It feels weird to say I "finished" the game because Monster Hunter is one of those games that only truly ends when you choose to stop playing. For what its worth, this is my second time finishing the base game's main story. First time was on ps4 but I never logged it here, so I'm doing it this time. I adore the combat in Monster Hunter, and I think World perfected the more slow, methodical pace the series was built on at least until Rise went full spiderman. Rise is still loads of fun as well, but this game might just edge it out for me. My single biggest complaint with the game is how fucking stupid it is to play the story with others. The game constantly stops you dead in your tracks throughout the story and makes you go into expedition mode to get clues which bizarrely appears to be single player only. And even when every player has grinded out that bullshit, you can't just all go hunt the monster straight away cause everyone needs to see the stupid fucking cutscene before they can join or have people join them. They fixed this all in Rise so I pray they don't fuck it up again in Wilds. Everything else gets a big thumbs up from me, except maybe how many of the weapons are the same base with different bits strapped on.

Charming little game. It reminded me more of Samorost 1 than Machinarium, and I mean that as a compliment. Puzzles were considerably easier than Machinarium in my opinion and thankfully there were no slide puzzles. I also found it very funny, its all very silly gags that hit for me. I do feel like the idea of 5 protagonists all with different skills was a bit underutilized but who cares honestly.

First game I finished in the shiny new PC I built. Process was a bitch but getting to play this again at max settings and 144 fps made it all worth it. It remains one of the most fun shooters out there and the campaign is still great to play even after 2 previous runs. Multiplayer unfortunately seemed dead as hell and even when I got matches it was unplayably laggy. I think everyone's on the Northstar client thing? Idk I didn't try it.

very apt sequel to the first game in that it is the same but bigger and better. Puzzles are more creative this time around because they don't have to restrict themselves to all being part of the same puzzle box. I really enjoyed solving them and I think pressing buttons, moving levers and whatever else with the touchscreen still has a certain magic even after all these years. Story is still whatever who cares, barely an excuse for more cool places to base puzzles around.

Glad I finally played this. I'm not very well versed on survival horror, Resident Evil type games, but Signalis by all accounts is a great entry into this genre. While I never found it "hard" it was still a very tense experience pretty much the whole way through. Final boss was a bit of a bastard but besides that it was mostly the expertly made tension. Enemies getting up after killing them is such a dick move that really livened up the often frequent backtracking. I'm a fan of using thermite or flares to permanently kill some of them too. Puzzles are even stronger than the combat, there's a lot of variety to them even if they tend to involve lots and lots of hauling items around in your limited as hell inventory. The 6 slots thing is a pain in the ass, but I don't think I would play it without it. Visually this game fucks hard. I adore the grainy, pixel art with 3d model look it has. The maybe metaphorical hellhole you're stuck in is so well realized in all of its claustrophobic corridors and rooms with stupid amounts of detail. Even before it all went to shit it was a nightmare turbocomunist scifi chinese german dystopia and it shows. This ties into the story, which I am only tentatively sure I understood. There's probably a lot of literature references I am missing and other stuff that would make me appreciate it all more but as a brainlet with a surface level understanding of its themes it had me interested. It was more of a style over substance thing for me, so thank god the style is this good.

A very engaging puzzle game I replayed and quite enjoyed. It's been god knows how many years so I forgot pretty much everything. Visually I think it holds up fairly well for a 10 year old phone game, and its vibe of fiddling with a puzzle box by pressing buttons, pulling levers or opening latches with your fingers is pretty wonderful. Every puzzle is very doable, and in the few times I got stuck, the game pretty quickly gives you progressively more obvious hints until it just gives you the answer. The story is whatever, mostly an excuse for the magic that makes the fucked up puzzle boxes that shouldn't be physically possible able to exist. I liked the vague Lovecraftian idea of a power beyond human comprehension and your descent towards it even if it manifests as non euclidian cereal boxes with a puzzle on the back.

