Alright, alright. I have been very generous towards the EA DLC machine in the last handful of my expansion reviews. Those were packs that I use in my everyday usage of this game, so naturally I’m going to recommend them to whoever cares. You want to know which pack I’ve literally only used once and then never again? I think you know where this is going.

Like I said, I’ve purchased all of these due to a self-imposed challenge and while this game pack does include new content for a variety of things, it’s just so circumstantial whether or not you’ll get any enjoyment out of it. Selvadorada is a new destination world meant for vacationing only, meaning that you can only visit it in the same vein as Granite Falls from the previous Outdoor Retreat expansion. What does this entail? Oh, you’re just a tourist who shows up to tomb raid in some randomly generated temple. Oops. 💀

And uh, that’s really it!! Yeah, not really getting any use out of this unless you want to play as Lara Croft, so there isn’t really much to talk about here. You can learn more about the culture here by interacting with the Sims who do live there, but just like the other tourist destinations, it quickly becomes your Sim’s entire personality. The Selvadoradian, and Batuu (When I fucking get you, Star Wars pack.) interactions just fill up your dialogue options no matter what, it’s actually kind of annoying. Leveling up the Archaeology skill means that your Sim will be bombarded with requests to authenticate random relics that you can’t turn off. So, they’ll just get their inventory filled forever with random junk. And to be honest, I really can’t attest for how well the inspired location, food, or interactions come across because I am not Latin American myself. From what I understand, it's a huge mix of several different countries confined into this one town. I do not know how accurately things like the Rumbaism dance represent what they were going for here with their first attempt at showcasing a culture outside of Europe/USA, but I’m pretty sure running amok in a foreign city where you are a visitor isn't really smiled upon like, anywhere. It's definitely created from a tourist's point of view only, which is likely disappointing for a lot of people.

As for the temple raiding itself, it’s rather boring. You can manually progress through the jungle with a few transitional windows of choice which sometimes net you random collectibles, but it’s always the same jungle no matter how many times you visit. Sometimes some paths are just blocked off for some reason, meaning you’ll have to leave and come back to get them unblocked. There is only one temple that randomly generates new traps and treasures every day. Passing through these obstacles is just a two click process of “investigating it”, then selecting whatever option has the green thumbs up and that’s basically all it amounts to. Repetition, baybee, let’s fucking goo!! I hunted for this one treasure for so long, it kind of felt like RNG was holding me hostage at gunpoint.

Completing the aspirations added from this pack will just net you better treasure rewards and better moodlets while at the damn museum, so there’s really no point in getting them at all. Skeletons can appear but they aren’t as interesting as they should be. I’d love to do crazy shit with them but it’s impossible, therefore they suck!!

It would be way nicer if you could actually live here since it is quite nice to look at compared to the rest of the game, but you can’t. It’s not that it’s broken or glitchy, it runs perfectly fine. It’s just fundamentally boring and is so segregated from everything else that you could play the game everyday completely forgetting that it’s installed in the first place. Genuinely the best thing that it added was this portable water bottle thing that instantly refills your Hygiene meter, which I use quite often because I am incredibly lazy.

At least I finally met Sans Undertale.

No creative naming with this one, they just said “no bullshit” Cats and Dogs. Damn, they were right. I cannot seem to recreate my own dog though, so this shit sucks actually!!

I find it so funny that as soon as something involves pets, game developers lock the fuck in. Take the dog escort missions in FF7 Rebirth for example, just a straight up renaissance of craft for such a miniscule event in that 100 hours of game. Petting a dog is now seen as a mandatory mechanic right next to photo mode and fishing, vaporizing the psychos on r/petfree into ashes. Cats & Dogs is no different here as it adds in so much extra content just for the sake of celebrating pets. New artwork, decorations, furniture, the paintings that your Sims can make, food recipes, and even introducing an entire Sims Instagram feature just for taking dumbass photos of your cat. They knew what they were doing and the pets are integrated pretty well. They genuinely add to the life of your Sims by being their friends, instead of being their props.

Not met without controversy of course, since The Sims 3 Pets included horses. A lot of horse girls dunked on this one for only including what’s listed on the label. Personally, horses were nice for the open-world setting of The Sims 3 but that game came at the cost of your PC using your entire town’s electricity grid. So, I can see why they were left out initially. They’ve been added after the fact now so I guess it doesn’t matter anymore. (I don’t have this one yet though.)

Even without horses, there is still a lot here to enjoy. Personally, the ability to craft whatever abomination you want using the CAS Editor is funny enough. They come with their own traits that range from beautiful baby boy to dubious asshole. And of course, they can breed and create their own generational legacies depending on how crazy you want to get with it. I have seen some randomized Eldritch beings walking about, baiting me into adopting them. If I had less self control I would put them out of their misery THE FUN WAY, but it's gonna take more than a purple, sweater wearing dog named Goober to sway me into this responsibility. I think that’s why a lot of the stray animals are sick to be honest, they’re pulling on your heart strings. Do not fall for their manipulation!!

As for how they actually play and function with the rest of the gameplay, it’s overall rather smooth. However, you can’t play as them which I find to be a bit of a bummer personally. Thankfully, mods exist and I need to use them because I am an impatient person. I don’t really need to create a whole life story for each pet I make, but it’s just nice to manually cancel out when a pet is being annoying instead of waiting for your Sim to yap at them about it. You can level up a Pet Training skill to make it a bit easier to deal with the annoying parts of owning a pet though. There’s also the Friend of the Animals Aspiration which rewards you with befriending random pets a lot easier, so that is just itching a scratch I know some people have. You can also collect feathers by sending a cat to destroy the local wildlife. Ummm, don’t do that in real life.

