Do relationships between people really matter? They'll all break in the end, sooner or later. Can't a person be himself and walk down a path he chose purely on his own, without anyone else's intervention? He may seem like a nobody, but he'll ultimately gain more.

I’m a firm believer in the power of language over one’s thoughts.

Not in the sociocultural or moral sense, but more of a structural sense. If you’ve ever been through cognitive behavioural therapy (we are not typing the acronym), you’ll probably understand what I mean: For the disordered, the process of getting better is often just the process of acquiring more words to describe and talk down our thoughts.
Indeed, many people I’ve met in my life have suffered because they lack the language to describe and address their own thoughts. It’s easy to say “I feel bad”, sure, but emotions and thoughts are rarely so binary and require a decent toolkit of words to properly address.

With this in mind, I believe there’s no arrangement of words more powerful than:

“It doesn’t have to be like this.”

What do you do, then, when everyone’s words have been taken away from them?

Simultaneously so bleak as to be genuinely haunting and so hopeful that it inspired a significant paradigm shift in my life, Library of Ruina consumed me ever since I started playing it, with its de facto claim over my every waking thought soon becoming de jure.

I was filtered by LoR’s predecessor, Lobotomy Corporation, perhaps my only genuine mark of shame in decades of playing games and indeed engaging with art as a whole. It was right up my alley and hit basically every note I love in games, but alas I hit the wall and turned around instead of climbing it.

Bizarrely, this might’ve given me the best possible experience in LoR - in turn, giving me the best game I’ve ever played.

LoR opens on an unremarkable note. Some twunk named Roland trips and falls into the titular Library where the Librarian of her role’s namesake Angela peels a few of his limbs off, interrogates him, and revives him later as her servant.

What is the Library?

It’s a fantasy dungeon where you’re the big bad and your goal is to slaughter the people who’re invited so you can assimilate them as powerups and catalogue their knowledge for Angela’s aims. Every reception starts off with a little vignette of their lives and personalities, hopes/dreams, and reasoning for entering the Library… and then you murder them.

Yeah, LoR and the overall franchise is fantastically bleak. The first few people you kill are desperate down-and-outs or bottom of the barrel Fixers (mercenaries) too unremarkable to have the luxury of passing on such a vague, suspicious contract.
Angela, a sheltered woman with the emotional maturity and life experience of a 12 year old, frequently comments on how miserable/horrifying the world is, only for the suspiciously world-weary Roland to assure her that this is just how things are.

Angela is a woman who, for the bulk of her overly long and painful existence, was trapped - literally, and by circumstance. In LoR, she attempts to assert her freedom by giving it to other people; one must sign the invitation to enter the Library, the warnings are written on it. The choice is there to simply not sign it.
Only… As Roland himself repeatedly points out, it’s not quite that simple. Indeed, none of the people you kill in the early stages of the game really had a choice. They were either too desperate or under the thumb of someone much stronger. With the passage of time and progression of the story, many of the Library’s guests are coerced, manipulated either by contract or by sweet little lies, or commanded to on pain of death. Some are compelled by forces beyond their ken, or the welling of pure emotion that so many City dwellers had shut out of their heart.

I think it’s fantastically easy to make the observation of “LoR tackles nihilism as a subject”, and it’s not exactly wrong, but I think it’s remiss not to mention the ways LoR ties contemporary nihilism with the omnipresence of capital and systemic oppression.

A gear with a purpose is content, for its rotation has meaning. Humans are cogs in the machination that is the City. Someone has to make those cogs turn. That way, the City can run correctly.

The City’s inhabitants are, as reiterated endlessly by both the pre-reception vignettes, Librarian chats and Roland’s various interjections, stuck underneath the bootheel of capital. A Corp or ‘The Head’ is a ruling force that, while it does not place the building blocks of oppression in the land, is nonetheless the solid ground they’re placed upon by others. All of the City’s structure is, down to the rebar used in the concrete, built to maintain a status quo that considers the deaths of hundreds of thousands to be an acceptable tradeoff, but treats tax fraud as deserving of a fate worse than death.
Because of this structure, and those that perpetuate it, everyone in the City - including many of the people who're forced to uphold the oppression against their will - has basically shut down. Feelings are a luxury nobody can afford, and the boot placed upon their neck has been there so long that they consider it a universal constant - much like gravity.
In lieu of any hope, even the nonreligious have come to view the City as a god. The actually-religious exist in a circle of copium, ‘worshipping’ doctrine which is about accepting the boot as part of your life rather than as your oppressor. Characters like Roland repeatedly say they don’t believe in anything, only to talk about the City as though it were a vast and unknowable god - at best witnessed, but never comprehended.

But it’s made equally clear that it doesn’t have to be like this, especially in chats with the Librarians - who often put forward viewpoints that Roland shuts down because his mind, so thoroughly warped by the foundational cruelty of the City, cannot comprehend them on a base level. From the top of the City to the bottom, an endless domino chain of “well, it is what it is” cascades into acceptance of horrors that have no real reason to exist.
These people are not nihilistic because that is their actual worldview, they’re nihilistic because they don’t have a choice.

Treat everything like a rolling ball! You cheer for it wherever the sphere decides to go! If you truly wish for the good of other people, why don’t you stop holding expectations… and just laugh with them at their side? Everyone who lives here is a clown! Clowns can’t survive without feeding on each other’s smiles, you see?

Rather surprisingly, though, LoR does not castigate anyone for their nihilism. Sure, they’re fictional characters, but despite being miserable-by-circumstance their stances are still treated as valid. It’s most obvious later on, where one character finds out the orders they’ve been given were forged and is not at all angry - why would they be? Lies and truth are purpose all the same, and purpose is a luxury unto itself. If anything, they’re at least happy that their exploitation benefited them and their oppressor rather than merely the oppressor.

It’s somewhat difficult to discuss this topic further without spoilers. I’d like to come back and write a longer review, but for now I’m trying to keep it clean.

Art narrows your vision, after all. You stop caring about the things around you. That’s how most artists seem to act, I think. And so, you indulge in the craft, not realizing that you’re throwing yourself and your surroundings into the fire you started. It’s like the human life when you think about it.

My praise of LoR’s handling of nihilism and everything around it also comes with the caveat that I, personally, got tired of overly bleak stories not too long ago. Even Disco Elysium veered too close to the fatal threshold a few times, and so does LoR, but neither game crosses it.

Really, Disco Elysium is an excellent comparison if we’re sticking to purely positive ones.

Everyone in this game is humanised as far as the narrative allows, even the ones that are barely human - in every sense of the word. They have aspirations, no matter how trivial and petty, and comrades, sharing bonds and jokes regardless of whether they’re more noble Fixers or nightmarish cannibalistic freaks.
It becomes apparent early on that, despite the Librarians’ claims that humanity was snuffed out of the City, it persists in the moment-to-moment of people’s lives despite the eternal presence of the boot.

I said up above that not finishing LC enhanced LoR, and it’s here that it really became apparent.

Roland was not present for the events of LC, while the Librarians were. By the time I’d quit LC, I had only met four Librarians: Malkuth, Hod, Yesod and Netzach. Sure enough, these are the most straightforward Librarian chats, though they still exposit LC in a way that blends well into the narrative without obviously being an excuse for people to skip LC.
But it’s the later floors - with Librarians both I and Roland were unfamiliar with - where things amp up, both in terms of how heavy the subject matter gets and how Roland’s facade slowly erodes around the middle and upper layers.
LC as an event in the setting’s history has been deeply mythologized, subject to rampant speculation from the unfamiliar and much rumination from the familiar. Getting walled by the game itself made this narrative almost… diegetic. Like those of the City, I had a vague idea of Lobotomy Corporation and could only speculate as to why it fell to ruin in the intervening moments between games, but like the Librarians I was familiar enough with the company, its purpose and its occupants to recognize things and keep them in mind. Remember, the shame of quitting LC hangs heavy for me.

