Sonic Team's biggest weakness as a developer, by far, is the way they obfuscate the fun latent in their own experiences. We're too deep into the 'kinda amusing but far too bloated and unpolished for their own good' era of 3D Sonic to say that NiGHTS is their worst example of this, but it comes to mind when I think about what the most SONIC TEAM sonic team game is.

NiGHTS is often talked about more like it's an experiential title. It's themes, narrative, and music can make it feel like that, but it's actually a pretty tightly woven arcade game too. I'd argue that's where most of the substance lies and that the trippy visuals are a sort of window dressing.

According to interviews, the game came about after an extensive, experimental developmental period where the developers were emboldened to experiment with 3D technology. After 3-5 Sonic games in a row, depending on who you ask, everyone wanted to make something new. An extensive plan for a large scale platformer based on dreams was developed, but after extensive prototyping, the flying mechanic that they had intended for the end of the game as a big, climactic moment proved to be the only one that was any good. Whoops.

I think this shows a bit in the final version. Awkwardly shoehorned in platforming and an extremely frontloaded story that might disincentivize further replays by mistake are the big offenders here, but these flaws are turned into double edged swords by excellent decision making on the part of the leadership. The awkward 3D controls are relegated strictly to a punishment for poor control of NiGHTS and the story, while brief and light, has enough thematic heft to stick with you. Maybe it'll stick so well that you'll try the game again even after a rough first playthrough.

The flying is pure, freeform fun once you get the hang of it, but it's like nothing else released before it or since, so it's a very confusing concept to try to come to grips with in a short amount of time.

This is going to sound like I'm bullshitting you, but I really do think NiGHTS's un-evenness doubles as a strength. It feels truly like a fragmented stream of consciousness that succeeds at feeling as surreal mechanically as it is aesthetically. There are a lot of games about dreams, but they're usually a visual element supplementing bog standard gameplay. Despite NiGHTS's display of what makes a satisfying arcade game, it can't be nailed down to many existing genres or gameplay loops, especially now. It FEELS like the type of out of body experience you'd have in a dream, and the way it shies away from explaining it's core concepts and lore work to instill this feeling too.

It also helps that there's a pretty kickass arcade game under the hood if you're willing to take that rank system seriously. Let me give you a tip: Instead of turning those orbs on your first go around through the level, pass the goal and go back around again. See how many orbs and chains you can squeeze out of a single loop. All of a sudden, the game design clicks into place and you're playing an exhilarating action game with a tight arcade loop in line with the best Sonic entries.



NiGHTS is definitely an acquired taste, but lean into it's absurdity and you'll be entranced. It's a genuinely great game with an uplifting meta-narrative, top notch visuals, and the best soundtrack out of Sonic Team's legendary discography.

Some dreams feel like they're over in a few minutes, and others can feel like a lifetime. I encourage you to take advantage of the fact that this one only ends when you let it.

I've been exhausted with modern gaming focusing on presentation over mechanics but this was a good wakeup call re: how much that stuff really matter. The game feels great to play but no amount of snappy movement tech and mind expanding gameplay depth can cover for Aang's slapshod model and completely busted animations. There's no chance of even remotely buying into the fantasy that you're actually playing as the Avatar here, and thus a lot of appeal goes with that.

The actual cartoonier characters fare a bit better, and the developers seem to get incrementally better and making the most of their low resources with the DLC characters, but none of this feels like enough. Nick has fun interactions and satisfying movement but I ultimately end up going back to Smash Bros every time because that really IS Sora smacking Kirby so hard he gets sent to another timeline. Not a mannequin dressed like him crashing into a guy in a Ninja Turtles suit over and over again until one spontaneously combust. That second fantasy is appealing in it's own way but in a "funny gif on tenor" kind of way, not a "devote hundreds of hours of your life to it" kind of way.

The pitch here only gets more novel in the era of damage spongey bosses and slow, meticulous movement: Kill every enemy as fast as possible, with the quirk that every defeat in an encounter powers up your sword. Use your extreme mobility to dart around the battlefield, killing smaller enemies so you can fell the larger ones in a single strike. Bosses that would take 15 minutes in this game's peers have the potential to take 15 seconds here with the right approach. It's a uniquely sega approach to 3D action games and while it's not a perfect translation of the Ninja-flavored 2D shoot-em-up the OGs were, it's repsectable in it's own right and that's more important. The demon sword feasting on the blood of enemies and eating away at the player's own health if they're too passive is both the perfect modernization and contextualization of a classic arcade timer, incentivizing active play in all the same ways with a sinister edge that fits the new tone like a glove.

