Short review for a very insubstantial experience. Complete lack of challenge or stress in the gameplay that I would say subverts the horror experience had any effort actually been made to make the game even remotely scary or suspenseful. Ostensibly pays homage to old survival horror titles despite being a facsimile of what they actually looked like while adopting the very worst of their gameplay loops.

Crow Country is entirely putting square pegs into square holes to unlock triangular pegs for triangular holes. Silent Hill and Resident Evil had this as well but they had the sense to force the player to absorb the tense atmosphere between those bits by forcing enemy combat with intense resource management via ammo count and healing items. The gameplay reinforced the atmosphere; not a deep thought but it eludes Crow Country.

The writing is completely off as well. It's all Reddit-tier quips and lighthearted asides as if the setting was Candyland. It's tonally inconsistent with the visuals and also ineffective at inspiring humor if one was to assume that's a worthy goal. Following all of that up with the reveal of a future that refused to change was a particularly intense whiplash. Unsatisfying.

The worst thing I can say about Crow Country is that it proves anyone can make a game. No matter how fundamentally you misunderstand the design of games you insist you like, you can make a game. No matter how bad of a writer you are, you can make a game. No matter how misguided you are in your mission statement, you too can make a game.

After experiencing another disappointment with Signalis a year or so ago I'm about ready to call the "Survival Horror w/PS1 inspired graphics" genre DOA. Get them out of here.

I thought it was called Crow County for 95% of my playthrough. Pretty good dithering work.

2/5

I think Animal Well is an example of a subgenre that fundamentally does not work in games: the overly esoteric puzzler largely cracked through community-effort. These games have existed before, though they're never been overly populous, but Animal Well is a particularly egregious example of the trend.

Other games of this ilk, Fez and Void Stranger come to mind, are conceivably solvable by oneself with a lot of trial and error. Often that's what these games come down to: a "How would I know to do that?" level of ridiculous solution. This blow is softened when the effort is outsourced to a community who can work together to try everything in a fraction of the time it would take one person. How much you feel like you'd enjoy being a part of this discovery process will vary, but something is undeniable here: It only happens once. If you miss the boat on the community puzzle solving then all that exists are the solutions published across countless websites. The way these games are intended to be played has a very rapid expiration date given how the internet works, but at least these other titles can conceivably be solo'd.

Animal Well does not share that trait. There is a very in-your-face puzzle that can only be solved by networking with at least 50 other people to compare notes about the unique item in your current save. The game explicitly leans into the idea that the secrets will be solved as team; the game explicitly asks you to turn to the internet to get through it.

I bought this game a few days after release and this puzzle had already been solved. There was nothing for me to do. And hey, once I am already forced to just look up a pre-existing solution, why not do it for other puzzles? They may also require outside assistance.

It's such a baffling design decision. Animal Well will spend the vast majority of its existence as an old game. The "gameplay" portion of this puzzle is already finished and will never exist again. It dings the experience solely to facilitate the short-lived fun of a few dozen people in some Discord. Incredibly short-sighted.

And this is why I think all of the games in this niche subgenre just do not work. They all share the same issue: the nature of setting their game in a physical environment is at odds with the effort required to work through esoteric puzzles. The cost of combing through areas for hidden compartments or niche interactions with forgotten items is much higher when travel time, platforming, and being put in danger are necessitated.
The motivation to try tapping the interact button three times on every bush sprite vanishes when I have to go through the spike platform zone.

There "game" portion of the computer game becomes busy work in the way of trial and error brute force puzzle solving. Better conveyance would solve this, but of course then the puzzles themselves wouldn't be needlessly secretive. To some, it's so much more interesting to have a secret series of collectables that require setting up your printer than it is to save 12 hours time by indicating their existence. To others, it's laborious.

Without focusing on these more involved puzzles, Animal Well is simply lacking. The platforming isn't fun despite some extra, hidden techniques hidden in the game's inventory. The aesthetic is both uninspired and severely misguided; artificial scanlines are not only ugly but at-odds with the need to pore over the finer details of the map. The base game content in what has been called the first two "layers" is too short to justify the purchase.

Buy Animal Well if you enjoy looking up solutions online to feel clever about the work others have already done. Buy Animal Well if you enjoy parking your RV at a campground rather than pitching a tent in anything resembling wilderness.

The glorious return of AA good-but-not-great. It's hard for that to sound like a sincere compliment, but I swear that Stellar Blade has the extremely endearing quality of playing like something you'd rent at a Blockbuster Video. It's too short, lacking in ambition, and structurally flawed, but the minute-to-minute experience is very pleasing.

A large reason why that is lies in the design of the game's combat. There's a focus on parrying attacks over tanking or dodging them that demands a constant focus from the player. Even minor encounters cannot be auto-piloted, and the need to always be "locked in" creates satisfaction when overcoming any obstacle.

After finishing some of the longer boss fights, I'd find myself out of breath from how much mental energy had been consumed paying strict attention to the boss's move set. It made the victories feel noteworthy even if the bosses themselves weren't so difficult.

It's intrinsically fun to engage with Stellar Blade's combat system, and because of that I can forgive the fact that the game is disappointingly easy. Any difficulty experienced in the game came from a variety of poorly designed "set pieces" that take place largely out of combat.

A key example would be one of the few turret sections in the game in which the player must run from and avoid rocket fire in an enclosed area. The projectiles cannot be blocked or parried, and they can unreliably be dodged, so the dominant strategy is just to dart from cover to cover. But the movement of the player character never felt precise enough for this to be a worthwhile exercise, and at several points I had to eat frustrating deaths that felt more-or-less random.

Other poorly designed areas that spiked the difficulty curve include most encounters with several basic enemies at a time. The combat system of Stellar Blade does very poorly in handling multiple enemy combatants at a time. The player can get stun locked and comboed out easily; the camera isn't very responsive in switching between targets; moves are often impossible to interrupt into a parry given an unexpected move from a second enemy that was off-screen. One often feels at odds with the game engine itself when trying to deal with multiple enemies at once.

