I really don't understand the hate toward this game. Well, yes, it's entirely fair to complain about performance issues and bugs, poor online, as well as the fact that it was released essentially unfinished; it's becoming more prevalent in this industry, and it's not ok, no matter who's at fault.
That said, the game itself is fantastic! Despite these problems, I feel like I got my money's worth.

The worldbuilding and map layout are easily the best I've seen in the genre; it's like DkS1 all over again. It's marvelously interconnected, and it's beautiful! The whole map layout makes sense, and if you take the time to observe your surroundings, you will at almost all times understand where you are. And you will be amazed at the shortcuts you can unlock!
The map sketches are a really cool idea to help with your navigation, making you feel like you're on an ancient treasure hunt.
The lore is also surprisingly engaging!

Combat needs some getting used to, but the sensations are great, and there's good potential for builds.
Enemies suffer from a slight lack of variety IMO, but it's not as bad as people make it out to be.
Many bosses are wonderfully designed, but they still need some work on their moves, aggression and behavior to truly shine. They're also often much easier than their respective area, being similar to DkS2 in that regard (this is being addressed with frequent patches).

I loved this game to bits, to me it's a 5/5, but I can't in good conscience give a perfect rating at the moment. I will gladly do so once I see that the game is somewhat stable and in the state it should have been on release.

If you are considering this game, know that it's undergoing a lot of changes at the moment, so I'd suggest you wait until next year to buy it, as it will 1) be more stable, 2) be better balanced, 3) have more content (they're slowing adding more).

As it stands now, Lies of P is still my GOTY 2023. Nonetheless, LotF now stands as a diamond in the rough and has amazing qualities; it will become a truly incredible game one year down the line!

This is a metroid like 3D action adventure game that takes place inside a computer world. The premise seemed cool and I am sucker for Metroid game design but this game lacks the focus to create a good game.

Recompile has decent controls and mechanics, it’s not super tight controls but the feel of the character and jumping works well in this strange AI world. As you play you gain new abilities to access new areas, these start off simple like a double jump, a dash, and some combat upgrades like new weapons. But by the end of the game you get some ridiculous skills, one being a jet pack that lets you fly around like Superman, but drunk because controlling the jet pack isn’t great. So it nails the Metroid progression system, I was looking forward to each new power and enjoyed putting them to use.

The main problem with Recompile is the level design, this game feels like it was created by kid playing Dreams and for their level they just randomly put platforms everywhere. I was baffled at the design, some levels are huge sprawling locations that extend way above your starting point and even way below. The way up or down has you randomly jumping on pipes, or floating small circles, or falling down and double jumping on a small platform before going splat. Most games levels make sense from a design perspective and this game doesn’t. It’s just hard to move around, maybe some people will find it charming to play something so nebulous in its design but I don’t. I like smart cohesive level design, especially in a Metroid style game.

It also doesn’t help that the combat is mostly busywork. There are a few enemies and they are all some form of a floating orb that shoots at you. Once you get the best gun and the slow motion ability it all becomes trivial. There are some big boss battles that are interesting, they aren’t polished in any way but it serves as a good moment.

The game story is told through a bunch of files and in game messages. You are basically a AI construct entering a previously shattered AI, your job is to fix the broken AI so the levels you play through are the different pieces of the AI. It’s a unique concept and I enjoyed the story the files told.

There is a unique gameplay mechanic that is not used enough, basically you can hack modes that control the power through the level. Power is needed to activate elevators or gates to access new levels, to direct the power there are pipes with “and” or “or” gates, terms you will be familiar with if you know programming. Certain areas have small puzzles where you need to activate these gates in the right sequence to get the power where you need it.. or you can hack the gate to change its setting, which can make puzzles much easier. Apparently the game was supposed to change if you played certain way, like hacked too much but I didn’t see that in action at all. This mechanic was used early on a lot but by the last two worlds it’s all but thrown out, odd.

Recompile is clearly a rough indie game, I got to hand it to the team for trying a genre many don’t. That alone assured that I enjoy my time with the game but I was left wanting so much more. Its like 6 hours long which was perfect for this kind of game. It moves at a brisk pace with new powers and levels constantly so at least I wasn’t bored, I was just confused at why it’s all so sloppy. It’s free on gamepass, give it a whirl if you are curious, it’s not bad, but I think it’s safe to say this a game you can pass on.

Overall Score 5.8

It must be hard to create a "parody video game." Everyone's done the easy jokes, even games that are supposed to be serious po-faced prestige games. And pastiching a particular game is a lot of trouble to go to, since you've got to recreate the look, the style, the mechanics... No wonder we haven't got "The Worst of Us: Part 2" or something.

But the Witness, now there's a good target, right? It's beautiful, but not overtly difficult to recreate the style of. It's clever, but also takes itself a bit too seriously. And the central mechanic is flexible enough that even if your jokes don't land, you can actually create a pretty good puzzle game just by riffing on it.

So that gets us The Looker, which is, for the low low price of free, far better than it has any right to be. Not every joke lands, but there's enough that you'll probably be tickled by a few of them. And it uses the player's assumed knowledge of The Witness to further twist that game's mechanics - I particularly enjoyed the clever little pirate ship puzzle.

