About a decade ago, I got Castlevania: Lords of Shadow for the PS3 to fill the hole in my heart that God of War left. It looked and played very good, but somehow I just never got into it. Turned out, if you wanna play God of War, you should play God of War. Still, Mercury Steam had quite some success with that franchise and evolved ever since from the guys who successfully pitched a Castlevania game to Konami to the team who successfully pitched Metroid to Nintendo to a point, where they might now be their go-to studio for future 2D Metroid iterations. Still, when Dread got announced, while appreciating how stylish it turned out, I was skeptical and it would take a whole year for me to finally throw that game into my shopping basket.
The whole aspect of "Dread" made me worried. I usually hate games that would put you into stressful situations with timers or something hunting you, so how should this really be for me?
I sorta hesitated to really get into the game too quick, I expected the EMMI sequences to be something I might just have to live with, if I wanna experience that main iteration of that franchise, for better or worse. At first I ran around, appreciated how amazing it looks and how great Samus felt to move and traverse through the world but there was always the fear of something ruining the game for me, maybe EMMI or maybe some boss-fight thats just so frustrating or some other stupid design decision. I just didn't really trust Mercury Steam to take a franchise over, that got so iconic, a whole video-game genre got named after it (+Castlevania of course).

And boy, was I wrong.

After the second EMMI encounter, I realized the biggest problem I had was just in my head. I somewhere read someone saying, he would just treat EMMI encounters as puzzles and suddenly, they all worked perfectly fine for me. I just took the time to eventually die over and over again, but due to Dreads design-choice to just create soft-savepoints ahead of these encounters (or bosses) , this never got annoying or problematic.

Then came my second worry, the bosses. And it turns out, of all Metroidvania games out there (and there are a LOT) Dread might be the one with the best bossfights. They all feel superhard and make you question if you ever gonna beat this or just stop right here for ever. But they are always so cleverly constructed, that it never feels like the game's fault when you bite the dust.You just weren't fast enough. You just didn't dodge in the right moment. You just didn't understand that creature's attack pattern yet. And It's always made so easy for you to get back into the action and try again, just one.more.time. And suddenly you did it and feel like you can master ANYTHING. Dread really manages to push your self-confidence into space after achieving to beat a boss or solve one of the dozens of hidden puzzles where you need to combine a set of skills to get an item.

Everything else might have been said over and over again. The world-areas are brilliant, the integration of elements like fire, water, ice felt fresh (although this somehow has been there since NES times, idk how they did it) although I wish the game had more of those physics-puzzles; for instance playing with water-levels felt clever but these puzzles came just very irregularly and were so rare that in stress-situations you wouldn't realize you had to think that way as its more unusual for this game. A bit more would have made it more natural.

Special kudos to the crazy variety in enemies, many might follow quite similar patterns, but it was always cool to see something new.

And now to the one bad part of the game: the soundtrack. There might be a clear reason why it is what it is: Metroid expects the player to switch from area to area, sometimes within minutes, traversing a lot of different environments all the time. Of course it would be too much to always go through 15secs of that amazingly composed track just to jump into the next one, the next one ..... and all of that in a game that took me 16+ hours to beat. So yes, it's not really a problem, but still, it's funny when people say they couldn't recall one single track of the entire soundtrack after playing this for dozens of hours. And even that very backgroundy ambient soundtrack could still have a better production quality to fit the excellent visual presentation (like Hollow Knight!).
When the credits rolled, I almost facepalmed over the 1990s MIDI doodledeedaa. I mean this had some sort of old school style, but also was such a forgettable melody, I couldn't even recall this now. Although the Metroid world would have had so many great tunes to give.

The worst part about this somehow was, that it also proved how little a bad soundtrack could really affect the actual game. I mean, sure, maybe it wasn't so bad after all, or at least good enough to carry the atmosphere. But despite my problems with the compositions (or the lack of em) I just had the best time with that game. I mean literally. It quickly turned out to become my favorite Metroid game and maybe favorite Metroidvania ever. There's just so much done right here, so many small things, so many right decisions. After Metroid Prime 3, I really got annoyed by the Metroid concept to be returning over and over and over again. Always single rooms with returning enemies in the same places. Funny thing, Dread also follows these paradigms and yet it never becomes tedious. I still hope they try out more new things with Prime 4, but for Mercury Steam I believe they found an amazing balance between very old-school concepts and very modern approaches toward them that they should immediately continue to implement and further evolve in many, many Metroid games to come. They initially went to Nintendo, pitching a Metroid Fusion Remaster. Well 2 months ago I would've been on the fence about that, today it'd be a Day1.

