The gameplay keeps me hooked, the multiplayer is a lot of fun with a lot of content, and I had a really good time playing all of that

But the story suffers immensely
Unlikeable characters, and the ones we do like just have nothing to do or say, the story is an absolute mess that just relies on the stupid fucking Transmedia narrative wants you to devote all time and money to get the full on story instead of just giving you a solid story and supplemental pieces of media to enhance the experience, not be the only way to experience it

shit sucks man

It's a really good co-op experience that is full of creative style and amazing gameplay that constantly outdoes itself, only mildly getting repetitive in the 11 hours of playtime I had

another big thing of It Takes Two is the story and how the gameplay (how i take it to be) directly ties into the story, and it really helps to push this story from a good one to a great one, in my opinion.

Great story of overcoming your own obstacles to realize what you want. is good

9/10

yeah it's good! i've played a little bit of dusk and it's great, and i really like this because it trades the intensity of the shooter for an intensity with it's puzzles. it's very fun to just try and figure it out, to go over and over again just trying new things and patterns. i didn't play any of the custom levels, but the fact that it gives you free reign to upload and design your own is awesome. i'm also glad that this just doesn't take itself seriously at all! not that i was afraid it would, but it very much just seems like a very tongue-in-cheek game, just done very well. very cool!

1/14/23 - 777 hours
This game really never ends.
I love the gameplay loop, and I love the lore, and I really do think Destiny's going in a much better direction than it has before, but god damn it's not going fast enough. I really want to be able to consistently play this, but it's a timesink and requires so much time and energy and so much god damn time.
and for so little, too. Each season has the same grinds and gameplay, followed by a seasonal event that we see every fucking year, and then a new exapansion where it keeps happening. There really needs to be change in how quests are, and how story missions are played. I can't believe it hasn't happened yet.

Again, though, this game is fucking fun too. I love the gunplay, and the mechanics, and just mindlessly playing and focusing up. It's awesome for that!
The stories have been getting continually better, same with the characters!
I just feel so weird about this game.
I can't recommend it to anyone because it requires so much and kinda delivers so little, imo.
But here i am, with over 700 hours. And it's only gonna go up.

I have a lot to say about this I think.

I think Hyper Light Drifter has some of the best art direction, sound design and gameplay loops in any game I've played (which is a low bar but still it was awesome). Everything is married together in a way that's very dynamic, very impactful, and I'm absolutely in love with the presentation of it.

The gameplay is hard to get right, but when you do get it right, oh my god it cuts like butter and it feels so god damn good. Easy to learn but hard to really master, and while it is punishing, I also think that it really really encourages you to think fast, move fast, and worry about what's right in front of you. It's very good!

Now, for the story. I... I'm conflicted just because I want to give this story praise for telling us everything without a single word being read, but it's also the biggest detractor I have with the game. It's hard to really know what's going on, why everything you do as the Drifter really matters, and what the point of it is in the end. I mean, it's pretty clear that you're trying to save people (no spoilers!) and you get that through the 1 or 3 slide conversations you get with various npc's around the map, but it's really hard to feel the scale because of how ambiguous the opening and closing cutscenes are. There's a large element of time skipping happening, there's a lot of very confusing, if not striking, imagery happening that doesn't make a lot of sense even after finish everything, and there's a lot that feels unanswered at the end.

...but. I also think that all these things are monumental in setting this game a part from everyone else. I know about the main dev's sort of allegorical story he put into the game that mirrors his own struggles with... disease (no spoilers! I'm trying!) and the story really does reflect this: it's bleak, it's hard, and it's not rewarding in the long run. There's a lot of imagery, a lot of emotional moments, that in the end sometimes feels like life, where you just kind of feel like you got over one hill to see the rest of the mountain before you. And I love it! We only see the Drifter's perspective in this world that's already so rich with lore and more to discover, and we play through this world through the Drifter's perspective, in which we're learning things with them! That aura of confusion stays with us throughout the game, broken by reminders of what's at stake at the end anytime we collect 4 modules: a shadowy character stabs us in vicious ways, the 4 main power sources (I think) activate, the gate opens and some unknown power is unleashed that eviscerates what's left of this world.