Lastly, in a similar vein to the Dine Out expansion, you can buy and run your own Veterinarian office. If you don’t mind watching animals vomit and pee everywhere, sure. I would say that it runs a lot better than owning a restaurant, although it still comes with it’s own chaos. Managing employees who sit around and do fuck all can be a bit of a chore, but you’ll be doing most of the work anyways. Figuring out what is causing an animal’s illness is like solving a little puzzle, which is neat for a time but it’ll eventually come down to memorization at the end of the day. Since you build skills for healing animals, I found it really nice to use it on my own pets so that I wouldn’t have to travel to the vet office every time they fell ill. The only way that pets can die though is through old age, so don’t worry about seeing some doggy dog death that you won’t expect. However, it's all fun and games until Grim shows up on their birthday and then I want to beat his ass. Definitely not a pack that you need if you obviously don't care about having animals in your game, but it's a fun one nonetheless.

And that vet office? There’s one automatically placed in Brindleton Bay, which is based off of New England. I got my Dunkies watching my dog tear my couch apart. This shit is awesome actually!!

I don’t care what conservatives say. Parenthood does, in fact, cost a lot of money. This game pack was $20 for instance. I would be richer without kids!!!

I mean in all seriousness, this pack did not add children to the game, but I couldn’t help myself. Children and Teenagers were always there, but there was never really anything special that they could do. They were more like smaller humans that went to school and were limited in their gameplay functions. Shells without a soul or personality. Ugh, and you gotta feed them and shit!! BARF!!

This pack remedies a lot of the uselessness that children had before by simply tossing in a bit of personality to the mix. It doesn’t seem like a humongous change on paper, but you’d be surprised to find out that a lot of what gets added here bleeds into almost every second of the gameplay. That is if you’re the type of Simmer that isn’t batshit insane and actually enjoys keeping their families alive. Before there was really no reason to play as your child sims, but now this gives them things to do.

It’s generally the little things. Items and clothes specifically dedicated to them, interactions with other kids, parental discipline, after-school projects/clubs, the occasional emotional turmoil that we all felt when we were the ages of 10-16, temporary phases, etc. It really does not sound like much, but it is a pack that is running on all cylinders at all times. Children and Teenagers are given a meter towards different personality traits that will eventually shape how they would act as an adult. For instance, a child who’s been taught Good Manners will end up being a way nicer person. Or a child with less Emotional Control, will probably become an incel or some shit. Do better, parents. In reality, they’re adult form is actually kind of an asshole and can only be prevented by actually putting in some effort towards teaching them better traits.

It’s a simplified system and not much of it makes that much sense. Everyday each of your children will ask one of their parents for advice and you’ll get a pop-up like this. You have zero idea what each option entails (until you get a higher Parenting skill), but they will all increase one trait and decrease a different one. It is a very binary system, but I think anything more advanced would burn a lava hole into the game’s core and straight through your PC’s hard drive. In all honesty, my save file is a 100 Baby Challenge and I tend to just randomly pick each time they come up as they can be rather intrusive sometimes. But, there are better ways of increasing a Child’s trait if you need to do it that badly. Different actions that a child does will also increase some traits as well. So if you’re badly hurting for them to be the best citizens ever, just make them do all of the chores non-stop everyday, get A+ grades, and participate in several hobbies. That will break them into something, most definitely. They’re gonna go really far, haha.

Other things: There is the Super Parent Aspiration, as well as the actual SKILL for Parenting. Who would have thought? If you play with the younger life stages, it’s absolutely the first skill that you’re probably going to max on complete accident and it’s not a bad one to have. It’ll unlock this thing called Full Parent Mode which prevents your Sim’s needs from decaying over a certain amount of time, making it way easier to get a lot of shit done. The best part is the Super Efficient Parenting action though, it will give them the midas touch and instantaneously make the kids happier by feeding/changing diapers/cleaning all in one go, instead of having to do them one after the other. Very handy when you have 7 kids in your household like it’s the set of a sitcom show.

So for family enjoyers of the Sims, this one is considered to be like, the quintessential DLC and I would agree for the most part. I think part of me is just so used to seeing those little advice pop-ups that I kind of just glaze over them for the most part. Most people aren’t psychotic like me and play this game casually, so it will shine brightest when you’re playing it just as intended. As someone who played the game at launch, yeah, these new kids would absolutely stomp the old ones and it’s not even close.

Honey, they put RPG skill trees in our Sims game.

In an effort to bring a bit more of the thrill of The Sims 2 without the abrupt bluescreen crashes of The Sims 3, we have now come to the first of a handful of occult related expansion packs. Look, I am not the biggest occult stan.. never fully seen Twilight even as a joke, I will admit. Some fans would disagree and claim they’re like the air they need to breathe or else they shall perish if we don’t get them all as soon as possible. I am never going to sneer at a different playstyle, but I’ve also never quite seen the appeal at the same time. My Sim can no longer go outside in the sun, this is not revolutionary. That is just everyday life for the average Gamer.

That being said, we’re on that immortality grind mothafuckas!! Vampires do not need to sleep or PISS, so there is no other perfect time than now to force your Sim into maxing all those Skills you still have left over. All you have to do is locate the nearest vampire and simply ask for them to change you. Although I recommend avoiding Vladislaus Straud as much as you possibly can. He has what I would call ugly disease and therefore he was killed almost immediately in my save file. Since Vampires can’t die of old age, it was the only way to make sure his bloodline ended early. No thank you.

With that Skill tree though, you can unlock more powers to use that are actually quite interesting. The more powers you use/more blood you drink, the more XP you get and then those lead to levels like a normal video game. Basically anything that is annoying can be eventually rectified through this, such as becoming immune to sunlight. However, those abilities come at a cost; for every power-up you obtain it must be accompanied by a weakness in order to prevent you from being an unstoppable God. The weaknesses aren’t really that big of a deal though, it’s stuff like needing to drink more often or having to sleep in a coffin, etc. You can make it so your Sim gets super sad about having to drink blood. Shut up, you crybaby!! There’s one where you will take more damage in the sun though, I don’t know why on Earth anyone would ever take that one. Maybe for hard mode, pain and suffering I guess.