The pace of the game is another glaring issue. The way the player accumulates upgrades and resources seems way too rushed in relation to the progression through the story. Paradoxically, several key skills for basic combat are for some reason locked through the first few hours of the game. It never feels like you are at where you're supposed to be. Either you're lacking in the ability to access a counter for a key type of attack or you have hundreds of thousands of dollars with which to buy everything you could ever need.

It's not only the pacing of player progression that is under-cooked but the pacing of the level progression as well. Stellar Blade includes two types of levels: linear corridors that largely indoors, lack a map, and are more tightly designed, and vast, wide open spaces with enemies more or less plopped out anywhere without much regard.

The open levels take so much time to thoroughly explore but do very little to move the game along. The linear levels are the opposite in both regards. The end result is hitting plateaus that stop the game and its story in their tracks after a period of smooth progress. I enjoyed both types of levels, as they succeed at offering different experiences, but more care should have been made in unifying them into a complete package.

Other flaws include the soundtrack, which was a complete miss for me. The music chosen to overlay much of the game was not only forgettable, but extremely jarring with the tone of the environment's design. In the abstract I can appreciate a bold stylistic decision but this one did not land in the slightest.

The voice acting is another issue. I generally like to play games in a language I both A. understand, and B. can expect good performances from. Imagine my disappointment, then, when I found out that the North American version of the game lacked a Japanese language option. It had a bevvy of other European languages, and the game's native Korean, but Japanese was left out. I chose English, and was quite disappointed to hear some of the worst voice acting of my life from all of the minor characters. The three main characters, luckily, were performed well. But every side quest begged me to skip the voiced readings of the dialogue. Shout out to the mechanic loli whose sister died; absolutely terrible work.

Given the discourse that surrounded this game's release, I'm going to give a straight comment on the character design: I enjoyed this game more due to Eve's sex appeal. I enjoyed this game more because great care was put into her design and the design of her optional outfits. Since the beginning of art as a concept human sexuality and sex appeal have been key to many works, and that remains true here. There is no reason to deny or downplay what this adds to the experience.

Is there a lot wrong with Stellar Blade? Yes! Of course. Hell, the logo does a better job spelling out Stettar Blade than anything else. Did I have a great time while playing it? Naturally. In a world of bland, bloated AAA releases and soulless games that live as a service, one has to appreciate a game with a vision that exists as art artists wanted to create. Warts and all I value Stellar Blade.

I'll probably rent it again in a few months to try a damage-less run over the weekend. Pick up some Nestle Crunch while I'm at it.

Having never played the first Dragon's Dogma, I was relatively surprised to see the buzz Dragon's Dogma 2 was receiving on social media up to and after its release. In addition to the normal marketing materials, users that had bought and played the game were almost uniformly glowing in their assessment of the title. Twitter was abound with clips of their exciting battles and exploits, and the phrase "Game of the Year" had been bandied about. Now, recency bias is a potent thing, but I was certainly intrigued by this reception. So, after making the conscious effort to temper my expectations, I bought the game and dove in.

There's a lot of elements to Dragon's Dogma 2 that impress. Chief among them is that the game has a complete and total commitment to immersion. Going through the quests, both side and main, demands an approach in which the player views them as events coherent with the world as if it was a real environment and not a complete work of artifice. The game leaves things up to the player's common sense to suss out, which is much more satisfying than endless prompts and quest markers that have become standard in open world games over the past couple of decades.

This is an attitude that permeates much of the game's design. Fast travel, while possible, is minimized in an effort to make players immerse themselves in the world. At times inconvenient mechanics such as encumbrance and the effort needed to make a safe campfire for resting are real concerns of would-be adventurers that other titles regularly choose to gloss over. Monsters aren't drones lurking in designated places doing nothing until activated by the player. Instead they are convincingly wild in the ways they show up unexpectedly in would-be "safe" areas such as towns, or they are much stronger and larger than the player could ever hope to be at the time of their chance encounter.

There's many more examples one could list, but when playing Dragon's Dogma 2 you feel like an adventurer in a fantasy world with all of the responsibilities that would entail. It's not always easy or glamorous, but that's why it's an adventure and not a theme park.

This approach to design is so respectable that it breaks my heart that the moment-to-moment gameplay of Dragon's Dogma 2 has been so utterly fumbled.

Combat is an integral part of the experience that no player could possibly hope to avoid, and yet it is so bland. Physical attacks carry no weight in their hits, magic barely registers as connecting, and monster health pools can be so large that encounters regularly feel like slogs. The pawns one can hire have the potential to carry the player even while below their level, thereby removing any feeling of contributing to a fight at all.

While problematic on its own, this flaw is doubly severe in how it compounds the issues Dragon's Dogma 2 already has. With players not having so many fast travel options, at least in the early game, they will be traveling on foot quite often. This, in turn, means they will be getting into many combat encounters. Exploration is thereby discouraged, as excursions out into the wild bring with them the drudgery of combat. In turn, viewing monsters as boring instead of threatening shatters the immersion the fast travel decision was supposed to promote in the first place.

This is not the only example of poor game design clashing with the mission statement of the game. Pawns, as a system, are a baffling choice to me. The developers want players to feel engrossed in their world, but the pawn system is one of the most grossly artificial I could conceive of. While there are in-universe explanations for their existence, the amount of player-made mommies I encountered with immersion breaking names scuttled that meager effort almost instantly.

It's not only the intrusion of other players' inclinations into my fantasy world that makes the pawn system a poor design choice. The adventuring party, as a concept, has been central to the RPG genre all the way back to early titles like the first Final Fantasy. The appeal of the party as a mechanic is two fold: In terms of gameplay, one can balance their approach with characters of different specializations. In terms of story, many players enjoy growing alongside and getting to know their certain characters over a game's runtime. The pawn system of Dragon's Dogma 2 executes the first premise decently enough, though it's not so necessary when the player can change their own class so easily, but it actively bungles the second.

