I hate to abandon games, especially this one but...
I so badly wanted to love this game. The art style, the humor and the gameplay all seemed perfect to me. This game looked like it was made for me. I first played this towards the end of last year and for the most part I was enjoying it but then I played it more..
As I write this review I have 17 hours into it. In the nicest way possible this game is SO boring... (storywise). My favorite parts about this game is exploring, the combat and the puzzles. I could literally care less about the story unfortunately. I didn't see this game as anything longer than like.. 8 hours, and me being at 17 hours and barely being halfway.. this game is a slog. It has too much for what it is. Filler areas that the game can do without, all these characters and such that don't give an emotional pull.. Thank god that this game has a fast forward button and you can pretty much skip all dialogue. It's unfortunate because this game is absolutely beautiful, stunning even, but lacks in so many ways. When it comes to music, it's terrible and very annoying. I swear there's like only 4 songs and they play over and over and over to where I had to eventually play the game on mute. The music just fills me with rage I don't know why LOL.
Also.. this game kinda runs bad. I don't know if me playing on switch has anything to do with it but the game stutters from time to time and there's input lag..? You'll be walking around and the game skips like a scratched dvd or something, it's weird.
The pluses about this game are the bosses, they're actually a challenge and it's rewarding when you defeat them. The pixel art is gorgeous, very reminiscent of the Mother series and I love that. Anything other than combat/artstyle is really a hit or miss with this game AND there's dlc that I'm not gonna check out even though it's just like a farming sim? I don't know..
I don't find myself picking this game back up because I genuinely was not having fun, it feels like a huge chore to get through which is not what I was expecting. Not the worst, it's just so mediocre that even ragging on this game makes me feel bad.

"Curiosity killed the uncool cat, ya dig?" - Chad Ghostal

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a first-person horror game where your character wakes up in an abandoned building and has to solve paint-by-numbers puzzles while armed with a flashlight that has limited battery power.

In Sound Mind makes a poor first impression, its opening oddly lifeless for a game touting the collaboration of The Living Tombstone and presenting itself with psychedelic cover art. However, as I got my bearings in its first hour, hunting down a cassette tape that would whisk me away to its first proper level, I remained hopeful that the game would make good on its promise. I pet my cat before I left and got a trophy, "GOTY 10/10." Bad sign.

Protagonist Desmond Wales is as poor a therapist as he is a pet owner, inviting poisonous plants into his home and staring out the window while his patients doom spiral. Now you have to repair their broken psyches and give them closure while unraveling a conspiracy involving the highly psychoactive drug Agent Rainbow, which led to their deaths. What this means from a gameplay perspective is that each level centers around a specific patient in a location pertinent to them, such as... an abandoned grocery store. An abandoned lighthouse. An abandoned factory. An abandoned military base. This may all be the doing of Agent Rainbow, but each of these locations are drab, downright colorless both in aesthetic and flavor, occupied only by cookie-cutter enemies (of which there are three variants through the whole game) and uninspired puzzles.

Desmond's patients also haunt their respective levels, having mutated after succumbing to their inner-demons. You can't just shoot them like your typical fodder-type enemies and will need to employ more inventive methods to counteract them, with most of these encounters doubling as a means to solve environmental puzzles, like luring Max Nygaard - now a disembodied mechanical bull head - into breakable walls.

The problem is that much like all the other puzzles you run into, once the solution has been presented to you, you're expected to repeat it ad infinitum. Shining a light to scare away Allen Shore (nice Alan Wake reference) loses all its tension when you find yourself doing it a dozen different times, never once iterating on the mechanic after its introduction. The third level has you ferrying three CPUs between power panels to unlock doors, and by that point I became conditioned enough to know that would be my main method of progression through the next two hours of game. Everything you're tasked with feels like it was written out for you on a torn piece of notebook paper and stuck to the fridge, just a list of chores no more engaging than taking out the trash.

