I played Silent Hill 2 first because I heard Silent Hill doesn't really hold up, that 2 is better, and the stories aren't connected anyway. However, my question now is why do people think Silent Hill doesn't hold up. I can understand distaste for 3d graphics as lifelike as origami, but this game accomplished a lot with its limited resources. Its atmosphere still works amazingly well, and the level design is even better than Silent Hill 2's. It's different from its successor, but not necessarily a lesser game. When you play it, you might start by thinking it looks a little rough, but by the end you'll wish more games had such an engrossing world to explore.

Even as a horror fan, horror games can be incredibly stressful. Only after I've finished playing one do I start to appreciate the thrill of it all, and in spite of the delay, it's enough to keep me coming back these stories over and over again. However, Silent Hill 2 isn’t a thrilling type of horror. It’s exhausting, it’s grey, it’s confusing. The gameplay isn’t interesting, it’s usually just wandering around, trying to make what little progress you can like navigating an unfamiliar room in the dark. The story is unrelentingly bleak, so don’t expect villains to overcome or wrongs to right, there aren’t any positive emotions you get to walk away with when playing this game. If the criteria to judge a game is in the pleasantness of its interactivity, this game gets a failing grade, but that was never the intention of this design. Most narrative-focused games tell their stories like a movie with interactive setpieces, but this one does it with every single detail. The depressive atmosphere, the confusion you feel, the design of the enemies, they’re all just as much a part of the story as the cutscenes. The feelings of the depressed and isolated protagonist are conveyed so thoroughly that they begin affecting the player, and the small decisions they make are incorporated into the character, subtly changing the story to line up with the player’s outlook. The narrative presentation is flawlessly comprehensive, no opportunity was wasted, a quality that few games have ever achieved. This type of story won’t resonate with everyone, but anyone who cares about interactive narratives needs to experience why this game is still the gold standard.

I've been pretty hard on this game in the past, being a massive fan of the classic-style linear Castlevania games. I could still throw out the same complaints of being slightly aimless and extremely unchallenging, but the amount of polish and charm SotN has is absolutely insane. The visuals, unique weapon effects, optional content, and general attention to detail make for a game that's oozing with love. The biggest shame about it is that while it contributed the second half of the word "Metroidvania", not many games other than its direct followups seem to follow in its footsteps rather than Metroid's. I would like to see some games break out of the Metroid formula and try for Symphony of the Night's level of environmental interaction.

The definitive action game. I wasn't a fan of action games when I started it, but this one won me over, partly due to the style system and partly due to the super memorable boss lineup. Every action game should really have something like the gunslinger style, where you can disrupt enemies that are sneaking up for you in a way other than dodging. Every action game should have rival characters like Vergil, who evolve in their abilities in the same way you do for climactic showdowns that repeatedly escalate in both mechanical complexity and narrative stakes. The weapons should have personality and depth, the enemies and their attacks should be distinct... anything you think an action game needs, Devil May Cry 3 has it. Action games today still struggle to hit this perfect balance, but with this game, even an action game skeptic like me has to admit the potential in the genre.

This game insulted my intelligence. When the combat tutorial included air juggles, I was excited for where the game was going, but it was all downhill from there. You can juggle, but the game doesn't trust you to do so and you have no incentive to use it. You get new abilities, but the game doesn't trust you to think, so every obstacle is a just a giant colored square. I guess that's also why it's so linear when it claims to be about exploration. Just don't bother with it, try Hollow Knight.

Another ring in the tree of cinematic shooters. It has better tech than Uncharted 3, making it a visually stunning game, but it's mostly the same. I think it wrapped up the series pretty well though and it has the best story of all of them, so I guess I'm cool with it.

Game analysis is a lot more complicated than explaining why you liked or disliked each part of a game. It’s important to be cognizant of biases and expectations, while still recognizing the importance of the reference points that influenced the game’s development. The Evil Within is a great example of how difficult this can be, with the marketing campaign leaning heavily on the fact that Shinji Mikami was the director. If everyone is told that there’s a new horror third-person shooter from the creator of Resident Evil 4, the implicit understanding is it's going to be a spiritual successor. This was an especially powerful strategy in 2014, only a couple years after Resident Evil 6 made fans lose hope they would ever get a worthy followup. With that context in mind, it’s easy to see how a good game that didn’t meet people’s expectations could still be seen as disappointing. This game isn’t the copy of Resident Evil 4 people may have wanted, but is instead a much more horror-focused game about breakneck action. The over-the-top style is no longer a slow boil that takes place over the entire game, it’s an explosive love letter to the horror genre from the word go, starting in a mental hospital, evolving into a nightmarish butcher shop, which dumps you into a spooky town in the woods, all within the course of an hour. The gun battling is less methodical, instead asking you to quickly swap between all your tools with efficiency. This includes a larger suite of weapons, traps, stealth, and ammo types you need to juggle and master if you don’t want to be overwhelmed. If you play this game in the survival-horror way the marketing suggested, it will seem like a mess, but when played with the action sensibilities the mechanics actually promote, it’s a great experience. I wouldn’t blame people for wanting something more typical of the genre or something with a better story, but if you’re in the market for some frantic action, this is hard to beat.

This might be the hardest game ever for me to critique. It's good, it's original, Metroid fans adore it, and it's packed with content for the price, but I didn't have much fun with it. I found exploration to be a chore with a bizarre and unhelpful map system, in a world full of enemies too simple to be interesting and too uninteresting to be fun. The atmosphere and a couple breathtaking moments were enough to keep me playing until the end, which is more than I can say for most games in the genre at least. I guess it must be pretty good for someone who doesn't care for these games to think it was basically ok, but that doesn't mean I can personally say anything other than "it was basically ok".

