Resident Evil 7: Biohazard is a premium piece of survival horror that lives up to it's name. It's paper thin premise may cause some confusion if one stops to think about it for a few seconds, but the game won't give you any time to with how quick it is to get to the meat of things. It's elegant blend of atmosphere and mechanics will hook you from the start and keep you on edge for the majority of it's run.

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard trades out some franchise conventions for a more traditional horror setup. The trained shot in the form of a beat cop or secret agent is swapped out with an everyman with a shakey hand. The first person perspective that became popular in the genre was embraced too, letting you experience the series in a new way. The subdued tone throws out the action movie cliches that the series is known for.The cynical reading is that these concessions were made to widen appeal, but the end result makes it hard to see it as a mistake.

The essence of the series has been kept in the game's mechanics. A small inventory, limited weaponry and a dangerous labyrinth filled with life-saving items to scavenge and terrifying creatures are all hallmarks of the series that make you feel your back against the wall more than any other series in the genre. Decisions about what to carry with you when you leave the relief of a save room are critical as you improvise in the field to survive. You’re always given the option to fight, but resources are kept low enough that you’ll be considering if it’s even worth taking every shot and cursing yourself when a bullet misses it’s target.

A simple crafting system has you weighing every ingredient’s use. Chem fluid can be combined with other pickups to make offensive or defensive tools which let you lean into different playstyles depending on the situation. Making these decisions on the fly and having to live with them as you carve out safe routes through the game’s various decrypt mansions, warehouses and underground passages creates it’s own tension that the game’s aesthetic only highlights.

The first person perspective can seem clunky at first compared to more convenient ways to get a read on the action from previous games, but all it does is trade some of that convenience for a stronger immersive factor. Other creative decisions like going with an everyman and the first half’s grounded, intimate tone enhance the urgency of the situation. It’ll be up to the player whether these changes can make up for some of the added frustration a first person perspective brings. It becomes more difficult to judge the space of the player in relation to the environment enemy which causes problems with the combat. A cautious, evasive playstyle becomes preferable, which suit the circumstances of this game well, but the last third or so dials up the focus on combat which undercuts this angle a little.

The true stars of the game are the Bakers, the mysterious family at the center of Mia’s disappearance. They’ve been gifted with horrific enhancements and an over-the-top lust for mischief by the game’s true antagonist and a lot of the game’s tension comes from what they add to the gameplay. You spend the majority of the game lurking their respective lairs, trying to look for the path forward and solve puzzles while being stalked by these monstrosities. Their demeanours are all unique as are their methods for tormenting Ethan, giving each section it’s own memorable setpieces and boss fights.

The game starts to lose some momentum once the Bakers are dealt with and the backstory behind their Residence unfolds. The game’s tension starts to fizzle out as the protagonsts’s armory expands. The labyrinths fade into more linear hallways with deliberate encounters. The game’s combat problems go from negligible to hard to ignore. The game can’t help but end on a bombastic setpiece. It doesn’t suit the strengths of the game and unfortunately it isn’t mechanically engaging enough to justify.

The bizarre last quarter is a shame but the game is chock full of moments I’ll look back on fondly in every sense, from it’s clever puzzles to it’s strong atmosphere. Memorable characters and thrilling boss encounters. It won’t win any awards for uniqueness but there are very few horror games as successful at melding time honored tropes and mechanics together as this one.

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.

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.

Movement is fast, free and responsive with a focus on using any piece of terrain on the map to evade, reposition, and fight back. It's the classic setup of a player being positioned as a superpowered underdog against a hoard of enemies done better than most modern examples due to a focus on game feel over spectacle. Each combat zone is designed as a playground with endless vantage points for you to take and fight from. The movement system pairs with a liberal invisibility mechanic to give you the sense that you’re never truly out of options, even when it feels like you are.

The game lets you push small groups around with your newfound superpowers in the opening chapters before quickly upping the stakes with larger hoards and new enemy types designed to force you to move around. Being able to shoot wallrunning, sliding, or boost-jumping through the air means almost anywhere on the map can be used as a vantage point. The cloak mechanic seems like too easy of an escape at first, but push through the games on harder difficulties and you’ll realize that the enemies are so aggressive that what seems like a powerful escape is not as generous a gesture as it would be in other games. Add in the ways the game flat out subverts this mechanic in later levels and you have a welcome addition.

