Dark Souls 2 the black sheep of the souls family. While I completely agree with every critique made about this game, I still absolutely loved it. I'll admit the way the game punishes you for dying by permanently lowering your health until you use a humanity bothered me at first, half way through the game I had gotten used to it, and by the end when I went into Vendrick's memory with the 4 crowns and was able to permanently stop that mechanic. I actually felt like I had accomplished something by finishing all of the DLC content. If the boss run backs hadn't been such hell in this game it would have been 5/5. The adaptability thing is pretty stupid as well, but I went into the game aware of it, so it never really made a difference to me.

This game was damn near perfect. Without going into full on reviews, I enjoyed parts of the original Alan Wake but didn't love it(I did love the story). But I LOVED Control. The pay off of this game combining the 2 worlds together was done so well, nothing felt shoe horned in at all, the world of Control plays a big part of the story in Alan Wake 2, but you could also know nothing about Control and understand what's going on still. It works so naturally. The atmosphere was on point, with the dark and dinginess of the whole world, that somehow looked beautiful at dusk with the sun shining through the trees, and the dark and nightmare like world of the dark place. The gameplay was great as well, as I said I didn't love the first Alan Wake that was mostly because of it's gameplay. But Alan Wake 2 nailed the survival horror genre, with actual creepiness/good jump scares, a great atmospheric world that made me want to explore the world to find all the great collectables(thankfully you don't need 100% of everything to get all the achievements, I'm looking at you words of power), good combat(except those stupid guys that speed all over the place, screw those guys), and cool different ways of breaking down the story. With Saga and her mindplace(which was also extremely well done), and Alan with his writers room. The story telling of this game was also on another level, I loved the dual story it told, where you can switch back and forth between Saga and Alan. With great great implementation of live action. Can the game get kind of silly, or self aware at times? Absolutely, and for me that added so much more to it, it was done so well, it all felt natural to the game and to the story. Questions were answered, answers were questioned. Where do we go from here? No idea, but I can't wait to find out.