I really only dabbled in the whole Vampirism bit for my challenge, so I purchased the perks that mainly revolved around survivability and convenience. There are some diabolical powers at play here though, like randomly decreasing a Sim’s needs? I love the idea of watching a Sim eat a sandwich, then instantly dropping their hunger meter back to starving. Just keeping them in a constant state of joyless waste. Of course, there’s also turning into a frickin’ bat and converting other Sims into Vampires. I went for the Good Vampire Aspiration first, then the Vampire Family one after. Oh, the fall from grace she had when it turned out that transforming others is not actually consensual, and her new siblings were in fact very unhappy with their new lifestyle. Sorry!!

There’s also the addition of Forgotten Hollow, but I’ve never personally lived there. It seems rather quaint and gothic of course, but I’ve never enjoyed that it’s always nighttime there. Perfect for a vampire connoisseur though. Overall, it’s a good bit of fun for a while but I have no intention of staying a Vampire forever as they do not, in fact, sparkle. Yes, I turned a bunch of my friends into them and then cured myself LOL. Sorry again!!

Oh hey, bat sex.

Finally we are getting into the meat and potatoes. A divine course of DLC that’ll make even the most serious dollar sign min-maxxers shudder in fear.

Ring ring, who’s calling? Oh, that guy you met once and never again. He wants to know if you’ll go to GeekCon with him and dress up as Star Wars characters. A random townie just crashed the rocket ship there and literally exploded (didn’t die), so you bought the festival related SWAG to commemorate this fine afternoon. They’ve concocted the perfect sample of stupidity to coax my Sims out of their house. Apparently it’s karaoke bars and dumb little stupid events that happen every other week. There is nothing like getting a bunch of Sims together and watching them interact on their own, whether it’s bettering their lives or destroying them. This is why I play the stupid, haha funny gibberish game.

The bulk of this pack is stored within a new city, which you can travel to at any time. Living there will require you to foreclose your house and gulp.. become a renter instead. Unfortunately, you cannot edit the foundation of the pre-made apartments, but most of them are rather lavishly gigantic. We’re talking sitcom levels of large, despite being the cost of a pair of shoes per month. Video game escapism, my beloved. It does however come with the added addition of shitty annoying neighbors. Video game escapism, denied. I like the busyness of the city, but I still prefer to just travel there instead. With it having 4 districts of different things to do and an assortment of foods to eat from different cultures, I’m still slowly working my way through the Collectibles that it added. There’s just a lot to do in the city, baybee. I barely go to the other towns in this game, San Myshuno is where it’s at.

I haven't really talked about the furniture in these packs and that’s mainly because it's.. well, just chairs and couches and whatnot. I do not claim to be or even exist on the same level as Bob from Bob’s Furniture. I’m much more the type of person that just kinda throws things I like together. Orange walls with green couch cushions, ya know? One look into my Sim’s house will make even the most sane individual break. But, guess what you sicko Animal Crossing enjoyers, this pack includes a gigantic superstore’s worth of furniture, not to mention the added abilities to perform street art to scribble all over your walls and lawns with. And don’t even get me started on Lot Traits man, give your house a literal personality so that it’s easier for your Sims to learn certain skills or encourage certain behaviors while they’re there. There are now more than a million different ways to make money that aren't just going into a rabbit hole and disappearing for 8 in-game hours. I would consider this to be a pretty big root for the tree that is this game as each pack created after this one just adds more oomph to it.

The only thing that genuinely annoys me is that they added a Singing Skill. It’s not the skill that annoys me really, but my Sim just loves to whip out her best Ariana Grande impression whenever there’s nothing to do. It’s like she’ll die if she doesn’t do it once every two hours. But other than that, this is a beefy hamburger of an expansion pack that adds a ton of content from aesthetics to actual gameplay. I don’t think I go a single session without using it, so I would think this one is pretty bang for your buckaroos.

What's on the menu tonight, boys? Invisible food.

So, I'm not really sure if this used to be as buggy as it is now or if I just never noticed, but taking your Sims to a restaurant is kind of a miserable experience. Like, it's an all day excursion. Take PTO because you're gonna be stuck there until 3:00 AM when you really just wanted to go on a date night with your husband. I'm not really sure what the issue is honestly, maybe all of the furniture just short circuits all of the Sim's brains and gives them stupid idiot disease, or quite possibly they all have some serious ADHD because it's almost impossible to keep them seated for even 5 minutes.

The waiter is a pregnant alien and the chef is a robot who keeps shutting himself down mid-shift. There's a thunderstorm outside so everyone is running around in fear. The bathroom is too far away so there's piss puddles all over the floor. The guy sitting next to me keeps eating everyone else's food. I ordered my appetizer 6 hours ago and it still hasn't come. An old person just died in the lobby and a celebrity is screaming songs into the open mic. It's nothing but CHAOS!!!!

I appreciate the sheer amount of possibilities that could happen, but I seriously don't recommend bringing more than one Sim to one of these things. It's funny for like 10 minutes, but it does quickly turn into a migraine. I went to a restaurant everyday to fulfill the Experimental Food Collection, and that's really it. She ate 3 meals in one sitting each time and can now craft the most disastrous artisanal foods you can think of. Squid tentacle à la Mode if you will. Nothing but the finest cuisine over here, except for when you order something and it comes invisible like the waiter is pulling the biggest prank and charges you for it anyways. Dickhead!!!

Aside from that, there's really nothing else other than the gameplay. Having no Aspiration is a bit weird because in this pack you can actually own your own restaurant, unlike the Spa Day pack. You can actively choose the staff and take care of your guests, which is rather nice but there's really no incentive to do it without an Aspiration though. (Unless you really want to live your restaurant owner fantasy). Being in direct control of the operation helps it run a bit better and you're actually paid for a full night. I'd definitely rank this above Spa Day even with the bugs just because of that alone.

I like the ideas a lot with this one but it's probably the buggiest pack out of them all. It's been patched multiple times throughout it's entire lifespan and it seems they just can't figure out how to get it to function normally with all the other DLC throwing wrenches into the Sim AI. With every other expansion pack added into your game, this one breaks again. It's not a super necessary pack to have for a full experience of this game, so I wouldn't buy it again personally. However, if you're a true psycho you can feed unsanitary sushi to your guests and literally murder them with it, so there's that.

