I normally wouldn't be found in the same room as a horror game. I have no interest whatsoever in receiving spooks. However, a game that combines the insane plot of the first Alan Wake with the vibes of Remedy's previous game, Control, made me want to give this a try. I did not expect to find a 10/10 in the first week of January! If I had played this game a couple of weeks earlier, this would have been my 2023 game of the year!

The genius and insane story, the silly humor that presents itself in radio shows, adverts, and character interactions, the live-action elements that are so naturally integrated, the music (not looking at any song in particular… wink), the art direction, the dialogue, the setting, the sound design (the flashlight omg) and Remedy's history that is subtly celebrated—everything is absolutely top-tier. The only thing that falls short of the ridiculous standard set by every other aspect of the game is the gameplay because it's just good? Like, that's the only complaint—that something's good. But I was so invested in literally everything else this game does that it doesn't matter.

This is a game that is so proud to be itself that I get actual joy just thinking about it.

I'm going to present my thoughts in a drive-by format lest I balloon this into a 1 billion word editorial. In short, BG3 is a good but extremely lumpy game that ultimately overcomes its story, combat and consistency issues with compelling character writing that evokes the actual thrill of tabletop DnD. On with the madness:

- The game looks great. The massive budget allows for a much more cinematic experience than these games normally get, and it elevates a lot of character interactions. The camera movements in the cutscenes are a nice bonus as well, the whole thing feels more immersive for it. It's in this capacity that making a classic isometric RPG at a modern AAA scale feels the most to me like a genuinely worthwhile artistic experiment.

- Buuuut, I can't help feel that it's aesthetically lacking style. I've said this to a few friends, and I've mostly been met with "What are you talking about" and "How would you have it look then" and maybe they're right because in both instances I don't have a good answer. For me, It's a know-it-when-you-see-it complaint, and I know that if Planescape Torment looked like this it'd be far worse for it. Not to say this should have the theatrical Gothic mood of that game, but it shouldn't feel as flat as it does.

- A great deal of effort has gone into making this an extraordinarily fast-paced turn-based RPG, and for that, I am endlessly grateful. But 5e will not budge. It's an obfuscated and frustrating system that serves to insinuate, but (especially in this stripped-down version) does not supply, depth, while extending battle times unnecessarily. You'll have some great moments (knockback was extremely fun for me to play around with, and if you're a DnD mega genius [I'm not] you can do far crazier stuff than that), and at a baseline level it's mostly enjoyable, but it is just begging to be streamlined and ultimately too repetitive. You start really feeling this in Act 3, which unfortunately lessens the impact of the best encounters of the game, many of which are surreptitiously dumped at the end of said act. My favourite of the entire game (to avoid spoilers, it was underwater) was entirely optional and tied to a side quest that can be resolved without experiencing it, and it precedes a bog standard big guy fight that is the quest's alleged climax. The pacing and placement of fights are odd from beginning to end.

- You know what else is weird? The level scaling. The level 12 cap is questionable as is, just because it cuts you off before you get to any of the extra freaky 5e stuff, but the journey to it is perhaps even weirder. Even on my faster-than-average playthrough, after being (from what I can tell) slightly under levelled entering Act 2, and being so low-level entering Act 3 that the game felt the need to warn me, I still entered the final encounter at max. Why scale this in such a disjointed manner? I understand the motivation behind a final act XP dump, the last mission requires you to be of a certain power level beforehand and by nature of its 'no turning back' structure, the devs need to ensure players will be capable of defeating it by the time they arrive, no matter how they get there. It's as admirable a reason as any, it just makes the whole Act feel slapdash. Even the freaks that do everything will have this problem, I have a friend scraping level 7 before he's even done with Act 1! Boy is he going to be bummed when his party reaches its strongest incarnation halfway through the game.

- The writing is hard to comment on, not least because I've probably only seen a single-digit percentage of it. From what I've seen, there's an obvious separation of priorities. Dialogue is uniformly good, quests are variable in quality but usually satisfying, character quests are probably the best of these, but the main story is WEAK. The plotting is never better than dull, I have serious problems with how entirely without mounting tension the theoretical main threat is, and I loathe the amount of times this story resets its major villain. I do, however, recognise it as not the main focus. Just like a real tabletop campaign, I'm willing to forgive lumpy beats and cliches for how they shape characters and interactions. The game lives and dies off its cast, and they are excellent. But this isn't real DnD, it's a video game, one heavy on its main quest at that, and I can't ignore how rough I think it is. To put it briefly, the story is a decent thumbs up, and the plot is a firm thumbs down.

