Donkey Kong 64 is well known as a veritable disaster, and as such this might be the most redundant review I will ever write. That said, journaling is cathartic, and this is the only way I can think of to exorcise the demons currently plaguing me. In the case of DK64, that's a lot of doin', so let's "jump" right in.

The first problem to rear its head occurs right in the tutorial and first minutes in the game: the imprecision of the controls and platforming. Rare was smart to give each kong a mid-air attack that grants some hovering, as course correction for every meaningful jump is necessary. Two things exacerbate this issue: the camera and the game's hitboxes. The former ensures that whatever the player's target is will never actually be visible to them when they need it most, and the latter makes touching barrels and collectibles are frustrating affair.

For a platformer, Donkey Kong 64 just feels very unsatisfying to grapple with. Movement isn't smooth. Jumps are fraught with peril for all the wrong reasons. Combat is extremely basic and plagued with the issue that it's impossible to call out the attack you want on demand. (Want to do a running attack? Enjoy randomly stopping dead in your tracks a quarter of the time.)

Perhaps the problem with the basic control of the game is why Rare decided to largely center it around a variety of "fun" minigames. Each of these takes the player out of the level and shoves them into a dystopian barrel world. It's actually quite an impressive degree of immersion-shattering that I've yet to see replicated. These minigames range from trivial, to frustrating, to bugged. Not a single one of them is a worthwhile experience, and the fact that they make up so much of the game's runtime is embarrassing.

The existence of the minigames has the knock-on effect of trivializing level design. Instead of building unique objectives into the landscape of the level, as other platformers do, Donkey Kong 64 is content to build countless little houses each with five little doors that each house a fun little minigame. This schema is returned to again and again, all the way up to the absolute nadir of the game's level design, Crystal Cave, that features two of them in close proximity to one another. Add in the fact that one of the kongs' objectives each stage is to kill a basic enemy and you wind up with quite the uninspired objective list.

The true objective of the game, though, is the mental calculus of routing an efficient path through the levels to minimize one's time with the game. The true joy of Donkey Kong 64 is that this efficient path does not exist. All levels essentially have to be traversed five times, as the developers were keen to put kong-specific collectibles in dead-end rooms that serve no purpose other than reward a different kong for finishing a minigame or some other bullshit. The mental burden is on the player, then, to make the best of a bad situation.

Put another way, Donkey Kong 64 is the ultimate Traveling Salesman Problem Simulator, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy that at least a little bit.

It's very clear that Donkey Kong 64's grasp falls short of its reach. They wanted eight unique levels, but couldn't find compelling designs for all of them. They wanted 200 bananas to mog Mario 64 but couldn't think of unique objectives. They wanted to include unlockable powerups but most of them fall in the bucket of "You can now ground pound a different colored switch." They wanted boss fights but half of them are recycled. They wanted five kongs but they play identically.

It's tough to categorize Donkey Kong 64 as anything but a total failure with so many unrealized goals. I don't think that's a particularly saucy opinion, but then again who needed a review of Donkey Kong 64 in the year 2023?

I'm not entirely sure why I bought Signalis, but I now know I was in error to do so. The most charitable thing I can say for the game is that I am absolutely not its target audience: I scare easily in horror games, have little interest in them, and have never played the early Resident Evil or Silent Hill titles Signalis is clearly looking to ape. Despite that, I gave Signalis the old college try only to find a mechanical mess of a game whose problems can't be waved off as genre convention.

Signalis is a really good example of incentives in game design and how they can undercut an experience. The game design starts off with some good ideas: inventory is limited to add consequence to combat encounters; there are no autosaves to ratchet up the tension; controls are clunky enough to discourage a more action-oriented style of play. All of these decisions seems like they would mesh well with a survival horror game, yet they ultimately are the undoing of anything resembling immersion in the game or its world.

The core of the issues lies in how optional all of the game's encounters are. The vast, vast majority of enemies can be ran around and avoided without fighting them. Given how limited resources are, this becomes the dominant strategy. Why waste ammunition or risk incurring damage when it's easier to hold the run button and weave around? It's also faster. On a base level, there's very little reason to engage in the resource management the game is very clearly pushing as a means of creating tense gameplay.

Without resource management being impactful, the limited inventory space suddenly becomes an inconvenience rather than a conduit for strategy. A good example played itself out many times over my run through the game. I'd have a full inventory, encounter a necessary key item pretty far from a safe house, and suddenly have a decision to make. I could run back to the safe house and rearrange my backpack to have space for the item, or just fire off some rounds to clear ammunition from my inventory to pick up the item. Or use a healing item unnecessarily again in the name of making space. Without the combat encounters putting stress on these resources, the player is free to essentially waste them. The whole exchange breeds contempt for the inventory system. Once I understood how the game worked, I never really needed to plan a load out. I wonder why the inventory was built this way to begin with, other than this system likely being similar to an old survival horror game.

The lack of an autosave feature is another way Signalis calls back to its inspirations, and this is another mechanical misfire. The threat of a death that will meaningfully reset progress only works if developers commit to that notion. There needs to be stakes, usually in the form of the time investment since the last save. Signalis refuses to raise these stakes through the vast majority of the game. Areas are small, with all of the action taking place within 20-40 seconds of a safe room. Players are free to run back to the safe room every time they accomplish something, no matter how small, thereby ensuring any death won't ding them too much. Hell, this constant saving is doubly encouraged by the previously mentioned inventory system; the only place to dump the items picked up on any excursion is the same place the player saves the game. The combination of the level design and the save system works to deflate the tension, which is a bizarre undercutting of the only possible reason to design the save system this way in the first place.

