You can think of sequels as existing on a sliding scale between refinement and evolution. On one side you have Yakuza, where you’re doing essentially the same things in the same locations with an increasing amount of polish, and on the other end you have Final Fantasy, where every game plays very differently from its predecessors. Nioh 2 has enthusiastically thrown itself onto the refinement side of the scale, with pretty much every system from the first game being polished to a mirror sheen. The amount of quality-of-life features is truly staggering, from tiny things like being able to change the colors for different tiers of equipment rarity, to more immediately useful things like being able to save equipment and skill loadouts to swap between builds instantly. If you just wanted a smoother Nioh experience, this game will probably be ten out of ten for you, but the focus paid to refinement naturally came at the cost any significant evolutions. Personally, I enjoyed how the first game was so different from its contemporary action RPG’s, but Nioh 2’s locations and enemies are essentially copy-pasted from the first game. Although the combat has been refined with new abilities and finer balance, it still has the exact same feel overall. That puts me in a hard spot when it comes to a review, considering that in an “objective” sense, it’s just the first game all over again with additional upgrades and features, but when it comes to the experience of actually playing it, the comparative lack of imagination leads to a markedly lesser experience overall. It gets even more complicated when the question naturally arises of whether it could be recommended to people who haven’t played the first game. And honestly, I couldn’t tell you. The stories are mostly unconnected, but connect at the end, but the fragmented and confusing presentation of the story made it so confusing even for someone who had played the first game that it was nonsensical anyway. I think you could enjoy it without the explanations from the first game, but the difficulty is so high that maybe going in without the experience would be utterly miserable. So, as much as I think this game is extremely well made, I can only recommend it to the narrow subset of players who had played the first game, loved it, and just wanted more without significant changes, and also didn’t care about the story at all. If you’re one of those people and haven’t played it already, go nuts, but for everyone else you should probably wait for a sale.

I liked it.

...Was that not enough of a review? Saying it’s a beat ‘em up and that I liked it covers the basics, and I think this meta part of the sentence earns some points for stylistic flair.

That's River City Girls. It includes everything you basically need, and it has a unique style that makes it stand out, but you’re left wishing that there was a little bit more substance, something particularly memorable, instead of being the video game equivalent of fireworks. Spectacular, but there’s a certain melancholy in the level of technical skill that goes into such a fleeting form of joy.

Note: this review looks incredibly long, but there’s a stopping point midway before I start laughing about the DLC’s. You can choose your own adventure.

The entirety of the Skyrim experience can be summarized by what it’s like to level the Enchanting skill. Starting the game, you know you want to create powerful magical gear, so you run through the starting quests to begin your collection process. You scrounge every soul gem, pick up all the enchantable items, delve into caves to find new magical effects, and slowly build up your capabilities. Watching the skill steadily rise and using it to make better gear feels immensely rewarding, and you keep on adventuring and working until you reach the very top. Once you’ve reached the goal and made powerful gear that lets you blast through everything with ease though, what do you do now?

As simple as the question is, it’s one I really didn’t have a good answer for when I did my replay for its upcoming 10th anniversary. Why bother exploring those caves and dungeons anymore, when they won’t give me anything better than what I just made? The only joy the simplistic combat offers is in toying with enemies who have no way of opposing you, but there’s only so many times you can shout bandits off cliffs or paralyze them into goofy poses before it starts getting old. There are tons of quests to do, but most of them involve putting you back into a dungeon full of boring draugr, all for the sake of gear you have no use for. The guild quests and main story are slightly better, but their narratives are incredibly basic at best, like the Mage’s College questline for a magical lampshade of no real significance. At worst, you have something like the Thieves’ Guild questline, which is laughably nonsensical at every turn. So, the only thing left for you to enjoy after establishing your build is the expansive wilderness, which to be fair, has a lot of wonderful locations that are worth discovering for their own sake. I applaud how each region feels distinct enough to where you can tell where you are without looking at a map, and the zones flow smoothly enough to where it never feels blatantly artificial. It’s a great place to explore, but walking around isn’t a very expressive activity. RPG’s are all about player expression, building a character, roleplaying, and making decisions, but once you get past those initial hours of setting up your build, there’s no escalation in challenge or roleplaying stakes at all. You just wander the countryside until you run out of interest, and then the experience ends with a whimper instead of a bang.

I don’t want to sound like I really hate this game though, or that I’m trying to be fashionable with criticism of a popular game. There are completely valid reasons it’s popular, with the aforementioned beautiful land to explore perhaps being the most significant. Simplicity can also be a draw of its own, and within the genre I have yet to find a better name for than “after-work-with-a-beer-and-a-podcast-games”, it’s hard to beat. However, I can’t praise a game because it leaves me unengaged enough to do other things at the same time. I was hoping for an RPG that was just a little more enchanting.