The gameplay loop on paper is perfect, but the developers were averse to fleshing out anything outside of it. Shinobi isn't a 2D action game where you retain perfect control of your character, it's in 3D which requires the game to step in to make up the difference in precision possible with the extra dimension with a lock on system. It's shockingly unreliable for a game who's entire strategy revolves about picking out specific targets. If there's a horde of enemies on screen and you want to start with the small target in the back to build up cursed energy and stay on the move, good luck making sure the camera doesn't snap to any of the enemies in-between. Sometimes it doesn't even snap to enemies at all, with the camera staying stationary when you press the lock on with enemies behind you. That's the time you'd most need the game to snap to attention. It's the most imprecise tool possible in a game trying to encourage precise play. That's a long enough scarf for the game to trip over.

The core premise of your clan being possessed and you being forced to pick them off one by one is a good enough hook, but the story overall isn't fleshed out enough to work any meaningful drama from it. The boss squad makes for some entertaining fights and diverse personalities, but the first time the player meets most of them will be in these battles even as Hotsuma recalls cherished histories for them all.

Level design is of questionable importance when given a well fleshed out, varied combat system but for something this simple and to-the-point it was an opportunity to add some much needed variety. They only manage it some of the time though, with battles over bottomless pits or in narrow hallways that leave little room to skirt around enemy fire the best the game can come up with. Repeated level chunks in the same area don't help. Sometimes it feels like you've replayed a level a few times by the time you've gotten through it once.

Varied enemy design tries to pick up the slack here but despite there being some decent variety on the art side there's not a ton separating them all mechanically. You have smaller, floating turret enemies meant to be fodder, more standard types on the ground meant to gang up on the player and corrall them in with defensive play, and larger varieties of each that take a fully charged sword to take down effectively Even in the most varied cases you'd ideally be killing the enemies before they can get their gameplan going anyway so they all start to blend together.

Bosses usually are a highlight though. The lack of a tutorial is baffling at first but you'll quickly realize that the strict damage thresholds of the bosses are the method the game chose for teaching players about the Tate system. You simple won't make any meaningful gains on without understanding it. I'm not sure if the boss in the third level is even beatable without taking it in consideration. It's easy to see how this game got it's reputation, but the bosses flip on their head in a really cathartic way once you "get it". This might be the only action game that I've ever gotten an S rank on a late game boss on my first try. The way this game's systems flip from obtuse and frustrating to simplistic and empowering once the gap in understanding is crossed is the most extreme I've ever seen.

Once you "get it" it's a hard game to hate. It fufills the ninja fantasy well enough with it's focus on speed and precision and there's enough depth here to make for some pretty decent score attack fun here too, but a lack of polish and variety hold it back from it's true potential. It's got me interested in checking out nightshade, since I feel like it could really succeed with a second pass.

I've landed on a 7 for this right now but I could see it drifting lower. It gets the surface details right but it doesn't take advantage of it's position to add some much needed layers to JSR's formula, so it feels kind of redundant. The trick system just lacks nuance, so chaining a combo system across an entire map feels trivial after a few hours.

Despite that though the game has a lot of charm, awe inspiring character designs and story moments that got a genuine laugh out of me. The wrapper is great even if the chocolate is just okay. That's how I would describe a lot of sega's legacy library, so maybe this imaginative world and characters will be enough to inspire the next JSR-like, 10 years from now, and the cycle will begin anew.

Or maybe the one sega's making will blow our socks off and put that lingering desire to see the true potential of this IP to bed. A snowball has a better chance in hell, but there's still a chance, right?

The Last of Us 2 is, mechanically, more of a refinement then a reinvention, but the story is running the opposite goal of turning the themes of the first game on it’s head. Despite the grim visuals, setting and tone the first game is ultimately a story about love and redemption. The second game twists this on it’s head with the core relationship this time being a hateful one. Redemption is still core but with the heightened violence and cynical, sinister impulses driving the main characters it becomes a much harder conceit. Can the irredeemable still find peace? It’s a disturbing premise without as many stories to use as a blueprint. Threading this needle to a satisfying conclusion would require a steady hand. Naughty Dog took on a much more difficult concept when writing this story and while I feel they mostly stuck the landing, some of that challenge shows in the final game.

