The simple act of holding hands is key to a bond between boy and girl that transcends their language barrier. With no HUD, no life bar, no button prompts, and no tutorials, Ico is the purest experience in all of gaming. You discover everything for yourself, with nothing to break your immersion. The castle the game takes place in is a character unto itself, your prison and biggest obstacle, with such a well thought out interconnected design.

A game absolutely everyone should play to open their eyes to the power of the medium for storytelling, a landmark in gameplay-story integration.

It was two hours into this game when I fired my first bullet, directed at the first boss. Considering how most horror leans towards loud action instead of quiet dread, I was initially impressed, but it slowly dawned on me how terrible the implications truly were. The gameplay of survival horror is about managing resources: you weigh the convenience of a neutralized threat against the danger of an empty magazine, and consider alternatives like taking damage to run past, or circumnavigating the threat in other ways. In my entire playthrough, I only killed a single common enemy, as it blocked a narrow hallway with no alternative routes. So, that avenue of decision making, and thusly, gameplay, didn’t exist for me. I could walk into any room, and if enemies were laid out in a troublesome way, I could walk out and back in until they loaded into spots which presented no challenge. It seems like a cheesy strategy, but the game provided a survival-horror framework which is meant to focus on intelligent usage of resources. So, bypassing every room without challenge isn’t a decision that I made to go against the design, it’s the opposite: it’s the default optimal choice within the framework. With no pressure to make new decisions, there was no engagement. Verbalizing that perspective helped explain my boredom with Signalis’ gameplay, but it also explained my complete lack of interest in the presentation. Did they make save points throw up a screaming red screen because it was atmospheric, or because it’s what Silent Hill did? Did they make the soundtrack a cacophonous industrial grind because it fit the setting, or because it’s what Akira Yamaoka did? Was the idea to make bold new decisions, or go with the framework? Genre-defining fundamentals like fixed camera angles are one thing, but title-defining personality is another, and much of what’s meant to make this game unique is taken from genre templates. To be fair, it does have some original ideas and nuances to its presentation, but if the way you find that uniqueness is by locating keys to open doors to find boxes which contain keys to open doors with boxes with keys, it just isn’t worth it. You’re mindlessly stepping through the patterns of a game which defined too much of its personality by following patterns.

If slowly walking through lava caverns, scanning things, matching the color of a peashooter to the color of an enemy, slowly walking through lava caverns, fighting the most tedious bosses in all of Metroid, slowly walking through lava caverns, not having a satisfying metroidvania progression or sequence breaks, ignoring enemies and slowly walking through lava caverns sounds like an awesome time then you HAVE TO play this incredible 138 Metacritic score masterpiece.

In all seriousness I really wanted to like Prime but man, this got very tiring the moment the novelty of "Metroid but first-person wore off". Everything related to morph balling was awesome though! Maybe this could've been an even cooler Metroid Marble Blast spin-off.

i wish i liked signalis more. but i feel like a lot of the enjoyment i got from it was just from it being in a genre i love, which is only recently getting a resurgence, and not from the choices the game actually makes.

the game is inspired by a lot of fantastic media. resident evil (the remake of 1 in particular), silent hill (mostly 1 and 2), evangelion, the shining, lovecraft, and more. i can tell because it won't shut up about it. i'm not opposed to wearing your inspirations on your sleeve, but this game does it so blatantly and so frequently that it distracts me from the game i'm supposed to be playing and enjoying, and makes me thinks of other things i like better instead. yes, signalis, i remember the part in resident evil where jill plays moonlight sonata on a piano to open a secret passage. that was a cool moment. you aren't recapturing that by putting a piano in one of the save rooms and playing moonlight sonata in the background, because it's not tied to anything, it has no relevance, you're not doing a new twist on it. you're just making a reference to a game you like. yes, signalis, i recognize the carpet from the shining. yes, signalis, i remember angela from silent hill 2. yes, signalis, i've seen end of evangelion. can we make our own thing now? the worst of it is the blatant, absolutely shameless lifting of an entire major area from silent hill, taking its mechanical gimmick, its aesthetic, and even its name. the game even has the nerve to recycle an entire major plot moment from SH2 in that area. there is a line between "cute reference" and "borderline plagiarism" and signalis crosses it.

signalis strikes me as a game made by people who like a lot of things, but don't understand why they like the things they like. they like the resident evil remake, a game where some downed enemies will eventually get back up unless their bodies are burned, and need to be killed again in a stronger form. but they wanted to one-up that mechanic, so now EVERY enemy gets up unless burned, infinite times, which discourages combat too much. stealth quickly becomes the dominant strategy, slowing the pace of the game down and leading to the player stockpiling way too much ammo and healing. by the time i reached the final boss, my item box was stuffed with dozens of healing items and bullets for every gun, and i'd never touched any of those guns aside from the pistol, and maybe the shotgun once or twice. it's not that the game is too easy once you've figured it out, it's that it's too easy to figure out. enemy encounters should be as much of a puzzle as any door code or wall safe combination.

maybe the biggest offender is the save system. resident evil requires you to spend an ink ribbon to save for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is pacing. in a game where every bullet/healing item is precious, the player is gonna wanna save often to lock in their progress. by tying your ability to save to a resource, the game keeps you from ducking into a save room every 30 seconds and slowing the game to a crawl. it also means that if you wanna savescum to try a room over and over until you can do it without spending bullets or healing, then it'll at least cost you a save ribbon, probably two since you're gonna wanna save again after your perfect run. it's another thing the designer has to balance, but the effort is worth it.