This might sound familiar if you’ve read my New Vegas review, but…
Addendum on the DLC (includes spoilers):
The date listed for this completion is for a replay, which was also the first time I played the DLC, so here’s the DLC for the review. Just like last time, this will be longer than the actual review, and this is where I drop all pretense of being clever and just joke my way through, like a self-indulgent oversized dessert to the main course.

I just said I wanted to avoid sounding like I hate this game, but Dawnguard makes that job difficult. Knowing the first DLC would be all about vampires, I made my character a vampire at the first opportunity. However, the first mission of the expansion is to join the vampire hunters, who welcome a stranger with skin as pale as death and eyes aflame with lust for blood. This doesn’t paint a flattering picture of the organization this whole thing is named after, and the quest involves killing a pile of vampires I should be allied with. It was as if I was fully onboard with this elaborate scam of getting common folk to pay vampire protection money to people who had never actually seen a vampire before. This became doubly hilarious when I rescued the vampire companion introduced in this DLC, Serana. When speaking to her, my character seemed surprised she could tell I was a vampire, even with the aforementioned unmistakable features, and was equally shocked when being told Serana is a vampire herself, when it was painfully obvious after two seconds of looking at her. When following her to the spooky vampire castle, we ran across a few Dawnguard patrols, but since I hadn’t formally accepted the vampire lifestyle yet, they weren’t hostile to, or at all interested in, the two vampires leading the way to the ultimate vampire base. The first time my vampirism was fully recognized was when speaking to the Dracula stand-in, who declared that I wasn’t a REAL vampire, and had simply contracted a lesser version which doesn’t count. My first task after being correctly re-vampired would be to collect a special chalice containing the ultimate blood that was so special that it powers up super vampires. But here’s the kicker: that super blood is how I contracted vampirism in the first place, the game just didn’t have a contingency for that happening. The location with that blood also contained a reference to the magical chalice I was meant to use, but claiming I had seen it before resulted in being called a liar and that there was no way I could have known about it.

In short, the DLC had failed literally every single opportunity for roleplaying. I was utterly amazed at how something as simple as “this character is a vampire” was so thoroughly bungled by an expansion about being a vampire, in a game that already had vampirism to begin with. To make matters worse, the rest of the quest content is incredibly mediocre. You’re told to find an elder scroll, which leads into a quest to find two other elder scrolls, one of which is the same one that’s used in the main story. After another quest to actually read them, you learn where a magical macguffin is, and obtain it in a quest that requires you to run across the map to fill up a jug of water five times. Then, you kill Dracula. If I was amazed before, my reaction to the end of this DLC lacks adequate words. Did it really not include any interesting areas to explore? Did it really not include any deep quests at all? The Soul Cairn was cool to look at and all, and the vampire transformation is sorta cool (albeit mostly useless), but is that really all this DLC offers? Honestly, this might be my least favorite expansion Bethesda has ever released, but I won’t be able to confirm that until the 10th anniversary of Fallout 4.

Dragonborn starts off a lot better, with an original premise about an entire island being slowly brainwashed by someone of incomprehensible power, who is backed by the Daedric prince of knowledge that drives men to madness. Seeing Morrowind again was also a nice start, but as I got deeper into the DLC, I too began to go a little insane. When a quest began to run all over the island and purge the evil from five stones, nightmares of filling that damned water jug flashed in my mind, and the subsequent dungeon involved wandering around to collect five dwarven cubes. At the end of this journey into collectathon madness, what resulted was a final showdown that was the same as any other fight in the game, with the villain slashing at me ineffectually with a sword as I blasted him in the face with thunderbolts. For a DLC about the mind, control, and knowledge, reducing the final encounter to a slap fight feels like a missed opportunity.

Finally, Hearthfire. People may forget this DLC even existed, but Bethesda charged money for it, so it gets a review whether it wants one or not. It’s about building a house, and there are three plots of land to choose from. After that, you collect supplies like lumber and stone, and create the house via selection in a menu. When it comes to the aesthetic or architecture, you have no choice, and the only room for personalization is in which wings you add, such as armories or greenhouses. When it comes to furnishing, it works the same way: you collect supplies and simply buy the items in a menu, without an option for where they're located or what style they should be. For an expansion that exists thanks to the explosion of crafting games, the amount of player expressiveness is incredibly low, with options restricted to “yes” or “no” on a list of prefabricated inclusions. If you want a hunter’s lodge, too bad, you get a normal looking house. If you want to have a basic home attached to a large training ground for warriors, or to live in a specialized study all about research of the arcane, too bad, you get a normal looking house. Also included in this DLC is adoption, where you can furnish your home with a robotic facsimile of a child, who has no significance other than saying hello whenever you decide to visit. I would go on about the oddness of this inclusion, but this small, hilarious paragraph from the wiki says everything I could ever say about how absurd this whole mechanic is:

“If the child's parents are killed by the Dragonborn and the crime is noted by the guards or observed by the child, adoption may not be possible. Children may be "aware" that their parents were killed by the Dragonborn even if the crime was committed while hidden, rendering adoption impossible.
It is possible, however, to guarantee adoption after killing a child's parents. Immediately after committing the crime, by bribing the guards and (magically) calming the child for a certain period, it is possible for children to reach the "acceptance" phase, when it becomes possible to open dialogue with them again. They say things such as "(sigh)," and "What...what am I gonna do?" and at this point, it becomes possible to adopt them.”

