This game is stellar. Just played it first time this month and couldn’t put it down until I beat it. I love the judgement ring. Attempting to hit perfects brings a satisfaction to every battle.
Music, atmosphere, art direction, and storyline + character writing all go hard.

One good critique is a lot of the best stuff is in the European back half of the game. The first couple hours are good, But the story is sparse as your party goes from village to village avoiding capture and performing exorcism. I would also say this game is mostly easy and you’re often using the same kinda strategy of healing, item support, and relying on 1 or two moves. The final boss fucked me up around the level mid-40s tho. And it was great! I loved having to prepare my team to get stronger.

Best part is how much meaningful side quests and missable content there is. We’re talking several optional boss fights, entirely fleshed out bonus levels, many charming npc convo, all kinds of items and equipment, plus some of the best cutscenes in the game if u take certain party members to certain places. Crazy. Plus there’s new game plus. It DEMANDS a great second playthrough. And I already want to play it’s more popular sequel.

I have put maybe an hour or two into Silent Hill 2, and I know it's a game that I need to finish at some point. I know the great twist, I've had that spoiled for me god knows how many times. I honestly put it into the same camp that I have movies like Alien in: even if there's something in there that surprises me, having the big moments ripped off like a band-aid purely through pop culture osmosis dampers my curiosity somewhat. All of this is to say, while you may not personally be excited for new Silent Hill games, I'm just curious to see something new. Since I was only really around for P.T. once that was spoiled for me, too, I'm not counting it—which leaves me with the newly released The Short Message.

I did not get the hate that this got over its leaks, and having finally played it, I still don't. Having seen those leaks, I actually have more of an appreciation for this; I know now that this was pretty cohesive in its themes and intention when it needed it to be and never deviated from that. I don't mind a lack of subtlety, as long as the bluntness of what you're working on is there for a good reason, and I found the reasoning for it here to be acceptable. It's laser-focused on what it wants and needs to say from beginning to end, and this focus is echoed throughout the spaces you explore. Although I can see someone being a little irritated that this is linear to the point where doors don't unlock unless you read certain notes, most of those notes serve the story and not the lore. There are notes that serve the lore, but they all feed you the right amount of information while giving you space to think. What impressed me on an immediate level were the cinematics. I genuinely can't tell if they were live-action or rendered, although I know that they were likely rendered. It's uncanny as hell, but it's equally impressive. What impressed me throughout, however, is how well this serves as a mood piece. Each and every location, whether it was important or minor, made me feel something. This is more of a vibes game than something substantive or scary, and while that might be disappointing if you're going in expecting serious scares, it kept me hooked. One concern I do have, if this is the playable teaser many are making it out to be, is that the only area where I noticed evident performance issues was when I was near fog. If the new Silent Hill games are all going to lack the fog or run like shit because of it, we might be in for a doozy. But regardless of that one scene, the rest of this was pretty solid! ...for the most part.

Yeah, those chase scenes, man. I'm a little biased because I already don't like chase scenes, but something about them here felt either like filler or downright infuriating to deal with. If it weren't for the last chase sequence, my rating for this would absolutely be three-and-a-half stars because the vibes were just that immaculate for me. But no, god, no. I don't know if I ever want to go through that again. Put it this way: the game doesn't make a big deal about which rooms you go into because of its linear trajectory until the final chase sequence, where it expects you to remember the layout of the map like the back of your hand while elements of it feel completely different. It expects you to find five photographs in this mess without giving you a map or checkpoints. At a certain point, the stress I was intended to feel gave way to frustration. The only reason I didn't stop playing there was because I wanted to see the ending. That was it. The ending was nice, and there was a cute little tune that played over the credits (way more people worked on this than any other free game I've ever played), but I don't think that forgives it. It was that bad. At least the creature design was cool, though—although I found it to be scarier in the leaked concept art than I did in the final product. Consequences of having that kind of stuff leak, I guess. Whoops! Feel bad for the developers on that front, because I'm probably not alone in that.

What I liked about this, I really liked. If a new Silent Hill game is made from this mold, I wouldn't mind, actually. The Silent Hill 2 remake being a horror game that needs to have a trailer dedicated to its combat should say something about how skeptical I am of that, but I might also check it out when it's on sale. If this and that trailer is Konami's way of getting people back on the Silent Hill hype train... I mean, I wouldn't call this embarrassing. This was cool. But, 7/10.

