it's placement here is definitely an aberration but honestly i hate this thing. this is a brazen minecraft/terraria rip-off, slathered with Dark Patterns, that replicates all the worst parts of it's two components and has almost none of their respective strengths. has the same noxious air as roblox, to me, and herefore huffs the world's worst vibes

take the piss

in lieu of actually being even once remarkable, wrath of the righteous instead offers you so much mediocrity, literal hundreds upon hundreds of hours of it, at such a scale that it demands respect ipso facto. so much mid that you'll choke on it. which was all i wanted at the time when i was going through one of my many depressive spirals of 2023 but a game compelling you to play it does not make it good, and it's long past time we learned the difference.

turns out there's a reason the only thing people remember about this game is a cutscene that lasts a minute or two

honestly some of the funniest things in video games is the plot of this game being about batman discovering a new kind of criminal in gotham city...an unprecedented figure of terrifying complexity...a villain that thinks...crime...is funny? but no...that can't be...


anyway the game is shite

Kingdom Hearts, in some of its best moments, thrillingly flirts with the inherent unreality of its premise, and the ghost of our world that haunts it's own. I remember when I was a kid, just on the verge of being too old to play pretend, when narrative and structure starts to creep into play, a serialized adventure playing out with two of my closest friends, where Heartless started creeping into and invading the real world, where parts of our town and it's surrounding environs became echoes of worlds like Hollow Bastion and Traverse Town. And, of course, we have videos like that one of the two guys fighting with umbrellas yelling KH fanfiction dialogue at each other, which is as beautiful and important an artifact as any of the games. For all these things, a Kingdom Hearts augmented reality Pokemon Go-like game where you fought heartless in your hometown, beating them up outside the Premier Inn, is not only a sincerely tantalizing prospect, but a fantastic realization of one of the series' most enthralling themes.

It's a shame Square didn't actually make that, and made this shite instead.

heartbreakingly, it really is quite rubbish.

heartrendingly embarrassingly bad. a pathetic act of desperation made for the worst people on the internet. makes me sad to even think about.

a sublimated form of watching people jack off over webcams.

bro you cannot be charging 5 quid for mr brightside i could hear that right now by walking into literally any building in ireland

yes i did buy it what's your point

i got this free with my graphics card and man it sure does feel like it

generously about 40% of a finished video game. will probably be a good once it's finished though!

lovely art and theme but when it comes to actually playing it, it's pretty tedious! there's basically never a reason to interact with other players so really this is just kind of a slow deckbuilder that ends too soon for a satisfying finish and feels like it punishes both winging it and careful planning such that it's oddly dispiriting to play.

looks and sounds beautiful but outside of the specific moment on being a game you can play with your younger sibling in 1994 it doesn't hold. maybe the single worst menu in video games

charles leclerc's face on the cover here is the face i made playing this

compellingly unperfectable logistics manager hiding under the veil of the world's most annoying and racist city builder. loses steam once you get out of the cold war unforch

(with increasing uncertainty and weakness) "Y-Yeah, s-sure, I love Joe Mad art it's so silly, just let me ch-check howlongtobeat real quick..."

by no means bad and i'm so excited by the enthusiasm it has sparked for crpg ideas but i am much less excited by the enthusiasm it has sparked for d&d. i'm gonna let the goat take it away on this one

"In the same way, critics who set out to talk about a fantasy novel without having read any fantasy since they were eight, and in ignorance of the history and extensive theory of fantasy literature, will make fools of themselves because they don't know how to read the book. They have no contextual information to tell them what it's tradition is, where it's coming from, what it's trying to do, what it does. This was liberally proved when the first Harry Potter book came out and a lot of literary reviewers ran around shrieking about the incredible originality of the book. This originality was an artifact of the reviewers' blank ignorance of its genres (children's fantasy and the British boarding-school story), plus the fact that they hadn't read a fantasy since they were right. It was pitiful. It was like watching some TV gourmet chef eat a piece of buttered toast and squeal, "But this is delicious! Unheard of! Where has it been all my life?" - Ursula K. LeGuin

a linear sequence of scares. some good, some bad, some great, some terrible. it turns out the scariest thing of all is the endless misogyny of aaa video game writers. can one of you fuckers please talk to your wife even once

provides a deeply valuable service of being something to poke away at during boring work meetings

complete mid but mid i found delightful. joe mad forever

it's fine and it has a fantastic soundtrack and james mccaffery elevates the poor material immensely by his performance but it is basically diluted kane and lynch 2 and i don't even like that game that much. dan houser has one story and the tragic thing is he's not even that good at telling it

look i'll be honest i kinda used the limbus company fiasco as an excuse to give up on this. clearly an incredible work but the game's uncritical adoration of gacha aesthetic and design philosophies reads so much worse when they would later go on to make one. resolutely not for me though it's clearly a phenomenal piece of work.

