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Personal Ratings
1★
5★

Badges


4 Years of Service

Being part of the Backloggd community for 4 years

GOTY '21

Participated in the 2021 Game of the Year Event

GOTY '20

Participated in the 2020 Game of the Year Event

GOTY '19

Participated in the 2019 Game of the Year Event

Favorite Games

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Pokémon Gold Version
Pokémon Gold Version
Super Mario Odyssey
Super Mario Odyssey
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

047

Total Games Played

000

Played in 2024

000

Games Backloggd


Recently Played See More

Chicory: A Colorful Tale
Chicory: A Colorful Tale

Jun 26

L.A. Noire
L.A. Noire

Jun 07

Ratchet & Clank
Ratchet & Clank

Jun 03

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard
Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

May 31

Down in Bermuda
Down in Bermuda

Jan 23

Recently Reviewed See More

New Pokemon Snap delivers on exactly what the name implies, an updated version of the 1999 N64 classic that provides a stunning and thoughtful portrayal of the behaviors of Pokemon's ever-expanding cast.

Like the first game, the player is tasked with traveling on rails through courses filled with Pokemon to snap photos of them for a professor and ultimately uncover secrets within the environment that lead to new paths and courses.

The decision to stick to the classic formula has been somewhat controversial with some folks hoping the new game would add more freedom, but ultimately I find Pokemon Snap to be more of a rail shooter than a photography game.

Through this lens, I think the game most excels at guiding you through paths that allow you to take in gorgeous scenes and the exciting interactions the Pokemon have with the environment and each other on your first run through and then use subsequent runs to try to set up your perfect shots. Some of my personal highlights involved being surprised by a Pokemon I did not expect to see in a certain area or an interaction between two or more Pokemon.

New Pokemon Snap's visuals are breathtaking with a wide range of environments spanning from quiet fields and serene beaches to lush jungles and dank caves. The Pokemon animations also do so much to bring each creature to life.

Capturing photos of Pokemon for the professor still follows the somewhat nonsensical rubric of judging your photos based on size and how centered the Pokemon is in the frame.

New to New Pokemon Snap, however, are star ratings for photos and course levels.

Each Pokemon has a slot of 1- to 4-star photos that denote different poses with the higher stars often requiring special conditions to be met to set up the snap. The work to find these stellar photos is often ultimately worth it but can be made frustrating by the fact that the tools you gain to interact with Pokemon don't really have defined roles. Much like the first game as you progress you gain access to fluffruit, apple-like fruits that Pokemon will eat and react to when struck by, illumina orbs which make Pokemon glow and can interact with some environmental elements and the ability to play music which can cause some Pokemon to dance or perform special actions. This ultimately gets muddled as all three methods can be used to do things such as wake a Pokemon up or get them to perform a specific action and in some cases, a combination of two or all three is required and the only means to determine what is necessary is trial and error.

Course levels use points that you are granted for having photos scored by the professor on each run to unlock new variations of the levels with different Pokemon that appear and occasionally different optional paths. Some courses also have a day and night version with their own individual level system, meaning each course can contain as many as six different versions without factoring in alternate paths within them.

These two factors combined with the ability to alter the zoom and framing of your photos after a run and further alter them with filters, stickers etc. that can be earned by completing requests (which essentially offer tips to 3- and 4-star photos) make each level incredibly dense and provide dozens of hours of replayability.

Outside of the standard courses, each area contains a special Illumina Pokemon course where you are tasked with following around a single (usually supersized) Pokemon and pelting them with illumina orbs to take their photos. These sequences were the weakest part of the game for me taking a lot of the most frustrating elements from the Mew final boss stage in the original game and eliminating much of the spectacle that makes the main courses interesting.

After more than 20 years of waiting New Pokemon Snap provides an update to the original that feels both modern and faithful, while offering nearly endless possibilities for those who want to go the extra mile and track down each and every shot.


Chicory is a charming puzzle/adventure game with clever mechanics and level design, endearing characters and an emotional story.

The game has you take the role of a janitor working for Chicory, a kind of mystical official known as a wielder who is responsible for providing color to the game's world. At the outset Chicory and all of the color of the world have vanished leaving you to pick up her magical brush and solve the mystery of where the color has gone and the origin of strange black trees that have appeared throughout the world.

As the new wielder, the brush grants you the ability to color in your surroundings and earn new ways to interact with the paint, such as swimming in it a la Splatoon or using it to illuminate dark caves.

The core gameplay loop has you uspgrade the brush's powers and use them to solve environmental puzzles to navigate to the sources of the corruption infesting the world, obtain collectibles such as clothing for your character and new ways to paint with your brush and complete tasks for NPCs.

