Well, I think I took the advice to "focus on the main questline" a bit too literally and now at a mere 20 hours in I have seen the credits roll. I do think this has given me a good taste of everything in the game, but I certainly feel that I missed the point and yet I'm not entirely sure I'm bothered too much by that.

    | I'm one of those people, just to set expectations here |

If you've been in gaming circles long, you've probably met one of us. A jacka— a firmly-opinionated-person who insists Morrowind was in fact the best game Bethesda put out and every release since has been on a decline design-wise. Now… I actually enjoyed Fallout 4 for the 100+ hours I put into it and will readily admit it. So, I'm not the worst of these types. But, after 15ish years of playing every BGS release, modding them to hell and back, then resetting for a few vanilla sessions before getting frustrated and modding them to hell again—

I got some opinions.

    | This could be their best game since Morrowind |

See, to me the biggest marker of the difference between Morrowind and everything before and after it in BGS's library was that: in Morrowind, you could play for first 5+ hours of the game without leaving any of the towns or cities and for the next 20 you could get away with only a handful of quick stops at the local caves/tombs. You could just fast travel hop around the population centers and explore for random quests and faction storylines. It made the world interesting because you actually engage with its people in a way that wasn't necessarily measured in quarts of blood.

Starfield brings that back. I spent a good 3-4 hours near the start letting myself get pulled adrift by the random questlines you discover just by walking through the byzantine settlements and future-cities. And everytime I was just gleefully enjoying the game it was usually from such an encounter or a moment where the major questlines took some time to breath and dwell on a nicely crafted environment for you to explore and which actually took some thought to do so.

At its best the game spectacularly captures that sense of wonder and adventurous optimism that many of us feel towards Space and humanity's long history speculating on it—and our short history of exploring it.

The dialogue here is also a significant step up from their previous titles and you can really tell they were "trying" to reach a new level of narrative presentation here.

    | Unfortunately its broke and it ain't in a fun way |

There's a limit to how much I can care about what an NPC is saying to me when they're chronically turning away or in the process of phasing into the next plane of existence. Dramatic moments like a character's death don't hit as hard when the one holding their corpse in lament is teleporting back and forth to seemingly act out two roles in the play simultaneously. And I don't really feel the gravitas of a great discovery if every NPC in the room interupts every other line to say "WHEN YOU HAVE A MOMENT LET'S TALK."

GREAT. LET'S TALK NOW. OH. YOU HAVE NOTHING TO SAY. COOL.

It only hurts more because of how much potential the game shows at times. There are some quests in this game that had me more engaged than the whole of Skyrim's main storyline. I would get a nice little cozy tingle of SPACE ADVENTURE!™ and a smile would spread across my fat mug.

But then the next hour of gameplay would shove an icecube down my shirt.

    | The primary point of pain |

I could go on about combat at length, but it's better to just summarize with an explanation of how Stealth currently works in the game. It seems to operate on a system where upon each time you load the game each NPC rolls a dice to determine if they are a bloodhound or a rock:

"Bloodhounds" will notice the scent of the paint of your armor as you stand on the other side of a wall and can spot your invisible companion with ease. And once a bloodhound becomes even the slightest bit suspcicious you exist, the entire dungeon will be alerted to you and stare at you through those walls until you move somewhere they can finally trace a bullet path to you.

"Rocks," meanwhile will let you land sneak attack criticals on them as they shoot in your direction because you're kinda far away and they need to update their prescription. They honestly think they're simply in the middle of target practice and they're very confused by how their bullets keep bouncing right back at them.

And, as mentioned, if you happen to reload a save all roles will be shuffled. Good luck.

Stealth is usually my preferred build in a game and it has existed in every BGS game since at least Daggerfall.

So yeah.🙂

    | There are other points I could make but I'm not sure I care |

For instance, I could probably double the length of this review just commenting about how this game tries to balance scripted and player directed content and how well that does and doesn't work. But quite frankly I think the game just made me too darn upset with its UI jank, physics issues, animation misfires, and obscene balance flaws to care.

I will reiterate again: there is cool stuff here. But you have to have a higher tolerance and better luck than me to walk away feeling good about it.

Although, there is one other point I want to touch on.

    | Final aside on the main plot |

I'll avoid the specifics for spoilers but—contrary to what I see as a common opinion—the main story doesn't really have the weight people say it does unless you've invested some time into the world and characters. So learn from my mistake and don't mainline the whole thing.

