Bloodborne is my choice for best FromSoft game.

The world design of Yharnam is absolutely stunning, blending Gothic Victorian horror with Lovecraftian horror elements in an expertly paced and structured game. The music is incredible and lends to the atmosphere of the world, often with grand orchestral choirs and strings for boss fights or chillingly dark and creepy vocals for some of the areas.

Combat is fast and visceral, rewarding counterattacking quickly after taking damage to reclaim some of your lost hp makes Bloodborne a much more exciting game than some of FromSoft's other, slower games.

Bloodborne's story is mysterious and esoteric, in typical FromSoft fashion they very rarely tell you anything outright, requiring you to read item descriptions and completing npc side quests to learn more about the lore of the game for those who are interested.

A potential source of frustration (besides the challenging difficulty) is that your main source of healing, blood vials, are a consumable resource meaning you can run out of them. Running out of blood vials while trying to defeat a boss and then having to go out and grind for more breaks up the pace of the game and can be annoying.

The "Old Hunters" DLC is also a great expansion to the game with some of the most interesting boss fights in the whole game, I highly recommend it if you decide to play Bloodborne.

Overall I think Bloodborne is a masterpiece that any fan of FromSoft should play and I hope that we get a sequel one day so we can see more of what Yharnam has to offer.

How did this come out in 2009? It looks and feels like a ps3 launch game, complete with a lame sixaxis gimmick, framerate that struggles to hit 20fps most of the time, constant pop-in (seriously, cars and geometry sometimes didn’t load until they were like 30 metres away), and animations that make Morrowind impressive by comparison (for instance: https://youtu.be/O1P3GBG05Vg?t=53), jerking around like malfunctioning animatronics and with facial animations that basically consist of the bottom jaw moving up and down like a sock puppet. It’s hilariously bad and it makes the serious scenes impossible to take seriously. The colour scheme is that monotone, washed out grey and brown that was so popular at the time, and the lighting is so simplistic that the game feels lifeless most of the time. The dialogue is also terribly written, with stilted delivery that sounds like each line was recorded at different times and the actors never actually saw each other face to face. How was this released in the same year as Uncharted 2, adjacent to GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption?

Thankfully, most of the story cutscenes are rendered in a stylish graphic novel inspired style to sidestep this issue, but it’s still incredibly jarring whenever the game cuts back to in-engine cutscenes. The story is convoluted nonsense that has you going around beating up homeless people and engaging in police brutality, while you help the NSA use the Patriot Act to keep people safe (this is the good path). More specifically, there are these escort missions where the game doesn't let you cuff anyone, even though you have a previously established infinite lightning cuff power, so that you have to beat up the prisoners to make them fall in line (https://youtu.be/XNHSUzUB-CU?t=871).

There are somewhat interesting ideas about the government manipulating people and the conflicts being driven by a class divide, but it’s so disconnected from how the game’s binary morality directly rewards you for falling in line with the powers that be that it totally misses the mark. The choices are also mostly really stupid extremes, like “do you want to murder innocent sick people in a hospital or save them and become a literal messiah?”. Every time you make a major karma choice, the game pauses for 5 seconds to tell you the thing you did, and there’s no way to turn off or skip this notification. I know it doesn’t sound a lot, but there’s a lot of these moments and it adds up over time.

The instant you finish a mission, a pop-up appears and the game pauses, often triggering before the mission’s dialogue and cutscenes are even wrapped up. Everytime you clear a district by finishing a side mission, the game cuts to the map screen (the one element of the game with a consistent framerate), slowly zooms in on the area, tells you you’ve cleared it, and then lets you play again. These weirdly intrusive UI elements add nothing to the game. The power upgrade trees are another underdeveloped idea, mostly giving you wider AOEs on your attacks, which is really frustrating on the good run because it makes it harder and harder to not hurt civilians.

The gameplay is the real saving grace here. Aside from all the other problems I mentioned, the shooting and traversal is a lot of fun (even though the collision detection for the parkour is pretty jank at times). I could easily see my score on this going up to a 2.5 or maybe a 3 if it got a proper remaster. There’s a solid amount of variety in both your abilities and the enemy types, as well as the city setting affording tons of verticality and traversal options. Pretty much everything else here is doing the bare minimum to funnel you back into exploration and combat encounters, because that’s the one thing this game does nail quite well. It’s a shame this game is such a technical disaster, because there is a decent core gameplay loop here at the very least, but it’s buried under so many problems that it's hard to appreciate much at all.

