Signalis is a game that rewired my brain chemistry, for the better - kinda.

This is one of those titles that it's recommended to go in blind playing, try not to look up too much, just pick it up and go for it, and that's something I heartily recommend, so I won't go into too much detail here because of it.

Instead, I'll try to sing it's praises as best I can. I replayed this game twice, I plan on replaying it a third time soon, I got so enraptured in it's tangled web of a story I took notes, and even then watched video essays afterwards to compare. I love this game, I love it's style, I love it's gameplay, I love it's story and characters. The only thing I don't love is sometimes interacting with doors is a bit of bitch when I'm in a hurry. But that's okay, I can forgive it.

Play Signalis.

A stunning, beautiful journey that I already wish I could play again for the first time, Outer Wilds is incredible.

The whole time I felt like I was on an adventure, like no other game could make me feel like, I was truly the hero in a story revolving around me, not the player avatar, but myself. Once it was solved, it was over, I can't replay it, I know how to solve it, and that's what makes it so special. It's a brief capsule, a lone chapter of the adventure I had in a far off galaxy, I played an important role in a fantastical galaxy, and it was wonderful.

I do wish that perhaps there was more interactivity with the world outside of the Scout and the Translator, but it is an absolute feat what Mobius managed to accomplish in designing puzzles with what little tools they give the player.

There is a part of me that wishes I could explore the star system that homes the Outer Wilds Ventures crew forever, but a larger part of me is forever grateful that I was able to visit at all, even if it means I won't go back again.

Resident Evil is a classic, and I can fully see why. The ominous atmosphere, the horrifying enemies, the excellent sound design.

Beforehand I had only played the Resi 2 remake, a game I intend to revisit on my playthrough of the series, and expected a downgrade. However, aside from the tank controls occasionally causing Jill to go the wrong way (which only caused a Game Over once), this game is fantastic.

That being said it's not perfect, while the majority of the puzzles are great, and provide that sensation of "Aha! I know exactly what to do" when you get the last piece, towards the end there's a couple of "click-everything-on-everything-until-something-works" (Ah yes, the broken flamethrower is the key to this door). Plus, the inventory system seems largely arbitrary, and does little to effect the game outside of "Oh good, I have to trail all the way back to get this from the item box".

Still, it sets an incredible benchmark for the rest of the series, where it only moved strength to strength (despite a few hiccups down the line)

A short but incredibly fun experience, there's not many games out there like Katamari Damacy

It's interesting to consider that it's really in a league of it's own without many taking inspiration from it, the only thing really springing to mind currently being Donut County. What's also impressive is how little Katamari has aged, it's charming minimalist aesthetics and controls are just as solid as when they launched. Sure, Re-rolls HD-ification of it helps but in terms of visuals alone it's endlessly charming.

It's short, yes, able to be completed in about 4-5 hours if you just want to rush through, and only offers a handful of levels (albeit expanding each time you play), but it hits a sweet spot where it doesn't overstay it's welcome with the contents that it has. Don't get me wrong, I feel there's potential for a lot more (potential that most likely is explored in it's sequels), but I had a wonderful time with what's there.

The controls are good, the physics can get a little funky at times, but in a game where almost every asset can be absorbed into a cataclysmic snowball I think it can be excused for the few times the Katamari gets stuck or clips through the world.

Hi Fi Rush is a wonderful piece of art.

There's the time-old argument as to what's the most important thing in a video game, is it the graphics? The performance? The gameplay? The truth is, it's the experience. Experience is king. It's a combination of all these parts to make the player the star of the show and make them know it. Hi-Fi Rush pushes you under the spot light in the absolute best way possible.

Maybe I'm biased, "rhythm hack-n-slash with comic graphics and a goofy cast" feels as if it was made for me personally, but this game is just so incredibly well executed that I can't help but want to recommend it to everyone. The gameplay, the music, the cast, the writing, the levels, everything is just immaculate.

My only major gripe is that sometimes during the fights it can get a little too crowded, and there's maybe too many spinning plated without sufficient warning of oncoming attacks/low health. But ultimately its a gripe I got used to with time.