This is worth an hour of your time whether you loved or hated the Witness. If nothing else, you get to experience some of that game's wonder without giving any cash to old Blow.

The comparisons are too easy to make. A narrative driven independent game with lush prose that dabbles in magical realism and science fiction as it confronts visions of both the future and past. It also happens to be set in a version of our world (in this case, the American South) that has been skewed, deals with themes of labor politics and the plight of the working class, and draws on and reinvents design philosophies from decades year old games. The comparisons make themselves. That’s why I am doing my damnedest not to say those games’ names, because to do so robs Norco of its own, distinct identity. It’s torture not to draw line after line between its constituent elements to its counterparts for the sake of preserving that identity, maybe especially because I think Norco is experiencing an identity crisis of its own.

Let me be unequivocal: Norco is a good game. I think it’s worth playing. There’s a part of me that feels bad for offering an emphasis on criticism, as if I’m kicking down a darling indie game. So I’m trying to be particularly explicit here: I think Norco is a good game. It’s filled with beautiful writing, unique characters, and potent themes of grief and politics. It has things to say. But I’m not sure Norco is quite sure what those things exactly are.

I have biases, and two in particular that I arrive at here: I care disproportionately about endings, and I care greatly about “aboutness”. Norco’s ending fell flat for me, and I struggle to know for sure what it’s truly about. These are my biases. As I’ve just said, there are so many reasons to love this game. That’s not what I’m going to write about here. I’m going to write about what keeps me from truly loving Norco.

I think I disproportionately weight endings in narratives because they are what stories leave you with. When you walk out of the theater, the thing that is mostly immediately carried with you is the last frames before the credits rolled. Games, historically, do not have great endings. I don’t mean mechanically; there are lots of games with great final bosses and all that. But the narrative ending, the last moments, these are usually unnoteworthy, and it’s usually brushed off. With narrative driven work, however, this is a little harder to forgive. Of course, everyone likes different kinds of endings. I am picky with my endings, I’ll admit, but I try to have a nuanced understanding of what does and doesn’t work with me in an ending. Enter Norco.

Norco’s ending, by which I mean the exact final moments before the credits roll, feel rushed and incomplete. It is in desperate need of a denouement. It’s ironic, because the climax of this game is flanked, quite literally, with two beautiful moments on the left on the right, one of which is perhaps the game’s most beautiful sequence. I will not spoil it, but it is an ethereal, melancholy, and haunting image of memories and home. I almost wish moment was positioned as the Norco’s last moments, because this potency is immediately undercut by the climax, which felt bereft of catharsis. And I think the reason this climax fell so flat for me is because it relied on the motives of the main character, whose identity and desires are opaque and indistinct.

Kay, the protagonist, never feels like she is given the opportunity to become a character of her own. Blake, her brother, almost feels like one, but is mostly off screen. The companions you encounter feel like characters. They have motives, interiority, likes and dislikes, quirks. Catherine, Kay’s deceased mother, who you play as in flashbacks, gets to be a character, too. This is welcome; rather than just being a grief object for the protagonist, Catherine gets to be a person. So rarely are stories about grief as much centered on who we lose as how we lose them. But what about Kay? What are Kay’s feelings? What does Kay want, need? What does she like or dislike? I’m not sure I could tell you anything about her, despite having spent hours in her shoes. I felt more empathetic and understanding of its side characters by the end. All I know about Kay for sure is that she is detached.

A detached character is obviously not a bad thing, and detachment serves an important role here. Kay’s detachment, as I read it, is representative of a response to what feels to many young people like the slow march into a catastrophe by modern industrial society. It is very intentional, and the rare moments where Kay’s detachment is overtly characterized, it is felt strongly. But when a game builds up to a climax which centers on the characters goals, motives, and desires, her own specific relations and history, all of which are deliberately muted and blurred… I struggle to be moved by that climax and its ever brief ending.

Kay is neither a cipher nor a character you roleplay as. I don’t know what she’s supposed to be. She’s not me, but who is she? I can neither imagine myself as her or imagine her as someone else. Like the game itself, the player is in a crisis of identity.

Norco is kind of a mess, both narratively and mechanically. It’s modeled after classic adventure games, but the puzzle design is a far cry from that old school style -- which is not something I’m exactly mourning. Those puzzles were notoriously arcane and absurd, an ethos that has aged in quite a way, and it wouldn’t have worked here. Norco’s puzzles are relatively straight forward and signposted heavily, and you can ask for advice. But Norco also has a combat system. And it has mini-games. A lot of them. Most of these mini-game puzzles are fine. Nothing exceptional, but nothing horrible. There is one bit I did think was excellent and well executed, which I won’t get into again for spoilers, but involves a boat. But I truly have no idea why this game has combat. It’s not fun and just feels silly. And this lack of cohesion is also seen in its thematic underpinnings.