But before we get started on the execution of the story I just want to acknowledge how disagreeable of a premise this would be to anyone that loved that first game. I didn’t understand the enraged reaction but I really should have. The Last of Us is often grim and heartbreaking but it’s ultimately a crowdpleaser that leans hard on genre conventions with a few clever twists. The thing about tropes and conventions is that they become that because they stay satisfying to watch in a way that’s timeless.


This game is much more eager to make more of it’s own moves. Some of the more violent impulses of the human mind that we only saw flashes of in the first to their logical conclusion. Characters are built up and fleshed out only to die at inopportune and unsatisfying times. If The Last of Us was a story about how the bonds we form with others can carry us through the dark, tragic world, The Last of Us 2 explores what would happen if that light disappeared and how we stop ourselves from being consumed by the void twe’re left with.

What I’m saying is that they didn’t write a safe follow up to The Last of Us despite how easy that would really be. They wrote a story about the consequences of that game. The exact type of consequences that Joel and Ellie agreed to look the other way on in the first game’s acclaimed final scene.

But you can’t run away forever. I tend to cringe when games like The Last of Us are praised with terms like “adult” and “mature” strictly because of it’s aesthetic but I really don’t know another way to describe this shift in tone and messaging. Strictly talking from the evolution of the first game to the second, it’s like being hit with same doses of reality that come with adulthood. It’s a nice “next step” for Ellie’s journey as she turns 19 and a lot of the rocks that made up her life are taken away from her.



There will be spoilers from here on out, as a heads up.

In the opening hours of the game, Joel is killed and he doesn’t get the blaze of glory one might expect of characters from his type. It is unceremonious, random, and ugly. He is made to look weak and pitiful. The player is forced to watch it unfold from Ellie’s perspective. The game starts by offing one of the franchises’s pillars in a surprising way that leaves everyone uncertain of what happens next, and I couldn’t have thought of a better way to be put in Ellie’s shoes for this adventure. Joel’s death got a genuine reaction from me that none of the games in the first game did, and it synced my feelings with Ellie’s as she charged blindly and impatiently into Seattle to chase a group she knows nothing about and a individual she knows nothing about the whereabouts of.

This blind rage drives the story for the first half of the campaign and instead of things lining up for Ellie it’s full of false starts, dead ends and violence that rarely turns out to be necessary. If Joel’s death doesn’t lose players then this part serves to drive more of them away. I personally don’t mind a character transforming into something they’re not as long as it’s handled believably though and as far gone as Ellie is by the end of this first half it’s hard not to see how she got there. Her mind deteriorates as the violence she feels compelled to commit takes more and more of a toll on her with Ashley Johnson’s delivery becoming more withdrawn and stoic as the game goes on. The game has a unique sense of dread running through it as Ellie’s quest continues to go more and more off the rails and more bodies pile up. In a penultimate level Ellie starts to prioritize violence over the safety of her friends with a rationale that brings to mind addiction, and things almost never end well for those kinds of characters.

The tone is prevented from getting too bleak through flashbacks to her relationship with Joel, showing how much of a positive he continued to be in her life despite everything. It feels a little cheap for the game to have it’s cake and eat it too in regards to Joel but it ends up paying off so well it’s hard to be angry.

The game falls back into the scavenge - fight - scavenge cycle from the first game but with some refinements to both. The game is a little bit more open ended and systemic in most ways, with the exploration sequences having more optional content and the combat arenas being built with a lot more depth, angles to attack from and ways to sneak away and lose your enemies. Even more valuable than any collectable is the optional conversations you can find by taking a look around.

AI is more aggressive and new enemy types like dogs and sepharites keep Ellie on her toes by constantly tracking her position. Movement is more important than ever and these jungle gyms the designers built facilitate it perfectly. Being forced to engage with the level design more needed more complex and memorable arenas to compensate and thankfully Naughty Dog rose to this challenge. The arenas in this game stick out in my memory a lot more than the corridors of the first.