Does this game want to be realistic or escapist? This should be a simple question to answer, yet its inconsistencies in design make it harder to crack than the Enigma machine. In one early setpiece, you grab an MG42 turret to hold off the Nazis.

These emplacements have limited ammo, and you have to reload them, suggesting that the game is aiming for a more immersive, believable style as opposed to the infinite ammo emplacements common in the genre. But then a few missions later you hop on a jeep turret and it has infinite ammo, only it can overheat. This is strange but for most of the game this rule of overheating vehicle turrets and ammo-based emplacements stays consistent, so it’s not that big an issue. However, in the penultimate level, you get on another MG42 to hold off more Nazis, except this one neither overheats nor has ammo. If you’re going to undercut mechanical choices just for a cool setpiece, why have these limitations at all?

There’s other little issues like this, such as every door open having a lengthy scripted animation, but then in the French Resistance level there’s no animation for opening windows. The weird “drag the stick to the circle and then press a button” quicktime event totally fails to simulate… any action, really. As silly as mashing buttons fast and stuff like that may seem, they offer a vague approximation of tension and more minute gestures than a typical control scheme can offer. The Call of Duty series has actually been pretty good with these kinds of things, the final fights in Modern Warfare 2 and 3 for instance have little intuitive motions as well as button prompts that immerse in the action of hand-to-hand combat decently well. Hell, even the trigger-mashing of Call of Duty 3 was more effective than this. I’m not against QTEs per se, but this game uses them really poorly.

For some reason, the cutscenes are locked at 30fps even though the game runs at 60, and the transitions often stutter even moreso, which is really jarring, especially considering how often this game is jumping into scripted sequences and wrestling control away from you. There’s a moment in the introduction to your squad where Zussman (I finished the game, like, an hour ago, and I had to Google his name because I had already forgotten it) does the five finger fillet and you can see the knife clipping through his hands, lmao. There’s so much care in some aspects of the presentation, but so many things just break or don’t work as intended and make the whole thing fall apart. There’s a few interesting ideas here, but most of it is taken from other, better ww2 fiction.

Call of Duty has always been a weird mishmash of various TV, movie, and other game influences, so the lack of originality isn’t a problem in and of itself, but WWII doesn’t do anything new with them, nor does it even do them as well as the things it’s cribbing from, let alone coming close to surpassing them. The narrative is totally divorced from the gameplay. In the cutscenes, your squadmates are your ride or dies, and you’re constantly saving each other’s asses from the brink of death, but in practice they… give you ammo sometimes, and mostly just sit back and watch while you risk your life doing all the difficult stuff.

They’re not teammates, they’re equipment dispensers. They don’t even give you the stuff you need, like Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite, you have to ask them for it, and they’ll just leave you to rot otherwise. This coldness of war worked in the old games precisely because they weren’t trying to connect you to the characters, aside from a few plot critical NPCs the man next to you could die at any moment in the grand, dehumanising machine of warfare. But here, contrasted with this inspiring tale of the heroism of 6 men played by actors whom Activision gave a bunch of money to pretend to be soldiers, it just makes it impossible to pick out any coherent thematic thread. The game takes great pains to show the destructive chaos of war, with nearby soldiers having limbs blown off constantly, but it’s also full of action setpieces like the collapsing church tower and the (rightfully) mocked train crash scene that would be more at home in an Uncharted game. There’s an entire mission about concentration camps, but you also have bullet time. This campaign doesn’t know if it wants to be a serious interactive experience or a heightened video game romp, and it fails at both.

The Last of Us is one of the best games I have ever played.

This is not an unpopular opinion, I’m sure you know, as The Last of Us put into the public eye a strong focus on narrative in video games while also balancing it with one of the most engaging combat systems I’ve seen in a survival horror game. The design of its combat paired with the excellent pacing of its story made it easily one of the most powerful games of the last generation.

I was not looking forward to a sequel; I was almost dreading one. The ending of that first game is so beautifully ambiguous that giving definitive meaning to it could only ruin it. Joel and Ellie's relationship had been so perfectly played out that there was nothing a sequel could possibly add to their dynamic, I thought.

But somehow those sick, naughty dogs found a way to not only balance the intention of that ending with its new story, but elevate it to heights it had not seen before. Never would I have expected this game to show so much respect to its prequel, and still expand even further upon its themes and characters without eliminating the choice that Joel made.

I could go on and on about Ellie's journey and what it means for both her and Joel, but it’s entirely worth experiencing yourself. The kind of complicated, personal questions it asks you are genuinely thought provoking enough to warrant a playthrough from that alone.