Luigi’s mansion 3 is a game that made me take a good look at the modern industry as a whole. In an era where it seems developers in every region are all following the same 10-12 game play templates cause that’s what they think “good game design” is, or bloating the hell out of games with garbage filler content due to consumers constantly whining about “value for the dollar”, it’s beyond refreshing to play a game that is reasonably short enough to not overstay its welcome and is mostly brave enough to not bog down the experience with said garbage filler content. While being mechanically refreshing.

Since this is a post 2013 video game, there is some unfortunate heavy hand holding in the beginning. What starts as a funny, non intrusive tutorial on how to use the poltergust by showing how polterpup reacts to the breeze, turns into an annoying series of lectures and pop ups during game play to explain how mechanics work. I can somewhat forgive this given the games all ages appeal, but I can imagine younger players getting annoyed on subsequent playthroughs by this as well. The first game had the right approach by letting you play around in a training room until you got your bearings. That would be welcome here, as the game actually has some very visually appealing references in the menus in regards to the controls. It’s not as if the series has ever been mechanically complex either. These heavy handed tutorials aren’t worth anyone’s time.

And the combat certainly isn’t any better in that regard. It seems that Next level games is afraid to let the combat require a little dexterity to be fun, as the dumb super suction prompt from dark moon is back, but made even worse this time because it’s now a multi hit slam AOE that mogs other ghosts. I’m sure for a very young child this would be cool, but I greatly miss the slightly technical dexterity the original game required. It added a psychological edge to the combat. Luigi’s Mansion has never been a difficult series, I am not making any declaration of that here to be clear, but it really did not need this aspect watered down even more than it already was in the previous entry.

Enemy variety is also the absolute worst it has ever been in the series, with only 4 mook types you’ll be fighting over and over again (and one gimmick door ghost that shows up once in a blue moon), expect to fight the basic blue ghosts ad nauseum for almost the entire play through.

It’s not all bad on this front though. The stellar boss fights from Dark moon are back and mostly a great time. All of them have gorgeously over telegraphed attack animations and require you to use your brain to a reasonable degree to proceed. From the gardener needing you to cut his vines with a buzz saw, the pianist needing you to study his shadows and use the size of the massive arena to properly dodge his attacks, the pharaoh needing you to blow away her seat made of sand with wind as you would naturally expect, , and the eye on the prize mechanic that you deal with from three different bosses that somehow never gets old. Every boss is mostly smartly designed and a joy to fight.

I say mostly cause the final boss fight against King Boo is slightly frustrating in his final phase. You have the same eye on the prize mechanic (The game wants you to pay attention to which one tosses the correct bomb, instead follow my advice and focus on the one with four teeth, he’s the real one, you’ll thank me later if you do play this), but it’s hard to hit him if the real one is at either corner of the arena, due to the pillars at those corners causing the bombs you throw back at him to go flying elsewhere. I had to wait around until the RNG spawned the right one in the center to beat him. Other than that, he was just as well designed as the other bosses and another joy to fight.

For some reason boss fight cutscenes are unskippabble, but the game over cutscene is. So if you happen to die you’ll have to sit through a rather long pre fight scene again and this can get obnoxious fast.

There is unfortunately a broken safety net in place in the form of gold bones. They only cost one thousand coins and will spawn you right back where you died if you have any on hand. In a game that is already incredibly easy as is, this is completely pointless. The slam already does enough damage when dealing with each phase of a boss, and the game is very generous with health hearts later in the fights given how hard the bosses hit anyway. At most if you are struggling with a boss you’ll get them on your third try. Having this is dumb and is something I posit (that I also mentioned in my Dark Souls 3 review) is only in here to get people through the game as quickly as possible so they can post “highlights” on social media, when the design of the bosses should speak for themselves.

Lastly on the combat front, if you’re playing in co-op the combat will be busted wide open, as enemy AI is only designed to deal with one player at a time, and both Luigi and Googi’s slam AOEs stack and they completely break the pace of boss fights as a player who knows what they are doing can do borderline speed run tactics to take away any sense of psychological satisfaction from the puzzle aspects of the encounters.

On the level design front, the game is excellent.

You start to notice just how good it is early on, The new plunger adds a nice tactile feeling when getting objects out of the way with some weighty slams and pulls, using the plunger to pull switches or rip objects of a wall (and sometimes a weapon out of an enemies hand) is immensely satisfying. The burst jump makes for some fun novelty moments involving waves/lazers and other dangers coming at you when dealing with traps and stage hazards.


Floor 3 is a very good tutorial for how gooigi works, You have to constantly move him through specific store grates in a mall, one of them even requiring you to use both characters to open a door, making this a great primer for what most of the puzzles will consist of. The green house has a great sense of vertical scale as you slowly climb your way up the plant stalk, chipping away gradually through each densely packed plant heavy room. But far and away the best floor was the movie studio.