If the main review and all this DLC ranting point to one flaw in Skyrim, it’s the total lack of meaningful player expressiveness. The roleplaying is minimal in every regard, and the game is only held up by the fun of exploring the wilderness. No amount of vampires, Morrowind callbacks, or robotic children can fix the fact that the RP part of this G is underwhelming. Whether the exploration actually does make it all worthwhile, well, I guess you’ll have to go on the journey yourself to find out.

And wow, at the end of my New Vegas review I noted that it was too long and hoped everyone reading would have a good day, but this is even longer than that one. To you heroes who love to read, I grant you a plenary indulgence. I really thank you for, appropriately enough, indulging me, and for trusting me with your time.

Note: This is a review of both the base game and Brood War, as it’s hard to talk about them in isolation.

If there’s one thing fighting game fans and RTS fans have in common, it’s holding a very patronizing view of people who expect any level of success after finishing the single-player campaign. Sure they present some interesting scenarios, and the way they give some background for the action is nice, but when it comes to conveying the advanced mechanics or the real competitive experience, they tend to fall short. On one hand, it makes sense to differentiate the experiences of different modes, but ideally, the single-player options should give players a way to orient themselves and prepare for the unpredictability of human opponents. For fighting games, this is pretty tough, since so much of the game is about reading other players’ patterns on a second-by-second basis and adjusting your play accordingly. However, I think RTS campaigns actually have a lot of potential to emulate the multiplayer experience. For example, there could be a mission where you’re told that one of the enemy factions has lost functionality of their warp gates, and can’t produce units. Instead, they will attack by cannon rushing, a common strategy to see from people attempting easy wins against unskilled players. Maybe there could be a scenario where you either encounter an enemy that sticks to ground-based units or one that only uses fliers, and you have to scout and punish them accordingly before they construct a death ball. In this way, players become exposed to real strategies and learn good fundamentals that are applicable in all levels of play. Unfortunately, the typical scenarios in Starcraft do the opposite of this sort of teaching. It’s rare that the scenarios are relevant at all, and the strategies that are incentivized would actually set you up for failure online. Most maps include enemies with pre-established bases with loads of static defense, rewarding your attempts at scouting and harassment by immediately destroying your unit. You just build up your own ball of units and smash it against subsequently higher levels of defense, instead of actually learning to watch your enemy, harass their workers, prevent base expansion, and counter their strategy.

To be fair though, the base game can be forgiven for some of this, given how the concept of an online meta was less of a design concern in 1998, and it actually does a small amount of smart tutorializing at the very start. It gives you a basic level of functionality, but your enemies have access to units and abilities one step up the tech tree, so you learn how to counter them in a controlled environment. Then, in the next mission, you get to use what they were using, already fully cognizant of what makes those things effective, and the cycle repeats with new tools to learn about. While Brood War’s campaign is a huge improvement over the base game’s in most ways, it doesn’t take the next step with this learning process and still consists of breaking established bases with piles of units, even when the developers at that point had experience with what the game was like in a real multiplayer environment. It would have been fantastic to see the expansion run with the knowledge that players were already familiar with each faction and the general pace of the game to then teach more advanced concepts. Not only would this benefit people when they go play multiplayer, but by providing a set of challenges more robust than “break the base”, the entertainment value of the campaign increases in its own right. It’s not that these campaigns are unenjoyable or anything, the stories are still pretty fun and overrunning defenses with a line of tanks or a wave of acid-spitting monstrosities is always satisfying, but a shallow level of strategy being required in a strategy game campaign is a missed opportunity, which goes on to cause problems with how much it’s required in the multiplayer.

Well, at least some of the multiplayer. I’m sad to see there aren’t many custom games being played anymore, which were the refuge for kids like me who sucked at ladder matches. If you played a lot of Tree Defense, Bunker Wars, Jail Break, Stacked Cannon Defense, Raccoon City, and all the others back in the early 2000’s on US East, you may have played with a baby Uni. If so, I apologize, but I also thank you for being a part of a very foundational part of my love for games, even if nowadays I have more fun criticizing the single player campaigns that no one cares about anyways.

