after your 10th hour or so the gameplay gets super boring. no replayability, either-- i played the same 4 levels to winstreak run wins on big daddy hades to see how the plot goes, and would probably have had a better time if i watched the scenes on youtube. heat mechanic sucks too, none of the options are fun even though the game is too easy without them. still a high star rating because i did have a good time with everything else about the game: visuals were nice, characters were fun, music is crazy, and the devs clearly put tons of love into the game.

Ben Esposito refers to Neon White as a "game for freaks." One would assume that this game is meant to appeal to social outcasts, rejects, or at the very least those with very specific and esoteric tastes. Instead Neon White panders to the lowest common denominator of anime fans that dominate spaces like Twitter and Reddit - who are indeed freaks, though likely not the "cool" kind of freaks that Esposito is attempting to appeal to.

The gameplay is fun! A bit floaty, but not enough that the moment-to-moment platforming suffers. The process of learning levels to optimize your time and get an Ace rank is incredibly addicting. In spite of being a single-player game there is an undeniable communal aspect if you're playing with friends, since the PC version compares your scores to those of your Steam friends - a lot of the appeal to me is running levels over and over again to try and best your friends' scores. The levels are gorgeous, intuitively designed while remaining complex enough for optimization, and over in less than thirty seconds. The music is fantastic and the presentation (my distaste for the VN format aside) is spectacular.

Thus comes the elephant in the room: the writing. Abysmal on every single front, an endless fount of regurgitated memes originating from the "Anitwt" community on Twitter only to be reposted and recycled onto the countless cesspools of Reddit. You can't go twenty seconds without hearing a buzzword or in-joke, and in the rare moments without talking about characters' breasts, making John Cena jokes or name-dropping Naruto characters you'll find it hard to take the characters and their dialogue seriously for the simple fact that nobody talks like this. If anything it's only accentuated by the fact that the voice acting is really great (Steve Blum voices the title character!) and the actors are giving it their all with every line, struggling to wring emotion and depth out of dialogue that simply has none to offer.

I don't have anything to say about the plot because I don't care and I'm probably going to skip it from here on out. The only comment I have about the dating sim elements is that the Persona series and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

Overall a really fun game if you skip the cutscenes and pretend it's just a bunch of floating levels in a void with no context or narrative presentation!

It's difficult to pinpoint what Minecraft does so differently that other games, before or after its inception, can't seem to be able to remotely capture. Regardless of how many years have passed since its Alpha days, booting the game up and spending those first couple of hours building dirt houses and digging ridiculously autistic tunnel systems still represent some of the most magical and captivating moments I have experienced in a videogame. A maverick trail-blazer of game design, Minecraft disregards any previous notions of what makes or breaks a game, and instead plops you into an indifferent and artifical world without any seemingly narrative context and invites the player to fill it with life and personality by leaving his permanent mark on it, starting right off the bat by having you punch wood out of trees and that totally making sense.

Either a stroke of genius or just pure luck, the combination of cutesy and colorful lego like aesthetic with the occasional lonely and scary desolation nature gives Minecraft a surprisingly introspective atmosphere, making grand statements about human labor and wilderness conquest out of simple moments like finally finishing that perfect wooden balcony as you watch the square sun rising and "Wet Hands" starts to play. The tangible and real threat of Minecraft's permanent item loss and unwillingness to throw the player a bone or hold his hand, turns the mere idea of exploring the outskirts of your comfy man hole into a cautious adventure that has you feeling a sense of joy as you catch on your way back the familiarity of your ever evolving house on the horizon, and turns a simple detour that leaves you lost in the woods at night into a dreadful nightmare that has you frantically searching for a light source inbetween the trees as you dodge a horde of zombies and skellies.

While there is some truth to the criticism that "there's nothing to do" in Minecraft, which can be attributed to its low skill ceiling and diminishing returns as you run out of goals and ideas, the devs have been intelligent enough to not mess with the core appeal of the game with its inumerous updates over the years, and that's letting the player find his own fun, be that building a giant castle at the top of a mountain, building a minecart track that crosses a lava lake in the Nether, conquering The End and beating the Ender Dragon, or simply exploding enough TNT at once to crash the game.

I still can't decipher Minecraft after all these years. All I know is that I keep coming back, be it with a group of friends, or by myself. I still find its quiet and randomized world to be beautfiul and imaginative. I still love how the animals and enemies look and sound. I still can't get over how perfect and effective its oddly sad soundtrack is. I still get a stupid grin on my face when I manage to make the simplest of redstone mechanisms work. I still shit my pants every time I fall into a sense of safety around my home base and suddenly hear that dreaded hiss behind me as I watch my work explode. I dunno, it's a very good game.