Maybe Dine In instead.

Man, they don’t make ‘em like they used to.

For all this time, I mainly avoided the whole club aspect of this expansion pack thinking that that’s all it really added. Eh, whatever!! Maybe I don’t want my Sim to enjoy group outings with friends. But then you pull yourself back a little bit and you realize that this pack is like the main reason why there’s any LIFE in the LIFE SIMULATION game at all. I was a fool, but now.. Now I am with my tribe. In terms of completionist content for my own sick pleasure, there’s just 1 new skill and 1 new aspiration so that part is whatever. It's the actual gameplay elements that shine the brightest here though.

No, really. Arcade machines, dance floors, foosball tables, bar nights, dance clubs, cafes, civilization itself? All of that was added in this pack and it kinda makes me wonder what on God’s green Earth were Sims doing before it. Watching paint dry? Slowly aging until the sweet release of death between the walls of their solitary home? While it’s still a bit of a pain in the ass, the group mechanic allows you to control multiple Sims at once to get them to actually interact together while out. Activities can be done with several Sims, like they actually like being around each other. Before you would just kinda hope they’d sit together at the dinner table so you could have some semblance of normality in your escapist life, but sometimes that wouldn’t be where the cards fell. My wife would eat dinner on the toilet while I sat alone in the dining room. Well, not anymore!!!

They worked their pussy off creating Windenburg. It’s gotta be one of the best towns in the whole game in terms of aesthetics and things to do. It has a shit ton of empty lots to build off of for the most nasty Sims architects out there. You can visit an old antique house and learn the backstory of a random ghost couple for no reason other than.. they felt like putting it into the game? Like, it sounds stupid but I’m being serious when I say they don’t do stuff like this anymore. I’m sure as I keep reviewing these packs, there will be less and less to talk about because they get more streamlined by release order. The Sims is pretty well known for having genuinely bananas lore and questionably canonical timelines. Stuff like this just reminds me of how charming this series is at its center, even if it doesn’t really feel like it anymore.

For the club feature itself, bro I can’t tell you enough how alive I actually felt putting one together. They give you so many goofy ass options to work with in terms of club requirements and activities. It’s the kind of core dumbassery that I love experimenting with in The Sims, just a breeding ground for chaos to lay waste across your town. As your club grows more powerful, the more perks you can buy like a completely diabolical Fallout: New Vegas build. You short on change, buddy? Get your 8 friends to paint for you without a break, then collect their money. No need for romance when we’re all doing the do. I’m beating up the elderly AND cleaning up the beach at the same time. It's not like they're gonna help with that. The rewards for skill boosting are unbelievably broken in exploitative ways that I will be taking full advantage of. If I want to max a skill in under an hour, I can just buy all the skill boosting perks and then have my friends come over to watch me show off until it's 100% done.

And look, you can bark at me all day long about how this all sounds like it should have been base-game content and yadda yadda, I agree. I get it man, whabby doo, but we don’t live in this utopia that you speak of. Your dreams are just dreams and I am not the CEO of EA. You can't really talk about The Sims without someone booing and throwing tomatoes about DLC and I don't disagree with those criticisms. But, I am the ruler of my own wallet and I say that video games were actually a mistake for mankind. I am the schmuck who bought the expansions so that you don't have to, my brave soldier.

My definitive answer is that this pack is one of the better packs in the entire line-up. Is it the best ever? Naw, there's some fancier dinner plates coming down the line, but people might really enjoy the social aspect of this one and those people can use this information however they will.

Gang, gang.

!!! MOVE OVER GAMERS, WE GOTTA GET THIS REVIEW OUT BEFORE CHRISTMAS !!!

You want to know the funniest thing about being a kid? It’s being ignorant to the fact that some things are just horseshit, and boy was kid me quite the ignoramus. Revisiting this game, it’s not like I didn’t know what I was getting myself into but there was some sick part of me that wanted to relive a good moment of my life in the one Spyro game I have the most unblurry memories of.

Well it turns out, those memories end at the 2nd level and nothing beyond it. Even the borderline racist NPCs somehow scrubbed from my mind. There’s no shot I finished this as a kid, and my memories kept the better portion of the game in stasis forever. They’re not good levels per se, just functionally better. After that the game quickly hurtles closer towards dystopia the further you get into it. To put it quite bluntly, this game is just not finished and couldn’t be more of a beacon of developmental hell. Except this was from the PS2/Gamecube era back in 2002 and.. yeah folks, crunch and corporate shenanigans have been happening our entire lives. This shit was made in the same time it takes to grow a human fetus and still somehow ended up being more of a disappointment.

With vast levels that are emptier than corn fields and enemies with zero life put into them. There’s no variety to be seen, just small ranged dinosaur and big dinosaur who make this sound when you murder them. If this game has achieved anything, it’s that it is at the very least sometimes funny. But you won’t be laughing when the camera 360 no scopes itself into the wall of the level design, launching you off the platform that you’re currently standing on. On normal hardware this game runs like it’s being squeezed through a tube, but even while playing it through unscrupulous means there still feels like there’s some sort of wind resistance pushing against Spyro as he charges. He feels like he weighs a metric ton, which makes platforming a goddamn nightmare. If that’s not enough for you, throw in some magic floors that clip through your body, and mini-games made by Satan himself. The draw distance is abysmal. You want to go on your cozy little gem collectathon, but they removed Sparx’s little hint clues which means you’ll be scouring all of these gigantic levels for much longer than you want just for that one last gem to appear out of thin air because it glitched out the first time. It's actually a marvel of achievement that speedrunners were able to figure out how to beat this game in 1 minute, the amount of time it takes for the veil of nostalgia to be sucked from your eyes.

