WARNING: WAY TOO LONG REVIEW INCOMING!!! TL:DR GAME IS GREAT!! PLAY IT!

There is this weird misconception in the idea of games being art that artfulness is all in narrative and story, and that the act of play is just a part of the form and not also an extension of that. It's what I notice when I play games that strive for an artistic expression, that they seem to regard actually PLAYING a video game as a formality. I very much disagree with this line of thinking, as there is an artistic brilliance to classic arcade games like Galaga that has me dumping quarter after quarter into them just to play more. The feedback of getting really good at dodging, weaving, blasting, it's an artistic expression in itself. Games are the only ones that can provide this.

So anyway here is Ninja Gaiden Black.

A franchise that is regularly used in the same breath as words like "excess" and "gratuitous" might not seem like an art game, but when it plays this well, looks this great, and mechanically is just rock fucking solid? That's artwork to me. What's most interesting though is how deftly put together NGB really is when you really sit down to play it! Just saying "oh the ninja game with the big booby ninjas where you slash dudes a lot" completely downplays what work has went into making Ninja Gaiden a cohesive experience from open to close. The pacing in this game!! Holy shit!! I can casually play through half the game without even realizing it because it is always keeping things fresh and interesting. You're in a night time city, fighting ninjas and solving traversal puzzles, now you're in a monastery battling fiends, now you go underground to explore crypts, oh shit! it's the military! go to their base and disrupt their communications!
It's such a finely tuned experience.

What you also don't expect going into NGB is the atmosphere, and a lot of that is helped by the game's peerless visual presentation. For an Xbox game from 2005,
this looks amazing even today. Animations are just slick as hell, enivornments are varied and gorgeous to behold, it is no surprise that this was considered the tour-de-force as far as graphics on the Xbox were concerned. Some of the vistas later in the game will make you glad you can go into first person and take a look
at everything, it's just such an interesting world to exist in.

I'm also really fond of the music, which NGB takes a surprisingly understated approach to. It's all very atmospheric and moody electronics, with occasional breaks into early 2000s industrial rock or drum'n'bass. So it's essentially my dream OST. I especially love the music in the caverns, that's when it really dawned on me how considered the atmosphere of this game really was. There's something genuinely incredible about getting into an incredible beat down with fiends and ogres while soft
beautiful bells chime in the background. What a game.

As for gameplay, I mean, what needs to be said? Ninja Gaiden plays like a dream. I suppose the extremely high skill-floor is a point to look at, and it is absolutely true:
this game is so vicious to first-time players. But it creates one of the most incredible sensations I've gotten from a game: getting GOOD at it. I'm not talking the asinine "git gud" mentality that Dark Souls has bred into people whose only action game has been Dark Souls, but the actual feeling of getting good at a skill. I play guitar,
and Ninja Gaiden hits that same part of the brain that goes nuts when I play something difficult flawlessly, something hard to describe but when you feel it you feel it.

I think it's absolutely worth considering a game as art when mechanically playing it and getting good at it is extremely fulfilling in a way few games are. I don't want to get
weepy about NGB but you have to understand, this game is just so much fucking fun to play. Every difficulty you ascend gives a sensation of personal growth, that you accomplished something that seemed impossible by just putting the effort in. When I first played, black spider ninjas were just impossible to deal with, they were killing me over and over again, I had to drop to Ninja Dog and learn the game. Now? Smoke bomb, izuna drop, counter, on-landing, simple. Jump to hard mode. Damn, they're replaced with cat fiends now?
They can flying swallow ME?? No way I'm ever beating this. Well, how about this? Their recovery from whiffing a flying swallow is pretty bad, you can easily exploit that.

It goes on and on like that, just learning, adapting, trying new things, it's so exciting. You never fall into a pattern because Ninja Gaiden's enemies defy your attempts to, the game
requires reactive play rather than reflexive. You can't block and dodge-roll through everything, because an enemy will counter you eventually, you have to observe, adapt and overcome the odds.
It means that fights never play out the same, that the game always feels fresh no matter how much you play it, and that learning to deal with total bastards like Ogres and Berserkers is like unlocking a cheat code.

I also really love the enemy designs here, not since Devil May Cry 1 has an action game had such a great assortment of foes to beat the hell out of. I mentioned Berserkers, but goddamn those guys are awesome. One of my favorite enemy types in any game. I also love the cat fiends, they are relentless but also a lot of fun to guilottine throw. Oh, and yes, even ghost fish. Weaklings see ghost fish and think "oh no I'm going to die!!" Chads see ghost fish and think, "Oh my god I am going to get some yellow essence!" The art design is also so well-considered, Ryu's outfit might seem outrageous (which I mean, it is. He's a ninja battling monsters. I feel like he should have an outfit for that) but from a gameplay perspective it's perfect: Ryu is always visible, the camera is focused on him, nothing else in the game has the same coloring as his outfit, his arms being visible makes it easy to read what moves he's doing, nothing clashes against him.
Every design seems crafted towards making sure enemy moves are telegraphed and nothing gets lost. You might think I'm reading too much into it, and perhaps I am, but with how much time went into the making of this game, I am dead-certain they turned every stone over to make sure it all worked together.