The one gift I can’t be thankful for however is the liberal use of aim assist when aiming down sights. The game’s focus on movement meant this probably had to be necessary if they were going to market the game massively for consoles, but it’s not hard for even the untrained eye to see how hard it works in your favor. Those sick headshots you’re making while slide jumping at 200 mph don’t seem so cool once you realize the game was lining them up for you all along. Once you figure out how it works, it’s easy to abuse and even if you’re not trying to it’s so aggressive that it can snap you away from your intended target to a different one. Most combat focused games have some element of a power fantasy to them but making the strings so obvious is immersion breaking. You can turn the feature off, but the warnings attached to this option imply the game is barely functional without it. I found this to be an exaggeration but I bet less experienced players would have a tough time with it so I understand why it’s there. There had to have been some kind of middle ground to reach where the aim assist wasn’t so obvious, but I supposed that’s for the sequel to figure out(lol).

The weapon selection seems a little unbalanced toward ARs but it’s important to note that no option felt unsatisfying or useless. I gravitated toward the shotguns because I thought it paired best with the movement system. Chaining wall runs and double jumps to get up close and closing enemies out in one shot has it’s own sense of satisfaction that just poking from far away doesn’t have.

Almost every chapter manages to be memorable despite an uninspired art direction. This works due to a focus on gimmicks that twist the gameplay without straying too far from the core concepts of running and gunning. This reaches it’s peak in a chapter where your cloaking device is replaced with a gadget that lets you jump between two time periods. Jumping far into the future to escape your enemies seems delightfully overpowered at first until the game asks you to manage two encounters across two timelines at once and you realize you’ve accidentally wandered into it’s most dangerous area. The level gimmicks don't exactly maintain this level of creativity, but they're all pretty interesting in their own right and worth experiencing.

The titular Titan battles feel like they would be used more going by the game’s marketing, but Titanfall 2 knows it’s strength as a movement based shooter and saves the more stationary, explosive battles for big climaxes in the story or splashes of variety. This gameflow better prepares the player for the multiplayer component where Titans have to be earned through a solid couple of minutes of play. The Titan sacrifices jumping, sliding and dashing for so much explosive firepower that it changes the entire dynamic of the battlefield. Footsoldiers that may have given you a hard time as a pilot become blades of grass in the battles between you and a few equally titan sized opponents. I was eager to get back to power sliding on my first playthrough, but subsequent runs made me appreciate the depth in each Titan loadout. You have plenty of tools to manage the battlefield through offensive means now and are punished pretty handily for not using them properly. Even during battles with larger foes it’s easy for a few right decisions to end engagements quickly, and for a few wrong ones to backfire. It manages to feel as hotblooded and twitchy as the more traditional parts of the game despite the shift in focus.

It’s no surprise that the story takes a back seat in the middle of all this, but I do want to compliment the game on always making your Titan’s presence felt even when you aren’t working or fighting together. BT is the story’s greatest asset, an ever-so serious automaton that seems a bit too focus on his duty at first. His no-nonsense, robotic attitude comes off as a little shallow at first, but some surprisingly touching moments during the game’s finale reveal him as a perfectly competent character. Decidedly more human than the rest of the game’s cast who come across as woefully underwritten. Personalities range from “boring military power fantasy” to “washed up wrestling shtick.” Any ironically robotic group of characters for such a lively, fun game.

But again, Titanfall 2 seems aware of itself and it’s strongpoints. Once you’re in the thick of things you won’t be asked to pay attention to much else besides where to go, how to get there and who to shoot once you are there. It’s a tight, elegant trip back to a simple, more mechanically driven time. Appropriately balanced harder difficulties and a fun extra objective in the pilot helmets guarantee at least a few solid playthroughs before you power it down. Aside from a protracted intro, Titanfall 2 has a pure, infectious focus on the joy of play that runs through every aspect of it and informs every design decision.