Speaking of trash: this game's performance. Something about open environments is incredibly disagreeable with the framerate, and unfortunately most of In Sound Mind takes place outdoors, so the game is constantly choking to death. It also has a tendency to checkpoint you in the middle of hazards, nearly locking me in a death loop once as I was stuck respawning on top of a toxic puddle while getting hit by an enemy with 30% of my HP remaining. I managed to wriggle my way out of that after multiple attempts, despawn the mob, and then ate a candy bar which made Desmond go "Nom~" in a cutesy voice. Almost shut the game off there.

And I wish I had, because In Sound Mind's technical problems ultimately resulted in the game becoming unbeatable. During the last leg of the final boss, all objects became non-interactive, something that permeated through several earlier saves and which could not be resolved by restarting the app or the console. Just locking me minutes from rolling credits, something it could've had the decency to do hours earlier. I don't normally rate games I abandon, but considering the conditions under which I did and how close I was at the end, I'm comfortable giving this a 1/5. Would've clocked it at a 2/5 before that.

We Create Stuff is an aptly named studio, because "stuff" is such a vague, "whatever" term for an end product that there's no promise of it being worthwhile. In Sound Mind is just that, a cobbled together collection of rote design elements scraped off the bottom of the first-person horror barrel, served up with no imagination, neither invested in saying anything or being fun, it's just stuff. Great job, guys.

This has got to have the weirdest story mode in any Mario Party I've ever played.

It's been several days now since I finished Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. I've been decompressing, letting my experience sit in the hopes that my thoughts might coalesce into something clear and concise. But this is a game that took me 139 hours to complete, easily the most time I've sunk into a single run of a video game, and naturally there's a lot of highs and lows in there. In some ways, Rebirth is everything I was hoping it would be, especially after embracing the more contentious changes Square made to Final Fantasy VII's continuity. In a lot of other ways, it's doing crunches for three hours straight so the number of collectables in Johnny's Seaside Inn goes up by [1].

In my review of Remake, I heaped a lot of praise on Square's audaciousness in regard to how they treated the source material, especially towards the end of the game. The promise that the "unknown journey will continue" removed some of the expectation for where the plot was headed, so much so that something as well-known as Aerith's death could once again be considered a genuine spoiler insofar that it was no longer a certainty. Rebirth certainly takes what Remake set up and goes places with it, though it backloads much of this and rushes through at a pace that makes some of the payoff a bit too vague and convoluted. It's got a lot more Zack though, and as a Zack fan, we're feastin'.

Rebirth does otherwise follow the plot of Final Fantasy VII's first disc with about as much faithfulness as Remake does, which is to say you'll still be visiting the Gold Saucer, experience an extended flashback to Nibelheim, and battle a fucked up looking wall in the Temple of the Ancients. Just like the last game, a lot of these familiar locations and moments are expanded upon and fleshed out using material introduced in the Complication of Final Fantasy VII and various spin-offs.

This was at times detrimental to Remake given its focus on Midgar, ballooning what was a three-to-four-hour chunk of gameplay into a full 40+ hour experience. Though Rebirth is packed to the point of bursting with superfluous content, it suffers fewer pacing issues thanks to the portion of the original game it covers, which already provided the player more moments to breathe between visits to dungeons and towns.

That's not to say all that side content is worthwhile. In fact, a lot of it is pretty tedious, excessive, and at times frustrating, and while it's optional on paper, some amount of it will be required either by force or by need. Lighting watch towers, collecting lifestream and summon intel, completing hunts, taking on special hunts, capturing chocobo, digging up valuable loot with said chocobo, completing air-courses with chocobo, jumping around in two different frog minigames, WHEELIES, getting the high score in shooting galleries, playing Not Rocket League, taking on VR battles, destroying your tendons in god damn Cactuar Crush, taking pictures of Cactuars, taking pictures for the photography club, finishing multiple tiers of 3D Brawler, playing Star Fox, riding the G-bike, performing in two different rhythm games, MORE WHEELIES, taking on brutal VR battles, redoing the pull-ups game from Remake but somehow worse, breaking boxes in Desert Rush, catching a bunch of ffffucking Moogles, playing a more truncated version of Intermission's otherwise excellent Fort Condor tower defense game, finding PlayArts figures in well-hidden rabbit holes, setting up automated attack patterns in Gears and Gambits, playing the piano very poorly, I FUCKING LOVE WHEELIES

