I've had a dream recently. I was driving around my neighborhood, but it was different. Vastly different. I wasn't looking at houses, I was looking at abandoned buildings. The more I explored the neighborhood, the more decrepit it became: Houses became remains of a destroyed, rotting victorian era building; establishments that were nothing but wood and the occasional gothic imagery; memories that never were, would manifest in the form of ones you would never know its full history.

Dark Souls II is exactly that dream.

Drangleic is a world that once was. You just happen to explore its end. People fight for scraps of its memories, as if there's something to salvage from what calamity has already claimed. A demented kingdom is all you will find. I fear the concept of dementia, but I'm also morbidly curious by it, much so the concept of death itself. Exploring it for the first time, I've never really realized how much these morbid curiosities are why I've enjoyed Drangleic as much as I have. I just thought it was a cool world. It's crazy how stories can be told mainly through visuals and you could totally ignore the meat of it and still get the message.

Dark Souls, as a series, explores death in different ways. Where the first one's thematic is death and how we cling on to life (perhaps a bit too much), Dark Souls 2 gives us death, and how it will eventually make us all forgotten. To me, death only comes once you're no longer remembered. In other words, you cling on to those memories, no matter how much they're degrading.

Oh, right, this is a video game. Oops.

Dark Souls 2 is also my first souls-like game. It's a game that formed me as a souls-like enjoyer. I'll always tell people to start with 2 with a win-win situation of "If you liked the others better, then at least you started with the worst and built it up. If you loved this game from the get-go, then you got a new favorite in your hands". Balance is weird in this game: it throws many bones at the player. It's much easier to get a hang of the game and breeze through it, unlike 1 and 3, and Elden Ring. But that's why it's so much fun. I get to play without stressing too much, I allow myself to get hit more often due to the existence of lifegems, and so on. It feels so much more dynamic and I got to play this game multiple times, with different play styles each time.

I've never played the Scholar of the First Sin edition, and from what I've heard, it's even more of a "gank squad central" game than before. I never had an issue with enemy placement in the original, but if it's accentuated in the new version, then I'd hate to try it out, lest it ruins my perception of this game being the best one of the series.

I'm not here to start wars about which Dark Souls is better, but I will say this: Don't trust a person who will go out of their way to tell you unprompted that Dark Souls 1 is the best one. They probably only play it for the PvP.

A wonderful sequel that not only gives us even more breathtaking sights, but also overall improved gameplay from its predecessor. If you can believe it, annihilators are balanced now.

Gracing us with themed chapters is this wad's biggest strength once more. Every level is crafted with such meticulousness that it makes me wonder how the creators didn't lose their minds making a single one of them. Doom has been around for 30 years, of course, so with that time spent, come its most dedicated fans, ready to rip you a new one. A primitive engine that dates from the 90s, and yet they crafted some of the most beautiful scenery I've seen in a while. The art direction is, simply put, spot on.

Music this time around is sublime as well! I'm happy to state that I've got some new memorable songs that can be stuck in my head whenever I want to. A team of 4 people (from what I can see in the credits) worked to make 36 original tracks and they all fucking slap.

Map design is also a big improvement! I can still name a couple of maps that soured the experience, but they've only soured it a bit. Most notably, however, and I'm gonna make this one personal: Map28 could definitely have done without those white cacos flying way too high up in the air. Not cool. However, I can give props for making properly difficult maps, like the jaw dropping map36. Holy hell, that one's just one of the best maps ever made.

This was overall a much better experience than the first Eviternity, and the first one was already really good. Highly recommend this wad for any DOOM fan, as well as for the people who are dipping their toes into more difficult experiences. Considering this was a stealth drop, of all things, I've gotta give it to the team for not leaking a single thing, they must have been bursting a vein or two, wanting to share their work to the world as soon as possible.

Played on Ultra-Violence. Timer says 14 hours, but you could probably add 1 or 2 hours in there with my save reloading. I tried to not save scum too much, with a decent degree of success.

DOOM forever.

This game had the possibility of aging so badly from when I first played it back in 2004. Fortunately, it still holds up somewhat. Of course, the writing suffers from "Anime Aughts-itis", a terrible condition I've just coined. A lot of segments in the writing have not aged well at all, and obviously, that's to be expected for this kind of game. Everything else about this game feels barebones from its successors, but that's just how it goes for a series, does it not?

It's weird to go back to this game and see how thoroughly it preaches a message about morality and humanity, and then you get a bad sex joke to break the mood.

Why is it that a beloved game can age so poorly? Why is it that a world who has discovered a series from its technically first iteration remember a "future timeless classic" while being oblivious to its faults? Why is it, that even with a tinkered edition of a broken game, making it a bit less broken, is still a broken game?

Dark Souls changes a player. It changes a player in many facets. I do not fathom the player whose first memories of a "soulslike" game included frame dips into painful locations. I do not fathom the player who recommends a game to another, only to tell them: "It sucks at first but you'll see". People love a video game, but they won't hesitate to tell you about how some aspects of it suck. Dark Souls changes a player to become an adrenaline junkie for challenging gameplay. Dark Souls changes a player to rethink about their preferences to a "fun challenge". Dark Souls changes a player to consider difficulty as a factor to fun. As for me, Dark Souls changed me to become a more miserable person.