It can’t escape some old habits though. The AI is still a little too robotic and easy to trick, something that ends up undercutting this game’s ambition to make every enemy a more believable person. Sometimes the game will go long stretches without anything interesting to do only to turn around and lay the combat encounters on too heavily. It’s a balancing act that this game can’t figure out. Some more variety in terms of content would have helped with this a lot. The game tries with a new set of puzzles based around rope physics. A few of these are pretty clever which makes them better than the ladder and wood puzzles from the previous game but they didn’t dig into it enough.


Just as the other shoe drops Ellie the game switches perspectives and has us play as Abby, the daughter of the surgeon Joel slaughtered in the first game. This is immediately a solid way to reinforce the games themes by forcing us to understand the game’s bad guy and how she had similar motivations to Ellie. With Abby’s revenge completed though we’re forced to confront how hollow she feels after the fact and that Ellie doesn’t have any catharsis waiting for her at the end of this tunnel. Abby’s half boils down to realizing the cycle is a hollow exercise and pushing herself to escape it. It’s not clearly directly connected to Ellie’s quest aside from the beginning and the end but thematically they’re very much two sides of the same coin.

It’s a quest that’s a bit lighter and a little more noble and the tone shifts in turn. Naughty Dog’s famous setpieces were largely absent from the more grounded first half and make a return here. More fantastic settings than even the first game are employed and visually they’re more spectacular than ever. Abby and Lev’s trip over the sky bridge is bound to stick with me just for it’s imaginative setting and jaw dropping view. The combat encounters get a lot more vertical and complex. Abby trades out Ellie’s stealth oriented playstyle to one more reminiscent of Joel in the first game with abilities geared toward putting her on the offensive more often. It’s a little strange at first but being able to take more risks in this system ends up being a lot of fun.

Unfortunately the laser focused writing of the first half takes a hit. Abby’s more invested in her extended cast then Ellie is and not all of these characters are given the time needed to really shine. This is where the cracks of condensing the game into 3 days really start to show. The most believable relationships in the series are forged over a year or more with great detail and implications of what happens on and off the camera. Abby and Lev’s comradery is charming but it feels undercooked on the whole compared to the much richer relationships from the first game, the DLC or even other parts of this one.

Lev as a whole is a positive addition to the universe but his story leaves a lot to be desired. In both story and gameplay he flanks Abby from the shadows, so quiet that you forget he’s there until he makes a precision shot with his bow to turn the tide of tense encounters. He is awkward and withdrawn displays a lot of courage in trying to escape his faction. Courage that inspires Abby to do the same and forges a bond. But that’s part of the problem. Lev is only really there as an accessory to Abby’s story. His story tries to continue Naughty Dog’s more progressive slant by delving into some of the difficult circumstances that come with being transgender but this narrative is ultimately very one note and conveyed through exposition and developments offscreen over any of the craft that went into selling us on Ellie in the original games. In many ways it feels like cheap tokenism and I hate to say that about a character written and portrayed with such earnestness.

Abby’s story ends up coming up a little short compared to Ellie’s on the whole narratively. Contrivance puts the overall larger cast in positions to be killed off. Spectacular setpieces start to happen with very loose justification that doesn’t suit this game’s world. It’s definetly the more “fun” half of the game but I would rather have had a little more consistency over some of these elements. There’s a lot to like here but nothing that got under my skin as thoroughly as watching Ellie’s mental state deteriorate in the first half.

So it’s a bit of a relief when we switch back to her in the last stretch, long after Abby lets her go and gives her a chance to live her life. Ellie is living in a dream scenario, on a quiet farm with her girlfriend Dinah and her kid. It’s a jarring, frustrating sequence that turns satisfying when quickly calls out for the farce it is. Abby was hollow after completing her mission but Ellie is about as well off after she gives up and lets go, illustrating that there was no easy answer for getting over her hatred and trauma.

Seeking out Abby and finding her beaten so thoroughly by the world was one of my favorite moments in the game. One of the game’s biggest symbols of strength was reduced to a frail, fragile figure without Ellie’s input. There’s no honor in killing her now but Ellie doesn’t know what else to do with herself and tries anyway.