All of Signalis's mechanics seem half-cooked; a "wouldn't it be cool if" whiteboard list that never coalesced into a meaningful experience. Which is a shame, because aesthetically the game works much better. The graphics and sound design both do a good job in creating an unsettling atmosphere. But unfortunately that really doesn't mean anything when the gameplay doesn't work in service of the horror experience.

What players are left with is at times boring, at times frustrating, and thoroughly samey. No matter what is happening in the story you can count the fact that you, as the player, will be bobbing and weaving through enemies to find the square peg in room A, stick it in the square hole in Room B, to unlock access to the circle peg that is needed in Room C. Perhaps this is evocative of old Resident Evil games, which even I know have a reputation for this kind of nonsense, but I'm flabbergasted that someone thought it was engaging gameplay in 2022.

If they were set on making an homage to Resident Evil, they could've also copied the respect that game surely had for its players; I can't imagine there was ever a puzzle room in an RE game that had a note not five feet from the puzzle outlining its solution step-by-step.

I was beside myself when I found this. The puzzle it spoiled wasn't even difficult; none of the game's puzzles are difficult. Do the developers truly think that little of their audience?

I'll end by describing my last experiences with Signalis. I beat the game, found the ending to be lackluster, watched the credits, and looked up what people were saying online. I found some discussion of the final boss, an encounter I never had. Wouldn't you know it, the player is supposed to start up the game again to continue the story. So I did, and I played for another hour or so. What I expected to be a short story sequence opened up into a full 'dungeon' of sorts.

I'd had enough. I closed the game.

Signalis isn't scary. Signalis isn't fun. And for a game with a story that is so clearly open for interpretation, Signalis isn't even interesting, and that's what's most disappointing of all.

That's a lie, the most disappointing part is that it's not fun. God damn.

Don't let the rating fool you; Pokemon Scarlet is a deeply flawed, frustrating experience that is dead set on sabotaging itself throughout its run time. It has earned four stars despite its best efforts, and in the hands of a competent studio the game would have easily been a five. Its only saving grace is a formula that is tailor made to psychologically satisfy people on the most base, primal level. Anything one's higher functions might appreciate or notice is woefully under-cooked.

I suppose the latter is the best place to start; what exactly doesn't work here? In a word: everything. The game's frame rate is extremely inconsistent. Whether in the over world, in a battle, in a cutscene, wherever, one will be dealing with varying degrees of sub-30 frames. This even causes an amount of desync with the audio in the cutscenes. Had the frame rate been locked to a low number, that would have been frustrating but mostly fine. Instead, the game oscillates wildly when determining which extremely low amount of FPS it wants to present at any given time thereby ensuring the player will never get used to it.

The speed of the game is another element that drags it down. The game is slow. Glacially, monumentally, horrifyingly slow. This mostly manifests in the battles, which seem shackled to an engine that predates most of the series's fan base. Any stat change in battle takes a couple of seconds to come across to the player. Any attack needs to have its animation play out. Status effects like poison or sleep add time to every turn when their effects are possibly the easiest to automate.

What's frustrating about the issue is that it had previously been solved. The ability to turn off all of these animations has been mysteriously removed. This is a vexing change as it presents literally no gain to the player at the cost of their agency. Put more simply: who wanted this? Who wanted to lose options? This one change likely adds more than an hour to the average player's time with the game.

I need to beleaguer this issue further: Not long into the game I caught a big crab guy. This guy's ability was that when he would get hit four of his stats would change. Rather than playing the stat change animation once for all four, or two times for both the positive and negative stat changes, it played it four times. Every time it got hit in battle! My ability to use my favorite guy was impacted by the 60 seconds of waiting he'd add to my fights. It quickly became apparent that the optimal strategy for playing Pokemon was to dick around on one's phone while the battle's various loading screens played themselves out.

Speaking of loading, for some reason there's a ton of that going on as well. Not the typical loading screen, but every action Pokemon take in battle has a one to two second bit of loading before it comes through. Even throwing a Pokeball has this issue. Nothing at all feels smooth in this game, and that weighs more heavily on the player the longer they play.

The dual release nature of the game is also a glaring problem. I don't know how Gamefreak has been enabled in doing this for years, but whatever, I bought this game too so I cannot complain. Still, it is a transparent way of gating content for dollars. The core conceit of the game, the reason it works at all, is the "catch them all" ethos. This just doesn't work when the player knows from the onset that several of their favorite guys aren't in the game so Gamefreak can sell marginally more units. It's an incredibly anti-consumer move that should be called out every release cycle.

The story of the game is also a fumble. The framing device for the proceedings is a school. The player character takes classes, bonds with their teachers, and picks up little sidequests from the school. Or, they would, if anyone knew that content was there. So much of this content is essentially hidden from the player, as they are never told it is there nor incentivized to explore the school and find it. I imagine most people completed their game with taking the final exams nor getting their bond with their teachers to the highest level. It's hard to categorize it as a throwaway when this school veneer is the loudest of the game's design. Your character can never change from their uniform yet they will almost never actually go to class? A missed opportunity for a more satisfying integration of the school elements with the larger game systems.

