Gris should be a home run for me, its a game with incredible animation and a beautiful artstyle thats trying to tell an emotionally driven narrative through interaction and visual story telling but in the end i came away thinking of it in very average terms as it was never able to elicit any type of emotion out of me, maybe this was due to the lack of creative visual story telling and the fact that the game will never let you truly take in an emotional part because the music is telling you how to feel instead of being used to enhance an emotion instead it is the emotion. In terms of telling a story through the gameplay, I guess you could argue that the powers are to represent growth and a step forward in gris' journey to overcome grief but outside of that I can't really think of how the game tried to say something through its gameplay, maybe this is due to the game trying to be a fun expirence instead of trying to make you feel how the character feels. As mentioned, the game is still trying to be fun and enjoyable to play but I think this is to the games detrement since I don't really feel much for the character because nothing in terms of interaction is telling me how she feels, I think if the was trying to be less fun and focused of trying to portray an emotion more then maybe I would have thought more highly of the game or maybe if the game was more fun then I think I would have came away more positive even if I think its to the games detriment since the game is also just average in terms of design, never evolving or playing with its concept in interesting way both narrativly and from a gameplay perspective.

So I started to write up a whole long thing comparing the indie film movement of the mid-late 80s and early-mid 2000s to the indie game design movement of the mid 2000s-early 2010s, reflecting on how in these types of "industrial" art forms there are these brief windows where the tools of production and distribution are sufficiently accessible but also the competition is relatively sparse and it becomes uniquely possible for nascent creators to make a mark for themselves with their scrappy, clumsy, deeply flawed but often innovative first projects, but then how within a few years those windows of opportunity always slam shut again as things get rapidly more competitive and the technology gets better and even the "independent" end of things becomes highly professionalized and the expectations of minimum technical competence quickly become inflated to such a degree that were those early pioneer works to be made just 5 or 10 years later they'd be considered amateurish or straight up bad and go completely unnoticed... but then I got kind of lost in the weeds talking about Jim Jarmusch and Tom DiCillo and ended up deleting the whole thing.

Anyway, the point is that playing Bastion today, the thing that stands out the most is just how clunky and stiff it is in just about every way—from the controls, to the animation, to the implementation of the mechanics themselves, to the way the climactic final level awkwardly forces you to both swap out a key movement mechanic with an entirely new one, and swap out both of your weapons and your special attack with a cumbersome, kind of shitty new weapon that radically slows down the pace of the game and imposes a very specific play style. The thing that stands out the second most is how much this game serves as a trial run for a lot of the design innovations that would ultimately go into Hades.

I wouldn't really recommend this to anyone who's not a game historian.

I bought the Bioshock collection a bit ago, and after finishing the first two, I really didn't fancy starting another. And I'd heard that infinite was the worst of the three. Lots of online folk who clearly know better, laying into it for its terrible story and politics. I'm pretty sure it was not advocating white supremacy, in fact it was quite the opposite. And it makes killing the baddies a lot easier when they are pieces of shit.

As for the story, I found it much more interesting than the previous two, and I really liked the setting as well. Whereas rapture was interesting, it was too dark and gloomy to actually appreciate it.

The combat was much more satisfying as well. It was generally a more entertaining game and I am slightly annoyed at myself for putting it off for so long, but on the other hand, I'd been going through the annual game apathy period, and this did just the trick (enjoyed it a lot more than Starfield, which I'm really struggling to stick with).
I'm even enjoying the nice video of the singer and guitarist over the credits, and usually hate stuff like this. Anyway, third time's the charm. My favourite BioShock.