The fight stretches a little too long and gets a little too graphic, but the ending works. Joel flashes into her mind and she lets Abby go, realizing all at once what he truly wanted for her and how he was able to do what he did to protect her. She had to alienate or inadvertently cause the deaths of most of the people in her life to get here, though and the ending leaves her on that tragic note.

The game is about love in the same way the first game was, and how easy it is to justify hate in it’s name. It’s an interesting premise but probably not the best fit for an action game where the core loop is combat driven.Crafting a story about the destructive consequences indulging in violence leaves feels a little bit out of lockstep with itself when indulging in violence is so satisfying as a gameplay loop. The story is a precautionary tale about the temptation of violence but in the gameplay violence is directly trying to be cathartic. I think that the developers were riding on some kind of dramatic irony with that choice, but it’s so heavy handed it comes off as patronizing at times.

Storytelling or thematic ambitions don’t work in this medium without mechanical ambitions to go alongside them but Naughty Dog remains hesitant to push themselves here. Even the wheels start to fall off of the story just because of how many moving parts it’s trying to juggle. The first game was a little less mature and a little less ambitious than this one, but it was a little more consistent for it. I think I prefer this game though, warts and all. I don't have kids yet, but I do have parents I love deeply in spite of the grief they caused me. Ellie's trip into the void and back out again was clunkier, uncertain, nauseating and a little more relatable for me because of it.

The first impression this game leaves isn't great. The first thing it teaches you how to do is to ride the new gimmick around, and after that you're flooded with commentary from the pit crew about what you should be doing next. There's only a certain threshold of charming little space men you can have before the idea begins to wear out it's welcome and take focus away on what the actual experience is supposed to be. Pikmin 4 far exceeds it. So many cutscenes filled with the boring, forgettable crew having redundant conversations filled with bad jokes. None of these characters contribute anything to the gameplay loop either unlike the captains from previous games, so it's a lot of time devoted to characters you don't actually see putting any effort into solving the problems at hand. All that responsibility is replaced onto YOU, yes, YOU. The game opts to let the player create their own captain this time around and falls into every narrative pit that decision usually creates. Characters lavish you with praise at every opportunity for the most simple tasks, which is an about face from the cynicism that coated the writing of the first two games. Olimar was either completely on his own with no one to confide but himself, which added to the survivalist atmosphere, or saddled with the worst co-workers possible which was funny. This game is very straightlaced by comparison which is a step down from the unique tone the games had before.

This aggressive hand-holding permeates every aspect of this game. There are more PIkmin types present in the main campaign than ever, and progression is more open ended and nonlinear. You'd think this might open up a variety of different team compositions depending on the situation but the game only ever allows 3 types out at once and each area and cave has a recommended team. At that point, why break away from what the game has already set out from you?

Oachi starts the game as a good supplementary addition. He can jump and ferry the squad across water which opens up some traversal puzzles and decisions that just wouldn't have been possible in previous games. It also means there are less obvious roadblocks at the start, making each map feel more open ended and fun to traverse. Water was such a strong progress blocker in previous games that it dictated the order which you could do things pretty heavily, so removing that is a nice change of pace.

My suggestion to people who enjoyed the previous games is that you try to avoid upgrading him too much though. Beef up his defense for sure, but stacking on too many resistances and treasure-carrying abilities and he genuinely renders most of your Pikmin redundant. Technically something you'd have to opt into but it's an easy pitfall to miss.

One thing that also deserves praise is the cave system. Each one feels like it's more clearly centered around a unique challenge or gimmick this time around, so it's always something fresh. I was afraid the "dandori" challenges would feel like padding, and the battles against Olimar definitely do but the time trials are the opposite. They're carefully designed treasure hunting gauntlets where time limits are harsh and resources are limited. You'll have to form an excellent plan and execute it perfectly to get platinum medals on each one. They feel like the game at it's most Pikmin. They highlight the way these systems can shine under pressure in a way that doesn't reflect well on the rest of the game.

Outside of certain, clearly marked challenges though Pikmin 4 is so lax that it risks making a lot of series staples redundant. The day/night time limit still exists, but there's no hard limit on days and enemies never respawn so the only punishment for not completing a task in a timely matter is a quick trip back to camp. They might as well have let you explore for as long as you like. More gimmicks like Serene Shore's falling tides would have made timely execution of tasks more important without the punishing mechanics from 1 and 3, but for the most part they've removed those and replaced them with nothing which takes a little too much friction away from the experience.

