Animal Well Done

Like seemingly everyone, my appeal and interest in 2024's Animal Well stemmed from my even much earlier interest in Videogamedunkey, the head honcho of its publisher BIGMODE and longtime Youtube veteran. A fan of his for over a decade, cutting my teeth watching his now archaic League of Legends content, I knew that he had a knack (heh) for games that were fun if nothing else. I've disagreed with my fair share of his takes, but I knew with the announcement of Animal Well that there was a vision he had in Billy Basso's breakout title. Like many others, I waited with bated breath with more information about the game's mechanics and release date. Release came and reviews were staggeringly high for the ambitious sub fifty megabyte title, whose marketing campaign effectively boiled down to "Let Dunkey cook."

A disclaimer for this review: I struggle with Metroidvania's from a personal standpoint. I've played a handful of Metroid's, got into The Messenger, and maybe one whole hour of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, but I could never stick with them on the principal of how they play. Without a consistent path of clear exploration towards narrative completion, I struggle for reasons unknown. With Metroid I had a hard time putting together item unlocks to their eventual applications, and didn't do too well in remembering where to traverse. My problems with previous experiences translated almost completely to Animal Well which was... well quite a good game regardless.

Animal Well is gorgeous, one of the factors most apparent in its reveal. Each screen is filled to the brim with colour and purpose, the backdrops consisting mainly of statues, mysterious creatures, and absconding movements of water. As my little blob made his way through the games sub ten hour runtime (probably shorter if chasing the main path,) my eyes scanned just about everything within the environment because of the visual reward that entailed. One touch I greatly appreciated is the (optional) setting that places faux CRT scanlines on the screen for a more mysterious vintage feel. For a game as consistently dark and dimly lit as Animal Well, having a feature that exaggerates its despair and gorgeous loneliness like that accents your time with the game in quite a great way.

Platforming and movement in Animal Well is fairly par for the course within the realm of 2D platformers and metroidvanias as a whole. You use a small selection of items naturally found through exploration for traversal and puzzle completion. Apt timing is required for successful jumps, and running is done at a brisk enough pace to make the game feel like it has a sense of urgency and quick completion to it. One thing I do want to commend the title on within this space is that it never feels like it is trying to do too much or require a finesse in perfect timing or long jump sequences. Though the puzzles can become slightly infuriating and rub you the wrong way, the issue rarely lied in me having to gamble on a perfect platforming sequence.

I said "rarely" in that last paragraph because of one of my main gripes with Animal Well, which I might as well start off with now. One of the notable features of the game is that there is no combat... but the catch is that there are enemies. How do you fight enemies in a game where you can't actually hit them? By running away! This isn't the end of the world in theory but it leads into another issue with Animal Well: the save system. Not unfamiliar for the genre but saving and checkpoints happen at telephones scattered around the map. These are mostly well located and central to places in which you spend your time and often do unlock as you progress to become even more centralized than you first encounter them, but not all is well that ends well. There are several mandatory chasing encounters in which you must run away from a big bad that follows you screen to screen. Death, which can happen by taking damage down to zero hearts or being crushed by an object, leads you to reset at the most recently visited aforementioned telephone. I spent a disgusting amount of time last night failing in the late stages of a chase sequence only to reset at a telephone, having to run all the way to the encounter, and then run all the way to attempt to complete the segment. As a Souls player I am no stranger to runbacks, but doing this ad nauseum and having to repeat and repeat which the occasional random instant death on a platforming sequence was infuriating. Animal Well in multiple points lacks respect for player free time in having to traverse to an area where you had progressed. This becomes more annoying in the chases because you can't pause and open the map... an unfortunate page to take out of the Dark Souls cook book.

Overall Animal Well is a phenomenal debut title for BIGMODE and an impressive title put forward by Billy Basso. Even though there's no real narrative to stick to, the save system requires a lot of work, and the chase scenes are needlessly grifting... this game has a lot to like about it. I'd recommend Animal Well to casual Dunkey fans or fans of Metroidvania's.

Like a Dragon: Infinite Runtime

Forever an infinitely difficult series to review without turning it into a minefield of spoilers, I'll tread carefully in my Infinite Wealth review and provide a fairly short writeup for a game that is as cavernously deep as the eigth-ish-ninth-ish (main) entry in the Yakuza/Like a Dragon franchise. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth was a game that despite being a tremendous fan of the series' heart wrenching moments, delicately web narratives, and impeccable lived in worlds, I was timid about actually playing. The gargantuan length of its immediate predecessor and slower grind-heavy gameplay took a lot out of me, even if I was a pretty big fan of the story being told. From what I'd heard through media outlets and friends alike, Infinite Wealth had made the game even larger and more grandiose, and after playing it myself I can verify that to be true.