This isn't even getting into Chocobo Races or Rebirth's persistent card game, Queen's Blood, which both feel like full games grafted on at the hip. Sure, you could do as I did and fall into the trap of trying to 100% a game and come to hate parts of it as a result, but I also think it's fair to say these games are designed in a way that try to pull the player into its side content. Indeed, the story will have you dip your toes into most minigames, and the promise of valuable gear, folios, and even a super-boss might be temptation enough to suck you into some truly dreadful stretches of gameplay. I stomached about 3/4's of what Rebirth had to offer and started to get burnt out, but by that point am I really not going to finish the rest of it?

Well, no, because the final side quest is currently bugged and cannot be completed. Very nice thing to run into after doing literally everything else.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth feels like a minigame compilation that is occasionally interested in being an action-RPG, but when it is, it's pretty damn good. I was already a fan of Remake's take on the familiar "active time battle" system that served as the series bedrock during much of its turn-based days. New to Rebirth are synergy skills, which both deal significant amounts of damage while conferring positive buffs to participating party members. And y-yeah, you know, like... you gotta beat a lot of side quests and stuff to get folios to buy new synergy skills, but if you're playing the game like a freak-ass maniac, you'll have a lot of fun messing around with different party combinations. Aerith can put on Barret's sunglasses and pose with him. She's so cool, I hope she doesn't get stabbed later.

The materia system is intact and has been expanded with new materia that allow for some pretty inventive builds, my personal favorite being Exploding Yuffie. Character playstyles carry over from the last game, though I found newcomers Cait Sith and Red XIII to be the least interesting of the bunch, and as far as I'm concerned, Cloud, Yuffie and Barret are the best combination and suitable for basically any combat encounter you'll find yourself in outside of sections where your party has been pre-determined.

A lot has been said about Rebirth's presentation and performance, and I think most complaints about it are extremely valid. Performance mode is one of the muddiest looking things I've seen and I play Nintendo 64 games on a CRT routinely. Remake's infamous door texture is carried spiritually into the wind-ranging vistas of Gaia, though the inconsistent texture work is better hidden when roaming around the open world. However, plenty of cutscenes are blocked in such a way that draws attention to low-res textures and objects, and I don't know, I think they could've swapped out Midgar's horrible looking skybox if they were going to focus on it this much.

Look, it's hopeless for me. I'm all in on Final Fantasy VII. I see Cid Highwind raise a hand to a woman and my brain goes as smooth as a marble. Palmer wanted butter for his tea, I stood up and clapped and said "yes, thank you, I will spend one HUNDRED hours of my life playing Leap Frog." I have the deluxe edition with two steelbooks, one for each disc, and worse than all of that... I tried to platinum the game. I'm already dead, man. Dump my ass in the Forgotten Capital.

I could say "Square ought to learn some restraint and reign it in with the final chapter," but even if they don't, I'll be on my hands and knees in front of the dog bowl ready for more wet slop. Mmm, diced Zack Fair for me, please!

Not particularly enamored with this one although I can certainly understand why many are, since it allows for those kinds of conversations that frequently feel impossible in 2023, the kind where you and your friends or coworkers come together to talk for hours about the choices you made at a particular juncture and what happens if you pick option C instead of option B, you know what I mean - conversations that are much rarer when a modern game's sense of mystery can be completely dispelled within 10 hours by front page reddit posts and scores of "articles" reducing each dialogue prompt to Baldur's Gate 3: How To Get THE BEST Companion Cutscenes. The #general chat in my Discord server has people I haven't spoken to in years coming out of the woodwork to talk about the results of character creation, about the companions they've romanced and killed, about all the ways their characters lost an eye, and they all seem pretty content with the breadth of discoveries that this game enables.