- Speaking of, the performances are uniformly outstanding. There's this delightfully arched and heightened quality to a lot of the voice acting that makes it all feel quintessentially DnD. This'll ultimately be a personal preference thing but for me I adore that I can, for lack of a better term, see the role player behind the character. It's an easy joke that half of the reason this is the CRPG to make massive commercial waves is that in this one you get to have sex, but the romances wouldn't work at all without characters that are legitimately enjoyable to spend time with. The mo-cap and character design work (at least as far as the main characters are concerned) also deserves a shout-out on this front, I won't be forgetting an Orin or a Halsin any time soon.

- Despite wrapping up so many characters in enjoyable side quest-y stuff, Act 3 completely fails as a satisfying (or even coherent) third act of the main story. To try and avoid spoilers, it was too much of a hard reset for the stakes, and I was not compelled by any of the main quests narratively after Act 2's climax. The final quest is an absolute blast to play through, but the actual endings are only ok. The epilogue was very cute, but not enough so to overcome this.

- This is not a short game, which is not intrinsically a bad thing. For me, however, I'm pretty snobbish about runtimes and do not particularly appreciate sacrificing consistency in storytelling (or even just enjoyability of the damn thing) for the sake of scale. I immensely value it when a AAA game doesn't balloon into high double-digit hour runtimes on a first casual playthrough. I've got a lot of games I want to play, but if I love yours, I'll be back for more. This gets a little long-winded, but a 150-hour RPG that can also be a 50-hour one is very appealing to me and means I'm far more likely to come back and scrape every morsel off the plate at a later date. That being said, part of my endeavour to make this a ""short"" playthrough is the mixed bag of side quests, and while I enjoyed dipping into a handful of them each act, I was never compelled to fully dive in. Especially when I can just play the entirety of Fallout 1, which is a much tighter and consistent experience, in that time frame. Probably less.

- But the plus side to that enormous scale is the immense player expression, right? It's so ambitious because it's THE game that is just as unbound as the real tabletop experience. This is the one where you can truly do whatever you want. My only problem with this logic is that it wasn't represented in the game I played. As ambitious as Baldur's Gate 3 is, as many dialogue options, side quests, and paths not taken there are, I constantly found myself butting up against things it wouldn't let me do (including having to redo an entire long-ass major boss because pushing them off a cliff didn't reward me the mandatory progression item in the way that every other fight in the game had prior and the cutscene I'd just watched showed me acquiring, very cool). This is to be expected, we're in a contained game space after all, but if my intended experience involves as unbridled player expression as this one theoretically does, it feels awful when you do smack into a brick wall. It seems cruel to dock points for not letting me do literally anything I want to, which is not my intention, but I'm just trying to communicate that the moments where the 4th wall became visible were far more damaging to my experience here than an RPG of lesser ambitions. The more often I notice that the only actual options before me are carefully planned out by the devs, the less enjoyment I get out of seeing them through. Even if Baldur's Gate 3 does give me more options, its immersion-breaking moments are far too common and damaging for me to properly engage with it as a vehicle for role-play (at least past Act 1) in the way my favourite RPGs allow. It's a tough thing to find the right mix for, and this gets close, but it's so unwieldy that it just ends up losing its balance too often for me.

- Forewarning this final ranting paragraph, I played this on PS5, which is in many ways a miraculous port. I felt like they translated the experience seamlessly, and streamlined the menus to perfection. I'd never expect to play a game of this kind on console and have no issues with the layout and menu-ing. Genuinely very impressed with this. But...

- The bugs! My God do they dampen the experience. I'm surprised I haven't seen more discussion of it (though perhaps PC doesn't have this issue), by Act 3 most conversations were preceded by 5-10 seconds of my party frozen waiting for the cinematic to begin, and when I did get into the conversation character models were buzzing, or random textures were popping or what have you. This even happened in the final cutscene of the story! Once again this should be a small nitpick, but when it's encountered so frequently (and when every instance of it snaps me out of my transfixion completely), it no longer becomes minor. In essence, every problem with Baldur's Gate 3 is like this. Not to get on my soapbox about this again, but a massive scale and extended runtime, no matter the art form, is so often at the expense of the work and this is ultimately why. Small rashes become full-on blisters when you rub up against them over and over again. I'm sure I will give this game a complete run-through in the future, but this is a big part of the reason I'm not rushing to do so.

