The fact that this was the follow-up to Silent Hill 2 and is still revered as a good game is the kind of nonsensical feedback Silent Hill shouldn't be receiving especially not after 2 decades.

This game is shit on every level, it has the WORST story in the franchise where you have your sassy female protagonist whose just fucking yapping her stupid ass mouth, so quirky bro here's her zinger no#2314832 before she faces off against a boss. Her entire persona is supposed to contrast James Sunderland, the previous protagonist, but her dialogue is so bad that it's past the point of being "so bad it's good" and is JUST bad.

Oh you remember how lousy SH2 combat was? All we did was put more guns in and extended a bit of the movement vocabulary, now you can keep fighting in this shitty game that ages poorly every single fucking day. Instead of the rustic empty horror of SH2, SH3 has "purgatory" where everything is fleshy and gore-y, the game over-relies on graphic depictions as well as body horror (such as the scene where Heather "aborts" the fetus of god), and if you want a soft reminder about my stance on the occult heavy SH stories they all fucking suck ass.

All in all one of the worst sequels I have ever played, the only redeeming factor being the opening song which I fucking love. Shit game.

RE2R feels like it should be at the top of my rankings but it isn’t, this game is the golden standard for horror game pathfinding, it’s a game where you actually do have to make small decisions that can have direct positive or negative consequences, if you don’t board up the windows the next time you come to the same hallway the zombies are gonna be flooding it… Well you can just kill them, right? Nope, you can't. If you kill them next time you circle back here the lickers are going to be feasting on these corpses…. Well you can just silently tread around the lickers….Nope. Mr. X chases you down later and you have to run through these hallways which attracts the lickers. It's such a simple neat way to add small instances of decision making for the player.

Once you grab a key item you have a very good idea of where it’s meant to be used, when you’re going around the place the police station is so well designed that even if you don’t remember EXACTLY where you want to use the key-item you definitely recall a specific section of the map that you can backtrack to and find where it can be used. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t get very confusing at times, and I did have to consult a guide for some parts but the game can be played independent of a guide and you can get the complete experience.

Speaking of lickers, they are my favorite thing in this game, they are our replacement for the Crimson Heads in the first game where killing zombies has a direct consequence of them becoming a Crimson Head, but here a corpse attracts lickers

The game has you finding keys much like the original RER but here they have elaborate lock symbols that helps you keep track of which rooms you haven’t gone inside.

But with all of that said, RE2R is…… boring. I couldn’t stop being bored in this game; I don’t think RE has every necessitated the need for music but I really wish RE2R had some, the backtracking feels cumbersome and if you’re lost the playtime feels REALLY sluggish, I love navigating a maze that has you witnessing something new when you happen upon it with a new key item in hand but I just couldn’t help but feel exhausted by this game. It’s the ONLY game that feels directly boring to me, I don’t have the words to express what makes it feel this way.

The infamous larp scene, how could anyone possibly forget?

LiS: True Colors was a controversial title even before release, not because LiS 2 was a flop and already tanked audience expectations, but because of Alex Chen. One visit to the official content posted on YouTube is enough to summarize the public perception of this character, her powers of "empathy" in reality are powers of telepathy, you'd somewhat understand this from the trailer but the fact that it is not framed as such doesn't help the case for this game.

LiS: True Colors loves to play safe, all the characters are different shades of nice, for a murder mystery the game is too relaxed and never do the stakes feel like they are weighing down on Alex. The town seems to be healing her slowly and you can't help but root for her a little, Alex feels like a complete character even when she seems to have a bit of a savior complex as she's going from person to person fixing their issues. I like this aspect of storytelling, but it's unsophisticated nature begs for more exploration, these depictions of LOUD emotions that can manifest for Alex as she is slowly consumed by these powerful emotive forces are accompanied by simple but effective imagery and changes in the environment, and all these segments are fun. You're in for a treat as you see these wonderful fluid animations, Deck Nine gives a gentle wave of goodbye to the long gone days of characters with stilted fish eyed faces with quivering lips as they talked.

Besides an offputting internal conflict and resolution for Alex in a neat 20-30 minutes in the end (which has been the main point of contention for mostly any sane person who played this game), Deck Nine made me feel thirsty, thirsty for more plot developments, thirsty for more character interactions, thirsty for more conflict, safe doesn't mean bad and it was necessary to give confidence back to the franchise and this title does exactly that.

True Colors puts LiS back on the map, a hope that seemed stifled after LiS 2. But it's fate lies in the hands of the game that proceeds it.

Identity Crisis 8

Words can’t define how grueling it was to see this game through till the end, I feel like my interest completely depleted and my mind checked out right after House Beneviento, but I’ll address my complaints further down the line, let’s get the good out of the way.