For my first 20 hours, I was basically the same - there's a lot of fun to be had in poking around these early areas with the horniest party of all time (despite that fact) and chatting with rats, cats, and dead guys. In these early chapters the game best supports my preferred playstyle: a big circuitous route around the map, looking at everything as I drive past but only stopping to drink deeply from a select few side stories. Push further into the main story, though, and find yourself woefully underleveled because you grew tired of these fights 10 hours ago. It's never so difficult as to completely block you from progressing, but it's easy to feel that your punishment for not seeking out each and every side quest is being forced to initiate every fight from the (admittedly cumbersome) stealth or spend the whole fight herding enemies into a big circle so you can use your Level 3 AOE Spell of choice to meme the encounters until they're finished. I have no experience with D&D or this particular ruleset aside from other video games, but the adherence to such a system and its limits are obvious when you spend forty hours playing this game just to unlock a single cast of a spell that these developers would've given you immediately in their last game. It's a pace that works pretty well for weekly tabletop adventures with a group of IRL friends, but feels a bit too slow and unrewarding when I'm sitting alone, staring at a menu of unappetizing "roll advantage"/"create difficult terrain" spells as a reward for my once-nightly level-up.

What's kept me playing are the settings and companions - the mind flayers are arguably the least interesting part of this whole deal, so while it sucks that the main plot so prominently revolves around them, the side quests are generally well-crafted enough that one or two of them would be a satisfying enough adventure to fill the entire night on their own. I do wish that the companions would Talk Normally for five minutes but they've done well enough in telling some of the companion stories (Gale is a particular standout) that they can create genuinely affecting moments if you look in the right places. Not all of them are told so well, and some of the companions feel deeply artificial as a result, but generally speaking I can understand why a player might recruit any given companion not named Lae'zel to their party. For the most part, I'm also fond of the party chatter - every once in a while you'll get a nice bit of banter that feels like the result of actual role-playing with friends, whether it's a joke or a short flavorful exchange revealing how two companions interact or a story that fleshes out someone's background. It's not as personal as it could be if it were your real friends bantering with you, but it's a fun approximation and it's deployed tastefully.

Ultimately my grade for the experience is a big ol' shrug and the word "Sure?" written exactly like so. I think the lipstick looks fantastic even if it fails to produce miracles for the pig that is 5th edition rules, with its awkward magic system and glacial level progression and a litany of boring buffs. Compared to the average person I'd be considered a "hater" of Divinity Original Sin 2 but it felt so colorful compared to this! I love killing bosses by shoving them into a pit as much as the next guy, but much of this experience feels like the developers are skillfully wringing every drop of charisma that they can from the source material and hoping that the player doesn't notice that "the chill druid left and now the mean druid is being mean, go fetch the chill druid" feels a little trite. I'll be doing my best to hit the end credits, but if I don't make it, know that I'm probably out there starting a new save on Tyranny instead.

Expressiveness is the quality that defines roleplaying games: they’re judged by how freely players can assert themselves in a reactive space. Players want to convey their personality and make choices, but while these are the obvious core concepts of the genre, Baldur’s Gate 3 has proven to me that they’re not what makes an RPG great. Having the capacity to make decisions is certainly a necessity, but decisions only matter when players care about the outcomes. Choices surround us in every moment of our lives, but most vanish from our minds within seconds for that very reason; they’re so emotionally inconsequential as to be hardly worthy of notice. So, more fundamental than allowing for choice is providing a real adventure in which to make those choices, and defining a journey which has players encountering challenges, learning, changing, and overcoming. This is the critical component which Baldur’s Gate fails to establish, most glaringly from its narrative structure.

