Silly, but I have a soft spot for the Telltale formula. The detective story pairs well with the gameplay, which gives you a nagging sense of always missing out on something due to the choices you make. It's also a challenge to the player's God complex: playing as a cop (literally a lone wolf) who must adapt to his community, where there isn't yet an institution he can hide behind. Obviously hampered by some blatant telegraphing, stilted dialogue, and a terrible villain (Bloody Mary) - but intriguing enough to be sad that its original creative team never got to continue the story.

The later ones fix the controls, the awkward camera, but this is still maybe my favourite 3D Mario platformer because every level is a puzzle with multiple solutions, a space to be explored instead of a route to follow directions. The atmosphere is palpable and strangely melancholy, abetted by one of the greatest soundtracks of all time. And Mario himself is a physical presence - he sounds like an easily terrified middle-aged man, all whoops and groans, and he plays like one too, e.g. using his whole body to turn. Which is funny, but also personable in a way that's since been lost. He's a corporate icon now instead of someone willing to endure immense physical pain in order to get laid.

Has a weird structure, beginning on a brutally hard note (the Ludwig fight), going narratively explicit in the middle, and finishing somewhere primal and hard again. Orphan of Kos is a great fight, and some of the environmental design is good, but I still have the same problem with Bloodborne: it's at once too vague to be satisfying and not abstract enough to work as a mood piece. Comparisons to the original Dark Souls are unfavourable - that was all about light and shadow and could be enjoyed as a kind of perverse origin myth, whereas this is more a series of disjointed setpieces with tenuous thematic connections. It's trying to evoke dream logic, which is at odds with the grounded, you-are-there nature of the gameplay. Which is maybe the point, but it doesn't always work for me. And fuck Laurence.