Adding to the frustration of all of these issues is that they were fixed. Pokemon Legends Arceus, a singular release that was solidly constructed, was a major step forward for the franchise. It was fresh, fun, and a new take on the same formula. Arceus was developed as Scarlet was coming together, so it's not shocking the Scarlet doesn't borrow anything from that game, but man does Scarlet feel like pure regression. Arceus's frame rate was fine. Battles were quick and smooth. It had no partner game that siphoned off content. Hell it didn't even have DLC. The time travel story, while not extremely satisfying, was thoroughly referenced through to the end. It was a rock solid experience that will surely be forgotten now that we can see the sales divide between it and Scarlet. Gamefreak had a perfect opportunity for evolution with their franchise, but unfortunately it looks like they're going to press 'B'.

So then, what saves Scarlet from being abject garbage? Well, it's a Pokemon game. The core conceit of exploring a world, catching guys, training guys to evolve, and bonding with a team is a fun one. If anything, Scarlet proves that formula is impossible to bomb. If anything, the formula is heightened by the open world, a change to the series (A change first seen in Arceus) that I quite enjoyed. That, plus the appearance of Pokemon in the open world rather than traditional tall grass, made hunting them down an enjoyable experience.

As always when I play these games, I completed my Pokedex, and unlike past games in the series this isn't a tedious endeavor. Only the holdover mistakes from ghosts of Christmas past rear their ugly heads: some Pokemon must be traded to evolve; others only appear in Violet. With 400 guys to find, doing so in an open world is a big upgrade from having to shuffle around tall grass and sit through encounter loading screens for hours on end.

Another system that benefits from the open world is the progression through the story, or stories. Pokemon Scarlet has three different campaign threads for the player to follow and complete at their leisure. All three of these were enjoyable on some level, though there is a clear ranking to the quality here. The Team Star battles come in last place, with the titan Pokemon hunt winning out. Still, the ability to complete these and there various stages in whatever order the player wishes is a level of freedom I truly was not expecting. It was a necessary step to follow through with the promise of open exploration, but I wouldn't have been surprised to see this bungled as well. Regardless, what we got is what works best for the conceit of the game, and this is probably what will stick with me most after finishing up with Scarlet.

It's hard to understate this. It was fun to leave the "first" gym battle for the last of my 18 events just so I could bully some bug Pokemon. It's fun to climb a mountain range you've never been to before only to fall off the other side and land on some new gym you weren't expecting. It's fun to make a plan and then have it get sidetracked because you got lost. I cannot possibly imagine a Pokemon game without this set up, at least not one in the mainline series. If anything sticks around from Scarlet, I hope this is it. Hopefully Gamefreak doesn't then remove the map feature for seemingly no reason.

The common discourse about Pokemon Scarlet is something along the lines of "Wow this game is buggy but I've having fun! Look at these wacky glitches!", which is an accurate sentiment, but it's also a dangerous one. This game is fun in spite of itself, and any amount of forgiveness levied simply because of enjoyment is an anti-consumer attitude. We should not accept games this broken. We should not overlook flaws that run this deep. This game is fun, yes, but it could have been so much more than it is right now. These "wacky" glitches actively detract from the experience, and in dunking on the game that should never be forgotten.

Gamefreak has continuously been enabled by Pokemon. People are psychologically primed to enjoy collecting. The Pokemon themselves are often designed by committee to appeal to the most people as possible. The studio does not have to try to have a hit with these elements, and it's difficult to say that they were trying with Scarlet. Regardless of the game's quality, that feeling pervades the experience: nobody cared when making this. They shipped a broken, chugging game and just didn't care because it would make a billion dollars anyway. And it did.

It's up to all of us to personally decide how we feel about this arrangement. I knowingly bought the game so I'm a culpable party, but voicing dissatisfaction is important. Enjoying a flawed, janky experience is fine too should one do it knowingly. But the "Don't care; had fun" sentiment that seems so popular is a destructive one, and the destruction wrought is on this franchise.

Sonic Frontiers is a game whose quality scales inversely with how closely it is examined. If you jump into the over world for 15 minutes to run around and collect stuff, maybe play one level without aiming for S ranks, you'll probably have a pretty good time. You'll reflect on how Sonic has finally taken a step forward after years of stagnation, and put your controller down contented with the existence of Frontiers. The experience doesn't fare so well under almost any other amount of pressure.

Over the course of my 24 hour play through in which I completed as much of the game as possible, the cracks in Frontiers's visage were both large and apparent. Almost every system in the game breaks down the longer one plays, and the flaws become impossible to ignore.

I have always been someone who enjoys collecting items in open world games, so it was incredibly disappointing to see that not even this was immune from the wide scale bumbling that plagues Frontiers's mechanics. Initially the various collectibles are presented as both meaningful and plentiful, the best combination. If there is both many items to collect and a good feeling for doing so, the player is incentivized to seek them all out. This extended to all of Frontiers's various tchotchkes and baubles: gears get you into levels, keys get you chaos emeralds, the red and blue stones increase your power and defense respectively, and memory stones get you side story segments. A lot of these items are even marked on your map, further incentivizing players to track them down. It all felt meaningful.

