This is a tough one for me to review. I’ve got biases out the wazoo here. I played this game with the love of my life over the span of months after smoking the big bowl of weed every single sesh. It’s not the easiest scenario to recreate. You’ve got to find the right person, wine them, dine them, take them home, marry them, inherit a dog, acquire another dog, buy a house, experience the good, the bad, and then ultimately show up together, late, to the adolescent activity of recreational drug use. They then have to introduce this concept of “Wallace and Gromit” into your life. The ignorance is key here. You’ve got to want to learn about this clay man, his dog, and his love of cheese. This curiosity must be tangled into the youthful nostalgia of your special friend.

These are my circumstances. I was put in a situation where the game could literally not fail. I was destined for a good time. The banks are just too big and no one else could possibly expect to recreate these circumstances, so how could I, a reasonable and humble reviewer, give this seemingly nothing game the full 5 stars. Two reasons:

1. I don’t care about other people’s playing experience and frankly think it’s their fault (and a great offense) that they are literally not me.
2. and cause its just good dude.

Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is the perfect video game adaptation of Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and by simply achieving that core idea through laser precise execution has produced some of the best hang out vibes in any game I have ever played.

From a purely visual perspective Wallace and Gromit is a stop motion clay animation and by luck(?), good timing(???), the PS2 is the perfect console to create choppy 3D models that imitate this look and feel to the fucking letter. It feels like you are controlling the literal characters from the show not a video game version of them. And it just don’t stop. They took this little backdrop town from the movie and recreated it into this huge lived in and explorable 3D space in the game. When you click the right control stick and hide the radar you can experience this whole town with literally no HUD. When you pause the game the menus are all a UI from one of Wallace’s gizmos. I feel like I’m controlling the movie and not playing a game. I, as a person who loves video games, absolutely despises video games, and never ever wants to feel like I am playing a video game while playing a video game. The attention to detail here to let the player be fully immersed playing as Wallace and Gromit of all things is ridiculous but above all: effective. Very effective, frighteningly effective. Sometimes we would boot up the game and just run around having Wallace say hi to all the citizens of the town, aesthetically different and named. When running past Pip Windfall, the red-haired soccer playing youth, Wallace would sometimes refer to him as “a scamp”. It’s delightful.

The gameplay is much in the same vein. Wallace and Gromit in the movie are “vermin-catchers”, the main gameplay is herding critters and protecting prized pumpkins. This is done with a variety of tools but it’s mostly using the sucker vacuum. You suck stuff up and shot them into an even biggerer non-moving sucker. Once big sucked the vermin is officially considered “catched.” There are different vermin with different characteristics and methods of catching. The standard rabbit can be herded into the big suck using just body positioning which is where this shit gets wild. There are several environmental tools that need to be operated by two players. This game is designed primarily as a two-player experience. Gates open with levers that need to be held open while another player runs through. You got lifts, bridges, doors, all the classics. Herding large amounts of rabbits through the games obstacles is a test in cooperation that would leave us audibly yelling every time we succeeded. Adapting 'Wallace and Gromit' they did not forget to leave out the 'AND.' Focusing development on a two player experience, a two player main storyline, there's a lot of untrodden gameplay innovation here. A third person, co-op, herding game. I'm never going to get another game like this until some kickstarter indie FREAK with actual skill and talent decides they would like to spend a lot of time making approximately no money.

If you are specifically me and specifically meet my specific life criteria, you are GOING to have a good time with this game. I hope everyone everywhere can find their own Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. I hope everyone everywhere can also experience the 10mg CBG gummy known as the “Mother of all Cannabinoids.” Though in our house we just call her mommy.

I don't want to be this guy but I feel like it's my duty to be this guy. I can't stay silent about this. I can't just skirt around the edges. Chained Echoes isn't just LIKE Chrono Trigger or FF6 it's BETTER than Chrono Trigger or FF6.

The game is just way more fun to play mechanically, it has a lot more customization with a lot less bloat in its systems. On screen enemies, all the homies love on screen enemies. The overdrive system combined with fully healing your characters after every battle turns the normal MP attrition management of a SNES era JRPG into DPS/party optimization. Which my monkey brain loves: The enemies make the big numbers, I make the big numbers, everybody wins.