With half of my party so blatantly being temporary, man-made golems instead of anything resembling a character it is so hard to accept the party as a legitimate, in-world construction. If I am constantly going to be reminded that most of the people on screen come from the world of XxDickSucker420xX, how in the world is a restricted amount of fast travel going to draw me into the world of the game?

And boy, one will be reminded of that often. The pawns in this game chatter incessantly. They chat about elements of mild import to the player, such as locations of items, and they also chat about absolutely nothing often to comedic effect. The former has its uses, though I still would prefer it toned down in frequency, but the latter is incredibly misguided. For party chatter to be interesting, the party needs to have personality. Pawns, by design, have no personality.

The artificiality of it all cannot be ignored. Even the name, pawn, drives home the point that these are beings with no humanity. So then, why is the game so insistent on contradicting that with attempts at endearment to the player?

The pawn dialogue highlights a separate issue: the writing. The outmoded form of English chosen for the game's dialogue is incredibly jarring. Other series of games and certainly other works from other mediums have certainly gone down this road before; "old English" is nothing new to people who have been around the block. But Dragon's Dogma 2 sticks out as uniquely weird in its phrasing. Rather than sounding natural the dialogue reads as a deliberate attempt at old English.

I'm not particularly interested in discussions of the accuracy of the words themselves. Art exists as a deliberate work by, and as such it is graded on the impressions of legitimacy, taste, and sense it leaves rather than its actual accuracy. Maybe people really did run around saying "yon chest", but in this game it comes across as ham-fisted.

Doubly jarring is the disconnect between this localization and the game's native Japanese. I played with English subtitles to a Japanese dub. I speak both languages. The dub had no attempt at using an archaic, period form of Japanese. To state the obvious, such a thing does exist and has been used for period pieces in the past. Localization discussions are simultaneously outside of my interest and above my pay grade, so all I'll say is that when a script constantly makes me incredulously cock an eyebrow, I am once again being drawn out of the game's world rather than the reverse.

There are other, smaller issues with Dragon's Dogma 2. The design of the monochromatic minimap is not at all a wise choice for dense areas such as towns; spell targeting is finicky at best; and the camera draws in too close during combat to properly see enemies. These, however, are not glaring flaws. No game is perfect, and most foibles are easily forgotten.

The reason I find Dragon's Dogma 2 to be so disappointing is that there is a clear indication of what the developers wanted to do with their game and how they wanted the player to experience it. The clashing of that intent with various mechanical decisions is a death knell, and a good example for others on how games must be coherent packages if they are to rise to the top of their field.

Deeply flawed yet eminently enjoyable.

Dark Cloud 2 is a game I've had an affinity for for quite a long time, and just recently I played it for the first time in 15 years. The amount of flaws in the game was staggering so I wanted to take moment to briefly recount them.

To start, the inventory system of the game is possibly one of the worst I've ever seen. The player collects so, so many items throughout the adventure in a variety of types. There's quest items, weapons, battle items, healing items, status items, crafting materials, upgrade materials, fishing materials, fish, etc. etc. All of these things co-mingle in the same inventory with no auto-arrangement options. Over the course of the game the inventory balloons to an unusable girth, and manually organizing things becomes a chore.

Crafting is such a fundamental mechanic of the game that a cumbersome inventory system is not only unforgivable (Spoiler alert: I end up forgiving this flaw) but mind-boggling in how the inventory made it out the door looking the way it does.

A second issue with the game is the implementation of the literal world-building mechanic relative to the first game. The Georamas were never too intricate in Dark Cloud 1 (DCX for the PlayStation fans) but they did go a bit further in the various requests of the citizens that the player had to keep in mind when arranging the cities of land. There was also that delightful totem pole puzzle in the desert area.

The city building in Dark Cloud 2, however, is pretty mindless. There's a reason for this: the amount of structures the player can build is largely uncapped. Let's look at an example:

In the volcanic area of the game there are a few buildings that need to be built a certain way. One needs to be elevated a few blocks in height, which entails committing materials to building those elevator blocks and then placing the house on top of it. So I did this, and when it came time to move a particular NPC into the village, I found that he needed a special house with a fence built around it.

In Dark Cloud 1, I'd have a conundrum here. I would need to construct more blocks around the house to allow room for the fence to also be built up a few stories high. However, in Dark Cloud 2, I can just build an entirely separate house on ground level, easily build a fence around it, and move the NPC into it with nobody occupying the higher-up structure.

By removing the cap on structures players can dedicate one house to each "building requirement", where before the very slight difficulty of the building sections came from balancing all of the requirements within the limited number of structures.

There are precisely two attempts to do something interesting with the building: One is a city that has to be built on four plateaus that rise and sink depending on the number of houses on them (???) and thus the player has to equally build on all to create a perfectly flat ground. The other is the final building section of the game that tasks the player with rebuilding a garden to the exact specifications laid out in a few portraits they can find in the nearby dungeon.

While these approach the more thoughtful usage of the building mechanics in the first game, neither is that mentally demanding nor engaging.

One is left thinking why they brought this mechanic back at all. Did Dark Cloud have that much star power that they needed to brand this as a sequel with ham-fisted legacy mechanics instead of just making a new game unburdened by what kids in Blockbuster perceived as "discount Zelda"?

Almost everything to do with the story of Dark Cloud 2 is another misfire. The voice acting ranges from mid to awful, and the awkward load times of the PlayStation 2 ensure that cutscenes never run smoothly. There are frequently awkward pauses as the next line of dialogue loads that produce unintended comedy as characters just stand around in otherwise dire situations.