No other game has made me grin ear-to-ear like an idiot while a boss kicks the shit out of me, purely because I'm wrapped up in the spectacle of it. I so desperately hope that this isn't the last we see of Chai and the gang.

In Yakuza 4 I feel like I never got to spend enough time with the characters individually, whereas here I am spending far, far more time with them. In the time it took me to complete Yakuza 3, 4, Spider-Man, and Miles Morales, I had only just got to the half-way point of Yakuza 5. Granted, I took part in the side-quests, not that they give you any grand reward but they are just fun.

However, even with this quintupling of content, I can't help but feel the story is underwhelming. The problem with stretching your story all across Japan is you need to have a damn good reason to pull it all together, and Y5 doesn't quite hit the mark.

In between downright frustrating characters in Haruka's story, a true stretch of connection in Shinada's and a villain whose objective is completely unclear ("I hate the rampant nepotism that the Yakuza Clans have been suffering from for so long. That's why I'm bringing my untrained son to lead the Omi Alliance!") Yakuza 5 fizzles out rather than comes together on an explosive finale.

Y4 has Kiryu, Akiyama, Saejima and Tanimura coming together atop the Millenium Tower for a climatic showdown with the main villains (and Daigo for some reason), Y5 ends with the characters splitting up for their own underwhelming boss fights.

It's always 50/50 in a game that starts as strangely as Control does. You hope there's a cohesive story under there and hope not to be dissapointed or underwhelmed by the end. Control does not let you down.

It throws you in at the deep end at the heart of this weird world; the Federal Bureau of Control, and let's you peel it back and discover it for yourself, very rarely does it spiral into tangents explaining what this world is about, by rather let's you discover it by osmosis. Spend long enough in the Bureau and you'll understand enough to know what's going on.

There's enough in the main plot to have you figure it out, but there's pages upon pages of flavour text and bonus missions for those who want to learn more. The gameplay is immensely satisfying and easy to get accustomed to, although it will always be endlessly frustrating being one shot by a grenade or flying object no matter how much health you upgrade Jesse with.

And the designs are fantastic. Each sector of the Bureau is incredibly distinct while still recognisibly being the OIdest House. And the characters as well, Trench, Darling, Emily, Amish, all of them kept the story immensely engaging, encouraging me to further unravel the mysteries of the Hiss.

It's honestly surprising that after nearly 20 years, Psychonauts doesn't have many copycats.

From a surface level, Psychonauts is a platforming adventure game, with elements of a collect-a-thon scattered here and there. But dive deeper and you'll find it has the heart of a Point-n-click adventure buried within, which is no surprise given the LucasArts lineage that developed this game.

In some areas it hasn't aged well, platforming can be janky (especially with Levitation) and most of the bosses are either painfully tedious or shockingly easy. But so much of it is a distinct and vibrant romp, from characters, levels, and gameplay design, it sticks out far above the rest.

I thought Yakuza 0 would stay at the top of the Yakuza series indefinitely, but Kiwami 2 has such a satisfying combat system, such a wealth of things to do, and such an incredibly intricate yet engaging story, while staying sufficiently cheesy where it needs to be. Ryuji Goda may be one of the best written villains in the series, towards the end you could be forgiven for rooting for him.

While it does have it's typical silly moments, it's also loaded with heart-felt scenes that make you connect with Kazuma Kiryu more than ever.

The one criticism is that the longer sub-stories (Majima Construction, Cabaret, bonding with Haruka), don't quite reward you in the way 0 does in providing the Dragon of Dojima fighting style, making them not really worth it unless you enjoy that sort of thing.

An impeccable story trapped in a modern open world game.

Zero Dawn hooks you on it's main story from the get go, the mystery of Aloy's heritage has intricate twists and turns that culminate in a beautiful story about the persistence of human nature, and how simply the care of one person can take so many so far. I wish that I could gush about the rest of this game like I could the narrative, but it suffers from so many problems that can be found in tons of other modern open world games that, toward the end, I just wanted to play the main story and ignored most everything else.

First off, the world itself. It's beautiful, the environment team did a spectacular job of bringing the landscapes to life, it is a crying shame that the design doesn't encourage exploration whatsoever. EVERY LITTLE THING has a big, obnoxious marker on it that you can't turn off, which meant most of the time I wasn't paying much attention to the world around me and instead just kept following markers. Which is infuriating, because the world is BEGGING to be explored, and yet the mood only took me once or twice.