Of course it isn't all perfect, I know the story gets dinged a lot, which I mean, it's functional. I personally do resent games that just focus on action and take a "So random" approach to storytelling or world building. It's why I bounce so hard off of shit like My Friend Pedro in particular. Feeling like a badass is more fun when it's contextualized in a world, when the world boils down to "it is a video game LOL!!!" it's almost impossible to feel any stakes, odds, or pressure against you. Ryu is the master ninja, he is a stoic professional, and his demeanor makes me want to perform at that level, to inhabit the title of Master Ninja. It's why Thief is more fun when you are not killing people and going thorugh like a ghost, because Garrett is the master thief and would absolutely pull a job off like that. So, while Ninja Gaiden definitely doesn't have a gripping narrative, it absolutely doesn't have a random events plot that is without meaning or merit. Even still, it does have a competent story with effective story beats, such as Alma using the last of her humanity to save her sister before dying, or Ryu going to the shrine maiden's grave to get the gem to power up the dragon sword. Yeah it's not going to blow your mind but you'll be able to understand character motivations the whole way through.

Oftentimes in reviews you'll see people discuss the theme of a game, but they'll just use keywords. A game is about abuse, violence, war, greed, etc. Those aren't descriptive enough in my opinion to describe a narrative's thematic angle. It's like saying Metal Gear Solid is about "war." It's technically true, but some a vague descriptor. A good theme should reflect in your head when you are done playing, as a question you ask yourself, something you are meant to take away with you when you finish a piece of art. When you finish Metal Gear Solid 3, for example, the question the story should have you asking is "how right is it for our allegiances to change our enemies within a day?" I believe Ninja Gaiden wants you asking, "what does it mean to be the master ninja?" But not just in the context of Ryu in the story, but for the player and how much they are willing to learn and improve until they truly are a master ninja. It's a game that extends its theme outwards to the player, it's why Ryu's inputs are so precise to what the player does, you are connected to him and through him you are the master ninja.

This shit is getting pretentious so I will simplify it a little: it's a meticulously crafted action game where you fight a lot of ninjas and demons. Its easy to understand at a glance which makes it easier to get immersed in the extreme mechanical density of its combat.

A lot of common complaints you'll hear about this game usually come down to 2 very important things: 1. Ninja Gaiden is NOT Devil May Cry. These games have similar verbs and on a surface level look alike, but are completely distinct entities. 2. Ninja Gaiden is a game you learn. The camera, the lock-on system, it's all elements of the game you end up learning to use to your advantage. I feel like these things trip people up, going in expecting it to play Devil May Cry With Ninjas, when it is Ninja Gaiden. There is this irritating mentality I've seen online where every game has to be like Dark Souls, when Dark Souls is its own game, other games can be other games. It sounds obvious, but it bleeds into people getting mad at Ninja Gaiden for not being like something else, when there is NOTHING like NG, so to strip it of its idenity and what makes it click with so many people is an Art Crime.

Oh this game has also been ported a shit-ton. Black itself is a re-release of Ninja Gaiden 2004 with every enhancement from the Hurricane Packs minus the intercept move (the world was not ready for a sensual ninja to parry it back intercept style...) So you might wonder, which version should I play? Ninja Gaiden Sigma Plus Ultra HD Arcade Neo Edition or Ninja Gaiden 2004? Well it's pretty simple actually! Do you own an Xbox One/Series X? Buy Black! Even a physical copy isn't that bad and digitally it's 10 bucks if memory serves. Don't have an Xbox? The Master Collection is a fine game! Sigma compromises the experience slightly in ways I'm not crazy about but might be more your taste. Removes a lot of the adventure elements that make NG so unique in its pacing, adds in some dogshit new enemies, and makes Rachel playable in fun ableit short chapters. Also Ryu's outfit is very shiny in a way that I don't like, but your mileage may vary. Probably don't buy it on Switch though because that piece of shit will no doubt chug trying to run a game from 2007.

Okay that's my overlong Ninja Gaiden review bye!!!!

To me, Side Order distills the Splatoon PVE experience to its best qualities. Considering Splatoon campaigns have been exclusively composed of levels designed as obstacle courses, enemy gauntlets, and various other trials, it makes perfect sense to forgo the formalities and just introduce a format that is, itself, a series of challenges: the Roguelike genre. Not only does this create more harmony in the progression systems but it also eliminates some of Splatoons more aggravating mission types: theres no instant-failing rail shooting galleries, box sculpting mini games, and generally speaking no requirement to use some of Splatoons more estranged weapon types.

Or at least for the most part. Unlocks are exclusive to each weapon and so full and total completion would require you to do a full run with every weapon type. This is not necessary to enjoy Side Order however, and the way the DLC doles out upgrades makes it more easy than ever to spec away the flaws of particular weapon types - meaning that while this might be Splatoons most demanding campaign to 100% in terms of effort, its also the most flexible and most rewarding Splatoon has felt across the past 4 campaigns theyve made.

Bonus Thoughts:

- The Jelletons (jelly skeletons?) taking inspo from Salmon Run enemies was smart cuz Salmon Run is also something that plays alot to Splatoons strengths as a game.

- Story lacks the huge climaxes that more traditional story campaigns usually have, however I think the more agnostic boss design is much more interesting.

- With even just a few permanent hacks purchased you are nearly unstoppable (pure happiness) It might seem like quite a task, to be expected to win with weapons like the Umbrella but in truth power skews so far in your favor that essentially every run is a win no matter what youre using. It is deceptively doable.