It’s unfortunately hard to get a grasp on the game’s multiplayer when the population is still low. The game was clearly designed with longevity in mind, but a poor launch had ripple effects on it’s community. Luckily, the servers are still up and running but you’re not going to get as much mileage out of it as it probably deserves. If you’re looking for a multiplayer experience there are probably better options, but the game is frequently cheap and more than worth the asking price for it’s singleplayer.

You wake up as a young child who wakes up in a dense labyrinth and stumbles a towering, intimidating beast who’s back is littered with spears. What may be treated as a powerful beast to conquer in most other games, even Ueda’s own, is turned on his head as the player is encouraged to lean into the child’s first instinct: to care for it.

This is the natural extreme of one of the themes that define every game in the ICO trilogy: relationships that define barriers of language, clan or species. Trico is originally on edge around the boy: perhaps rightfully so with it’s injuries clearly at the hands of man-made weapons, but they learn to trust each-other as they work through the maze together.

It’s premise and focus on puzzle solving brings to to mind Ico over Shadow of the Colossus. Unlike Ico the power balance has largely shifted. The boy can run, jump, climb, manipulate smaller mechanisms like switches and fit through smaller passages in caverns. Even in his wounded state Trico more than pulls his weight, jumping over large caverns and manipulating bigger machines and structures. His large body acts as an excellent tool for platforming, too. The player can put Trico in the proper position with a little direction and scale him like they would a Colossi from the last game.

Directing Trico was where The Last Guardian had the most potential to fall short with so much of it resting on the game’s AI. The characters are unable to communicate, so the player is tasked with miming what they want him to do. The boy’s frantic exaggerated animations made this really charming on it’s own, but I’m surprised by how responsive Trico is while keeping a realistic amount of delay as he comprehend what you want him to do, considers it, and executes. If you actually understand what you want Trico to do and convey it to him properly then you’ll never be kept waiting too long. It might have just been my imagination, but it felt like he grew sharper and more responsive as the game went on and his bond with the boy grew. On the whole they did a good job of making him reasonably responsive without making him feel like a vehicle the way so many animal companions do in games.

Breaking things up are sections where the player is tasked with nursing Trico by finding food for him or sections where the two are separated for plot reasons. These sections try their best to avoid tedium through interesting level layouts ans scenarios. Navigating your way through more simplistic puzzles with the boy’s limited move-set shakes things up and paints a picture of how much more difficult things can be without your companion.


Ueda has always approached games with a trademark “design by subtraction” approach. The valley has a lot of spacious environments that keep the world from feeling like it was built just for the player’s convenience. There’s not much extra to find or alternate pathways to take, but it keeps the world from feeling artificial and accommodates the enormous Trico very well.

I feel like this can come with some drawbacks though. You play with what is largely the same set of mechanics for the entire game with the tools the player gets to play with evolving only marginally. There are some unique puzzles and mechanics but you’ll be ferrying barrels around and running away from guards a lot more than anything else. It’s possible to keep the variety going with a simple set of mechanics as Ueda proved himself on the last game, but TLG can’t help but start to feel repetitive, especially around the middle portion, without something like Shadow of the Colossus’s unique encounters to carry it through.

The combat encounters with the guards feel like the game’s weakest portion. Trico disposes of them easily when he’s actually around, but the game frequently pits you up against them by yourself and challenges you to solve a puzzle or move an object while you’re surrounded by them. There’s not much challenge to these sections, just tedium as you circle around a room trying to stay clear of them and mashing out of situations when they grab you.


A game with this ambitious of a concept can’t escape some clunk here and there. The camera struggles in-doors and the way Trico, the boy and the environment collide with each-other can be pretty clunky. This is more forgivable in the context of a fairly laid back puzzle solver where these things are unlikely to be punishing, but I can think of a few occasions where the boy was killed by poor collision detection during the platforming with some checkpoints that made things a little obnoxious.