- It's a good game! I hate that this reads so negative because I had a good time with this game for the most part. I just found myself butting up against small elements of almost everything! Far too often for me to truly love the end product. That being said, I look forward to playing it again in a fuller capacity. If when I do it's been a little polished up, I'd be unsurprised to find a more functional and satisfying experience. I'd also be unsurprised to see a lot of these fundamental storytelling complaints reaffirmed. It's well worth the purchase and even that game of the year award if only to get this team making another game on this budget without the need to lean on DnD. If they do, it'll almost certainly outstrip this. For now, I'm slightly baffled by the praise, but happy with the game on the whole, if a little disappointed that transferring an old-school isometric RPG to the modern AAA space means learning all the wrong lessons from said space.

Sunset Overdrive is a lot of fun. It is quite possibly one of my favourite superhero open world games, because in spite of being a game about shooting people, that's still what it is. It is basically the best Infamous game, in terms of gameplay at least.
So when it fails in other departments, repeatedly and regularly, it is very disappointing.
The writing is... Borderlands-ey, with a pinch of Saints Row 3. Very self-aware and fourth-wall-hating, full of anti-capitalist satire and 80s movie references, and trying to be funny and only sometimes having the spaghetti stick to the wall. The game will not shut up, and usually that's fine as the game doesn't expect you to take it seriously either. This is mostly becuase of the main character, who is referred to only as "player" in the subtitles, or "asshole" by some enemies. This character feels like they were supposed to be an actual character, probably that guy on the front cover. The character customisation is pretty good, the four "body types" in character creation aren't directly gendered and can use all beards and cosmetics (even if the game assigns you a voice actor automatically), and except in one instance of dialogue using "he" for my female character, the game is usually gender neutral as is standard. However, the way the character acts leads to them either reading as a straight man or an openly flirty lesbian, the later of which probably wasn't intended. The character has opinions, an attitude which is called out by the game world's comic straight men, and although I feel like a stronger narrative could have been created using an actual set character, the game was also better for being about a Lesbian Fuckboy disaster (for me at least). The story rarely takes itself seriously in the slightest, and doesn't expect the player to either. It's an excuse to keep missions going and little else. The side characters are generally fun and a bit wacky, though I struggle to ignore the treatment of a disabled character where... I'm not sure what the joke is. He lost all his limbs and characters visibly react as he hobbles around, but never bring it up directly so it just becomes an awkward elephant in the room. The story of the second DLC is also painful to me, substituting the usual "scab" enemies who are basically generic raider enemies for ... Oil Rig Workers who think you're trying to take their jobs. Because you're aiding their boss (who, spoiler alert, is trying to do that and the game condemns her for? But you still... kill random innocents). This especially hurts as the other enemies in the DLC have cool designs. There is also the DLC2 Side Quest which is an extended Psycho reference, which honestly just... really hurt my experience right as it was about to end, especially considering the character creation treated this rather well.
In addition, the Windows port is buggy as hell. I have fallen through objects on a few occasions, the game came fresh with a corrupted save file that cannot be interacted with without crashing the game (which I was fortunately able to just work around by saving in other slots, even if I never fixed the issue), and the game crashed out of nowhere on a few occasions, fortunately without losing any progress that I noticed. The dialogue also sometimes doesn't seem to have realised that my PC isn't an Xbox, though this is relatively minor as issues go.
And yet, despite all this, the gameplay is some of the most fun I've had in years. Traversing this open world is a joy, the guns are interesting and fun and have enough auto-aim to compensate for the way the game encourages you to bounce and grind around everywhere while fighting, and the abilities your character are overpowered in an incredibly fun way. This game fills me with a lot of joy, in spite of the numerous issues, and I will probably bother to collect all the items in the game just because the actual game part of this video game is so incredibly strong. I also thought DLC1 was a real highlight, with cool new weapons and the meta-joke boss at the end being a really fun idea, and a sign that the developers were taking criticism on the nose. I cannot fully forgive this game's flaws, but the gameplay is just that solid. It is a real shame that there is unlikely to be a sequel that can fully realise the potential this game shows. But as it is... My heart wants to give it five stars, but my brain wants to give it three and a half. Four stars is the closest I can get to representing that.

I'm really glad this game has gotten so much love over the last couple years compared to its reception on release. It was the first time in a looong time that I was actually engaged properly with an FPS' campaign and could legit pick some of my favorite moments/scenes from the levels. Titanfall 2's fluidity in its gameplay and variety in its weapons/titans make it a real gem that I hope is further expanded upon in another sequel in the future. Although with Apex essentially strapping concrete shoes to the feet of TItanfall as a franchise and kicking it into a river, I doubt this will ever happen but I'm just glad to have messed around with it as much as I had. Viper is still the best!