But that isn’t all Part II has to offer, because the already rich gameplay structure of Part I is also expanded upon, turning the original’s Resident Evil 4 into full-on Metal Gear Solid 3 territory. The amount of new craftable items, unlockable weapons and upgrades, enemy variety, verticality, open-ended level design – it’s all to the absolute benefit of this game making it one of if not the most enjoyable Naughty Dog games to just pick up and play ever. I can almost guarantee that more than half of my time playing this game will be in exclusively the Encounter Select.

The Last of Us Part II improves on the original in so many different ways, that it almost competes with its predecessor in quality. there is no way to say that lightly. Naughty Dog have beaten all conceivable odds and created not only a wonderful game, but a sequel that should stand as a symbol of what any continuation of a game should strive to be.

The Last of Us Part II is one of the best games I have ever played.

Kentucky Route Zero is in one way a collection of stories intertwined between ghostly caricatures of the past, complicated stressed and living individuals, and government and environmental factors that work in such mysterious and incomprehensible ways to the denizens living underneath and on it that they might as well be supernatural, and which they are shown as within the entire work.
Every Act has interesting messages to tell, and lives to reflect on and shed a tear with. By the time everyone comes together to mourn the end of the journey, each person is fleshed out further than the featureless faces that adorn them would suggest. The game touches on several aspects of a decaying shifting void that is midwest America, whether that be the brainwashing ghastly denizens of corporations that push people into the neverending spiral debt hole they craft, or the old denizens on the high mountain scattered long after their nature project failed with an attachment to a dingy computer program that sounds constant static. There isn't really a single piece in here that feels without purpose or really in the wrong space at all. It is dense, certainly a less explicit piece than most, and a large amount of factors that make up the whole are something that it intentionally encourages you to research on your own. Each dialogue in their own points to several meta and thematic factors that don't just have to do with the characters at the receiving end of each line.
The visuals and music are just as thematically placed, each a perfect painting and screenshot in of itself. A lot of work was put into matching the perspective of the characters and where the camera is placed. A few specific examples that stand out to me is the revolving passage of time in Act 5, as a cat hearing everyone mourn and discuss where they're going, or the overbearing perspective when you move about the Hard Times. Or my favorite part, The Entertainment, as you bounce between each painfully depressing line.
I won't claim to understand all of what I saw as I played through the game, and honestly there are a lot of things that are too subtle for me to catch on, or maybe I'm just not in tuned enough to just get it. But that's fine. It's still a masterpiece of the medium, something I wish to see considered in high regard for the recognizable future. I hope it inspires people as much as it teaches me on aspects of life I've never been a part of or could directly relate to. It's a perfect encapsulation of what it sets out, and I was very emotionally invested. I highly recommend getting Kentucky Route Zero.

If you skip past the main menu of either of the first two Dead Space games, and you spend not too much time scrutinizing shit like tutorialization and texture quality, you probably won't stop to consider their age. The diegetic interface escapes most of the telltale signs of contemporary sensibilities, at least on the surface, and the sound and art design are strong enough to carry dated fidelity. It's not immediately clear to me that Dead Space 1 is twelve years old, which is really impressive.¹

Dead Space 2 opens in much the same way as its older sibling, carrying the interface forward, but there's no mistaking this period of games. Isaac has a voice, and he's not afraid to use it. He's here to exclaim like a big boy ("Fuck," Isaac exclaims)—he'll even employ bigger sentences as smaller parts of Cutscenes™! Isaac is a character that speaks and has something resembling a personality. That's observable fact.

Okay, the cinematic touchstones are generally fine.² Isaac being tossed around by a rampaging necromorph (read: angry space zombie) who intends him terrible, gore-fueled harm— it's exciting, right? Sure. I'm just not convinced the burgeoning Uncharted era did much good for developers who seemed pressured to prioritize 'loud' for their next project. Probably can't blame just Nathan Drake³ for that one. But what the fuck do I know, maybe this is exactly what Visceral wanted to make.

Everything is polished to a crisp sheen. Movement, gunplay, the kinesis ability, they're refined and equipped for a faster pace; the relatively linear action of a cinematic shooter. As someone who thought the shooting in Dead Space 1 was great, this is mostly improved. But it is missing something. Grit, maybe. An amiable friction that would never survive so much dedicated polish. On balance, I think both hit similar highs. On the other hand, there's no low in this quite as bad as how the first game ends, which is nice.