Do we know what this means? Only because we saw the very vague opening cutscene, but even then our knowledge is limited. All we know is that we have to fix things somehow, and we're running out of time.

It's a great game! I started to go for a completionist run and I'm only missing the three hardest achievements in the game! One day I'll finish those, but until then, I'm excited for what else Heart Machine has in store for us all.

it's not really anything more than just a fanfic given the visual novel treatment, which i guess is really cool for whoever wrote it but besides some nice moments of just flynn and carl alone time, goofin off (which i think is pretty well written, kinda feels like they just were ripped straight from Echo) once the shirt comes off it just devolves to generic furry porn
which i am here for, just wanna make that clear, i'm traaaaaaaaash lmao

i really wish there was more to it, honestly. something to, i guess, justify it's presence in the itch.io page for the Echo Project? I feel like there was potential to be able to explore Flynn's feelings of Carl, and Carl's feelings of trying to express some of his desires in this way. I still like it, the two cg pieces are good, but besides being some nice wish fulfillment for me there's not a lot going for this lmao
extra 1/2 star because flynn sucks at dark souls. just like me fr!

in my post-Echo clarity i played through Benefits and Route 65 just to destress from the day (much needed!) and while I still have a lot to say about Echo that will end up being an MLA styled essay, in the meantime I can digest and write about Route 65 a bit

I think this is a really, really nice piece of companion media for Echo. Sure, Route 65 gets a scene taken directly out of it and put into Echo (and it works so well!) but I honestly just wanted more of the Gang in a younger state. Being able to see them at an age where they were coming into their own skin and becoming the people we would know and love/hate in Echo, acting like kids while this heavy trauma just sits around, unspoken, was awesome! I think going through each sort of scenario of Chase coming out to his friends was really nice, and just sort of this precursor to how they are in Echo. Flynn, the smug asshole who secretly just wanted his friends to be happy by getting Leo and Chase together. Carl, who exposes some of his secrets to help make his best friend feel better about his awkward experience. TJ, who, despite his religious background and that (to be fair, usually correct) stigma of Christians not being accepting of gay people (as evidenced by his end text scene) tries his best to be their for Chase and to make him feel better. Jenna, who just wants to be there for her friend and have an ear lent to him despite the shit going on in her home. And Leo, who immediately rejoices because this friend he's cared about cares about him too.

This isn't to say each of their coming out scenes don't come with a negative quality because this is Echo, after all. Like I said, these scenes are indicative of how they will end up being in the main story.

I mean, personally (as a gay furry former-Mormon (yeah gotta flex those things about me) who was terrified of coming out), this little short was almost cathartic. And, I'll be honest, had me feeling wistful, and jealous.
I resonate with Chase here because the process of coming out was a very stressful one for me. It didn't happen all at once, and on accident (although my mom did have her fair share of seeing furry porn saved on my phone at the age of 18) (it was only once), but I remember agonizing about the prospect of what could happen for two fucking years after my older sister came out. Funny, how I was so stressed about being abandoned when my parents were more than fine with my sister, but I guess like in Chase's case, when things hit the fan and you're stressed and anxious, you don't think about these things. Especially as a teen!

But, I digress! The writing here is nice and reminiscent yet different of Echo's main story, because it's sort of this adolescent story and it feels like it! It clocks in at a very short hour-ish, and while I think all the short stories in the Echo anniversary update are far better than Route 65, I still think Route 65 is a nice, not required but beneficial companion story to Echo for those that just want more of this cast. Like me!

side note, I really liked the individual phone-screens at the end of the credits each time, just nice little pokes at the future of these characters! Jenna's definitely didn't spook me!
second side note, i feel like i'm forgetting more here, but I also think I just have said what I needed to say. I might edit this if I think of anything else to put here but whatever! Echo's awesome!

This is literally just the best cozy game, honestly. Fun characters and funny jokes, with just such a simple gameplay that doesn't overstay itself at all, where the heart is just in the simple message of taking the time to do things you care about, and spend it with the people you care about.
Growing up sucks! But it sucks less when you can forget that you're growing up.
And they beautifully illustrate this point by literally giving you a Baby Gator mode to "look at things from your younger perspective"
fucking excellent game!

foorontnite

it's fine, no build is legit the only reason i play this game and also friends. I've spent so much money on this game i'm ashamed to admit how much. the loop is the same everytime but there's very fun combos that you can just, get in every match and they're all different. idk, if i didn't have a group to play with i wouldn't play this (already i've only had like 3 actual sessions where i played for about a week each time throughout this season)

the character artists are the real winners here. Furries win again!