Drake’s Fortune created the cinematic action genre we know today, Among Thieves refined it, but Drake’s Deception is the first sideways step of the franchise. In some ways, it genuinely is better than its legendary predecessor, with more impressive technology, a smoother pace, and the advantage of a more developed cast of characters. On the other hand, some of the plot points and twists are questionable at best, utterly nonsensical at worst. The character of Talbot, for example, is one of the biggest question marks in the entire series. He randomly appears and disappears, is seemingly immune to gunshots, and has mystical powers that go entirely unexplained. The setup seems to be that he’s a supernatural entity misleading the main villain, but that doesn’t actually happen, and fans have endlessly debated what the original plan for his character was. The setpieces are some of the best in the series, but the narrative justification for experiencing them is equally muddled. The best example is a ship graveyard section, which is a fun location for shootouts and has a lot of unique moments, but the only reason Drake ends up there is because he gets randomly captured by pirates you’ve hardly seen before. He escapes, and they have no bearing on the plot from that point forward. It’s still an enjoyable ride from front to back, but Drake’s Deception has a general sloppiness to it that prevented it from raising the bar in the way its predecessors were celebrated for.

Going back to play the Uncharted series was like cutting down the tree of cinematic gaming and looking at its growth rings. Compared to how thin the first game was, Uncharted 2 was a great evolution, but it's still pretty close to the center. You can tell that the developers learned a lot from their first swing at the genre, with an expanded, more interesting cast of characters, and one of the most legendary intros in gaming. The story brings you to a better variety of locations, the setpieces are more ambitious, and the shootouts are more interesting, addressing the problems with Drake’s Fortune across the board. However, with the connecting thread of all these elements still being a dry implementation of third-person shooting, it’s not the revolutionary step up in quality that would elevate it to a timeless classic. Instead, it’s the perfect period-piece for a moment in gaming history. Its successes are the highest out of all its peers, while sharing the flaws of a design that still needed years of refinement. Among Thieves may not be the best experience if you go in fresh, but there’s value in seeing the best of what 2009 had to offer.

Even though game publishers are gigantic entities run by hundreds of people, it’s interesting to see how they’re gradually personified through the way they conduct business. EA may run over twenty development studios, but most people would know them for buying studios, having them put out mediocre sequels, and shutting them down. Square Enix meanwhile is known for situations like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Human Revolution revitalized the brand, and Square immediately saw the potential to make Deus Ex into a multimedia franchise. Mobile spinoffs, comics, and sequels would immediately be moved into production, attempting to capitalize on the hype as soon as possible. Mankind Divided itself was going to be the core of this push, being a huge upgrade over the first game with a bigger team and a higher budget. That was a fine plan, at least until Square Enix’s dreams of a franchise got the better of them. The game was essentially cut in half, with the idea being to use its parts for two games instead of one. The multi-hub setup was cut down to just one location, and the runtime was fifteen hours instead of twenty-four. The story comes to an abrupt conclusion halfway through, which can charitably be called a cliffhanger for the planned third installment. Naturally, this didn’t go over well, and Mankind Divided sold well below expectations. Even when the game looks beautiful, has a great city hub to explore, and fun augmentations, getting cut off in the middle of the action was a massive letdown. Instead of Square Enix taking this as a sign that the next Deus Ex should be more fleshed out, they saw it as people losing interest in the franchise, and the DLC was the last Deus Ex media that would release for (at the time of writing) five years. This really is the most painful way for a franchise to end, with the game being good enough to where fans mourn the lost potential, but bad enough to where even an unlikely sequel wouldn’t get the budget it deserves. With how Square followed the same pattern of getting ahead of themselves and killing a franchise before it really began with Avengers though, I’m not holding my breath for Deus Ex to make the comeback I’m hoping for.

A platformer without jumping sounds like a painfully quirky concept, but Snake Pass actually pulls it off. Skillfully navigating an environment with the limited toolset of a snake provides for compelling gameplay, and you'll find yourself strangling your controller as you try to maintain your grip on each ledge. There's also a surprising amount of nuance to basic movement, and learning ways to efficiently navigate is an oddly rewarding experience. That's about the only string to the game's bow though, for better and worse. It's nicely focused, but if it starts frustrating you, there's nothing else to keep you playing. If the uniqueness of it all catches your eye then it won't disappoint, but you're not missing much otherwise.

I think everything that needs to be said about it has been said already. It's atmospheric, polished, fun, and you should check it out if you haven't already. You may notice that "scary" was missing from that list, so you could think I'm damning it with fine praise, but Dead Space shoots more for tension than scariness. I think that might be part of its widespread appeal; even people who don't typically like horror games can enjoy it after getting in the groove.

If you were to ask the average gamer about Factorio, they would probably say "What the hell are you talking about", but if you were to ask someone who HAD heard about the game, they would probably tell you that it's very addicting. With endless potential for improving your factory and a low-pressure environment to do it in, it's easy to get invested and keep incrementally optimizing for hours. However, if you're not the kind of person that typically likes those games, Factorio is difficult to recommend. It's the gold standard of its niche, but it doesn't spend much energy giving guidance or setting goals to entice the newcomers. Luckily, it has a low price point of $20, so it's worth a go.