Very cool and surprisingly short experience. They truly do not make games like this anymore, for better or worse. Batman Arkham, both Asylum and City, are among the first games that come to my mind when I think of the seventh gen of consoles and the games that defined it. This is actually my first time playing this however, and it was good fun. This game's signature combat has been copied by a whole bunch of games, and with good reason. It is a joy to play around with batman as he caves in criminal skulls. When the combos are flowing like they ought to it almost feels like batman is dancing, just with a lot of broken spines. The animations are almost hypnotic, and I wanted to keep combos going just for how it looked at its best. The big enemies can be annoying though, their attacks are pretty much all unblockable and you have to dodge out of the way. They have a really quick punch that got me way too many times and was probably my main cause of death. Exploration is all right I suppose. the titular Arkham Asylum is quite pretty but fairly small. I don't mind personally, travel times are very low and it helps with the pacing. Fuck all the Riddler stuff though, I am never bothering to do that. I just picked the ones that felt natural and never touched anything else. Story was a standard comic book affair, but there's few villains as interesting as Joker. This game has produced what by now is probably one of his most iconic interpretations, and he steals the show every time he appears, and he appears a lot. There's a bunch of other Batman villains, but they weren't the most memorable. I think the boss fights sucking ass probably influenced this view for me. Really only Poison Ivy ans the Joker get like an actual boss fight, everyone else is just enemy gauntlets, probably with several of the most fuckin annoying enemy type thrown in. Overall, maybe if the game was longer I might've been aggravated, but at its length I found it very digestable and it kept my attention through most of it. I am curious to see how I'd feel about Arkham City or Knight, which seem to be Asylum but bigger.

Saw this for basically pennies on sale, and decided to give it a go. This is a very frustrating experience, not because its hard, but because you can see how in a different universe there is a version of this game that is good, great even. A particular complaint for me is the artstyle. Don't get me wrong, the game has an animated, cartoony look to it that is really pretty, but I take issue with how it handles its premise. Hyper intelligent fish on mech suits with a medieval aesthetic? Sign me the fuck up! It's an incredibly original idea that sadly gets wasted in my opinion. The robot designs are nice, but there's not nearly enough and the enemies start repeating pretty fast. They're funny looking and I like them, but there's no point to them being all fish. It feels like they came up with the idea but then immediately forgot about the fish part. It does not influence the story, any mechanics or the environment. They're just fish and they can subsist on oil and antifreeze, shut up. I am genuinely surprised there's no underwater section at any point, they're not always great, but it would've helped with the monotony. There's like 3 biomes in the game, and they are all bland. Combat is serviceable, and after a few upgrades found it does feel pretty good to control Attu, but the enemies barely evolve their tactics and besides the movement upgrades everything you get feels useless. I basically never used bombs for anything that wasn't breaking walls and the different flavors of electricity you get near the end seem like they might do more damage to certain enemies but I could never quite tell. There's a lot of pieces of armor too, but I basically only equipped stuff that gave me extra damage. some sort of transmog system might've been nice, cause I think there's some drip to be made mixing and matching pieces. Music was whatever, it felt like there was 3 tracks at most, and the story is nonexistant. You get a cutscene at the start, and one at the end that's basically just "good job" with nothing inbetween. No dialogue either, the only character you meet that isn't trying to kill you is the merchant and they never say anything. They have a cool design but they might as well just be a vending machine. I have been pretty rough on this game, but I think it can be decently fun, it just makes me sad to imagine how it might've been better. I'm hoping the devs one day circle back to this and a theoretical feudal alloy 2 is made, there's just so much that could be expanded on.

Samorost 2, for all its strengths, still felt very much like an extension of Samorost 1. It was good, but with a little tweaking I could conceivably see it being fused into Samorost 1 and released as a single ambitious Flash game that I might've beaten over the course of several computer classes while procrastinating. Machinarium, however, represents Amanita firing on all cylinders and making something new that was also their biggest game yet. The result is pretty delightful, though I found it frustrating at times. With the power of hindsight I can see how younger, stupider me never beat it cause holy shit some of these puzzles are tough. I have no shame in saying I was forced to use a guide (which by the way I quite like the ingame guide, it has just as much care visually as everything else and it requires just a little skill by making you earn the solution with a short shoot em up minigame to access the walkthrough) several times throughout the game because I found it quite cryptic. There is also liberal uses of my worst enemy in puzzles: sliding tiles. I am dogshit at those and the game loves to throw different versions of the concept at you that I either brute forced by accident or looked up the answer cause otherwise I'd be there all day. Even with that the game took me a pretty respectable 7 ish hours to beat which is quite decent. Art wise, I fucking adore everything about it. Robots are always cool, but the ones on this game are insanely creative with a fuckload of fun designs. The dirty ass city all these toasters live on is fantastic and I took screenshots in like every room because I was loving it all. Just for the visuals alone this game is worth buying on a discount, full price maybe if you like this kind of game. The Amanita bundle I got this on actually comes with every soundtrack and art book for every game included, and as soon as I beat this I poured over that. It's a shame that to my knowledge there's no physical artbook that has ever been sold because I would've gotten it in a heartbeat. Still, the art book you can get digitally is actually pretty nice. It's not very elegant, with most of it seemingly being notes and sketches made on a notebook, but they give the art a very raw, dirty feel that really reflects the final look of the game. You can tell they had a solid idea for how they wanted the world to look, and they went on to execute flawlessly. Music is also pretty nice, goes really well with the game, and its mostly relaxing. Minus points in that department because on what's basically the last room of the game there's an incredibly annoying static sound that almost gave me a migraine. I will admit I'm not totally sure if that was a bug or somehow intended, however. Story was quite simple, but I respect how much it actually conveys without any dialogue. I hadn't thought much about it, but none of Amanita's games from the ones I've played yet have any actual dialogue, just animal crossing esque funny noises when characters speak and pantomime. Ending is satisfying enough, and overall I had a pretty decent time with this game. If the puzzles weren't so cryptic at times and there were less sliding tiles I'd be even more effusive about my praise, but I think this is a game worth trying regardless.