But these are problems that I’m ultimately willing to forgive. I consider Ico and Shadow of the Colossus to be fairly flawed experiences that end up paying off in big ways in the end and The Last Guardian is no exception. The way Trico goes from a skittish, traumatized creature to one that isn’t afraid to fly again isn’t exactly a groundbreaking narrative, but it’s reflected so well in the game’s animations and mechanics that it’s hard to to get sucked into it. It doesn’t always stick the landing, but it’s really hard for me to rag on a game with such a bold concept and such a tendency to nail it when it really does need to nail it.

The ending especially tied every loose end and plot thread up in a neat way. It’s easy to read Ueda’s games as vague to inspire further thought about the world and lore, but I read them more as a closed, complete experience that only uses what’s absolutely necessary to convey their point. If Ico was a game about bonding through dangerous situations and Shadow of the Colossus was about conflict, violence and how it saps away at the soul, The Last Guardian’s ending reinforces a game about compassion and its power to heal us from conflict and trauma. The boy and the beast manage to break the boundary between species and divert from their predestined path to be enemies, and all it took was for one to reach out a helping hand to the other. It’s a powerful tale that’s told mechanically as well as it is visually. This rare combination makes it a very special game.

Way back in like 2014 or whenever this shit came out, back when I was a dumbass, I fucking hated this game.


I was a big Kamiya fan and an even bigger Platinum games fan. I was also a loser without an actual next gen console that was stuck with the literal ball and chain that was the Wii U and it's fisher price add on. So, naturally, there was a lot riding on this game. It had to justify the purchase of this abomination along with having a legendary prestige to live up to.


Every time I tried to play it, I could barely make it past the 5th chapter. I thought the artstyle was obnoxious the gimmicks came at you too quickly and too overwhelmingly to get a grip on, which lead to a lot of flow breaking deaths. Fucking minigames up the ass from the second level onward trying to meet Nintendo's mandated quota for justifying their painful lump of a controller. A philosophy that plagued almost every game on the hardware, but hurt doubly this time with a dense combat system that I wanted to just.


The actual, moment to moment combat had potential but had the same problem of stacking too much bullshit on me at once, with the mere act of switching weapons being it's own submechanic, for starters. Constantly managing that while moving your guys out of danger and handling the puzzle-box tier enemy design was always too overwhelming for me.


Just about the only saving grace for me was the over the top setpieces and even those were bogged down by some of the most obnoxious characters I had ever seen in a game.


But since Platinum to me is the video game developer equivalent of that relative you feel obligated to help out no matter how badly they fuck their lives up, I chipped in on this remaster. I didn't expect it to change my mind, but I figure the better this does, the more secure Kamiya would be in his next project.


Anyway, forget all of the bullshit I said above, it was dead fucking wrong. I was wrong. The Wonderful 101 isn't just a great game, it's one of the finest action games ever made. It's one of the cleanest, effortless executions of a completely new concept I've ever seen.


Almost every choice it makes is bound to rub new players the wrong way because it's a game completely unconcerned with impressing you. It's a game that makes the best decisions for itself without any regard for conventional design or the outside world of gossipers and wanna be critics thinks. It's a game passionate about the art of old school, arcadey game making. The type of craftsmenship that makes you want to pick it up again and again.


Let's start with that fucking camera. It blows my mind, in an era where accessibility and ease of play is paramount, that this game's camera is overlooked to the extent that it is. This is the only 3D action game I've played this generation where there is absolutely no guesswork in terms of who's on the field and what they're doing. Other games will just let their shitty lock on systems fly, decrease the aggro of the enemies that aren't in the frame(a mechanic that's easy for players to exploit once they know it's there), or implement some gaudy, immersion breaking hot glue UI solution like a flashing arrow, because just animating a good tell is a lost art I guess.


The only thing you lose in trade of this is the sense of immersion a low camera provides, but hey, that's great too, because FINALLY, we have another developer that's focused on a game playing well instead of using immersion as an excuse for lazy or lackluster design. Even if no other action game picks this up, we have at least one game that tried it.


And that weapon swapping shit I just complained about? Fucking genius. Now every command is a calculated risk instead of an easy button press away because you have to consider the positioning of the enemies when you draw your morph. Do you draw something big for the damage and risk your work being interrupted? Can you draw the more complex morphs from multiple angles in the heat of a bad situation? It's a system that feeds back into the old school principles of snap decision making and positioning that makes action games engaging. It looked at a snappy, tried and true system and saw a way to insert more meaningful gameplay in. This was inherently a risk, but the team was so confident in the idea they risked the entire gameflow on it, and it paid off.