A significant element of the story is time travel, and Dark Cloud 2 has some of the least thought-out time travel mechanics seen yet in games. There is no attempt to logically think through what time travel would mean in-world insofar as causality and logic. I'm fine engaging a game on its own level when it comes to these things rather than missing the point by nitpicking, but the way time travel is handled in this game is just so illogical that it can be difficult to accept at times for anyone who has engaged with the idea before in any other form.

The rest of the writing, too, is off. It's incredibly juvenile, which is of course fine were the game to be good for kids, but I the mechanics of Dark Cloud 2 are just one step above what most children would find approachable or even possible to engage with. The mismatch of the mechanical depth and the maturity of the writing produces some amount of cognitive dissonance.

And man are there just so many mechanics! At the base level there's world-building and weapon crafting, both fundamental to the completion of the game. But there is also photography, invention, monster recruitment, fishing, fish breeding, fish racing, golf (???), and robot customization. All of these exist in varying degrees of completion of depth, and none of them are particularly engaging. The dominant strategy of completing this game seems to lie in choosing just one of these, whichever you find the most fun, and forgetting all of the others exist.

And yet the core gameplay loop of this game is just so satisfying to me. Running through samey floors of dungeons, wiping out enemies, building up your weapons until they evolve (???) into another weapon, saving the nearby city until all of its inhabitants are happy, it's something I could do for hours. Despite all of the flaws listed above, I was incredibly disappointed when the game concluded after only 35 hours.

The Dark Cloud series will never win any awards nor be put on any best-of lists, but it is one whose gameplay resonates so completely with me as an individual. I love these games; I love playing them despite all of their warts. It may take a special kind of autism, but if you enjoy rote dungeon crawling, I recommend this game with my entire being.

It's probably easiest to describe the Infinite Wealth experience by describing my final 90 minutes of play.

The beginning of that block was spent running between every restaurant in town to order, literally, the entire menu on the off chance of catching one of the stupidest conversations conceivable between my party of characters whom I've grown quite attached to. Stupid jokes, everyone piss drunk and fucking up every enemy encounter we ran into, and the sheer absurdity of how much food I shoved down their throats on my quest to max out Kiryu's levels through any means necessary.

90 minutes later I experience the emotional nadir of my gaming career with the abject emotional sucker punch of the game's final musical sequence, an experience that had me in tears. Not to linger of how much of a loser I am, but it wasn't a misty-eyed sniffle so much as a head-in-hands bawling. The clarification is worth it to highlight the emotional capability of Yakuza 8, and for people who have played it, there's absolutely no mystery when it comes to the game's secret weapon.

Anyone who's played Yakuza 7 will sing the praises of its protagonist Kasuga. There's no surprises left to be found in this eighth installment; Kasuga is Kasuga is Kasuga. And what Kasuga is is a supernova of charisma. It's foolhardy to make a claim on the entirety of fiction across mediums, but contained to the realm of video games I feel pretty confident in singling out the writing of this character for excellence. Without going into a full character study, I'll say that the writers have found a successful mix of emotional depth and unwavering moral compass. The latter might imply a lack of growth or arc, but instead it's a constant string of challenges for Kasuga's character to shine through. Even if you know where it's going, it's never not exciting to see him keep on the righteous path despite all that goes on around him.

(This is my first parasocial relationship; how am I doing?)

It's the attachment to Kasuga that enables the emotional climax of the story. What, to me, initially seemed like an unrealistic act of forgiveness became the only logical course of events. Of course he resolved things this way, he's Kasuga. It's difficult to write about without spoiling things overtly, but it's a moment that will stay with me for a long time. One of my favorite scenes I've experienced in fiction.

Something I find fun to speculate is the complete opposite experience one could have while playing Yakuza 8. Infinite Wealth has two protagonists, of course, with the other being series idol Kiryu. I'm a secondary; I'm a late-comer Kasuga stan. For most fans Kiryu is the star of the show, and Infinite Wealth is a (backdoor?) tribute to the character and the series. A surprisingly large percentage of the content is dedicated to sending off Kiryu.

This includes references both overt and subtle to events and characters from all of the previous games in the series. Even random spinoffs like that survival horror zombie game (???) are paid homage. This is contextualized as Kiryu making peace with his life in light of his cancer diagnosis. I'd lying if I said it wasn't alienating for someone with no point of reference, but it's very easy to see that the game is not interested in catering to that group. Most of said content is optional, anyway. It's nice that fans have a chance to participate in a living funeral.

Kiryu has his own arc and spotlight within the game, including a scene immediately following the final boss that strikes me as particularly moving should one be familiar with the character. The notion that someone could have as strong of an emotional reaction as I did for a different character speaks to the quality of the game's writing.

I had been penning this review in my mind as I waddled along what was ultimately an 88 hour adventure. Until the story paid off at the end, I had envisioned most of this would have been written about the design of the open world.

Open world's in games are almost a joke these days. You look at your map, see thousands of icons that don't mean anything, climb a tower somewhere, and click fast travel buttons the vast majority of the time. Infinite Wealth has some of this nonsense, but it was the first time I had felt naturally encouraged to explore a world in a very long time.

Several of the side activities presented in the game are intrinsically fun to work through. Aloha Links, the friend making mechanic, simply asks you to press the dedicated Aloha button in the vicinity of certain people on the street. There's 200 potential friends and you bet your ass I found them all. There's a nice sound effect that plays when you form a link, Kasuga looks like an idiot as he mispronounces "aloha", and everyone on the street is having a good time. It's a pleasing gag that, when combined with watching a friendship meter fill until you make a certified buddy to cross off the checklist, never gets old. Take a taxi everywhere and you'll miss so, so many friends. It's just not done!