it's just like ys 1 except the truly abominable dungeon is right at the start instead of at the end

some really unfortunate level design mars what is otherwise a really fun game. bump combat absolutely rules

on the whole probably a much weaker chapter than 3 was however i had a much better time with it because i played with more people and made my friends laugh a lot with my impression of venom from the venom films. hearing the laughter of the people is game of the year every year and fortnite remains a good delivery mechanism for that regardless of what stupid hat it is trying on

really good execution of a bad idea. homeworld's gameplay, narrative, and aesthetics all lose a dimension - sometimes literally - in the decision to make this a prequel but it still manages to bring the juice where it counts with some really engaging tactical puzzles and excellent voice acting.

look i'm not gonna tell you that halo infinite got good this year all i can tell you is that i've had a pretty great time with it in 2023. halo with The Boys still our national pastime

not really my kind of thing but very cute and charming!!!

placeholder for all the dlc. a sickos only package in a way that's kind of delightful to see for a game like this, quintupling down on the game's challenge in a way that truly forces you to engage with the genuinely phenomenal class affinity system and also the genuinely abysmal loot system. mostly sidesteps the game's perfect ending for a stupid what-if story that i had a good time with

i played the two starcraft 2 expansions this year at last. this one was the weaker of the two but it was still fun if overly easy. blizzard's writing has never been good but jesus christ what is going on with the plot of these games

endearingly earnest slice of mid with just enough genuinely charming and clever touches to make it not seem like a waste of time to finish. some of the outraged negative posts on this game are truly wild you guys need to chillax. the funniest post-credits scene in video games.

like putting paprika in room-temperature water

i actually had a lot of fun playing through this but it is undeniably basically the most boring possible take they could have had on a re4 remake, so obviously they went with it. utterly bizarre from a tonal and aesthetic perspective due to it's unwillingness to shift some of the Iconic Images of the original despite it's palpable embarrassment of them. it's diminishing returns for the resident evil remake series i'm afraid

enjoyed my time with this more than i was necessarily expecting to, when everything clicks together it's legitimately astonishing, but it's shocking just how obviously and immediately nintendo have come up against the conceptual limit of the botw formula. totk is less a coherent game than it is an entire basket full of toys dumped onto the compelling core of botw. some of these toys are fun, some of them aren't, and there's far, far too much of both. closer to ubisoft than the nintendo adults will ever admit, both in this and the astonishingly racist story. the gachapon machines are maybe the single tackiest and ugliest aesthetic decision in a game this year, like putting a pepsi machine in skyrim.

an ostentatious funeral dirge for the entire big-budget RTS genre, revelling in it's excesses, for good and ill. i had a great time playing it but the story is wildly racist to a degree even a step beyond most other blizzard games aside from WoW and the last set of missions are kind of weak

"I prefer not to um...not to speak. If I speak, I am in...in big trouble. In big trouble. And I don't want to be in big trouble." - Jose Mourinho

its crazy taxi but the map isn't as good but it's still crazy taxi what am i NOT gonna have a good time???

basically just as good as it needs to be to provide a framework for spooks and scares but because it really is Just As Good As It Needs To Be I can already feel the tension between myself and my already waning enthusiasm for its diminishing returns and those that truly love it who are still trying to wring as much enthusiasm as they can out of it. mark my words someone will have a travis mcelroy lecturing people on amogus etiquette moment in this game in 2024

story is like laughably bad but competing for time trials on various tracks over discord is some of the most pure fun Gaming i had all year. northern ireland represent.

my friend vis made this so there's a bias here obviously but i think this game genuinely Has It!!!! it sparked an enthusiasm for shmups that has remained strong thanks to the clever way it handles difficulty

fell off on this as the year went on (and when SF6 came out) but i still had a great time with this earlier in the year. aesthetically divisive but i think it mostly works for me

essentially just one puzzle but a truly delightful one. i had a fantastic time playing through this one with friends, constantly pushing up against all the stuff you can do and the little interactions you can find. i'd play a million of these

tank controls are immaculate emanations of God’s design. embarrassing the way this is treated as a mere stepping stone to dmc: it rules all its own

more of a toy than a coherent video game but an excellent toy nonetheless. the challenges are actually really fun this time. it’s easy, in 2023, when XIV is worse than it’s been in half a decade and 16 was rubbish, to think that final fantasy is bad, but this is a great reminder that it’s actually pretty great

my very good friend and memoire 0079 collaborator Roxy made this so I am biased but I think think this is fantastic. easily the thing that creeped me out the absolute most this year, really disquieting prose that sends shivers up my spine

still playing this but I really love it. divine low poly mechanical fish that you blow out of the sky with an ostentatious weapon upgrade system that feels incredible. indulgence personified

https://x.com/woodabris/status/1722612395670172021?s=46&t=wCK4VIrt-1w10PQW6dNDKg

made me actually sick and scared and stressed so much that i couldn't play it anymore. so, phenomenal

kain r heinlein is so cool

kinda hated the combat here but my what an astonishing thing this otherwise is

rian johnson stole the climactic death scene of "the last jedi" (2017) from this and it was better here.

absolutely love it in the abstract but don't really enjoy playing it sadly

the prequel to The Bouncer (2000)

a cavernous well of sadness that i drink deep of so completely