It is ridiculous how a game this calm, slow paced and silent can create such opposing contrasts in perception. Up from moments of awe, love and appreciation for the amazing design choices the studio made down to frustration hell like I've never experienced it before.

I can generally accept a game demanding me to be patient, especially when it comes to letting an AI driven NPC find its way through the world. But there are so many times when actions just don't work, are misinterpreted and in few cases even buggy to a point where I had to reload the save file, that it sometimes feels more like being a beta tester to go through all the hurdles so the edges can be smoothed out. But they aren't and its a constant try, try, fail, repeat to a point where I just have my smartphone ready to play something whenever Trico again decided to go into a completely opposite direction of where I need to go. I mean the latter would still be explainable that this game isn't as straight forward accessible as a Super Mario or even Soulslike game where every input matters. But so often it feels less like having to guide a pet or a child even and really just like failing at trying to make that NPC-AI progress through the game. Trico is such an amazing virtual creation of a believable lifeform, that it sometimes feels sort of on purpose, when he (or she?) wouldn't go where you want just to state the fact that this NPC isn't like others. In many cases this indeed creates some nice scenes where Trico actually behaves like its following its own agenda, a concept that Team Ico already mastered in their previous games. Like Agro, the horse in Shadow of the Colossus, already stood out of other horses or even mounts, as he wouldn't just steer with a 1:1 transation of your inputs, but often feel like he would really just carry you and agree to the direction you want him to go. Back then, this workd perfectly fine. Here it often just doesn't.

And still I can only subtract one star as the brave decision to create something so unique over such a long development time that must have been pretty nasty, looking at how often this felt like being in dev-limbo and got delayed, can only be praised with huge respect. I am sure it is way harder to create something outstanding today than it was 20 years ago, at least on an AAA level but that's exactly what Fumida Ueda managed to pull off here.

I played this game halfway through and at some point it got me so unnerved, I had to stop it for a while, not knowing if I'd ever pick it up again. But at some point when playing through the Horizon Zero Dawns and God of Wars of this world, you just want to experience something that stands out so I'm glad I just let go and stopped fighting against that natural gravitation that would drag me back into this great world and its great story.Once you stop caring too much whether you progress or not, it becomes less frustrating. I wouldn't say that this is the message I want a game to have, but at least in this case it definitely helps and rewards you with an amazing journey like nothing that came before or after it that will definitely find a more durable place inside any gamer's heart than the next Assassin's Creed or Call of Duty game.

Genesis Noir is an outstanding achievement in visual storytelling. Evan Anthony, one of the main brains behind this game, already had a beautiful portfolio of motion designs and interactive use cases, like working for Google on animations, beforehand. Playing Genesis Noir is just like diving into an artists brain, there are so many feelings and views and impressions raining down on you, mostly just presenting thoughts and things, the creator might just have in their mind and thought they'd show it to us in this deeply personalized way that feels like getting a share of his most abstract dream.
I gotta confess, I didn't get 100% of whats going on, maybe not even 70% but the main premise of mashing the creation and death of the universe with a 1930ies classic murder case, brought to live by the greatest animation work that looks like Saul Bass forget to take his meds (in a good way) and live recorded Jazz music that alone makes it worth playing through the game another time, all of that carry so much additional value, that its fine if some story bits are left for interpretation.

Only cons are some actual gameplay ones. I mean the game isn't very complex, but playing on a Switch/console makes it at some point cleat, the game wasn't optimized for this. It plays OK but often when you have to select things, you gotta steer a mouse cursor, when you ask yourself, why can't you just select stuff with the analogue stick or even tap on the Switch's screen. There are a lot of similar situations, where mouse-cursor focused control schemes drag you out of this jazzy intergalactic feverdream, slapping UX-realities in your face to make you realize, its an indie game that probably didn't have the budget to fine tune this experience for all devices, although I'd say thes should absolutely do a version for mobile devices as it could work perfectly well for that.