signalis takes the easy way out and allows infinite free saves. so if you wanna play safe, which you SHOULD because that's the name of the game, then you'll shatter the game's pacing by saving after every single room clear. you'll savescum rooms over and over until you get by without taking a hit, then you'll save again, and it won't cost you anything. call that exploitative if you want, but we already had a mechanic that stopped players from playing this way nearly 30 years ago in the original resident evil for ps1, and signalis fails to learn from that despite constantly referencing that game. even the resident evil 2 remake, which had free saving, still had a hardcore mode which brought back the ink ribbons. i wish signalis' hard mode did the same, instead of just lazily increasing enemy health and damage.

also, for god's sake, why do the defensive items take up an item slot? and why can't i have a stun rod and the flashlight equipped at the same time? REmake doesn't make you give up an item slot to carry a taser, and silent hill doesn't bar you from using melee weapons if you have your flashlight out. this is just a stupid, misguided attempt to make inventory management more intense, when what it actually does is make stun rods worthless to carry around, force you to run back to the item box every time you wanna go through a dark room, and make the theoretically cool in-game screenshot item a waste of time and inventory space.

the story is fine, but it takes a lot of skill to pull off this sort of lain-esque, stream of consciousness, highly interpretive storytelling, and i don't think signalis sticks the landing. there's only one Serial Experiments Lain, and that's for good reason. i'm not sure even david lynch could put "Image Intentionally Left Blank" where a cutscene would normally go and make it work. i understand the story fine, but it's trying way too hard with its presentation. simple in-engine sequences would be much more effective than the 15 different styles of cutscene this game cycles through, especially the amateurish-looking anime ones that are way too clean and pretty for such a grungy, rusty, bloody game. though i suppose i haven't seen many games before which have such explicit lesbian overtones. depending on who you are, that element might hit hard.

if i weren't such a junkie for Scary Hallway Logistics Simulators, i'd probably be more down on this game. when i actually think about it, so much bad comes to mind. but even if it's fucked up, inferior resident evil, it's still resident evil, which i'll never stop finding fun. and given this game was made almost entirely by just two people, it's a monumental achievement. i just wish it were a better game.

The parts I love about Scorn, the atmosphere, aesthetic and puzzles that remind me of an old FMV adventure game, like its some long lost 3DO game, were enough to keep me going to the end. The intentionally oblique puzzles required a lot of exploring the environments, hitting interactables and piecing together what did what in order to solve a bigger, overarching puzzle were really satisfying and personally, I liked its less is more attitude to narrative, world-building and even explanation on what everything did. There's a consistent in-world logic to a lot of the fucked up machinery you need to use and once you're on the wavelength, the puzzles aren't too difficult but crucially just challenging enough to make you feel smart as fuck for solving them.

Unfortunately, the abysmal combat is a total exercise in frustration - slow, inaccurate, clumsy and deeply unsatisfying and there's plenty of opportunity to take a cheap death because you got caught on some gland sticking out of the floor or some shit and get dumped back a good 10-15 minutes of progress, which in a game where all you really do is press some buttons and look around a bit, isn't ideal. I've seen a few places go "well, there's only about an hour of combat in the whole game" but when you can punt through it in about four hours, that's quarter of the game that is dog eggs.

No one felt the need to stick a shotgun in Myst to spice things up a bit and the Scorn devs could've done well to have kept that in mind.

Stray is a game where you assume the role of a cat. This is the entire promise of its outward appearance. You control a сute furball navigating in a world proportionally large for your light presence. You can press B to meow and Y to cuddle with other cats. You can take a nap in allotted by game designer places. The cat mannerisms are meticulously animated and instantly gifable for twitter. An instant crowd pleaser of a concept, as Twitch and Steam numbers immediately suggest.

One of the first big puzzles you solve involves power outlets. You have to scout a room to find 4 cube-shaped batteries. You have to grab them with a floating button prompt and bring them to a computer. You have to MANUALLY (with paws?) plug them in power sockets. Surely, you already see a problem.

Stray takes place in a society of robots mimicking the images and idiosyncrasies of humans. Robots wear clothes, robots eat food, robots live in a police state – not because they need to, that’s just what we tend to do. The greatest irony of Stray is how it’s no different from the robots it portrays. It’s caught up in appearances, stupefied by feline oddness – and completely misses the essence of dubious little being.

Do you want to be a small rascal bumbling the way through, guided only by the most primal of instincts? Wrong game! And it’s mind-boggling to me how attentively every unique keynote of the whole premise is impaired here to create the most nothing hodgepodge of a modern action-adventure. You are pulled through a cat-sized theme park with the main attractions made up of the lightest of puzzles, dullest stealth sections and unlosable chase sequences. Traversal, which must pop with cats’ preciseness and unlimited agility, suddenly turns into a chore, because you can’t have a cat failing a jump, right? Even the animal inaudibility which opens the door for interesting environmental storytelling and silent interactions is undercut by the introduction of a companion drone acting as a translation layer between the feline friend and basically everything else in the world.

There are absolutely glints of creativity and good vibes here, and I decently enjoyed exploring the little hub levels where the game matches its title the best by letting the cat go a little astray. These bright moments though are far and between in this hugely underwhelming affair. Rain World: Downpour can’t honestly come soon enough.