LAD 8 is the first title within the series to take place significantly outside of Japan, this time having the bulk of its gameplay (mostly through Ichiban) taking place in the fiftieth American State: Hawaii. Previously I thought this would be a significant boon to my enjoyment of the title because I thought the series could use a fresh start outside of its typical close quarters Japanese city streets where you're shoulder to shoulder with pedestrians and throwing down in alleyways. It turns out that I actually wasn't a fan of the transition in the slightest. Never having been to Hawaii myself I can't verify this to the actual existence of the city, but much of Infinite Wealth's streets felt almost too large and full of empty expanse. With the series prior, I'd grown use to the almost claustrophobic feeling of having too much to see and too much to do around you. However many of the games taking place in Kamurocho be damned, I took to a significant liking of the familiar sites and sounds. As the series grew and expanded to Okinawa, Osaka, and Hiroshima, I felt like Sega and RGG did a pretty good job at introducing the player to new locales that played into the DNA of what players knew. Hawaii felt big and... interestingly empty for a Yakuza/LAD title. I didn't feel connected to the valley-like wide roads and emptiness between buildings... the beach and the town didn't really feel inviting to me, for whatever reason nothing took. In addition to this, the enemy placement for such an expansive entry was abnormally dense. It felt like I couldn't run my party more than a few feet without turning myself into an engagement. I understand this is probably beneficial to levelling up characters and jobs, but man does it make for a disrupted and un-rhythmic experience. I was dodging streets and pulling detours to a far greater level than I ever was in the beat-em'-up titles that came out prior.

On the topic of not being able to buy into the new world put forth by RGG in Infinite Wealth, the voice acting and languages used came off as a bit... strange. I understand that Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is a Japanese game that takes place in America, and in an American state that has a significant Japanese population, but I didn't understand the rhyme or reason behind how many characters spoke and understood English or Japanese. It seemed like the language spoken altered based on narrative convenience rather than a logical sequence, which made some characters that spoke in a broken English like the American born Bryce interesting. This doesn't really matter to anything in the long run but it made buy-in to the locale a little more difficult for me.

Now outside of the map being not my fancy, what actually rubbed me the wrong way? Mandatory fungames! I didn't buy Animal Crossing, please don't subject me to three days of woo hoo tee hee ha ha silly Animal Crossing on an abandoned Island in an otherwise (mostly) serious game. I didn't enjoy going from chasing disappearances and trying to dissolve Hawaii's gang violence to talking to the Western Kentucky mascot Big Red and cleaning trash so I could raise tourism to a location I did not want to be at. When I found out I couldn't leave at my own will, I looked up at the sky like that one gif of Willem Dafoe from At Eternity's Gate. Adding this on to the two forced moments in which you have to participate in a Roguelike a Dragon and I was (sarcastically) livid with several moments of the game. I get why you include these things, and in the long run its good for people trying to get the most dollar per hour value out of the game, but my plead with RGG going forward is that they strip this out of what the player has to do and leave it up to what the player could do. Rebirth made this same mistake and I'm wondering why this trend is proliferating in the modern JRPG space.

This review comes off as overtly negative, and for honesty's sake it kind of is... but there is a lot of Yakuza charm once again present in this title. There are the silly moments from Ichiban and company that have you (metaphorically) rolling on the floor in laughter, and the gut wrenching moments minutes later that the series is known to inflict. I was a fan of... about one half of this game and those were the sections devoted mainly to series mainstay Kazuma Kiryu. It's not necessarily because he's the old guy who we've grown accustomed to over the last few decades, but because his story felt more focused and mature. I do really enjoy Ichiban and think he's a perfect protagonist for the series henceforth, but the segments focused on him felt a little all over the place narratively and didn't hit me as hard as what we see the Dragon of Dojima go through. Familiar faces hit hard, and the cast in Infinite Wealth can go toe to toe with just about any game out there, I just wish they were employed in a more uniform and focused plot.

I usually wrap up my reviews with a plead to either play or not play the title based upon its expectations from the player base and my enjoyment of the title overall, but I feel like people looking to play Infinite Wealth and continue the story of Kiryu, Ichiban, and company will do it regardless. I didn't enjoy this title nearly as much as I did LAD7, but I'm glad we got to ride out with the crew one more time.

