I whish I played this before, when I was really struggling at school. School was really not a great time for me, every day I thought about things I would not like to remember, and I feel like this game kind of really shows you how to have a healthy school life, and even if it may not have made me change and have an amazing life, it would have made my mind a bit more positive, and having a virtual school where I could feel safe and establish relations with people would have eased some of the pain I was feeling at the moment. It's my first Persona game and I didn't really know what to expect, but it was definitely worth it.

Have you ever wondered what it's like to play a game as the actual code or program inside the game? Well, now you can! TING is a game in which you embark on an adventure with the game's code. You start out at the title screen and must dismantle the entire screen to get the code's attention. In this process, you discover a "glitch" that is trying to destroy everything. You get sucked into other dimensions and try to find your way back. The entire game is in the style of a point-and-click adventure, but instead of controlling a single character, you are the "user" that the code talks to. He gives you hints along the way as well as being able to unlock actual hints, which makes some of the more obscure puzzles easier.

You have to really think outside the box with this game, as you can take down parts of the UI and completely break the smaller games inside to progress. You will end up with a classic adventure title and a JRPG that makes fun of Zelda tropes. The game also pokes fun at other games and mechanics, such as microtransactions and free-to-play mechanics. I don't want to spoil the Easter eggs, but the game has a great sense of humor, and anyone who has watched a few behind-the-scenes videos on how games are made will appreciate this game and the message it's getting across.

Every area is new and different, and no two puzzles are the same. Some areas have multiple screens, and you can manipulate them in interesting ways, such as unscrewing the computer monitor you're playing the game on and getting the back of the scene through the back panel. You have to also be okay with dragging the objects onto everything and trying combinations. Some things may not look obvious, but they make sense once you get the object or discover its use. Things like a mouse cursor popping a balloon, a metal letter T being used as a screwdriver, and the sign to a game title being used as a bridge. Almost every puzzle can be figured out with a bit of thinking, but a few were so obscure that I had to use all the hints available to me. When you press the hints button, it will show locks over the object that has hints. This can also be useful just to figure out what objects can be interacted with or what your focus should be without even using a single hint.

There are cutscenes in the game that can't be interacted with, and this is shown with filmstrips going up the sides of the screen. Because this is a "joke" game and you can break actual games inside, you need other cues as to what's a joke and what is not. Sometimes I didn't know what was a joke and wound up restarting the game, but you also need to trust the game. There isn't much else in terms of gameplay, but there doesn't need to be. This is a very clever idea for a game that I have never seen before. The story is interesting, the characters are likeable, and it's just an overall fun time and something really unique. The visuals are charming and switch up all the time, which makes you think outside the box.

The Callisto Protocol: A video game designed to teach people the concept of “hurry up and wait”. It's very flashy with excellent textures and lighting effects, but it's a hollow and boring game experience barely worth it even while heavily discounted.

You're Jacob, a cargo transporter and maybe smuggler. You and your pal are hijacked by terrorists, so you give them a fat middle finger and crash your ship back on Callisto, a prison planet. Only you and Dani, the hijacking ringleader, survive and the two of you are immediately arrested and thrown into Black Iron Prison. Jacob wants out, but warden Duncan Cole may be up to some scientific buffoonery.
I feel like this game is in a rush to get wrapped up before I ever got a chance to get interested. You're rarely given any sense of scale for the prison and you see zero prison life; Jacob gets arrested and when he wakes up next, he's escaping. He was in prison for 30 minutes, apparently, talk about timing.
The scale of where the plot goes is just embarrassing. The Illuminati shows up when they absolutely did not need to and visually they look like they got off the set of “Squid Game”.

A lot of The Callisto Protocol is made up of time wasters like crawling through vents, shimmying through crevices, or climbing ladders. In areas where Jacob can walk, often something like grime or entrails will impede him so he cannot run. This game is comically paced to a point where I cannot help but suspect these are no longer “hidden” loading screens but rather padding to make the short game feel longer and more deserving of your money. In other games such as God of War (2018), when Kratos and Atreus are climbing a wall (time waster), they at least have a conversation to help with worldbuilding and deepen the relationship. Striking Distance Studios just puts Jacob in vent after vent with nobody to talk to. Seriously, why?
When you're not wasting time in vents, you're fighting very easy enemies with a repetitive melee system or guns that can hit weak points and kill them in one shot. The "exciting" stuff is pretty lame, too.