And the enemy design, good lord the enemy design! So many action games now have too many enemies that are just fodder, but TW101, from the first level onwards, is constantly introducing regular fucking enemies that emulate the ebb and flow of a good boss battle. Start on the defensive, work your way in, exploit whatever clearly defined weakness they have, and then launch them and cuhrazy combo them to your heart's content after you've toppled them and gave yourself an open lane. Almost every enemy in this game went from "god this shit is fucking annoying" to something I could throw on it's back within seconds of it being on screen. No impenetrable armor. No bullshit that teleports/dodges away from you the entire time.


The enemy design pairs with the simplicity of the weapons to make a lot of strengths or weaknesses either immediately apparent or something you'll slap yourself on the forehead for not figuring out without bogging the game down with more tutorials than it needs.


Bosses? Take the multiphase design of the enemies and crank it all the way up to these gigantic behemoths that have millions of tiny nuances to make what seem like slow, spectacle ridden nightmares possible to optimize and exploit and no damage with ease. They're not all winners, but by the end of the second playthrough I hardly minded most of them.


Oh and those minigames I complained about? Those "distractions?" The gamepad intensive ones are still shitty of course, as expected, but so many of these turn out to actually be nuanced enough to become breezy or even enjoyable on repeat playthroughs. There was a lot of care trying to make this an extremely varied experience and not just a bunch of combat rooms.


And that's the catch: "repeat playthroughs." The Wonderful 101 is not the game for someone who wants to fire and forget their way through as many experiences as possible on some kind of coveted race to get a good boy sticker on a backlog sheet. It's the type of game that gets better with every subsequent playthrough, with the knowledge you've accumulated leading to new discoveries that lap onto the next playthrough and then the next. It's a quality all good action games have, but TW101 executes better than most.


Part of this is because of how little filler there actually is when you get down to it. Those laughable graphics I was just complaining about were a calculated risk that ultimately allowed the game to be content packed in a genre where most run out of steam 2/3s of the way in. It might seem to be a baffling risk to take for a first party release on a dying console, but to me, the Wonderful 101 is ultimately most concerned with making the best game. Not the most impressive trailer. First impressions are one thing, but the weeks, months, and years after a game's release are where it's true value becomes evident, and TW101 has stayed in my rotation since it's rerelease.


Kamiya was right to sacrifice Nintendo's support and widen the potential audience of the game because, personally, I don't think a game like this was going to resonate with the always online Console fanboy type. They're always looking for the next Nintendo Direct or big showcase, always talking about the next Smash characters, always chest beating about what the next big exclusive is going to be. They're always looking for something new to fuel their discourse, but they're never stopping to appreciate what's out there beyond maybe the big releases, if those releases are lucky. How many Nintendo fans did you see bragging about Bayonetta 2 vs it's abmyssal first run sales? Why balk at the obvious benefits of a PC release if you truly care about this game when it's now archived forever and the flexibility of mods can improve it more? The restricted reach of an exclusive should be an obvious downside to those who really love a game because they should want more people to enjoy it. Instead, fanboyism looks at all of these carefully crafted pieces of art as fuel for their discourse fire. Something to be mindlessly devored and discarded instead of savored.


Kamiya's only mistake was that he made a game for himself and the people of his ilk. That small audience that loves action games for their depth, complexity, and replayability. The type of person that can sit and play an arcade game over and over squeezing every ounce of nuance out of it's systems. Blowing an exclusive deal on such an oddball like this is going to be a mistake to most, but I'm glad that someone out there thought the things I like about games were worth fully indulging in.


Do I think every action game should have these mechanics?, hell no, but considering the fact that we're starving for unique mechanics in just about every genre right now? Clap it up. Give these kings a metal for trying and largely succeeding with the highest of high concepts.


What do I think of The Wonderful 101 Remastered? I love it. It's fucking wonderful and the haters can suck my wonder DICK.