The themes are easy enough to identify: the struggles of the working class, religion’s social role, messianic myth, the desire to find meaning under late capitalism, ironic middle class hipsterism, the ever-extravagant machinations of the bourgeoisie, and so on. But these themes are neither explored on their own fronts nor are they unified by any central theme. The “Mind Map”, which is an interior display of the lore and relationships in Kay’s life (again, trying not to make the comparison here) is dense with connections but not with cohesion. There is some fascinating world-building and cool ideas in here. But where do they lead to?

Obviously I don’t think it’s necessary that a “message” be had in art, but when you neither pose questions nor offer answers, it can begin to feel more like these themes are props. Norco mostly acknowledges and maybe comments on its phenomena. Again, that’s not intrinsically bad, but I have my preferences, and the absence of direction doesn’t work for me here. All of it is cool, sure. But I don’t know what to make of it, and not in a way that fills me with giddy curiosity. I didn’t leave Norco with any questions, for either its world or for my own.

Again, I feel guilt, “damning with faint praise”, but I seem to be in the minority here, which is nice, I guess. It makes me feel a little more comfortable offering criticism. After all, I can find plenty of ecstatic analyses of Norco, but not as much where I’m coming from. I see why others have fallen in love with it. But I never got that far. Maybe I’ll grow more fond after reading criticism and other’s feelings. But this was my initial response, and that counts for something.

Norco, at its core, ends up as a collage, so scattered as to almost resemble a pastiche of itself. It’s soup full of scoopfuls of ideas that have been lightly emulsified. Collages can be good. And Norco is good. Its lack of thematic and structural direction does not nullify all the beauty therein, but it is why I don’t think I’ll ever get goosebumps when I think about it.

It's easy to look back at The Stanley Parable and laugh at it. It is, after all, a kind of self-important game that said things about video games that were getting pretty tired even in 2013. I loved the Stanley Parable when I first played the mod, loved it a little less when I played the steam release, and ultimately have found it less and less compelling as time goes on, as the times in which the jokes landed got more and more distant and the commentary got more and more trite.

One might reasonably ask why such an aging process has harmed Stanley when it hasn't harmed other games on quite the same level, and my argument for that would be that Stanley, to use a memetic phrase devoid of meaning, insists upon itself. There's little room for interpretation or multifaceted interpretation of it: Stanley Parable is a two-dimensional game, and what I mean by that is that it works on two dimensions: the jokes, and the commentary. There aren't really any other characters or themes or aesthetic twists and flourishes to appreciate: it's a game that is very blunt about what it's saying, and doesn't really have anything to it other than that. Which is fine! Really! But it kinda relies on the things it's saying being really good, and maybe they were, once on the facepunch forums or on ModDb. But now? Not so much.

Which is why the prospect of Ultra Deluxe intrigued me. It represented an opportunity to provide a new experience, to build on what came before, and make a case for Stanley Parable still being relevant, over a decade after the original mod came out. Perhaps I built some unrealistic expectations for it going in, as I did honestly think that a Rebuild of Stanley Parable was the right step to take for this, and I remember feeling similarly deflated by the steam release of Stanley hewing so close to the original mod, but regardless, The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe arrives with the enthusiastic impact of a wet fart in an empty room, not so much making a case for the relevance of the work in 2022 as making a supreme demonstration for it's growing irrelevance.

What we have here is an acceptable repackaging of the original game (with some pluses being options to sidestep some of the edgier stuff in the original release, namely the unbearably cringeworthy suicide sequence, and some minuses being the stripping out of jokes in the subtitles and the loss of the language of jokes that Source familiarity provided) alongside some, on the whole, pretty dire new content. Teeth-grindingly ancient observations on collectibles and DLC that would make CTRL+ALT+DEL groan paired with the Bucket. The fucking bucket. All the bucket stuff is absolutely unbearable humor that felt like being trapped in 2012-era reddit with people going on about narwhals and bacon. The superfluity of The Bucket Arc is clearly an argument about the futility of adding extra content in a re-release, but you still went and did it, and it was shit. It's satirical bent never rises above putting a dunce hat on itself and going "look at how dumb we're being". Ultra Deluxe has the same problem as Stanley Parable proper: it cannot help but slam you in the face with it's Point and it's Jokes, and when those land it works, but in Ultra Deluxe they almost never do, so you're just left trudging through a tediously unfunny experience reliving 2015 neoGAF in the most agonizing manner imaginable.

Ultra Deluxe is not without merit: there are truly talented artists and level designers at Crows Crows Crows, and they've crafted some really amazing spaces here. It's something they're really great at: their online multiplayer game/space TheClub.zone (which was shut down to give them time to develop this lol) is proof positive of that. But underneath the enormous weight of The Writing, they're never allowed to live, to breathe beyond the confines of The Writing's vehicle, and unfortunately, The Writing here is crap. It's as simple as that.

I wanted Ultra Deluxe to let me love Stanley Parable again. To prove once and for all that it has stood the test of time, that it does have a worthwhile place in video games and video game culture. But after seeing everything Ultra Deluxe has to offer, all I can do is sigh wearily, and type my review, which is as follows.

(ahem)

"Reddit Game."