What’s it all for, you may ask? Well, some of the most weirdly named Dragonflies I could have ever imagined. They really just pulled from anywhere with these guys. “Hey, it’s Karen!!” Spyro says, but the subtitle says “Rhett.” I can’t believe my childhood hero Spyro just deadnamed that dragonfly. And like I said, these issues get more prevalent as the game keeps going. With each level, the more unfinished it feels. The worlds get emptier with more nonsensical tasks that barely function. Assets aren’t re-used, but still uninspiringly pulled from previous titles in an effort to save time. Unlockable powers that get used less and less, voice lines completely missing in some instances, etc., etc. It all culminates into a final boss fight that not even I could foresee. A baffling affront to God himself, just a gauntlet of atrocities deep fried through the Christmas deadline conveyor belt. Spyro died and we killed him.

Keep this game dead, do not “reignite” it. There is no redemption to be had. Lock this one in the vault and treat it like a lesson. One day you too could make your own Enter The Dragonfly, and you don’t want to be that guy. Sometimes things should be left as memories in our heads, never to be revisited. This is a ghost for a reason, so fear it.

Now for the end of this review, I feel like it’d be only fitting to just stop talking in the middle of my

Within the first 5 seconds of freedom this game gave me, I immediately picked up the kitchen knife and used it in probably the worst way possible. The game didn’t stop me and it also didn't seem to care, and neither did I. But that was probably the worst way possible to start this game, because as it dragged on for hours the main thought in my head was, “We were cooking on the first route” which should have ended the game. Instead I was trapped in a torture chamber of nonsensical solutions and horrible dialogue delivery, with an ending that wasn’t even interesting enough to be worth the painful drawl. The image of Daisy Ridley’s weird polygonal feet are scarred into my brain forever.

While I find the trial and error bit of gameplay to be rather neat, it’s done in such an excruciatingly painful way here. Every do-over lacks the ability to skip the cinematics so you’ll feel your body rapidly age with every scene you’re forced to watch on repeat. The lack of options your character gets to work with are frustrating and unrealistic. The characters shamble around like zombies and there’s zero way to speed up the process to get back to a later segment in the timeline aside from some line skips. I guess had they implemented such a silly concept then the game would quite literally be 12 minutes long. Instead, you sit through hours of trying out the smallest changes, only to awkwardly miss-click something and have to redo the whole process again. With every make-out session your wife assaults you with unprompted at the beginning of every loop, the more reptilian I felt while playing this game. How icky it made me feel while I slowly became an iguana.

You’d think a game that allows you to stab the shit out of your wife in the first five seconds would have literally anything to say about violence or impatience or domestic abuse or literally anything? Maybe it’d point a finger at me and go, “You’re part of the problem!!” and question my immediate conclusion to stretch the game's choices to it’s most inhumane limits. Nope. It meant nothing, like it was just something cool you could do for the sake of it. Violence is actually the only way to siphon any useful information from any of the characters, in fact the peaceful communicative solutions don’t even open up until after you’ve murdered so it’s not like it’s not encouraged. But, it literally doesn’t acknowledge this as something awful nor does it affect your character in any real way. The game does not care, so why should you? Allowing me to start the game with the ability to do this really set itself up for failure. It never challenged my thought process, so I just simply progressed with not giving a shit. It's almost like game interactivity has a way of affecting the player if it's implemented in a meaningful way instead of just existing for "artistic" shock value.

At the end of the day, does it even matter? I went through all this effort just to land on a conclusion that I said out loud as a joke. When the twist happened and that joke ended up being the reality, oh fuck off. This is it. It’s just a game that let me murder my wife in the first 5 seconds of it and nothing else. Riveting stuff, guys.

How they got James McAvoy, Willem Dafoe, and Daisy Ridley involved in this is insanely hilarious. They sound like they’re phoning it in the whole time, like they don’t even believe in this game’s bullshit themselves. It’s artistic, I’ll give it that. But, am I buying it? No. I ate chocolate mousse while a man screamed at my wife and hogtied her to the floor right in front of me. Neat.

Got around to playing this game the right way and I’m glad that I did. Disregard my first review as either a solo-player's point of view or just simply the insane ramblings of a madman. We’re KeyWeing as God intended now.

This game is playable in solo mode for sure, but it’s like asking your brain to work at a level it cannot simply comprehend. With co-op you get free range of your keyboard and a buddy that will share 50% of the backbreaking work with you. How else do you people think you get your mail? Not by people, but through the blood, sweat, and tears from the most overworked, underpaid, armless birds. At least they get the benefit of informal dress codes. Please excuse my dripless friend, he’s just not quite at my level yet.

There are 4 main level designs that vary in obstacles as the game progresses which is just enough variety that keeps the game extremely fun throughout its entire playtime, which is decently lengthened. It’s enough to get through in one session and can be stretched by rechallenging the levels for better rewards, hidden items, etc. There are bonus levels with different gameplay mechanics as well and they net you more tickets for your gold mine of Kiwi cosmetics.

I think what works the best for KeyWe is how there isn’t any Overcooked! or PlateUp levels of vitriol. All three are great games with similar co-op mechanics, but there’s equal opportunity for both players to actively help in each scenario here. You can’t really impede on the other or kill your friend, which makes it a real breath of fresh air. In fact, the only thing that impeded anything were the slight moments of online desync, but it wasn’t a big issue. I found establishing a level of communication and having to shout “1, 2, 3!” before simultaneously finishing a puzzle to be rather charming. We are considering speedrunning the game now, that's how Earth shattering it was for us.

The difficulties fluctuate without ramping up to impossible degrees. While it’s a relatively easy game overall, the later levels have a fitting stress factor for the hidden masochist inside of you. The final stretch is one big, satisfying gauntlet of all of the skills you've acquired throughout. It’s not that the levels are super difficult, they’re just stressful with really well-executed shit inducing anxious music to go with them. You're a professional at this point, but the music is making you second guess yourself. The OST is actually fantastic and I’d post examples but I can’t find it ANYWHERE!!! All I have is this old trailer to work with, but it uses one of the best songs in my opinion. Classic example of the composer giving it their all, even if it’s for a short goober game about bird mailmen. Never stop.

Anyways, play KeyWe. It’s ridiculously fun.