Before I start with my review of "Dark Souls: Remastered", I would like to warn you that this is a review of both "Dark Souls: Remastered" AND "Dark Souls". This is a review for both because I never got past the first iteration of the game: Its technical faults made it a dizzying experience that made it unenjoyable from frame one. Dark Souls: Remastered is but an accompaniment piece to its original version, making it, at the very very least, playable. Dark Souls doesn't need too much to make it playable, but what happens after that?

I have fully played Dark Souls AFTER I've played Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 3 in their entirety, and then some. I wasn't a stranger to the series when I entered the world of Lordran, and yet, I was more miserable playing through this game than I was with the other two combined. Difficulty is undoubtedly an important factor in its game design, but this is also where difficulty as a game design was still being fleshed out. Dark Souls is the result of experimentation, following the success of its predecessor. One game wasn't enough to determine what can make a game hard and fun at the same time. I can't say they haven't tried — quite the opposite, they definitely took their time to craft every stage with care — but, the result of their labor only showed that, even if you do try, you can ultimately fail at providing your experience.

What is a Dark Souls game, but a game about finding opportunities to attack your opponent once they've finished attacking? Can you be greedy and sneak a 2nd or 3rd hit while your opponent's defenses are down? It's a game about learning patterns, using what little movement you have to weave through combat and come ahead victorious, no matter the realistic odds you had fighting (un)godly beings. I've got to say, Dark Souls is the game where you need to do the most Guesswork. Capital G in Guess, because more often than not, knowing a pattern is not enough to get through fights. Some fights take too much time because these patterns are chained too quickly, or don't leave the hero enough time to even score a slice. Some fights pit you with more than one — I could stop here, many people already know what I mean — enemy at a time, and these fights don't have "Patterns" in mind: they have a mess that you need to clean up. The mess doesn't care if you can't attack, you just need to know when the mess has finally let an opportunity show up. The difference between a pattern and a mess, is the intent of difficulty by the game's designers. Should a fight be all about patterns? What even is a pattern? I can only say that a pattern has as loose of a meaning as you have the many ways of approaching fights. The problem is: many of these ways are sub-optimal. Weapon balance is all over the place, some locations make your weapon completely useless and, most of all, the fucking bow isn't going to budge your enemy's health bar.

In a world where misery takes hold of everything, you'd think miserable gameplay would accompany it well (remember this sentence).

The beauty in the decay of what was once a kingdom makes for great vistas to explore. A dead world, rich of story, is undeniably the greatest strength that Dark Souls, hell, its series, has given to us. Dark Souls changes a player to enjoy a world's environments. That, for once, is a good thing I can say about Dark Souls. That's why it's not one star: It has wonderful, redeemable qualities. Crazy how a rating system can work. Anyways, could you wonder what video games could be without Dark Souls? Would we still have countless amounts of lore hunters occupying the gaming world? A question that I shudder to even think. Lore hunting, as cringe as it sounds, is still a wonderful and necessary aspect of analysis. It's what people would do with books and movies, so why not video games? I'm not saying that Dark Souls invented lore to hunt, I'm just saying it was the reason why it became so much more popular. I'm also a fucking sucker for historic (more specifically gothic) architecture, so the locations to visit in this game are like a gourmet meal to my eyes.

Does this game suck? Objectively, yes. I like some things about Dark Souls. For one, I'm thankful for its existence, despite its immensely flawed experience catering. Thankfully, they fixed Dark Souls later on after learning from their mistakes: It's called Dark Souls 2.

If this were a game not made by Remedy, I'd call it wack and somewhat boring. However, this game was made by Remedy, so it was good.

But, like, that's it. It was good. Control is probably Remedy's weakest game so far to me. It's still a compliment to say it, cause that means... you get it. I don't need to spell it out.

Obtuse storytelling is what Sam Lake eats for breakfast. The devs love that stuff. This is a tough task, cause you still want to keep your players interested and not tune out after 5 seconds of hearing someone speak what is essentially alphabet soup. Thankfully, if you can't follow through with the main story, you at least got these wonderful tidbits named "documents". Side stories and layman's terms explanations of the world of The Oldest House keep you wanting for more. Characters, while some of them a bit bland, still fit together to form a squad of oddballs.

Gameplay is hit and miss at the same time. Some fights feel good, some fights don't. It's weird. At some points, I do lots of efficient damage to enemies by using my entire arsenal at them and, at times, I feel like I'm just dealing chip damage when I'm throwing everything but the kitchen sink at them. Combat loop is good, but the lackluster feel of being consistent makes for very confusing progression and made me think that I just needed to do more side quests, only to resume the main path and just laying waste on everything in my path in a button press.

Big drawback is the whole crafting system. It's not necessary, we didn't need it. If there's one thing I don't want in my video game is a crafting system, no matter how shallow it is. There are better ways to offer upgrades and items, and the game already was doing that.

Game looked great with RTX. One of the rare experiences where I'd actually recommend putting it on.

Control 2's eventually happening. Alan Wake 2 has been out for half a year. With what I've seen, Remedy isn't anywhere close to dropping the ball. Bless those guys.