- Its impossible to not make my Agent 8 look like a gimp that just got back from edm night at the club

Had no plans to review this despite my love for it but it's currently free to own permanently, for a full week at the time of writing so I'm obligated to shill. Sorry in advance.

It's an unspoken rule in my social circles that you shouldn't play 4x games with me, especially Civilization.

Why?

I like war. I consider it the sole reason to play these games. Managing an economy and production in such a way that it allows you to continue the maintenance of an ever-expanding warfront is always where I get most of my fun from, and honestly I think it's where the mechanics of 4x games really come together as a whole. Warfare is expensive, after all, and building to keep it afloat is honestly more engaging than building farms or whatever- God that makes me sound like a US politician.

But I grew tired of warfare in 4x games, Civ-likes especially. Past a certain point they're little more than "right click doomstack onto enemy until dead", forever. I longed for a game in this style that had more strategic depth to it, and ideally none of that cowardly shit like "turtling" or "pacifism". I wanted units that countered one another in a vicious cycle, and factions that felt meaningfully different beyond having passives like "The French enforced unfair amounts of debt on Haiti when they revolted agains French rule" or "The English get +2 to xenophobia" alongside maybe one different unit.

Gladius was the answer to that prayer.

On the surface this game isn't very appealing. To put it bluntly: Gladius is an ugly game. The UI is straightforward and no-frills, the music doesn't ever peak above "serviceable", the models are straight forward and lo-fi in not particularly eye-catching ways, and the terrain looks fairly uninteresting regardless of place. This is the brownest game to come out of the 2010s, somehow.

The onboarding process isn't much better, not doing much besides giving you a basic overview of the controls and telling you how to attack. If you let your Civ instincts kick in, you're almost certainly going to get killed by the trash mobs rather than any enemy players. I have personally sat in voice chat and watched as people get washed by trying to play this like Civ 6.

Gladius is not Civ, nor is it Endless Legend or Humankind or whatever Civ-likes the youth enjoy these days.

The big difference, I feel, is in the units.

Every Gladius faction has their own unique units, but there's ultimately not that many of them and you don't always unlock straight up "better" units. Each unit comes with inherent traits, but also weapons which have their own traits as well as accuracy/armor piercing/etc stats. Starter units tend to be all-rounders, but later ones are more specialized.
In contrast to Civ, Endless Legend or even Age of Wonder, units don't often become redundant in Gladius. Indeed, 'science' in this game is little more than unlocking more units and more abilities for units.
It's these extra abilities that add a lot to the tactical nature of combat. Take the standard Space Marine unit - the Tactical Marine - for example. They're not very flashy, having nothing more than their Bolter for combat, but research gives them several grenade types that let them hold their own against armored units, vehicles, or monstrous units.
Similarly, the design of the game is such that there's an ever-growing chain of counters to consider. It may seem alluring to ignore 'trash' units and field tons of tanks and uber units, but they can so easily be felled by focus fire, anti-armor auxiliary abilities, and flanking.

Ah, the morale system. Combat's most important addition.

Gladius uses the standard grid-based system of Civ and its imitators, and naturally this means units occupy one tile each while being unable to share tiles. The map generation is scarily good at creating chokepoints, dense foliage/ruins that obscure sight, and advantageous terrain. If units are flanked, lose too many allies in a single turn, or take attacks they can't retaliate against, they'll eventually start to crack. At first they'll simply take a minor stat penalty, but this eventually snowballs until they're taking obscene damage and dealing paltry damage.
More than any game of its kind, I feel, Gladius deeply incentivizes the need to have a solid frontline, but also some support. It may seem sensible to bundle your units up, but it only takes one teleporting/jetpacking/longjumping unit to break that formation and start draining your morale.
Terrain and engagement become more meaningful. Cliffs confer an incredible advantage against melee units, city ruins and trees interrupt the accuracy and effectiveness of long range units, and while Space Marines can attack from two tiles away, they get a bonus for being up close which necessitates a moderate amount of risk-taking - to name one example of how traits dictate fights.

Hero units are also present and while they're not quite ultra demi-gods who can solo entire armies, they provide enough buffs and offensive edge that slotting them into your formations becomes a game unto itself. They can level up alongside your trash unit, but you get to pick perks for them. These perks are, honestly, I'd say the only part of the game on a design level that kinda sucks; there's always an ideal route to take them and a lot of are just outright doodoo. Fortunately, heroes aren't mandatory, so I don't hate this too much.

I'm not gonna go through every faction's gameplan, unique traits, and design philosophy. There's way too many of them, and nothing is shared. Even the Chaos Space Marines diverge from their brethren significantly.

By now I assume you've looked at the store page and seen the enormous amount of DLC. Let's chat about that.

Is any of it mandatory? No. Proxy Studios keep their game meticulously balanced, with patches every few weeks. Gladius is perfectly playable without any DLC, and for the longest time I didn't own anything besides the Chaos Space Marine DLC.
But it is substantial. Those packs add a lot of options to each race, and paradoxically their value diminishes the less races you have. The latest unit pack, released alongside the free-to-claim weekend, has 11 units but 7 are inaccessible if you own no DLC. These aren't P2W unit packs, but the units do offer new tactical avenues that make for more interesting gameplay. To tie both topics together: In the latest pack, and after 6 years of existence, Assault Marines (teleporting melee) finally got an upgrade in the form of Assault Terminators, which is huge for the survivability of what're usually disposable shock units.
Personally, I'd just buy whatever tickles your fancy. I'm a crazy person and one of this game's strongest shooters, so I have all of it.