In the end its among those games, I never thought I need in my life, I just stumbled over it through Youtube, immediately bought it when there wo barely any coverage, thought at least its gonna be visually interesting, but apart from just being that, its a mind-expanding journey told by all instruments of multimedia. Its a perfect game if you need some more casual, relaxing yet audiovisually interesting breaks from your Elden Ring bossfights or just something to sip a coffee or whiskey to.

Let's get some things out of the way beforehand. There are some things that are mediocre or even bad in DE, which to some might feel like kicking a cow in india, but thats just the way it is.

C O N S :

- steering with a Joypad on a Switch not always felt amazing It's quite impressive that they managed to optimize this for mouse, joypad and even touch, but I encountered some passages that were pretty uncool to control. With a mouse/finger you click where you wanna go and the character would go there. With a joypad you need to guess where you can go and often thats just not possible. Also the running animation doesn't feel dynamic enough to be fun to steer with an analog stick which is also something that doesn't matter with a mouse.

- Interface and items on consoles
maybe I didn't put enough skill points into my real-alter-egos interfacing perk, but first of all, the whole way they handled items and their usage with R3 and L3 is weirdly implemented. As soon as you understand it, its OK but they way they handle this never feels well documented and its a lot of guesswork which item you can put on L3 and R3 to use yourself and which item is just activated when you need it. Second the latter, the activated ones, this was not very well done. You get a prybar and think "cool I got a prybar now" but of course after the first usage you keep it for the rest of the game, believing you might need it as it says it would just open locked things. Guess what, you'll never need it again. And the same thing happens to most items that are not usables like drugs or cigarettes. I guess I'm just too used to have a prybar as that single most important item like in Half Life. But if you don't let me use it, just make him throw it away after it never will make any sense again.

- Clothes. I mean for many this says it all. There have been memes around the game making you go through every single garment item before any white check to see if theres anything useful to push your stats. This is very tedious and among the biggest reasons that hold me back playing the game again immediately. Surely I'm gonna but I need a break from clothes-browsing.

- Some Bugs, freezes. No Armageddon but still annoyances worth mentioning.

- At some points it can happen that you are sorta clueless and thats when it can become a bit bland and frustrating. Usually there are some threads to follow and one leads to the other and there are always dialogues and stuff... but when the game demands you to find that one clue to get the story moving forward, it can become pretty hard and tedious to find that, ending up running around, talking to people again, searching all possible dialogue trees (including choosing a lot of things that you deliberately didn't choose before to stay in character but then try out because maybe it helps progressing). Its not necessarily a huge strength.


P R O S :

+ ..... I'm kidding, of course I won't list all the great things now like a list as this list would take forever.
I am more and more turning to someone who prefers to only play indie titles for the rest of my life as after Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium is just another game that breaks all known borders of how smart a game can be without ever feeling pretentious or cheesy. It's absolutely highly recommended to watch some making of videos about Studio ZAUM on Youtube as it makes clear, this is just one of those games, that just happen as a result of a lot of happy or not so happy developments, circumstances, a lot of luck and even more work but can't ever be done again like this. If you read Jason Schreyer's books about the hell many companies and especially indie studios had to go through to get anything out, it seems like a paradox that an estonian team that never did a videogame before would create an RPG game to rule all RPG games through .... its writing. I mean seriously?
Well, gamerpeople, the joke's on you, it turns out, that books are still the most immersive medium over interactive media and combining these two might rarely end up being a success. But when it does, it is called Disco Elysium.

I could write a lot more great things about this game, but I feel I should leave it as spoilerfree as this. Maybe the absolutely wonderful soundtrack and of course the voice acting (by the way the narrator wasn't even a voice actor and might be the best I listened to in years) has deserved some special credits.
I am just utterly grateful to be alive at a time when this game came out to experience it along many others for the first time. Needless to say that, while I filled some paragraphs with some cons before, none of them matter anymore once you see the credits roll.