I really enjoyed helping Morty make his movie, from the rather clever puzzles requiring you to use your logical thinking skills to memorize portals to get a bucket of water from one set to a well in another (Which is a funny homage to the ring), then growing a plant on another set and then getting a torch lit on the next set, then finally getting his megaphone back on the final set. It all wonderfully culminates in you helping Morty make a kaiju movie. The kaiju suit the other ghost is wearing always glows differently depending on the attacks it throws, showing how well telegraphed and crafted it all is.
The puzzles are overall challenging enough to be satisfactory for all ages while not feeling brain dead easy. My favorite was the weighted scale puzzle on floor ten, where you need to use precise amounts of sand and weighted vases to solve a combination lock. It was one of the best examples of intergrating physics into game design I have seen in a long time, many games have physics engines just to have them, so this was incredible to see.

The game has generally good pacing, as you’ll have a series of shorter floors after one large one, but the game unfortunately shoots its self in the foot four times, once where you need to find a mouse who steals your button on floor 3, then two awful hunts for the polterkitty when she steals your elevator button, then you need to backtrack down a few previous floors (in a row) and when you find her, wait for her to slowly walk behind you before you flash her with your light and then slam her, before going on your way. And then there’s a macguffin hunt where you need to rescue a toad and get a poltergust upgrade part back (for a one time set-piece that feels tacked on), then take the long way around from a floor you already explored, constantly getting stopped by monster closets where you engage in the boring mook combat until you get back on track.

Said monster closets become a major issue on late game floors. As they are far shorter to finish with far fewer puzzles to help the game not feel bogged down, but as I just mentioned said monster closets do exactly that, it got so bad that I knew after solving a puzzle I would encounter another eye rolling, mindless combat section blatantly placed there to pad out the length in the next room or back in the hallways.

There isn’t any psychological edge to the level design, dark moon lacked it too and the original had it in spades. You just go through the motions each floor and while I did enjoy my time in most of them as I gave examples above, the hotel really doesn’t feel like a hotel at all, but instead a series of theme parks from a “world template checklist”. The constant back tracking in the first game through similar yet different enough rooms got you intimately familiar with the mansion, it made the game feel extremely cohesive and made the mansion feel like a warped outlier in the mario franchise, and while I understand the criticism of the boos being mandatory, that game gave you more than enough hints to go after them while back tracking and punished you heavily late game if you didn’t. These “I should have done that” or “I should have thought of that” moments are defining aspects of the medium that make it unique and compelling. This could have been mitigated some what if after a floor was cleared, it would look like an actual floor, but alas that doesn’t happen. Ghosts respwan when you revisit making your progression feel a bit moot and it doesn’t lead to a conclusive sense of satisfaction.

The game does feature online multiplayer modes, and just like dark moon they aren’t very good. Scare scrapper is interesting for about half an hour before you’re going through the same 4 bland objectives over and over again. Engaging in the boring combat and just sucking up money or pressing X to find toads in the same few bland rooms. Scream park fairs slightly better, as you have Luigis using the mechanics in creative ways like using Burst to put hockey pucks in a net, or collecting coins while working around the games impressive physics engine, but once you’ve played every mode, you’ve seen everything this tacked on feature has to offer. Multiplayer has always gimped single player focused games in some way, and it would be vastly preferable if developers used those resources for a more polished single player experience, a good game will have replay value simply on the virtue of being good. You don’t need bloat like multiplayer to encourage re-playability.

And on that note about bloat, the boo hunts return in single player , as well as the gems from dark moon. But they are pointless to go after as the rewards you get are very underwhelming cosmetics. Getting all boos (who don’t even feel unique this time, you capture them like any other ghost) gets you a boo themed flashlight, and a diamond nozzle for the poltergust. These tacked on fetch quests would be a bit more tolerable if the rewards meant anything, but they’re just your standard modern game “value for the dollar” bloated garbage that damn near every game is plagued with now.

The story is nothing to write home about, for what it’s worth the plot never ventures into being any sort of bad, at best and worst it’s an inoffensive kid friendly story. The cutscenes do a good job conveying that Mario charm and cuteness the franchise is known for, but as someone who adores the original Luigi’s mansion, I take heavy umbrage with the “Mario” part of that direction.