Other things you would miss include the photo rally that tasks you with snapping pictures of key locations for extremely minor rewards. But of course the reward is in the fun of the treasure hunt itself, as the items you need to photograph are only relayed to you in the form of small, context devoid image that forces you to suss out where it could be. It's very satisfying to be wandering around only to get a sense of déjà vu from some landmark and realizing it's on your list of to-shoot photos.


I had a lot of fun with these two mechanics, but they are admittedly minor. What wasn't minor was the effect they have on your play through. You walk around more, you fight more enemies, you get more resources, you upgrade your weapons more, you happen across more opportunities to train your team of Pokemon (Yeah), you take some time to do side quests, you find the hidden conversations your party could have only by walking by certain locations, your relationship level rises, you work through the party members' individual quests, and I could go on.

The point is that be tacitly encouraging players to actually inhabit the game world instead of warping around it constantly, the game naturally and smoothly delivers a drip-feed of its systems. In other games grinding of some sort would be necessary. Grind for resources, grind for experience points, grind for opportunities to raise your bond with your party. Infinite Wealth incentivizes and trusts the player the find perfect gameplay rhythm that the developers had built into it. It's very impressive.

When you have excellent, well-considered gameplay alongside a story capable of genuine emotional connection. That's a winner. Yakuza 8 is incredible across the board, and the only thing left for me now is the crushing void felt in its absence.

Fuck me for playing this one, I guess. The bulk of the game is better than my two star rating would imply, but the combination of a momentum halting, seemingly endless exposition dump at the climax of the story combined with sudden-onset-stupid-Japanese-wordplay made this one a chore to finish. I was just happy by the time it was finally over.

There's various plot twists, all of them dumb, but if taken at face value and contained to just the first three routes, Raging Loop is not the worst game in the world.

Put that on the box, please.

Probably the most ludonarratively cohesive game I’ve ever played. It’s inspiring how Moon loudly broadcasts its mechanics and themes and then sticks to them with such commitment.

Mechanically Moon is all about time. The game works around two concurrently running clocks: the limited time your character has left before passing out and triggering a game over, and the continuous passage of time as the game’s seven day week and the routines of the various NPCs loop. Let’s start by discussing the former.
Moon exists between periods of sleep, not unlike our own lives. Everything the player can accomplish within their time awake is saved and catalogued upon resting, but should one run out of gusto before reaching their bed, the game is over and the day’s progress is wiped. Especially early on when energy is in short supply this means you will be racing back to bed to bank your progress even after accomplishing the most minor of tasks.

The amount of time one can spend without resting is increased by leveling up, which is done by accumulating “love”, which in turn is done by doing things to help out the world’s denizens whether they be human or animal. It’s an incredibly wholesome arrangement; something as simple as listening to someone’s personal problems can get you a small amount of love. Other, larger acts, such as bringing together two lovebirds, accordingly give the player more love. It’s a game all about increasing the kindness in the world. By doing so you get stronger and that is channeled into more time to spend helping people.

What’s satisfying is how time is manifested in the game. Very few things pause the clock, so if someone needs you to wait for them, you will indeed be waiting for real world minutes. If a character needs you to show up on consecutive Sundays, you’ll spend the days between with the commitment hanging over your head. This is all to say that being kind, showing love, is not trivial, and nor should it be. If you want someone to love you then you’ll need to invest mental bandwidth into thinking of and remembering them. Don’t worry, they’ll reciprocate the gesture.

It would be easy to shortcut several elements of Moon in favor of a quality of life improvement, but a notion as selfish of QOL runs perpendicular to love as a concept. Moon asks you to engage in selflessness, and every facet of the design pushes towards that goal, even when it runs up against the notion of what is “fun”.

More openly Moon seems to be about subverting violent, “typical” RPGs of the time, what with its marauding knight-in-shining-armor “Hero” running amok across the world and massacring everything in the name of Exp, but I don’t think such a surface level, cynical reading is accurate.

No, Moon is more of a statement against thoughtlessness. Every puzzle in the game, every task there for you to conquer, is easily solved through just observing people, their routines, and the environment. It’s not a difficult game, the puzzles aren’t challenging, but they sure do become impossible brain teasers if the game is played with a self-centered approach that blinds the player to detail. If you just want to get through the game and “win”, the self-centered hero, you will surely struggle.

The second of the game’s clocks, the looping week, is where the most detail is to be gleaned. While a bit of a hackneyed idea now, Moon’s NPCs all have set schedules in accordance with the hour, day of the week, and events of the game, and this grants it a lot of depth. If you want to investigate a character, your best bet is to check on them on each of the game’s seven days. What do they do each night? Who are their friends and when do those characters tend to meet? If you want to help someone you’ll need to get to know them, even if doing so precludes your convenience or your ability to dote on others in parallel.

What’s brilliant is that one’s ability to explore this aspect of the game thoroughly waxes as the strategic depth of the other time mechanic wanes. There comes a point while leveling up where the main character’s remaining energy ceases to be a realistic concern. This could have become an incredible bore had Moon shown its hand too early, but instead it seamlessly transitions into a fascinating game of people watching that just wasn’t possible earlier in the game.

As such Moon works on a few levels. It’s time management and scheduling for some percentage of its run time, and a narratively focused puzzle solver for the test.

Other elements of Moon are worthy of praise. The soundtrack is great, the pre-rendered backgrounds are entrancing, and the story itself is relatively interesting. But this is a game, first and foremost, and games should always convey themselves through their mechanical systems. Moon is exemplary here, and deserves a visit for that quality alone.

Incredible game!

I usually write longer reviews but there's really only one thing I want to hone in on when it comes to Super Mario Role Playing Game: the addition of a combo counter that persists through encounters is a stroke of genius. This one element single-handedly takes an otherwise bare bones and somewhat dull combat engine bereft of challenge and makes it engaging for the player throughout the entirety of the experience.