What the hell is this game. Haven't been sucked into addiction like this in ages. Sometimes when I have to force myself to quit this game to finally find some sleep (which Grindstone is great at ruining as all the endorphines being spread when chaining your endless combo-splatter-chains)
this really did catch me off guard when I was just following a recommendation after activating that 3-month trial of the Apple Arcade. I do believe that theres nothing on AA coming even close. Like Last Campfire is an absolutely beautiful piece of game but I just lost interest after a while as I felt I played too many games like this before. Grindstone might also use similar triggers as some other of these block-rocking games, but it expands this principle through almost RPGlike fighting mechanics which sound just as weird as it is fun. I wish I could just buy this game standalone but will just continue playing it day for day and am still waiting for the fatigue to emerge at my gaminghorizon but so far theres a constant and steady flow of new ideas and concepts to spice up the gameplay which at its core remains very solid and pretty much always the same at an almost laughable simplictity.

Kirby games never fully clicked with me, so Nintendo took a truck, loaded it with just everything they got and unloaded it over my head.
There's no escape. You have to dig this if you're into platformers. I still wouldn't say its my favorite one EVER but theres just so much creative gamedesign, so many ideas to chuckle about, such a nice visual language, such an accessible gameplay, the whole game is playable in Coop, aaand so on, it turned out to be perfect for my kids and actually the first game they really enjoyed playing in coop.

I would even dare to say, this is to the Kirby series what BotW was to Zelda. Although with Zelda I could have understood if some disliked them abandoning so many learned paradigms. In Kirby's case I can't really understand how anyone would ever go back. And its so funny to me as Kirby always felt like such an 1980ies kind of franchise. Now seeing him sucking cars to 70% completion is just as stupidly funny as if this was what he always was meant to do.

Just started a new savegame thanks to having access to it over NSO and for me personally this game aged way, way better than I would have thought. Especially as the PAL version was in 50Hz, this game, like most N64 games on NSO, feel sorta fresh to me now as the framerates are way snappier and the gameplay feels just that bit faster and more fluid.
Of course this game has some things that didn't age so well, just like its spiritual successor Yookah Lylee, the worlds can feel sorta empty, some moves don't always feel so much fun to be executed and the camera not always shows what you wanna see (but for me, now having the direct comparison after playing M64 and BK along, BKs camera was the way more future proof one, especially as it didn't have to be treated as an entity of its own)
And looking at some N64 games that today feel superdated, blurry, blocky, BK still feels just like I remember it to be nearly 25 years ago, when my teenager-me locked himself in his room for a week, playing through the whole game like he would have had never done before with any video game.
The audiovisual depth carried by the gamedesign, the quests and the supercomplex moveset delivered a diverse experience that you would have had with a complex RPG with extensive menus and a HUD. But no, they managed to do everything with sorta minimal interfaces and, yeah, a lot of things to collect.
The whole recipe doesn't cook as well tody as it did in '98, but after looking at Mario's Odyssey, one can't argue that BK has influenced that genre for decades to come (just like of course Rare has always taken its share from Mario games)

This is absolutely peak Rare and I'd argue they never got back to this level ever again. Not saying they didn't do good, but when you've been that 14 yr old guy in 98 playing BK at that time when studios just realized that 3D was cool to create games on, it was just like a huge explosion of impressions and of course ideas of how the future of gaming might look like.

So, what can I say, absolute masterpiece. Grant Kirkhopes very best work on any soundtrack out there to date and I even think that some texture work looks pretty cool 24 years later (like the walltextures in the hub world-caves like that treasure trove-cove-room; looked absolutely amazing for N64 standards back then and still looks better than anything seen on that console).

Lets hope for Banjo Tooie on NSO as that game was such a collectathon, I don't believe I ever had the nerve to 100% this but might be more likely to do so on the Switch.

Whenever I'm feeling really down, of all the games, its always Tropical Freeze that manages to really win me over again and again. Its hard to describe how this overjoyed and often cringy vibe of that game can enlighten even the rainiest of days. That wouldn't help if the leveldesigns would not hold some of the best platforming segments of all time to a point, where DKTF seeres itself from the franchise, becoming this firework of creativity where every single level becomes a pure showcase of new gameplay concepts. Most of the time it then becomes a thing to not just follow the common structure of a DK (or Mario) game where they introduce a mechanic, master over the course of the level until you reach the end, but instead then suddenly elevate you into a completely different setting where you still have to show off your skill in often supercrazy environments (most commonly pointed out at this point is that wind instrument-level that, when you think you're about to touch the goal suddenly throws you into an instrument to be blown around for a bit until you finally made it).

