Still one of the best platformers ever. Apart from the super unique gravity shifting mechanics, the world and artstyle are also really eye catching and just make for fun places to "fall" through.
I think the plot works for the most part as everything is rather mysterious and dreamlike, even if the conclusion is a bit abrupt and therefore a bit unsatisfying.
Some mechanics and level design in part can be a bit wonky or even frustrating and most of that would get ironed out in sequel, but I still had a blast.
Besides, Kat is just such a heartwarming dumdum for a protagonist, how could I not enjoy this?

I'm a bit shocked, flabbergasted, completely bamboozled actually.
This is THE game of 2017? If i hadn't played with friends, I'm not even sure I would have finished this at all.

There are just so many weird decisions I can neither make heads or tails of.
First, the basics: the control scheme is all over the place. One button is never used except for "interaction" (talk, pick things up), but sprinting and jumping are the farthest apart...like a combination you're likely gonna use very often. And you can't change the control scheme except for switching jumping and sprinting... Was this an inside joke?

Then there is weapons breaking. I've heard how this supposedly gets you to try different ones, but...there are only like what 5(?) different types of weapons? What are You supposed to try out then for 50-100 hours? That just means a fight might be a potential loss of resources, especially when you don't know if the one you will be getting will be even as good. A lot of the enemies being damage sponges also didn't help.

Fighting in general will mostly be a nuisance cause you will lose more resources than you're getting. Ressourcen overall make this game a chore. Got hit by an enemy? Well there goes all your health, better eat 20 apples/ a cooked meal. This area is too cold, this one too hot, better grind out clothes or potions to resist that. Wanna endure any hit whatsoever? Better grind out that armor or do a couple of shrines. Wanna be able to climb or get across a lake? Better grind out shrines so you can cross a small lake a ten year old me could have crossed.

Shrines in general can be fun, but often they get repetitive or tedious cause you need to be able to finish them from the very start, never evolving your tool set or making the riddles more interesting. The same is true for the divine beasts making it possible to cheese almost everything. And because so many things were tedious I wanted to cheese as much as possible. Many people love how you can do anything but the most pragmatic approach is often super boring.

"Everyone can play this game like they want" isn't really true. Either you're good enough to speedrun it or just scavenging resources for bosses and better equipment. A lot of which, you could also miss. Friend had to look up a guide to get to the guy were you can exchange the korok seeds. You know a fundamental part of the game. Same with the fairies. What kind of design is that of you might miss fundamentals? (Some shrines will also need you to have arrows, don't have any well tough luck, again talking bad design)

Then there are so many things that - it seemed to me- were made useless on purpose:

Horses can't hear you and have to pass obstacles in real time (except for stables) just doesn't make me use them cause it ain't worth it. leaving me to pass the endless planes of this open world, while I hope I will finally reach my destination.

Rain and slippery surfaces just effectively give you a time-out. Wanna do anything? Just wait for the rain to stop!
And what kind of idea is this game having about physics anyway? Lightning strikes you specifically when you wear anything made out of metal. That's how lightning works. Other times electricity works as you would expect in real life. (The ragdoll physics and sometimes the mechanics will be super wonky too).


On a more personal note:
I genuinely hated this game's approach to implementing music. A whole lot of nothing, you climb a mountain and then you hear three notes. I really developed a hate for these sections. Didn't work for me at all and all I could do to was making fun of them to get any sort of entertainment.

I also never found a game this hard to READ. When my friend played for a whole session I wondered how much he gathered from the overworld and found things to do. I just saw empty plains of nothingness. Didn't know a row of trees was supposed to be interesting.
(It also didn't help that the light effects often made me see nothing at all, and with no options to tweak this, I realized for the first time how important accessibility options are)

What I did like, was mostly stuff you'd find in a classic Zelda game. Eccentric characters, interesting places (when I came to the towns like the city of the gerudo or places like the korok forest) and the boss fights were at least alright, most of the time. I didn't find many memories, but the ones I did find were actually kinda cool. Wish they weren't as hidden on the map.

All in all this was maybe the biggest disappointment and I will never trust anybody of you ever again. If I hadn't had so mich fun hanging out with my friends while playing this, I would have never finished it.

For a racing game with a grand total of one (1) playable cars, this has a hell of a lot of imagination and spirit. Tracks are long and packed with set pieces, shortcuts, easter eggs, jumps, and hidden boost lines that might make you forget about the race altogether in lieu of pure exploration. You could play each of them ten times (and you probably will, because there aren't that many) and still find new stuff.

The mechanics alone would make this great as a pure racer, but the surprisingly layered, thrilling track design make it really stand out. It's basically like if SAN FRANCISCO RUSH was good.

I Loved Journey and Flower, so I was quite excited to try out Thatgamecompany's new game.

Sadly the online service based nature of the title really sucks away all the wonder and magic.

There is still a beautiful game underneath all that nonsense but it lacks the elegance of their previous games.

I really hope they return to making non service based stuff in the future.