If you want to know what this game is like, go to the Beat Saber page and choose a random review to read. (https://www.backloggd.com/reviews/everyone/eternity/recent/beat-saber/)

Did you get a good one? Maybe you did, but you may have gotten one that’s not even a complete sentence, or maybe it was just a complaint that makes no sense to you. This is the experience of wading through user-generated content in a nutshell, whether that be something like Backloggd, Reddit, or Beat Saber itself, a rhythm game that coyly skirts around the problems associated with music distribution by having players create their own charts and share them unofficially. This is where the majority of the game’s content comes from, and why a link to other people’s stuff really is the best way to summarize the experience. It’s a loop of going to where the loosely sorted pile of user-created material is, hopefully digging out something good, trying it, and deleting it afterwards if it didn’t meet expectations. On top of that, you have to hope that the artists you like are among the few with good charts, that the genres you’re into are well-represented, and that the difficulty of the highly rated ones isn’t too extreme. If not, the entire appeal has been crippled, especially when the score-attack aspect that’s core to rhythm games is implemented with a bizarre system that rewards how widely you swing arms instead of actual rhythm.

So, with all that in mind, it’s almost impossible for me to give Beat Saber a rating. Its quality rests upon its effectiveness as a platform for content that is not its own, and even the sharing functionality itself is coordinated by fans. The best I can say is that it’s a great skeleton for a game, and the few amazing charts I found proved how fun the concept can be, but that means “it’s potentially fun” is the highest evaluation it could earn, and that’s not a metric that’s hard to beat.

Why aren’t there more love games? The term “love game” itself sounds extremely weird, but love songs are practically all you hear on the radio, and for a while, it seemed like every movie regardless of genre had a romance subplot. Meanwhile, pretty much the only games about romance are dating sims, a niche genre that is frequently mocked and perceived as lesser than the highbrow and urbane violence we’re accustomed to. Maybe it's because romance doesn't translate to interactivity very neatly, making it hard to get players involved in the drama, and causing even the best emotional climax completely flop for a large portion of the audience. Recognizing this potential problem, Final Fantasy 9 did something pretty smart, setting up multiple love stories in parallel to resonate with almost anyone’s personal experience. Each party member’s personal journey revolves around a different kind of story, from a classic fairy-tale romance to something more abstract, like the love of one’s people or country. The game skillfully balances the focus on each of them by mixing combinations of characters, letting their different perspectives build on each other to give players insight into the authors' thoughts about being in love.

Of course, the amount of patience that players will have for indulging the parts that don’t resonate is another matter entirely, especially when so much of the central plot and gameplay are grounded by a love of the franchise itself. While this may include the best parts of the series, like its beautiful aesthetic and compelling characters, the worst parts are here too, like two-dimensional villains and a pace that is uncomfortably slow at times. Towards the end in particular, the love it shows for classic Final Fantasy grandiosity borders on obsession, and it muddles the beautiful individual stories with unnecessarily high stakes. It’s a case of missing the forest for the trees, forgetting that the big dramatic showdowns of the series were memorable as a payoff for emotional investment, not just for their own sake. Final Fantasy 9 may stumble when it comes to the handling and pacing of those big scenes, but luckily, the little interpersonal moments are strong enough to make up for it. It’s a game where I recognize all the flaws, and I wouldn’t say that I like it as much as other RPG's, but for the whole-hearted appreciation I have for a game trying to tell this kind of story, I guess I have to admit that I love it.

There’s a little saying about this game which summarizes the situation beautifully: “Max Payne 3 is the sequel no one wanted; Max Payne 4 is the sequel everyone wants, but will never get“. Of course, you can’t blame fans for the initial skepticism, given how the game’s development was famously troubled, passing from studio to studio and undergoing delay after delay. On top of that, moving the narrative to Brazil seemed incredibly bizarre when the originals were entrenched in an iconic New York City noir, and had already resolved the conflict at the center of the story. It seemed like Max Payne 3 was just an attempt to slap a known brand on a different, lesser product in order to generate more sales, but this isn’t the entire truth. When you actually play it, it feels great, and was only eclipsed by Control seven years later for how spectacularly chaotic its gunfights are. The polish that went into every detail is staggering, making shots feel deadly through punchy sound design and environments that explode with reactive effects, along with a soundtrack that’s good enough to listen to on its own. Really, the only part that lets Max Payne 3 down is its confused handling of the series’ baggage, which is made all the more disappointing when Max is accompanied by a sidekick character who could have just been the protagonist himself, and allowed for a creatively unrestrained story. However, at this point there are a lot more constraints on making another sequel than just the narrative. Max Payne 3 had a budget of 105 million dollars, and it took a year to make that back by reaching four million copies sold. Meanwhile, Rockstar’s own Grand Theft Auto 5 cost 137 million dollars to develop, and is now the most profitable entertainment product ever after selling ~140 million units. No matter how much retroactive praise Max Payne gets, the likelihood for Rockstar to dedicate that level of production value to another linear campaign is slim when other investments are so much more promising.

However, that really might not be as bad as it sounds. Control is a particularly good point of reference for this discussion, because its creators, Remedy Entertainment, were the original people behind the Max Payne series. It’s not that the brand itself has a sacred property that gives it ownership of visually spectacular gunfights, or is the only intellectual property that can stand out with a stylized narrative presentation, these concepts are still moving on as strong as ever. The takeaway here isn’t to blame Max Payne 3’s awkward branding for killing the potential of its gameplay, but to recognize that these are two separate things in the first place. Other studios could make the Max Payne 4 that fans are begging for, even if it doesn’t have the same name attached. It’s all the more reason to celebrate and support smaller studios who are less beholden to make mega hits and can craft unique games without working their staff to death. That’s the sort of sequel that would respect the legacy of Max Payne more than an actual trademark ever could.