The air was promptly taken from my sails upon discovering how easy it is to circumvent the exploration to get all of these. Literally every single collectible is attainable from the fishing minigame in such a quantity that there is no need to engage with any other part of Sonic Frontiers. One can find the fishing minigame, spend an hour there, go fight the boss of the area they're in, and repeat. The one thing gating this abuse is the currency needed for fishing, which is also known as the currency that more-or-less rains from the heavens every so often in the over world. It is gated in name-only, as the average player is going to accumulate hundreds more of this currency then they'll ever need.

This secondary way of attaining items has two mind-goblin-esque effects on the player: Any effort into exploring and finding items now has the convenience of The Alternative to overcome lest it feel like a chore. There is also the knowledge of the fact that collectibles aren't finite. It's a lot easier to motive oneself to collect 120 stars in Mario 64 than 120 of an infinite amount of stars. The former feels like an accomplishment; the latter feels arbitrary. Having initially started Sonic Frontiers with the goal of finding every collectible presented on the world map before sliding into Big's Fishing Adventure for hours on end, I find it hard to overstate my disappointment.

Said Fishing Adventure is the only part of Frontiers that is a consistently enjoyable experience bereft of frustration. There is one location, one song, a repeating cast of fish, and it's awesome. The gameplay is extremely simple, but the slot-machine-esque feeling of waiting to see what you pull in and how many tokens it brings with it never got old for me. Had it been better designed so as to not trivialize the entire game, I'd say that this is the best fishing has ever been in a game. The depth of other fishing games cannot measure up to the comfiness.

When not exploring or fishing, Sonic is repeatedly subjected to various sections of "speed gameplay", and this is where the game is near-unsalvageable. A thought occurred to me while playing: Sonic games have always encouraged the player to spend as little time actively playing as possible. How many times has a Sonic game been so uncontrollable that the dominant strategy was to maneuver oneself into a place where one didn't need to touch the controller?

"Thank god I'm on a rail for 10 seconds, I won't go flying."

"Whew, a loop, I can relax for bit."

"Lightspeed dash, what a relief."

The controls in Sonic games have always been so bad that they are liable to kill the player if control isn't wrestled from their grasp. "Wrestled" is the wrong word, as it implies a desire to retain that control. No, Sonic games have Stockholm Syndrome'd the player to the point of engaging with an experience they actively seek refuge from while it is ongoing.

Frontiers, of course, is no different. The controls in the speed sections just do not function. What's amazing is that they do not function in consistently different ways; the developer introduces a drifting section for one level solely to remind the player that despite all the time that has passed they still don't have that one down yet. It is very telling that Sonic Team designed these sections to be 90 seconds long, on average. Any longer and S rank runs would have completely fallen apart lest the controls test the player's patience beyond their limits.

These control issues do crop up from time to time while exploring, though not nearly to the same degree. Putting aside the woes of the meaningless collectathon, exploration feels janky. Players are liable to get roped into invisibly marked 2D sections without a way out, or get pushed and pulled by scores of bumpers and boost pads that leave them far off the path they were traveling. How incongruent these items are with the world only adds to the frustration of it all. The lack of apparent intuition in their placement also makes parsing them difficult; it's not uncommon to pan the camera around looking for some improbable link of springs and rails between where you are and where you need to go, especially in later game areas. Finding these paths is too difficult as everything tends to blend together.

On the opposite side of difficulty would be the combat, something so easy to trivial that one wonders why the devs bothered.

Two things gate Sonic's ability in combat in Frontiers: Power upgrading items, which as established are plentiful and easy to max out on, and unlockable moves. The latter is worth focusing on. Initially it appears to have depth; there is a skill tree and many options for every encounter. However after only a couple of hours one can unlock the entirety of said skill tree. That is a disappointing experience unto itself, as it's almost always better to use one move, The Most Powerful Move, over and over instead of doing anything else. There is so much effort and focus put onto a system that may as well not exist. Again, it falls apart under the slightest pressure.

Frontiers's use of quick time events in its boss fights deserves to be called out. The bosses, which were already imprecise and confusing affairs of Super Sonic darting all over the screen until getting clipped by an attack, didn't need an extra element of frustration to reset the player's progress towards the end. But Sonic Team thought it impossible to enjoy a "bad ass anime moment" of Super Sonic unless the player was there to hit square with the same rhythm employed for the fishing minigame.

What hurts about all of this is how close Sonic Frontiers is to working. The character writing has never been better. The soundtrack has elements that take steps in new directions while also containing moments that meet the expectations of older fans. The game is different, something that should always be praised from established franchises. It's such a shame that all of its systems are as half-baked as they are.

Despite all of those faults it's not difficult to imagine a few tweaks that would vastly improve Frontiers. Indeed, I can only imagine that mods to the PC version are fixing that as I write, but it would be disingenuous to consider those while writing a review. As released, Sonic Frontiers is a mess. It has the ability to entertain if one really squints their eyes and takes frequent breaks, but it will disappoint anyone looking for meaningful experience.

I'm constantly amazed at how much I enjoy Made in Abyss: Binary Star Falling into Darkness as its flaws are as numerous as its title is needlessly vexing. Early on in my playthrough I compiled a list of bizarre design decisions and that list only spiraled out of control the more I played. I constantly used the Switch's capturing feature to post clips of oddities, bugs, and things that made me go 'Hmm...' to Twitter. The game is not all that well put together, and at times it seems poorly thought out. That's all to say nothing of the forced 10 hour tutorial that the player is subjected to.