Puzzling can be a little dry in some of the early sections where your brush's powers are limited, but as you gain new abilities the game does an excellent job at introducing new mechanics that combine your skills in interesting ways and force them to think about them differently. The game also has an excellent tip system, reminiscent of Link's Awakening, if you find yourself stuck and one of my personal highlights was taking some time to backtrack and paint in areas I left blank to take a break from a puzzle that gave me some trouble.

There are no hostiles or combat outside of boss battles, which begin by simply having you swipe your brush over an enemy while avoiding their strikes but evolve mechanically with each encounter ultimately leading to some pretty stellar battles.

Outside of the gameplay, Chicory really shines in its writing and world building. All of the characters you encounter have memorable and endearing personalities and NPCs will often show up at shops or on random screens throughout the world to comment on how you've colored them in.

This all helps feed into the stellar story which offers commentary on the demands of being a public creative, as well as exploring your path in life and the impact you have on others.

All of this is underscored by an absolute banger of a soundtrack that emphasizes everything from tender emotional moments, the adrenaline of a boss fight, the spectacle of a big city and a reference to another popular game series that made me laugh out loud.

Chicory draws on the spirit of 2D Zeldas and other adventure games, combining those inspirations into a modern and polished package with a well implemented gimmick and satisfying gameplay mechanics.


L.A. Noire is a promising experiment from Rockstar's past that in many ways has still not seen its full potential realized.

The core gameplay of L.A. Noire has you take on the role of rising star cop Cole Phelps as you collect evidence, famously use facial cues to interrogate suspects and engage in boilerplate Rockstar shootouts and car chases. in 1940s Los Angeles.

The investigation aspect still largely holds up as novel to this day and scrounging around crime scenes for clues (although the game does hold your hand slightly by alerting you when you've found everything of note) adds an extra layer of accomplishment when you pull it out to catch a suspect in a lie. The game does tend to litter the areas with an often repeated supply of irrelevant items that can be inspected and while things like matchboxes will be crucial evidence in some cases and meaningless in others, the game doesn't do this quite enough to justify the junk.

Interrogations themselves are the main draw of the game as it allows its focus on performance capture to shine as one-off suspects become memorable characters. The actual mechanics of investigations as a whole are kind of a smoke and mirrors trick as no level of failure really has any material effect on the game's trajectory but the performances make even small mistakes notable experiences and the writing allows for a botched question to still provide some semblance of information.

The remastered version also replaces the classic "Truth, Doubt, Lie" with "Good Cop, Bad Cop and Accuse" and while "Bad Cop" in particular is a more fitting description, these still don't quite go far enough to convey how Cole might respond to a suspect. Dialogue choices can occasionally lead on tangents that wind up frustrating, such as identifying that a suspect is lying about something but having Cole call them out on something tangentially related you might not have evidence for.

The open world is where this system starts to fall apart and actually lags behind more linear and abstract detective worlds like the Ace Attorney series where it could have expanded on them. Some later missions do progress differently depending on what order you choose to tackle tasks in but most cases do not involve the kind of backtracking and cross-examining that make both L.A. Noire's predecessors and successors interesting.

Instead, the open world is largely just a stage for car chases, gunfights and tailing missions both in main story missions and side quests that don't really feel distinct or interesting. I often found it grating for a case to end with Cole tackling or gunning down a suspect, when it was infinitely more tense to have to bring multiple suspects into the interrogation room and decide who to charge.

This is especially heartbreaking because the world is so well constructed that in a late-game car chase I crashed my car into a building only to realize "Hey this is the laundromat from mission 3" and the final homicide mission that has you use clues to travel to specific landmarks. Unfortunately, the game doesn't really require you to treat its fictional L.A. as a lived-in and interconnected place, instead just pushing you along from point A to point B.

Much of this is understandable when considering L.A. Noire's true intention is to tell a linear story, which it fundamentally does well. The rise and fall of Cole Phelps is essentially a mishmash of noir tropes but the game does a good job of elevating secondary characters such as Cole's partners and his former military teammates to make the story worthwhile. Cole himself fits pretty neatly into the standard Rockstar protagonist at the time as he is naive enough to act as an audience stand-in but tortured enough to add emotional weight.

My primary gripes with the story are that we don't really get to see much of Cole's life outside of his police work and the war, which takes away some of the gravity of a late-game twist. Also, the homicide desk is one of the most satisfying sections of the game from a gameplay perspective but ultimately reads like a non sequitur as the story ramps up in the second half.

Looking back, L.A. Noire is nestled in an odd space where it was not quite as innovative as it could have been. It does well to bring aspects of the more visual novel-style detective games to the AAA space but fails to fully connect the dots as much of the open world aspects feel like filler.