Case in point, there's a part in the story where you're meant to rendezvous with a contact, you find them dead, and they have drawn a map in their blood to where you need to go, in their dying moments. "Oh cool!" I thought, expectations suddenly rising "A puzzle! I need to decipher the map and figure out where to-" and then the cutscene ended, and a big, obnoxious marker popped up on screen, always there, always demanding my attention, always telling me where to go.

Now, this isn't entirely Zero Dawn's fault, these quest markers are a plague on the modern AAA gaming space, but what frustrates me is Horizon is SO CLOSE to being such an incredible, perfect game but it so frequently succumbs to these dull design decisions that it doesn't stick the landing. Side quests are dull and result in "go here, scan thing, talk to person, fight machine" ad infinitum, so I just stopped doing them. Gathering resources in the world is pointless because most shops will just sell them to you and you amass currency so fast that you might as well just fast travel to a merchant rather than go out and gather the things you need.

With just a few changes to its core design, even optionally (no quest markers, limited merchant stock, harsher resource restrictions) then Horizon could really encourage you to explore its world and get engrossed in it. And you should! Fighting machines out in the wild is SO immensely fun, so much thought has been put into each enemy and taking on any of them feels so good, in between fluid, well designed enemies and Aloy's razor-sharp control.

Horizon Zero Dawn is worth your time for the story alone, but it could have been so, so much more.

Underwhelmingly mediocre, A Short Message decides to subvert your expectations by...meeting your expectations.

What made P.T. so engrossing and interesting was it's ability to keep you on your toes. It was one corridor, you could really only walk around and look at things with very bare minimum interactions. With so little, it managed to cement itself as a premium piece of psychological horror media, and it was merely a demo.

A Short Message doesn't pretend it's P.T., it's trying to be something else. The DNA of P.T. is there, it's a first person, graphically impressive short experience in the world of Silent Hill, and it has the protagonist stuck in a loop. It starts off with some interesting ideas, centred around the suicide of a young social media influencer, it taps into the toxic dynamic between young people and online engagement, craving status and the fragility of that vindication. But it's all very surface level, the game has nothing more interesting to say about it other than "Social Media Bad. Bullies Also Bad."

It instead pivots toward how the protagonist was implicit in her death somehow (because of course she is, why else would she be in a Silent Hill game) and the traumas that led her here. Which, again, wouldn't be so bad if it all wasn't incredibly surface-level. Nothing new or interesting is said here, just when you think you're about to have twist thrust upon you the game goes in the direction you'd expect it to go.

Match this with some truly awful chase sequences and you find yourself with a really middling experience. It's graphically impressive, and at times the Villa can feel really unsettling, but it never really sticks the landing. Given how long audiences have been waiting for Silent Hill to make its triumphant return, it feels like a magician putting on a grand spectacle for their buildup for about 20 minutes before pulling a rabbit out of a hat; sure, it's impressive, but we've seen it before, and did you really need all that razzle dazzle just for that?

What a truly wonderful game Pentiment is.

It's nice to see companies like Obsidian willing to hedge their bets on a game so truly niche, what other companies would look at as something "difficult to market". Sure, it has Josh Sawyer at the helm, which allows people to claim it's "by the mind behind Fallout: New Vegas", but even still its truly inspiring to see something like this come out from a big studio.

And what a fine choice they made, Pentiment is a deeply intricate, well written narrative adventure that made me regret not paying more attention in GCSE history. Its knowledge of 16th century Europe is fascinating, but if the pages upon pages worth of history on Monastic Scriptures don't hook you (which, frankly, it should) the story it tells is one to behold.

It's a murder mystery, that tells an enthralling tale over three points in time, towards the end I had prepared myself for a vague sort of ending, where interpretation is left to the viewer, and yet I was pleasantly surprised by an exceptionally neat bow tied around the story, with a fantastic message about our place in history and the impact we have on our futures to boot.

The controls are a little janky, and the prose can get a little heavy, but this is more than made up for with its benchmark writing and stunning art.