Pros
(+) I like the fact that the game has this children’s storybook backdrop and it’s very unusual for the franchise to include these kinds of fantasy-like elements (I say “these kinds” because we DO have supernatural Tamil villains who can super sprint and dodge bullets ala Wesker) which work even better when you’re getting your body torn open and your limbs cut off and re-attached, it all feels like you’re not a real person and the odds you face are artificial and insurmountable, you’re transported to this fantasy village with a giantess, a talking doll, mr magneto, even the minor bosses like the fan dude who charges at you (I like how the notes say he gets his own limbs chopped off of his body because of the fan) and then later his internal machinery catches fire and he starts breathing it at you.

I LIKE the creativity they had with this game, in a sea of “fleshy mutant with bulging eye that you’re supposed to hit” this game really had variety even though it’s still bullseye enemies yipee

(+) Ethan being mold cool but executed horribly and shouldn’t have even been a reveal

(+) House Beneviento and the Factory are overall really good segments even when their charm only works once and never again, Beneviento is the only time this franchise has attempted to be psychological in its horror delivery and it felt like for once RE could measure upto Silent Hill in being genuinely creepy and not over-reliant on gore-like elements

(+) The Duke is cool

Cons
(-) Pick one game that you want to call back on, you can’t keep oscillating between different past games that you want to reference. So, Castle Dimitrescu is RE1, Dimitrescu herself is our Mr.X callback so that’s RE2, the weapon
inventory/merchant/starting gankfest is a reference to RE4, the game itself extends the combat for RE7, and in none of these circumstances did I feel like the game faithfully reinvented the wheel, again this keeps contributing to how inconsistent and glued together a lot of the elements of this game feel, just slapped on without any depth or nuance.

(-) RE7 combat sucks and it works only for that specific game where you have limping mold chasing you flailing its tentacle arms around, revamping that almost sluggish combat so the game can have this quasi-action game approach feels so unnatural to play and especially on Hardcore this game is diabolical.
When I was at the Lycan hideout I legitimately zoned out, and there’s one specific reason why the action doesn’t work, the backstep speed, they made it really slow so that whenever an enemy approach you it feels like you’re backed up against an invisible wall only having to expose your back in order to run a few steps behind to put inches between you and the enemy. THIS SUCKS, I don’t get the sentiment of having a high-octane FPS game but actively limiting the player to 2 things, switching weapons and holding your arms up to guard, and the game wants you to guard A LOT.

WHY? In RE7 all the claustrophobic space made complete sense but in RE8 it just feels fucking stupid and counterintuitive to the very idea of making an action heavy game

(-) The bosses suck complete dick and the fact that even after 8 installments and countless spin-offs and remakes they keep releasing this unsophisticated bullseye enemies is so pathetic, and I’m going to be very candid RE could straight up not have bosses and it would largely improve on the quality of the experience,
Heisenburg and Moreau are SPECIFICALLY bad and even though I can give a pass to Moreau for being a filler boss Heisenburg doesn’t get a graceful pass from me, imagine building up this insanely cool character and then having no real payoff for it

(-) The game can be very easily segmented into multiple portions because of how distinctively the bosses and their designated areas work, Castle Dimitrescu, Moreau Lake, House Beneviento, Heisenburg Factory, Lycan Hideout, the Village open grounds, and not only are they structurally different but they also differ a lot in terms of gameplay, the cream of the crop here is Castle Dimitrescu, House Beneviento and the Factory while the rest are just really REALLY bad

Again, the word of the day is consistency and the game is capricious in execution, by the end of the game I nearly forgot that there were village survivors who burn to death in a house fire of which only you make out alive, had the game had you find survivors and set up some sort of “survivors of mother miranda” network instead of having you fight quirky and goofy villains as your only source of communication it could add so much more value

(+/-) The game is linear but it’s done tastefully in my opinion, there’s no deep pathfinding or having to traverse a maze like structure and even if you’re lost it’s very easy to backtrack your footsteps, the factory is the only “technical” section and believe me when I say I wasn’t even paying that much attention and I would still easily make it to where I needed to go, the game has you coming back to familiar areas and opening routes internally which means that it’s pseudo linear with very clear mission goals so the lack of sophistication makes it less frustrating but then it doesn’t replace the simplicity with quality action segments so it feels like they traded off routing in exchange for pretty much nothing.