And yet, I can't say that I don't love the game. Made in Abyss is a great example of a survival game that has real tension, real discovery, and real challenge. The way those three interact on a minute-to-minute basis creates an extremely compelling experience that is much more than the sum of its parts.

At its base the game is about plunging further down into the titular Abyss and the game is not shy about making this a trying experience. Characters suffer a sickness when rising in altitude, not unlike divers resurfacing, and this stops your progress constantly. Walking up a slight incline? Better stop for 5 seconds to quell your character's growing sickness. There's a hunger and stamina system that constantly hamper your progress as well. Your greatest enemy might be a cliff face that you simply don't have enough stamina to scale at your level, or it might be your lack of preparedness as your empty stomach demands you return prematurely.

Now this all sounds like standard fare, but where the real challenge lies is extricating oneself from one's dives. Getting back out of the Abyss is much, much harder than going down there. To say nothing of the risk-reward tension of deciding how deep to dive insofar as what your supplies can accommodate, environments are confusing and clearly designed to be hostile to the rising climber. Some passages are one-way, and on more than one occasion the game pulls the nasty trick of unexpectedly blocking previously used routes forcing the discovery of a new way up. All of this takes place under the ticking clock of your depleting hunger bar. The lack of a meaningful fast travel in areas one hasn't absolutely surpassed means it is very likely that you will fail. The likelihood of a loss is exacerbated by the save system: One cannot save anytime; saving uses a consumable that can only be used in certain areas of the abyss; and entering a new area overwrites the autosave meaning one can be locked into an unfavorable situation.

So now that we established that failure comes often, what is the cost of such failure? Time, mostly. At any time the player can select to "Give up" from the menu. They are returned to the top with absolutely none of their progress. None of their experience; none of their collected items; none of their exploration remembered. It's all gone. Given that I've spent hours on one run into the Abyss, I want to stress how big of a cost this is and how miserable a failure feels. With that in mind, the aforementioned tension created by the game is palpable, as any failure is hours of progress gone.

Discovery is another feeling the game nails, though I'm reluctant to praise it too much on this axis. Each layer of the abyss is visually compelling, functionally unique, and filled with distinct areas unto itself alongside a variety of imaginative flora and fauna. However, being based off an anime (and in turn a manga), the visual design is derivative of another work. A good realization, but not an original idea. Still, seeing this environments brought to life to explore at one's leisure is the kind of experience fans wanted when experiencing the parent works. More importantly, it creates organic and intrinsic rewards to enduring the exploration and the overall feeling of stress the game provides; one wants to push deeper not to collect an item, but to see more of the Abyss.

Another element of the game I enjoyed is its status as an "Arceus-like". This is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek "genre" I've created to note games that involve a lot of mindless open world collection, monster killing, box checking, and inventory management in service of finishing not-at-all-rewarding sidequests doled out similar to a randomly generated MMO. The name, of course, coming from Pokemon Legends: Arceus, a game from earlier this year. Despite how boring and tedious that description sounded, I enjoyed those elements of that game, and Made in Abyss very much scratches the same itch. Every area has a "Collect 50 items" sidequest to complete, and it's fun to run around spamming the collect button. This is despite the need to drop half of those items because of your encumbrance limit and how the reward for the quest is basically nothing. Perhaps the term "Autism Simulator" is more evocative of the feeling I'm trying to convey here.

The final point I want to hit on is the 10 hour tutorial mentioned much earlier. At the onset of the game players are presented a choice between two games, one that follows the characters from the anime, and another that follows original characters. Despite being presented a choice, only the former is able to be chosen at first. This "Game A" is one that is stripped of many features: you only go downwards through the Abyss; many areas are blocked; you cannot craft any meaningful items; weapon types are locked out; weapon durability is disabled; there are no sidequests; there is no leveling. I could go on. Game A is a shallow facsimile of the true experience, and it's vexing to me that it's the one forced onto the players. While it does serve as a soft tutorial to ~60% of the game's systems, it just is not compelling in the slightest. I imagine many players will give up on the game before getting to Game B, whether they stop playing after the credits in Game A or just don't finish it at all. The abrupt ending of Game A is also a point worthy of criticism, but to be honest it just shouldn't exist in the first place.

At the very least, Made in Abyss: Binary Star Falling into Darkness rewards players who stick with it. They are rewarded with a much deeper Game B. They are rewarded with challenging gameplay that scales very well unlike other survival games that plateau once a certain rank of gear is unlocked. They are rewarded with increasingly fascinating layers of the Abyss as it descends into the earth. And of course they are rewarded with new, fancier whistles.

This game carries an absolute recommendation, but keep in mind what you're getting yourself into here.

"It gets good after 10 hours."

Indeed.

Splatoon 3 highlights my issues with iterative sequels as a concept. Ostensibly this game exists to vaguely update the formula fans enjoy and do absolutely nothing to alienate anyone who bought the first Splatoon or its sequel. Indeed, this concept is seen in many other franchises on the market today. Call of Duty, John Madden, Assassin's Creed, iterative sequels are everywhere, though they usually see an annual release.

