguelike (roguelite? honest to god i do not understand the difference) deckbuilder with no story, multiplayer, or really anything going on outside of the main gameplay loop, but my god is that gameplay loop fun. i like poker quite a bit to be honest (though i'm not much of gambler) but this is barely even poker outside of the hands and the aesthetics, instead it's much more of a luck and math based puzzle game. trying to give yourself the highest possible score by building your multipliers and sprinkling your deck with cards that have a variety of different enhancements. one run you can be scrambling to get a flush or a straight on the last hand to desperately beat the boss and the next run will have you just cruising to the end playing pairs the entire game. you can write it off as "addictive" or "mind-numbing" but to me i just find this game so pure, so raw, about engaging with simple systems to create astonishing results within strict confines. usually have found myself incredibly bored with roguelites (likes?) but this is the first one to really sink it's claws into me and i think i'll have a hard time letting go. it's over for me once the mobile port comes out.

also want to just quickly praise the art direction which is simultaneously charming and psychotic in the same breath. all of the unique joker cards have great designs, some merely being beautifully rendered pixel art, others drawing their influence from other cards (baseball, pokemon, credit, etc.), many of them drawing specific influence from clowns in pop culture (juggalos will love this game, woop woop), but all having their own unique charm that makes some legitmately hard to not buy even if their effects will just tank the run. also love the swirling backdrop that really makes you feel like you're succumbing to madness as you accidentally enter your fourth straight hour of play, and the great punchy sound effects are sure to provide the pure dopamine hits any gambler craves.

i swear i'll try to finish one of those other games at some point.

extremely charming lo-fi vibes when looking at it now while remaining an incredibly effective noir pastiche and love letter to hong kong action films, classic bogart detective stories, and the idea of the pre-9/11 and pre-giuliani new york underbelly.

i think what stands out most to me here is the incredibly strong writing mixed with the consistent tone the game pulls off. set during the harshest winter storm on record, max payne allows itself to really bask in the cold, unfeeling, and violent reality it creates. the narration feels like a mixture of raymond chandler and alan moore, all pitch black hard boiled cliches funnelling themselves towards a nihilistic death drive. this feels very in line with the cold grey colour palette and dilapidated interiors/exteriors that make up the visual design. a world where blood stains all hallways and the only way to survive is to kill or be killed. but the game is also not without a sense of humour, it very much knows that it can’t be takes 100% seriously due to the use of remedy staff members as models for the cutscenes and the lo-if, though well art directed, visuals of the game. the splashes of humour here are actually great and never detract from the moody tone the game is aiming for, much like all great scandavian crime novels.

remedy’s stated goal is to create games that reject the cliche’s of the medium, narrative first without skimping on gameplay and it feels all very cohesive even from their first real effort here. in order to stylize their gameplay, max payne borrows the bullet time effect from the wachowski sisters’ matrix films and the use of slow motion from the films of john woo (specifically namedropped multiple times in the game). this allows max to slow down time in order to preform death defying stunts and render almost impossible kill shots. rather than being a straight up third person shooter this in effect turns the game into one of the first acrobatic shooters. while it is definitely starting to show its age now as a lot of these ideas have been refined in subsequent games, there’s such a simple thrill to jumping down a flight of stairs and mowing down a few henchmen that never got old to me (even as i had to do the same segment over and over again as i got closer to the end).

the last thing i want to mention are the platformer prologue sequences. while the platforming itself is jank as hell, i just absolutely loved the horrific mood these levels set. max having to relive his greatest trauma over and over again, constantly blaming himself for his own tragedy. the best part of the entire game i think is during the act iii prologue where the game takes a more metatextual bent, getting very close to metal gear solid ii: sons of liberty. i wish payne had gone a little further in that direction, as the reveal had my mouth literally agape as i was seeing it, but even as it stands it’s an incredibly effective sequence

bottom line is that this is more of cyberpunk 2077, won't be giving this a specific rating since i think most of what could be said here was already said in my original review but i do wanna talk a little bit about how this changes things, what i liked, what i didn't etc.

when first popping into dogtown, the new area of night city added by this dlc, i was a little worried about the shaky start. johnny gets replaced with a new character, songbird, and you are tasked with saving the president?? there's a bunch of first person platforming??? the map waypoints barely work in the new area???? then i started to settle into the groove of things and the dlc started to become more fully formed for me (though the map waypoints barely work in the new area).

