The revisionism around Cyberpunk 2077 and the reception of this DLC makes me feel like I’m going fucking insane. It’s like everyone forgot how bad this game was because a mediocre anime launched on Netflix.

Cyberpunk 2077 had a myriad of foundational and structural issues regarding its world design, writing, quest design, and mission structure that cannot be fixed by making slight edits to the leveling system.

It wanted to be every kind of AAA game simultaneously without succeeding at any single junction (probably because it’s impossible to combine some of these game styles). It wanted to be an open-world RPG with the density of an Immersive Sim and a Grand Theft Auto-style game with bombastic, setpiece-driven missions like Call of Duty.

Phantom Liberty septuples down on the latter pairing in particular. It is a meaningless open-world that buffers what are essentially Call of Duty missions centered around set pieces, complete with walk-and-talk and press F to pay respects segments.

It’s a shame because, for all of the original game’s faults stemming from a hellish development cycle with a lack of a cohesive vision, with multiple rebooted versions of the stacked on top of one another to create a freakish AAA homunculus, Phantom Liberty offered a second chance on a fresh slate.

Instead, it’s just more of the same inharmonious game design, except this time, the characters and writing are even less interesting.

Cyberpunk 2077 was never good, and it can’t be good until CDPR makes a new game. I think people struggle to accept that CDPR dropped a massive fucking turd, and the reception to this DLC and the 2.0 version of the game is just a sunken cost fallacy for the games media hype machine.

Now that the game isn’t in a state where it’s literally falling apart at the seams, it can receive the ecstatic fanfare that people have been edging on for the past three years.

As great as Cyberpunk 2077 looks and sounds, it’s nothing more than a celebration of shallow AAA tropes and bad taste in a hollow open world. Now that the stink of its fraudulent launch has been cleaned up and laundered by an anime, post-launch support, and media fluff pieces, people can hop back to touting CDPR as an industry paragon.

If you already like this game, then Phantom Liberty and the 2.0 update will probably be up your alley. For people like me who didn’t enjoy the original game, they will not change your mind.

It’s also funny that after all of the controversy surrounding the transphobic imagery in this game, they couldn’t be fucked to remove it after three years and a “game changing” update.

Oh, I also ran into a game breaking bug that prevented me from beginning the last mission that made me have to go back two hours and replay multiple missions.

This is the first Souls-like to ever come close to From Soft quality. Even more shocking is that it actually does reach that level of quality at some points.

+ Great Atmosphere
+ Excellent Art Direction
+ Superb Bosses
+ Surprising variety of mini-bosses/elite enemies
+ Spot-on Soulsbornekiro gameplay
+ You can play records in the Hub and vibe while you go about upgrading, restocking and leveling up
+ Fantastic Sound Design
+ Twink

- Very Linear
- The stagger system could be communicated a bit better to the player, the lack of an on screen stagger bar can be frustrating
- Some of the elite enemies are a bit HP Spongey
- Sudden difficulty spikes (Not a huge deal but it can be a big turn-off to some)
- Last chapter is too long
- Balance is a bit messy, certain blades are just soooooooo much better than others

Bloodborne may have the hardest early game difficulty than any FromSoftware Soulsborne games. Central Yahrnam may come as a confusing labyrinth of multiple layers for first time players, and the two bosses that inhabit it are some of the hardest bosses in terms of early game (the boss arena for both being particularly unfavourable to the players doesn't help either). But it doesn't feel "unfair." It is very punishing, yes, due to vials and bullets being consumables that don't recharge, but it is a hurdle that can be overcome. Unlike Dark Souls 2 where both the character growth system and the early level design actively forces the player to have more difficult time than they should, Bloodborne instead is expecting the players to catch up to it.

And when the players do catch up, it's a marvelous experience. The action is fast, tight and balanced just right to constantly reward the aggressiveness, but also punish going too far. That may be the general way of things in other Souls games too, but what Bloodborne does is that it allows the player to dance on that fine line between in a tighter sense. It expects a lot from the players, but it also rewards a lot. And there are plethora of smaller ways that the game offers to knock down the difficulty without making it seem like it takes away the agency from the player. It is a meticulously balanced game, and its level design takes the best of Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 DLCs.

Okay I kinda loved this game and kinda hated it. Loved: the aesthetics, the oddball comedy, the surrealist touches, and the gameplay, which has just the right amount of balance and variety to keep you engaged for ten hours or so.

Hated: the fact that all this game's excellent style and design is basically in service of...nothing. Based on the title you might expect Yuppie Psycho to have something to say about corporate culture, institutional dehumanization, upward mobility, bureaucracy...something! But the few promising gestures at satire in the beginning fade quickly into the background, and it becomes clear that this game is not really about yuppies (or psychos) at all, the developers just thought a sinister corporation would make a good setting for a survival horror game.

Which, fair. It is a good setting, and the developers do, as I said, knock it out of the park with the aesthetics. The horror is more conventional than the premise suggests (you won't get much commentary on the more mundane horrors of an office job), but well-done as these things go. The plot, however, is some hot nonsense. I understand the mystery-box style of storytelling they are going for here, and I'm definitely not averse to a little ambiguity or confusion, but the plot is just so obviously cobbled together from spare genre parts, it really feels like they had some cool character designs they wanted to use and just kinda tossed them in a story-blender. I dutifully earned every ending, clinging to a desperate hope that one of them, just one, would provide some faint sliver of thematic resolution, but it was not to be. Maybe the biggest flaw in the end is the flatness of the characters; everyone is colorful and quirky but no one is very human or memorable, which sadly dilutes what little message the game has.

That said, if you like horror, and you're in it more for the style than the substance, Yuppie Psycho is worth playing. Despite my reservations, I did enjoy it enough to play it to completion. I just wish the aftertaste wasn't so bitter.

The Pikmin platformer that Nintendo wishes they'd made.

That's a little unfair to Tinykin though, as it manages to stand out on its own merits - it's a genuinely good 3D collectathon platformer that looks and runs brilliantly and pulls you in with large, detailed but rarely overwhelming level design filled with interesting scenarios and some quite fun dialogue with the world's inhabitants. The game is also smart enough to realise that dealing with enemies can actually be a chore in this type of game and as such just does away with them which really helps the flow and allows for more exploration.

I'm a bit of a sucker for games where you play as a little guy in a large setting (especially a homestead) so I think this was always going to do well with me but it turned out to probably be my favourite game of the year so far.