Proof that just because something is revolutionary, doesn't mean it's good.

I'm 20 years late on this one, and maybe that's why I'm missing the appeal of the game because I don't have the nostalgia glasses on, but I really don't understand the hype that Shenmue gets.

Sure, the NPCs have routines, and sure you can talk with all of them in this immersive world. But when 99% of the NPCs regurgitate the same responses, refuse to talk to you, or just point you in the direction of the 1% you DO need to talk to, what is that adding to the game?

All of the ideas presented by Shenmue are good on paper, but executed poorly. Exploring the world to investigate a mystery? Good! Having the "investigation" be asking people the same questions ad infinitum until exposition happens? Not so good. A day night cycle with characters following a routine? Good! Locking players off from certain things until a certain time and not allowing them to advance time in hour-long loops? Not good. I mean for gods sake the whole game up until finding Charlie is a wild goose chase that leads nowhere until you get the Chinese letter!

I'll admit that Shenmue popularised a lot of really interesting mechanics, I won't say it introduced them when examples can be see elsewhere (see Mizzurna Falls doing a lot of what Shenmue did the year prior), but when they're presented like this it makes for a slog that doesn't want to show off the one feature the whole concept was based around; the fighting, which is actually really good!

I'm sure we haven't seen the last of Shenmue, and I will play the others, so I only hope that they learn to take these incredibly interesting ideas and really show what you can do with them, realism is all well and good but when you try to make a game too realistic, you end up losing what makes a video game fun.

Very rarely will I review a game that I haven't completed. I don't think it's fair. But I'm going to make an exception for Starfield.

This game is a testament to Bethesda's refusal to improve. A belief that they don't need to. Perhaps in a year where they've been forced to go toe-to-toe with a competent RPG in Baldur's Gate III (in fairness, not one I've played, but I think I could safely say it trumps Starfield in every capacity) they'll finally see that they can no longer rest on their laurels.

Starfield is by no means a game made incompetently, it's technically impressive, especially by Bethesda's standards. The gunplay is good, the game looks pretty, and the tech aspects are quite cool. But the story and RPG elements are severely lacking.

The game is vapid and empty, it's white noise, it's the video game equivalent of eating flour. I played for twenty hours and not once did I find anything that was remotely engaging. Nothing about the main story engaged me, the "mystery" of the artefacts was completely worthless because all it was just "weird floating rocks", at least until TEN HOURS IN when it was suddenly revealed they give force powers. That's right, in the time it takes to FULLY COMPLETE games that have FAR MORE INTERESTING THINGS TO SAY than Starfield, Starfield is only just getting round to revealing a core mechanic. And the side quests have nothing I was interested in, they just flooded by quest list as I was walking around, assuming that I was tuning in to every conversation happening around me from nameless NPCs.

Ultimately I think that's what it boils down to, Starfield ASSUMES I already care about everything that's happening in the world, and therefore does nothing to try and pull me in. It ASSUMES I care about the artefacts, so doesn't need to actually engage me in a mystery. It ASSUMES I want to join every faction, so doesn't actually tell me anything about these factions. It ASSUMES I'm going to get really invested in the base building mechanics, so never stops to tell me what the value in it is.

One day I will come back to this game, I will finish it, I will write an essay about it, there's plenty here to write about, I didn't even get started on the godforsaken ship combat. But for now, I'm not investing any time in it. For now all I can say is Bethesda need to start learning from their contemporaries and stop assuming they're the gold standard for western RPGs. I'm not sure they ever were.

I'm not one to call a game perfect, there's always something that could be improved to make it just right. But Rez is perfect.

It accomplishes what it set out to do. It's an art piece, an audio and visual spectacle, a skillful shooter. It was all of these things when it came out 20 years ago and Infinite adds more. It's somehow like this game was made for VR, before VR was anywhere near what it is today. And Area X is something to behold.

All of that aside, the core five areas of Rez are unforgettable, weaving you through a story that says so much while barely saying anything at all. All while providing a rhythmic on rails shooter that's all killer and no filler.

I could go on singing this games praises for eternity, and I'm sure I will, but it's best experienced yourself. Find some headphones, dim the lights, grab your controller.

Welcome to Synaesthesia.