Psychopomp is an hour-ish long dungeon crawler that takes place in a hypnagogic nightmare land filled with incoherent thoughts and peculiar characters. Mechanics are simple, operating in four directions in typical dungeon crawler fashion with the ability to consume items and converse with the denizens of whatever world you're in. Vibes wise it feels like the Milk inside/outside of a bag franchise but didn't have enough bones to stick out on its own as a captivating experience to me. It's short and it's free so I guess there's not a whole lot to ask for but I didn't find this experience necessarily worth it.

Minami Lane is an incredibly short but sweet management sim all about creating the most charming little road that you can! Accompanied by a helpful tanuki and beautiful low-fi hip hop soundtracking, you must work resident satisfaction and smart fiscal investing to grow your street to meet specific objectives. In each of the game's five missions, the missions and optional objectives all felt feasible without min-maxing any certain stat or investment scheme, an issue I've had with management sims in general. With a runtime of maybe two hours, it's hard to recommend this as hard as I want to, but with its low buy-in and wholesome enjoyment, I really liked Minami Lane.

Slovakia.. err, Hungary? Never felt so good!

Felvidek is a peculiar and particular JRPGMaker game with a runtime of four or so hours in which a playable priest and drunkard soldier find themselves embroiled in a multi-faceted religious-political conspiracy. I'll be honest the moment to moment plot and overarching narrative of this game were increasingly hard for me to follow as time went on, largely in part due to the long-winded speeches that site antiquated medieval European histories and faiths, but from what I was able to parse it was a fairly captivating tale. The conversational humor is tragically silly, and the fate of many characters is what you'd expect in a comedic 15th century title.

Where the game waned for me was in a randomness of difficulty. There is no levelling system, and I can't fault the devs here because the game is short, but you run out of ways to really bolster your character pretty early. You gain a few items that will make your party stronger by the means of armor, weapons, and buffs that permanantly boost your stats, but that takes enough time to kick in for early fights to hurt. Most encounters are short and enemies don't have too much health, but early on you'll feel the pain of just about everything. As you advance in the game and get new party members and a few items, things feel very doable as long as you have the coin to purchase items to spam during and after fights. There's a few times where you're locked into fighting with no way to gain back your health/mana equivalent and it felt a little unbalanced.

In all Felvidek is a mostly-forgettable Hylics-Like unless you're really looking for a walkthrough of Eastern Europe in the 15th Century with some neat visuals and music.

Senua's Slugfest: Hellbruh II

Man, this was such a let down for me that it's almost hard to put into words. Senua's Sacrifice back in 2017 was one of the neater gaming experiences I've had in recent years, a fantastic dive into the Celtic mythos coupled with a passionate tale of the general scorn and abandonment that those who suffer from mental illness have suffered for a heartbreaking amount of time. Even though it was largely basic in terms of gameplay, I felt like there was enough agency in movement and originality in the story to keep me going. Overall I gave it a four out of five stars, because the scant gameplay couldn't bog down what the message of the game set out to offer.

Senua's Saga however took the concept of the first game and somehow turned it into a numbing tech demo with a runtime almost insulting for the price its offered at. I played this on Game Pass, but saw it was lifted as $50 on retail websites, and even then it's not worth it. It feels like 75% of the gameplay loop of Hellblade II is walking through fantastically designed, yet unfortunately monotonous environments, at snail speed as voices speak into your character's ears. Trot, trot, trot you do with very little in the way of worldbuilding or interesting conversation with your party members. A story is there but its told in such a jolted and lazy fashion that I couldn't be bothered to piece things together. The other quarter of the game is boiled down to brainless puzzles that revolve around pushing the trigger buttons to open up pathways, and then combat that is so incredibly one note and boring that you could very realistically fall asleep while playing. Dodge, attack, dodge attack... ooh an npc runs into the enemy you're fighting and stabs them, but is killed by a NEW enemy... no way? Rinse and repeat that a million times until completion. Everything is boiled down to the same recycled one on one fight, sometimes the enemy has a different appearance, but every single one plays the exact same. I like to believe this was better in the 2017 title but man, I don't have the heart to know.