Sometimes it's good to succumb to monkey brain and bask in the glory of "number go up". It's an entirely optional incentive the player has no tangible reason to care about, but I'm not exaggerating when I say it made the experience for me. Having never played the original, I would not be surprised if I found that game boring. Not the remake, however.

There are other wins here, of course; the reframed cutscenes, the rerecorded music, and the graphical facelift all work to enhance the decidedly dated aesthetics of the original. Other elements that work as well now as they did in the SNES era, such as the chunky sound effects, are still present.

Most definitely the definitive edition of the game. I would know; it's the only one I've played.

Wonder is an interesting game because it’s good in ways that are new for the series while falling short in areas Mario is known to excel in.

I’d like to begin with what was the most surprising home run: the online, somewhat asynchronous, multiplayer. I had written it off as completely meaningless, but it consistently kept me engaged through to the end of the game. I’d really hate to evoke a certain title, but seeing other players along on their adventure and weaving in and out of their lives while occasionally offering support and messages was reminiscent of some game.

And it works really well for Mario! Someone’s standee marking the path to a secret exit, or a revive point placed before a tricky jump were two organic uses of a multiplayer system that might at first seem like a poor fit for a platformer. Being able to emote at other players and conquer courses alongside of them are less mechanically engaging but are extremely resonant if you’re a human being. I was conquering the game’s final hidden course alongside another player, and after seeing him respawn next to me a few times, we traded off waiting for one another as we conquered each section of the level. Overcoming that with a stranger whom I’d never see again was a novel moment of emotion I never got from another 2D Mario game. It wasn’t very deep, but it was unique in the series.

The older style of multiplayer is gone, and a loss of a feature is unilaterally a bad thing, but for solo players this system works incredibly well. If you haven’t used it I’d recommend replaying the game entirely with this feature.

Another, unfortunately, uncommon W for this game relative to its brethren is style. Wonder oozes style, and one can tell great efforts were taken so that every course presents something new. This comes out visually, but the mechanics of each level’s wonder fruit section are also incredibly inspired. Only one or twice was an idea revisited, which was great to see. Other Mario games simply lacked such mechanically diverse levels, especially in 2D.

However, this approach to level design isn’t without pitfalls. As each level needed its own unique selling point, there are fewer of them to go around. Instead of the usual eight fun worlds there are now only six.

But perhaps that’s for the better. Outside of the wonder fruit sections the platforming on offer is neither difficult nor particularly engaging barring the final level of the game. This is particularly strange for the series that made 2D platforming its bread and butter. Boss fights are also a simplistic bore.

No, Wonder is at its best when the basics of platforming are either stripped away completely or augmented with a mini-game-esque flair. In addition to the wonder fruit sections there are scores of mini-levels that ask players to go on scavenger hunts or do something else trivial as a break from the usual gameplay. All of these diversions are welcome, and while they don’t solve the difficulty problem, they are fun.

The implementation of new features is another typical strength of Mario, but the badge system in Wonder left a lot to be desired. I was hoping for them to be utilized in ways that necessitated picking the correct badge for a given level. Whether that be to finish the level or get all of the collectibles, I was expecting to need to use a variety of badges.

It’s worth noting that the game’s somewhat open structure would make necessitating a particular badge somewhat difficult in terms of level design, but multiple badges fill similar roles; expecting the player to have at least one to get an optional collectible would have been perfectly reasonable.

As it stands badges just don’t add much to the game. I kept the same badge equipped for the entirety of the game and was never at a loss on the road to 100%. Perhaps for the diehards the expert badges can fill in for the missing challenge, but self-regulation does not gel with difficulty as a rule.

A little more rapid fire now: Music? Not up to snuff. Voice acting? Oddly hit the mark; the characters all had personality in spades. Overall world design? Very well executed mix of SMW-style linearity with more modern, open spaces in which to hide secrets.

Wonder does a lot right, but the relative fumble of the basic platforming mechanics has me rethinking my affinity for this genre of game. It might be unfair to hold that against Wonder, but overall I still had a great time, so I won’t think too much about it.

By the way if you’re that Japanese Luigi who spent 20 minutes on the last level of the game with me, hmu.

Good lord. It's astounding to me that a game with the reputation that Pokemon Sword has managed to disappoint me. I could've sworn that I went in with eyes wide open; I'd play the game and have a good time despite the well-publicized flaws. After all, it's a pattern I have repeated to success a few times.

Pokemon Legends: Arceus was a game that everyone knew looked like dog shit from its announcement trailer. I bought it, and had an excellent time for several hundred hours on my road to 100%.

Pokemon Scarlet was (another) game that everyone knew looked like dog shit from its announcement trailer, and it was also one that was well understood to be complete and total jank. I also enjoyed that game for upwards of 100 hours.

So, as I sat bored one day, I figured "Why not but Pokemon Sword! I'm down for another hundred hour, janky adventure with subpar graphics." Of course, only the latter half of that statement ended up panning out.

First I'll describe the devil I knew. It's hard to be aware of Pokemon Sword without knowing its reputation for subpar graphics. Surely an odd thing to make a mainstay of the series, but god damn it let's let GameFreak cook. While this is most definitely a identify to have with this Pokemon title, it's almost redundant to take serious umbrage with it. The games are so consistently undercooked insofar as visuals that by this point you either accept it or you've moved on. It's a worthy talking point, but not a big contributor to my opinion of Pokemon Sword.

The flaws that only showed themselves over the course of my time with the game, however, were much more damning.

Part of the reason I enjoyed Legends Arceus and Scarlet so much was the sense of freedom and, to a lesser extent, adventure that permeated them. (You're probably enjoying a laugh at my expense right about now if you've played Pokemon Sword. Good beats.) Pokemon is a series that lends itself well to nonlinearity. The agency to seek out your favorite guys and build a team you connect with does a lot to enhance the experience; any amount of time you're forced to bond with the second-stringers is wasted.