(Minor spoilers through act 2)
In the opening cutscene, your character has a mindflayer tadpole inserted into their head, so your call to adventure is getting it out. This is fine in itself, but the game is quick to tell you that there’s no urgency to this task, relieving you of the burden of care. Every quest you receive to accomplish this goal, across the first ~22 hours of gameplay, results in failure where your party just sorta gives up. It takes another ten hours before the main villains are established, a stale group of evil zealots of evil gods who just love being evil, pursuing an agenda which players can't feel meaningfully aligned against. The simplicity of the central narrative gives the impression it’s just supposed to be a foundation for a character-driven story, but the interpersonal aspect is similarly lacking. In what feels like a symptom of the game's long stay in early-access, your companions put their love and trust in you in act 1, before anyone’s had the chance to organically develop relationships or encounter life-changing struggles. Characters don’t have the time and space to have an arc, and you don’t get the chance to express yourself alongside them, you simply skip to the end for an immediate and vacuous payoff. There’s no journey here, you’re simply being presented with scenes from an adventure without actually going on one.

The same can be said for the mechanics, even when they’re lifted from the tabletop game, thanks to a design philosophy where every playstyle is thoroughly accommodated. This seems like a good strategy in a genre where players want to assert themselves, but the refusal to challenge players leaves unique approaches feeling irrelevant. Even with a party led by a Githyanki barbarian, with very little in the way of charisma, intelligence, or skill, there was never a time I couldn’t overcome a situation in an optimal way. I could pick whatever locks I wanted, disarm whatever traps I wanted, circumvent any barrier I wanted; the game never asked me to think ahead or prepare. I didn’t have to be ready with certain spells or proficiencies, it never demanded more than following a clear path. Even if it did, the cheap respecs mean that you’re a maximum of 400 gold away from having a team perfectly suited to the task at hand, and even if you don’t end up using that option, knowing that your choices are so impermanent is a detriment to any feeling of growth.

That’s the key here: growth. My characters leveled up, but I don't feel like they grew. I traveled, but I don’t feel like I went on a journey. I made choices, but I don’t feel like I went in new directions. After a fifty-hour playthrough, all I remember was that I chilled out, ran around some nice maps, and managed my inventory. I spent all that time relaxing well enough, but I didn’t overcome challenge, feel much, or learn anything. All I could confidently state that the game did for me is live up to its basic selling point, of being an adventure I could take at home, a journey where I go nowhere.

Just because a game makes people angry doesn’t mean it has a critical design flaw. Built-up tension can make victory all the sweeter, and there’s always going to be a level of frustration associated with even a completely fair challenge. On the other hand, making players fall asleep might be a categorical disqualification. As much as I hate to admit it, in the fourth act of this game, the pace was so slow and so little was going on that I actually fell asleep in my chair. It’s the first time in my life where that’s happened, so this is where I should normally start tearing into it for not keeping me engaged. However, that’s not the right approach this time. Artsy games with a lot of dialog are usually called book games, ones with a lot of first-person exploration are called walking simulators, and the best way to summarize Kentucky Route Zero’s style would be to call it a road trip game. Not just for the game’s actual driving and highway imagery, but for the sort of adventure you have in a general sense. There are moments that actively engage you like a typical game does, but that’s just the destination, one piece of a full journey. In between, there’s going to be a lot of sleeping. A lot of reading. A lot of looking out the window, passing by the places that define people’s lives in a nameless blur. The moments you’re far away from home, tired, and experiencing something new have a memorable otherworldly quality, and all these little moments are what Kentucky Route Zero simulates. It uses a blend of fantasy and drama to portray the realness of these experiences, both of you as a passenger and of the people whose lives you briefly intersect in the middle of nowhere. The presentation is so magical and the subject matter so unique that I want people to experience it, even in spite of the ways it bored me. Just like any trip, there will be times you're bored or wish you were back home, but you’ll always be thankful for the memories.

Listen - I like surreal things, I like abstract things, I like slow things, I like reading. But man, there needs to be something for me to hold on to to make it through a game. 'Vibes' and 'themes' alone aren't enough.

You'll see this compared to Lynch. No. It bears absolutely no resemblence to his work beyond the most superficial. Every second of everything he has ever done, no matter how 'dreamlike', is animated by a powerful and clear emotional core. And that's the point of the exercise. It's just as easy to tell what his stuff is 'about' as it is with this game, but he gets it across in feelings, through image and performance - this game does it through dry, detached, opaque walls of text and deliberate tedium. Sorry, but one of those is a hell of a lot more compelling to me than the other.