i liked a lot here, many of the new characters are given just enough depth to really be compelling, in particular songbird, idris elba's reed (always a pleasure to see him), and alex which serve as your main team for tackling the espionage centered story, all former spies trying to get themselves together enough for one last mission but haunted by the demons of their past. i also really liked how characters from the main game who are not really given much depth are slotted in here and expanded upon, especially fixers muamar and mr. hands who you grow closer with as you find yourself exploring and doing gigs in dogtown. johnny also is (thankfully) only gone for the very start of this dlc, and as such you get to spend more time with him commenting on your journey and learning more about his own military history which i just found fascinating. i also really loved having to put on someone else's face and use your knowledge of both the person you're imitating and the person you're talking to in order to get away with your impersonation, but this is used too sparingly to really be a worthwhile game mechanic (though it's possible there's just some sidequests i haven't gotten to yet where it is used more).

[ending spoilers for this next paragraph]

i think the thing that i liked most about this expansion is the new ending that phantom liberty gives to the main cyberpunk game that you can really only get if you've made a few (i think) wrong choices in the expansion. for me the "canon" ending here is killing reed (heartbreaking but necessary) and helping songbird escape to the moon, bittersweet but hopeful and still has v taking matters into her own hands to try to get rid of the biochip (preferably ending her journey with the aldacaldos). but if you help reed and end up getting the neural matrix for yourself, you are rewarded with a 2 year coma, killing johnny and becoming just another face in the crowd. the final conversation with johnny where he uses your real name is just achingly beautiful, as are your phone calls with everyone you used to know as you see how they've moved on from you, judy's especially hurts. the final shot of a lost and broken v, fading into the crowd of night city before the credits roll is fitting, no longer able to become a legend, just another anonymous person trying to find their lot in life. i think it's pretty easily the best thing that this expansion adds and really connects it to the best parts of the original game.

there's unfortunately also a lot here that i don't think particularly works. the political aspect of this dlc is very much at the forefront of the experience (what with you rescuing the president and all) and i think it's especially gonk. that's not necessarily to say that it doesn't have room for ambiguity with who is "right" throughout the runtime (songbird, the FIA, myers, hansen, etc.) but moreso that for as much as the expansion tries to make this political intrigue one of the main driving forces of it's narrative, it's never really able to fully explore the questions of power, systems of government, self-governance, etc. that it raises. it's a lot like the base game, wearing the aesthetics of the manchurian candidate, enemy of the state, costa-gavras' z, the parallax view, or the insider without really able to rise to the occasion of actually exploring the same things those films are exploring. it's way moreso mission: impossible - fallout than it is all the president's men (no shade though i do love the mission impossible films). i also found that phantom liberty really doubles down on a specific playstyle that is at odds with it's core aesthetic, namely large scale gun battles. there's at least three instances i experienced where the game expunges any idea of stealth in order to just put you into a large shooting gallery, and for an expansion that is kinda short on overall gameplay-centric main missions it does stand out. also, and this is a somewhat minor thing, but i found myself more frustrated with bugs than in my initial playthrough of the game, the map i've already mentioned but found a lot of the time characters would step on each other's dialogue and in one instance i found myself saying something that just got no response from a character i was talking to (this was particularly egregious since it was phantom liberty centered dialogue that was supposed to occur with judy during a "date" at v's apartment, since i had already exhausted all of the other dialogue options with her several dates ago i was excited to try to hear more from her and was rudely denied). finally, i think the choices here are interesting but feel a lot more telegraphed than in the main game, and for a game that is supposed to be all about choice it does feel somewhat boring to just have a dialogue option on screen which asks you which character you want to "betray".

still, i had fun with phantom liberty much like i did with the base game. this is not the "next frontier in dlc" or "game saving dlc" like many media outlets were clamoring to call it when it came out, but if you already liked cyberpunk 2077 2.0 you are going to like this, and if you didn't like it already this will not change your mind.

p.s. managed to complete the secret ending finally after finishing phantom liberty, and chose the johnny ending and was beautifully surprised by how heartfelt that one is too, guess this is all to say that the best part of cyberpunk are it's endings, and only if you give it the time to actually let the story affect you.