I absolutely love this game, but if you know how it works, you probably shouldn’t buy it.

That may sound odd, especially when it’s a social co-op game that was popularized by Twitch streams, but playing with that context may actually hurt your experience. Personally, all I knew about Phasmophobia going in was that it was about ghost hunting, it had online co-op, and it had a well-received VR mode. Luckily I had buds who were willing to buy the game even when they knew as little as I did, along with a VR headset, which makes anything scary about ten times scarier. We all agreed not to look up anything about the game, nothing about how any of the items work, nothing about the behavior of the ghosts, everything we learned would be through experimentation. The twenty hours it took for us to learn these lessons and go from “the idiots in the abandoned house” to “The Bustin’ Crew” were fantastic, since the gameplay itself is so unique, along with its satisfying learning process, and the added hilarity of learning how your friends would act in a scary situation. However, as soon as we knew how things worked, all that was left was going through the motions, doing the same things on the same maps over and over again. Repetitiveness is the most common critique to see in reviews, but I believe this issue has been aggravated due the aforementioned viral nature of the game’s popularity. If you watch a few streams of it, you’ll know the maps and how to play effectively, and will only get a few hours of interest from it before it feels tedious. If you play with friends or randoms who already know the maps, you will follow them or just be told how everything works, and the appeal will dry up quickly. It’s also natural for any game that generates its content randomly and doesn’t have a set progression path to be considered repetitive to some degree, as the only definitive endpoint is getting bored and deciding to move onto something else.

I do realize that’s a pretty bad sell for a game I want people to play, though. “Check out this game, except don’t research it, just take my word for it, and also convince three of your friends to do the same thing, and it’ll get repetitive eventually” is hardly the best way to get people to shell out cash. However, the humor, the terror, the mystery, and the uniqueness of learning how to hunt ghosts is so compelling to me that I really want people to see it for themselves. Sometimes the best experiences are the ones that take you by surprise.

Praising its atmosphere while admonishing its unrefined gameplay is the obvious route to go for a review of Demon’s Souls. Some people aren’t drawn in by its dark tone, some can’t adjust to its weighty combat, this is the sort of analytical static that will probably surround it forever. However, there is one aspect to it that completely eclipses its successors which is a little less obvious, in the brilliant way it structures itself as an open-ended game. Just as Demon’s Souls has the endless static of “atmospheric but clunky”, all three Dark Souls games carry the criticism of “great when you don’t have to constantly warp between locations” to some extent. So, how did Demon’s Souls actually manage to get it right on the first try?

The best way to point out what makes it so good is to start with the counterpoint of Dark Souls in particular. After gaining the ability to warp between bonfires, the first of the four open-ended areas you tackle will probably be a decent challenge, but after that, your character will be so kitted out that the rest will be trivial. Not only that, but the quality of these areas varies dramatically, with Lost Izalith perhaps being the nadir of the entire series. Meanwhile, Demon’s Souls doesn’t just set you loose to tackle each of its zones in a linear fashion, it encourages you to mix it up by giving each area multiple layers of incentives. The most obvious is the supplies you can farm from each area: healing grass in Boletaria, upgrade materials in Stonefang, magic spice in Latria, souls in Shrine of Storms, and lotuses in Valley of Defilement. The next layer is with the titular souls themselves, which heavily incentivize players to challenge themselves for great rewards. Magic users don’t just run to a shop and buy the best abilities, they have to brave one of the most punishing areas of the game for a basic kit, then actually defeat bosses and use their souls for the best abilities. Similarly, miracles can provide great utility, but you have to actually go defeat some bosses and use their souls to earn that advantage. The last layer is the way that each of these incentives were intelligently balanced around which players would want to come there first. Strength-based warriors would want to go to Stonefang for its upgrade materials, but most of the enemies there are highly resistant to slashing damage. Mages want to go to Latria, but it’s filled with a mix of low-level enemies to waste your spell power alongside highly powerful spellcasters who can demolish low-HP builds in one shot.