The friction removal doesn't just end there. A generous 'time rewind feature' hovers over your head any time you make a mistake. Pikmin has been embracing save-scumming as a feature more and more over time, but having this prompt pop up the second you make a serious mistake feels like a step over the line. Save scumming was definetly possible in the first two games but easy enough to ignore and forget about. 3 signposted it as a feature and now 4 has prompts popping up everywhere, letting you rewind down to the second. If the game is going to assure me over and over again there's no real danger to losing resource..what's the point of the focus on resources?

The overt handholding focus leads us to our last error, probably the game's most damning. The controls. In contrast to the extreme amounts of control the pointer gave you in previous games, Pikmin 4 opts to automate as many functions as possible. Automatically aiming, automatically counting how many Pikmin you need before it cuts off your throw with no regard for how many Pikmin you might actually want on a task, and Pikmin trying to take more agency to automatically start tasks regardless of your input. These start as nuisances that don't hurt much when the game is more laid back, but as dandori challenges and late game bosses ramp things up they become a genuine pain point. I can't count how many times I've had Pikmin die because they latched onto the wrong object, or had my time for a challenge thrown off because the game decided the task had enough Pikmin on it.

All of this feels like Nintendo went a little too far trying to make Pikmin widely appealing. Iwata Asks interviews reveal the developers laid the lack of sales on the mechanics when to me there was a more obvious answer staring everyone in the face: The gamecube and the Wii U were both notorious flops. Pikmin was obviously going to do way better on a console that has an actual install base. Every Nintendo IP received an explosion of sales on Switch for a reason. Nintendo should have at least tried a more traditional title on the switch first before coming to this conclusion.


I liked Pikmin 4 overall, but only because of what it carried over from previous games, not because of anything it added. It has moments of very strong level design but it's held back too much with all the helicopter-parenting. At the very least, whenever Nintendo released a more handhold-y title in the past they worked their way back to something more challenging. My hope is that Pikmin 5 trusts the player more and opts to give them more agency in the game. Even if harsh time penalties never return, I hope they find different ways to put pressure on the player and put their resources to the test.

A Short Hike just goes to show how much more you can do with less. It’s a simplistic premise about taking a hike up a mountain that reveals surprising layers of depth the more time you spend there. More importantly it’s the best kind of distraction: A game that takes you somewhere else for at least a little while.

The game’s top down perspective and artstyle immediately brings to mind Animal Crossing, but the game gently subverts your expectations by adding more options to your movement. You can run, jump, glide and climb virtually any wall, which will render ground that seems unexplored completely interactive. What seems to be a gentle immersive sim peels back the curtain to reveal a surprisingly tight 3D platformer with a host of toyetic mechanics to mess around with.

It’s less the size of an open world and more like a park or a jungle gym where you’re encouraged to run wild for a few until you’re all tuckered out. The overarching goal is to get Claire to the top in faint hope that her cell phone will get a signal so she can receive an important call, but she can’t make the climb without Golden Feathers, the game’s principle collectable that will increase her mobility. Thankfully the denizens Hack Peak Providence Park are willing to part with them if you humor their quirky games, responsibilities or desires for a bit.

This open ended progression calls to mind a lot of early 3D collectathons without much of the padding of those games. Exploring, playing minigames and completing side missions is usually fun in their own right with these concepts exhibiting a lot of polish. The direct impact just completing them has on Claire’s movement is the best kind of motivator to keep trying things, enforcing a satisfying experience in every way.

The camera perspective and tone along with the tight 3D platforming will bring back a host of titles from the gamecube era, but since these elements are blended into the same world in a smooth way, the nostalgia factor mostly works in the game’s favor. This game’s target audience likely played Animal Crossing, Super Mario Sunshine, Wind Waker etc. at Claire’s age so the send-ups will bring a player back to a time where they might have resonated the most with her.

We don’t really know what’s got Claire so worked up until the end, and initially I felt like this was a mistake but thinking back on it it might not have been hidden as a way to have a twist toward the end. Perhaps it was done so players of any kind would insert herself into her shoes.in her shoes. Any worries or anxieties pulling at the back of your mind are sure to disappear for at least a little while as you spend a day running and playing on an island paradise with your friends.