okay so a ton to say here but i'll try to keep it as brief as i can without accidentally ripping too much from tim rogers astonishing 12 hour video on the subject (though many of my praises and critiques may echo what he's said about the game).

cyberpunk 2077 is a brilliant mess, a cacophony of ideas and feature creep that may never fully amount to much at all and is simultaneously like every other open world game on the market while also being nothing like them. a richly detailed world that has no idea what it's themes are actually getting at. i was also enamored with it, enthralled by it's scope, and hanging on every word these characters spoke.

i'm gonna start with the bad here, simply because i think it's interesting to just do that first but also because i feel some caveats must be made before i heap any praise on this. i'm playing from the 2.1 update having never tried the game at launch, so i do not know exactly what has been changed, rebalanced, or fixed since then (but i have some idea). i knew this game was too hyped, too big, and too ambitious to not just get fixed at some point, and for the most part that has been accomplished. i only encountered a handful (okay perhaps a double handful) of immersion breaking bugs throughout my almost sixty hours with the game (guns remaining in characters hands during cutscenes, eyes shifting erratically, one time jackie walked through a cabinet and it's contents exploded out) but nothing game breaking (except when trying to use photo mode lmao). these are not cyberpunk's greatest worries though, as it's bigger problems run to a more structural level.

cyberpunk 2077 wants to be a part of this pantheon of literature and cinema aesthetically without really paying attention to what CYBERPUNK really is. it borrows liberally from it's influences, the dangerous neuro implant from johnny mnemonic, the BDs are an echo of the SQUID from strange days, the visual aesthetics of blade runner and ghost in the shell, the bike from akira, etc. but it never really understands that all of these pieces of art are about much more than just their setting. cyberpunk constantly points to interesting thematic avenues it could go down, like the ethics of cybernetic enhancements and living beyond the corporeal form as a digital representation, what gender and sexuality even is in a world where parts can be swapped out like clothes, or corporate greed and the ways that various businesses have gradually taken over our governing bodies, or hell even just the way that poor are forced into lives of crime in order to live in a world so hellbent on keeping everyone down. but right when you think the game is going to take an interesting turn and explore something more deeply it veers away, scared to make it's audience really think about the ramifications of the world that's been created here and instead showing them more loot to pick up, or a quick joke to break the tension. it's like the developers are saying, don't take any of this all too seriously, it's only a video game. it's a cover band playing the hits, never ready to write it's own song.

this fear is at odds with what i think is actually the strongest area of the game, which is the character and narrative writing. this is why even after feeling somewhat empty in the thematic department, i'm still giving this game a decently high rating and why i sunk so many hours into it. almost every character you meet here feels like they have more going on than the player can ever really feel privy too, and these rough faces slowly melt away to reveal raw humanity underneath. in my run i completed almost every side quest i was given, simply because i wanted to see where they went, how v would be able to see what any of these people are really about.

(light spoilers in the next paragraph so if you haven't played it i'd actually highly recommend you do, this alone is more than worth the time you'll spend with the game so if you haven't yet but are thinking about doing so, let the story unfold for you rather than reading what i have to say about it)