Basically as soon as I finished the first game, I downloaded this and immediately started playing. This sequel came out two years after Samorost 1, and it's a better game than that one in pretty much everything. Game length is still not the longest, but I am more than fine with that. According to steam I clocked a little over an hour and 10 minutes on it, and that seems accurate. The artstyle remains charming as fuck, and there's a lot of new things to see in this game. Music is also still quite relaxing and very appropriate, but writing this exactly 3 months after beating it I can't remember any of the tracks off the top of my head. They were perfectly appropriate for the situation. Puzzle situation had a lot of moon logic moments, and I'll admit I looked up a guide at one point because I did not know what to do next. A couple puzzles have a lot of steps and there's some long animations that are cute the first two or three times but start to get grating after a while. Still a very decent point and click romp, but I think playing it so close to the first one makes them blend in my head now.

I have been playing a lot of games this year but I am a lazy cunt and have been postponing logging them in here for months. During September Amanita Design celebrated their 20th anniversary with a chunky discount on a bundle containing all of their games released on Steam, so I went fuck it and bought it. I was familiar with Machinarium, one of their games, having played it but not beaten it years ago. I then decided to go through their games in release order, starting with Samorost 1. This game was not actually part of the bundle, because it was released for free on Steam in 2021 as a celebration of its own Even got remastered on So I download this, open the game and 13 minutes later according to steam, I'm done. It feels weird to even try to review a game this short, but it was a flash game from 20 years ago I suppose. Playing it felt weirdly familiar, I must've randomly gone through it at least a decade ago during computer class instead of doing any actual work. It's quite possible I did not, but the game has a very striking artstyle that easily sticks in my memory so maybe I just saw it somewhere. Game might only be 13 minutes, but they were pleasant. The music is quite relaxing and goes well with it, and the puzzles were a bit easy but fun to complete due to how bizarre the world which made me never be sure of what to expect. Overall what's here is great, but frankly I'm glad this is free because its a tougher sell when the asking price is anything above that. As of me writing this I've played up to Botanicula, but I remember this left me very excited to see where the studio was going next.

This is a game I would charitably say has good ideas but doesn't always execute them in the best way. Right now I would say its a fuckin mess. On paper it could have worked, but the devs either didn't have enough time or experience, possibly both. To its credit, the world is ambitious. There is actually quite a lot of variety in the sights, and I quite liked the small archipelago part of the map that you explore by island hopping with your little boat. The character designs are interesting and colorful, displaying a lot of personality. This display is all they have however, because in possibly the most baffling decision made for this game with an already huge number of fucked up choices, there is only 3 voices in this entire game. This by itself doesn't sound too bad, most voice actors have a lot of range and can work as several characters at once, and it is an expensive part of development, so it makes sense for a small studio to not go overboard. The problem is the implementation. For about 95% of the game, the only voice you will be hearing is the narrator. On conversations, the characters make random grunts sometimes and the narrator just tells you what they said. Their delivery is mostly pretty flat, like they care just as little as me about the story. There was probably a highlight somewhere, but I was so fuckin done with it after like 10 hours I mostly played with youtube on my computer and barely paying attention. A problem that really compounds this is the boring as hell most of the time, annoying as fuck more than it should've writing. I understand this game wanted to be a game with multiple paths based on a karma system, but what this resulted on is that every fucking character feels entitled to judge you as soon as they meet you every time. There's not one character that's an annoying preachy asshole. Even without anyone around, the narrator loves to drop the most inane comments every single chance they get, and it was exhausting. Basically nothing said ever was worth paying attention to, and the plot was also pretty nothing. Because it has to exist on this weird quantum superposition where you can both be a good little boy that helps everyone and literally hitler it all must be bland as hell to accommodate every part of the asshole spectrum. Unfortunately, even if you try to turn off the voices to just pay attention to the gameplay, this isn't particularly good either. Combat is an interesting mix of melee, guns and magic that had potential, but like everything else in this game it never congeals into something good. None of your attacks have any impact, the sound effects are weak, the enemies barely react, and they are damage sponges until you start stacking the damage buffs. The weapon crafting is kinda neat, you find different parts around and you can stick them together for a unique weapon. There's probably a trillion different combinations, and every part used appears in the final result which is cool. Still, the only part that actually matters from any given weapon is the blade/cannon that determines more or less its damage, what kind of movement set it gets, and the single special effect like heal on kills or shooting double the bullets. Everything else are extras that add more damage. The powers in this game are also quite dissapointing, they also feel like they barely tickle the enemy, and despite me specing on it, the damage numbers it did were never better than just pulling out a gun. Some of the powers do give you extra mobility while traversing, like the bubble that lets you jump quite high and kinda run on water. And as a nail in the coffin, this game runs like dogshit on ps4. I had several crashes and the fps were crawling a lot of the time. I'll admit that at this point that's probably more the fault of the old ass console than the game though, but it certainly didn't make the experience better. I believe there is universe where this game was good, and perhaps a Biomutant 2 is what is needed to refine the concepts and polish this gem so rough its basically still coal into something decent. Prospects do be grim though.