There's a point with a pretty obviously significant gameplay unlock. From that point I would suggest setting the main quest on the back burner and doing side quests until you're just about sick of the game (which, hopefully for you, will be many hours later than it was for me).

Personally, I didn't really find the main plot all that interesting. However, there were two surprisingly fantastic segments in the last third that I quite enjoyed for their own merits.

    | The average player will probably enjoy this game just fine |

I'm too familiar with this studio. The lingering pain points are too glaring to me. I was hoping it would be a new start for the studio but they snuck an overstuffed suitcase onto the flight. They are at least in a new city, but we still have some work to do.

If you move your frame of reference a few years forward, however, things are looking amazing and I hope many people have fun exploring the Cosmos.

SOMA was… kind of relaxing. Obviously not when the monsters are chasing you. But, when the quiet and the dark set in and you explore the crumbling underwater facilities, occasionally chatting with the single other lucid entity in the depths… it's quite calming.

I started on the standard mode, but after a while I found the stealth more of a nuisance than tense so I just restarted in the "Safe" mode and focused on the story. To my surprise, the game still managed to freak me out pretty well at parts with just sheer set design and soundscape. I may have even put off finishing the game for a month just because I found the noises the creatures made so unsettling, but I won't admit to that here.

Even if that alleged event happened, it never really spoiled my overall feeling that the game is ultimately very low-key. The dialogue in the game I think being the main reason why this ends up being the case. If the game had never introduced Catherine, it would have gone on to feeling like a fairly generic haunted house adventure dodging monsters, solving puzzles, and soaking up the creepy environment.

But then she's introduced and the whole scenario is recontextualized with the narrative details that come with her.

I won't go into those details for sake of keeping readers fresh to their own interpretation of the story here, but I will say that the tone of the dialogue was entirely unexpected to me for a horror game, and yet it felt so thematically fitting that it worked to create something that worked so well for me.

I'm not entirely in love with some of the ways the game doles out the details of the backstory and world, with frequent use of audio logs you can't listen to without stopping or greatly slowing down. But at least the pace is set properly such that I would usually listen anyway without too much grumbling.

The other major factor in the rhythm of the game was the way you interacted with its elements. Every mechanical interaction (aside from simple buttons) requires a small mouse motion to follow through. I wish the sensitivity on it was just a touch higher, but otherwise I found these interactions smooth and cathartic to execute. They made what could have just been menial box ticking to continue the game into a fun and tactile little performance.

Isn't too much more to say. SOMA is a well put together exploration game that does well to capture both the peace and terror one can find on the ocean floor. That duality is something I've rarely heard of let alone experienced in a horror game (not that I play many) and I think with the Safe mode letting players tune the balance of that, I can heartily recommend this to anyone looking for something more narrative and ambiance driven—and don't mind a few spooks.

This game is so unique and has a story that really surprised. There really isn’t anything like this game. You are a little robot that goes around and helps this family who has some deep issues. You also get some Toy Story vibes at night when the toys come to life and help them with their problems.

This isn’t really a platformer you go around and clean and collect items/ do things for people. The timer is a bit annoying and sometimes it’s really hard to tell what to do but this game deserves credit for being so weird and unique.

I was highly anticipating this game for years but I never expected it to be so amazing. Just as a baseline it takes all the elements from Pikmin 1,2, and 3 and brings them back with tons of quality of life and usability updates to boot. Miss the caves from 2? They are back and better than ever, filled with tons of different enemies, bosses, and thoughtful situations to work through. Love the multitasking abilities from 3? Also back and improved by the inclusion of the dog Oatchi who is an unstoppable force. Like the time constraints of 1? Let's just say there is some stuff in here that will be right up your alley.

Alongside all of that are new additions as well, first off having some new pikmin types obviously keeps things fresh and the ice pikmin are a lot of fun to use in combat and problem solving. Glow pikmin aren't in the normal rotation of pikmin but that doesn't make them any less fun to use, their ghostly powers are only used in the new night time missions which are a pikmin spin on tower defense. There are a little over a dozen of these and they are pretty short so they function very nicely as a pallet cleanser to shake up the gameplay.

The new dandori challenge caves achieve this as well by taking what would be normal caves and turning them into fun challenge rooms. Sometimes you need to try to get all the treasures within a short amount of time, or maybe you have to battle an AI in a pikmin battle challenge. These different modes shake things up but aren't so prevalent or long that they ever got stale to me. Add in a a neat hub world and a couple good size bonus modes with great rewards and you are looking at 30 hours to get 100% which felt like the perfect runtime to me.