this started from the very beginning with jackie welles, a mountain of a man who's sensitive eyes betray a much richer soul behind the rough exterior. getting to know him through dialogue and a very well done opening montage creates a very real connection for the player so that every time he's mentioned after he's gone there's a weight behind those words that's hard to find anywhere else in the medium these days (and made me always choose to remember him when talking with others, a fallen comrade and legend in night city). this opening chunk extends outward as the game becomes more freeform, but i think the character writing shines the brightest when dealing with any of the romance options, and when dealing with johnny "keanu reeves" silverhand. the romance questlines are all stellar, learning more about judy, panam, river, and kerry really makes the player feel like they are getting to know these people in even the brief hours they are able to spend together. panam is wild and hotheaded but has so much love for her community that all she wants to do is to do right by them, river is jaded and cynical but is just hoping to find some sort of salvation for his family (never thought i'd ever feel for a cop but turning down his romance because i only have a little time left on this earth is just such a gutpunch), kerry is aging and tired of feeling like a has been but still is trying to give whatever else he has to keep some chaos in the world, and judy (my ultimate romance choice) has just lost so much and is bad with people but is trying to fight for what's right and ultimately escape these situations she always finds herself in. each path provides players with the ability to see these people at their best and worst, it's rare to get this much characterization out of romance options in any game outside of visual novels and i just found myself so drawn in by all of these stories. then there's silverhand, the asshole inside your head with the heart of gold. for all the talk about reeves somehow phoning this performance in (have you seen any of his movies?) i think he was the pitch perfect casting choice for the jaded rocker brimming with anger at everything surrounding him. being able to help him relive his past and right the wrongs he's sewn was the driving force behind the game for me, and i loved seeing him and v evolve over the course of the game's runtime as their lives and personalities slowly start to intermingle. every time he popped up i had to hear what he would say, even when the things he was saying were trying to get under my skin. it's also with silverhand where i think the game's themes actually shine the most, questions of personal identity, legacy, and mortality are the most deeply explored with all of v's interactions with silverhand and i think it's where the game is at it's best. also just wanted to shout out cherami leigh who provides the voice for female v and does a great job at really capturing the essence of a woman on the edge of society and mortality, it's a fairly thankless role as you rarely ever see your own character's face speaking but leigh provides more personality than a face ever could just with her voice. also just as an aside for endings i personally found the aldecaldos route to be the most satisfying, especially with judy as the romance option, while the legend of night city route is bittersweet and still ultimately warranted it felt out of character for the v i had played so it didn't stick with me as much (as if v was exactly the same at the start and end of the game). i've yet to do the arasaka or silverhand routes yet so remains to be seen how good those are.

in all honesty for all i've complained about the world being devoid of meaning it is still so richly detailed that i found myself basking in it any chance i got. i think the mark of a good open world game is how much it makes you want to use the fast-travel system and i almost never found myself opting for that route, always preferring to hop in my car or on my bike to blast some music and careen through the streets to my next objective. while it is just aesthetically ripping from cyberpunk cinema, i personally LOVE cyberpunk cinema so regardless it still scratched an itch i've been trying to scratch for years. the gameplay itself is pretty standard open world rpg stuff maxed to dizzying heights, so many different choices for how you want to build your characters weapons, abilities, clothing, i'm sure there's a dozen different ways to approach this game with some yielding better results than others. where the gameplay really has a leg up is in it's variety of dialogue choices, allowing you to really inhabit the role you are playing and provide different ways for you to look at different characters. a lot of these are an illusion, providing no big shakeups for how the story progresses but instead simply how dialogue moods shift, which i still think goes a long way into allowing the player to really feel like they are inhabiting the world rather than simply being strung along (disco elysium does the same thing and we all love it for that, but will cut no slack for cyberpunk lmao). it never feels quite as immersive as something like fallout: new vegas or hell even vampire the masquerade: bloodlines, but still had me racking my brain at times wondering just what the hell i should do in a given situation, who i really want to be.

in any case, it's all kind of a mess but i'd be lying if i said i didn't love the time i spent with it. gonna try out the expansion at some point as i know it switches up a lot of the ending stuff but i gotta take a break for a minute, maybe read a book or something lmao.

p.s. i only installed one mod for my run through the game but it was invaluable to me, and that is the CP77_radioext mod for creating custom radio stations. while i do really respect the developers for paying actual musicians (tomb mold!!) to create a ton of new tracks for the game under pseudonyms in order to give the radio stations a futuristic authenticity, i really wanted to explore night city listening to my own music without having to constantly pause spotify when dialogue came up or having to adjust volumes in order to get the mix right. after some trial and error in order to get the mod to work i created a few throwback radio stations in order to keep them within the world of the game while also having music i liked playing. makes all the difference when you're racing to your lover's house while dancing on my own by robyn plays, getting into a firefight with linkin park blasting, or just taking in the sights to the love theme from blade runner.

angrily whispering to myself in the mirror “i will not be won over by cheap references to things i like “ while chibi sam porter bridges and dante from devil may cry adorably dance on my screen.