"You have to get to know someone to be able to understand them." - Pascal

Almost everything has already been said about this game. So this time I'm just gonna write what it means to me:
This game marks my switch from a philosophy to cultural and social anthropology. Quite fittingly this game has numerous references to philosophers, their theories and what might be rather lacking about them. (Though some get more honest/ thorough critiques than others).
However, this game kinda poses against the mere reflection on meaning of life, what it means to be human etc. Instead it see the necessity to carve a future for oneself despite the hardships and embarrassments along the way.
Androids as well as machines (and in consequence humans) are characterized as imperfect, very divided creatures, that are full of different viewpoints, histories and the like, making a mutual understanding hard or downright impossible. Especially the final ending however makes a point of the necessity to still try. No individual can just live by themselves, people need to support each other if they want to create a better future.
And that's exactly the turn in thinking I made, when I left behind philosophies perfect theories and instead embraced to engage in real practices and histories of human culture, however imperfect they may be.

So yeah, this game means a lot to me.

P.S. other things worth mentioning:
I really love the feature of the death messages and how they evoke the idea of haikus, hastily written on the battlefield.
I don't know if they had to cut on costs on the aesthetic, but the PS3-like greys and general mudiness often hidden behind fog und made to glisten with a certain way of lighting, really gives the whole game a nice melancholy feel, that I rather enjoy.
The battle systems blend of DmC and RPG makes for something fun, but not necessarily deep as you can brute force alot of the game. Making 9S so weak in comparison to the other two makes him a bit annoying to play at times.
Why is A2 so cool?

Chorus is the true successor to the Factor 5 style of arcade space combat games that started with Rogue Squadron and ended with the tragically misunderstood Lair. It's fast, frantic and intense, with smooth controls and expansive open world asteroid sandboxes to zoom though at ludicrous speed and complete missions and side activities in.

Its densely told story follows Nara, a former high ranking member of a space cult bent on achieving the eponymous "Chorus", a forceful state of harmony among all sentient beings via the negation of free will, whose refusal spells doom for any apostate. When Nara is made to destroy a whole planet due to this policy, she starts questioning her indoctrination. Haunted by guilt, she embarks on a quest with her sentient ship Forsa (short for Forsaken, oof) to stop the Cult forever.

As you progress through the game, Nara unlocks a number of psionic abilities, which are really what sets the game apart from similar ones in this genre. These range from EMP bolts that disable starfighters to boosts to spear through enemies and even one to grab foes out of thin air (well, thin space) and throw them into objects. It's a cool gameplay twist, and it adds an extra layer of complexity to the starfighting genre, since each enemy requires a different weapon or power to effectively despatch.

The sense of speed is phenomenal as you turn on your afterburner and dart through asteroid caves and buzz a few inches from space stations with the precision the game controls allow. Fidelity isn't high if you stop and look closely, but the awesome vistas with their sense of gradeur and scale are breathtaking at times. It leaves you wishing that locations were a bit more diverse: if even just one of its sandboxes had been a planetary surface instead of just asteroid belts and space stations, it would have done a lot for its variety.

Combat is a lot of fun, proof be it that when the game's dynamic quest system decides to through an optional enemy encounter at you, you will go out of your way to engage in it more for fun than for the monetary rewards needed to upgrade your ship. Some of the large scale battles, especially the final one, are ridiculously epic in scope, and forgiving enough to be entertaining on top of that.

There are a ton of sidequests as well, many of which are narratively interesting and yield unique upgrades like weapons or efficiency modules you can juggle around to spec your fighter the way you like it.

The core issue with the game are the difficulty spikes: while the core loop of the game is fairly easy, considering how overpoweredd your ship will quickly become, the major set pieces against the occasional boss encounters and even some of the tutorials can become hair-pullingly hard.

Each of the three or four major boss fights can take upwards of 45 minutes to defeat (without retries that is), considering how insanely high their health pools are and how small and difficult to hit their weak spots. If that weren't enough, some of their attacks are borderline impossible to avoid while trying to also be on the offensive at the same time. They're just frustrating, but thankfully they offer mid-fight checkpoints to mitigate the aggravation.

It's also worth mentioning that this is a fairly buggy game: it won't affect most of your experience, but in my fifteen hours with it I ran into a handful of game-stopping bugs that forced a checkpoint restart: enemies didn't spawn a few times, preventing the mission from progressing, mission a couple missions wouldn't end despite completing the onjectives, one time the portal to go back from a side area disappeared, forcing me to fast travel from the map, and about halfway through the game the map itself bugged out, from then on showing my ship as the name of the location mentioned before. This fixed itself near the end of the game but was annoying all the while.

A flawed game for sure that needed a bit more balancing and polish, but definitely a must play for fans of this sparsely populated genre. If you were let down by Star Wars Squadrons you can safely gravitate towards this one.

these blobs can fucking sing!

We lost something culturally when a studio that put a swarm of blobs whose mouths match the vocals in the game music gets shutdown to fund games that poorly ape Hollywood. And hollywood isn't even good in the first place!

This isn't the most fun or innovative or wild game ever made yknow. But it's a game which seeps with joy, acknowledgment of the medium, and totally whips aesthetically.