There are plenty of problems with this game, stuff like motion blur making me want to vomit, melee combat following a very boring pattern, needing to tediously stomp every corpse to get necessary supplies, environmental effects (like lights turning off or ceiling panels falling) replay when you leave a room and return, there's no map system, enemies can grab you and easily get a free hit in, the ending is locked behind paid DLC, you're rarely rewarded for going off the beaten path, and probably more I'm missing.
Good things? As previously mentioned, the graphics are insane. The game looks great, but since it looks SO good and plays SO bad, this just seems like poor time management or focus and a waste of manpower. The DLC mission does some hallucination stuff well. The stealth sections with Jacob killing blind enemies worked okay, though maybe it was too easy (the whole game was). They just lifted some stuff right out of Dead Space and what worked well there works kinda well, here.

It's only $20 for the “full” game right now (again, the ending is in paid DLC... outrageous) and I still don't think it's worth that. There won't be a Callisto Protocol 2 and that's a very good thing. I've read people saying this game is some kind of hidden gem that wasn't given a fair shot and that's a load of horse shit, it's just bad. I feel bad for Josh Duhamel, a sentence I never expected to say.

I do not recommend The Callisto Protocol. If it ever goes to $10 for the whole thing and you far-too-passionately LOVE Dead Space, sure. Otherwise, this can and should be avoided.

This game is just incredible. The gameplay is amazing, much more dodge-focus than something like DMC, which makes the flow of combat feel very natural and you always need to be concentrated because enemy attacks can be really fast, needing you to have some very sharp reaction time (sometimes even too fast for my liking).
I think that what most stands out in this game, however, is it's personality. Bayonetta is just such an amazing character. It's usually kind of uncomfortable to me when characters in media are so sexualized, but here it just works. Bayonetta is a confident and powerful woman, and everything is so crazy and she is so powerful that the sexual parts just add to that "did that really just happen?" part. Like when the big bad guy throws a freaking satellite to you and you start playing satellite tennis with the boss. It is just a crazy experience that never fails to amaze and be charismatic.

Dark Days: This is a really lousy experience. Essentially an “escape the room” game with a monster in some of the areas, Dark Days fails to deliver both interesting puzzles and tense scares, and its narrative suffers the classic pitfalls of indie-tier junk.

It opens with a jumpscare, not the most clever but certainly an effective one, as a monster in your front seat lunges at you while you're driving. Jade, your rambling character, pulls over at a motel and shenanigans begin, including introducing a monster who attacks when you “stare” at her. It's a fine concept, but this gal is WAY too sensitive because just having her on screen for an instant is enough to prompt her wrath. It's not very hard to manipulate, though; when you hear her breathing, you can just clam up and wait her out if you want. She'll go away and you can get back to looking for fuses or keys or whatever. You can also just look at walls and strafe when you know she's behind you. By her second encounter she was already no longer frightening to me.

That's the whole game: find the item(s) to escape the room while the monster waits for a reason to kill you, then repeat that a dozen-or-so times. Jade will be speaking to herself the entire game (and cannot be fast forwarded), awkwardly saying nothing to the men speaking to her at various points, and you'll learn a story about some cursed place in the desert and how Jade's wife is sickly. Is it interesting? Absolutely not, my brain was completely off for this game, and my subconscious/muscle memory still managed to get through this mess in under two hours. I love when the bad games are brief.

I won't spoil it, though I sort of will, when I say it ends in exactly the manner you'd think an indie game would. Apparently this game supports VR and I could see the horror working out better there, but even then it's so brief with zero replay value, what's the point? It's cheap, but it's not worth it at all.

I do not recommend Dark Days. It's a waste of time and hard drive space.