Hellblade II is a lazy glorified tech demo. It's beautiful and the cutscenes are something special, but you are missing absolutely nothing by skipping this game. For a game that was paraded as a flagship title for Xbox in the current generation, Senua's Saga is quite telling of Microsoft's gaming offering. Starfield, Senua's Saga, Halo Infinite... all have been so impressively garbage that they're being lapped by everyone else when it comes to putting out compelling video games. I'm not sad, I'm just incredibly disappointed. If you want good games in the creepy linear walking sim genre, just play the Plague Tale titles, at least those have something going for them.

My third playthrough of Platinum Games' near-perfect Metal Gear Hack and Slash is complete. Quite possibly the most quotable game of all time somehow houses impressively poignant political and social commentary while also being an incredibly snappy and engaging title to physically play. Platinum Games was in its bag at this point in time, hammering out the Bayonetta titles and about to get into their magnum opus in Nier: Automata.

Memorable fights, speeches, music... Metal Gear Rising has it all, an impressive swan song for Jack the Ripper.

Memes, the DNA of the soul.

1000xResist is one of those sleeper indie games I picked up because of the seemingly out of nowhere cult favoritism and fanfare they've gotten, thinking I may be in the running for a hidden gem and possible memorable sleeper hit. What I quickly found out as I made my way through this visual-novel esque piece of abstract was that you are intended to revel and take in the confusion as a piece of endearment towards this media and not as a detraction. The scope of the narrative is entirely obscure and reminiscent of an amalgamation of futuristic and philosophical pieces of work that I've experienced in the past like Nier: Automata, Land of the Lustrous, and strangely enough Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. I'm all for the out-there when it comes to penning a story, but there has to be a level of grounding for me to have a buy-in. Nier: Automata's abstractism and grandiose questioning of Philip K Dickian ponderings works because it has an immediate pressing storyline to help carry on the deeper and more intrinsic philosophies. Where 1000xResist separates for me is that you as the player are immediately thrust into a cavernously deep thought-focused plot with no real endeavor made to either coat it under an easier to parse coat of paint or giving it a guiding light. I'm not saying that it needed to be spoken to the player like they were out of Idiocracy or something, but Moreso that levelling out a ten or so hour experience in abstract and only making it more confusing and... abstract leads to a story that never really sticks for me.

I was able to understand the loose goings-ons of things as they happened and the messages placed throughout the game, but it never really struck with me as a critically important or thought provoking piece of media. This is the same gripe I had with the last six episodes of Neon Genesis: Evangelion that gets me in hot water with friends of mine as we discuss the hallmark and legendary anime. As the creator delved further into the conceptional of Shinji's mind and enemies at large and further and further into psychological mysticism, I fell out of favor with the show. It felt like it was trying to "think too much" and not "say enough." That is ultimately my qualm with 1000xResist, there is a lot being done in weird ways that are meant to be symbolic and interesting but ultimately fell flat because of the persistence to non-linear and ambiguous storytelling.

On top of qualms with the way the story was told, there are some slight issues I had with this game that don't really chalk up to much of a real con-list: voice acting I felt could have been greatly improved to create a more passionate tale, and the hub world that you revisit quite a bit is maze-like and annoying to traverse.

Pick this up if you want a mildly interesting (basically) visual novel that jumps heavily into science fiction themes, but if you want a game that will stick with you and make you think, this was not it.

Five Nights at Umbrella Corps

Crow Country is a really neat Resident-Evil styled survival horror that takes place in a theme park somewhere in the Atlanta metro. Being that I'm a huge fan of RE and the survival horror genre at large, when I saw this near the top of the highest rated Backloggd games for 2024 my interest jumped. This was everything I was looking for in a game while I await Shadow of the Erdtree. It's remarkably short (less than five hours, however I was afk for some of this,) fairly easy, has an awesome CRT aesthetic, an RE1 camera, and the lore was interesting enough and told well to keep me interested in its short run time. Plotwise it’s nothing extraordinary: You play as Mara, a girl investigating this dilapidated land of attraction. The more time you spend investigating the nooks and crannies of Crow Country, you meet more people and become further enveloped in the spooky mystery behind disappearances and fatalities alike. Zombies known as "guests" inhabit the park in various shapes and sizes. Some of these guests are large and tower over the area you're in, some nimble and move quick, others literal blobs on the map... they're remedied all the same by a few shots from whatever weapon you're using. I used the basic pistol, in RE style, for the majority of the game until the final boss and got along just well. There are several optional bosses as well, all of which went down with a few grenade tosses and a shot or two. I liked this a lot about Crow Country, its short and doesn't control all too well (I mean really, what tank control game ever did) and making combat as simple as it is just making the runtime feel better.