I could go on at length about the story, but to do so would spoil most of it - and honestly, I’d rather praise the storytelling for now.

Our conductor will be the one to fix that! He’ll take me to a world where there are pure and clean ingredients aplenty! That day can’t come soon enough! I’ve been filling my stomach with trash for too long.

LoR’s format is very simple. Each reception consists of a window into the guests’ lives before they accept the invitation, a cut to Roland and Angela discussing what they just saw, a fight, and then a wrap up conversation afterwards. In between receptions, you suppress Abnormalities (puzzle boss fights that give you useful treats) and have chats with the Librarians.
It sounds straightforward, and it is, but there’s an elegance to LoR’s usage of the player’s time - the format is maintained right up to the credits, and while some conversations can initially feel like pointless filler it eventually becomes apparent that LoR wastes no time.
I don’t believe that foreshadowing inherently makes a good story (an opinion which makes George RR Martin fans fucking hate me) but in LoR’s case, it does. As early as the 4th line of dialogue spoken in the game’s entire 130 hour runtime, it references concepts, character and organizations that will appear later. Truthfully, I was initially a bit sour on how many Nouns the game threw at me early on but around Urban Plague I was seeing a lot of those Nouns actually manifest on screen, often to follow up on either a bit of exposition Roland/Angela delivered or thematically iterating on something that seemed inconsequential at first.

And man, what characters Roland/Angela are. LoR has no wasted characters, managing to make even the one-off filler guests you slaughter memorable, but Roland and Angela really stand out as both the best in the game and my favourite protagonists in uh… Fiction as a medium for human creativity.

This is just how the world is, and the ones best adapted to it come out on top, simple as that. Adapt or die. If you can't, you either become food or fall behind until you're wiped out.

Roland is a funny man, a very funny man. He has a quip for everything and deliberately plays his status as Angela’s whipped boyfriend a disgruntled servant up for laughs, but like many real people who use humor to cope, it is plainly obvious that he’s hiding a lot of deep-rooted bitterness towards his circumstances and the world he lives in. Even many of his jokes betray that life in the City has eroded him, and his catchphrase “That’s that and this is this” slowly goes from funny to haunting as the game progresses.
A good friend of mine described him as “An Isekai protagonist but played entirely straight” and I think it’s an apt comparison; he has many of the same building blocks (sardonic guy with some bitterness) but the concept is actually explored and treated with any gravity. He’s also a literal outsider to the world of Lobotomy Corp/the Library, so.
Every time I think about Roland I inevitably recall a story someone once told me where their restrained and seemingly conservative father got drunk at a wedding and started dancing shirtless with his best friend, and when [friend] said "that's a bit gay innit?" he retorted "I WISH I WAS, SWEETIE”.
There’s a really poignant moment on Hokma’s floor where, upon being asked if he’s religious, Roland denies it wholeheartedly. Except… This instinctual rejection is wrong. He certainly believes it, but through his chats with everyone and his endless exposition on the City’s evils to Angela, it is abundantly clear that Roland subconsciously views the City itself as a malicious God that has personally picked him out of a lineup and fucked him over specifically.
It’s these little contradictions, hypocrisies and idiosyncrasies that really bring this game’s cast to life, but none moreso than…

The thoughts and emotions I hold when I craft them... A resentment towards the City for driving me to this desperation, and a blind anger for the rich. Bitterness, and... a yearning for vengeance toward the man who rid me of that hope and pushed me to despair.

Angela. Fucking Angela. My little pookie bear who’s a bitch to everyone (for very good reasons) and is so deeply fucked up. The depths of her misery are vast, simultaneously impressive and horrifying in their seeming endlessness. She’s the kind of miserable that you often don’t see outside of Central/Eastern European literature.
Which is a good comparison, honestly, because PM really get what makes a good tragedy with Angela. She’s miserable, haunted by a past that’d crush lesser folk, and desperately chasing a purpose she’s not even entirely sure she wants. In pursuit of her murky, ill-defined goal, she baits countless people to their deaths - becoming not much better than the man in her past she claims to despise.

But she smiles sometimes, and that’s enough.

What really strikes me about Angela though is how fucking transgender her storyline is.
Early on there’s a flashback to the early days of Angela’s life as an AI in Lobotomy Corporation where she experiences both profound amounts of empathy and a desire to nurture strong, intimate relationships with her peers. She’s then subjected to what I can only (tragically) call Male Socialization: Her creator affirms that she’s not meant to do that sort of thing, “things like her” are meant to feel nothing. Any expression of ‘unfitting’ emotions is shut out and shouted down.
When she breaks free of her shackles, she radically alters her appearance, having only a passing resemblance to her initial form - which is decidedly less feminine. I joked on twitter that she looks both transfemme and transmasc at once.
But more tellingly, Angela is infinitely more neurotic in this game. She’s expressive, has a short fuse, swears a lot, smiles far more readily and seems to show fondness for the Sephirah in her own roundabout way. As her humanity draws closer, she begins to feel shame. Shame for what she used to be, and shame for what she is.
It is incredibly easy to relate this to the experience most trans women have once that second puberty kicks them in the taint. At least, the ones who have self-awareness and a sense of shame.

It’s even more pronounced in the receptions. Despite displaying every sign of humanity, whenever guests arrive and are met at the entrance, they clock her as a machine and constantly rib her for it. “That’s not a human lmao” is said every other reception and it bears a deeply uncomfortable (positive) resemblance to trans people being clocked and mocked for their appearance.

As I write this, I’ve been pondering the concept of scale. You, the reader, have probably played a sequel at some point in your life. It’s natural for them to scale up, and I myself have played far too many that scale up far too hard. Halo went from an existential war of survival to a cosmic clash with demigods, robots and shadowy factions.
Yakuza went from being about one small corner of Tokyo to being a country/globe-trotting clash against conspiracies. Devil May Cry was about one oedipal gay guy on an island and then became about generational trauma and saving the world. Fallout went from being good to being terrible. Final Fantasy went from stories of heroes to failed attempts at modern epics. The list goes on.

LoR is a massive scale-up. LC was a game about some deeply depressed people playing SCP in a single lab. Given the scale of this setting’s City and the fact that LoR’s cast covers someone from every corner of it, it’s no exaggeration to say that LoR went from a lab to the entire world.

And yet it sticks the landing. The vignette format for character introductions helps; the Library is the centre of the game’s world, never once left behind, and characters are shown through brief windows into their life. It’s particularly resonant in the world formed by the 2010s, where people are more plugged in than ever yet seemingly more distant too. The entire world, too, is at our fingertips; through the form of fleeting windows into bits of an existence far beyond ours.

But the social media comparison is a little cringe, don’t you think? I do too.

If they want to live their lives as they see fit, then they won’t stop me from doing the same. Think about it. We can’t roam the street in peace; we’re forced to live in the darkness. What sins have we committed to deserve this treatment? Why must we suffer to ensure that your kind lives a painless life? We’re humans just like you.