Gladius isn't an easy game to love, and I wager 90% of people who try it will bounce off because it's very aggressively not like other 4x games. If you can stick with it, though, it provides a uniquely rewarding experience. Plus, for some arcane reason, it refuses to die. It gets two DLCs a year and it's lasted six entire years with Proxy promising to keep going.

Having rolled credits, I still don't understand why this game exists. What was the intention behind this game? When you make a sequel to a video game how do you evolve from the original? What do you fix, what do you do differently, what do you add? Hellblade 2 does none of those things and instead doubles down on the design template of the original game - which was released 7 years ago. What we're left with is essentially the first game again yet somehow worse in some areas.

I understand the desire for something like Hellblade. Yes, the game is gorgeous. It's a visual showcase of Unreal Engine 5 tech, I liked looking at the shiny rocks and trees and volumetric fog tech. But underneath all that is a hollow and nauseatingly linear "game" that refuses to attempt anything new.

I think my biggest gripe with the game is the writing and narrative devices. The first game was novel and unique in how it presented itself, however in Hellblade 2, they use the same voices in your head and the same 3D audio trickery to the point where it feels gimmicky now. It also feels like they've upped the frequency at which the voices are talking, to the point where I was subconsciously ignoring them, even if they were expositing key narrative information.

I also feel like this doubling down on the original themes and usage of psychosis or schizophrenia comes off as hokey or juvenile, rather than whatever I assume the devs intended. I don't think that presenting Senua's mental illness as some sort of in-universe superpower that can help save the land and its people is a smart decision narratively, and I think can be rather insulting depending on how you view the game. With the first game, it was Senua coming to terms with herself, which is a much more honest and natural way to explore the themes they wanted to present. The insistence on this narrative device becomes the game's weakness. How do you write a sequel while still relying on these themes and growing the character past the first game? You don't. It's just not the right decision to make.

As a game, it's the same as the first just with more production value behind it. Nicer animations for the shallow combat. The puzzles are the same albeit easier than the first as they removed a lot of the originals jank and the voices in your head help you solve them. The music is fun, and the performances are great. Ultimately the writing is what falls flat for me and because the game relies on it so heavily it drags the whole experience down with it.

I think Ninja Theory is talented, there are moments in this game where I was seriously impressed by the animation work or some of the cinematic sequences. I just wish they would spread their wings a bit and deliver something more rather than limit themselves like this.

I pray they don't make a Hellblade 3. Please just make Enslaved 2 or something I don't know make a video game again for godsakes!

one of the low key best games of all-time. just an unparalleled sense of atmosphere, and the levels strike a great balance between being immersive and realistic-feeling but relatively simple and approachable in a way that i don't even think has been exactly replicated. and then even with a tight and unique mechanics the missions go places you just don't anticipate at all. it really feels like an adventure where you don't know where you're going to go next. the sequel might have (arguably) improved some of the mechanics but doesn't have as much of that mystery. the only real flaw is it peters out a bit at the end - some of those ending missions feel rushed and don't quite work. but that is not unusual for PC games of that era.

(i'm reviewing this version because i think Song of the Caverns was the only essential added mission for Thief Gold, but consider it the same rating for both)

A waste.

I didn't finish the original Hellblade. I remember spending about an hour wandering through a forest where traveling through a gate would change the surrounding terrain, and it just kept going and going and going far longer than it had any right to. It was a ridiculously badly-paced section that was placed early in what was set to be a padded game, so I stopped. In the wake of the news of Xbox shutting down some of my favorite modern studios, I was surprised to see that they'd picked up Ninja Theory back in 2018; I hadn't noticed, given how many companies Microsoft has been keen on acquiring in the past few years. To be perfectly transparent, I was going into this sour. It was with my arms folded and my face screwed up that I downloaded Hellblade II — a sort-of defiant "well, let's see what Xbox thinks is worth keeping alive if not Arkane and Tango". What I had managed to play of the original game was, at the very least, interesting. I figured Ninja Theory would be able to tread water and release something that was about on par with the last title.

It's worse.

I wrote in my Breath of the Wild review that people who thought that game was doing anything seriously impressive or novel probably haven't played many games. It wasn't an especially polite thing to say, and it ruffled some feathers, but I stand by it. I'd like to take this opportunity to go further and suggest that anyone praising Hellblade II for being like a movie probably doesn't watch many movies; if they do, they don't have any actual understanding of the medium beyond blind, uncritical consumption. I've seen praise get heaped on this for its cinematography when it's comprised almost exclusively of over-the-shoulder shots, the most bog-standard drone flyovers you've ever seen in your life, and simulated shaky-cam group shots where everyone stands stark still in a circle while having a conversation about nothing of importance. This is shot, cinematographically speaking, like shit. Watching this feels like someone gave a film student an eight-figure budget. Take a shot every time you're in one of the over-long combat encounters and Senua gets grabbed from behind to transition into the next battle.