Splatoon, not so much. 5 years separate the releases of Splatoon 2 and 3, and I have no idea what the developers could have spent that time doing. Splatoon 2 is a game I have not played, but having played the first I can say it feels exactly the same as Splatoon 3. The core gameplay is the same, the multiplayer maps are the same, the layout of the (lacking) single player campaign is the same, and the online systems are just as archaic as always.

The idea of an iterative sequel taking so long to come out rubs me the wrong way. Why is Splatoon 3 $60 if not for all the time that went into its development? If someone just kept playing the second one, or even the first, what would they be missing out on that is unique to this title? Not much.

A review for Splatoon 3 is very unsatisfying to write, as one would be essentially reviewing the other two games concurrently. What am I going to discuss here? The stagnated gameplay formula? No, all I can really point out is the redundancy of this series, which is really disappointing from a company like Nintendo who basically built their legacy on each of their major franchises constantly innovating with each release. The Splatoon series, while overall decently fun, misses that boat.

But hey they added a CCG. That's half a star right there.

Quick review here. Frogun is a game that exists to be looked at and known about rather than played. I imagine it brings someone great pleasure to look at screenshots and videos of a game made in 2022 that resembles the PS1 games of their youth. And perhaps it's even intentional that the gameplay is incredibly shallow, trivial, and at times frustrating as many older games made for children were. But I refuse to believe that anyone could sit down with this game, play it to completion, and feel as though they were enriched by the experiences.

Playing Frogun is a chore. I struggled to get through a session that breached the 10 minute mark, as one's patience begins to wear halfway through that. If you've played one level of connect-the-dots frogunning and paint-by-number treasure collecting then I assure you you've played them all.

Special shout outs to the racing levels which seemed to be designed in a way that is intentionally at-odds with the completionist itch the collectables in the game are clearly trying to scratch.

Further shout outs to the Banjo Kazooie-esque way one's collected treasures vanish upon death, leaving the player to retread the same ground over and over or tag up on checkpoints constantly. Really fun in a game with so many omnipresent markers reminding you if you haven't 100%'d a level.

Additional shout out to the oddly large amount of scrolling text in speech bubbles in the game, especially those that occur mid-level asking the player to either stand in place reading for a minute or two, split their attention between reading and platforming, or just ignore the text entirely. Don't worry, the game also tracks whether or not you picked up these journal logs, incentivizing you to find them and clutter your screen even if you're not interested in the contents.

Circling back around Frogun looks like a PS1 game (But in higher definition, with a higher framerate, and really it doesn't resemble anything from that period save for low-poly models but that's neither here nor there) and that's good enough for some people. They can buy it, think "Wasn't the PS1 great?", never play it, and feel rather contented.

Personally I prefer games that were made to be played, with all the design decisions being made with that mission statement in mind. A wild concept, to be sure, but one I hope to see more of from this budding "video game" medium.

Live A Live is an interesting game in that it has many identities rolled up into one. Of course, that might seem obvious when one looks at the packaging and the core conceit of the game, but it really runs deeper than the superficial idea of simply playing as different characters. No, the mechanical identities in this game are also quite numerous, which is something best described as a 'beguiling strength' of the game.

It's quite enjoyable to find a new twist or gimmick with every character one picks up. A stealth mission, a horror story bereft of combat, a weird marriage of Street Fighter and Megaman, rather than different characters sharing a game, some of these feel like distinct games altogether. The differences of each story line are manifested in gameplay rather than set dressing, heightening that effect. It makes this first part of Live A Live exciting to play through, and given that each of these character missions only take a few hours to complete at most, it is also a brisk experience. It makes it easy to overlook the couple of segments that are less exciting or mechanically samey (Namely the prehistoric and near future chapters).

But really all of this is just a ruse, as this first part of Live A Live is just a prelude to the actual game: A hackneyed 'team-up' segment that shamelessly falls back on classic RPG mechanics. (Though, I suppose at the time of the original's release, they were just "RPG mechanics") This includes random battles, grinding, and a need to obsessively min-max the gear of each of your characters. This final, long, segment of the game is fun, but it feels at-odds with everything that came before it.

The problem is the continuity between the first and second parts of the game. As an RPG, your characters all level up and grow throughout their individual stories. However, all stories are not created equal, and thus has different amounts of combat. Unto itself this is not problematic; you're never expected to grind in any of the stories, and completing them is rather easy. However, when one loads into the end game, it's very easy to find oneself unprepared for what's to come.

To provide more detail: At the start of that final story the player chooses which of the eight characters they'd like to play it with. One of my characters was level 10, another was level 5, another was level 2. All of those levels were the natural result of those individual stories, yet most of them necessitate grinding once loaded into the final story, as the latter is scaled for characters of higher levels.

It's baffling, the game does not at all prime the player to invest in the characters' levels. After all, why would you care if you're not going to be playing as them in an hour? Why would you care if the mission is easy anyway? Then there's a sudden shift of momentum and the "real game" is an RPG where your level dictates your success. It's annoying to have a forced shift in your priorities; it's annoying to be presented with a grind when one was not needed before.

Don't misunderstand, this final section of the game is quite fun, but it feels at odds with the stated conceit of the game up to this point. It's a final piece of variety that upsets everything before it, a spice that throws off the balance of the dish. Taken individually it works fine, but not here.