This game has a lot of potential, but I feel like the initial concept works against it. It’s a bit more mean-spirited, where you kind of hope something horrible happens to everyone and it actually needs to in order to progress. It’s a concept that unfortunately rips away all of the scariness and hilarity that most people would probably be looking for. Aside from a well-timed spawn, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Unlike the other game that this one will be compared to until the end of time, there’s no chance of organic comedy coming from your friends who are avoiding danger rather than looking for it. The point here is to hope that something kills everyone and that the camera man isn’t dicking around somewhere else while it’s happening.

I played the game for about 2 hours and feel like I’ve already experienced everything it has to offer. The upgrades it sells you are mostly cosmetic and the amount of views you get per video seem completely arbitrary. You’ll have some rounds of gameplay where everyone dies in the first 5 seconds, leaving you with 60% of film left and others where barely anything happens at all. The environments don’t really give you that much to play with and there’s no reason to wander off because there’s only one camera. Every day ends with an awkward movie experience where everyone sits around looking at the unedited footage and maybe sometimes you’ll hear a light chuckle under someone’s breath. It’s nice that they offered it for free, but I probably won’t go back to this one until it gets some major updates.

My third eye is open and it’s crying.

This pack seemed so obviously fine tuned to a mediocre experience that I’m sure someone out there might enjoy, but it’s a personal nightmare to me. There aren’t any new collections, but there sure are a handful of weird aspirations that delete my inner peace instead of inspiring it. You’d probably guess from the title, but it’s a pack that introduces the spa, and therefore tosses in everything from detoxifying tea to massages to meditation and yoga. But boy, am I far from relaxed.

Finally my dream job of re-organizing the bones of my neighbors through unlicensed massages is actually achievable, except they made it work in the dumbest way possible. You can’t outright buy a spa in the same way that you can a restaurant, so your Sim is meant to just show up and start massaging people.. just.. because they want to? Please do not tell the IRS of my grift, but there’s no shot I’m getting a W-2 for this. It’s weird in practice and also in function, since the spa has actual NPC employees working hard for their $7.50/hr. It feels like the equivalent of you squeezing behind a cash register at your local Walmart and accepting tips from the customers for letting them skip the line faster. It’s aggravating because the NPCs are actively competing for your space, when really you’re just an asshole, leaving you to constantly beg the customers to let you tickle them a bit with your fingers.

That’s honestly really it? You get the Wellness skill which gives your Sim super calming aura, I guess. They can teleport while meditating and that’s pretty goofy, but other than that there’s not much here besides the furniture. The neat thing is that apparently EA actually refreshed this pack sometime in 2021. (This is the only time they’ve done this. Probably the only time they ever will.) This refresh added Aspirations that weren’t there before and these were what I was forced to do. They are not fun because they play poorly.

It meant I had to pull off some MLM scams at the local spa by bringing people with me. Getting multiple Sims to do an outing together in this game is like pulling teeth and the spa locations have got to be the worst places out of them all. There’s yoga classes happening every 5 minutes, which distracts every Sim in the vicinity like they’ve been hit with a sonar thought wave. One brain cell, only yoga. Everyone drops everything they're doing in an instant and starts performing yoga outside even in torrential downpour. It made getting the massages I needed really aggravating. I ended up deleting the yoga mats and pondered locking all the yoga instructors into a 2x2 containment cell. I would have honestly been doing this town a service since we lost some neighbors who were forced to perform yoga in a snowstorm. God bless those poor souls.

The rewards are not really worth it because they just net you more money for performing spa work. Sir, I am a 2.2 Simoleon millionaire and you will never see me on this lot ever again. I’ll take the soothing super power though if it makes my Sim’s kids complain less while they’re around me. I’d skip this one personally, unless you’re super into granola.

I hope we see free pack refreshes more often though, but this was 3 years ago and that ship has probably SUNK. I've mastered true clairvoyance now and that is sensing when EA is trying to siphon more money out of my wallet and surprising them with a Home Alone death trap instead.

I am a charlatan, an utter buffoon. A fool in clown’s clothing, already messing up the order of my reviews. Outdoor Retreat is actually the first expansion to The Sims 4 and the laugh track that plays over my life is pointing at me in a never ending cacophony of agony. Is it that I went a little too hard on the fizzy juice or just that this is a pack that isn’t used very often?

That’s not to say that this pack is bad by any means. It’s just that the majority of its content is separated from what would be normal gameplay. It introduced vacations to The Sims 4 and a lot of what it has to offer is located in Granite Falls. This place is by far the best vacation spot in the game so far. The other two are dumpsters in comparison. I haven’t dabbled that much in the woods yet, but it’s a camping site where you can partake in bothering the wildlife and accidentally setting your Sims on fire with a fire pit. In fact, the first time I went here my Sim immediately died upon leaving so I actually believe the place is cursed by this version of Boo Boo Bear.

You could be chillin’ and minding your own business under the stars and suddenly a guy in a grizzly bear costume starts doing push-ups off to the side of your campfire, right in front of your children. The game and your Sim recognizes this person as a real bear, but he’s clearly a dude in a costume and his name is Clyde Johnson or some other randomly generated name. He’s talking to you, but he’s totally a real bear. He’s stealing from the plate of hot dogs you just made as we speak. No one knows his secrets, but he has an agenda. Either Granite Falls is the location of the Sims furry convention or this is just a mystery left in the shadows never to be fully uncovered.

There is also a hermit that you can befriend if you follow the correct paths. I haven’t met them yet and I don’t know if they’re as weird as Clyde, but what I do know is that they’re going to be the next target in my 100 Baby Challenge. They let you fish for rare fish and collect rare bugs like Snow White without the 7 dwarves. I’m going to their house literally right now and bringing the bear with me.

I’m also a bug guy, if I were a Pokémon Gym Leader, I’d let a bunch of kids kill me in the first 1 hour of the game if it meant I could be a Bug Type Leader. This expansion adds the Insect collection that works pretty similar to the collectibles in The Sims 3. Like, they kinda just spawn wherever and then your Sim comes and yoinks them. Ooo yes, enjoy your little glass hut you will now live in forever my pretty little beetle guy. They even got one for the weebs too, look everyone can be happy! I can’t attest for how hard this collection is because I still haven’t finished it, but I doubt it’s anything significant. I’ll just live in the woods for 8 Sim Weeks until I find them all. My children haven’t seen me in years but I will have this awesome collection to add to my basement.