While I was settling in expecting a visual feast, this is more of a visual buffet. Maybe a visual McDonald's. It looks good, to be certain, but it's really not that impressive. The mandatory upscaling present here forces some compromise to be made where it really ought not to be; DLSS is hailed as being the best option of the lot, but it still leaves shimmering artifacts on the edges of models where it can't quite get the anti aliasing right. Switch over to FSR and you can mostly get rid of the edge-shimmer, but it similarly demands that you manually set the sharpness a bit too high and fuck up the graphics everywhere else. I can say without hesitation that I've seen a lot of games that look significantly better than Hellblade II. For probably the same amount of money and about six months earlier, Alan Wake 2 does everything that this wants to and more convincingly. Go back a few years to Detroit: Become Human or Death Stranding and it's plain to see that those are far more impressive works from an entire console generation prior. I wouldn't normally give a fraction of a fraction of a fuck about graphical fidelity, but seeing all of the praise for how good this game looks makes me wonder if our eyes are working the same way.

I appreciate Crystar for pointing this out in her review, but Hellblade II has a very funny concluding monologue. Ending the game on the statement "all the questions were answered" implies that any answers were given, and further suggests that any questions were asked. There's not all that much that's ambiguous here, and the parts that are don't manage to raise any interesting questions. I had a feeling that the giants didn't actually exist, which Senua seemingly confirms at the end when she screams it at the final boss. "There are no giants, it's just you", she says. Unfortunately, the giants not being real means that most of the game didn't actually happen. All of the characters who were talking about giants weren't. All of the characters who died fighting the giants didn't. Everyone who thought they saw Senua kill a giant didn't. The natural disasters that the giants caused were just random and unrelated; whether they ended after Senua "killed the giants" is either another coincidence, or they didn't actually end at all. Cut all of this away, and there's really not much story left. Senua and her friends (who may not exist) trek across the land (which might be ravaged by natural disasters) while fighting the undead (who may not exist) so that Senua can get a blessing (that definitely doesn't exist) from a group of underground mystics (who definitely don't exist) until they get to the slaver king's doorstep and beat him in a fight. This reads like one of those early-10s fan theories about Rugrats being Angelica's dying dream. I know I like to exaggerate for comedy's sake when writing reviews like this, but this is a stone-faced recap of what happens. There are no jokes here.

The command to not pay too much attention to the writing comes a little too late into the game, long after you've already sat through dozens of ridiculously trite scenes. The bar for the writing sits around the point where Senua cries while looking at her bloody hands, and the voices in her head say "you have blood on your hands", just to make sure that you understand. The voices aren't much more than exposition fairies. They exist to recap story events that just happened with breathless awe, never giving you a chance to think about anything being said. A character will mention something that Senua hasn't heard of — giants that control the weather, let's say — and the voices immediately pivot to acting like confused toddlers. "Giants? What are giants? Can we kill a giant? Are giants real? They can't be real. There's no such thing as giants. We don't know what's real. Giants might be real. What does he know about giants? Why is he telling us about giants? I wonder how much he knows about giants. Does anyone know what giants are? What if he's lying? Can we ask someone else about giants?" It continues at this pace for about five hours until the game ends. The voices chattering on and on is one thing, and I could at least understand it as something the devs were doing to intentionally provoke the player, but this constant motor-mouthing falls apart when you enter into combat. The voices somehow don't have enough lines to cover these incredibly strict and linear fights, so they're constantly repeating themselves. I heard the line "their bodies strong like rocks, you have to hit harder!" four times in a single encounter, and at least ten in total before the game ended. I was half expecting them to start asking if I had any potions, or food. Add this to the canon of game characters who manage to annoy the player by spamming voice lines like they're running HLDJ.

Pacing is, regrettably, another factor that Ninja Theory has regressed on. A vast, vast majority of this game is spent holding the left bumper and up on the left stick. You walk forward, and you walk forward, and you walk forward, and Senua's never really in much of a hurry to get anywhere. You'll have a good twenty minutes where you're doing quite literally nothing besides walking in a straight line while the voices ask questions about shit that you already know. They'll also celebrate you figuring out the solutions to the ridiculously simple puzzles in the most simpering way imaginable. I do not need to be told that Senua is a very, very smart girl who can do no wrong when the game told me where the symbol was, and then automatically solved the puzzle for me when I held the focus button vaguely in its direction. These over-long sections where you walk around and do nothing are occasionally interrupted by over-long combat encounters where you tap dodge and spam light attacks, and that's where the fun really begins.

Most of these fights are fucking silly; the part where Senua interrupts the ritual is easily five minutes, as is the cave fight, as is the undead raid on the village. This is only as much of a problem as it is because Senua can only ever fight one enemy at a time, which makes them drag. There are about nine distinct enemy types that exist in the entire game, and they all take turns to lazily swing at Senua and slowly get chipped down. A lot of games that do mob fights will have some enemies hang back while others slowly come at you, but this doesn't even attempt to give you the illusion. Senua never has to fight more than one enemy at a time, regardless of how surrounded she is. What really gets me is the fact that this wasn't a problem in the original Hellblade. Enemies would come at you in twos and threes, and that was even in the earliest fights of the game. This is a total regression of a system that was already pretty thin, and the fact that Ninja Theory have cut out a majority of Senua's attacks to streamline the combat even further than it was boggles the mind.