I believe there are just way to little games like TF, games that just laugh at attempts to be stylish and mature and have that weird Funky Kong character that basically looks like a completely deranged uncle who's stuck in the 1990ies and who you'd better keep off your kids as the most "cool" approach of the game. Instead the game just celebrates its goofy humor, slapstick animation work (that still feels absolutely gorgeous at times) and finally supersuccessful character designs. I point this out because the enemy-designs in the first DKC Returns game were rightfully critizised and now every enemy character feels like they really took their time to create something special. Like that tribe of owls in world 2 could star in its won franchise, its really fantastic concept work.

Also something that might always be mentioned anyways but can't be pointed out often enough: They got David Wise back to do the soundtrack and while I was a bit underwhelmed in DKC Returns by his work as there I was basically just digging the actual rearrangements of the SNES-tracks, this time its just an absolutely objectively amazingly (3 adverbs? that must be a grammar fail, right?) composed score. Its really fascinating how all departments here try to deliver some over the top experience. Usually you'd try to pull some back to not overshadow the other. You wouldn't want the soundtrack to be such a tentpole element when the rest couldn't follow. But in that case, they just threw everything into the mix and every aspect just manages to shine individually. This manages to even outshine most Mario games.

The only aspect that still don't perfectly work for me, which sadly also happens to be among the most important things of the game are its controls. Just like Little Big Planet, games have always looked for reasons, why their characters don't steer like a Mario does. Meaning they implemented something to make it a bit more challenging, because the character happens to be a sack or an ape and has a different momentum and weight. But for me as a player, thats not a handicap, its just annoying and its the reason why I'll still be more likely to pick up a Mario game as I don't need this extra layer of handicapped control that would hold me from enjoying the game's world. In DKTF, the game's main character Donkey Kong just controls heavy and slow and the game's concept leans onto having second characters on your back, helping you through their own skills like floating. But there I see a weakness in gamedesign as it really becomes an annoying disadvantage to lose your buddy and be forced to play the game with whats supposed the star of the show. But sadly, playing with DK on his own is never really that fun as his whole control-scheme is limited and feels frustratingly constrained to feel the joy, that platforming should originally provide.
On the bright side, DKC Returns' controls with their infamous implementation of motion-control inputs for crucial actions, was way, way worse than this and compared to some of the best platformers out there, it still works quite fine after some getting used to it.
Still, it stings a bit to know, that this aspect might be the only thing, really keeping this game from absolutely timeless perfection that barely any game reaches in its genre. Like F-Zero GX among future racers, this game just plays among the industry's brightest stars.

As I nearly bet even the latest of the superchallenging special levels in this game, I still won't take the control issue into account as its more a matter of training a bit and in the end, the game gives you so much back for getting used to that, it doesn't really matter anymore.

Also I should mention the coop-mode that's a bit lost and pointless. The game is clearly not designed for coop, its sorta bad at managing the screenspace with two characters, the level-elements often just work for one player and so on. I'm not sure why they really had to implement that as I absolutely love a good coop game still believe they should have saved the effort for something else. Designing the whole game with 2 players in mind from scratch would also have ended up in a way more casual and streamlined game so going for 1 player is absolutely fine. Maybe just having some cappy-sort of 2nd character to collect some straying bananas so your kid has something to do while you're doig the actual work would have been a better fit.

Anyways, this, too, can't really change anything about a 5 star experience. This is absolutely a must play for every Jump'n Run enthusiast and beyond that a showcase of wonderful design choices and a lot of heart put seemingly effortless into an amazingly clean composed package.

Addendum: recently my USB-stick on my WiiU, holding 64 GB of game data (on the WiiU, thats quite a lot) died. DKTF was one of the reasons, why I wasn't so sad about it. I got a new stick and was actually glad my TF save got killed, forcing me to start the game completely fresh once again.

As a piece of interactive Art, this game is absolutely awesome. As a platformer, its OK. The feeling o steering the character feels a bit stiff compared to a Mario game, but then again, I can een play it on an iPad which must mean something. Plus so far it never got so hard that it became frustrating co control. So in the end, its a bit like a more challenging walk through artworks and designs that are most definitely the star of the show. If you're into games like Journey, then this might be for you. Best played on a larger screen than a phone.