I have this scar on my right knee. It’s huge, with its width spanning my entire knee and thickness on par with my pinkie. Looks more like a pursed mouth than a scar sometimes.
I got it from a very mundane event; I had an obscene growth spurt early on. During a friendly soccer match in school, my oversized body failed a dexterity check and, upon kicking the ball, my body went up into the air too. I landed at a grisly angle, my descent causing my knee to get dragged along some chipstones. Embarrassing, yes, though it was still some of the worst pain I’ve ever been in and the bleeding was so intense that the only reason I was immediately taken to hospital was because the school nurse nearly vomited upon seeing my bone peek through the wound.
But most people don’t know that, they only see the scar and my occasional limping. They can see the present-day effects of that pain and that damage, but they can only speculate as to the cause. There’s only one domino on display, and they can’t see the ones that fell behind it.

LoR’s windows into the lives of its guests are much the same, and they help keep the story from outgrowing its confines. Almost every character with very few exceptions is depicted at the absolute nadir of their lives upon introduction with concepts like ‘backstory’ thrown in the trash in favour of letting you use context clues instead. Such is life in the City; only the ‘now’ matters anyway.

I only realized that day that I cannot blindly trust what my eyes show me. In that moment of the past, I was made a fool. The shallow promise that our safety would be secured… The thin piece of contract is what cost me everything. Had He not saved me, I might have drowned myself in resentment toward the whole world… and met my end.

Now, normally videogames are a balancing act, or a series of tradeoffs. Many of the most fun games I’ve played have mediocre stories at best and outright abominable stories at their worst. Likewise, gameplay is often the first concession made for narrative. Indeed, the common thread of my Top 25 is games that weave their gameplay into the narrative well OR have a healthy serving of both.

The #1 entry on that list is foreshadowing.

I’m very used to games, even more outsider games, tone down their gameplay for the sake of marketability. It wouldn’t be wrong for someone to assume LoR, which is far more conventionally palatable than LC, would do the same.

And for the first hour or so, it seems that way. You roll a dice to act, whoever rolls higher goes first, and you spend Light to use your cards. Easy!

Except…

Inhale.

Every character on the field rolls one - or more - speed dice to act. Whoever rolls higher goes first, with 1 being last on the action order and Infinity (yes, really) going first. Multiple speed dices means multiple actions and cards played per turn.
Each card has its own dice - offensive, defensive, and counter - with each dice having subtypes for damage/defense types.
When a card is played, the dice on the card roll - unless it’s a counter dice, which is stored in case you receive a one-sided attack.
When two opposing characters roll on the same speed dice value, this causes a “clash” where dice now have to outroll one another. The higher roll goes through. This can also be forced if someone with a higher speed dice attacks someone with a lower speed dice - this is a redirect.
…But there are also ranged attacks, which ignore the turn order - this seems overpowered, but if they clash against offensive dice and lose, that dice is recycled and can roll again.
…Unless the ranged user has a counter dice stored, at which point they can roll to defend. If counter dice outroll an incoming attack, they too are recycled.
But-

You get the point.

LoR is very uncompromising with its mechanics. There’s nothing here that can be ignored. I didn’t even get into abnormality pages, keypage passive ability sharing, E.G.O or any of the status effects.

There’s a common sentiment among Project Moon fans that LoR’s difficulty spike is vertical. I don’t necessarily agree, for my many years playing YGO competitively and engaging with deckbuilders gave me a huge advantage, but I can see why.
Many games with some degree of mechanical complexity or an unspoken set of rules will throw (what I call) an Exam Boss at you. Exam Bosses exist to make sure you’ve actually been using and engaging with the mechanics that were introduced via antepieces in the hours prior.
Well, LoR has a neverending chain of exam bosses in each stage. Impuritas Civitatis, the game’s final stage, opens with two relatively easy fights before throwing twelve Exam Bosses at you. At its core LoR is a card game and you WILL need to build robust and numerous decks to progress.

But I don’t think it’s as hard as people make it out to be.

LoR’s strength gameplay-wise is that all of your options are available to you at any given moment, and there isn’t much need to bash your head against the wall like in LC or pray for good banner luck in Limbus. It’s very simple to back out (sometimes taking a guest’s book with you, which is akin to getting a free cardpack from your opponent) and come back with a new strategy/build/Library floor.
Once you’re in Urban Legend, the game starts offering routes for progression rather than forcing you along a straight line. The solution to any wall is often on one of those other routes; every enemy has a weakness or a gimmick. Bleed as both a status effect and a deckbuilding component appears early, and it’s useful until the credits roll on most enemies. My Discard Hod build was still being used as late as the final boss.
I suppose you could say LoR is more of a puzzle game than anything.

What really enhances the gameplay is how well it’s leveraged for the sake of the narrative, and/or for giving fights weight.

Most boss fights come with a mechanic that’s unique to them specifically, or they introduce new twists on an existing mechanic that’s meant to upset some of the more comfortable strategies. Queen of Hatred gets a lot of hype as the game’s first major roadblock, but her purpose is to teach you to use Bleed and to convince you that maybe it’s okay to skip a turn or take damage on purpose.
There are numerous points in the story where the game outright lies to you about what’s coming up. More than a few times does LoR throw a surprise, unlisted second phase at you or some other curveball. Shoutout to that purple bitch.
A lot of the single-enemy boss fights come with mechanics that at first seem ‘’’bullshit’’’ (lol.) but in reality are just there to give it some impact. One character having 5 or more speed dice might seem ludicrous, but it helps to sell the world and the sheer power of the people within it.
The majority of people who play this game will scrape by many of the harder fights by the skin of their teeth, but in a game all about the eternal upward struggle to live, isn’t that sublime?

Of course, everything up above is aided by how this game sounds.

My only light was taken from me twice… For a brief moment… I felt all kinds of emotions before that piano. Despair, obsession, rage, sorrow… But, it took no time for those feelings to dissipate into nothing. Everything… yes. Everything seemed beautiful afterwards. Was it truly a tragedy that I lost her? Who defined it as tragedy? You may still be blinded by wrath, but I made the decision that I will care not about those feelings anymore.

On every front, LoR is an absolute masterwork as an auditory experience.

The soundtrack is borderline perfect, one of the rare games with 80-odd songs where every single one is standout and memorable. The Story themes are subdued but perfect for their respective atmospheres while the battle themes maintain a morose atmosphere that nonetheless manages to carry a sense of excitement when needed. You may be the villains, but there’s no reason it can’t get funky sometimes. There are only three songs in the game that sound anywhere near heroic.
Mercifully, important tracks don’t often get reused and the single song that gets taken from its original context is used masterfully anyway. To say nothing of the returning songs from LC.
That fight near the end of the game hits like a fucking truck if you’re familiar with the last game’s OST.

And the voice acting, good god the voice acting. After so many years of enduring games where a lot of the VAs are just repeating a role they did in the past or emulating a VA they look up to with all the tact of a fandub, it’s so nice to play a game where the characters are voiced straightforwardly, as though they were people.
Sometimes it’s Roland being a flirty little dipshit when Angela gives him an order, sometimes it’s Gebura audibly trying not to throw up when tasting some coffee, sometimes it’s Chesed’s tildes being obvious in his speech, and sometimes it’s Tiphereth suddenly turning into a Yakuza thug when Roland’s beef with her spills over.
And, sometimes, its characters delivering some of the most haunting soliloquies in the history of the medium. There’s a quiet rule running through LoR’s entire runtime wherein every sickass vocal track barring one is preceded by a character delivering a soliloquy to themselves before coming back for a fight, and all of them are deeply moving.
The one prior to Gone Angels might be a meme now, sure, but seeing it for the first time left my heart in my throat and my jaw hanging from my face like a useless slab of bone.
Whether LoR is being horrific, tragic, funny or tense, the voice acting never falters. I was frankly amazed to find out that a lot of the VAs are either amateurs, F-listers or total no-names because there is not a single weak performance among the cast - and it is a huge cast.