There are glimmers of something good in here. I really do like the part in the cave where Senua starts to get the blessing from the hidden men, and the entire place lights up like a LIDAR scan. It's got some genuinely good pacing, too; you've got puzzle sections that lead into little combat encounters, and then those lead into walking sections, and that leads into a stealth section, and then it leads into another puzzle. It's the only place in the entire game where any of these systems feel like they're working together in harmony, rather than existing solely to interrupt one of the others for going on too long. It's a shame that Senua has to exist outside of that cave. I thought it was a good place for her to be. It was interesting, at least.

Anyway, I'm not sure I buy Ninja Theory's Games for Impact-bait shift in the past few years. I see their logo and I think back to how they would write Monkey killing escaping slaves because it was badass, or that GDC talk they did for DmC: Devil May Cry where they dedicated a section to making fun of Dante for being gay. The company, to my knowledge, has never really had a reckoning for any of that. Tameem Antoniades seems to have slipped out the back door just in time for this to release, but he's still got the sole creative director credit. I'm willing to believe that Senua's actress Melina Juergens actually believes in what she's doing — she's said in interviews that her father had a psychotic disorder, and she seems to have the most solid understanding of the crew when it comes to how the narrative ought to handle Senua's mental illness — but I'm not extending that faith much further than her. There's something about the documentaries that Ninja Theory self-publishes where they go over how very, very carefully they handled psychosis (we promise!) that doesn't pass the sniff test. I don't think it's bad that this exists, and I won't erase the people who have said that these games have been genuinely good reflections of their own mental illnesses; I just have some strong doubts that Ninja Theory is doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. One look at their back catalog suggests to me that they only wanted to make a Serious Mental Health Story because their old shit stopped selling and they could tell which way the wind started blowing. With the constant distractions of giant-slaying, risen undead warriors, and the sins of the fathers subplot, the current big game on the market "about psychosis" barely has time for the psychosis.

The conclusion that I'm forced towards, reductive as it is, is that people who love Hellblade II don't play anything else. They don't really watch anything else, either. I don't know what they do. It's not worth just harping on the fans, though; I don't think many people dislike this game for the right reasons, either. Complaining about a game not offering a good enough playtime-to-dollar ratio is peabrain shit. People also cry about Senua being Sweet Baby-core because she's got peach fuzz and bug eyes, all acting as though she isn't the the textbook definition of conventionally attractive. And the game isn't bad because it's story-focused — the game is bad because it's fucking boring. You engage with it in a boring way, and it tells a boring story. This isn't an inherently broken game. The concept is fine. It's the execution where Ninja Theory makes it clear that they've got no fucking clue what they're doing.

Great photo mode, though.

I was 22 when I had my first psychotic episode. I had dropped everything and moved to Austin with a girlfriend who was not a good fit for me, pursuing my dream of (somehow) becoming a professional actor. None of this was going well; the relationship and the jobs I was working were all dead ends that I wasn't really acknowledging or dealing with.

Eventually all the stress and self-deceit came to a head in a giant fight, and I started thinking things that were decidedly false. I came to believe that I was the center of a conspiracy of surveillance, Truman Show style, that was being run by my friends. Every detail that I noticed confirmed this: I saw a car make a weird U-turn which to me was proof positive that it was following me. A dump truck passed the window with a flashing yellow light; this was clearly someone trying to signal to me that they were in on the conspiracy. A cat sitting on the hood of a car must have been some kind of sophisticated spy camera.

I never experienced hallucinations, I was never violent and I didn't cackle maniacally like every single clueless, no-effort depiction of mental illness in Hollywood and elsewhere. The only thing that was missing was my capacity to critically examine my own ideas.

You know how when you're thinking super hard about something for a long time, and you finally figure it out, and you get that big rush of endorphins like "ahhhhh I finally got it." It's a great feeling, but you have to work to get there right? You have to come up with and reject a lot of ideas before you find the one that fits. Well, I was having that "ahhhh" feeling with every fleeting notion. You don't realize how many thoughts you reject as nonsense until you lose the ability to do so.

You might see a squirrel run toward you and think "Wouldn't it be cool if that was some kind of little robot?" then immediately reject that idea without a second thought. That rejection is what was broken in me; even the most momentary flight of fancy became the unassailable truth. I saw the squirrel and it was self-evident that it was being remotely-controlled as a way to keep tabs on me. Not a single thought in my mind that any of this stuff was wrong.

Public mental health facilities in Texas at the turn of millennium were about as you'd expect. I was there involuntarily and kept trying to escape, so I spent a lot of the first few days restrained (more than 20 years later I still get a panicky feeling in my chest when I think about being strapped to that bed). I was shot up with Haldol that left me a drooling, twitching mess. At no point did I receive anything resembling therapy. After a few weeks the doctor assigned to my case finally came back from vacation and I seemed fine so they basically shrugged and let me go.

"Depression with psychotic features" they called it that first time. Eventually, after experiencing more episodes and being institutionalized and re-diagnosed a few more times, they settled on the diagnosis of Bipolar I disorder and I've been stable on lithium for over a decade now. I was lucky and got basically the happiest possible outcome. I don't think that's the case for most people dealing with mental health issues, especially psychosis.