pretty cute for the ps5’s answer to wii sports, shows off the tech really well while also having a lot of personality due to the deluge of references to past playstation accessories and properties that luckily feel more super smash brothers than they do spider-man: the one with tobey maguire and andrew garfield. short, charming, and really gets your mind wondering how this controller can be used to great effect in an actual game, which imo is just what something like this is for

incredibly, incredibly promising early access game. as it stands, the core gameplay loop is already incredibly solid. rummaging through files, searching through computers, scanning through cctv footage, gathering fingerprints, searching corpses, it's all stellar. the game posits itself as an "immersive-sim" (a term that has over time gradually lost all meaning if one were to look at the steam tag) and for being comprised purely of procedurally generated open worlds i think the game is already doing a stellar job of sticking to the thief/deus ex model of being filled with so many different interactable things within the environment (whether this be computers, file folders, notes, posters, photographs, etc.), the ability to tackle objectives in any way you want to, and having a large degree of freedom to how you want to interact with the various systems the game has put into place. non-player characters have schedules that they stick to allowing you to plot whether you want to break into their home to look for a murder weapon while they're at work, or barge through the door and surprise them while they are home for an arrest, or even sneak through a vent at their workplace to look through their computer while they're at home.

there's also the pinboard system of keeping track of each case you're working on, which at first can feel unwieldy but slowly reveals itself over time to be a great asset once you get the hang of actually using it. you're able to place pieces of evidence on it wherever you want, and some links between pieces will be made automatically based on what information is shared, but you're also able to add any connections you want. this allows for being able to plan you're investigation extremely effectively depending on how you want to tackle it, grouping objects together by location or individual and slowly checking every lead until you finally reach your culprit. there would be times when i didn't know what to do before realizing there was a piece on my pinboard i hadn't fully explored yet, tracking down a specific person, and finally being able to pull all the pieces together and catch the killer. you will legitimately feel yourself becoming a better detective as you play the game more, as you learn more tricks of the trade on your own and will be able to track people down based on smaller and smaller pools of evidence, and nothing will compare to agonizing over a case for hours before realizing something specific you can do and finally solve it.

i know i'm being a little vague with how exactly these systems work and what you can actually do in the game, and that's because i truly think it's best to try it for yourself and figure out what is best for you, but also because i feel that in it's current state there are modes of operating here that i feel like kind of go against the core ethos of what the game is trying to accomplish and that knowing this right off the bat will take some of the fun out of it, i just hope there will be some balancing changes coming in the future to make the game a little harder to exploit. the stealth system at the moment is kind of broken, while there's a lot of thrill to the actual sneaking aspects of the game and trying to break into places without getting caught, there's very little punishment for actually getting caught, as most fights just involve some janky hand to hand combat which can be too easy to actually win even against multiple combatants and fleeing from enemies is just exiting the building before they have no memory of what you've done.

there's also the various issues that come with this being a procedurally generated immersive sim (especially in early access). there's a distinct lack of pathos to a lot of the crimes and jobs. while there's a wealth of reading material in the game (emails, apartment leases, various sticky notes) you'll very rarely find something you haven't read before with the names swapped out which in turn makes investigating by looking for a motive completely impossible. this could be fixed in future updates by having more bespoke crime scenes, but as it stands this is game that is much more focused on systems than narrative with the player having to build that from scratch based purely on context. i also ran into a lot of generation bugs in the game: screens impossible to see due to a cabinet being placed right in front of them, rooms with way more doors than they need to have, vents being impossible to progress through due to strange geometry glitches, a building who's top half would not load at all, though i chalk this up mostly to early access and assume that most of this will be fixed as more patches roll out.

i still obviously have gotten a lot of enjoyment out of this one so far, with twenty hours dropped in even in the early access state. the voxel based world is a joy to inhabit, with really strong art direction and environment design complemented well by the lighting a weather effects placed on them, and of course as i mentioned the actual main gameplay loop is incredibly addictive even if it's not yet as deep as it could be. incredibly promising and excited to see where this grows and evolves from here.