Holy shit, it’s also 4/20 I just realized. Light up that herb baby, we got the Herbalism skill. This works attached to the Gardening skill and helps you identify plants in the wilderness. There are herbs now that are either healthy or toxic, and the only way to find out is to either eat them caveman style or train for your Herbalism PhD. Although, the toxic ones only make your Sim sick and can’t actually murder them. I don’t think it’s that super useful, aside from being able to make herbal remedies on the stove that instantly fill your piss meter or something. No longer do I have to shower when I can just drink a potion that retracts the sweat back into my glands, so I guess I would say it’s not completely useless. There is this weird glitch right now though where if you own a grill outside, your neighbors will just autonomously cook herbal remedies on it and then leave them on the ground. Every now and then I look in my backyard and there’s just piles of jars of this crap just sitting out there. I think in honor of this review I am now going to start drinking whatever horrible concoction they leave instead of just selling them. Godspeed to my Sim.

Aside from that it also adds some really nice features that you can take with you, like a tent. I can just buy a tent and sleep anywhere I want now and not a single other person can say anything to me about it. I got shit to do and my Sim is tired but I’m not leaving and coming back; whip out that bad boy and have a snooze right in the middle of the restaurant. Combining this with the reward trait you get for clearing this pack’s one Aspiration is also pretty wise, as it allows your Sim to enjoy camping no matter what and never complain about it ever again!! You could be homeless and they’d still have a ball.

So while this pack is weird and mostly segregated, it’s still pretty good for the little things it adds. The items you can make and take with you can benefit other aspects of gameplay, at least if you’re me torturing your poor Sim to go through the Olympics of Simming. All in all, it’s just a funny little camping pack you can use whenever you get bored of looking at the four walls you force your Sim to live in. I think I am going to befriend the Bear now, I have some experimenting I want to do with him.

I am on a bender right now, so I’ll slowly start to review (almost) every Sims 4 expansion. The ones that I own, at the very least. I have been partaking in a self-imposed 100 Baby Challenge, but added completionist elements to it in order to spice it up. (All Aspirations, Collectibles, and maxed Skills on one Sim.) Because of this, I am having to use pretty much all that every expansion has to offer in one single save file. This save file is years old now and is on the verge of black hole collapse, but it’s still standing even if it’s got wobbly knees. I will not be starring these reviews though. As much as I would love to have a 3-star middle finger looking graph on my profile, I really just don’t want to muck it up with a ton of DLC expansions.

Anyways, Get to Work? What are you, my mother-in-law?

Ah, the very first expansion in a long line of never-ending add-ons. The Sims 4 was known for having quite the rocky start with a pretty bare bones base-game that was lacking heaps of things that were eventually added in updates later. Get to Work seemed to be a call-back to The Sims 2 Open for Business and The Sims 3 Ambitions, which offered gameplay features for the sickos that get their thrills from working behind a cash register. Get to Work adds on to this by also introducing active career paths like playing as a Scientist, Doctor, or full-time Bastard.

I actually do really like this initially since most Sims careers are rabbit-holes. I can go to work with my Sim and watch them do home-wreck affairs in the office with the randomly generated neighbors that look like they fell out of a blender before coming to work. It’s got a shelf-life though. There’s only so many samples I can analyze, or patients to scan before I get bored. However, you get promoted a lot faster by gripping the bull by the horns and just doing it yourself. It’s just that after a long time you kind of realize it’s eating up the whole day… like real work. The Detective career expands on this a little bit by allowing you to go to crime scenes, but soon you kind of realize that the culprit is just always spawned into the crime scene before everyone else and you know it’s them every time. It’s funny though because you can release the prisoners for no real reason. I don’t know why you’re in the slammer bro but I want to get home early tonight so go on, GIT!!

I think the lack of an aspiration is what disappoints me in particular though. You would think there’d be a few that were attached to the careers they added, but nah for some reason. Without that there wasn’t really any need for me to pursue these career paths that deeply. I’m not gonna spit at added gameplay elements though. I play The Sims for the life simulation after all, so even if I don’t particularly have an interest in curing Sim cancer, I can at least appreciate that I have the ability to do so. I can see why people would enjoy the routineness of the tasks you’re given on the job. Plus, you can also just send them to work without going yourself and it’ll play as normally as it usually does.

This pack also introduced several unique collectibles though and also Aliens, which are what I would consider to be a staple to The Sims. The aliens have some diabolical social interactions, like erasing the entire memory and relationship panel of a targeted Sim. They disguise themselves as humans and the only real way to discover the truth is by seducing them and finding it out after the fact. They sometimes randomly abduct you in the middle of the night while you frantically try to cancel out the interaction. They will impregnate your husbands!! Absolute menaces to society, but I love them anyway.

Other things: Magnolia Promenade is one of the worst towns in the game, but not the worst. Only 4 empty lots meant for retail properties, so it just doesn’t breathe any sort of life from it. I find it so odd that there’s buildings drawn onto the map where other empty lots could have gone. I guess it’s nice that there’s a designated area to put your retail store instead of using a lot in one of the other neighborhoods though. I haven’t actually dabbled into the Photography skill yet, but it’s funny to fill your walls with horrid photographs and be reminded of them every time you enter Build Mode.

Also, baking! So long Hamburger Cake, we’re having Rainbow Gelatin tonight baybeeee.

It’s honestly not half bad for a first expansion, but in hindsight it’s also not that impressive either. They use a lot of these gameplay elements in future expansions with careers that are more varied with better rewards. There are a lot of expansions like this though, which I’ll get into when I get to them. You’ll experience parts of them once and then not really ever again. If you’re looking to expand your game through DLC, there are better packs that will give you better bang for your buck in my opinion.

