I really enjoyed this! The graphics look great, almost on par with recent games, and I love the art direction. I really admire the dedication to the retrofuturistic aesthetic of the Alien films, Sevastopol Station looks like it fits in with that world. The real highlight is the xenomorph. Encounters with it always feel tense, especially with the motion sensor, and I love the way that it seems to learn from your previous strategies.

That being said, I do wish that it was a little shorter. There were multiple occasions where I felt like the story could've ended in a satisfying way, but it kept on going and by the end I found that the effect of the xenomorph had been lost on me somewhat.

Nothing changed about the game in the YEAR AND A HALF it was gone, except for the addition of three new characters and three new premium currencies. The game is still painfully buggy, with painfully slow combat, and frustratingly unbalanced characters.

Keep all of that in mind when I say this game is so damn fun! I am in love with the roster, there are just so many fun characters to play as! Tom & Jerry is my main, but I’m also great at LeBron James and Superman! Even the characters that I don’t play are so well made that I have to respect the work put into them! Also, the fact that Game of Thrones has a rep at all is still hard to believe, but I desperately crave a character that ISN’T my least favorite character in the show.

Anyway the single-player mode is mediocre and I just found out that you can’t even train with characters before buying them anymore and that’s STUPID! Don’t support this nonsense! Don’t give Warner Brothers a dime!

But also you should play this game because it’s actually pretty fun sometimes. I also have stocks in Warner Bros so I want this game to perform well…

Can y’all tell I’m conflicted?

Dunkey really wasn't exaggerating!

Animal Well is an absolute spectacle of an indie game, with unique gameplay elements and incredibly clever puzzles that push the limits of what a Metroidvania can expect from a player. I'm quite surprised that I was able to finish this game without a guide, but that just goes to show how effortlessly the mechanics are communicated!

And of course, the biggest stand-out is the GORGEOUS animation that I couldn't stop admiring from start to finish. If this game should be remembered for any one thing, it HAS to be the phenomenal art design.

"Completionist" Update:

THIS GAME IS SO DEEP AND COMPLEX THAT I CAN'T 100% IT! ONE OF THE PUZZLES REQUIRED 64 CORRECT INPUTS IN A FUCKING ROW!!! MY BRAIN HAS MELTED TO SLUDGE AND THERE IS NO END IN SIGHT!

In the span of three weeks I've spent 75 hours doing everything you can possibly do in this game. It's truly very fun. IF you consider a lack of variety for weapons, upgrades, synergies, and bosses to be a bad thing, then there's a chance you won't enjoy this as much as you would Gungeon or Isaac, but I promise you the game makes up for that with a wonderful cast of characters, a great story, fun-but-slightly-repetitive gameplay, and gorgeous music and visuals. I personally wouldn't recommend 100%-ing the game, but it's not a worthless experience in that aspect.
On another note, I wish there was more romance options, as the surprising addition of romancing was really interesting until I found out that the only options were three pretty unattractive people. Let me swoon Charon, you cowards!

I know a lot of people absolutely adore Baldur's Gate 3, including a lot of queer people, and as a result I've been really anxious about posting this. I don't want to act like my opinions are objective, I personally hate it when people list their opinions as if they're facts so I'm really sorry if I end up doing that unintentionally. I also want to apologise if this ends up feeling vitriolic or hateful. A 7/10 is a positive score, and I definitely enjoyed my time with Baldur's Gate 3 overall, but I just had some flaws with it and its queer representation that I haven't really seen anyone talk about and I just wanted to write those down here. There might be a couple of minor spoilers here but nothing major.

I was very surprised when I saw that Baldur's Gate 3 had been nominated for multiple queer gaming awards, like the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Video Game or the Gayming Awards, because I found BG3's attempts at LGBTQ+ representation to be... condescending and frustrating, especially with its trans representation.

Firstly, every BG3 romanceable character is playersexual. This alone might not be a flaw. Other games I can think of like I Was a Teenage Exocolonist and Stardew Valley are able to have 'playersexual' love interests while still telling queer stories, and as a result the characters don't feel playersexual so much as they feel like bi/pan representation. BG3 does nothing of the sort. My character's relationship with Shadowheart never felt like it was a queer relationship, it didn't feel like a queer story, because ultimately my character could've been removed and replaced with a man and nothing would change. The only queer couple I can think of in the game are two side characters, Dame Aylin and Isobel, and while they're delightful they didn't really change that I never felt like the game was using my character's relationship as an opportunity for meaningful queer representation.

I've written before about how I dislike it when game devs include genital customisation and describe it as playing a trans character, it feels at best reductive and at worst objectifying. This is also a critique I had of Cyberpunk 2077, but that's able to somewhat mitigate it through the presence of Claire, an interesting and well-written trans character with her own questline and story arc. BG3 has... Nocturne. A character who shows up once and has at most a dozen lines of dialogue, all of which are about a cis character. Because trans people aren't people apart from how we relate to cis people I guess. Hell, it's mentioned that Shadowheart is the entire reason why she "found the strength" to transition in the first place, and she's introduced by her deadname long before you actually see her and learn her actual name. There's no reason to deadname her, Shadowheart knows her as an adult after she's transitioned and earlier games like Tell Me Why don't deadname their trans characters even in flashbacks to their pre-transition selves. Shadowheart is my favourite BG3 character, but it's so frustrating that the game's only trans character is entirely dedicated to making her look great and isn't a person beyond that.

This also extends to a problem with the character creator. While you do have the "nonbinary/other" option for your character's gender, it doesn't really change the fact that the character creator is incredibly binary. Naming them body types 1 and 2 doesn't really change the fact that one is very masculine and the other is very feminine, and this combined with the eight or so set face options for each body type mean that there's really not an option to play as a more androgynous character. Obviously, there's no one way to look nonbinary. But I thought that the lack of options to depict your character really felt like I was being pigeonholed into playing a certain character, both in terms of appearance and personality.

My problems with this game's LGBTQ+ representation weren't my only problems with it. I also had some problems with its combat balancing, story, (some of) the characters, and I never really felt like I was properly roleplaying my character at all. You can ask in the comments if you want me to go into more detail about those, but I felt like its LGBTQ+ representation was a flaw that I've never seen discussed. It feels like it was well intentioned but misguided, and I think it's important to critique it so that the developers can learn from their mistakes and improve next time.