tempted to bump this higher once i can play with actual people and some of the more annoying bugs and ai issues are ironed out post launch but i'm going to first start with the bad so you can kind of understand what you're getting into if you plan on playing the game. technically the game is optimized very poorly, with it's penchant for photorealism there's a ton of massively taxing physics objects in the game that slow the game to a crawl when engaging in crowded rooms or even just walking through the hub world. there's a lot of bizarre design decisions that hinder getting into a groove with this game, such as the inability to restart a mission without the game booting you back to the hub police station (a hub world that would be greatly improved by simply replacing it with a menu, large and empty with little actual personality). missions are also just plagued with pretty unrealistic AI on both the suspect and companion side, making some missions much more difficult than they need to be, suspects shooting you through walls without knowing of your presence or companions failing to follow orders and just standing around while you run into a room and get riddled with bullets.

more than any of this is simply the fact that this is an absolutely vile piece of software. on the very surface level it's pretty clearly just propaganda for police brutality, allowing the player to brutalize suspects in gory detail with limbs and heads flying off when shot from close quarters. there's incentive to use non-lethal means to apprehend suspects (the only way to get an S rank on all missions) but very little punishment for just going in and killing all of them (slightly lower score and your interchangeable teammates get a slight mental health debuff). there's also the queasy fact that some of the situations here are ripped straight from the headlines, with missions pretty obviously based on the siege of christopher dorner and the pulse nightclub massacre, as well as others more coyly recreated like a school shooting mission taking it's name from gus van sant's columbine film elephant or a siege on a wealthy hollywood pedophile that's strikingly similar to dan schneider. then there's just the abundance of 4chan and right wing memes slyly referenced in the game such as a gas station taking it's name from /tv/ baneposting and the abundance of missions which involve your team raiding child pornography rings which just feel ripped straight from the sound of freedom.

with all that said, this is still one of the most nailbitingly tense games i've ever played. your character and your teammates are incredibly vulnerable even with the most amount of armor on, and will go down with only a few shots from an enemy you didn't immediately notice. the game feels more like a survival horror game with tactical elements than a straight up tactical shooter, checking under every door in the hopes that you can get the drop on someone before entering the room before entering and getting domed by someone else you didn't notice hiding around the corner. the fact that suspect locations and evidence are procedurally placed around the map makes it so that you need to constantly keep yourself on your toes, no runs of the same map will ever be the same, and i can guarantee this is even more nailbiting in multiplayer without the crutch of ai companions that can more quickly find the suspects than a human's reaction time, leading to even more chaos and confusion.

and for as much as i've complained about the thematic ideas and overly engineered environments the world here is actually incredibly compelling. it's grim and nihilistic, full of violence and brutality. the game is much more similar to the work of s. craig zahler than the "equal opportunity offender" of postal 2 and south park or the unremitting right wing "comedy" of the postal 2 expansions or the daily wire films. the game is filled with flavour text to dive further into the depths of depravity, environmental storytelling that does actually really add to the immersion even if it tanks the performance. the brutal violence actually adds to the depth of the proceedings for me (even if it may not be explicitly intended), where players are complicit in acts of pure evil, never solving anything and getting very little reward beyond maybe a new helmet and a "good job" from your superior while your team's mental health constantly spirals and more death is on the horizon.

i think it's totally fair to hate this game based purely on any of the negative aspects i've mentioned, but at the same time if this sounds interesting to you i would highly recommend at least checking it out as i was thoroughly engrossed (altho maybe i should just play swat 4 instead lmao)

played this with my boyfriend off and on for the past six months or so and found it really enjoyable for the most part. he likes video games but was never an obsessive as a child like i was so a lot of the more game-y stuff that comes second nature to me any time i pick something up requires some more getting used to for him, as such i found this game struck a good balance between being fun for those that are more casual about their gaming and not being too safe for those that play more to feel uncommitted (tho there were times where i could really tell he was frustrated when he got stuck on a platforming section lmao). i think a lot of this owes to the variety of gameplay ideas that the game employs, while for the most part it sticks to being a simple 3d platformer there are always new specific abilities that each of the characters has in order to accomplish certain things in the environment or solve puzzles to keep progressing. then there were also be times when the game changes genres entirely, ranging from 2d platforming sections, to a dungeon crawler, to pirate simulation, to even becoming a rhythm game! it's this boundless variety in gameplay, mixed with some stellar art direction in the miniature characters inhabiting our own world aesthetic, that makes this game easily worth playing. even a lot of the minigames hidden throughout the levels are incredibly fun, partly because of the fact that you need to search to actually find them and also because they give a more competitive diversion in game so purely focused on cooperation.