A counterargument to all of this may, counterintuitively, arise from the biggest fans of the game. If you know where everything is, you probably only need to kill three or four bosses in total before your build is online. However, this is a case where you need to put yourself back in the mindset of a blind playthrough. This game was designed for people who had never seen anything like this before, and the designers worked hard to convey the information we can take for granted in a naturalistic way. Players can be counted on to try and find the most efficient path forward, so by mixing layers of incentives with a difficulty level that forces characters outside their comfort zone, players wordlessly get sucked into exploring every corner as a real adventurer. They make decisions about which areas are worth exploring right now, which to avoid, and which bosses might give the most useful spells, relevant weapons, or simply the highest amount of souls. Players poke at the defenses, make mental notes, explore, and learn while jumping from place to place and making progress one step at a time. This is the genius at the heart of the game’s nonlinearity: in breaking into distinct areas, it constructs a cohesive adventure. I think that’s a major factor of why the hostile atmosphere is a commonly discussed topic, since it’s such a perfect fit for a game that wants you to feel threatened and to be observant for any possible advantage. Really though, it’s not just the atmosphere, it’s the mechanics, difficulty, and even its story that harmoniously build upon its open structure to create one of the best adventure experiences in gaming. Other games may have refined its ideas, but none of them quite replicate the unique feel that Demon’s Souls achieved. If you haven’t played it, please give it a try, it’s been a longstanding member of my top ten for all these reasons and more.

P.S. I haven’t played the remake or even seen much footage from it, so I can’t comment if it’s an adequate substitution. If a PS5 is all you have available, it would probably be fine, but when in doubt, I always lean towards the original.

Have you ever cooked a meal without using salt? If you haven’t done a lot of cooking before, it’s easy to forget to salt things properly, especially when salt doesn’t really have a flavor of its own. Saltiness is just a component of the sense of taste in itself, so it’s hard to pin down how much you really need, but experienced cooks will tell you that if your dish feels incomplete and the flavors aren’t as vibrant as you wanted, the first thing you should do is add salt.

Tyranny is a game with no salt. All the ingredients for a great RPG are here, with fun companions, an interesting world with a unique story to tell, an involved magic system, and thought-provoking decisions to make, but it still feels incomplete. I can’t point to a core flaw or to any specific feature that should have been added or removed, it’s just… it’s missing something. The flavor isn’t popping. Some people want their RPG’s to have a big, cathartic, emotional climax, others love quiet moments among trusted companions, and I can’t tell which of the many possibilities would have made Tyranny stand out. The game feels unfinished, not in the way that it barely runs or only has half the content it promised, but in that it’s missing some kind of moment that would tie the whole thing together. It’s still perfectly enjoyable, and fans of Obsidian certainly know how to appreciate an undercooked game, but it breaks my heart that they keep putting out these beautiful concepts without the refinement to make them unqualified classics. You could even say that it makes me feel a little...

New Vegas and Morrowind have a shared, magical little quality that I think has gone mostly unnoticed even after all these years, something that’s been in plain sight but critically under-discussed. And that is:

Their titles.

… Not that the words themselves are what's particularly special, but how their respective titular locations actually do define the entire game. Morrowind was so interesting because it, for the most part, bucked the fantasy trend of having an unambiguously defined hero, and players instead had to prove themselves to all the various societies in the region. Each group interprets the role of the Nerevarine differently, in a way that reflects their values, conveying an understanding to the player of Morrowind and its people. New Vegas works the exact same way, with a similarly undestined hero slowly learning about all the conflicts that shape life in the Mojave. The opening hours of the game are genius for how they introduce the daily struggle of the wastelanders, the cruelty of the Legion, the ineffectual bureaucracy of the NCR, the brutal lives of the urban Freesiders, and finally, the resources of the strip that they’re all counting on to save them. Making it to the strip is only where the game begins, and even by then, the player has already been fully integrated in the setting. Choices have been made that had the weight of consequence, not just from the mechanical standpoint of NPC reputation, but from the knowledge that those choices could impact the future of New Vegas. You know an RPG is something special when you could take out all the skill points, character attributes, and traits but still have a compelling roleplaying experience, and that’s why I think it’s stuck in people’s minds the way Morrowind has. Gameplay systems may age, but a thoughtfully constructed world with relatable characters in a conflict you’re invested in has a timeless appeal.

Addendum on the DLC (includes some spoilers):
The date listed for this completion is for a replay, which was also the first time I played the DLC, so here’s the DLC for the review.
Firstly, Dead Money was an odd lurch in tone, but it’s probably my favorite of the bunch. It’s an interesting post-apocalyptic story that could honestly stand on its own, but its themes actually do tie back into the main story in an elegant way, coloring the player’s view of each faction with an understanding of how dangerous a fixation on the past can be. Just wish there were fewer bear traps.
Honest Hearts feels like a Yin-and-Yang companion piece to Dead Money, with societies that are trying to start without the baggage of the past. However, while obsessing on the past is dangerous, you can’t escape from its influence. In other ways, it feels like the rest of New Vegas in miniature, including its problems, most notably having a half-baked villain. A little bland as an expansion but basically ok.
Old World Blues is… a thing? I heard it was the best for years, but I found the dialog to be so painfully unfunny that I nearly stopped playing. Apparently there has been quite the heel-turn on how much people like it now though, and it’s been slowly sliding down the ranks. I just don’t have a feel for what this DLC was trying to say, other than “stupid sci-fi is fun”.
However, Lonesome Road might actually be my least favorite for other reasons. While Old World Blues is painful to listen to, I think this one actually hurts the narrative of the main game, which is hard to forgive. It attaches mythological significance to your character at the very last moment, and suddenly defines a specific backstory that robs players of the history they built with their character. While the rest of the game hinted at what Ulysses was like, it never went so far as to actually set up a conflict with him, so he had to patiently explain your own backstory to you in order to manufacture enough drama for the final showdown to occur. After all that, you can still just convince him to just bury the hatchet and walk away, which seems like an unusual option. As much as I hate forced combat in a game that lets you focus on speechcraft, I think that the game let slip a beautifully tragic theme of irreconcilable differences. Metal Gear Rising put it in a way that's oddly fitting for New Vegas:

Standing here, I realize you are just like me, trying to make history.
But who’s to judge the right from wrong?
When our guard is down I think we’ll both agree that violence breeds violence, but in the end it has to be this way.
I’ve carved my own path, you followed your wrath, but maybe we’re both the same.
The world has turned and so many have burned, but nobody is to blame.
Yet staring across this barren wasted land, I feel new life will be born, beneath the blood stained sand.

I think if Ulysses was more of a perfect devil’s advocate, who would always rationally and passionately stand for everything you stand against, killing him would be an incredibly emotional moment. If the series’ theme is “War never changes”, the courier’s final challenge being the most basic human violence of brother against brother, courier against courier, it would have been a perfect parallel to the past, to Romulus and Remus, and to the future, to the Bull and Bear. I imagine that this idea was the original concept, but sadly, it didn’t quite shake out.

Sorry that addendum went on longer than the actual review, thanks for making it all the way down here, I hope you're having a great day.

I don’t drink. I’ve never even been to a bar, and I feel a weird sort of melancholy about it. One of mankind’s longest traditions is to come home from work and enjoy a beer or hang out with your mates at the bar, so I wish alcohol didn’t taste like paint to my immature palette. VA-11 Hall-A only made this little fear-of-missing-out worse, since it’s the perfect romantic version of the bar experience. The lights are low and moody, you get to choose which songs are playing, it’s quiet enough to understand people, and everyone there is friendly and attractive. Since chapters are separated by individual nights, and most people will be playing the game right after coming home from work or school, it ends up naturally emulating the reality it intends to portray, with nights in game corresponding to your nights in real life. These qualities make for a game that feels weirdly comfortable, it's just a nice visual novel with some fun characters and a great atmosphere that you can sink into like a lounge chair. I think there’s a lot of potential for games to build off the knowledge of their audience like this and create relaxing experiences, and this an interesting pioneering of the concept. On the other hand, maybe the real thing would always be better, but until my taste in alcohol is as unimpeachable as my taste in games, I’ll just keep enjoying VA-11 Hall-A.

If someone put a gun to my head and told me to write reviews that didn’t start and end with statements of only borderline relevance, I would probably tell them to pull the trigger. A good hook is critical to piquing interest, and compromising its effectiveness in any way can dramatically weaken the entire review, or prevent the establishment of an interesting through-line altogether. It would be like requiring a game to lack a unique selling point, which is hard to even imagine when it’s such a basic rule of marketing a product. However, Prince of Persia might just be an example of what that would look like. It doesn’t add anything to the series’ parkour gameplay, the iconic time manipulation of the Sands of Time trilogy has been taken out, and the overarching structure has shifted into a basic collectathon of 540 glowing orbs. Much has been said over its decision to have the prince’s companion always rescue him from fatal mistakes, and while I disagree that this contextualized checkpoint system makes the game easier, it does drain the tension that was unique to this style of gameplay. The only hook Prince of Persia could be said to have is its beautiful animated-movie style presentation, with all its polished animations and details that flesh out the characters without interrupting gameplay. However, details like these are supposed to be icing on the cake, and aren’t a substitution for fun and engaging interactivity. A spoonful of icing can be a treat, but it’s not a good idea to make an entire cake out of the stuff.

You’ve fallen through the ice at -20°C, turning a normal supply run into a fight for your life. Your clothes are soaked-through and beginning to freeze, you have no choice but to throw them off and scramble to safety, praying you have enough useful consciousness to make it there. Building a fire can be difficult at the best of times, and your shaking hands and soaked supplies aren’t making it any easier. It’s all going to come down to the resourcefulness you can show in these agonizing minutes that will make the difference between life and death.

Stories like that are exciting, right? That’s what this game should be about, those moments of survival where you’re perched on a knife’s edge and have to be smart to survive. But oddly enough, The Long Dark has such a weird balance with its survival gameplay that players are never really put in situations where these moments could occur.