Even on a base level, the smaller sfx are so nice. Clicking through menus is auditory/autismal joy, the various sounds of combat are sharp, distinct and punchy. 5v5 fights are a beautiful chorus of crashing, slashing, shooting, stabbing, clinking and roaring.

O my sorrow, you are better than a well-beloved: because I know that on the day of my final agony, you will be there, lying in my sheets, O sorrow, so that you might once again attempt to enter my heart.

I don’t like hyperbole. I was given the autism strain that programmed me towards sincerity, and the culture I grew up venerated insincerity and humor-as-a-mask so much that I can’t even stand playful contrarianism.

So I mean it when I say Library of Ruina haunts my every waking moment, and that it’s by far the best game I’ve ever played in this long, long history I have with the medium. It's left a gaping hole in my chest, a kind of numb longing that only pops up after a truly once-in-a-lifetime experience. I finished it three days ago, and ever since it has been in my mind for every waking moment. You don't know how crushed I was when I realized "grief" is a word that the City's inhabitants don't have.

If you have any familiarity with me or my reviews, you’ll probably know that my critical brain is on 24/7. Not by choice, that’s just how I’m wired. Things like nostalgia and hype tend to not have much of an effect. I carry this into my reviews, even if it means dunking on things I have a lot of fondness for.

Yet I can’t really find any fault with LoR beyond some minor bugs/typos the fact that the anti-capitalist story was followed up by Limbus Company - a gacha game. But that’s that, and this is this.

“Flawless” isn’t a word I use lightly, and I’m not going to use it here. Not because I think it’s flawed, no, but because to defend that position would require both an actual thesis and also for me to spoil the entire game, start-finish. Maybe some other time.

I didn’t intend for this to get so long or so heartfelt, so I have no idea how to close it off.

Uh… How’s the weather where you live? That train was fucked up, right? Do you think the game would’ve been better if Binah didn’t wear shoes?

See you next time.

Yesterday, I finally finished Tears of the Kingdom... it turned out to be one of my favourite games I've ever played.
In light of this, I wanted to go and reflect on my pretty mixed opinions about Breath of the Wild, and retrace the thoughts that I had when I finished it last year. So here's some opinions that will hopefully lead to a TotK review soon.

I say i feel mixed, but I like BotW. I enjoyed most of my time with it! it feels like a game that wants you to have fun, on many levels... but it also tested my patience with monotony, sheer size, and frequent little annoyances.

At the forefront of it all, i want to start by saying that this game nails the excitement of exploration for me like very few open worlds can manage to do, especially in the first half of my playthrough I was having a great time. Its map is absolutely stunning and varied and rife with vistas, the best open world ever created on such a scale, frankly.
Additionally, the smart placement of PoIs so they're visible from hills and other landmarks is at the core of the gameplay side here. So, most of the time you go to a place that seems significant, like the top of a mountain, you'll find at least a korok seed to reward you. Most of the time.

Once I got more than used to the loop of discovery, the cracks started to show. Distances are long, with many stretches of emptiness inbetween PoIs, so getting to any destination in sight is rarely just a little hoppity skip, but could instead take multiple minutes of walking and climbing, not even mentioning possible hindrances like rain, snow, or giant cliffs.
All in all, apart from the rare settlements and stables, there's really only four types of PoIs to find while exploring the majority of the map: shrines, korok puzzles, enemy camps, and minibosses.

The first one is what mainly kept the exploration exciting for me. Shrines are by far the most unique and substantial type of repeating content scattered around the map, almost every shrine offers a unique set of puzzles and completing them lets you up your stats, giving any player good reason to search for them.
Korok seeds fit right below in the dopamine hierarchy for me, as upping weapon slots with them feels critical especially early-on. while not all of the korok puzzles are engaging, the most satisfying thing was developing an eye for where to locate them in the environment.

So, wanna know about minibosses and enemy camps too? heehee hoohoo let me talk about the combat system. :>

Weapons break quick. you can only carry about 5 weapons at the start. there's mostly weak weapons to find at the start, but you might come across some strong weapons while exploring. as someone with attachment issues, I really started cherishing any good weapon I would find.
Camps and minibosses may or may not offer a few nice weapons, but there is no guarantee that it will be worth the investment, especially as you get past the starting hours and overworld enemies become ever stronger variants, thanks to the hidden levelling system.
I think there's a pretty clear issue with the incentives for raiding camps here, but if fighting enemies is always fun, it wouldn't be too bad.

Sadly, the combat itself was a mixed bag for me. the basic souls-y system the game uses is a bit too simple to sustain swaggy sensations through many hours of gameplay, and the engagement i found with it gradually dropped off, except when I was fighting Lynels and doing cool flurry rushes. it doesn't help that enemy variety is lacking in most locations, too.
Difficulty, at least, is highly up to the player thanks to the anti-instakill at full health combined with a food system that lets you instantly heal up anytime if you've cooked up enough girl dinners. Similiarly, the elements of sandbox combat provided by bomb barrels, elemental arrows, pushable boulders etc provided glimpses of more player choice, but not enough to address my issues.
So I simply stopped engaging with most enemies partway through, which only made exploration more monotonous.

The story quests are sort of sprinkled on in small doses, and they're the other part of the game that kept me motivated. While the Divine Beasts themselves are not that much to write home about, and the boss fights and their gimmicks aren't super fun (except for Kohga), the towns and their inhabitants are cute... these sprinkles of lively civilization are what keeps BotW from feeling, well, lifeless.
They're beautiful little hubs to guide you through both the plot of the game as well as each of the larger areas of Hyrule. And all of the town themes slap too, I enjoy having them playing as my brain bgm sometimes.

I even found the majority of the story NPCs likeable, and while this game gets a lot of slack for its patchwork storytelling, I found it captivating enough, I didn't expect anything more and it's not needed in a game where the plot is more of a backdrop (literally).
Now let me state that I love Mipha and she's SO fucking cute :3 Her and Zelda (she has autism btw) upheave this game.

I could keep going about more of the little things, like how frequently meeting characters around the world who have their own little sidequests and stories added to the atmosphere quite a bit, though on the same hand not many of these quests were notable.
I could talk more about the highlights of Eventide Island and rebuilding Tarrey Town, or the lowlights of Too Many Combat Shrines and how thundery weather struck me as a stupid annoyance.
But eventually, I just felt an urge to get done with this game, and I gotta do the same with my review.

It should say something that despite tiring out, I was still having enough fun with the game to go out of my way and do every single shrine before going for the ending.

Hyrule Castle made me damn happy to be playing this game, one last time. The realest of dungeons in the entire journey, backed by a majestic soundtrack... this is true peak BotW.

And then, Calamity Ganon...exists.

It's impressive how Nintendo made such a sprawling world with an immaculate atmosphere while knowing that very, very few players would ever see all it has to offer. They should have made a game that lets you appreciate even more just how fantastic this Hyrule is.

It’d be so easy for me to just give this a 0.5 star and have my review be “Haha, gacha game”. Nobody would care at all and 99% of people wouldn’t begrudge it.