You get the Sky Armor suits and the airship and it completely recontextualizes the world and previous areas making them worth revisiting and exploring.

The world is cool, the lore is cool, the characters all rule. I read a book that talks about a land of big fungus and then I go and see the big fungus. YES. One of the characters talks to a big bird and decides to become a better person. YES YES. There's a mountain that's just a big meditating monkey. YEEEEEESSSS.

It felt like a weird cross between Berserk, Les Mis, and the first book in a Cosmere trilogy. I think if this was just a book I would have still been satisfied but it also excelling so hard mechanically within its genre. I need to clean my pa

Really cool game. It has the architectural horror that I love great deal in Control and a museum is a particularly good setting. The big puzzle rooms very intentionally exist to be be video game puzzle rooms but the context of a museum makes them kind of believable. Then you get some of the larger art pieces that spruce up the hallways between the bigger rooms and they are genuinely fun to just stand and stare at. The characters and their interactions are really enjoyable. I think Mary is a sweet heart and I for one forgive her for her crimes against humanity.

Game clocks in at like 3 hours and that might be the best thing about it cause good lord who has the time to play video games still.

I played a lot of Tetris Friends in college. College was a dark and depressing time in my life. The rat race of academia, the mounting debt, the failed relationships, and the looming threat of poverty in our crumbling world without the necessary diploma was heavy on the head. Tetris Friends was a frantic and stressful Facebook game full of ads and a hierarchical matchmaking multiplayer where super freaks from far away countries would t-spin your whole body and shake you for your lunch money. I think I got pretty good at tetris in this time.

Eventually I did graduate from college and I deleted Facebook and tetris left my life for nearly a decade.

Now I return to tetris, an adult riddled with hippie love and big boy drugs and I see that tetris, in my absence, has done much the same.

It's everything I've ever wanted out of a tabletop game. The rolls and skill tree are present enough to feel like I have a real input and customization in the actions of the character. Just enough interactivity to separate it from a visual novel.

Which is all good and gravy, but the main appeal is in the excellent setting and narrative.

Tabletop games like DnD have plagued me for a long time. I love the concept of them. Immersing yourself in a role and telling a group narrative. Unfortunately they never actually play out that way. The sessions I've experienced always turn into a frantic rush to the nearest dungeon or fight and then 5 hours of trap checks and the absolute slog that is tabletop combat. This of course is all dependent on your group and your DM, but for me, these sessions were a nightmare and have completely soured my opinion of games like DnD.

Citizen Sleeper gives me a taste of what I've always wanted out of DnD. I played the game from start to finish playing the role of the sleeper and doing what I thought my character should do and I was rewarded with every step. The world is easy to immerse in, the multiple narratives are all excellent, the rolls of failure and success effectively simulated the failures and successes of real life that tabletop dice rolls are supposed to simulate. My motivations were one to one with my character. I didn't do stuff so I could min/max my engineering stat line. I did stuff because I needed to eat, I wanted to help my friends, I had to pay off a rough customer. When I eventually got to a point of comfort, where I could make a steady income and survive, I felt a weird sense of pride. The Eye, in real time, began to feel like a home.

The creator of this game in a recent interview said he could keep making games and stories in the Citizen Sleeper world for years and if that's the case I'm ready for it.

Neat game. I think I would have enjoyed it more if I didn't play so much Groove Coaster last year. I thought the gear and the leveling up and the party configuration stuff was all pretty cool for a rhythm game.

Final Fantasy as a series definitely has enough bangers to fill a whole catalog of songs but compared to other rhythm games it felt lacking in diversity. What it lacks in diversity, it makes up for in its consistency. Consistently good experience, consistently good visuals, consistently good music, and a consistent overall aesthetic. I think this game is incredibly well made and I know the kind of guy who would love this but I'm not that guy.

I had to google what the difference between a rogue-lite and a rogue-like was. They probably teach this in elementary school now and it's not new information for most but the key difference I see is that rogue-lites have "out of run progression". Which Vampire Survivors definitely does have and I do appreciate. The lack of permanent progression is why I normally avoid the genre. They are always fun but I can never imagine myself giving one of these games more than 4 stars and I have sickness in me that needs every game I play to be my potentially new favorite game ever. And looky there, 4 stars. I liked seeing all the madness and flashing colors, I liked having a game I could play with one hand while listening to an audiobook. I logged a quick and casual 30 hours in like a week and I think that's kinda fucked up.