Conclusion:

Don’t pick this game up, I can’t emphasize the amount of cringe I had to sit through towards the end, Ethan’s death feels inconsequential, the story reveal has no impact, the game wants to have emotional stakes but you really never warm up to Ethan Winters enough to care, you don’t really care about this damn stupid baby either. No task in this game that you perform feels connected to another, the village isn’t mysterious and I didn’t want to know anything about it, even with it’s small wins this game loses on all other fronts, I can’t sit and pretend this even passes as a quality title.

Pure, unfiltered, garbage.

Hats off to the modding team for making this game accessible to the wider audience. I know it's a disservice to play the game in any other format because of HOW MUCH the VR plays into the flow of the gameplay and every combat encounter centers around VR, even reloading is something you physically do, but until VR tech becomes way more widely accessible this is a good alternative.

The non-VR mod also insta-solves all puzzles and there's like a billion of them which have already been a subject of criticism by reviewers, often times I had to go into the console and have to spawn ammo or medicine by the absolute scarcity that plagues this game, there's also issues with upgrading which is probably why I had to over-rely so much on ammunition with my lack of firepower.

Cons:
The "comedy" is horrible the borderlands writers were in the room, Russell is a good voice in your ear but the banter just wasn't tight enough, besides that there's elements of the plot I liked and elements of the plot I disliked.

I already knew the ending but now having played the whole game I can confidently say: I don't like the ending. I don't like a mish mash retcon for a game's pivotal ending after a decade, a plot that's been marinating for so long doesn't deserve to be written off, I HATE it. I like the final sequence where reality is warping as you're seeing silhouette's of people who resided in the apartment complex but everything about the implications of the actual finale annoy me. That being said a fresh slate to the plot after so many leaks about what episode 3 was actually I can't really blame them.

The gameplay loop is probably more interesting in VR but it really got tiring having to scavenge boxes and litter to find ammo, and it's clear this is probably way more immersive in VR having to physically move boxes around and shake stuff
I'm going to be controversial, THIS much combat in a VR game does it no favors whatsoever, and having contrived claustrophobic design to insist on a arm's reach VR experience takes away from the series' past design choices in many ways. The enemy body vocabulary HAS to be slowed so that VR can be accommodated but that's not the issue that I have, it's that some of the combat philosophy feels TOO repeated for it's own good, this means that the game is forced to put a lot of barnacles in the game, the combines don't feel good to fight at all

Pros:
The detail in this game is off the charts, there's SO much detail, the animations are done insanely well, the new enemy variants really compliment VR gameplay especially the armor crab and the electric crab (one of the best enemies EVER. It can animated corpses and it shifts and moves around the body while you try to hit it just absolutely amazing).

Jeff is singlehandedly the most genius chapter in the game and the it does a really good job of pre-teaching you what you're supposed to do before you actually do it.
The alien zombie infestation of Northstar just looks jawdropping, this game's horror is really fucking good and I can only imagine how insane it is in VR.

There's some lore implications sprinkled THROUGHOUT the plot which are just amazing as usual valve has really good worldbuilding

All in all, I DO NOT recommend anyone play the game like I did, but if you ever have a VR headset this is definitely a game everyone should try out

Narrative driven games are completely dependent on their story but this is probably the one game where the actual story isn't the shining star it's the way that they chose to tell it that steals the show, as well as the greek/roman historical backdrop they chose as the primary setting

It's easy for time-travelling stories to get out of hand very fast and this one kept it really simple and for it's own benefit kept it relatively safe

Where I love the setting and the storytelling, I actually thought the game is TOO short, I don't wish for any more characters or entanglement in the plot but I wish there were more endings than 4 out of which 1 is a variation of another ending and 1 is a bad ending that you can get any time,

I also think the villain, although being interesting for how he exploited the system to his own benefit, was pretty disappointing when revealed as the antagonist, let alone his reasons for doing what he did, I hated the villain to the point where it makes it difficult to recommend the game for how disappointing he is (I'm not talking about the big boss of the place)

Other stuff:
-Voice acting conveyed what stiff body movements could not and it's competently done for a budget title
-I like the fact that you can scam the 2 people who scam you towards the end
-The game actually REALLY surprised me with that final futuristic area and even though the final big boss seems cartoonish I liked that it took me by surprise
-Fata Morgana museum scene at the end had me crying laughing
-That guy inside the underground catacombs is the one trope I love in trapped in a [place] themed games where there's survivors from previous groups that have been trapped in the same place are alive somehow

I remember giving this game a glowing review when I played it ages ago and it's always funny to turn around and see how much of the glaring flaws I was dismissing for my recency bias,

Look the yakuza are acting so absurdist and out of character this is so funny!!! (this is the entire fucking franchise), a game designed so that you take screenshots and upload them on twitter so your garbage smelling friends can go "heh...I told you its peak"