Now I am generally pretty positive in regard to this game, especially because it respects the players runtime, but I felt like a lot of the puzzling and item usage felt a little... random to me. This made the game for much of its latter runtime feel more like a metroidvania than an RE style survival horror than I believe was intended. Items required you to run from one end of the map to the other and sometimes puzzles felt a little obscure in their solutions. Overall I think it could take a hint from the RE2/3/4makes and be more intuitive than it was.

In all if you're a fan of survival horror, especially from indie studios, Crow Country is a must play for 2024. It's short, sweet, and wears its inspiration on its sleeves in the right way.

Dud Space

This is one of the most confusing games I've played, and I mean that with no hyperbole. Granted I have experience around the original Dead Space, of which I'll get to in a bit, the reception for the remake amongst my circle of friends and folks on the internet has been effectively unanimous praise. I'd had this version of the game on my radar for some time, but I had never felt the rushed need to play it because I'd soaked in enough of it growing up. I never physically played the original myself because I was extremely horror adverse as a youth. Any scary show, movie, or game sent shivers down my spine and I had nightmares for days upon days... but like most people that waned as I got older and I began to dabble into the survival horror genre. I'd watched my buddies play Dead Space quite a bit, and caught countless speedruns of both the original and the remake at Games Done Quick events to the point where I felt like I knew the game pretty well without ever completing it myself. After being beckoned to jump into it, at the same time I was playing two other survival horror games, I finally assumed the role of Issac Clarke and boarded the USG Ishimura.

What I got was what felt like to me the most recycled, drab, monotonous, and focusless survival horror game I've ever played. My opinion of Dead Space is effectively so low that I would rather play Resident Evil Revelations 2 again because that game at least made me laugh at how poor it was of an entry.

For a game that wears its influences on its sleeve as much as Dead Space does, I hoped it might be able to grasp the what made groundbreaking pieces of media like Resident Evil 4 and Alien so good. What legitimately insulted me about Dead Space more than anything else was how every encounter from the beginning all the way until the very end of the game felt the exact same. You walk through a hallway and see a panel, what do you think will happen? If you're answer is: a Necromorph will pop out, you are correct! Every single panel! Every single hallway! The entire twelve chapters! Wow! You walk into a room that sizable could fit four to five human sized people holding their arms out, there is a door on the other side, what do you think will happen? If your answer is clearing out a room of enemies for thirty seconds to life the quarentine... you are right! It felt as if the scenario designers for this value brand RE4 turned the entire game into an if:then statement and let that decide gameplay sequencing. If player runs through hallway, then they must fight necromorph that will surprise them. Dead Space spends its entire runtime telling you to be scared instead of... actually scaring you. Wave based combat works in some games like perhaps a Gears of War or a title where it makes conceivable sense to be fighting a controlled group of reinforcements over time, but having Isaac fight the exact same group of barely-varied zombies wave after wave makes for an absolutely abysmal level of gameplay. It would be one thing too if the shooting and combat was interesting and controlled well in any form like a Resident Evil where there's more to it than just shooting... but Dead Space's encounters are all conquered in the exact same manner. Because they didn't want to copy RE too much, they craft some in-universe mumbo jumbo that decapitation doesn't work against your enemies. What does though is the dismemberment of arms and legs, which really just means you'll be using more ammunition to do the exact same thing you do in other shooters. Running into the same enemies and shooting theirlegs then arms for however long Dead Space is mind numbing to say the least. It took me not even a few hours to get bored by what I was playing, an impressive feat for somebody who literally put eighty hours into Soul Hackers 2.

I had moved on to my next paragraph and came back to write a little blip here. You know what I love? When I enter a room and need to restore power to a door so that I can progress, I really love when there's a battery hidden somewhere in the room that I need to pick up with my force gravity spell and walk as slowly as possible to restore power and move on. Its needless padding to runtime that does not enforce player agency or make you feel more complete in your quest to quell the necromorph outbreak. For the four thousand times you put a battery in its slot, you do not feel the sense of pride and accomplishment that was probably hoped for by the developers.

I had issues with the game outside of its encounters and combat too. Dead Space is dark, and yeah that makes sense because it's a horror title and the use of the unknown and what you can't see is paramount in making the player or audience feel uneasy, but there is a happy medium at play that was not present in Dead Space. For the first few hours of the game I physically could not see in front of me. I have a good monitor and graphics card and was running the game at fairly high settings, which in my opinion means that things should be... clear. I had to crank the brightness up to 100 to be able to conceivably see where I was going. I turned the music off at a certain point too because it was extremely distracting and took away from the atmospheric integrity of horror in outer space.