Assassin's Creed Odyssey. A game that's taken me two years to complete (I believe I started playing this right after Origins, which I finished in 2020 at some point) A game that I've actually beaten twice because once I finished my first playthrough (a completionist run, also known as a mistake), I realized that I remembered nothing of the story so I replayed the game again, this time as Kassandra (two birds with one stone, right?) and played through the story just so I could see if the story was actually bad. A game that I have, unfortunately, spent over 200 hours in and will be spending more time in, as I still have the expansions to complete and the rest of the achievements for those to complete. What do I think of it, after all this time? After about two and a half years of playing, after playing the game twice because the story was just that uneventful for me?

Well
it's fine, I guess.

There's a lot of interesting choices made in this game, on a writing perspective, on a design perspective, on a gameplay perspective, in every way possible. It's, weird. That's something that I thought about many, many times while playing this game over the last two and half years(!?!). For every nice little thing or big, cool choice that I saw and experienced in the game, there was another baffling, wacky choice that made me scratch my head repeatedly. It was literally just split down the middle.

The story moves back and forth between serious, cinematically directed cutscenes that are honestly fantastic and go exactly for this Greek Tragedy vibe that's present throughout the whole game, and then on a dime they'll turn into the back-and-forth Judd Apatow style dialogue with procedurally generated animations that really just look so goofy and weird. The voice acting ranges from very excellent to very, very poor, but throughout it all it just suffers from, what it seems, a lack of direction. It just feels like the actors just reading down their lines in a list, and then the game just pieces them together whenever it feels like for the sake of procedural generation. Which, also happened. With the very lackluster cutscenes that permeate the game at every possible moment, this makes for all of the stories, main and side, to feel extremely forgettable and just like fodder, which is exactly what 90% of the side quests are. It's, not great. And the story itself, involving the family of Kassandra and Alexios, is one that's rooted in wanting to be this tragedy, reminiscent of the whole Greek playwright climate around these times, and while it has it's moments, it also feels what I can describe best as MCU-level of dialogue when, it just feels so weird to hear it here. It doesn't help that the game, on my second playthrough in which I prioritized doing story missions and required side quests (as well as exploring the map and viewpoints which I used the fast travel extensively for, fuck the over-reliance on ship transportation!), still took me 45 hours to complete. 45 hours, and I'd estimate at least 10 of those hours to be exploration because the game just really needs you to walk around the whole of the Peloponnese. It's, not great, besides some exceptional story missions that are lost in the roughness that is the rest of the fetch-questy, open world design that plagues this game.

This directly contrasts with the combat, which look, I'm just gonna say it, it's not Assassin's Creed. Origins wasn't Assassin's Creed, Odyssey isn't Assassin's Creed, and I'm sure as hell that Valhalla isn't Assassin's creed, in the sole idea of what the first few (amazing!) games of the series had going for it in terms of what the gameplay was; pseudo-stealth games with a simple combat system that prioritized parkour and exploration more than anything. While these three newer and heavily-inspired-by-RPG games retain some of these elements, it feels so drastically different that it really shouldn't be called Assassin's Creed (and honestly, the story is so loosely connected to the Templar-vs-Assassin-vs-Isu conflict that it just feels tacked on at this point).
But.
Holy fuck is the combat fun, if not a bit button-mashy, but it feels really really good and fun to chain combos around, and there's a few different ways to play around with it, different weapon types that feel good to mess around with and figure out how best to be the most effective. With the more spongey enemies, they tend to feel unfair because you can really feel the Dark Souls inspiration in terms of the combat, because sometimes the enemies will be magnetized to you no matter WHAT even if you deflected their combos and stunned them already. But the combat, generally speaking, was the main draw to me playing the game because damn it was FUN.