The original Luigi’s Mansion was unique among the vast Mario IP because it had almost no cutsey sillyness. Sure, the portrait ghosts did some goofy things here and there, but for the most part, it was a PG horror style atmosphere where the ghosts acted like actual monsters rather than the school yard bullies enemies in other mario games act as. Luigi’s fear felt real because he was out of his element, with his desire to save his brother pushing him forward in spite of the other worldly danger he had to face.
With 3, the unfortunately goofy ghosts are back and even more obnoxious at points. The first game feels like a genuine outlier tonally now, as the light horror has gone into full fisher price horror, the mook ghosts are constantly shown goofing off, breaking things they accidentally drop, making silly faces, and other such child friendly things to appeal to fans of the Mario IP. It makes sense for Luigi to be scared by actual monsters that act very animalistic and destructive, it makes less sense for him to be spooked by what equates to spectral preteens with attitude.

Even the most simple stories can be enjoyable with the correct atmosphere and visual story telling, and 3 is heavily lacking in this regard.

What it isn’t lacking in is visual prowess. The series has always been a technical showcase for the platform it’s on, and 3 is no exception. It’s a mostly gorgeous game. Real time reflections are near flawless, gorgeously detailed shadows are abundant, and textures show incredible depth like stitching in clothes to scratch marks in gold doors.

And while I do have an issue with how the “theme park template” leads to a less cohesive feeling world, I won’t deny that the art direction was incredible. Each floor’s visual aesthetic clearly has a ton of effort and care put in to try an immerse you in that floors theme, from swashbuckling pirate treasure coves and medieval dungeons filled with traps, to pristine and clean gyms and a claustrophobic pyramid. It’s highly likely you’ll have at least one floor you’ll love based on theme you like, as Next Level games did an admirable job in trying to appeal to a wide range of subjects. As an old man the lack of cohesion to me is disappointing. But if you have a young child they’ll probably have a few floors they’ll really love as there’s bound to be one with a subject that is line with an intense interest they have.

The physics are a joy to play around with. Objects react realistically to how far away the vacuum is and fly away or toward you accordingly, smaller soft objects will even warp inward when being sucked up and objects you shoot out from the vacuum will change how much they bounce of walls depending on how far away you are. I was so impressed with how the sand reacted when sucking it up on floor ten that I spent a good 45 minutes just playing around with the sand physics there. The engine never stopped impressing me.

Unfortunately there is some ugly as hell bloom at the start. When you first enter the hotel you are blasted with such a powerful blooming glow it’s genuinely laugh out loud worthy, even the blooming text early on has bloom and it looks god awful. Thankfully once the ghosts reveal themselves, this ceases to be a problem.

The UI is very nice looking and inspired, with the main menu being an actual virtual boy, so you get some deep warm reds and sharp blacks to give a very other wordly vibe. And while I do dislike the goofy tone that has taken over the series as I mentioned previously, I do always like that Nintendo never pretends that the virtual boy never existed despite being a massive failure and always gives funny self deprecating homages to their coolest failure every once in a while. These small jokey homages are perfectly fine so long as they are done sparingly and not made over the top. Which is the case here.

The switch is more than capable of making some beautiful games (every system is), so it’s nice to play a game as beautiful as this one with such a well crafted physics engine under neath.

Music is the weakest aspect of the game, and always has been for the entire series, I doubt you’ll find even the most ardent Luigi’s mansion mega fans able to name a track beyond the main theme. You have your spooky whistles and string sections as you’d expect, and fast paced horns for combat sections. Really the only track that stands out is E.gadd’s shop theme. As it sounds like something you’d hear in an anime licensed game from the 2000s, with its fast paced warm and welcoming midi instruments and comfy synths.

While it’s a heavily flawed game with the modern trappings of bloat and extreme easiness that contemporary games are plagued with, I enjoyed Luigi’s mansion 3. The level design is a satisfying series of strong puzzles and boss fights in spite of the boring combat, the visuals are outstanding and the music is unoffensive. The fisher price horror atmosphere carrying over from dark moon is disappointing, as well as the cheap tacked on multiplayer and pointless boo and gem hunts, topped off with some annoying blatantly padded macguffin hunts. Despite that, it’s refreshing to play a solidly made, fun game that isn’t following the same 10-12 “good game design” templates that every game of every budget seems to be doing now, even if it’s a new entry an established franchise.

I’m no fan of the series becoming more and more kid friendly with each entry, but at the same time if you have younger relatives like I do, a game like this would actually be very good for them. The puzzles require moderate amounts of logical thought, the floors will probably appeal to an interest they have, and the very simple combat is flashy enough to make them feel cool. A child could be playing something far worse and less appropriate for their age group, so at the very least, a parent would have a good option in this game for something that might challenge their child in a decent way.

7/10.