I'm beginning to appreciate this modern indie multiplayer genre-trend that's emerging of "information-limited cooperative procedural VOIP action". See also: Phasmophobia.

Docking a half star for the strange combination of effect choices in the graphics pipeline. I guess it's a unique look, but thick cel-shaded pixelation isn't pleasant to look at.

It's fitting that a game about amassing huge swaths of treasure has Too Much Stuff in it. If I didn't ignore the vast majority of the side quest log in this, I'd have made myself sick of playing.

The way hunting and collecting treasures defines each of your excursions into the world molds a satisfying core loop out of this thing, although what kept me coming back was watching my friends lay the smack down on anyone who even so much as looked at me funny.

Conversational text-adventure game that feels like an episode in a Netflix Original anthology series.

I think I'm getting a little tired of subjugated-humanoid-robots-with-emotions stories though

A real smorgasboard of weird-ass design choices. It's got moxie and some truly psychotic systems - the 15 day life cycle of your characters and the choice to make traversing floors take a whole day chief among them - but the real-time combat annoyed me into oblivion by the time I fought the chapter 3 boss. Done for now.

Also another classic case of menu-system overload. Manage your party and sub-party inventory and layout to get items to cook food to restore stamina which constantly depletes and craft upgrades for your base that require skill checks that are gated behind other skills that require skill points gained from XP that are distinct from the other kind of points you get for sustained attack combos that let you respawn your characters when they die so you can go back into the dungeons after making sure your party sleeps back to full health or in bunks with each other to get special bonuses but don't forget to use the toilet or they'll piss themselves in the middle of the dungeon and raise their stress bar so they can't attack

I guess the plot is sort of interesting?

More of a board game than a mystery, but the art direction carries it further than the sum of its parts.

Love the density of clever systems, but drawing encounters, stories, and available items from essentially a stack of cards, combined with the sort of autopilot story progression, didnt do as much for me as I'd hoped.

Completed two playthroughs, died a few more times.

EDIT: Knocking this up to 4 stars from 3.5 because my experience of playing has only grown more fonder with distance. Really truly more than the sum of its parts.

Nintendo's greatest fidget toy (positive connotation) yet.

Tasty audiovisual climbing experience. A great payoff for anyone who wished Uncharted's climbing took effort.

Ends sooner than you might like it to, but exactly as soon as it needs to, given the actual mechanical scope of the thing. Eight hours or more with these mechanics would probably have players cursing the fiddliness, or growing annoyed at the swinging, or something.

goofy ass video game. yeah i dunno man it's fine
enemies that die real good? great. levels you won't get horribly lost in? great. the experience is kinda hollowed out by a weird, kinda flat difficulty curve with pretty dull bossfights. i played on "hard" with a controller, since, you know, n64.

The eerily slow, underwater-feeling movement, the deceptively sluggish combat, the minor mistakes and gotchas that set you back half an hour or more, even the brazen lack of mechanical transparency... it's all here, folks.

Cleared Normal and Hard championships.
Racing you can really sink your teeth into. Makes the act of jetskiing a visceral thing.

Brilliant, enthralling storytelling.
Most of the mechanical difficulty comes from not being able to see shit through the particle effects, though. Maybe I shouldn't have pushed the game beyond what my poor 2070 could handle, but it just looked too good, man.

2006

Neat. Story wore off on me past the halfway point, though.
Does a good job of keeping a constant forward momentum, but the things you're going forward through do start to blend together once you see all the pieces used.

It's nearly impossible to play this game without being sucked into the lumpy, spongey combat, somehow. Why bother going out there to explore and discover new things, if all that's really out there is a bunch of people waiting to be shot fifteen times before flopping over?