As much a work of love as it is one of complete insanity. The most incredible thing about these games is that they exist. If I told you about it, you wouldn't believe it. If I showed it to you, you still wouldn't believe it. If I explained it to you, you'd think I was crazy.

And then you play through it.

Norse epics, mid-seventies pseudohistory and four thousand year old Sumerian myths reimagined as increasingly elaborate puzzles. Deadly traps and mysterious riddles that aren't pulling your leg or punishing you arbitrarily, you just didn't pay enough attention, because you have grown used to not having to pay attention, it's just a video game, right? But it's not just a video game. It is a trial. A test of your worth. The penitent man will pass. The penitent man will pass. The penitent man will pass.

It exists. Somehow, it exists. These are the greatest games ever made. There is nothing else like it.

I usually think of myself as a very intelligent person with a natural talent for solving problems and the analytical chops to make these solutions work within a given framework, but Sequence Sorter had other ideas. Sometimes I tell myself I'll get it done one of these days, but the last time I gave it a go I fell one or two additional lines of space short of unclogging an unholy abomination that got about halfway through before it needed yet another ugly, unwieldy hack to keep going, and I think I never felt so crushed while playing a video game - elsewhere you might get a game over, but TIS-100 will defeat you.

The most disappointing game I have ever played. Bad performance, cheesy combat, inane story, and the protagonist looking like a submissive sex doll for absolutely no reason except to bring in thirsty teenagers is just the absolute lowest, creepiest marketing ploy I can possibly imagine. This is the kind of stuff those people who make blanket statements about how video games are stupid and degenerate point at when they want to dismiss the medium as a whole, and I hate it for making me agree with them even if just once.

"Oh, but it is so deep and complex". Yeah, if you're a horny teenager who never managed to stop fapping for long enough to read a book or watch a movie. "You're just being a sex-hating puritan!" No, Bayonetta is awesome, you can sexualize your characters as much as you want if you do it right. Bayonetta is also about a billion times more fun than this garbage. Go play Bayonetta instead.

Incredible clarity of design and a tasty meme. When you finish each "world" gratification comes in form of both the knowledge that you have conquered yet another devious set of puzzles and a little tune that vaguely reminds me of that youtube video of some nerd playing the Titanic theme on a recorder. Will constantly surprise you not only with how many ways there are to manipulate a sausage (hur hur hur) but also with how many ways there are to fail a level. Quick, infinite undo button allows you to experiment wildly on each level, which quickly teaches you that rapid-fire trial and error will just make you get it completely wrong a lot faster and haha no you really have to use your brain, good luck, this game is 100% idiot-proof.

This is the work of someone who understands not only why roguelikes are such a long-lasting genre but also why they've been mostly stuck in a niche for nearly forty years: by identifying what actually works and separating it from what is just tolerated by inertia, Golden Krone Hotel is all gameplay and no busywork. A bit like DCSS in how it doesn't want to bullshit the player or let the player bullshit it... if DCSS took place in a cozy little Romanian castle (read: spooky, poorly lit, broken windows, not really that little, vampires everywhere) instead of in a sprawling Australian underground dungeon.

As a vampire hunter turned vampire, or maybe a vampire turned vampire hunter, or possibly even a hunter vampire, you spend roughly half your time as a spell-casting, sword-swinging, revolver-shooting, lore-reading, human-looking, slowly regenerating BATTLEMAGE, and the other half as a slowly decaying monstrous bloodthirsty nightvision predator who probably can't sign his own name or even properly grasp a pen with those massive claws to begin with, and who also spontaneously combusts if exposed to the scorching sunlight of a gloomy Romanian afternoon; mind those broken windows and keep aware of the time of the day unless you want your vampiric self to develop instant atomic skin cancer. The Hotel has some very spacious rooms so I'd recommend just exploring the opposite side of the floor while the sun impersonates Auric Goldfinger's laser cannon.

Or, you know, just drink one of those Soul Elixirs that turn you back into a human. This is what the game is about, in the end; managing your time and abilities as both a spellcasting human and a faceshredding vampire. NPCs from the opposite faction will attack you, and different areas have different predominant populations; resources are generally limited just enough to be comfortable for a whole game as you alternate between forms, but to make it not really convenient to try to spend all the time as one of the two. All in all, an extremely solid game that knows exactly what it wants to do. It is rewarding on account of how differently the same character might play as human and vampire; not only the way you approach each fight changes, but you also need to reevaluate constantly whether you should really be in a particular room, floor or even branch of the castle around the time you transform.

While a lot of roguelikes both old and new take pride in their unstoppable feature creep and unwillingness to let players play the game, instead clobbering them with infinite menus and inventory screens and cooking recipes and fetch quests and all other kinds of bloat that just get in the way of the moment-to-moment gameplay that made the genre, it's refreshing to see a game that presents no more than a few novel core mechanics and builds a fair, balanced and distinctive experience out of it.

Started over a few times but never made it past the first couple hours of act 2; Larian basically doubled down on all the annoying things from the previous game (they trust their cliché-ridden writing waaaay too much, even if it isn't as incredibly dreadful this time around) while completely reworking the formerly innovative combat system into what is essentially a glorified dps race.

Still arguably worth it if your tolerance for generic overblown "chosen one" narratives is high; mine isn't, and when it's easier to find literal gods to talk to and be sent on yet another quest to save the world by than it is to find a pair of trousers for everyone in your party, you know that the developers have gone way too far up their own asses with the "divinity" theme.

The four stars are for the X360 port, which fixes the stupid infinite lives bug. Completely bonkers, barely plays like a traditional shmup past stage 3. Giant toy robot bosses feel more like boxing matches. God tier obnoxious eurodance trash soundtrack somehow still isn't loud enough to drown out the porn moans from the playable characters when a bullet flies too close. Final boss yells BOMBA a few dozen times in a row and literally (as in, literally literally) fills the entire screen with bullets, and that's not even near the top half of hardest things in this game. Will cause a lifetime phobia of snakes with lasers, in case you didn't have one before.

Only that madman Shinobu Yagawa could have created something like this - it flopped extremely hard and along with Muchi Muchi Pork! (another weird, if slightly less demented game) it probably cost him his career, but I get the feeling that he simply saw the writing on the wall for the genre and decided to go out with a bang.