Dropped at the Phazon Mines, wasn't enjoying enough to push through a huge difficulty spike. I'm sure this game was a revelation at the time, but there was little here that excited me.

Weird decision to release a climbing game with the controls in a very dodgy state: unreliable, coarse, and finicky at the worst times. That said, there are moments when it captures the charm of seeing a route through a problem materialise in front of you almost without conscious intervention. It's nothing like climbing, except when it is.

Fun, if slight.

A charming puzzle game brought down by clumsy controls and boring, repetitive combat. How many times have you heard that story?

You remember Alan Wake? The janky 360 era third person shooter with literary pretentions? Surprise, it's now a sprawling (unusually meditative) big budget trans-media meditation on the disturbing implications of genre fiction and authorship, as well as the most technically impressive video game to date.

It's fine. Doesn't break my top five Resi games.

An excellent mental workout from start to finish, with the exception of the stealth sequences. Why put clumsy instant-fail timed sections into your brilliant linguistic symbol matching game? It's like finishing off the icing on your beautiful birthday cake with a steaming dollop of dog turds.

Absolutely do play though, very worth the minimal time investment.

Wonderful fractal chitinous exploration puzzle game. One of the best things it does is constrain the possibility space within its mindbending architecture so well that you are very rarely at a loss for how to move forward: there's always a nearby switch to press or portal to jump through, and I never found a way to end up in a dead end.

I could have done without the boss encounters.

The least fun I've had with a Bethesda game since Star Trek Legacy. Narratively as deep as a puddle while stuffed to the gills with tedious combat encounters. All the interesting systems are locked behind skill points that you earn at a glacial pace.

Down with this sort of thing.

100 hours later, I can be confident in what I thought a few hours into Act 1: this is the best CRPG I've ever played and the best translation of a good part of the joy of tabletop roleplaying.

Just play Inside again.

I'm a bugger for a spot of communist noblesse oblige. Better plotted than any recent non-animated Trek drama, shocking "gameplay" though. Next time drop the phasers and stealth sections.

Despite some minor pacing and storytelling issues, a towering achievement and probably the best modern Final Fantasy. I love you Clive, despite all the running around in leather trousers; you must smell like death itself.

I will not grind, you cannot make me grind, I will simply stop playing your game and complain about it on the internet.

Vaan? No, never heard of the guy.