Dead Space's mission structure of going from point a to point b to press a button or turn something on became tired as soon as the game began. I understand interaction in Dead Space is meant to be scant to drive home Isaac's isolation, but it makes for bad game design especially in its poor implementation. Story beats happen because there are a plethora of folks who see him and talk to him from a distance, which half bakes the intended isolation. He's constantly fed information and conversation as he runs through each samey hallway, he never truly feels alone. I'm not saying that Isaac needs a buddy or anything on his quest to... do whatever this game is about, but the poor quest design and forcing of every single task upon the engineer makes for resoundingly boring mission design.

There's really nothing I liked about Dead Space. I did not like Isaac Clarke, I do not like him with green eggs & ham. I did not enjoy the story, the gameplay, the environmental design... nothing. But hey that's okay! This game is unanimously praised by seemingly everyone, so maybe this review won't be helpful to you, but this was the widest miss of my gamed played in 2024.

Dead Space is a poor attempt at trying to recreate Resident Evil 4's magic. What RE4 manages to do in creating a gameplay and narrative rich action-survival-horror game, Dead Space fails to do. I cannot recommend anyone to play this title, especially if they already played the game as released in 2008.

I'm going to preface this review with a complaint: Any game that finishes on a four phase bossfight and follows that up with a multi-faceted escape sequence that can end in a game over if you move slightly too slowly through its intended sequence deserves a strongly worded letter and discerned frowny face. Parasite Eve, here is your frowny face :(.

Parasite Eve was one of those games that I had been greatly interested in but had long escaped me because I didn't grow up with or embrace the Playstation ecosystem until the PS4 came out so I could jump on the FF7R bandwagon. This means I lost out on a lot of the mid to late 1990's classics and favorites from developers in their golden ages, in this case that was Square Soft and the nearly endless hits it seemed to release. Parasite Eve, a JRPG horror game with much of its development DNA being rooted in Final Fantasy was an immediate piqued interest to me. I knew absolutely nothing about the gameplay going into it, zero as to what the story was about, and again very little about runtime. What I got out of finally playing the 1998 classic was a quick and easy b-movie with a simple (yet enjoyably so) gameplay loop.

Taking place over six days, Parasite Eve's story revolves around a parasitic growth named Eve who is hellbent on creating and perpetrating the reign of the "Ultimate Lifeform." Unfortunately this story does not involve Shadow the Hedgehog's origin story. What begins as an NYPD cop named Aya Brea going on a date to the opera quickly morphs into a race against the clock to save Manhattan, and in turn the world. Aya begins her investigation immediately after the entire opera house is morphed into gloop by the demonic Eve on stage. Collaborating with the lead detective in her NYPD precinct, the military, and a Japanese scientist she embarks on a desperate mission to understand the mystery of Eve's origin and goals so that peace can be restored. I appreciate the limited scope of the story, as I mentioned previously this title only takes place in the one borough in New York, allowing for the story to move at a hastened yet measured pace. There's no moment where you think you should be in a zone longer than you are, and you don't miss out on anything by only hitting a few of the marquis locations within Manhattan. In your investigation you'll visit the zoo, the Museum of Natural History, the Statue of Liberty, and the Chrysler Building should you choose. I've said it before, and as a fan of Metal Gear Rising I'll say it again, games that pace themselves well are a dime a dozen and it's a severely underrated way to craft a solid game.

Gameplay in Parasite Eve is fairly basic, with combat utilizing a classic Final Fantasy ATB system where you can choose to either use special PE powers or simply shoot your gun at the opponent. The PE powers cover all the bases like healing yourself, giving Brea a shield or speed buff, and eventually moves that do devastatingly large amounts of damage to the opposition. These moves are strong and bolster your survival arsenal quick a bit, but need to be built up over time in battle. I liked this balance, forcing you as the player to dish out damage in the random encounters and boss fights while you're PE gauge built up and you could add some survivability into your kit. Because the game stayed at a lower level of difficulty throughout, I never felt like the system of running around in a fight to build up my gauge felt unfair or busy. World encounters (which are random to an extent) are often remedied through simply gunfights, but the bosses will require more planning and usage of the paranormal.