Majima's side of the story is salvageable (if you hate melodrama rip your enjoyment), everything else is nonsense and over the top unfunny ass shit

Rape End Aegis

This is a regular nukige which is entirely made up of rape content, and when I mean rape content I mean gargantuan amounts. This is in the same special genre of games that clockup pushes out which have extremely intriguing scenarios surrounding hyper fetish content, it's completely normal to not engage with this type of media but there's definitely a lot of creativity to come up with scenarios that outrape each other

I think what sets DEA apart from clockup titles is that clockup actually engages a lot with scat and gore content while DEA is mainly focused on rape, but it doubles the stress of reading it by attaching humiliation to it, all the content up to End 1 has the central theme of absolute embarrassment, you see the MC's vanity and self-righteousness completely collapse one rape after another, being reduced to a literal human semen toilet

Anyways, my honest thoughts are End 1 is extremely self indulgent to read and I found everything related to the forced impregnation to the "Grand One"/"Little One" plot extremely exhaustive, there's an entire part where Nana's boyfriend Satoru comes back and betrays her and it was the most lousily hamfisted thing ever, after the August attack reducing the MC's power and making her a designated cum dumpster was difficult to read not because it was disgusting but moreso because it was just yet another contrived scenario to completely destroy the MC's will, it felt like the writing was cyclic and it was the 26th time she was being reduced to a sex toy for the purposes of being gang raped (that's just what the VN is I can't really complain)

End 2 has 1/500th the rape (just 2 scenes) and deals with the politics of moon residents asking for independence and housing 1.2 million citizens on mars and it was fine, I'm glad it didn't stretch as disgustingly as End 1 did which I can't emphasis how much I hated reading End 1 so it was so much better to read about what was happening outside the Cathedral, it's probably the only optimistic piece of writing in the VN where the main cast survives and even though End 2 in it's entirety is anticlimactic it's still short and "sweet"

Pros!!! (HOW?)

+ Within it's own contrived rape scenario, the character writing for the MC is pretty interesting, they keep her tethered to her self-righteous attitude and keep the dial up and down just enough to not completely break her

+ The story is definitely very interesting with some decent reveals, although much of the contributions to the pacing are made by the absolute rape cage the Cathedral is but there's still general intrigue that keeps everything connected and gives the plot a sense of direction

+ The 3 main characters are extremely enjoyable and had not only distinct personalities but very well written chemistry

+ Illyusha

+ The fact that you can play soltaire in the extras menu on top of the fucking hentai CGs

That's all I have to say about Rape End Aegis, this is the type of content you engage with when you want to read something extremely taboo with very difficult to consume but interesting writing on the subject matter

Cancer of the Wild

A lot of my opinions aren't brand new or something that I haven't complained about earlier at great length, but I wanted to condense my thoughts into single post now that I've gone through the game

Pros:
(+) The shrines, even when I can whisk out the combat shrines, or the maze ones, or the ones that forced me to break my weapons or whatever, all of the shrines come together to bring an extra dimension to this game, I thought all of the gimmick tools were unique and the shrines really had some out of the box ways of making you use them,

(+) While on the topic of shrines, amongst the 60 I've done, I didn't need a guide for any of them, they've successfully made shrines that make logical sense even if you sometimes have to trial and error to figure out the exact system at play, and I really have to emphasis, some of these shrines with the extra mini-challenge for chests really DO an amaaaazing job, while others don't explore their mechanics in totality and just end as soon as they begin

(+) The story is nothing to write home about, but I think it works, anything that's more showing less telling is better and they don't exposition dump you genshin style where the text is literally bleeding out of the tiny text box

(+) On some occasions the game really has an interesting sense of cartoon-ism, oh you're destroyed a beast made out of bones? Well they can re-animate AND use each other's heads. You throw a bomb at a pig and the weapons knocks out of their hands, you can shock a horse and THEN find a way to tame it

(+) And finally and possibly the most underrated thing about the game, a layer of unpredictability, the game is filled with "aha" moments where you're like "will.....this work?" and then it does, I've solved countless of shrines where I was coming up with techniques on the fly to make my life easier and it was honestly astonishing how much creativity you can come up with

This is me scratching the boney frame of this game to dig out some positives, onto the negatives

Cons:
(-) The combat was designed by a team of developers who made it and then refused to let anyone playtest it, absolutely fucking cancer, the combat is at the level of atrociousness where it should be enshrined in the hall of fame for experience-ruining sections for games, the best thing you can do in the game is don't even hold up your shield to try to parry or dodge anything, go up to the enemy and spam normal attacks, or literally if you don't want to exhaust your weapons just throw bombs at them