There's a lot of things one could talk about concerning Live A Live that would make for interesting discourse. The game has a wealth of interesting ideas (Up to and including an insane anti-boss-run that serves as one of the potential endings) but it's all small potatoes when compared to the intrinsic structural issues Live A Live presents. All the same, I'm happy the game took what was clearly several risks. While the final experience is middling, it's a very memorable game, and that is extremely appreciated.

I sat down to play Bugsnax based on the promise that it was inspired by games such as Dark Cloud, Ape Escape, and Viva Pinata; games I very much enjoyed in the past. While the game avoids being outright derivative of any of these older titles, it does struggle to develop an identity of its own, making for an experience with a relatively low ceiling despite its endearing qualities.

And boy does it have some endearing qualities. Bugsnax is quite the colorful game filled with inspired visual design. The titular creatures are amusing visual puns, and the NPCs look to be straight out of a children's picture book. Bugsnax is enjoyable to look at and that fits nicely with its overall relaxed pace and lack of demands on the player.

The moment to moment gameplay of Bugsnax is also quite enjoyable. Each Bugsnak is a puzzle unto itself in how one catches it, and more often than not there is more than one solution. While it sometimes feels janky, largely thanks to the physics engine, the game engenders creativity from the player. The less prescriptive an open(ish) world experience feels, the more it justifies itself, and Bugsnax does that well.

I would mark the narrative as another positive, though I don't want to overstate things. It does just enough to create a hook in the investigation of the Bugsnax and the island they inhabit, and while the conclusion isn't extremely compelling, that's all the game needed to do to stop the moseying-about from feeling pointless. It helps when the world and its creatures do so much of the heavy lifting; it relieves the mediocre script of the responsibility of carrying the narrative.

Mediocrity, unfortunately, is something that pervades the rest of the game. Every quality the developer's wanted to ape from their favorite games is bungled in its implementation. Town building from Dark Cloud? Rather than actually constructing a town to your liking, characters fill pre-determined slots with no customization. Boss encounters with boss snax from an action game like Ape Escape? Scuttled by the intersection of the clunky physics engine and the fact that the player lacks a health bar or fail state entirely. Collecting all of the Bugsnak species to enjoy at your leisure like cultiating pinata in Viva Pinata? Completely meaningless without a customizable living space for the Bugsnax. (There is a pen for you to dump them in, but vexingly the player has no way of choosing the snax that roam around there, negating its purpose) The developer's implemented a grab bag's worth of features from other titles while failing to understand their function in the first place; a very much "ideas-guy" trajectory.

Do these problems ruin the game? No, but many questions are raised. Why is there a limit to the number of snax a player can hold? Why are there so many sauce varieties when so many snax all like the same sauce? Why is being set on fire so infuriating? Why are there so many mail sidequests, and why are they all identical? Why both Bunger and BBQ Bunger? Why are its environmental puzzles so insultingly easy? Why, oh why, does it set the time to 11PM every time you finish a sidequest?

I've made reference to it earlier, but I want to take the time to talk about the physics engine specifically. So many moments in the game are made more frustrating due to the physics-wrestling the player must engage in. There's a sidequest to climb a mountain using the jump pad, but the real challenge is trying to set the pad on the footholds without it just sliding off. There's a boss where one must launch orbs at a large Bugsnak, but half of the projectiles one fires lose all momentum whenever they slightly clip another one of the orbs the devs chose to litter the arena with. Most of the game, most of the snak catching, is physics based in some way, and while its never non-functional, small issues continuously arise to needle the player.

Despite all of this, I enjoyed my time with Bugsnax. I think with a more competent dev team and a clearer vision behind the project it could have been something great. As it is, it's just fine. I caught all of the Snax, and I'm content to never think of it again.

I caught all of the Snax, and now I'm full.

I caught all of the Snax, and I spoiled my appetite.

I raided my pantry, and now I'm all out of snax.

I finished snak time, and now it's nap time.

I don't know, choose one.

The reputation of the Souls Series has long been its downfall. Dark Souls 2, with its global death tracker prominently displayed at the beginning of the game, delighted in making encounters artificially difficult by adding a multiplier to the enemies one would face at a time. Dark Souls 3, having seen that players took to rolling through attacks to avoid them, added immense amounts of unnatural delay to all boss attacks to punish players for dodging prematurely. All of this felt too meta to thoroughly enjoy an experience. Instead of an organic challenge galvanizing the player, the omnipresence of an unseen hand ensuring a needless difficulty discouraged them.

It was only Sekiro and Bloodborne, two games unfettered with a similar name to their predecessors, that managed to iterate on an increasingly stale formula in a satisfying manner. The latter leaned into fast paced aggression following the all-time slow pace of DS2, what with its lack of shield options and healing-by-damage-dealt mechanics. Sekiro turned the entire combat system on its head by introducing the slightest amount of depth. This was not only evident in the parrying system but also the variety of combat arts one could unlock. These games weren’t without flaws, but they felt more like a studio expressing itself rather than one needing to deliver on the promise of the baggage that comes with “Souls”.

Which is all to say that I had high expectations for Elden Ring. Despite the mechanical similarities this wasn’t a Souls game and thus From Software would have more freedom to craft whatever experience they wanted to deliver to players. Unfortunately they seemed to intentionally aim for derivative, and the parts of the game that displayed innovation floundered.