I've seen folks argue that Dead Space 2 moves away from horror in ways reminiscent of T1->T2, or Alien to Aliens, and while I believe that's ostensibly true, the horror in this series was always bodily, and just about every misguided step into psychological tension is clumsy at its very best. In that sense, the notion that the sequel shifts focus is largely successful, because you have less time spent showcasing trope-ridden writing somehow meant to elicit terror. Marginally. There's still a lot.

I like Dead Space 2, though. Even nine years later, games that involve guns in some form don't often attempt this level of granular interplay. It's underpinned by a morbid—and silly—premise ("[...] the limbs!!!" they scream, hoping the player will finally understand), but that's all in service of a genuinely fun game.

Except the part where it occasionally confuses pitch black darkness for 'scary'. I wish it wouldn't do that. I'm not scared, I just can't see.

Both Dead Space 1 and 2 are worth revisiting in 2020. It's a good time. Got me wondering about 3, but that shit was tired even with a two-year interval back in 2013, so I don't have much hope.

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¹ Too Human also released in 2008. Peruse screenshots at your leisure.
² Quick-time events are not fine.
³ It's capitalism. And Nathan Drake.
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I feel it's important to note that a combination of two things finally got me to play my first real Souls: playing Sekiro and later growing to miss it dearly, and attempting to play a much worse Soulslike and getting so fed up I took solace in the real thing. For all their fearsome reputation, FromSoft games function like eductational tools: they take your hand and gently guide you from a novice to a player who can confidently defeat even the nastiest boss. They want you to succeed and they speak a consistent and thoughtful language to teach you how. If other games truly want to grab a piece of From's shining star, they don't need to learn a combat system or checkpoint-based level design, they need to learn how to teach.

this game makes me feel like the dumbest motherfucker alive.

and i love it. never has a strategy game so beautifully crafted a CONSTANTLY tense experience without making situations feel completely hopeless. every single turn in this game feels like the odds are completely against you, but never is there a situation that you cannot get out of. every randomly generated playthrough is refined to where you can perfectly beat it through your own cunning. this game makes me feel like the smartest motherfucker alive.

every situation, every element, every aspect of this game is equal parts smart and fuckin' cool. you can technically beat this game in 5 hours but due to the amount of things in it and the sheer joy playing it gives me, i can (and certainly will) put way more in. this game makes me the happiest motherfucker alive.

As a FromSoft stan, I have played through every game in the soulsborne series. When Sekiro was released I was ready to dive in, but goddamn did this game hand my ass to me for the first little while.

The fluidity of the combat in Sekiro is truly a feat of game design. The amount of decisions your brain needs to subconsciously make while managing each battle is daunting, but when it clicks it clicks and your will be chopping through men, monsters, and monkeys like the sword saint himself. It truly feels like an accomplishment when you finally beat a tough boss, and feels even better when you stomp them first try on your second playthrough.

The story is par for the course for a Miyazaki game, with lots to dig into and a slew of memorable areas and monsters. Miyazaki don't miss, and this is the best action game I have played in years

this is gonna be one people debate endlessly about

is it better than 2016, is it the right direction for doom, is that really the ending they went with, all these questions that may never get answered except for that last one

as im sure you know by now, this is very different from 2016 which is the absolute best thing for it. going from a game about being the autarch of destruction to a first person shooter with immense depth in its mechanics is a uncharacteristically subtle change that makes a world of difference, which is exactly what a sequel needs

doom eternal is hard as shit but its tacticality in how you "rip" and "tear" as one might say makes every shootout engaging as hell. some fights are a bit reliant on having enemies with too much health or just spawning a bunch of them, but despite that minority of lame fights the combat itself is inherently extremely engaging.

theres a lot more to this game that i could get into, but the core loop itself is so great that you have to play this game simply for that.

This is my favorite game of all time as well as arguably one of my favorite novels. It's devastatingly beautiful and vitally necessary. The strong influences of the magical realist, southern Gothic, and postmodern literary traditions make it more of a participant in the broader culture than almost any other video game, but at the same time the way it builds up its world and story collaboratively with the player would only be possible in an interactive medium.

Beyond any of its impressive formal qualities, though, the most important thing about KR0 is the way it talks about the real world and the American South in particular. At the same time compassionate and mournful, full of rage and despair and just a few glimmers of hope, it's one of the most honest and vibrant depictions I've seen across any art form of the way America eats itself alive, and the myriad ways people struggle or give in as they're digested.

When I wept at the end of Act V, I wept for the broken dreams of everyone who has been destroyed by America.