That 1% is, unfortunately, me.

Look, I am Mihoyo’s foulest hater. I gave Honkai Impact 3rd a chance and hated it because, even putting aside a lot of the straight up barefaced plagiarism that game carries out, it was just a bad game that felt like someone trying to remember the combat parts of Crash of the Titans.
Genshin Impact was even worse, being the world’s first AAA skinner box that shamefully ripped off beats from Breath of the Wild to sell anime archetypes to children and teenagers. I hate, hate, hate Genshin Impact. Endlessly empty overworlds that occasionally reward you for self-harming by feeding you “storylines” that are just characters saying prophecies, politics and keywords ad nauseam were grotesquely fused with floaty, unpleasant gameplay where “player expression” caps out at smashing through your characters and hitting the skill and/or ultimate buttons until things die.
Any pretext of having ‘characters’ is also thrown out into the gutter, because outside of time-limited FOMO events you’ll be hard pressed to find a Genshin character with a real personality or even a goal. I wonder if people only remember Yae Miko because you can ‘get’ her character without playing an event that hasn’t been rerun since Covid quarantine.

So, you can imagine that I was extremely cynical about Honkai Star Rail. My view of it was that Mihoyo, not content to defile the character action and open world genres, had opted to shit out a turn-based game as well. And for the longest time, this game was my punching bag. Whenever it appeared during an event or festival I’d always say something like “more like honkai shit rail lmao” in my group chat, and whenever I saw fanart of the characters I’d gripe at how awful 90% of the designs are. Lastly, do you know how horrifying it was to find out HSR would be an interstellar adventure? From a studio that struggled to make me or anyone else give a shit about a single planet in Genshin? Madness. Utter madness.

But I was bored on Christmas day. Preternaturally bored. I don’t really know what came over me, but I got the urge to download this game.

And… I’m still playing it.

I’d even go out on a limb and say it’s good.

From here on out, I’m going to compare this game to Genshin almost every other sentence. Sorry, but there’s really no other way to highlight just how well this game does certain things without bringing up the studio’s awful last game.

Anyway, upon booting up HSR, two things immediately caught me off guard.

Number 1: The dub isn’t terrible. Genshin’s is infamously wooden and embodies every bad trend with English dubs. The women almost exclusively talk in either a Peppy Girl Voice, that same breathy detached voice that’s often only heard on amateur VA voice reels, or they’re using a flat Regal Voice that results in characters like Raiden Shogun and Rosaria - two ontological opposites - sounding identical. The men aren’t much better. Honkai’s dub, however, is surprisingly robust. I could probably tell you who each character is just from hearing a single line, because the direction being given to the VAs is phenomenal and it results in characters managing to shine through just voice alone. The nicest thing I can say about Honkai’s dubwork is that if a character sounds bored, I often assume it’s intentional.

Number 2: The characters are written - at all. Genshin’s characters have a bad habit of being the exact same template but copy-pasted over to another region. There’s really not much difference between Jean, Candace, Ningguang, and the Raiden Shogun when broken down to their base narrative components, and every region has a Cool Guy, a Sad Guy and a suspiciously forward underage girl. HSR has less characters overall, but it bothers to actually write them out and give them arcs.
Silver Wolf and Kafka only appear for 20 minutes in the intro before fucking off until a later patch, but their dynamic is excellent and they themselves have so much personality that I’m still thinking of them hours later.
Don’t get me wrong, HSR is not going to give you intricate Yakuza-esque plots, but I was gripped by the Jarilo-VI cast’s struggles to survive in a world that was entombed in multiple senses of the world, and the utter tragedy occurring between Hanya and Xueyi beats out some of dynamics I’ve seen in many actual JRPGs.

Both of these apply through the entire game (as at the time of writing), but that they’re immediately obvious from the prologue is what got me hooked.

Don’t get me wrong though, it’s not all perfect. The actual plots tend to be straightforward, and the game’s insistence on giving you 5 minute quests with 15 minute exposition dumps calls to mind Final Fantasy XIV in all the wrong ways, not to mention that who gets characterization and when often feels like it’s decided by dice roll.
I love Natasha, the caring but deeply exhausted leader of Jarilo-VI’s underground vigilante police force. In a cast of mostly younger adults she stands out as a tired middle-aged woman who initially keeps going because she thinks she has to in order to ensure there’s a world for the next generation to even inhabit, and she ends up feeling a bit aimless/overwhelmed when that mission ends up succeeding.
But she’s mostly ignored in favour of Bronya, Seele and Serval, all of whom I enjoy yet sadly sponge up most of the screen time. Bronya especially tends to have her character arc reiterated to the audience every other cutscene, though unlike Genshin characters or FFXIV’s Y’shtola, her arc actually resolves.

Towards the end of the first planet, it dawned on me that I was enjoying the writing because the writers had very clearly taken the right lessons from Genshin. Rather than force the player into an endless hamster wheel to maybe see the characters progress, the characters are just front and center in the story and they’re utilized extremely well.
Sure, I can cynically say that they only made the characters likeable to hype you up for their banner reruns, but at least I can tell the banner characters apart based on personality. I’ll pull for Seele because I like the headstrong, illiterate moron who is clearly in puppy love with Bronya. Not because I need a Quantum - The Hunt character.

The real star of the show, though, is the gameplay. I often scorn the idea of gacha games having “good gameplay” as the sentiment is often echoed by whales/longterm players who’re experiencing an entirely different game in practice, but HSR really caught me offguard on that front.
It’s all very simple: Enemies have big icons above their head stating which element they’re weak to, and you build teams to deplete their weakness gauge so you can stun them and do big damage. Each character has a basic attack, a skill (which costs a skill point), an ultimate attack and a passive - along with an overworld ability.
There’s a tendency in games like this to have earlier characters be incredibly simple and without any depth, which is a trend HSR bucks right out the gate. The protagonist, Dan Heng and March 7th (the first three freebies you get) all have their own mechanics and roles, so tightly designed that they’re perfectly usable in harder content with a standard level of investment. Power creep is still a thing of course - I got Ruan Mei, a very recent addition, in one of my first pulls and she can just take turns away from enemies - but so far the game avoids that nasty trend every other gacha has where early character skills are a single paragraph and later ones are entire pages.
Characters all have Paths, which is HSR for ‘Role’, but each character applies the concept of their path differently which thankfully avoids homogeny. Two of my main units, Sampo and Pela, are Nihility characters - debuff centric. Pela is focused on removing positive buffs and makes enemies infinitely more vulnerable to other debuffs like those conferred by her ult. Sampo, meanwhile, is a Damage Over Time character. All of his attacks have a chance to inflict a Wind DoT and his ult does less damage than others in exchange for massively cranking up the damage enemies take from the DoT effect.

Praise also has to be given to the game for lacking any duds as of the time of writing. I’ve frequently taken breaks from the story to get some leveling resources because every character I currently possess has a scenario in which I end up using them, and though I’ve yet to get the character I want from the permanent banner (which the game dumps tickets for on you), every character I have gotten from that banner has been used in a serious capacity since I got them.

Overall, though, the game leverages its extremely simple gameplay to put you through some absolute ringers. The core mechanics are simple so the fights can be… well, not? Bosses and even elite enemies come with mechanics that can throw careless players for a loop, some of which I’d even describe as MMO-esque. The earlier parts of the game can seem simple enough to just blitz with a high-damage team, but eventually enemies start using taunts/lock-ons/stuns and other debuffs to force you to think carefully. Really, it’s this variety in enemy mechanics that results in the above praise: Even Asta, a relatively boring character, has incredible mileage in any fight where making the party take turns faster is a boon.