Openness also gels with the games on a narrative level. Just about every one of these games is about a kid shoving out into the world to carve their own way. Having one's hand held and dragged through a linear series of events would be too dissonant with that idea. While it's easy to look at the latest games in the series and say that Pokemon has only just now reached that level of nonlinearity, the games have always had this down. Even in Pokemon Red one had a few junction points where the player could choose which boss encounter to pursue. You always had some amount of agency.

Pokemon Sword does its best to dispense with that idea entirely. There is always one (1) correct way to progress. Not only are there no other options, there are never any side routes for optional objectives or challenges. No, you simply are rushed through the main story until the game finally stops at some point post-credits with the message to "Go explore!" when there is no longer an incentive to do so.

Not that there would be much to explore, anyway. In addition to being a linear corridor, the world of Pokemon Sword is lacking in anything compelling to do or see. It's not even interconnected, as a few parts of it are cut off with only the loading screen of a train station linking them. The claustrophobia of the world design only exacerbates the death of the sense of adventure started by the game's linear progression.

And without an adventure to embark on, what is the reason to even play a Pokemon game? It's surely not the combat, which never even approaches a stress test demanding the player actually engage with it on a strategic level. It's also not the collectathon nature of a world with so many unique monsters; the absolutely glacial pace of any encounter discourages someone from catching 400 unique creatures.

I'm at a loss trying to answer that question. Why play this game? Why did I play this game? While I feel deflated now, it's nothing compared to how I felt when I finished the "post game content". Seeing my final play time fall shy of 30 hours was paradoxical in a way that inflicted psychic damage.


My time with Pokemon Sword was so insubstantial and mind numbing, and how dare it be this short??

In a month of playing Baldur's Gate, Armored Core 6, and whatever else, this MissingNo-core puzzler held my attention the most. It was brought to my attention by a post on /v/ that simply read "Puzzlekino or Voidslop?" and for whatever reason I bought it without investigating further.

I don't feel much of a desire to write an in-depth review here, so just know that the puzzle gameplay remains intriguing all the way through to the end, the game's score is fantastic, and the "more than meets the eye" subversive elements of the game are hidden well enough to not undercut themselves in a pitfall so many would-be-clever devs fall into. A game well worth playing.

Puzzlekino.

It's an almost unheard of experience for a game sequel to completely obsolete its predecessor. To drive this home, let's actually examine that claim.

Iterative sequels are the first to spring to mind when considering where this phenomena might happen, but they often come with a revolving door of features between every couple of releases that ensures some instances of the franchise will excel in different areas. Sometimes the game engine will receive minor tweaks in ways that take two steps back while graphics or gameplay options take one forward.

Other, more narrative games will generally be more of a side grade at best. Judge a game for its story, and the next game most likely has a different story rather than an objectively better or worse one.

Other sequels, poised to put their older siblings in the trash are hobbled by outside hands. A famous voice actor getting fired or upper management pulling funding, time, or creatives. Maybe there's simply a bold creative direction taken in good faith that does not pan out.

It's not really a mystery that I've been building towards Tears of the Kingdom completely obsoleting Breath of the Wild, but I hope you have a sense of how miraculous that is. The timbre of games development is so intrinsically hostile to this happening, and the fact that Tears surpasses one of the highest quality releases of the last decade only solidifies the achievement.

"I'm never playing Breath of the Wild again." was a persistent thought throughout my time with Tears, so let's see why that is.

The spirit of exploration has essentially served as the mission statement for this current iteration of the franchise, and it was extremely pleasing to see the continued embrace of the ethos. New, extremely hostile environments are introduced in Tears in addition to the base Hyrule map we knew from Breath of the Wild. This is a good choice, of course you want new content, but Nintendo played it perfectly by being hush on 50% of the world map prior to release.

What better way to make the player feel like an explorer than to present them with literally an unknown land?

The theme of exploration is a perfect fit for the amount of agency the game trusts the player with. Tears is a game with a lot of content. A lot! Killing all monsters, finding all caves, finding all Koroks, all shrines, all light roots, upgrading all equipment, all the side quests, all the side adventures…

A lot!

But the game is smart enough to not let this get discouraging. A daunting number like 900 Koroks turns off all but a select few players. Nintendo recognized this and did the smart thing of not gating a substantial reward behind it. The same goes for basically all of these “check list” items: If the only players who are going to bother are the players who feel intrinsically rewarded by the journey to get it done and the subsequent knowledge that it is done, why not let that be the main reward? The game knows players will curate their own experiences insofar as what is and is not worth their time to complete. Just as an explorer chooses and makes their own way through the world, a player of Tears of the Kingdom can be an agent of the type of experience they want to create.

It's an extremely good example of ludothematic harmony. Games often tout an adventure focus or an exploration tag, but it's one thing to ship a copy of Horizon Zero Dawn with a preorder bonus of the game map showing all the places to find treasure trundles lest the player ever really be surprised, and another entirely to let the player control Link for about five hours before accidentally falling into a hole and stumbling upon the other half of the entire world.

Breath of the Wild was another game with a lot to discover, but, save for the first moment encountering a dragon, nothing was ever as surprising or truly unknown as some of what one will come across in Tears. I try not to phrase this as anything too derogatory; my point isn't that Breath of the Wild has shortcomings, but rather that Tears has surpassed a masterful game.

Let's go back to those dragons from Breath of the Wild. Cool, right? The devs agreed, so they brought them back, made them easier to interact with, gave them (and others) a much more prominent place in the game's story and let them figure into the climax. If you want a cool dragon moment, Breath of the Wild has been once again made redundant.

It's this ability to perfectly hone in on what worked, why it worked, and how to rework it beyond that to be even better that pervades Tears. Shrines are another example. Fun physics puzzles that regrettably included a few too many samey combat challenges? How about replacing all of those with extremely unique no equipment scenarios? Too many shrines dotting the landscape reducing the fun of finding them? Much more of them are hidden in caves or in the sky to restore the fun challenge of accessing them. Shrine quests were pretty fun little puzzles and those stick around largely unchanged.