I can only imagine how longtime fans of the series felt after eating this fucking good for the first time in almost 10 years. I'm a newcomer to the series except playing a bit of AC 1 before this released. And by god, this is an absolutely wonderful game. I knew I was probably going to like it based on my experience with AC1, but I was floored by how good it ended up being. I bought the game, and played it non stop until I beat the first route the next day. Afterwards I immediately started the second route because it was just that engrossing.

It's so fucking fun to play this, that rush you get from a good 1v1 duel against another AC never got old for me. The titular Armored Core handles like a dream and the truckload of parts make for a lot of possible builds. It is true some things like the Zimmerman shotguns were busted as hell back when I played it, but since then a couple of balance patches have dropped that evened the weapon playing field a little and some of the weaker stuff is probably a lot better now. Hell, I kinda want to go back in for another playthrough and see what changed. There are a total of 3 story routes to play through, and you need to do so to experience every single mission in the game. Final one requires you to have beaten the game 2 times, while the first 2 are always possible based on your choices. There is a wide variety of missions, and not all of them are winners, but there's more than enough to satiate me until the hopefully inevitable expansion/sequel this series always seems to give its numbered entries.

The story was also great, it's pretty good scifi with some amazingly strong characters despite none of them ever showing their faces and only existing as disembodied voices you hear through the radio. The voice acting is absolutely phenomenal and carries so much of the emotional weight the big stompy robots can't by themselves. Visually, Rubicon is not the most beautiful of planets. It's an industrial, desolate and horribly polluted hellscape, and despite the potentially drab setting that could have gotten boring without all the mission variety, the game managed to make my jaw drop with how beautiful some scenes could be. This game has some of the prettiest skyboxes in any game on god, and the climactic missions that end chapters always left my jaw open with the spectacle. The bosses on this game man like holy shit. When Contact with You hits during the Baltheus fight it was transcendent. At that moment I knew that this game would be one to remember possibly forever. Whole soundtrack is good as hell, I must admit a decent chunk does blend in with the carnage on missions, but its always right where you need it to in order to elevate every important moment or fight.

If I had a better computer I would be emulating AC4 right now, those games look so fucking fun and part of me wishes that Fromsoft tries the neckbreaker 3000 style again with better tech on platforms that can actually handle it, but even if that never happens I'm just glad there's good ass mech games like this out, and I'm glad I played it.

Not a terrible game, but also not great. Having not seen a single Kurosawa movie, any kind of reference this game might be making that could elevate the experience are just completely lost on me. I liked the visual presentation, the black and white does work pretty well and the game had some decently memorable vistas on its 5 or so hour runtime. Even at this length it did feel padded out a times, you really spend a long ass time before you actually get to the titular Yomi. Once you are there though the game gets fairly more interesting with the levels being more creative and introducing several enemy types that make the combat a bit more varied right when its starting to get on my nerves. By the end of the game I was kinda sick of it again, its just too simple and clunky. One of the most consistent strategies I found was turning around and spamming the move that hits anything near my back, and that worked for like 90% of encounters. Story was also pretty whatever, just a revenge plot with no memorable characters.

I quite enjoyed this. It was a very human story that I could really understand how it might resonate with other people. Parts of it hit home for me, coming back to your hometown to see how it has changed and left you behind in some ways is something I went through not too long ago and the way the game portrayed it felt really familiar. The gameplay is nothing to write home about, but exploring might give you fun bits of extra story so its worth doing. This game's focus and major strength is on its characters, and they're all well realized people. Their experiences here made for a very engaging game.