(-) The OSTs are insanely fucking bad, I was running away from most combat encounters not only because they suck, but so that the fucking blood worm they unleased on my eardrums would stop burning up my ear canals, the composer took inspiration from pieces of rock falling down a mountain, and it's THE SAAAAAAAAAME IT DOESN'T CHANGE

(-) Open bodies of land that have nothing in it (believe it or not the game is actually pretty fucking short most of my time was actually spent going from A to B trying to unlock towers, hell if I even stopped doing that I'd have been done with the game in a week)

(-) Weapon breaking bad,
(-) Rain == slippery bad,
(-) "Grab this blue torch and go from A to B" bad,
(-) Horse kicks you off if you oversprint bad,
(-) Thunder shocks you if you equip a metallic weapon bad,
(-) Environmental hazards that require specific gear bad (they do this on 3 separate occasions, heat, fire and snow, all of them different variations of cancer)

These are mechanics that you're constantly dealing with and they put a damper on your experience insanely fast, the first time rain hit me outside the fish area I was like "oh.....so it's THAT kind of game", for the sake of pseudo-realism it creates embarrassing hurdles to simple tasks whose only way of completion is at the risk of being annoyed as opposed to being challenged,

Yes, these hurdles don't make the game meaningfully challenging, they make it ANNOYING

(-) Lack of direction splits two ways, for shrines and for the overworld,

Shrines:

I've talked about this at length but I can't emphasis how important having invisible direction is, some of the shrines are straight up "hit ball so it goes in hole" and it's as if they forgot that weapons break in 2 seconds in this godforsaken game, just put an invisible funnel or fix the shooting direction so that the player can go through the process more easily, why in god's earth are the puzzles designed so that you KNOW the solution but it takes FOREVER to solve, when in reality it should be the other way around, you should know the solution and the puzzle should solve immediately,

Other times the shrines NEEDS you to use arrows while it provides you with none, all of these are fixable issues if the game just GAVE YOU WHAT YOU NEED, don't make me go hunt for materials for trials,

Gyroscope puzzles are a better case for "how the fuck did they not add invisible walls or helpful direction to make this easier?" and they just didn't they didn't really give a fuck, on one hand there's 60 ways to solve a puzzle on the other executing the puzzle in it's intended format is a pain in the ass

Overworld:

The game teaches you about combat at specific parts of the game that you can entirely miss, this is also why I think the game's idea of freedom of choice is a veneer of bullshit, it fucks with the game's OWN interests, on some occasions you need to talk to a specific NPC so that ANOTHER specific NPC can pop up and sell you a bra and panty so you can enter le woman village,

(-) Bosses:

Thunderblight was cancer because the combat is cancer others were gimmicky and I don't really give a fuck about them, Ganon LOOKED really cool though, props to them for making him look all mushy and gross, very Silent Hill 5 final boss of them

Closing thoughts:

BOTW is a game where every critique you have for the game is at something that was designed with pure intention, none of this is an oversight by the developers, whether come rain or lightning, the game speaks to it's roots and builds on it's own archaic design

This is a PS1 game masking itself as a modern game, all of these elements you can find dating back to that era, even the beloved gliding of the game which brings ease of access you can find as a core mechanic in spyro the dragon (not to say gliding is some copyright design)

BOTW at it's core has all the right things to make it playable and interesting, but it's downfall is the inclusion of elements that exist only to beat and extend otherwise straightforward tasks,

Something as easy as climbing a pile of rocks is only an activity that could be made tedious and annoying in a game like BOTW, which perfectly summarizes why I did not like it at the end of the day

Cancer.

Fun read, was so engrossed I read it all in a day,

The actual END of the VN is pretty ass but everything before that is really fun,

Centers around Sakura but Rin fans got enjoyment out of it too (thank god she isn't inactive or has just minor amount of usefulness my god), rape was a bit goofy infact so were the h-scenes........at least I got a laugh out of them

Good

So bad its genre defining

The game is fundamentally broken, hitboxes are janky, none of the places are designed with a proper thought, adp is suddenly a fucking stat because why the fuck not, parries are worse idk how they fucked that up, all the bosses (most of which are like knight + sword or XYZ + sword) with either cheap movesets with bad i-frames or just bad design

Game is also genuinely ugly and I don't know why it departed from it's original intention of being dark which would genuinely fix it's washed out textures that make my blood boil

No compliments, not just a bad souls game, a bad game

Also I will never not find it funny that Drangleic Castle has a fucking poison room bro why in the fuck is that there? For the queen? Stupid

I liked some of the OSTs though