Weapons in Parasite Eve are limited in diversity but do give you an interesting way to complete the game. There's a few categories of guns you get: Pistols, rifles, machine guns, shotguns (I think,) and grenade launchers. Each come with their boons like how rifles have a longer range and machine guns have a higher rate of fire, but also have their cons that seem to balance them out. Rifles with that range have a lower rate of fire and maybe a smaller clip size, whereas machine guns dish out more shots but do less damage per shot and aren't as effective from further away. This leads to a chief complaint I had with PE, and that's how customizing rate of fire on your weapon felt rather... pointless? This is because the more shots you get in your "turn" to attack, the less damage each shot does. I remember upgrading one of my weapons to have seven shots per turn, only to find out I was doing twelve damage per shot. I was mystified and thought I'd reached some random difficulty spike, but I soon discovered that my error lied in trying to do more damage per turn. Though there is some reasoning you could give to have more shots per turn, I felt like the ability to blast through the opposition as quickly as possible with fewer, high damage blasts felt a lot better.

Playing PS1 era games nearly thirty years after they've come out is often a crapshoot because of how far visual fidelity has come. Even within the genre, think about how expansive the differences in Final Fantasy VII and its Remake title are. Even though Parasite Eve shows its age on the polygonal front, the FMV cutscenes that it hangs its laurels upon are to this day still pretty impressive. Many horror games from the 1990's simply don't "feel" scary because they can't impart an actual element of visual horror on the player, but Parasite Eve goes to an incredible extent to make the disgusting transformations, deaths, and general grime of its cinematics feel visceral. Multiple times through my playthrough I made an exhausted uneasy face at what I was seeing, coupled with impressive soundtracking work to make the moment feel eerie. Square since time immemorial has known how to do work in the CGI space and its vindicating to go back and see how great they've always succeeded in that space. Nearing conclusion, I felt like I played a grotesque version of Final Fantasy VIII.

I do want to shoutout the legendary Yoko Shimomura here for her OST. For a game this short, it's filled with certified BOPS and BANGERS that make each area and moment feel distinct right from the opening crawl all the way to the end credits. It may be an interesting take for a lot people to hear but I think this is her best work yet, even in a career that includes Kingdom Hearts, FFXV, Live A Live, and Super Mario RPG.

Before I close, one thing that nearly ruined this game for me is that I named my protagonist "Gherkin." I don't like pickles... as a matter of fact I hate them but for whatever reason when the chance came to name my protagonist I thought of a sloppy, large, green gherkin. I couldn't stop laughing any time her name came on screen, and anytime I told my buddies I was going to go "Gherk" it erupted myself into cacophonous laughter. I guess my lesson here is that most players should probably keep their first name as "Aya" or go with something less abrasive. It reminds me of when I named my Tidus "Chad" in FFX and completely forgot his name wasn't Chad for months after I played.

Parasite Eve is a quick and fun JRPG experience that should not be missed if anyone still has a Playstation 1 around. I recommend this game to anyone with a knack for the golden age of JRPG's or the older Resident Evil title.

Charles Dickens once said: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness." Weepboop once said of Kingdom Hearts III: "It was the times."

My favorite part about beating a Kingdom Hearts title is reflecting on the twenty to thirty hours I spent playing the game and asking myself if I ever actually understood the plot.

For the ninth time, the answer is no. I don't fucking understand Kingdom Hearts.

I'm watching the credits roll as we speak, or rather as I monologue and I don't understand who half of the characters in the final crawl were. I don't understand what the Kingdom Hearts is. I don't understand the difference between Terra, Terra Xehanort, Ansem, Ansem the wise, and Xemnas. Every one of these I play, I realize that one Dunkey video where he goes and explains the plot of these games in jumbled detail was actually the most coherent and lore accurate depiction of the "lore" of the Kingdom Hearts universe. What the third mainline installment of this series succeeds in doing is putting together a crustless, playable, and mostly enjoyable experience to actually put in your hands. Gone is the garbage combo stun of KH1 & 2, gone are the obtrusive and malformed mechanics of the spinoffs like Chain of Memories and Birth by Sleep, and in is just good ol' hack and slash with fun buttons to press that make you do more damage and actually combo for once. The combat isn't perfect, resoundingly far from it in fact, but I'll be damned if I didn't actually enjoy fighting things from time to time. I didn't understand the spells and the saturation of gauges and bars Sora has to watch out for, but for the vast majority of the game it was coherent to utilize from a gameplay perspective. In closing of the mechanics, the formchanging was pretty neat and a great way to emphasize using different keyblades.