I know people cream their jeans about the first Psychonauts game but that wasn’t really my experience with it. Big uppies to the visual style and really unique level-design, but the controls and platforming were uhhhh… POOP?? It was still a really fun game, but I just didn’t find it to be the game that everyone held up so high at the time. There were things I found odd with it like how some powers were only useful for short sections of the game and then never again, and generally just how annoying it was to platform and move around. The story though? That shit rules, dog. Psychonauts uses everything in its crayola box bussy to personify ideas and mental concepts into living designs, be it through the enemies or the overall builds of the levels as they shapeshift around you. The levels were just as much characters as the characters were, and the exploration was rewarded with interesting character writing that was shown instead of told without force feeding you a novel of it at the same time. It’s a game that I wish I liked more and I think I’m only babbling about it because I reviewed it when I was new to this site and didn’t really understand how to barf up how I felt in words yet.

Anyways, this is a review for Psychonauts 2 and the short of it is that it was by and large a tremendous upgrade from its predecessor. My main gripes revolving around the game’s controls and camera angles flew right out the window pretty much immediately. Movement and platforming was so buttery smooth and that dodge roll they gave Raz might as well have renamed him Rizz instead. I was so happy that they gave most of the essential powers in the first few minutes, allowing you to play around with them from the get go. With the added addition of the new enemies, now just about every power has a place on the table, allowing you to dish out pain in any way that you see fit in the moment. While there are particular enemies that require certain powers to be exterminated, the Pyrokinesis and PSI Blast abilities still carried most of the weight. The Time Bubble power is pretty much a must have moving forward, and the upgrades to all of the abilities makes them so much more useful than some of the abilities from the first game. My only minor gripe with the combat was having to assign powers mid-battle through the power wheel. For whatever reason I just would not budge from removing Levitation from LT and anytime I had to remove it during a wave of Panic Attacks and Enablers, I did audibly groan but that only happened a few times in the late-game. I definitely appreciate the challenge even if it meant swapping hotkeys like I was playing a speedrunner’s version of ball in a cup. However, hitting the objects that dropped health would send them into the fucking stratosphere sometimes, which made them pointless in my time of dire need. I would say that my least favorite boss fight was the plant one just because it was probably the most restrictive, but that’s one boss out of several who generally made for some really fun segments.

Aside from this game basically Kingdom Heartsing me by being a direct sequel of a 2nd game that I don’t own the console to, it was still a groovy time from start to finish. While none of the levels hold their own version of “Milla’s Secret” nearly at the same intensity, it was still a rather warming story about a group of friends working through their regrets with the help of Raz. It’s a story that still “went there”, just in different aspects. I don’t personally need the most fucked up thing to happen that lands this game into another 4,000 Top 10 Darkest Moments in video games lists until the end of time for it to be compelling. People are still DYING, Kim. I found the deep dive into the other Psychonauts to be rather interesting as it helped build the world that exists outside of the levels to a higher detail, closer to the ones that represent the actual brains where all the showmanship is. Of course the actual brain levels are still the best part of the game too and a whole heaping of them really delivered. I found both the cooking and concert levels to be the stand outs, as they represented the chaotic unraveling, or re-raveling, of their mindscapes so well. Like honestly, is the character losing his damn mind through sensory overload or am I, because that was quite the adventure into horrible ASMR that I didn’t expect to fall into.

And that’s where this series really shines because who else is crafting level design in a way that really puts you in the shoes of it’s characters in the same way that Psychonauts does? Where it really asks you to maybe reflect on your own trauma by dousing you in colors and sometimes difficult climbing; where mental healing and overcoming your obstacles is truly the ultimate goal at the end of the day. As someone who has mental illness in my family, it’s such a tender way of showcasing forgiveness for not just someone else but also yourself. It’s exquisite art design that is packed in just about every crevice and corner with some sort of metaphorical punch to each character’s inner turmoil, whether they have an addiction, horrible regrets, or unimaginable shame. There was care in connecting the platforming mechanics to the overall visual storytelling that combines into this whirlwind of gameplay that tells its story, with narrative twists that really make ya go “ZOINKS”. Interactivity is so fucking cool, bro!!!!

With that too, the game still has its comedic beats of course. The comedy is still written in a way that isn’t competing with the more downer sides of the plot because it’s written in a way that understands when each tone has its place to shine and both lift the cutscenes up without overshadowing each other. That is an aspect of both games that still rings very true. Unrelated to this though, Raz is voiced by Richard Steven Horvitz who also voices Billy from The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, which made his blood curdling screams that he makes upon falling off a ledge really funny to me for some reason. Dying really wasn’t an issue because I genuinely laughed every time he screamed, as horrible as that sounds.

Related to Raz’s voice though, my real complaint of this game, that is still rather minor, is that Raz honestly talks way too much. I know that I’m 3 years late to this game, but I’ve been noticing a trend lately with any game involving a puzzle that if you don’t solve it in 2 seconds, the characters feel the need to just blurt out the answer for you as if you can’t figure it out for yourself. I am all for accessibility features for kids and everyone else but I really wish you could turn off tips without having to mute the voice audio in the menu. Sometimes I just want to examine what I’m working with before jumping into it and I don’t need Raz backseating the shit out of me- “I need to focus more with my Clairvoyance to-” at every chance- “I hear some emotional baggage around”- he could get- “I think I need to connect blank with blank in order to progress the level” Raz, please, I beg of you.

But all in all, this was a really good time and I felt like it would be. I really wanted to like Psychonauts 1 a lot more than I actually did and when I heard this sequel turned out great, I was more than excited to play it. Overall, I found the levels to be a lot more memorable here as well. I’m sorry Milkman fans, but I have made a solemn oath to never lie in a Backloggd review unless it was about how good I am at the games I’m criticizing. While this game does have things that irk me, they’re really not something that dings it in any grimy way. I guess they’re just more of a personal preference. But, having played this and Portal immediately after beating Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, it was a huge breath of fresh air. Give me more games like this pretty please, please, please please.

Also, stop posting this fucking meme every November, you goddamn selective assholes. Whoever made this image and then dropped it into the piss ocean that is Xitter needs to answer for their crimes.