The Great Fairy fountains were a favorite, of some, in the first game. Upgrading gear was fun, for some, and most people were a fan of Great Fairy redesigns. Of course Nintendo would bring these elements back, but they did so with the good sense to attach fun, meaningful quests for unlocking each fountain. One more thing they identified as worthy of bringing forward and spared no expense improving. The fact that said quests gel perfectly with Tears’s new physics tools is particularly inspired.

These physics powers are yet another aspect of Tears that obsoletes Breath of the Wild. How quaint is making an ice block when you can scale through solid matter? How blaise is picking something up when you can now pick it up and attach it to anything? What is the more impressive invention: Localized time travel, or a bomb?

Could I tempt you with a square bomb?

Not all of these are intended direct comparisons, nor are all of these questions fair, but it’s pretty clear that Link has a larger variety of options this time around with his powerset.

The tools in Breath of the Wild were impressive in how they played with each other. Bombs could jettison the things one put in stasis, or the ice blocks would elevate objects placed onto them. It was a cohesive kit that gave players the most powerful iteration of Link to date, save for Soul Calibur 2.

Tears kicks things up a notch by not focusing on the intra-activity of Link’s kit, but the interactivity of all the ways it can modify the various objects occupying Hyrule. This is most easily seen with the contraptions one can build with any interactable object, but the weapon fusing system goes even deeper. I imagine it will take players cumulative years before they stop seeing videos of new possibilities posted online.

Did you know a wing shield gives you a higher jump out of a shield surf? Did you know a floating platform arrow will fly for a bit before spawning a platform for link to use, thus grating stable ground in midair? Have you ever made the butter sword?

Every object in Tears asks the implicit question: “What can I do with this?” The options are indeed exponential in scope, but the genius is how optional it all is. If you answered “No” to all of the previous questions, you likely didn’t struggle with the game. Everything is designed to be possible at the “base level” of gameplay; the skill floor is relatively low. The skill ceiling, or perhaps the nonsense equity, is extremely high to match.

A little knowledge goes a long way in Tears, and I imagine subsequent playthroughs will involve a lot of sideways thinking for the seasoned player. BotW had this too, but whereas in that game it involved the mechanical skill of pulling off unintended jobs from odd angles, Tears makes the edge gained feel much more organic as it simply stems from knowhow.

In this section of the review I will discuss the dungeons.

What a success! I was in the crowd (Minority?) that was happy to see dungeons replaced with Divine Beasts in BotW. They were relatively open ended, featured inspired designs, and had exciting attack sequences leading up to them. Unfortunately the nature of the puzzles involving moving the beasts wasn’t so exciting intellectually, and the boss encounters lacked personality. While the dungeons in Tears don’t require a rocket surgeon on hand to solve, they do largely ameliorate both issues.

Puzzles, save for one exception I still wake up in the dead of night thinking about, have a clear intended solution that of course does not boil down to “Move the beast this way”. As mentioned they aren’t difficult, but the need to find a new solution each time is just enough mental effort to keep the player engaged. As for the boss fights, they are simply night and day with BotW as they feature unique enemies that call for special tactics to take down. Fitting climaxes for the dungeons preceding them.

To find flaw, which I am almost (Almost!) loathe to do, the choice to repeat these fights in the Depths does not sit right with me. It’s never exciting to find the second copy of what was presumed to be a unique encounter, and the fights are involved enough to make taking them down multiple times a nontrivial task. These subsequent encounters lack coolness and demand time, which is a truly dreadful combination.

Coolness is salvaged, however, in terms of lore. Each dungeon is contextualized within the local lore of each tribe to varying degrees of subtlety. My first visit to any of the peoples of Hyrule saw me interacting with Gorons, and without the context of what was to come, I blew off Gorondia as a silly joke. Egg on my face when I rolled up there with my fat fuck boyfriend only to find it’s a literal Fire Temple. It was a cool moment, and while the surprise factor wasn’t there, the rest of the dungeons earned similar respect to their names.

What’s in a name, anyway? In Tears, the answer would be epithets. It’s somewhat standard practice to subtitle bosses like “Steve, Lord of the Clyde”, or “Brendan, Bane of Twitter”, but Zelda has oscillated between having these and not. Perhaps it’s their flakiness that makes their appearance cool, but the reason I bring them up at all is that the dungeons also have epithets in Tears. It’s the smallest thing, but it is quite enjoyable to know that the fire temple is “Lost Gorondia, Rediscovered” rather than just…the fire temple.

These small yet effective elements of presentation are omnipresent in the game. If the words of the devs are true and the game had a year plus of just polish, these are the types of tweaks I imagine they made in that time period. Or maybe Ganon’s health bar always grew longer and harder as his blood flowed into it. It’s hard to say!

From large to small, there really is not an element of Tears that I would not call a success. There are some lumps in the gravy as there always are, for example trying to corner the member of your ghost posse whose ability you need to use is a needlessly tedious process, and the control remains just as clunky as it was in BotW. There are some other flaws as well, but what I need you to understand is that it just does not matter.

A theoretically perfect game doesn’t exist, and thinking about games in that way only serves to devalue your experiences and tarnish your impression of the world. Tears of the Kingdom cleanly surpassed what I considered to be one of the greatest games of all time; the fact that it has minor foibles is as irrelevant as it gets. Taken holistically, the game is a 10, or a 5 as this site would say.

Put another way, in 6 months I’m not going to remember the awkward claw grip I had to employ at times, I’m going to remember how terrifying it was when my second foray into the Depths saw a Frox jump up to greet me, and the wave of fear that single encounter set off that lasted for dozens of hours.

Games, like art, as art, are experiential. I just had a perfect experience.