Speaking of good combat, my least favorite part of Black Flag was finally rectified with Odyssey: the ship combat is fucking fun. They lose the realism in favor of speed and mobility and it makes it soooo much better and so much more fun to just engage in naval combat. Very good choice!

What else... idk, this just kinda falls weirdly down the middle to me, it's not a bad game but it's not a good game either, it just kinda is a game that exists. Feels like it was generated in the Ubisoft collective conscious and released, somehow.

edit 4/18/23 - Both DLC beaten as well as the Korfu quest. Final playtime that I'm counting is 256 hours 46 minutes. The DLC were so desperately better than the main game and not nearly as long.

This DLC just really has an issue with the choice system that Odyssey's main game implemented: mainly that, the writers don't know how to tell a good, compelling story (like that which is present in Legacy of the First Blade, imo) through the choice-based narrative of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. Not saying that they didn't tried, but the fact that most of the choices in First Blade don't have any affect on story outcomes (especially apparent with the controversial Episode 2 ending) really just kinda goes to show how unprepared Ubisoft is to push Assassin's Creed into new territory and commit to it.

Speaking of that Episode 2 ending, all I will say is that it's a really interseting story choice if it was
A) more built up into it, maybe throughout the main story (Pythagoras' ramblings don't count, he's an asshole and he's portrayed as such!) and
B) if Kassandra/Alexios (I played through this DLC as Kassandra) expressed more of a want to settle down.
If those elements were more apparent and more in place throughout the DLC and also the base game, this would have a much more deeper impact, especially with the choices that come afterwards.
However, that didn't happen, and also the game encourages player decision-making so those story beats fall remarkably and spectacularly flat. Nothing like saying the game doesn't actually care about you than just utterly disregarding your choice in the matter in the game that parades itself as you making your Odyssey. Jesus.

Besides that, the new Ancient menu is just a dumb rehash of the shitty Cultists kill menu - where half of the targets have no story beats and you just have to fetch things to find clues to kill targets. Really boring stuff that's aided by the few good story quests and themes that are brought up. Introducing the Order as not a sort of power-hungry Templar force (Like how the Cult was kinda portrayed as) but instead as a group that genuinely and utterly believes in peace through order, for the Greater Good, and hunting these Tainted Ones is legitamately such a fresh way to re-introduce the concepts we know and love/hate throughout the series. Good stuff there!

Overall, just kinda average DLC that is benefited by a lack of bloated quests (save for Episode 1, but the rest are good), a much more focused and stronger directed story, and really cool themes that play off ideas that are introduced in later games, even if I think those themes fall very flat by the time Episode 3 rolls around. Wish episode 3 had a longer sort of epilogue! and more regarding how Kassandra kinda deals with the end cutscene.

I will say also, the cutscene at the very end that shows of Aya very proudly made me say audibly "Fuck You" because c'mon Ubisoft, don't pretend like you weren't the ones pushing back against Aya as the main character because, in your own words, "Women don't sell!" Fuck you, Ubisoft.

it's been a month and a half after finishing this and i never wrote anything down here, mostly because i've been idly ruminating over this for the last 6 weeks
i joked with my boyfriend about writing an Echo Essay because this game really affected me, it hit very close to home and was, all at once, a stressful, anxiety-inducing, cathartic and overwhelmingly relieving piece of media that is going to stay with me for the foreseeable future, if not the rest of my life.
Look, if a fucking furry visual novel can make you rethink aspects of your life and your aspirations, you're gonna be thinking about it forever lol

The Echo Essay might come around on a replay of this, but for now I'm good with just saying this: this shit is good.

Just wanted to log something here since I'm kind of in a lull of playing several different games at once lol

Cities: Skylines is weird to me, because my desire to play it comes in waves, and when I get sucked in it becomes my ultimate cozy game, so much so that I forget all the bad things that comes with it (Fix your traffic systems!!! Please!!!) just because it's so god damn fun. Being able to just conjure cities and be completely sucked in to your own world (In several voice calls I became "Supreme Leader Fausty", lover of grid-based cities and complicated highways) and just fucking around.

Then I get it out of my system for a few months and go back into it and the cycle repeats. Truly, the Skyrim of city sims.

sidenote: I don't own any of the DLC (I am not paying that much money for it lmao), so take this with any grain of salt, or don't lol