Mental health is like sexuality, in that we as a society are obsessed with it but only seem to engage with it in the most unhealthy ways. In our entertainment media, references to insanity are constant. Calling someone's sanity into question is an easy and common insult. After every mass shooting, the airwaves are crammed with politicians scapegoating the mentally ill. We're finally to the point where (in some circles) it's considered unacceptable to use "gay" or "retarded" as insults, but nobody bats an eye if you call someone "crazy" or "psycho".

But for all of that, it's basically unheard of for someone in power to say anything meaningful about mental health. When Hollywood approaches the topic, the results are universally rancid. Games tend to fall into two camps: crazy-person-as-horror-villain studio hack jobs, or autobiographical indies that actually bring some experience to the picture.

And that's why Hellblade stands out so much to me. It's not an indie; it has the full weight of a storied and talented (albeit small) studio behind it. But they've done the work to actually try to depict psychosis in a realistic way, that brings the player into the experience as an exercise in empathy, not just a cheap aesthetic choice.

It was a marvel to me how the puzzles in the game are built around seeing patterns that aren't really there, exactly like I did during my psychotic episodes. The scene where all the trees have eyes, but they're really just tricks of the light, was so incredibly true to my experience. I never saw things that weren't there; I saw things that were there but misinterpreted them in critical ways, just like Senua.

And Senua? Possibly my favorite protagonist of any game. Melina Jeurgens gives it so much of herself, and her character design is such a breath of fresh air in an industry full of gross fan service. She looks like a real person! She's still pretty, but doesn't look like a RealDoll that someone dressed up in cosplay gear.

I could only play this game in short sessions because it's so damn intense. The story hits hard, and Senua's agonizing deaths were challenging. Mechanically, the game is really quite light. Only a couple gameplay verbs are made available as the story progresses very linearly. Hellblade aims to challenge the player on a sensory, emotional and intellectual level more than a gameplay one. For me, it was deeply effective and affecting.

With the sequel on the horizon it's exciting to imagine what Ninja Theory has in store for us next. It really feels like the conversation around mental health is starting to turn; the crazies are finally out telling their stories, taboos and misinformation be damned. I love how indie developers have stepped up and started raising the level of discourse around mental health and I really hope that more and bigger studios follow suit. Fear of retaliation or judgment can make mental illness a really isolating experience. It really does feel good to feel seen, and playing a game like Hellblade is really great reminder that I'm not alone.

a tranquil puzzle metroidvania filled with emergent gameplay. animal well was something i didnt expect to enjoy so much but the imsim like quality of its tools really brought up my enjoyment by a lot. being able to sequence break with just some intuitive thinking like "oh what if i hug the wall as i fall and use the yoyo to hit all the buttons?" was a continuous joy. while the backtracking is plentiful and can begin to get tiresome, the plethora of secrets hidden throughout the world makes it not as bad as one may think. the world is sometimes desolate, for better or worse, which does hamper the backtracking for me. sometimes i also felt that certain tools were underused in some cases (firecrackers couldve been more than just a combat tool imo). aside from the rare level design mishaps and how tools were so close to being used to the fullest of their capabilities, the game's cool. cryptic in the best way, eerily beautiful, and filled with organic puzzle solutions, animal well succeeds in being a labyrinthine mind worm.

if you fuck with animal well, PLEASE go check out mosa lina. that game's emergent gameplay incarnate.

keeping this one short because i'm roughly 20 years older than this game's most devoted fans and i very much doubt they're combing this site for reviews

when i wrote about the original game i mostly did so to highlight the ways in which the game is careful and considered instead of merely being 3d farmville and i'm pleased to report that's still the case here, but farm together 2 is closer to a major update than it is an entirely new game. it is extremely conservative for a sequel. the average player will wonder what the point of this is, but the newbies will like this one more than the first one and there's a lot of QOL stuff for the true devotees. a lot of ways in which the first game could be a little weird / ugly / have clunky menuing have been smoothed out here and while i think pulling a city folk and adding a town is a bit silly, it fixes things like half your farm being covered in hideous trucks and shops and storage facilities to convert your 10 million clownfish corpses into diamonds. that's the kind of change you're looking at, things that do meaningfully affect systems, but their impact is felt most strongly in the long-term and doesn't make for nice, neat selling points - at least, not at this stage. if there's anything of note for casual players it's that they've turbocharged the early game, allowing you to operate at scale quickly instead of nursing 5 lettuce plants for 10 real-life hours.

if you're gonna buy one of the games in this series, buy this one. if you already own the first one, then wait a bit. holding off on rating this one until i've seen a bit more, but i expect to revisit this later once its had time to grow into its own thing

Capcom has made more good games they've forgotten about than most studios have made good games.

The word that kept coming to my mind as I played Maximo was "deliberate". This game forces you to be thoughtful in your actions. You need to be precise in your platforming, as levels rise and crumble around you and platforms roll down rivers like Frogger. Failing a jump often means instant death, although the game is fairly generous with extra lives and continues. There is no manual camera, only a button that will attempt to center the camera behind Maximo. Honestly, this may be because I’m from a time before manual cameras (you merely adopted the dark etc.), but I felt that the camera was generally good at being where I needed it to be. And I love the slight Dutch angle its tilted at, it adds so much to the feel of the world.

Combat is just as deliberate. Your sword bounces off of rock and metal, making Maximo vulnerable for several excruciating milliseconds. Swing at wood, and it takes even longer for him to remove it. The biggest combo is a two-hitter perk you could potentially not keep in your permanent list, and it has a noticeable wait after the 2nd attack, so with multiple enemies approaching performing the combo could leave you open.