If I had to illustrate the differences succinctly, I’d point to Healers. In Genshin they’re superfluous if you’re at all good at the game, because it’s trivially easy to avoid damage and infinitely better to just bring DPS characters that’ll help you end fights faster. That is not the case in HSR. You can delay turns with Ruan Mei and Asta all you like, but enemies are going to attack. You are going to take damage at some point, and the need to either dispel or negate these inevitabilities is the driving force behind much more indepth team building. I got through several arcs of Genshin just fine using the same team that only ever saw a change when Raiden Shogun dropped, but in HSR I have three separate teams that I’m still constantly tweaking.

As for the world, HSR completely dunks Genshin’s poor attempt at an open world out the airlock and trades it for comparatively linear pseudo-dungeons and slightly wider hub areas. It’s all very ascetic in comparison; Amber doesn’t appear to tell you to fuck off and gather wheat at all during the intro, you just hold Forward and hit things between cutscenes. This is all to its benefit though, both because it allows individual area plots to work at all (Genshin could never have done the Overworld/Underworld thing well) and it allows each area to have a very strong visual identity, which means I can actually tell areas apart. It’s impressive that both halves of Jarilo-VI feel like they belong on the same planet given that every continent on Tevyat feels like it fell out of a difference 4/10 gacha game.
Oh and the fucking music. I’ll give Genshin credit on one front: The boss music is stellar all the way through. HSR, being an actual interstellar experience, is similarly out of the world but on all fronts. I couldn’t tell you dick about Genshin’s overworld/dungeon music but I still hum the Jarilo Underworld theme even when far away from the game. To say nothing of the cheesy over the top vocal track that plays during Jarilo VI’s emotional climax.

I also haven't seen many people mention it, but the side material in this game is excellent. The protagonist is given plenty of time to shine, and while the writing cribs ideas from Disco Elysium it knows full well it's never going to be a masterwork and instead opts to tell good jokes and write good characters. I talked to a trash can once, and it was brilliant.

Looking back at all the praise I’ve given the game, I do feel the need to clarify one thing: This game isn’t really exceptional. It’s just good, and among gacha games that automatically makes it the best. I have a lot of fondness for the game, its world, its lore and especially its cast, but there isn’t anything here you can’t get elsewhere. Yakuza: Like a Dragon has it all and is a one time payment! Same with Dragon Quest 11.

If you’ve read this far you’re likely wondering how the actual gacha/live service elements are, and they’re … not bad. Not good, because they never can be, but among its peers this is one of the least egregious ones - not quite GBF or King’s Raid good, though. Tickets and pull currency are handed out willy nilly compared to Genshin’s equivalents and while there are dailies & a battle pass, actually filling them out is trivial work and can often be done in minutes.
Genshin’s Resin system returns as Trailblaze Power, but to this game’s credit all of the dungeons/boss refights/elite enemies/whatever are available on a permanent basis - though the boss refights are limited to 3 a day.
Which… does actually lead into my biggest complaint about the game, and the one that’ll probably influence whether I keep going in the future:

There’s not enough Trailblaze Power.

And- Look, alright, I’m not gonna be mad that a game is making me put it down, but you need so much Trailblaze Power to progress at a meaningful pace. The onboarding process and early tiers of the battle pass (which accrue naturally) will give you tons of refills, but that’s a well that began running dry after I beat Jarilo-VI and made me hesitant for the future. It’s not actually much of an issue in Genshin due to how few party members you ‘need’, but this game’s better combat intrinsically leads to more grinding, which you’ll hit walls in constantly due to lack of Trailblaze Power.

All in all, I'm thoroughly charmed by this little game. I’m probably going to keep playing it in the downtime between bigger games and bigger writing pieces, but this is still a Mihoyo gacha game. If you had issues with Genshin and they revolved around character availability and the like, this game doesn’t fix them at all. It’s best to stay away, and likewise if you have compulsive spending issues or an addictive personality absolutely stay away - this game pads out banners with junk weapons, and it knows what it’s doing.

I wish Natasha was real.

I'm always profoundly weary of expensive videogames that allegedly sold millions of copies yet never once entered my sightlines beyond intrusive advertisements on mobile Youtube and a stray nomination at Geoff Keighley's masturbatory advertisement ses- sorry, The Game Awards. In the same way morality disappears as desire for wealth increases, wealth itself increases the negativity associated with 'nobody talks about it'. Nobody talks about Brigador and that's fine, but nobody talks about this game that apparently grossed 7 million players and that's alarming.

In my quest to find out anything about this game, I came across a multitude of reviews and pretty much all of them say the same thing:

"It's mid, but it's pretty."

Now, I like mid, so this was a decent sell for me. It was only £3 on a site I frequent too, so I figured why not?

Anyway, this game is bad, and it's ugly.

GT feels like someone lay under the mattress while 2010s game trends were being conceived and then scooped up the leftovers with a bucket. A somewhat promising if drab opening cutscene immediately dumps you into a flavourless combat arena where you hammer left mouse button to throw energy blasts at Slenderman until they go into a weakened state and you perform a DOOM 2016 glory kill on them to regenerate health.

This is every single combat encounter in the game.

There are lots of them.

Immediately, frame 1, right at the starting gun, the first thing GT did to earn my ire was not have any feedback on anything. I'm something of a mid-open-world conossieur, you could say. A lot of those games get by just by making the base combat and movement feel stellar, and in GT everything is like existing in a world made of sand. Your main 'weapon' is energy blasts with unsatisfying impact sounds and an excess of particle effects, and while the hand signs used to carry them out are cute, the entire act of 'fighting' in this game is kinesthetically unsatisfying. Same for the movement, it's like playing Mirror's Edge on morphine. You do unlock two other elemental blasts later, but the same issues apply.

After a series of gormless, unsatisfying combat sequences, you're told that you can stealth and soon you get The Far Cry Bow in all of its glory. I take it that this game has aspirations of being a stealth-action game, but I don't think the devs did their research here. Far Cry, Horizon, Cyberpunk, RAGE 2, Ghost of Tsushima, Batman Arkham, blah blah these games all had outposts. Setpieces. Encounters you could approach from multiple angles. Cyberpunk was dropping entire immersive sim levels in the world as sidequest dungeons. This game? Doesn't have any of that. Stealth is superfluous and arguably detrimental to any sane player, who I assume wants this game over as fast as possible and thus will shun the slow approach. Just huck your elemental blasts and talismans for that DOOM glory kill.

No really, it is a DOOM glory kill. You've heard of games being "best-of" compilations, GT is a worst-of. Soon after all of the above you're given a 1-2-3 punch of Ubisoft towers, pointless puzzles that do nothing but further break up already bad pacing (though there is a skip button), and the standard open world side quest/collectable padding. The entire time, you have TWO voices in the player seat that're making quips about everything.

I'm also not entirely sure if it's just a PC port issue, but this game was horrific to look at. Even with upscalers disabled and true anti-aliasing forced via Nvidia control panel, everything seemed to be smeared in a thick layer of goopy dry vaseline and the reflections had the kind of artifacting/ghosting I expect from using AMD's older upscaler. Everything about 10 feet from the camera was blurry and when it rained it was profoundly hard to make anything out. It feels like an early PS4/XB1 game, around that time developers were finally making games that weren't ports but massively struggling to feel out what the hardware was capable of.