There was a point while playing this game that I thought it was the greatest game of all time. The middle section is so strong. It's right when you've figured out the gameplay (which is unnecessarily complicated but very enjoyable) and the story chapters are these absurd one off slice of life little episodes that barely advance the main plot. One of them has your party split up and unknowingly take opposite sides on a kidnap/bodyguard mission. When the game wants to be funny it's genuinely a laugh out loud experience. You've got two melodramatic teens and Vashyron who can't help but take the piss out of them constantly. The line deliveries, choreography, and voice acting are all on point. Just look up some of the cut scenes from this game, they are hilarious. Most of the game is like this and it is oozing with charisma. I think I finished the first 14 chapters in about 2 months, but once the melodramatic characters took the narrative focus for the last couple chapters it became a huge slog. The last 2 or 3 chapters took me about a year to find the motivation to play through. It was such a low note to go out on and the 4 stars feel unjustifiable but while the lows are low the highs were high. I am happy to be done with the game so I can start reflecting on it fondly.

NOTES:

The games got good hang out vibes. It's all in one area, you can buy lots of clothes, the episodic narrative structure, the characters are always saying little one liners in battle. I don't think Zephyr and Leanne needed these grand narrative conclusions or answers. Just give me fifty missions of them turning the city power back on. I liked that mission.

My first foray into the Xenoblade series and it's the expansion, prequal, DLC to the second game of a trilogy and I don't think I'd have it any other way. It was short and simple and felt like a perfect introduction to a series that is a bit overwhelming from the outside looking in.

I had a lot of trepidations going in. There's a lot of videos out there making fun of Xenoblade. Weird voice acting and awkward deliveries, walls of tutorials and systems, overly dramatic moments, one liners on repeat, and the boobs. The cans on some of these gals put me in an absolute cold sweat hoping my wife wouldn't walk into the room. But really if you go in with your good time hat on, all of these things I thought I'd hate just came off as incredibly charming. I was being charmed left and right by this cornball cast of characters and their overly complicated lives and gameplay mechanics. I couldn't get enough of it. When Lora says "aren't we intrepid?" for the 500th time I was on my couch just hollering "hell yeah, we are intrepid as fuck!" I haven't played the other games so the blue guys come on the screen and say a bunch of silly words about whatever and I'm just snacking. Say more nonsense at me I love it. A whole cutscene just talking about how Lora and Haze kind of look like sisters, why not!

You put the good time hat on and the fun don't stop.

I've always viewed the Xenoblade games from a gameplay perspective as kind of a single player MMO. You've got attacks and cooldowns and random people online just champing at the bit to explain it all to you. Once you've got the rhythm of it all it feels amazing. You've got to time your attacks so they chain into each other while also keeping track of 3 bars that fill up and do one thing and another 5 menus that pop up and do another thing, all while the game is exploding in colors and numbers and just screaming directly into your face. Juggling all this nonsense "I won't lie, it feels good".

So yeah, I was really surprised to be so smitten by all the stuff I thought I wouldn't like. But even better than all of that is the stuff that I WAS excited for. The worlds are huge and beautiful and the game is just a joy to exist in. At the end of the game when you climb to the highest point and overlook the massive desert and city you just spent hours in at the ground level, and in your peripheral the mountains are moving and you realize the whole world is literally breathing because your on the back of this massive beasty, and it's all true to scale and lovingly crafted. I was in awe. This is Xenoblade baby.

NOTES:
I like that the characters have distinct colors and big gaudy weapons. They all look like action figures and toys. It fits with their over the top nobility and niceness. They are all pretty predictable character archetypes and I like that. I want an Addam and Lora toy and I want to smash them together and make them kiss.

Mythra's tits are out of this world. Then at the end you get a quick glimpse at Pyra and holy shit. I think Mythra is a really interesting and cool character with great voice acting and her giant rack really does her a disservice. But I guess I also don't want to contribute to like...large breast erasure or anything. They are just so distracting lmao