I think the problems here can be sorted into two boxes: Old and New.

The old problems I wrote about earlier: there are still too many multiboss encounters. Exacerbating the issue is that the bosses in question were clearly not designed to gel with one another a la Ornstein and Smough or double Maneaters (the rare times pre-DS2 games played this card). This is easy to see based on the fact that without fail players will encounter half of a multiboss fight elsewhere in the game, sometimes even paired with a different partner.

These bosses, solitary or otherwise, are still full attack delay out of nowhere. Imagine cutting into your steak as you eat dinner. You spear it with your fork, raise your knife, wait the customary 3.5 seconds, then cut in. Ridiculous, no? Imagining the steak strafing around you as you rotate in place during those 3.5 seconds only serves to weaken this metaphor, but hopefully you see my point on how unnatural this all feels.

It’s almost paradoxical in a way. If bosses take forever to attack, then it should make fighting two of them at once more manageable. This is true, but it misses the point. The problem here is never the difficulty, it’s the feeling one gets from the encounter. Organic vs artificial. Natural vs unnatural. The more these scales tip towards their latter ends, the less patience the player has to tackle a challenge put before them regardless of its difficulty.

These topics have been written about for years since prior From games have released, but luckily Elden Ring also provides plenty of new topics for discourse insofar as missteps.

The largest issue, perhaps with the entire game, is how the open world impacts the player experience. I have never seen a game that demands as much self-regulation on the part of the player as this one. Almost any challenge one comes across can be circumvented and returned to later at a higher level. And I want to be clear, I’m not speaking of grinding. That was always an option for lower skilled players in previous games.

No, one can go encounter new novel experiences, level up naturally, and then return to a previous roadblock hours later. While this might sound like a positive to some, it only serves to undercut what could have been a carefully designed difficulty curve in a more linear game. What makes this so problematic is the fun delta between something that is challenging and something that isn’t.

Combat remains relatively shallow in Elden Ring, and when one applies that shallow combat to an easy to defeat enemy, the triviality of the experience can only result in boredom.

I spent plenty of early hours pushing myself through the Caelid area of the game, one I now know is meant for somewhat higher level players, such that by the time I reached the Liurnia area I demolished everything. The magic academy? I don’t think I died once in my time there. It took some time before my level reacclimated to my surroundings, but the threat of sabotaging my own experience was always there. The fun I had in Caelid came at the expense of my fun in Liurnia.

This all comes down to agency and information. I believe that this is a high agency, low information game. You can go anywhere, but many of the game’s systems and objectives are hidden from you. For someone who loves adventure games, this is the dream. But it absolutely does not gel with the need for challenging gameplay and the game’s RPG mechanics. And it is all caused by the decision to go open world.

What does the open world offer? Surely not the agency I just spoke of; that was still present in spades in the much more linear Dark Souls. But it does offer discovery and diversity, both of which are quite meaningful.

Part of the fun of Elden Ring is the social aspect. Chatting with friends, conversations would often follow a pattern of:

“You know this thing I found 20 hours ago?”
“What the fuck no?? I never found that. What is it?”

And that latter surprise was both genuine and matched with an equally strong sense of interest. In an era of games that don’t do much to endear themselves to players outside of a visceral yet fleeting sense of “fun”, Elden Ring’s sense of discovery is sorely appreciated. It also plays into a feeling of diversity between any two players’ experience.

Looking at things in context, I’m happy Elden Ring’s open world exists to differentiate it from the other games in the “series”. They are all dangerously close to being identical, so any identifying characteristics are appreciated. But the decision to marry that open world with these gameplay mechanics was a misfire. This is yet another reason From shouldn’t shackle themselves to “light attack, heavy attack, roll”.

A new game engine would not necessitate a strict monitoring of a difficulty curve that could be undercut so easily. And it would surely be more interesting.

All the same, I can see why they’ve stuck to this. It is fun to fight big bosses while rolling around and punishing their weak points. It’s thrilling when you run out of healing items and the boss is almost dead. But sticking with what works isn’t how one makes a masterpiece, and it’s not how one commands respect for one’s art.

I feel compelled to issue an immediate correction: this isn’t “one’s” art. This game was made by a duo of directors: Miyazaki and someone I will only acknowledge as “the Dark Souls 2 guy”. My enjoyment of this game decreased noticeably once I learned this, as the more confounding areas and encounters of the game suddenly had an explanation behind their presence. The game was tainted.

I’ve been very harsh on Elden Ring, but only because I believe the floor on Souls games to be relatively high. My rating is still a 4/5; I still put 170 hours into it between my 1.25 playthroughs. I’m still playing it. I don’t need to tell you exactly why this game works. But when a series is this successful and this committed to reusing concepts, it’s much more important to note what isn’t working rather than what is.

One final note: there has been a lot of discussion on difficulty options in this series. “Should they be added?” etc. The clear answer is that they’ve had an easy mode since the original Dark Souls: summoning. They’ve had final resorts for people who are stuck: grinding. And now with Elden Ring they have another option for those of blunted progress: ignoring the problem altogether for several hours. Any calls for a mode labeled “easy” are willfully ignorant of the options available to them. And if these options aren’t enough, you can always load up a different game.

Pretty good. 4/5.