When I previously reviewed the original RE4, I said that game aged perfectly well for a game from that era. I was certainly someone who believed a remake was totally unnecessary, but I guess I was wrong.
The previous remakes were great. RE3 obviously being the weakest for the amount of things that had been removed, but RE2 left a lot behind too. It just did it a lot better. This game though, left almost nothing behind. Some of the sillier stuff was taken out, as were the QTEs and I'm glad for that, so what we have left is a raw revisit to a classic, with some horror elements that were completely absent in the first version amped up to create probably the best game in the overall franchise.

I did play through Separate Ways too, a mode that in the original game felt completely disposable and utilised poorly. This time around it delivers on the promise of Ada's parallel journey through the game. It's got some unique stuff too. It was relentless though, bringing back old foes and ramping up the difficulty to an absurd degree so it wasn't a breezy adventure.

I knew I'd love this game, but it was another case of being forced to play it through it leaving Game Pass. Sometimes it's the best push, because it was the kind of game that I started and couldn't put down after. Coming in with the pre-established Outer Wilds love, and a love of murder mysteries, breaking the whole thing down and solving the mystery was a ton of fun. I got all the endings and it didn't take as many cycles as Outer Wilds, but I know if I put the effort in, I could get all those achievements easily. Perhaps further down the line when I've forgotten most of it.

I'm not a long time racing game player, and this review is very much about a beginners experience with the story mode. It's more likely I'll review Project Cars for a proper racing sim experience.

It works! Honestly, it teaches you how to play the game while also being entertaining. There was a mission early on in the story where it just tasks you with overtaking 2 or 3 cars and it's freaking daunting. Weirdly, one you overcome that and learn how to do it (because it won't progress the story if you don't) the rest of the story mode becomes a bunch of pretty easy victories. I did enjoy the story too. Devon Butler is a detestable dude, but that's a good thing in a rival. If this game hadn't been delisted, I think it'd be the perfect starting point for the current influx of new F1 fans to jump onto.

Finishing my odyssey throughout a post fallout Russia, I busted my way through Exodus. It was a lot longer with a lot more going on. Some "open world" sections, though I'm hesitant to call it a full open world game when only parts of it are set in large areas. It seems more of a lure than anything else. Those sections were fine, but it is ultimately a linear game where you ride on a train with the rangers from the first two games (plus an extra DLC chapter with the American one), but it didn't suffer the same advancement issues the first one did.

If I had to review the whole series as one, I'd say they wanted to emulate Half Life, and got some of the way there. In the end, it made me want to read the books, which I have yet to do, but that's always a good sign. They ain't bad, and they ain't incredible, but I think we need more games based on books, because they always end up giving us worthwhile experiences.

This is somewhat a return to this game, as I gave up my initial playthrough on PS4 because I could not find my way around. both this and the first have an issue with progress being gated by an inability to parse information in the level design, though I did notice this time around that there were arrows to help you along the way. The story content was a lot more heavier this time, with other characters taking up a lot of the screen time. For a game that seemed at the time of release to be a marked improvement on the previous installment, I really found little difference beyond the benefit of time and some criticism of the previous game affecting development of this one.

After Elden Ring I clearly needed to detox, so I played the follow up to a game I previously loved. Her Story. It ended up taking the basic loop of that game and got more ambitious. The thing about Her Story was that it was interpretive, which was mostly fascinating within the short space of time that the game afforded you. I'm not sure if having a dedicated ending for the thread you chose to follow was the answer here. It tends to put a strange capstone on even more uncertainty. Either way, it continues to be interesting and we'll talk about a more definitive advancement of that formula that has more definitive answers to go along with it when I review Immortality.

Unsurprisingly, the guy who wrote a whole book about his first playthrough of Dark Souls loved Elden Ring. There's many many things I could say about this and all the other From games and how my relationship with games has grown with them over the years, but for now I'll say there are few games that have me scrape every inch clean, and this colossal combination of basically 4 whole games captured my heart enough to start a new playthrough 100 hours in on a separate platform and inexplicably find new things in an area I thought I had done everything in.

I've written a couple short reviews of Genshin up to the end of the Inazuma campaign(technically finished two times over). I had a great time with that campaign specifically and haven't quite committed to the following two yet, but any time I return to this game, I am surprised and awed by what they manage to do and advance an already solid formula in weird and wondrous ways. I may return to discuss this again, but for now, I spend far too much time grinding instead of doing the stuff I actually like.