Outside of that, praise ends at saying it's pretty and Face my Fears was a great opener.

So where does KH3 falter? The answer is an unironic and genuine: everywhere else. The plot is mumbo jumbo complete nonsense. I presume it was written by an AI generated Animal Crossing character in their near-Simlish lingua franca, and Tetsuya Nomura scaled the southern slopes of Mount Parnassus to communicate with the Oracle of Delphi. Here he presented the acting script of Kingdom Hearts III to Pythia, who consulted her clergy around the tholos. The priests then interpreted the words and presented them to Nomura in dactylic hexameter. Nomura returned to Square Enix's offices and completely guessed at what they wrote, thus resulting in the plot and script of Kingdom Hearts III. I am in complete belief that there was nobody in the writing room at Square Enix that had the ability to say no to a creative endeavor, and all the "what ifs" were met with a unanimous "YES YES YES." I don't know why we visit any of the Disney worlds we do as Sora, or why we are tasked with playing out a shortform version of their cinematic storylines in this game. Seriously, do I really need to play Pirates of the Carribean 2 in a video game? No! Do I need to play Tangled to understand the story of Rapunzel? No! Do I need to hear Idina Menzel sing "Let it Go" and play out the events of Frozen in this game? NO. None of this adds up to a coherent or pleasant game to play. I excused it in Olympus in the first few worlds because I figured KH3 might be setting up a legitimate need to jump between Disney/Pixar IP's as part of the overarching storyline, but it became clear that they felt the need to run through their properties to attempt to appeal to fanservice and remind the player how strong Disney's portfolio is fiscally.

The fact that the mobile game I watched a summary movie for in the KINGDOM HEARTS HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue, forgot everything about because it was incoherent and senseless, only to find out it was probably the most integral lore to this game is hysterically hilarious to me. I assume a majority of people who played this game or consider themselves KH fans skipped the mobile content entirely, and they're probably even more confused than I was. This is like if you somehow made it all the way to Star Wars Episode IX only to find out that the Star Wars Holdiay Special was the most integral plot to Papa Palpatine's revenge. In the final scenes and resolution of fourty years of film glory and cultural impact, Chewbacca's family come out and free the galaxy of the Sith. That's what Kingdom Hearts 3 feels like, we got Holiday Special'd in Episode IX. I won't spoil but the post-credits scene of KHIII frustrated me to an end previously undiscovered because it pulls this card again. The mobile game, why the damn mobile game? Why couldn't, I don’t know... even the worst game in the series in Chain of Memories been the integral one? I get Birth By Sleep made a large presence in this game and its overall narrative, but why is the mobile game the big hitter here?

The best part of KHIII and this review is I originally had this game as a much better score, but over thinking out my talking points I've reduced it by a half star with each new grievance. How did they fumble the bag this hard? How will Kingdom Hearts IV do it even harder? What does Sora actually do in this game? Why can everyone survive in everyone else’s heart? Seriously how many people are inside of Sora's heart? Why is there a character named Xigbar? Why is his non-nobody name BRAIG. WHO NAMES A CHARACTER BRAIG. I'm happy to be done with Kingdom Hearts (for now.) I'm happy this series cannot hurt me any longer. I am free, I am clean. I can shower and not be disgusted with who I am. I can make coffee and wave to my neighbors. I can open the blinds and say hello to the sun. Maybe the real Kingdom Hearts was the friends we complained to about this series along the way.

I don't recommend Kingdom Hearts III to anyone. It's the most playable and enjoyable Kingdom Hearts (not including Kingdom Hearts 0.2: Birth By Sleep - A Fragmentary Passage) to play, but it's still unfortunately a Kingdom Hearts title.

The cold never bothered me anyway.

Me: Mom, can we have Bloodborne on Steam?
Mom: No, we have Bloodborne at home
Me: Bloodborne at Home

Bloodborne Kart is a decent attempt at telling the legally distinct story of Bloodborne while also being an abysmal kart racer. The AI is a complete nonfactor, often running into walls and getting stuck in both battle maps and races, leading to you being able to lap them one to two times each map. The visuals are neat, but the movement is choppy and a quick reminder that this is a free title. The music while pretty exciting in it's own right, doesn't match Bloodborne's aesthetic (which in theory is fine because it's a kart racer) but also doesn't match the racing (because you legitimately never have competition.)

It's jank and ultimately not worth your time. Go play Bloodborne on your PS5 or Steam Account instead... oh wait.