probably one of the most iconic games of the 2010s in how it blends the most prevalent and compelling gameplay loops of its time ('climb tower, expand map, go to marker, hit bad guys!') into its mystical, ghibli-invoking mythos. you have your cake and eat it, you can play far cry 3 while sort of convincing yourself its high art because its got clouds and rolling hills and torii gates.

its great! there aren't many games that have grabbed me like breath of the wild did, for someone who hops around games and completes very few of them this one had me playing it nonstop for the 50 hours it took for me to complete it. first and foremost it feels great to play, combat is just the right level of difficulty, gliding and climbing is extremely satisfying, and the sense of exploration - that is encouraged very early on through the captured memories quest, and indeed the excellent great plateau area of the game - is one of the game's biggest joys. it understands that the journey you forge for yourself is the most meaningful and enduring aspect for the player, and it's world matches the scale that such a memorable journey needs.

the more i played breath of the wild the less convinced i became this was going to mean anything special to me, though. for all its ghibli aesthetic, the story and general tone lacks the pathos of those films or anything to latch onto emotionally, which great games with much less scale or budget or influence have managed. there's nothing here that i can feel in my core, that sits in my throat or simmers in my brain. the writing is uninspired, the voice acting is dull, and as breath of the wild continues on and the gameplay loop keeps... looping (all these shrines and beasts look awfully similar!) the less often and less strongly i feel those feelings of wonder and excitement that the early game does so well to nourish. i could talk more about my annoyances, like the constant pauses in-game as you pick up items, interact with npcs who talk to slowly etc., but i could forgive things like this 100 times over if it found ways to speak to me emotionally.

i want to demand more of it because idk, i'm entitled and greedy and maybe we should ask more from our art and our media. but ultimately its pretty great. good stuff. i had an awesome time playing assasin's creed: hyrule, most polished game in the series.

baby's first hitman game - pretty fun pretty goofy! a gay ol time! the story is awful and the writing of female characters is atrocious lmao but it has some fun b-movie flair i guess. i was fairly impressed with the visuals too, the hazy xbox360-y 2012 video game aesthetic is, dare i say, almost becoming nostalgic and cute - and there's a lot of noticeable detail put into character models and level design.

more importantly the gameplay is really quick and fun and feels like a big moving puzzle that you have to improvise to solve and i found myself blasting through the whole game pretty quickly, it took me 9 hours without caring too much for collectibles or replaying levels. its compelling for sure, and maybe i'll check out world of assassination at some point when that's a bit cheaper - or maybe blood money! blood money is supposed to be a good one right?

played this over nearly two weeks with my gf and it was a blast! absolutely fits the bill for me in terms of being a narrative focused video game where your choices have consequences, and it also being a horror game made the whole experience such a joy for me (i know, i should probably get round to playing until dawn at some point too). you can tell the writers of this are slasherheads in the way they gleefully fulfil certain genre archetypes and expectations and the casting is truly wonderful too - david arquette! tim raimi! skyler gisondo! those are just the names i recognised beforehand but there are some really fun performances across the board, i could go through everyone but miles robbins (dylan) and grace zabrinskie (eliza) stood out for me.

i think the devs and writing team did a great job instilling a real sense of jeopardy in this game - i care about the actions and decisions i'm making because it does feel like at any moment i could irreversibly kill a character i like and lose them for the rest of my experience, and when people do end up dying i really feel it, particularly when their deaths are as brutal and gory as they are here. we ended up getting three playable characters killed during our playthrough which i was ~pretty~ happy with? considering how bad it can get? and yeah it really felt like it mattered and we were pretty happy with our choices all in all when we reflected on them which is a really nice feeling to get from a game.

particularly when we considered how natural it felt too! considering the enormous possible outcomes and endings in the game we never felt our ending was weird or railroaded, it just felt like how a movie might play out, which was really neat. and a pretty original movie at that, for all the ways it might be archetypal in quite fun ways it also feels genuinely fresh and of its own unique flavour - blending a couple of spooky horrible things together into a compelling mystery thats experienced by a pretty memorable cast of characters - the quarry is special because its a game but if this was just a movie i think it'd still be a pretty fun one regardless.

kinda rocks. covers themes of ai sentience and exploitation with devastating conviction and nails its atmosphere with a grungy dark psx aesthetic and sound design that you feel in your core. horror is best when its personal though, and the relationship this game weaves between you the player and demOS is hard to forget. the writing is excellent, and the game creates a deeper level of immersion through a dynamic of punching in prompts into a retrofuturist console to interact with the ai at the centre of the story and then pulling you out of the terminal to solve puzzles and explore the inside of its mind.

things get all kinda of haywire, obvs, and the way this game led me along to its conclusion was pretty special i thought. there's a point where i thought the game had ended pretty ruthlessly and haunting in its own right, but no there was more! and it was even more scary! initially started writing this with the phrase 'mini masterpiece' but idk why this tendency exists (within me, within most gamers) to diminish games because of their shorter lengths - the engima machine is maybe.. just a masterpiece? its great! 10/10, no notes.