Enemies are incredibly varied in the best way to dispatch them. Even the duck button, which seems worthless at first, is crucial to destroy certain enemies without taking damage. There are these pirate enemies that are easy to knock down, but when you ground pound them you will take damage because they’ve been skewered through with a cutlass that is now pointing up. What you need to do is jump over them and knock them down from behind, which allows you to finish them off without getting hurt.

Maximo is full of little decisions like these. Do I tank this attack with my shield or do a ranged shield throw, both of which lower the shield’s durability? The shield is incredibly useful, and when it breaks you’ll be defenseless until you find another one (Maximo’s blacksmiths took Hyrule correspondence courses). Do I do this difficult platforming section to get one of the incredibly powerful temporary sword upgrades? Do I use one of my keys to unlock a gate or chest, or save them for later?

All of this adds up to a game that I enjoyed so much I beat it in a fever rush of two days. And after playing the first level of the sequel, it turns out they removed everything that made the first game work in order to make something that plays like… (checks notes) MediEvil? That can’t be right?

Rapidly hit the point where the thought of booting up Marvel's Midnight Suns felt like punching in to work, and that's a damn shame considering how much of an X-Com mark I am. I signed up for tactical card-based RPG gameplay and base management, not a social sim with uncarbonated, room temp Joss Wheadon writing.

Every character here is reduced to one or two notable elements that are constantly harped on. Tony Stark, played by Josh Keaton under explicit instructions to do his best Robert Downey Jr. impression, is constantly making cracks about having to operate out of a scary magical castle. Dr. Strange's magical prowess is constantly under scrutiny, a dotard in a room of quippy millennials - "Dr. Spooky," they call him. Sister Grimm rearranged one of the clubs' acronyms so it spelled out "EMO KIDS" because she's so clever and quirky. Peter Parker LOVES pizza, can SOMEBODY please get Peter Parker a slice of pie!? No deep dish, it's gotta be New Yawk style, wooo, love da big apple!

Another way to put it would be if the beach scene in Persona 5 kicked off a running gag where characters had to constantly bring up Yusuke buying lobsters and equate some part of every conversation involving Yusuke to lobsters for the rest of the game. Just... close your eyes and imagine that. Lean back, get comfortable, absorb yourself in how "good" that would be. Congratulations, I just saved you $20.

I remembered Deadpool was in this game and that was the point I decided I needed to get out. It's not that it's overly snarky or self-depreciating in the same obnoxious, overbearing way the MCU is, Midnight Suns is to its credit more confident in its setting, but it's just so lame. Unfortunately, socializing with your team is a major component of the game - so much so that it's disproportionate to the actual tactical RPG elements - and unless you're willing to mash through all the tiresome character dialog to get to the conversation options that let you scream "do you ever shut up" and tank your friendship rating, you'll just have to put up with it.

Every day you have to run around this castle talking to heroes to raise their bonds, break down materials, craft new cards, fuse duplicates together, train with heroes to get daily stat buffs, send heroes you aren't using on away missions... Navigation around the castle grounds feels cumbersome, and you have so many tasks to do before you're ready to head out that combat starts to feel secondary against the lethargic pace of base management.

The tactical card-combat? It's fine. There's not really a whole lot I have to say about it. The early missions are decently challenging, and each character comes with their own attributes and pool of cards that helps give them defined utility in battle, like Sister Grimm, who is essentially your defacto buff/debuffer in the early game. Combat encounters still feel somewhat samey, but I was only about five hours in when I bailed, I'd have to imagine they get more diverse over time.

The most I got out of Midnight Sun was when I went on a nighttime walk with Blade and he mentioned not being able to see something, to which the protagonist quipped "that's because you wear your sunglasses at night."

"Hey, it's a fashion choice."

Blade was not wearing his sunglasses. I gifted him a skull I found on the ground. He seemed to like it.

After sharing that I wasn't enthralled by Bioshock 1 because its combat was too floppy and weightless, I was urged to give Bioshock 2 a chance because its combat is so much better. And this is a consensus I've encountered frequently online as well.

So I played Bioshock 2 and the gameplay was exactly the same as Bioshock 1.

Except now you can use a shitty gun and a plasmid at the same time!

It's an okay stealth game that's worth playing once. But the issues go a lot deeper than just smaller levels and no rope arrows.

The worst design decision in this game was not committing to either first person or third person. The game tries to have both and it results in wonky sluggish movement because Garrett now has a physical body. The infamous floating Garrett bug was extremely irritating.

Most of the levels are fine but unfortunately nothing compares to the first two games. Even the famed Cradle wasn't quite as shocking as I expected it to be. It certainly had a potent vibe, but I expected to be more scared by what is apparently one of the scariest levels of all time. But maybe it really was back in 2004. I found some of the levels in Thief 1 scarier personally. In my opinion the seaside manor is the best level in this game.

Exploring the city between missions was a cool idea but this game had too many limitations to flesh it out properly. It became a tedious trek after the first time.

The story wasn't as good as the first two games and I already struggle to remember some of it, while I can recall the first two games' stories perfectly despite playing Deadly Shadows more recently than them. I was happy to get a definitive conclusion to Garrett's story though.