This isn't helped by the art direction being profoundly uninspired. I'm sure this game is fascinating if you're one of those people who thinks Tokyo is a place that was made up for Shin Megami Tensei, but having played enough SMT and Yakuza to last me a lifetime, GT offered nothing other games haven't done better. If you want a photorealistic Tokyo, Yakuza has that. If you want to see Tokyo get fucked up, SMT has that. GT does neither concept well, and despite the premise the design of both the supernatural phenomena and the yokai are boring. You'll be lucky to see a supernatural event that is anything more than "normal place covered in black ink".

There is a story here, but it's more flaccid and atrophied than half of the girls I know, and it borders on an excuse plot. The sidequests are far more engaging, and considering they're still bad that's almost impressive.

At times I wonder if this game was made out of spite. For a team like this - who would later go on to release the phenomenal Hi-Fi Rush - and a publisher with this much money, I can't think of any other explanation.

Going back to things you loved in your youth is always an uncomfortable gamble, because there's a 50/50 chance you'll either find a brand new appreciation for it in your old age or you'll suck air through your teeth every five minutes and murmur "Ah, jeez." to yourself.

Portal 2 is a unique oddity for me in that the 50/50 chance rolled 100/100 and I had both experiences, sometimes consecutively and sometimes concurrently. It's not helped by me being on a bit of a Valve kick and this was at the end of my replay list, which really highlights its status as their most oddball game.

Before I begin, it's absolutely worth restating just how much of a massive chokehold Valve had on nerd culture in the 2000s and very early 2010s. Having grown up around nerds and spent the vast majority of my education studying IT, the word 'cake' made me flinch up until around 2015. Even had I not actually replayed this game, I could likely recite the entire script because near enough every single line had been parroted and warped into some bizarre facsimile of humor by one specific corner of nerd culture.
I am not going to pretend I'm above the people I'm dunking on, because as late as June this year I made gauche "Grabbin' pills!" references while playing Project Zomboid and my last L4D2 runthrough with a friend saw me play necromancer to a host of jokes older than my nephew. Some diseases don't get slept off I'm afraid.

This Valve Mania was a precursor to a lot of modern developer worship cults, and like those it left a not insignificant amount of people with a general unwillingness to approach Valve games as anything other than holy relics. I, again, was one of those people for a time.

And... Having replayed all of their other singleplayer games till now? I get it. Even with flaws that're apparent as an adult, all of their games have airtight pacing, design that's still barely matched by a lot of their contemporaries, amazing unspoken player guidance and a phenomenal blend of narrative and gameplay - in part due to having the former take a backseat 99% of the time.

Except Portal 2, which stands as an oddball among their SP catalogue because most of those don't apply.

The original Portal is as close to a perfect game as the medium gets, really. Its pacing is sanded to a monofilament point, it discards more obvious handholding/directions with gentle nudges and intuitive signposting, the story runs concurrent with the gameplay but never usurps it, the comedy is rapidfire and laden with jokes that betray a lot about the setting as a means to not do exposition, and a slow but methodical rollout of mechanics that keep the game interesting until the credits roll. Plus, shirking the trends that were already endemic at the time, the game was set in this cold, sterile and lifeless testing facility that somehow looked more inhumane than the endless greybrown corridors of early FPS games.

It was a huge hit, and as humans are unfortunately prone to doing, people just wanted more. More Portal, in our mouths, Mr. Valve. Please.

We got Portal 2, which isn't what I'd call more Portal.

The intro alone signals to an observant player just how different they are.

Portal 1’s is hilariously brief. You awaken in a featureless bedroom and wait a moment. There’s a brief spiel by GLaDOS introducing the game, she glitches out, a portal opens and boom. In general, Portal 1 is really short for how much impact it had on the world; Undertale clocks in at a longer runtime.

Portal 2’s is overlong. Like Portal 1 before it, you awaken in a featureless bedroom. The announcer asks you to walk around, look around, and adjust the camera up and down. Then the jokes start. And they don’t stop. Jokes, jokes, jokes… Then Wheatley appears and I stare at my monitor, dead-eyed and slack jawed, wondering how I found this funny a decade ago.

I could write a really, really long spiel going through this entire game and tearing into just how obnoxious it is in every chapter, but it’d be repetitive even by my standards and I don’t really talk in circles so much as I do ouroboroii. There’s also no need, because the problems that start in the first chapter are the same all the way until the credits.

In the early 2010s, English culture began exporting itself all over the world thanks to social media. This mostly manifested as what I refer to as Gervais-isms; snarky, observational comedy carried out by overly bitter and unmarriageable white English dudes where most of the actual ‘humour’ comes from how fast they talk. It’s the entire foundation of BBC Sherlock for instance.

While this trend thankfully died a violent death, it infected a lot of works in its death throes. Portal 2 was one of them, sadly.

I will admit my biases outright before continuing: I cannot stand Stephen Merchant on any level, especially as a comedian. The trio he formed with Ricky Gervais and Kar Pilkington was a blight on the world and eventually gave birth to Hello Ladies, which reads more like an incel manifesto (as that is Merchant’s usual wheelhouse) than a sitcom. So it colours my view on this game pretty heavily.

I encourage you to read through the list of GLaDOS’ lines from the first game. and really take them in. Portal 1’s sense of humour is subdued, oftentimes difficult to pick out from GLaDOS’ otherwise normal dialogue, and when it’s obvious the game just moves onto the next line without clearly telling you ‘this is a joke’. Your reward for clearing each puzzle is a brief interlude by GLaDOS and then another puzzle.

In Portal 2, your reward is jokes. Sometimes you don’t even get a puzzle as a reward, just an endlessly white, beige or brown corridor where you spend the vast majority of your time scanning the walls for a single patch of portal-compatible surfacing. The jokes themselves are not only far greater in number, but greater in length. Portal 1 is about 3~ hours long, Portal 2 is twice that. 2x the length, 2x the jokes? That’s a fine and understandable metric.

Portal 2 is 2x the length, 10x the jokes and it’s…

This document has sat in my drafts for like three days now, after that ellipsis my brain just stopped because I could not put my figure on why the jokes sucked beyond “it’s very MCU-ish”, but I think I know now after spending two days playing XCOM 2 and Ultrakill ad infinitum.

Portal 1 is designed around the assumption that you like Portal.

Portal 2 is designed around the assumption that you like Portal’s humor.

Only, the humour in Portal 2 is not the humour in Portal 1. Portal 2’s comedy is grandiose, over the top, and assumes you always want more of it. It’s why Wheatley says stuff like “We’re escaping, that is what’s happening, we are escaping!” [No, really] for a full 5 minutes as you move in a straight line while barely engaging with the mechanics except to build a metaphorical bridge with portal spawning more simplistic than the first game’s onboarding puzzles.

Honestly, I could single out Wheatley as the sole offender here, but pretty much every character with a speaking role and more than five lines goes past the Joke Event Horizon at some point. The best part of this game is the first third set in the Current Aperture, because Wheatley is a minor character and most of it is devoted to either good ol’ Portal Puzzlin’ or the intense psychosexual nightmare yuri occurring between GLaDOS and Chell.

The worst part, though, is the middle section. Old Aperture.