i think where the game really falters, and what made it take so long for us to finally get through it, is the fairly limp narrative at the center of the piece. the focus here is on a couple going through a divorce and from the very start of the game you know where it's going, that this adventure forcing them to work together will ultimately rekindle their love for one another and they'll stay together for the kids. this i think would be fairly fine, if not a little cliche, if the game wasn't so long and the development of this theme so agonizingly one-note. the characters themselves aren't really anything to write home, a workaholic mom who's given up on her passions for her career and a stay-at-home dad who's also given up his passions due to pressures of being a father, and the moment-to-moment dialogue writing just never really expands them past this, constantly bickering with each other save for a few moments of reprieve and it feels like they never truly rekindle their love until the very end of the very last level of the game, and don't even get me started on the spanish love book who we both audibly groaned at every single time he appeared on screen. the game honestly may have been better served just allowing it's setpieces to speak for themselves, as trying to reach for more without much thought put into it beyond the initial concept ultimately just drags the game down. i said to my bf once the game was ending that it was very much a "love story written by gamers" so take with that what you will.

still though, as much as this last paragraph makes it seem like i wasn't particularly fond of the game, we both did still very much enjoy our time with it, and i loved being able to play through a game to the end with someone i care so much about. if anyone has any recommendations for other couch co-op games like this (accessible but never boring, story or at least world focused) please let me know because i would really appreciate some more stuff for us to play together!

incredibly charming short point and click from tim schafer. while lacking in a lot of the narrative weight i'd maybe want in something like this, it more than makes up for it with it's dry humour, fun characters, and interesting world.

at first seeming like a stylized version of our own world the game starts to reveal itself as a kind of mad max meets blade runner desert cyberpunk, though keeps itself fairly light with it's overall world building. pretty much everything that can be surmised from the game is taken from it's art direction, incredibly detail rich interiors mixed with sprawling desert exteriors gives the game this really unique vibe, which is complemented by just stunning pixel art drawing from classic cartoons and animated beautifully for the characters. i also REALLY love this early 3d stuff the game has going on with some of it's backgrounds, vehicle designs, and driving sections, a mix of plastic and chrome looking textures bitcrunched to hell it just looks amazing to me. full disclosure that i was playing the remastered version of the game using the original graphics but i switched over to the new renders a few times to help me find some of the clickable areas and it is just so clear that this game is meant to be played with that original pixel art. i'm sure a lot of time went into making it look good but those new renders just feel kinda lifeless, at times even looking like when you use one of those emulator filters to smooth out pixel art algorithmically and it all just looks wrong. though it is a bit of a shame to miss out on the remastered audio and some of the quality of life improvements this way.

narratively it keeps itself pretty light, doing a pretty standard corporate corruption plot involving secretive murders, inheritance theft, and an evil ceo hell bent on destroying the biking industry with minivan manufacture. it never lets itself get too bogged down in the details, just moving from setpiece to setpiece, and while i feel that it's lacking a bit more of an emotional punch that i would want it's handily brought together by a superb cast of characters. each time a person or a gang is introduced they feel wholly unique and lived in, which is in no small part because of how well they are all brought to life by their voice actors. mark hamill plays about a dozen parts here and they're all done super well, roy conrad is perfect in the lead as the stoic and wry biker ben, and as a huge simpsons fan i was really pleased to hear tress macneille show up in a bit part near the end. just found myself very charmed the whole time and i got through it in about three and a half hours all told so the game never outstayed it's welcome.

the puzzles for the most part are much more straightforward than one might come to expect from a lucasarts point 'n' click from the mid-90s, most everything had a fairly logical conclusion and the only ones that really stumped me were when i just accidentally forgot to pick something up since it blended into the background and i had to do some backtracking. i think the only gameplay element here that really drags down full throttle are the action setpieces. the mine road section is fairly mind numbing more than anything else, unresponsive controls and lengthy loops until you finally have all the items you need, but not really ever especially difficult. what really doesn't work is the destruction derby sequence, with controls so unresponsive and finicky i messed around with it for about ten minutes without really getting anywhere before just skipping it altogether (a new feature in the remastered port).

overall though, a short but ultimately fulfilling experience, just puts a smile on my face.