I had virtually no interest in cars before playing this, but I wanted something with good graphics for my shiny new PS5 and heard the haptic feedback in this game was incredible. That all ended up being true, but GT7's hardcore (to me) adherence to realistic physics and tuning is primarily responsible for me getting into cars (guess who knows how to change their brake pads and oil now...). It took me about a year of playing a couple races every week or two to "beat" the single player mode. I think treating this very casually was the way to go. Binging it would have been tedious.

That being said, the constant nudging towards spending real money on this game feels terribly out of place. Requiring this game to be always-online in the first place is ridiculous. Too bad modern AAA trends have infected their way into this.

I hear the original score for the older games goes hard. I ended up turning the music off entirely. At least the PS5 has Spotify support.

Toes the line on being a bit bloated in terms of collectible/checklist-y stuff; but the sheer amount of polish this sustains, plus the improvements made on some of my issues with BotW (the divine beasts, mostly) make this a worth sequel to an already impressive game. Loved the new temples and the new abilities. Sky stuff is great, and feels like the fully-realized version of aesthetic ideas that have brewing at Nintendo for decades.

I just wish this was on the Switch 2 so I didn't have to sit through a cumulative 304 loading screens from entering and exiting every shrine.

Maybe it's because I did this before The Foundation, but the difficulty spike from the main game is really absurd in terms of the reaction time and avoidance of one-shots they're asking of the player here. I already maxed out my health and energy but still had to turn on immortality and one-hit kills for a couple encounters (and that awful final boss). Regardless, I liked the implementation of Alan Wake mechanics into Control's more interesting gameplay loop. In fact, I wish it went further and introduced the flashlight just for this section of the game. Seeing Alan Wake's lore recontextualized from the sterile viewpoint of the FBC makes me look forward to checking out Alan Wake 2 eventually.

Picked this back up after getting stuck before a wall of difficulty in Chapter 9. I heavily dislike grinding, so the fact that it feels like the pacing of the game has built-in sections where they expect you to grind up to 10 levels at a time (up to 5 hours of mindless gameplay) feels like straight-up padding. Which is a shame, because there's already so much quality here that there's no need to pad it out. This is my first Yakuza, so I have a feeling I'll like the original series a bit more if it avoids my primary qualms.

Incredibly tight action gameplay here. Overall an astronomical improvement from Alan Wake. Tonally interesting but the way aspects of the world were chosen to be revealed or kept obscure felt a little haphazard. I feel like with something like this, you need to either go full abstraction and surreality--a la Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach Trilogy or Twin Peaks: The Return (both obviously massive influences here)--or truly leave enough hints and easter egg hunting for internet sleuths to piece together a coherent timeline. I'm partial to the former method, and I think Remedy is leaning towards that direction as well. However, there wasn't enough pathos to get me to care to parse whatever allegorical elements were in fact present.

Kept giving me aha moments through to the final puzzles!

The cat and Jessie talk at you way too much especially with some cringy parts in the first half. I think the voice acting is this game's only flaw which is unfortunate since it feels so unnecessary. This kind of world building could have been communicated through text or even just the audio logs that you have to interact with to hear. I don't need someone talking at me every second of every level.

I do wish there were some extra postgame puzzles that got even more difficult, though. Wouldn't be upset if there was a free update or paid expansion in the future.

Incredible how much of the DNA of future games is present here. I think there's also a lot to be said about how this game is at once forward-looking in its minimalism and willingness to be meditative in its quiet; but also very old-school in its Megaman-esque "here's the 16 bosses and you'll have to kill each of them gauntlet-style".

While many of the specific colossi are really incredible--and I think the long journey the player embarks on before reaching each one is really great--more than a handful are just plain frustrating. I think the problem stems from colossi whose challenge revolves around baiting them to do a specific action at a specific location. The bull colossi sucked, but the one in the geyser arena was an especially terrible time.

Nonetheless, when this game's good its real good. I have no reference point with the original but I think the remake retains a lot of the tone that I've seen from gameplay online and the reputation this game's mood has.