Old Aperture makes me feel like a rat scurrying about a maze, solving puzzles for cheese. Except I don’t get cheese, I get snippets from a show where JK Simmons rambles to himself while stuck in traffic. The maze itself is a grim, brutalist remake of Splatoon where you don’t so much “‘think with portals’ as you think with adult colouring books.
Portal 1 had this fantastically lonely, sterile atmosphere to it that’s completely thrown out for 2, and it was meant to be replaced by the overgrown, decrepit Aperture you see in the first third.
This in itself doesn’t really work because the underlying design of Aperture changed between games, so it’s less “here’s the facility you love from 1 but fucked up” and more “here’s a fucked up facility”. It also doesn’t work because you spend the bulk of the game in Old Aperture which is primarily sewage, concrete and industrial warehouses followed by a redux of New Aperture which shows off just how much the underlying design changed. Really, this feels like a sequel to a completely different game.

But back to the Old Aperture griping for a sec, there’s something to be said about how mask-off Portal 2 is about its aspirations in this area. It’s not really interested in actually being a sequel to Portal 1 so much as it is competing with every other FPS game that was popping up around this period and also Valve’s other big series Half-Life. This was the game to make the Half-Life connection 100% canon and it shows in the way ‘Narrative’ as a game design element is so much more prominent here - arguably moreso than in the other series.

Much of what is only subtextual in the first game becomes decidedly textual in Portal 2, often to the game’s detriment as it gets repetitive early. GLaDOS referring to your stay in the ‘relaxation vault’ as a detention is Portal 1’s first clue that Aperture kinda sucks, but in Portal 2 there’s an uncomfortable volume of “HEY APERTURE SUCKS” text that feels extremely redundant, especially in Old Aperture. Yeah, the JK Simmons bits are mildly amusing, but they’re also excessive - for lack of a better word. “Aperture made testing products out of stuff that gives you lung cancer” is a bit unnecessary for a series where the first hour gives you instant kill sewage pools and GLaDOS reading off a health disclaimer that suggests the end-of-level fields can melt your teeth.

I focus so much on the non-gameplay stuff because the gameplay front is… Odd, very odd, and I’ve been putting it off on purpose.
Portal 2 has an incredible amount of mechanics in the pot: Portals, buttons, light bridges, laser redirection, aerial faith plates, speed gel, bounce gel, gel that creates portal surface, gravity bridges, reverse gravity bridges, and probably something I’ve forgotten.

They aren’t very well leveraged, and the way they’re contributes to the game feeling like three overlong setpieces as opposed to a Portal game. The first third gives you a portal gun, light bridges, lasers and aerial faith plates. You go through tests that feel like a glorified tutorial on them, get 1-2 tests where you really have to apply that knowledge, and then the act ends.
You’re then shunted into Old Aperture, where the three gels come into play. As before, you go through some glorified tutorials, get two tests to apply that knowledge, repeat.
The last third is no different.

When this game was released I was still in academia, and playing it in 2023 makes me feel like I’m back in academia… In the sense that nothing in the game’s metaphorical curriculum actually matters, because once we know we’ve passed the potential fail state we’re shunted onto something new that has no real relevance to what came before, even in the graded final unit. Which is doubly fitting because the lecturer who taught me networking protocols, Sam, admitted he had only ever played two games: The first Portal, and Civilization V.

To dispense with metaphors though, I’d argue Portal 2 is overdesigned. There’s a lot here and, given how much screentime is devoted to straightforward interlude corridors where you’re talked to by either Potato GLaDOS, Wheatley or Cave Johnson, it all just feels extraneous. A vain attempt at making you hype for the next text chamber, without actually thinking about how to tie it all together. Much of the joy in Portal 1’s later chambers come from applying everything you know to get through the puzzles without stalling halfway through, from detaching your sense of space and accessible terrain from what’s immediately in front of you and viewing the chamber through the lens of where you could go with portals. This is, after all, what ‘thinking with portals’ even means.

Portal 2 doesn’t want you to think with portals. It wants you to think with aerial faith plates, gel and gravity.

The interludes… God, the interludes.

In Portal 1, deviating from the test chamber formula was a shock. Meant to throw the player off and put them in an unfamiliar, uncontrolled situation that both looked and felt weird. In Portal 2, it’s… Every few puzzles, sadly. I’ve said it numerous times, but the bulk of this game’s is spent in what I’ve been calling ‘interludes’; they contain no puzzles, just large spaces that require you to scan the room for patches of portal-compatible terrain, so you can make a very banal A-B portal to cross. These segments don’t really engage with any of the mechanics up above, which is especially jarring given many of them feel designed explicitly to do that. The game would feel a lot more cohesive if using the other mechanics in uncontrolled situations was more prominent, and not just something that happens in the last boss.

One last note that almost slipped the script: Portal 2 has a bit of an issue with signposting. Oftentimes it devolves into pixel hunts (again, interludes), or the way forward requires the game to flash a prompt on screen saying “HEY, YOU CAN INTERACT WITH THIS!”. It’s so very weird given Valve often excel at this, even in the VR space.

The unique thing about Portal 2 compared to other games I rag on incessantly is that the developers addressed every single problem I have with the game… Within the same game. It’s called Portal 2 Co-op and it fucking rules dude.
I played it about two years ago with my stepdad (because I know he would grief me and I him) and it was like peering into an alternate universe.

In co-op, none of my complaints exist. There are no dogshit interludes that get in the way of puzzles, so you and your partner can focus exclusively on the puzzles. The puzzles themselves leverage mechanics a lot more evenly, and in general just felt like they demanded more brain power than singleplayer’s relatively banal puzzles. The supporting cast are gone entirely, it’s just GLaDOS managing to blend her Portal 2 self with her Portal 1 self. It’s just, in every way, so much better. Sure, there are some levels that mirror Old Aperture and feature gratuitous gollops of gel, but they’re a sight better than their counterpart.

And this wasn’t even a post launch addition. It was in at day 0, the two co-op characters were a fixture of the marketing, and they’re on the cover art. If you play only Portal 1 and then Portal 2 co-op, you have a cohesive and well rounded experience.

Still, despite everything I just said, I do have to give Portal 2 credit for something that probably wasn’t even intended:

GLaDOS’ dynamic with Chell is delicious. To keep it brief: GLaDOS spends all of Act 1 trying to hate and belittle Chell for various things (her weight/face/bone structure/parenthood/apparent lack of morality/lack of speech/etc) but it’s just… It’s all a veneer, one that quickly shatters when Wheatley enters the picture. Wheatley, unlike Chell, can’t withstand GLaDOS’ emotional abuse and lashes out destructively. In turn, GLaDOS realizes that Chell is her only source of companionship, which reduces her to a pitiful creature who tries to rationalize why Chell should empower her again, a far cry from her usual domineering self. I know some Portal fans have spent a decade arguing it’s an act, but it’s really obvious given that her first words after the finale are “Oh thank god, you’re alive” followed by Want You Gone, which is a breakup song to the letter.

It’s… Shit dude, it’s the most accurate depiction of a mutually abusive relationship I’ve ever seen which is doubly impressive since Chell is so mute she doesn’t even have a credited VA. It’s all helped by Ellen McLain’s legendary performance, which to this day is still the best voice acting I’ve heard among the thousands of games I’ve played.

In the end, though, there’s only one real takeaway I can have from this game, and that is:

It’s really obvious why Valve stopped making single player games until Alyx. They’ve made it abundantly clear that innovation is their philosophy and an inability to meaningfully innovate killed a lot of potential sequels/games in their studio. Portal 2 is their one exception, and it shows. This game was by no means bad, and it was a huge massive success that put the company on the map for a whole new generation of people.

But it’s decidedly not much of a Valve game.

It is absolutely a 2010s videogame, though.