The best way to break down the problem is to analyze the game’s five meters: heat, energy, hunger, thirst, and status. To keep your heat up, you can just stay inside, rest near a fire, or wear clothes to slow the drain when you’re outside. Your energy level drains proportionately to your physical activity and replenishes upon sleeping, and hunger and thirst work in a similar way. Status is essentially the catch-all score card, being diminished if you’re overworked, hungry, dehydrated, sick, or injured. That sounds sensible, but consider what this incentivises players to do: minimize physical activity and stay inside. This solves the heat, energy, injury, and sickness problems, and it also kinda solves the hydration problem. Water can be easily melted from snow, and since your environment is so snowy, you aren’t even required to go outside to collect it. If you’re in a house with a stove, you can boil enough water to last roughly two weeks in an hour, trivializing this requirement entirely. So, the only reason to ever leave your house is to gather food, in a process which still doesn’t prompt the sort of player-driven stories the game needs. Simply following a road and cleaning out settlements gives an abundance of food, and you can even survive about four days with no food before your status drains to zero. So, the optimal way to survive is to do nothing for three and a half days, eat a big meal, then do it again. When you’re out of food, move to the next settlement, pick up endlessly respawning sticks along the way for building fires, and do it again. In each settlement, there will be more than just food too, so the ammo, clothes, and other supplies you find make it easier and safer every time.

The immediate argument to be made against that is “of course you want to stay inside, this game is meant to be realistic”, but realism isn’t interesting on its own. What is The Long Dark’s realism in service of? It’s interesting for a few hours as you learn the ropes, but after that there’s nothing left to maintain the engagement. Players can make the game more punishing with the impressively comprehensive custom difficulty sliders, but if they don’t change the fundamental dominant strategy of sitting on your arse, then that’s all the game will ever boil down to. To test that point, I decided to pretend the goal of the game was to traverse the longest route from one end of the map to the other, and this was a journey I found incredibly enjoyable. I set personal rules like not allowing myself to overburden my pack or store items in safehouses, and it ended up being a tense and interesting experience that I genuinely enjoyed. It’s this sort of challenge that would let players build personal stories, not the blank sheet of paper that is its main survival mode or the bland fetch quests of its story episodes. I may have had a great time making my own fun out of it, but I can’t recommend a game where I had to invent my own objectives, set my own rules, tweak difficulty sliders manually, and hold myself to those limitations in the face of their artificiality. Crafting games just shouldn’t require you to craft the game itself.

EA is probably the most universally despised game publisher out there, but Konami’s behavior starting with the seventh console generation made them a real contender for the title. Creating a beautiful remastering of MGS3’s big scenes just for a pachinko machine, canceling Kojima’s take on Silent Hill, and turning Castlevania into a God of War ripoff has led to the biggest face-heel turn in the history of the industry. However, even though Konami deserves a lot of the animosity they got from these actions (and many other similarly tone-deaf ones), I’m not convinced that Lords of Shadow actually deserves to be lumped in with them, in spite of its mediocrity.

To get it out of the way, yes, Lords of Shadow is the sort of top-down, chain-swinging God of War derivative that was so popular during the seventh gen. However, when it comes to formats to copy, God of War is actually a pretty good fit for Castlevania. The style was crafted to show off the bestiary of the Greek mythological canon, so copying this established pattern for Castlevania’s similar mishmash of monsters was a solid basis for a reboot. This may raise the question of why Castlevania felt the need to change at all, but even Nintendo doesn’t trust their number-one video game mascot of all time to sell consoles through sidescrollers alone. Even a game as universally beloved as Symphony of the Night being a platformer was controversial at first, and after its own slew of sequels, moving to a new style was a proven way to maintain the brand. In spite of how Lords of Shadow wears its derivative nature on its sleeve, it actually does accomplish this, carrying the core elements of the brand forward to a new generation. The visual design of all the monsters is incredible, the settings are beautiful, and the times that the game’s original concepts come out are truly great. It’s a wonderful mix of the romantic style of fairy tales and the edge of dark fantasy the series is known for, making for a game that feels fresh, yet respectful of what came before.

So, if Lords of Shadow is actually conceptually sound, why didn’t it become as beloved as the series’ previous reimagining? Well, as much as I’ll defend the decision to shake things up and praise how vivid its fantasy is, it’s all moot in the face of a game that no one wants to finish. Lords of Shadow is an eighteen-hour long action game, when what’s considered the best of the genre, God of War 2, topped out at twelve. Not only that, but Lords of Shadow takes much longer to get good, only getting interesting at around the eight hour mark. Even in the good parts, boring traversal and repetitious fights drag down the quality. As good as I think the final chapters are, I wouldn’t say they’re so good that they justify the time investment, and that’s the sort of thought that I just can’t get out of my head when it comes to Lords of Shadow. It has great moments buried in a trough of mediocrity, a beautiful fantasy style dulled by repetition, and a solid concept made unimpressive by its lack of innovation. It’s not that it’s bad thanks to being a cynical cash-grab from Konami, but because of much less dramatic reasons, like the development team not having the experience or a tight enough scope to fully deliver on the concept. Unfortunately, with the sequel being even more maligned than the original, and Konami shuttering its games division, it looks like this will be the last time a Castlevania game would ever show the embers of what made the series so great. I can forgive Konami for the failings of this game, but for cutting its history short, that’s something I’ll find it hard to let go.