The game’s length will definitely be a point of criticism going forward, but I think it largely works to it’s benefit. No concerns about total playtime means only the most polished of gimmicks, mechanics and minigames made it into the final game. It also kind of fits the game’s premise as a short, fleeting day spent away from normalcy. It’s like a day spent at a birthday party, the beach, or even inside playing a cool new game that only lasted a couple of hours as a child but left an impression on you for a long time.

I'm almost impressed. Every old development habit they've had is back in full force. Dropping Sonic into a lazy premise that just riffs on whatever's hot at the time instead of building out from his characters and world. Platforming getting interrupted by dull, repetitive beat em up/RPG combat that just drags the pacing of the game down to a slog. Poorly paced, poorly written, unfinished storyline where characters with larger than life personalites and designs that YEARN for interesting motion stand perfectly still, sedated, and talk about their feelings regarding past games instead of doing anything to move the story forward so the team won't have to do too many of those pesky new designs.

What platforming is here is more rigid and automated than ever thanks to a focus on grind rails that fire Sonic along a fixed track, toward a simplistic set of obstacles. It's the Sonic Colors formula again, large focus on simplistic obstacles that can only be focused one way and functional, but dull digital movement that carries no momentum, completely missing the standout appeal of the original games.

The cyberspace stages fare a bit better than the main map, but that's mostly because they're made from the skeletons of levels from better games. The final set on island 4 is all original and honestly the first signs of life this game shows in that entire last half, but the shitty controls mean you can't enjoy it as much as you should. I'm not sure how they've managed to make them worse than they've ever been, and yes, I know about the movement tech. Almost all of these games have it. It doesn't excuse how bad it is on the base level.

I get why this game got higher marks than the others, because one thing Sonic Team is good at is making surface level changes to make it look like they listened. Combat and platforming take place as far apart from eachother as possible with almost no attempt to marry the two concepts in an interesting way aside from a few enemies toward the beginning, but they take place in the same map with no character swapping so you can't REALLY call it an intrusive alternate gameplay style. The tone is darker and the story is addicted to referencing past events, so you can say things have improved and Sega cares more about it's characters and writing now even though the cripplingly dull cutscene direction and shitty narrative design from the last game are still present. You literally cannot parse anything about the ancients from their miles and miles of ruined structures. The fact that they're called "the ancients" instead of giving them an actual name really sums it up. They're a generic ancient society that are a stand in for the ruins and lost civilizations that define other open world action games without any of the effort put into flesh out those cultures. Hell, Sonic Adventure took a much better crack at this in fucking 1999, and that game was in dev for one year instead of 5.

All of this is pretty terrible, but it's nothing new. The biggest shift this game makes is it's structure, dropping Sonic in an open field and giving him a variety of objectives to complete ala a collectathon. Every single interact-able object being a glowing steel gadget directly above the world means that your eyes will be on those instead of parsing the actual environment for details like a normal fucking video game, sucking out the sense of wonder from exploring and leaving you with the busywork.

Some freedom to progress is great, but I think the funniest thing about all of this is how much Sonic Team and the fans hammer home how much you can skip all of it, as if the critique would just become invalid if the game made as much of it's shitty ideas optional. At first I felt a bit cynical about that point, but one of the most highly praised features of this game being the fishing minigame really validated it for me. It's just a braindead QTE that gives you the Power Moons needed to break through certain collectable thresholds enough to move the story along. And people actually PRAISE this feature for making some of the criticism invalid and pushing aside that pesky gameplay so we can focus on the true essence of Sonic: The story.

It's just a mess, and coming off of Lost World, Boom and Forces it's clear I'm the fool for playing along at this point. Sonic's entered a brand new dark age where the goal this time seems to be making the safest bets possible without trying to ruffle any feathers. Take the Colors fundamentals and change the wrapper. Since Sonic team is still pretty shit at designing games this never comes together as the crowdpleaser they clearly WANT so badly,(and before you guys say anything, no, floating around Forspoken's space on metacritic does not mean you made a banger) but it never hits them that they have to actually rethink how they design things if that's what they want. Sonic Colors was a soild game, but it's not rich or flexible enough to keep being used as a baseline.